MPLS Network Services

Wide area networks are almost a utility service for businesses today. You can’t get much done without broadband connectivity and the ability to securely transfer information between business locations. Do you really want to go back to FAX messages and overnight mail to conduct business? On the other hand, can you afford to do everything you need to do electronically? You can with the right WAN connections.

The idea behind MPLS networks is the ability to send anything, anywhere, anytime without in any way affecting the voice, video or data involved. Many networks can’t do this very well. Take the Internet, for example. It definitely lets you connect to anybody, anywhere on Earth. How robust that connection is and how transparent it is to the packets that traverse it is another matter.

The whole reason for using TCP/IP to transmit data is to ensure that what you send gets delivered intact at the other end. It won’t necessarily happen on the first attempt. If is doesn’t work, TCP gives it another try. Eventually, everything you need to recreate a file on the far end that exactly matches the one that was sent arrives and can be re-assembled in order.

Time sensitive transmissions, such as interactive voice and video, may not fare so well. Just about any little upset causes them to glitch noticeably. Video may pixelate. Audio starts to distort and break up. As delays in transmission time mount, it may be hard to maintain an interactive conversation. You just don’t know when the other person will start speaking.

Little wonder that companies tend to stick with legacy technologies, like analog voice, that they know work, or create their own proprietary and very pricy internal networks. At least when you build it yourself, you have some control of the results.

The high cost and labor intensive nature of private networks combined with the flakiness of the public Internet is what makes MPLS networks shine. An MPLS network is a carefully engineered and managed wide area network for hire. MPLS networks have a regional, national or international footprint. You connect each of your locations to the network through an access connection, which may be anything from a T1 line or ISDN PRI, to a DS3, SONET/SDH, or an Ethernet over copper or fiber service.

MPLS networks are often referred to as “cloud” networks. You connect to and from the cloud, but don’t have to worry about managing the internals of the network. What’s happening inside the MPLS cloud is that special tags are added to your packets as they enter the network and removed when they leave. While on the network, those tags are used to route your packets from source to destination. The actual content of your packets is not disturbed in the process.

The MPLS network itself has to be transparent to all the traffic flowing through it. That means having adequate bandwidth available to support all users. MPLS supports all types of traffic, including IP data transfers, VoIP telephony, ISDN PRI telephony, video conferencing, video streaming and so on. You can specify the quality of service characteristic for each of your packets and the network will ensure that you have the bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss characteristics to support that quality. The MP in MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol, and that’s exactly what it is.

MPLS networks have largely replaced Frame Relay networks, a lower speed & less sophisticated approach to the same service. They are also replacing proprietary corporate networks constructed from multiple point to point line services. When it comes to connections that span the country and even reach out to international destinations, MPLS networks offer significant cost savings while maintaing high quality of service.

Do MPLS Networks make sense for your operation? Find out by checking the cost and availability of MPLS Network Services. Then compare price, effort and quality with what you are doing now to make the best decision.

MPLS Service Providers Link Your Business Locations

It’s common for businesses to have multiple locations that need to be tied together with voice, data and sometimes video services. These can be branch offices, remote data centers, warehouses, franchises, factories and other business locations. What’s needed is a simple, cost effective way to link geographically diverse locations. MPLS service providers are ready to do just that.

Why MPLS? After all, there have been telecommunications services available for decades that can link one site to another. T1 point to point lines are readily available just about anywhere you need service. The public telephone network connects any phone to any other phone in the world. So what is it that MPLS networks have to offer that is new and different?

What MPLS is all about is privately owned and operated networks that serve large regions of the United States, some with national and even international footprints. These are what are also called “cloud networks.” The beauty of the cloud is that you don’t personally have to worry about the intricacies of wiring up and operating the many, many connections linking sites within the cloud. That’s all taken care of by the MPLS service providers. All you need is a link to the MPLS network from each of your locations. The network operator takes care of setting up the connections among your sites per your specification.

You might think that MPLS networks sound a bit like the Internet, and you’d be right. The similarity is in the way they make connections from anywhere to anywhere else. But that’s where the similarity ends. The Internet is a public resource with no quality of service mechanisms. If particular nodes get congested, packets wait or get lost. The Internet automatically sets up routing on the fly, so you never really know how your packets are getting from point A to point B. They just do somehow.

MPLS networks are engineered around predictable and dependable performance. Routing is done by a proprietary tagging protocol unique to MPLS networks. That makes them far more secure to outside intruders than the Internet. The tag switches have determinate paths that don’t change unless there is an equipment failure that needs to be worked around. Bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss are carefully controlled for each customer of the network.

