SAN DIEGO - Route-control technology promises to deliver mission-critical applications with the lowest possible latency and packet loss, all at the lowest cost.
So when Qualcomm wanted to quickly deliver the latest version of its popular e-mail program, Eudora, it turned to RouteScience Technologies and its PathControl gear.
PathControl and other route-control equipment and services - from vendors such as netVmg, Proficient Networks and Sockeye Networks - use policies to pick the optimal Internet access link for customer traffic. As long as the customer has multiple connections to different Internet service providers, route-control technology can pick the appropriate one based on cost, latency, packet loss and usage priorities as defined by customers.
In Qualcomm's case, the company had three partial T-3 ISP links to choose from, to AT&T, UUNET and Sprint. At the time of the Eudora upgrade in June, the Sprint line was still being tested, but the Qualcomm IT staff pressed it into service immediately to handle the Eudora demand.
The company also was still testing the RouteScience gear, but again decided to put it into action for the expected deluge of demand for the Version 4.1 Eudora software, says Norm Fjeldheim, CIO of Qualcomm. If PathControl didn't work, he could just shut down the box and traffic would flow to the three ISP links based on routing decisions made by Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). So there was no risk that the equipment would make things worse.
As customers connected to Qualcomm servers to download the Eudora update, PathControl determined how fast each ISP link could deliver the data. Based on that, PathControl, which is connected to the Qualcomm network as a BGP peer, issued BGP route changes to direct the downloads to the best ISP connection.
BGP chooses routes based solely on which one takes the fewest hops between routers, without considering delay, cost or other factors. As a result, BGP was directing most of Qualcomm's traffic to UUNET, which controls much of the Internet backbone.
With its three ISP links and a PathControl box, Qualcomm released the software two weeks ahead of schedule and did so without running into congestion, Fjeldheim says, despite peak traffic of 60,000 of the 8M-byte Eudora downloads per day.
Using its servers exclusively for delivering updates was a change for the company. It had been guaranteeing quick response time using service provider Akamai Technologies to cache copies of new Eudora releases at key locations throughout the Internet. But going it alone worked fine and had other benefits. "It's much cheaper than Akamai," Fjeldheim says, because all it requires is using the Internet connections that were already in place to handle other Internet traffic.
Bandwidth not the answer
Qualcomm was buying the Sprint Internet connection because users had experienced delay connecting to Qualcomm over the other two links, Fjeldheim says. He felt his only option was to throw more bandwidth at the problem, but when he heard about route-control technology, decided to try RouteScience.
In addition to helping smooth out the glut of traffic Qualcomm experienced during the Eudora release, route control also cut down on delay between Qualcomm's San Diego headquarters and its offices in China. Delays had been 200 msec, and that dropped to 100 msec with the addition of the RouteScience box, says Ray Buccat, director of Qualcomm's corporate IT networking.
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