The Age Of Managed Networks Is Upon Us

It’s a sign of changing times. Competitive carrier AireSpring is now providing proactive networking monitoring free of charge to customers of its MPLS and Voice over MPLS solutions. That’s 24 hour continuous SNMP monitoring of the network that will generate alarms and reports if any deviation occurs. You can be sound asleep, but the NOC (Network Operations Center) will be keeping an eye on your MPLS network.

What heralds the future in this announcement is that service provider management of WAN services is on its way to become the default standard. That’s a far cry from the last half-century of bandwidth services. You ordered your dedicated lines, set up your networks and supplied your own staff to monitor operation. If something went haywire when the lights were off overnight, it got discovered and dealt with in the morning. A multi-national or otherwise 24/7 operation provided its own NOC to keep track of LANs and WANs worldwide.

Perhaps it has been the constant hammering on cost reductions caused by the deep recession that were are just now coming out of. Company budgets have been beaten down and beaten down to the point where business as usual a decade ago is just plain unaffordable anymore. Out of desperation, companies have sought out new methods of getting business done that don’t involve so many people and so much investment.

Into this opportunity gap have stepped the managed IT service offerings. That’s everything from outsourcing your entire IT department to partnering with suppliers to take over responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the line service you lease, to closing data centers and shipping the equipment to a colo center or selling it off in favor of doing everything in the cloud.

The common theme is lease versus ownership. Ownership certainly has its advantages. It also has its responsibilities. Medium and larger companies liked the idea of having everything under their tight control in-house. After all, who’s going to look after your interests like you do yourself? It’s easier to control security and network configurations when your people are running the show. If you have to go outside to get a connection, like you do with telecom services, you simply have the carrier nail up a line between point A and point B. If and when it fails, your terminal equipment will set off the alarms and you get on the phone to file a trouble report and then monitor the progress of the repairs.

What downsizing pressures and lack of available capital have done is slowly pry the tight grip of total control away from corporate staff in favor of letting outside suppliers provide some services and take responsibility for their performance. What many companies are discovering, to their surprise, is that providers can be trusted to deliver and maintain everything from networks to computing resources and business telephone switching.

Managed WAN services can be anything from a point to point T1 line to a complex international MPLS network with hundreds or thousands of connections. The demarcation point becomes the managed router rather than the smart jack. By installing Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), service providers have a view of everything on the WAN between your LAN edges. That includes all last mile connections as well as what’s going on with the core network.

That CPE is destined to move farther and farther into the local network as customers come to trust their IT service providers. Once they realize that the carrier or cloud provider is catching and fixing problems faster than they had been doing themselves, the reluctance to lease rather than own resources will fade away. The desire to return to an era of high capital investments, higher staffing levels and slow response to sudden demand changes will disappear. The flexibility of the company to adapt to change will correspondingly increase and older paradigms will seem as quaint as stacks of punched cards and racks of glowing vacuum tubes.

Are you being squeezed for investment capital and personnel, yet dependent on high performance information technology and telecommunications to be competitive? If so, perhaps now is the perfect time to consider managed IT and network services. Compare the costs and flexibility and see if managed solutions can be of service to your company.

How Voice over MPLS Expands Enterprise VoIP

Medium and large enterprises have been converting from traditional telephone and computer connections to VoIP over converged networks. The reasons are higher productivity and lower costs. But what happens when you connect your phones and computer network to the outside world? Do you lose the advantage of your enterprise VoIP technology?

Sadly, for some businesses, this is the case. Everything is efficiently connected over a high performance local area network. That network stops at the edge of the premises. In order to connect with other business locations, both voice and data must be transmitted over common carrier telecom services. This is true for each location. There is one architecture for the internal network and quite a different one for the transport service.

Typical interfaces include a PBX telephone system that connects to multiple outside telephone lines. These may be individual analog business lines or a digital ISDN PRI trunk line. In either case, the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network is used to make calls to both outside phones and the phone systems of the other company locations.

Computer networking is handled with point to point dedicated lines, often set up in a star network with headquarters doing the routing for all locations. This works well, but can be quite expensive when locations are on different coasts or in nearly every state. Add international locations and costs skyrocket.

What’s a better solution? The latest technology is MPLS networking. An MPLS network is a privately operated “cloud” network that uses a special tag switching system instead of IP routers to manage traffic. MPLS networks offer quality of service mechanisms so that real-time traffic, like voice and video, are unaffected by simultaneous data file transfers. That makes MPLS networks ideally suited to extending converged networks among as many locations as needed.

How can this benefit your organization? By interconnecting all of your locations through an MPLS network, you can create a seamless internal voice and data network for telephones and computer connections. Using an MPLS network to carry telephone traffic is known as VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS.

With VoMPLS, all of your internal telephone calls stay off the public phone network and you avoid toll charges. Only when you need to make an outside call do you need to connect to the PSTN. This can be an enormous cost savings compared to your monthly phone bill now. Similarly, the cost of using an MPLS network for file transfers can be considerably less than the cost of all those dedicated lines and the effort it takes to maintain a proprietary network. Plus, any productivity enhancements you’ve achieved by converging your voice and data networks can be shared among your other business locations.

Can Voice over MPLS technology offer you a significant cost reduction? Why now get cost quotes for a VoMPLS networking solution to links all of your business locations? The savings and performance can be impressive.