What this all means is that MPLS networks work well for business users that set high standards for the quality, reliability and security of their telephone conversations and data transfers between locations. What MPLS providers can do is offer you a substantial cost savings over building your own private network to link multiple business locations. This is especially true if you have many locations scattered across a wide geographical area, including international offices.

How much of a cost difference is there between an MPLS network solution and what you are doing now for connectivity or have under consideration? Find out quickly and easily with a short inquiry to our knowledgeable Telarus consultants. They’ll get you competitive quotes from MPLS service providers that will clearly show how much you can save.

MPLS Bandwidth A Bargain

MPLS networks are becoming more and more of a standard telecom service offering. If you have multiple locations to link, you need to know about MPLS. Why? Because you could be saving a bundle over your current connectivity solution.

You’ve heard of cloud networks? MPLS is a cloud networking technology. This is different that cloud computing or cloud storage because MPLS is only about making connections. Whether you do anything within the cloud is another matter. This is about transport, or getting packets from point to point.

MPLS networks are privately owned and operated. If you want to get on the MPLS network, you’ll need to make arrangements with a MPLS service provider. It’s not like the Internet, which is open to anyone and everyone. The advantage of this premium-grade bandwidth service is that the MPLS network operator can guarantee bandwidth and quality of service.

But doesn’t premium-grade mean premium price? Not really. You need to compare apples to apples. In this case, you need to compare what you pay to use the MPLS network with what it costs to maintain the same quality connections another way. Traditionally, that other way has been proprietary company networks constructed from dedicated point to point lines or Frame Relay Networks.

Frame Relay is actually the ancestor to MPLS. It was developed for the same purpose. That was to connect geographically diverse locations with reliable and secure data links. Frame Relay networks served us well for decades. But they were designed in an era of much lower bandwidths, prior to the onslaught of audio, video and massive file sizes.

MPLS is the upgrade to Frame Relay. It can handle anything you need to transport in any format. The letters M-P-L-S stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. Multi-Protocol means that this network can handle voice, data, video and even TDM services such as switched circuit telephony. The built-in quality of service mechanisms ensure that each service gets the network characteristics it needs. You don’t have to worry about large data transfers causing your phone calls to drop.

The bargain pricing offered by MPLS networks is that the cloud is efficiently utilized to handle traffic from multiple clients. That way, you are only paying for what you need. You can always add more locations or bandwidth if the need arises. Try doing that with proprietary networks.

Does MPLS offer a cost savings for your operations? Find out with a MPLS network competitive price quote. It’s fast, easy and free.

IP VPN vs MPLS VPN

Security is an issue anytime you send data into a cloud network. One way to ensure that your data cannot be observed or tampered with is to build your own WAN network from point to point private lines. Another approach is to use a virtual private network that runs on resources that you don’t have exclusive use of. That’s what is meant by a VPN.

The beauty of using dedicated private line connections is that you are in control of both access and resource utilization. You need to manage bandwidth demand and packet priority. What you don’t have to worry about is someone else crowding you for resources. There is no one else. If you are really concerned about malicious parties tapping into your line surreptitiously, you can chose to encrypt the data while it traverses the WAN connection. That’s the ultimate in network security. It’s also the highest cost approach.

What’s attractive about VPN solutions is that they are much less expensive to lease and require fewer resources on your part. Both the cost and resource savings come from sharing the facilities with other parties. The Internet is a prime example of how massive utilization can drive down costs. If you want to really minimize costs, a shared access connection, such as DSL or Cable broadband, is the cheapest approach by far.

The same things that make the Internet cheap also make it insecure. Anybody and everybody worldwide can connect to the Internet for what you are paying or less. Perhaps they’re using a public library or WiFi hotspot network without paying a cent. Many of these networks make no effort to even verify user identity. It’s the perfect breeding ground for mischief makers and criminal activities.

Fortunately, there is a way to secure your data as it traverses the Internet. The trick is encryption. You encrypt your data packets using a key that only you know. Anyone else who has access to your data stream sees only gibberish. A popular standard for doing this is called IPsec for IP security. It requires hardware and/or software that you manage at each location for the encryption/decryption process.

IPsec lets you create a virtually private network out of the Internet, a completely public network. This is generally what is meant by the term IP VPN. One big advantage of this IP VPN approach is that laptop computers can be configured with this system to give corporate access to remote or home workers. All that’s needed is the VPN enabled computer and a broadband Internet connection.

