As business becomes more online and companies relocate IT operations to the cloud, the need for WAN bandwidth has steadily increased. Today it is not uncommon for even smaller operations to need 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps of reliable dedicated Internet and inter-office network bandwidth. Medium and large companies, especially those with highly technical products and services or medical imaging, can easily keep Gigabit connections busy. It may well be time to move up to 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN.
Types of High Speed WAN NetworksVery high bandwidth connectivity tends to break down into two categories: Dedicated Internet Access and dedicated private or virtually private lines.
Dedicated Internet Access connects your business location to the Internet through a highly reliable, usually fiber optic, broadband connection. It is called “dedicated” to distinguish it from shared bandwidth services such as cable, DSL, satellite, and cellular wireless services. Dedicated means that all of capacity of the line is dedicated to your needs. There is no competition from other users over this connection.
The Internet, certainly, is a shared resource and your packets are competing with everyone else’s online. There is no way to give yourself priority or to designate certain services such as latency sensitive VoIP phone calls and video conferences as more important than run-of-the-mill file transfers. Usually, though, employing a dedicated access line greatly improves your Internet experience because most of the congestion tends to be in the “last mile” connections to the end users.
Even so, you may want to bypass the Internet for business critical applications such as call centers, core cloud services and the like. You need a direct connection from your location to your service provider, who may or may not be located in the cloud. You may also wish to interconnect your own business locations via a private network of dedicated lines.
Content Delivery Networks
Another type of “private Internet” is the content delivery network. Studios and other video content providers have found that the Internet may not always be able to handle the number of simultaneous high definition streams that users demand. A way to improve performance for the end user short of a direct connection is to deliver the content to the Internet at a point closest to the customer. Entire private networks with multiple geographically diverse server locations are interconnected and then terminated at “Points of Presence” near the users.
Content Delivery Networks need to be very high speed to handle the amount of streaming traffic at a given time. 10 Gbps bandwidth could easily be a minimum, with needs expanding to 100 Gbps connections and more possible.
Content Delivery Networks aren’t just for high volume video steaming. They are also useful to make websites more responsive and easier to handle surges of requests by distributing the content of the website to servers nearer the users. By spreading the load geographically, response time is better and no one server becomes overloaded.
MPLS Networks
A Multi-Protocol Label Switching network is a privately run multi-user network that also helps companies get their most critical operations off the Internet. The advantage of a MPLS network is that it has regional, national or even international points of presence. You only have to supply the line from a particular business location to the nearest network POP. The network operator takes care of the long haul connections between POPs.
As you might guess, the big advantage of MPLS networks versus running your own private network is cost. Unlike the Internet, MPLS performance is guaranteed. The label switching protocol that is employed on the network for traffic control is not hackable using standard Internet Protocol tools and access is limited to paying customers, not the general public. This provides an extra layer of security for your data.
Where Do You Find 10 Gbps Connections?
Until recently, 10 Gbps bandwidth was considered high enough that it was only needed for carrier core networks and the largest business users. The original telco fiber optic standard was OC-192 at 10 Ghz, with 40 Gbps available as OC-768.
A newer standard is Carrier Ethernet that is easily scalable over fiber from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps, with 10 Gbps readily available today. In some locations, 100 Gbps Ethernet WAN connections are available for the most demanding applications. It’s likely that this service level will be common in years to come with the next advancements being in the Terabit per second range.
If your location or one nearby is lit for fiber optic service, you can likely get 10 Gigabit Ethernet fairly quickly. In some metro areas, 10 Gbps service is also available using point to point line of sight microwave. This makes the service even faster to install and potentially avoids high construction costs of brining in fiber if it isn’t installed already.
Do you have a need for very high bandwidth connections that are also highly reliable and low in latency and packet loss? If so, see what 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN services are available for your business locations.
