smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

With a wide area network (or WAN) you can connect your business’s systems together across several sites without having to rely on the low speed and unreliability of the public internet.

Network access is not something the average small-to-medium business wastes much time thinking about – the technicalities are normally taken care of by a third-party services provider such as BT.

But just like buying a car, all networks – and prices – are far from equal, and it pays to know exactly what you’re getting, rather than relying on whatever your provider happens to have on the shelf out the back.

Many newer and potentially business-boosting technologies, particularly unified communications (UC) and disaster recovery services, require an optimal network (or more colloquially, a ‘fat pipe’). This is why many equipment manufacturers such as Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco market UC so assiduously: it inevitably involves spending a lot of money on the expensive underlying network technology.

Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) is a relatively new technology for connecting wide area networks. It might sound like a terrifying acronym, but it is revolutionising the way businesses run networks across multiple sites in Europe.

Into the ether
Where many businesses connect their premises using expensive leased lines or the cheaper but highly inefficient public internet, VPLS uses ethernet rather than IP technology, allowing a carrier to create a virtual ‘shared’ network that it can break down into chunks and sell individually, scaling to the customer’s needs.

To the business user, computers in an office on the other side of the country, or even the world, look like they are appearing on a single, high-speed local area network (or LAN).

This lets you run cheap and effective video conferencing across your own network, collaborate near-instantly with offices on the other side of the world, frequently transfer large amounts of data to remote backup sites, or pull clever tricks such as remote desktop virtualisation. This latter setup entails one powerful server sitting in the middle of the business, dispensing desktop environments to personal computers all over the business, regardless of location. That offers the potential of big savings on hardware, support, management and security, particularly for a new or expanding business.

So effective is the technology that IT analyst firm Forrester expects VPLS-based services to become ‘the dominant means of delivery for ethernet services over the next 24 months’.

The firm also noted rising adoption of ethernet among SMBs across Europe, reporting that 38 per cent have fully deployed it to access a network or the internet.

Adrian Hobbins, chief technology officer of VPLS provider Exponential-e, says comparing current IP-based networking technology to ethernet-based VPLS ‘is like comparing a Robin Reliant to a Juggernaut 26-wheeler. You can now move 50,000 boxes when before you could only move four.’

Carriers have been traditionally reluctant to offer it, claims Hobbins, because of their need to make money from their existing investments. ‘You probably don’t know about it because your incumbent [provider] isn’t telling you about 2009 technology,’ Hobbins says. ‘He’s teaching you about what he’s got stuck in the ground.’

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