WAN Architectures – How they are evolving

Applications over the WAN

According to the IDC European WAN Manager Survey (2005) (PPT, 452KB):

• The growth is in ‘Voice over the WAN’ (doubling over the next year)
• IPVPNs are taking over from legacy networks – Frame Relay, ATM, X.25 and Point to Point
• DSL is now by far the most popular access technology – 40% of total site connections
• If running latency dependant applications over DSL, you need to consider Quality of Service (QoS)

The issue with ‘traditional’ networks

As Tiscali view the network environment, we see three key issues with a ‘traditional’ network:

• The majority of the cost of a traditional network (including traditional MPLS based IPVPNs) remains at the ‘access’ level. Therefore at present traditional networks have been limited to large sites, permanent sites, high data centric organisations and big budgets
• DSL based networks historically not been seen as an alternative because of a lack of Service Level Guarantees (SLGs), support for real time traffic (Voice, Multi media etc) and a lack of availability
• Larger organisations have been forced to run separate network architectures for large sites and small remote sites/Tele-working, thereby limiting corporate wide applications
• Many companies are still reliant on costly Dial-up Solutions (PSTN/ISDN) for smaller sites/remote employees