Benefits Of An MPLS Mesh Network

Once your business has expanded to include additional locations, like branch offices, offsite data centers, factories or warehouses, you need a way to get all those locations on the same network for data, voice or both. The latest and greatest way to do that is the MPLS Mesh Network.

Companies with two locations don’t generally start off with an MPLS network. What they do is buy a point to point T1 line or Ethernet Line service to link the locations. T1 is the traditional P2P telecom service. Ethernet line service is newer and offers the ability to link two LANs at the layer 2 switching level.

So, who needs an MPLS network for two locations? Maybe you do. The reason isn’t that you need the multiple site connectivity that MPLS makes easy. It’s a matter of cost. Depending on the availability of T1 or Ethernet point to point service, you might be better off getting T1 or Ethernet last mile connectivity to a much larger MPLS network. The major incumbent and competitive carriers have regional, nationwide or international service footprints. If your two locations are across the country rather than across town, it’s conceivable that taking advantage of an MPLS network for the long haul span might actually have a cost advantage.

Now, let’s consider the business with 3 or more locations. You can still use the point to point line strategy to link them. If you try to create a mesh network with P2P lines from each location to every other location, you’ll find this topology gets pretty expensive pretty fast. What many companies have done is create a star network with point to point lines radiating out from company headquarters to each remote location. All traffic gets routed through HQ regardless of where it is going.

When you do this, you are effectively becoming your own WAN network provider. It has the advantage of giving you complete control of the network on a instantaneous basis. But it costs you the staffing needed for constant vigilance and the need to establish new long distance P2P lines every time another location is added. The cost goes up linearly as you add locations because there is no economy of scale when it comes to dedicated point to point data lines.

Where you do get economy of scale is by sending your traffic over a privately run MPLS network. All those P2P lines are replaced by access network connections at each location to be served. The lines are only long enough to reach the carrier's local point of presence, and priced accordingly. The carrier then sets up paths through its core network to interconnect your locations as you specify. You can specify which locations can connect to which other locations and how much bandwidth they have available. The MPLS connections can be set up as fully meshed so that every location can interact with every other location.

Beyond that, MPLS networks can easily handle fully converged voice, data and video networks so that you can include your telephone service and video conferencing on the same network. That can be an enormous cost saver for companies with business sites spread over many states, or with international locations included.

Are you paying too much to run your own wide area network to link multiple business sites? Get the quality and performance you require and enjoy a significant cost savings as well when you switch to an MPLS Mesh Network.

Ethernet VPLS Extends Your LAN Network

Typical methodologies for connecting multiple business locations have included Frame Relay, VSAT satellite terminals, Internet-based VPNs and proprietary wireline networks constructed from point to point T1 lines. Now there’s a new technology that has performance and cost advantages that make it extremely attractive for branch offices, retail franchise, medical clinics and other businesses that need connectivity among many locations. It’s called Ethernet VPLS and it’s available now.

What is Ethernet VPLS and why is it better? The VPLS acronym stands for Virtual Private LAN service. That sounds a lot like a local area network, but run by a carrier and spread over a city, state or the entire country. That’s exactly what it is. Ethernet VPLS combines the advantages of Ethernet connectivity with the geographic service footprint and security of a MPLS IP-VPN network. The result is a layer 2 WAN service that safely extends your corporate LAN wherever you want it to go.

XO Communications, one of the country’s leading competitive carriers, is offering an Ethernet VPLS service that can transport both your IP and non-IP traffic. XO has an extensive nationwide fiber optic network and is a provider of Ethernet connectivity using both copper and fiber optic options. That gives them a lot of flexibility in hooking your diverse sites together.

For instance, XO can connect each of your business locations with Ethernet over Copper with speeds from 3 to 20 Mbps, Ethernet over Fiber for speeds from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps, and Broadband Wireless access in major metro areas with speeds from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps. All of these access options are scalable, so you can start with the bandwidth you need today and easily expand, location by location, as business activity dictates.

The beauty of Ethernet VPLS is that you maintain control of your network just as if you owned the wiring that interconnects all of your bridged LANs. You can maintain separate networking domains as if they were on the same LAN regardless of how far they are separated.

This is a switched layer-2 network service that can be configured as point to point, point to multipoint, or multipoint to multipoint fully meshed for any to any connectivity. If you’ve put a lot of time and effort into converging your voice, video and data networks, your investment is protected by four robust classes of service. These include real time, critical, priority and standard CoS. Enterprise VoIP and video multicasting have the resources they need to deliver high quality performance.

The WAN capability is there to support anything you want to do on your network. But the cost per Mbps beats competing technologies hands down. That’s a winning combination that will likely see Ethernet VPLS become a dominant WAN networking service in the near future. Why not put it to work for you right now, before your competitors catch on? Get more information and customized Ethernet VPLS pricing quotes to support your locations and applications. It’s a complementary service, with results fast.

A New Edge On Private IP Networks

So many companies have multiple business locations today, that IP network options have become cheaper and more available than ever before. A major player in this space is New Edge Networks, headquartered in Vancouver, Washington. New Edge specialized in private IP-based WANs (Wide Area Networks) that don’t use the public Internet. That gives them the edge on quality and performance in linking multiple business locations.

Why not the Internet? The largest network in the word certainly has proliferated over the last few decades. It connects just about everyone, everywhere on Earth at reasonable connection costs. That’s its advantage as a general purpose communications network and its limitation as a serious business network. Anyone and everyone can and do send just about anything and everything there is through the Internet. With network neutrality mandated, your critical transaction data gets exactly the same treatment as somebody on the other side of the globe Tweeting what they had for lunch.

The need for dependable performance, security and availability is what makes private networks attractive. Private networks are just that. They are privately owned and operated. There is no public access. Being a private entity, they are free to establish classes of service to guarantee that latency sensitive applications like voice and video conferencing have the priority to ensure low jitter and latency for optimum performance. New Edge, for instance offers six classes of service (CoS) on their network with service level agreements for each.

Strict control of network parameters makes possible the long desired goal of network convergence. Convergence merges separate data, voice and video networks into one single network that supports them all. Enterprise VoIP offers productivity features and cost savings, especially on a converged network. But voice is fragile, and your telephone calls can quickly turn to garbled mush on a “best effort” network like the Internet. Video conferencing, including telepresence services, also has great productivity and cost saving value. Like voice, real-time two-way video is fragile and breaks up with the slightest provocation. You need a solid network to support these high performance communication tools.

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching private networks, a specialty of New Edge Networks, give your business the opportunity to connect multiple locations on one fully meshed private network. Each location only needs an access network connection to the MPLS “cloud” network. New Edge offers a variety of connection options that include T1 lines, Ethernet, wireless, and even DSL.

Since most small and midsize businesses don’t have large full-time IT staffs to manage wide area network services, New Edge Networks offers full network management services, including the critical LAN/WAN interconnection. This lets companies concentrate on their core business activities while knowing that their wide area network is being well taken care of.

Does your company have more than a couple of business locations? If so, private IP networks may work to your advantage. Find out how you can improve performance and perhaps save money at the same time with high value MPLS network services from New Edge and other top tier service providers.