Managed Voice over MPLS For High Quality Enterprise Telephony

Companies with multiple locations are rapidly discovering the cost and performance advantages of MPLS networks. MPLS VPN networks are becoming the preferred way to interconnect multiple sites around the country and around the world. But what do you do about your voice services?


The traditional approach is to keep voice and data separate. The telephone system has a proven legacy based on switched circuit analog and digital trunking. Most PBX systems are set up to interface to standardized copper pair analog business lines or ISDN PRI digital trunks. These are your portal to the worldwide PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network that links every telephone set on Earth.

This traditional approach to business telephony has the advantage of guaranteed connectivity and proven voice quality. The incentive to change to something more advanced comes from potential cost savings and productivity features.

There are huge cost savings possible if you can combine your voice and data networks and keep your internal phone calls off the PSTN. Isn’t that what Enterprise VoIP about? That’s exactly what many major corporations are doing. But only well-healed companies can afford to manage their own nationwide converged private line networks. When it comes to international connections, the costs can go up dramatically. Is there a more cost effective option?

Why not use the same MPLS networks that provide data connectivity for your many geographically diverse sites to also carry your voice traffic? Well, why not? MPLS networks already have the requisite quality of service controls to ensure that voice packets won’t get trampled by data packets. The entire network is managed to ensure low latency, jitter and packet loss. It seems like a good match for IP telephony.

Indeed it is. That’s what VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS is all about. With VoMPLS, your internal telephone traffic stays on your own network. In fact, it’s the same network that interconnects all your PCs and other network device. You’ll only pay per-minute telephone charges when your calls have to go “off net” to the public phone system. You can make that connection yourself with ISDN PRI trunks connected to your company PBX or you can outsource call termination to a SIP trunking service.

Does VoMPLS make sense for your company or organization? New services, including one just announced by AireSpring, are making this option the best cost/performance choice more and more. Find out with a quick inquiry about Voice over MPLS network options.

Other Flavors of Packet Voice

When we think of telephone service these days it's in terms of two battling technologies. There's circuit switched telephony that has been the standard for over a hundred years versus VoIP, the emerging standard. But, actually, VoIP is just the best known example of technologies to transmit voice by packet over networks.

The real technology battle is the shift from switched circuit networks to packet networks. But that's been going on forever. Aren't we there yet? No, not really. But that's the direction we're headed until something else is invented.

Circuit switched networks have their advantages. Once you establish a path or circuit between two points, you have exclusive use of that connection until you are done with it. The advantage is that a continuous connection usually has little latency since there are no routing decisions to be made once the circuit is set up. The same is true for jitter, although signal quality is only as good as the connection quality. Analog has crosstalk issues and noisy lines can drop out portions of a digital bitstream.

The big disadvantage with circuit switched networks is that they tie up an expensive resource whether it's being used or not. That's the efficiency improvement that packet switched networks offer. By breaking up data into bite size (or is that byte size?) packages, routers can act as traffic controllers to keep the network busy but not overloaded.

Packet switched networks are a natural for data communications. The Internet protocol, TCP/IP handles breaking large data files into packets and reassembling them on the other end. It also ensures accurate delivery by forcing a retransmission of damaged packets. What VoIP does is mimic computer data by breaking the continuous voice signal into IP compatible packets and sending them down the same network with data file packets. But the TCP or Transmission Control Protocol that ensures accurate delivery doesn't work so well with VoIP. Since a conversation is continuous, retransmitting a broken packet and delivering it later would only cause confusing interference.

VoIP's popularity can be traced to the fact that IP is so popular and nearly ubiquitous in corporate LANs as well as the Internet. But beyond the internal corporate network, there are other types of packet switched networks for WAN or Wide Area Network transmission.

VoATM or Voice over ATM networks also breaks a continuous speech signal into packets. But ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) breaks the signal into 53-byte packets known as cells. The small cells reduce the effect of jitter or variable time delay and one lost or damaged cell doesn't markedly degrade the quality of the voice stream.

VoFR or Voice over Frame Relay networks use frames that transmit large packets of data that vary in size but can be up to a 1,000 or more bytes in length. Frame Relay networks have been very popular for connecting multiple business locations together, but are giving way to the newer MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks that provide the same service and more.

Both Frame Relay and ATM networks are private network technologies. They pre-date the massive popularity of the Internet and don't use Internet Protocol. But they do support voice, data and video using their own proprietary protocols.

What about MPLS networks? Being multi-protocol, as the name says, a private MPLS network can easily support VoIP traffic. Since this is also a private networking arrangement, the service quality variabilties of the public Internet are avoided. When VoIP is transmitted on an MPLS network it is known as VoIPoMPLS. But there's a way to directly implement voice on an MPLS network that is known as VoMPLS. This is a fairly new technology that is designed to work in on converged network carrying voice, video and data simultaneously over the same paths. MegaPath, a leading competitive carrier, has just announced a VoMPLS service for its network that combines manged voice, data and security for business-grade users.

Even wireless is not immune to the move from circuit to packet switching. Right now cellular services offer switched voice connections on one set of channels and packet switched data on another. But this may be changing with the emergence of WiMAX and LTE as wireless broadband services. A new forum has started up to develop VoLGA or Voice over LTE via General Access.

Is your company looking at options to reduce telephony costs or make better use of the network resources you already have? A reduced cost digital trunking service or some form of packet voice service may be the answer.