Wide Area Network (WAN) Options for BC and Alberta Business

If you are an I.T. Administrator managing a Wide Area Network, you’ll have a number of factors you’ll want to consider. Three of the biggest:

• Bandwidth
• Reliability
• Cost

We’ll admit that installing Fibre at each location, with multiple EVCs (Ethernet Virtual Circuits) over an MPLS network is a great solution for the first two of these factors — Bandwidth and Reliability — but it’s a solution that doesn’t fall within everyone’s budget. Check out our short PowerPoint on how our Meshed Private Network can be configured with multiple EVCs.

Skyway West, however, can also configure a high speed, reliable and cost-effective solution using inexpensive broadband technologies.

For example, one of our customers, a large retail chain, required an extremely reliable Internet connection at each of its stores in order for their POS terminals to communicate with the servers located at their Head Office.  Their internet connection was also important for their credit card authorization and for a planned future implementation of Voice over IP.

Full Duplex Fibre was installed at their main office, giving a faster Upstream connection and much lower latency which was important for their business applications.  But at many of their stores we installed two broadband connections, giving each location the speed and reliability that was needed while at the same time keeping within their budget.

For only $189 per month Skyway West delivered…

• 25 Mbps Cable Internet Connection (50 Mbps was only only an additional $20)
• 15.0 Mbps Business DSL service
• Automatic failover
• AnyIP Private Network service, eliminating the need for VPN routers at each store
• Policy Routing

Policy Routing allows Skyway to aggregate traffic over multiple Internet connections. For example, basic web browsing can be delivered over Cable while traffic that requires low latency (i.e. VoIP) is routed over DSL. Skyway can also route traffic based on the device on our customer’s network. For example, the traffic from each POS terminal can be delivered to the servers in HQ over the lower latency DSL.

QoS (or Quality of Service) is also automatically applied if one of the Internet services became unavailable. While  all traffic is sharing one connection, QoS gives important business applications PRIORITY over basic web browsing until both Internet services are available again.

For more information on our Wide Area Network products or any of our business Internet services, contact us anytime.

Chris Miles | 604-484-5257 | cmiles@skywaywest.com