While the Internet is cheap, it offers no guaranteed performance. You take your chances on network congestion, packet corruption, latency and jitter. File transfers generally work fine, but voice and video can degrade without warning. Many businesses want a more reliable network to connect their branch offices, warehouses, retail locations, and so on.

MPLS networks come to the rescue as an improved form of virtual private network. The MPLS network doesn’t have public access, but it is a shared resource. Your costs are reduced compared to dedicated private lines because the cost of regional, national or international connections are amortized across the total user base. What makes MPLS networks a VPN solution is that your data connections are essentially tunneled through the cloud wrapped in proprietary routing labels. You define your connections and the network operator instructs the MPLS network on how to route your packets.

MPLS networks are often referred to as MPLS VPN because they are inherently virtually private. Connections to the network tend to be through dedicated private lines, such as T1 or Ethernet. If you want an even higher level of privacy, you can choose to encrypt your data while it traverses the MPLS network. In addition to improved security compared to the Internet, MPLS networks offer performance guarantees for bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss. That makes MPLS VPN a popular choice for mission-critical business applications.

Do you have a need to connect multiple business locations? Which type of VPN makes the most sense for your needs? Is it IP VPN or MPLS VPN? One easy way to sort out the options is to get complimentary network consultation and price quotes through our Affordable VPN site. You may well be spending far more than you need to for the performance and security you desire.

Why Managed MPLS Networking Services

Let’s say your company has offices located all across the country. Each location has its own private local area network , perhaps supporting computer networking, IP telephony, and video conferencing. As stand-alone facilities, things work great. But your enterprise is more than just a collection of geographically dispersed sites. It is an organization with a common mission and processes.

You decided long ago that you needed to integrate your network facilities to unify the company. There are big efficiency improvements to be gained by not having to support every function at every location. When employees across the country are electronically just as close as those down the hall, you can establish centers of excellence and marshal short term support when there are local overloads.

There’s also the opportunity to avoid toll charges on internal telephone calls when you put your phone system on your own network. That can amount to an enormous cost savings when there is regular communication between sites. Only when you need to go off net, or on to the public switched telephone system, do you pay for local telco lines and, perhaps, toll charges. You can decide whether it makes more sense to have local access at each location or consolidate your lines with ISDN PRI service or SIP trunking.

The trick becomes how to interconnect those far flung business sites. Most companies start out with dedicated point to point T1 lines and move up to faster services, such as Ethernet, DS3 or OC3, as the traffic levels increase. What gets lost in incrementally adding line after line is the opportunity to save cost on WAN network bandwidth. One day you find yourself with a huge portfolio of telecom line charges plus a considerable staff to manage your ad-hoc WAN network.

What’s better? Today’s answer is managed MPLS networking services. MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is a “cloud” network designed specifically to link multiple locations with specific connections or in a fully meshed network. What characterizes a fully converged MPLS network is scalable bandwidth, privacy of connections, high reliability with fast response when issues do arise, a service footprint that covers all of your locations, and quality of service controls that ensure high performance for time sensitive applications like enterprise VoIP and real-time two-way video conferencing or telepresence.

That sounds like a tall order, but there are a number of top carriers who specialize in offering private networking services with nationwide footprints. It is even possible to include overseas offices through traffic exchange with carriers in foreign countries. Each of your sites is connected to the cloud through an appropriately sized dedicated access connection. From there the network operator programs your connections into the tag servers that manage network traffic. Even though your share the cloud with other customers, your bandwidth is guaranteed and your connections are private. For the ultimate in security, you can choose to encrypt your data during transit.

By turning your WAN network operations over to a MPLS networking carrier, you unload the burden of constant monitoring and network management, but you’ll also likely realize a significant cost savings. Will quality of service suffer? On the contrary, a top tier carrier has more resources at their disposal than you can afford to manage a nationwide network 24/7. They’ll also have far more bandwidth in their core network than makes sense for any single enterprise. That means you can grow your resources to match the growth in your business without incurring extensive construction delays every time you want to increase throughput between locations.

How do you find these high performance network providers? The best way is to go through a telecommunications broker who has a complete suite of carriers available to bid on your business. You can then feel confident that you are getting the best service at the best price, without having to develop the expertise and staff a group to search the industry. That’s all taken care of quickly and easily. How quickly and easily? Take literally a minute to enter an inquiry for managed MPLS networking services and an expert Telarus consultant will be at your service in no time at all.