Nexagent’s latest technology

Businesses whose wide-area IP traffic crosses carrier networks may benefit from lower costs and better monitoring of their WANs if technology from a U.K. company called Nexagent lives up to its promises.

Businesses whose wide-area IP traffic crosses carrier networks may benefit from lower costs and better monitoring of their WANs if technology from a U.K. company called Nexagent lives up to its promises.

Nexagent sells its services to integrators who piece together multi-provider WANs for corporate customers, and claims its technology can enforce quality of service across multiple carrier networks even if the carriers involved have no support agreements with each other.

Nexagent’s software also gives end users a single view across these networks so they can monitor the performance of their WAN to make sure it meets service-level agreements (SLA).

Without being limited to relying on carriers with peering agreements, businesses get more flexibility about which carriers they choose. With more options it is likely they will get lower bids, or so Nexagent thinking goes.

Nexagent sets up points of presence in cities where its customers need to piece together a link of their WAN provided by one carrier to a link provided by another carrier. Inside the POP, Nexagent peers with both carriers and sets up an agreement to monitor each carrier’s network performance.

At the peering point, Nexagent gear takes in traffic from one carrier, converts it to MPLS and reflags the traffic so priority levels from one carrier are mapped to the same or similar priority levels in the next. Then the traffic is handed off to the second carrier. Nexagent plans to build its peering points in cities as customer demand requires, and it will place two such facilities in each city for redundancy.

Nexaget also provides management software to manage these complex networks.

The company is just starting up services in Europe, but plans to have international integrators signed up soon, so the technology will spread to the U.S. The bottom line for U.S. users is that these multi-vendor IP services with full monitoring and end-to-end SLAs should become available here within months. Look for them.