For many years, WAN services were extremely straight-forward. For most of the 1980s, you had dial-up services, and both analog and digital point-to-point “Digital Transmission Services,” a.k.a. “private lines”. And the only major evolution was that you could go faster as your traffic increased with a lower cost per bit-per-second.
ATM vs. frame relay
Then, in the 1990s, WAN services started to get really interesting with the introduction of Frame Relay, ATM, and SMDS. At the same time, the Internet became sufficiently reliable and IP became sufficiently widespread that IP-based services became popular.
At this point, we’re wondering where you are in terms of which services you’re using and what you’re planning. To that end, we’ve put together a brief survey to gather your input so we may share it with you.
Among the items that we’ll be asking about, we’re particularly interested in your use of a variety of services and technologies both now and in the future. (We’ll admit that we left off SMDS. Great technology, great idea, bad timing, bad marketing. Anybody still using it?)
We’ll also be looking at how you access external Internet site from your branches. In particular, there are good control reasons to backhaul traffic to a central site (or sites), such as enhanced control and better security. At the same time, if you access the external Internet sites directly from the branch, then you avoid backhaul and the associated bandwidth and delay. Of course, this gets to be a more complex equation if you’re using an Internet-based VPN. Do you still send information to a central site (traversing the Internet twice), or do you separate the traffic as it leaves the branch?
After a quick question about budgets (which we’re guessing are not increasing nearly as fast as your traffic), we have a few questions about how you’re handling virtualization and the transition to HD video conferencing and telepresence.
Obviously, the great part about WANs today is that there are so many options. But that’s also the curse because you have to make a choice among several extremely viable option.
So this is your chance to let us know what you’re thinking, and we’ll be sharing the results with you. We look forward to hearing from you via the survey site.
