Are Your WAN Circuits Monitored For Quality?

By: John Shepler

As we transition from circuit switched telephony and make the move from in-house data centers to the cloud, our WAN (Wide Area Network) circuits become more critical than ever before. A misbehaving network connection that might once have been a mere inconvenience is now a productivity killer at best and a business shutdown at worst. It is essential that every copper and fiber optic line that leaves the building be running at peak performance all the time. But… how do you make sure that is the case?

Do You Know What is Going On Behind Your Back?
Technology has a sneaky side. When your outside network circuits are installed and checked out, the lines are verified to make sure they meet specs for latency, packet loss, jitter and bandwidth. Everything is running great. Tomorrow it’s still running great. But the next day, next week or next month something goes wrong. it might be a subtle change that degrades performance rather than knocking the line out completely.

Where do you point the finger?
The problem could be anywhere in the system. Is your LAN congested or are you dealing with a failing switch? Is it just your computer or telephone set that is having problems? Perhaps it is one of several network circuits that connect you to the outside world. How do you find out for sure?

Circuit Monitoring Is Your Eye on the Network
You can’t just blindly trust that everything is running smoothly. You need a way to look into the system. Likely, you already have that capability. You can run Ping and Traceroute diagnostic tests from your computer whenever you want. That’s great for troubleshooting if you know there is a problem and have time to sit down and run the tests. But what happens when no one is running diagnostics? Hard to say.

That’s where continuous circuit monitoring shines. You don’t have to jump in and run some tests. They are running all the time. Better yet, a monitoring program gives you a chart of how the circuit has been performing over time. Run a diagnostic yourself and you have only a single data point.

Get Automatic Heads-Up Messages
The other beauty of automating the performance monitoring of your WAN circuits is that the monitor can let you know when something goes out of whack. You can get an email when something goes wrong. That way, you don’t have to sit there and watch the screen continuously just in case there is an anomaly. You’ll get notified 24/7. The monitor never sleeps.

Best Deal Ever: Free Circuit Monitoring
The best way to get your WAN circuits monitored is to have it done for free. Ever hear of this? Probably not. This is a fairly new service powered by VXSuite and offered by Telarus on Internet and coax circuits with static IP addresses that they provide. MPLS and other monitoring is available. Telarus is well known for the extensive suite of carriers that they partner with and the best prices on WAN circuits. Now you get this bonus of free circuit monitoring included on both domestic and international circuits.

This circuit monitoring includes a ping and traceroute to that circuit. Packet loss and latency are also measured. If the circuit goes down, you get an email. You also have access to a web-based dashboard to view your current circuit status and performance graphics. A monthly email report is available if you wish.

Do you need WAN circuits you can depend on? Would you like those circuits to be monitored with the powerful VXSuite tools at no extra cost? If so, it is time to get the latest competitive pricing and availability of monitored WAN network circuits for your business.

Types of Bandwidth for Wide Area Networks

Wide Area Networks, or WANs, are connections between your business and the outside world. A WAN may also be part of a private network that spans multiple business locations in a city, across the country or even worldwide. These long haul circuits put the WIDE in wide area network.

So, how does one connect the local area network (LAN) to the wide area network? The connection is most often through a router and a specialized interface matched to the type of WAN circuit.

The most common WAN connection is a T1 line. T1 lines terminate at a "smart jack" installed in your telecom closet or other back room. From this demarcation point, or "demarc", you connect the T1 line to a T1 interface in your router. This can often be provided from the bandwidth supplier as a managed router.

There are different flavors of T1 lines, depending on your application. All of them provide a guaranteed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps both upload and download at all times. A T1 dedicated Internet line gives you a high reliability connection to a broadband Internet service provider. A point to point T1 connection gives you always-on private bandwidth between two business locations. You can add more point to point T1 lines to connect to other locations, or use your T1 line as portal to a private mesh network, such as a MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network. Of course, you can also establish a VPN or Virtual Private Network using T1 dedicated Internet lines at each location.

So what if you need more bandwidth than a T1's 1.5 Mbps? One easy way to expand bandwidth incrementally at relatively low cost is to bond T1 lines together to get multiples of 1.5 Mbps. For instance, 2 lines give you 3 Mbps, 4 lines up that to 6 Mbps, and so on. T1 over copper pair is almost universally available and offers the best cost/reliability combination for lower bandwidth WAN needs.

A popular service in major metro areas is Ethernet. That's right. The same Ethernet you run on your LAN can be extended to the WAN. Your connection to the Wide Area Network becomes as simple as plugging into a RJ45 jack on the back wall. Where available, Ethernet gives you the best cost per Mbps for bandwidths of 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps. The one hitch is that most WAN Ethernet connections are provisioned on fiber optic cable. You need to be in a "lit" building or near by in order to take advantage of these offerings.

Another high bandwidth protocol that is popular for business connectivity is DS3. DS3 over fiber optic SONET service or a T3 line offers 45 Mbps both upload and download. It can be partitioned into multiple T1 lines, also called DS1 service, or be used as a solid block of high speed Internet or point to point bandwidth.

Fiber optic services themselves offer nearly unlimited bandwidth for larger corporations or high intensity communications needs. Individual "dark fiber" strands can be lit to provide up to 10 Gbps per Lambda or laser frequency. Major carriers are now working to bond fiber optic lambdas to create 100 Gbps and eventually 1 Tbps backbones nationwide. High definition television is just one application driving the need for such infrastructure.

What's your best option for business location bandwidth services? Find out quickly by calling the toll free number or get instant online quotes for T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth and fiber optic Ethernet to 1 Gbps.