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.

LAN to WAN Ethernet Connections

Within the LAN, or Local Area Network, the Ethernet protocol is ubiquitous. But once you have a need to connect beyond the corporate confines, you need a method to connect to telecom transport services. This has always required a protocol conversion due to the differences between the LAN and WAN environments. No more. Now you can connect seamlessly from LAN to WAN with Metro and Carrier Ethernet connections.

The advantage for packet based networks, especially IP networks, is that entire network topology runs on the same technology. This improves transmission efficiency and reduces the latency involved in converting between protocols at each end of the circuit. By extending Ethernet into the WAN, or Wide Area Network, it is possible to treat a multi-location network as if it were a single large network. That's true even if the various interconnected LANs are hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

So, what is available in the way of LAN to WAN Ethernet connections? There are two basic technologies available. Both are typically found in metro areas where competitive carriers offer Ethernet services on their own IP-based networks.

If your business is located within a few miles of a carrier POP, or Point of Presence, you may be able to get EoC or Ethernet over Copper access. New modulation technologies combined with multiple twisted copper pair allows carriers to provide Ethernet service via multi-pair telephone cable. This is the same cabling that is already installed at nearly all business locations, originally to provide multi-line analog telephone service. T1 and ISDN PRI services make use of the same cable to bring in digital voice and data services. Now Ethernet can be provided by bundling multiple dry copper pair driven by terminal equipment at each end of the loop.

What bandwidths are available from EoC technology? Anything from 1 to 45 Mbps, depending on the carrier's facilities and the distance to the POP. Ethernet over Copper bandwidths decrease rapidly over distance, so higher bandwidth services are available close to the POP. Even if you are a block away, though, it still can make economic sense to use existing copper facilities rather than install new fiber optic conduits.

Higher bandwidths, up to Gigabit Ethernet or even 10 Gig E, are available on fiber optic Ethernet connections. If your LAN is running at 1000 Mbps and you have a Gigabit Ethernet over fiber connection to a data center across town, the effect of sending data over the WAN is completely transparent.

Normally, the WAN presents a bottleneck for packet transmission. That's due to the high cost of WAN connections relative to LAN connections. Using traditional T-carrier or SONET line services, a company may well have to settle for a tenth the throughput over the WAN as on the LAN. That may not be true with Ethernet connections. Competitive carriers are pricing Ethernet WAN bandwidth a much lower cost per Mbps than other technologies. At higher speeds, the savings can be as much as half or better.

Would your company benefit from switching to high bandwidth Ethernet services? You owe it to yourself to find out how much you can save with LAN to WAN Ethernet Connections.