Wide Area Networks

For the majority of enterprise-level firms, Wide Area Network (WAN) infrastructures will form one of their biggest operational expenses in terms of total cost of networking ownership. Given this fact, selecting the most appropriate wide area solution - or indeed combination of solutions - is a choice that firms cannot afford to undertake lightly.

The decision is complicated by what at first sight appears to be a confusing number of options in terms of technologies and permutations of cost versus performance tradeoffs.

A traditionally popular method of interconnecting geographically dispersed corporate sites is by renting dedicated leased lines between each node on the WAN. Leased line connectivity offers excellent quality of service and security resulting in reduced support costs.

However, deploying leased lines is also the most expensive way of creating a WAN infrastructure. According to Alison Adams, product manager for data services at Telewest Business, the ultimate disadvantage of serial leased lines is cost and relatively rigid bandwidths, together with costly upgrade paths.

Because of this and the need for increased flexibility, leased lines are increasingly regarded as inefficient use of expensive bandwidth and so now, many enterprises are now migrating from the communication technology to more cost-effective options such as IP-based Virtual Private Networks (IP-VPNs) or Frame Relay.