Low Latency WAN Options

Many companies have added low latency to their list of requirements for WAN (Wide Area Network) connections. Why has latency suddenly gained such importance and how do you get low latency?

Latency is the time it takes for packets to get from one place to another. The latency on your LAN probably isn’t a worry. The latency on your long haul WAN connections may well cause you big problems. For some specific applications, minimizing latency is the holy grail of networking.

Latency and bandwidth aren’t directly related. You can have low speed connections with very minor latency. You can also have screaming Gbps connections with horrible latency. What drives latency is distance, network architecture, and equipment design.

Here’s an example of a network setup where you can’t do much about latency. Consider television remote broadcasts. These are the ones where a van with a satellite dish on top parks at the scene of a news event. It really doesn’t matter where in the world the van and the studio are located. The TV signal is going to have a considerable latency or time delay. You see the effect all the time. If the anchor and the field reporter don’t wait a second before they respond to the conversation, they’ll talk right over the top of each other.

Why is this? It’s because the signal is being sent from the truck dish to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit at 22,236 miles above the Earth (mean sea level) and back down to another dish at the studio or network headquarters. That means the electromagnetic waves have to travel a minimum of 44,472 miles up and then back down. In practice, the distance is longer because the signal isn’t going straight up and down. Now, consider that the speed of all signals in space is 186,000 miles per second and you have at least a quarter second delay one way or a half second round trip. Any equipment in the path or additional landline connections only makes it worse.

This is why satellite broadband works great for one way TV broadcasts but terrible for VoIP conversations. One way streaming is unaffected by latency. Two way anything is definitely affected. Data file transfers aren’t terribly bothered by going through a satellite because the latency is often small compared to the transfer time. But video conferences can be awkward and real time gaming is an exercise in frustration.

The point is that if you worry about latency, stay off geosynchronous satellite connections. Even your landline and undersea connections are affected to the tune of at least a millisecond per 186 miles simply due to the speed of light. Actually, you’d never even get that minimum latency value because light slows down in copper wires and fiber optic cores. The electronics that switch and route your path will also each add a small amount of latency to the total.

So, what differentiates a low latency connection from one that doesn’t concern itself much with latency? What you want is short paths between locations and a minimum of equipment in between. That suggests private networks, not the Internet. The Internet is designed for universal access and self-healing in the event of problems. Latency is an afterthought at best.

Many of today’s top MPLS networks are engineered to minimize latency. There are relatively few label switches to route the traffic and the networks have sufficient bandwidth to prevent congestion that backs up data flow and makes latency worse. You’ll want a network that has fiber runs as direct to your locations as possible to minimize path length. If MPLS will do the job, it has definite cost advantages and can give you mesh network connections so that all sites can easily communicate.

If latency is your number one priority, you’ll do even better with direct private line connections especially designed to minimize latency. These fiber paths are as close to a straight line as you can get and there is little in the way of electronics to slow things down. The one hitch is that these connections are primarily found between major international destinations, especially those like London, Frankfurt, New York and Chicago that are financial trading centers. High speed financial trading is the number one application driving the deployment of ultra low latency fiber optic services.

Do you have a business need for lower latency connections or even a critical need to minimize latency on long haul links? If so, get availability and pricing on Low Latency Fiber Optic Networks to check your domestic and international options.

Maxed Out On Bandwidth?

Are you close to maxing out your WAN bandwidth? Has it gotten so bad that you occasionally experience network congestion at the worst time of all... during peak business hours? Well, don’t panic. Here are some ideas that can improve that situation.

First of all, are you using your network in the most efficient manner? In other words, do you just let every device launch its packets and hope for the best, or do you manage quality of service. If the problem is VoIP telephone conversations breaking up but everything else seems fine, then giving voice packets the priority they need will probably improve that situation without bringing every other process to its knees.

Similarly, if you’re trying to do backups over the network to a remote site during working hours you could be hurting employee productivity. Make the backup process low priority or try to run those processes overnight when they’ll have the network all to themselves.

Oh, you’ve done all that? You’ve fine tuned both the LAN and WAN as much as you can and you’re still running out of bandwidth. OK. That’s going to happen to everyone sooner or later. There are a couple of ways to go next.

One technical solution is to accelerate your WAN, usually the weak link in the system, with a hardware appliance. Riverbed is an acknowledged leader in this technology. Basically, you add a piece of equipment to each end of the line that manages the packets. One thing it does is look for repeating patterns and only sends the changes, not the entire data stream. It also makes cached copies of data frequently accessed, so you aren’t constantly uploading or downloading the same information over a limited bandwidth line.

WAN acceleration is particularly valuable when bandwidth is very expensive and hard to come by. But the acceleration hardware isn’t cheap either. So, before you shell out for any solution, it makes sense to compare all your options. Don’t just assume that you’ll pay through the nose for a bandwidth upgrade. Many, if not most, companies are probably paying more for both voice and data bandwidth than they would have to. How can that be? Bandwidth solutions have become more competitive than ever over the last few years. If your contract ran out years ago but you’ve just kept paying by the month for the same line service, you can almost certainly see a cost savings by checking the latest WAN bandwidth options for your business location.

You may have installed a T1 line at a time when that seemed like all the bandwidth you’d ever need. Now you’re maxing out the line. But, do you know that you can get additional T1 lines added to your service so that they act as one larger conduit? There are also newer options, such as Ethernet over DS1 and Ethernet over Copper, that give you lots of bandwidth at very reasonable prices. In some areas, wireless solutions are the best option. In others, fiber optic offers all the bandwidth you could want but lets you pay for only the amount you need currently.

What you need right now is a plan. You can start laying out ideas on paper yourself, but why not get some free consulting help at least to bounce ideas off? A Shop For T1 consultant is waiting to talk to you now. Call the toll free number or enter an online quote request now at T1 Rex to get the ball rolling.