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Spiraling Communications Costs

In the past few years, we've watched expenditures for data communications approach and then surpass those for voice--even considering that voice dollars are heavily inflated by fax costs. Every new application to every new partner seems to require its own data circuit. Every new office or facility we open to support our expanding businesses seems to require numerous new data circuits. TCP/IP-based applications have brought some reduction in the number of circuits we deploy, but it's not enough. Additionally, the circuits we purchase for our business needs are expensive point-to-point, long-haul lines.

For some reason we've trusted the telcos' leased circuits for our businesses, but when some other company comes to us with a new service, we demand to know how they'll be keeping our traffic private. Many of us had no choice until now--we had to trust the telcos. But at N+I this year, it became clear that we have an abundance of choices today to assist us in lowering our communications costs. Our choices fall into three broad classes: closed networks; link-layer WAN components, such as ATM and frame relay; and network-layer tunneling.

Fitting the Question to the Answer NetWorld+Interop is nothing like it was before it moved to Las Vegas. The straight-shooting engineers who make the systems work now are controlled by marketing departments, and the presentations are so smooth that you need to remember what it was you wanted to fix--or you'll end up fixing whatever the most enticing product happens to fix. The most fascinating presentations this spring were for closed networks. Many of these providers actually thought that companies would trust them based solely on their word that they would provide a private network. It was truly amazing how few offered any third-party verification of their privacy claims. Are we truly that gullible? Will we really trust these businesses on their word alone? When faced with these questions, some providers saw the value--both for themselves and for their customers--in third-party verification of their claims.

Perhaps you want to operate your own connectivity but you still need to support numerous private groups within your organization, or your business plan is to become one of the closed private network suppliers. The ATM and frame relay vendors were out in force selling direct solutions for private networks. Interestingly, to most of these companies, private does not mean nonreadable. Private means assured bandwidth and pathing. A few ATM vendors listed their support for ATM encryption at OC-3 speeds.

Either of these VPN solution paths could help reduce the costs and complexity of your corporate WAN and, in some limited cases, of your enterprise network. If you fit into the select community of single-sourced networks or roll your own, more power to you. May your work always be simple. But, many of us can no longer afford to operate our own WANs and cannot rely on a single network provider.