How can you meet the demands of sites that are outgrowing the entire
DS-1 and need bandwidths above 1.5 Mbps, not to mention the bandwidth
requirements of your corporate site? Several solutions exist to increase your
bandwidth well beyond DS-1 levels, but they come at a price. Here's help.
Want to shop around for WAN services without subjecting yourself to a longwinded sales pitch? WAN pricing tools let you price several combinations for moving data, even if you don't know exactly what you want. We assess offerings from Salestar/NAC, LDCircuit and Telco Exchange that furnish ballpark figures to help you budget your WAN.
Frame relay remains the WAN of choice for carrying a variety of services
among corporate locations. As your network grows, you'll want to look
more closely at frame relay access devices, which are available with
ISDN and modem ports. While normally used as backups for network access,
they also can be used for their remote dial-in/dial-out capabilities or
to connect to other access devices without using a frame relay
connection. We provide some FRAD guidelines.
To place an IP telephony call, you really need only a speaker, a
microphone and the Internet, right? Almost, the call must first find its
way through PBXes, local exchanges, gateways and H.323 or SIP before
anyone can pick up your call. Fortunately, Philip Carden is here to weed
through these complexities online in our latest Network Design Manual chapter.
What's fast, versatile and pervasive within carrier voice and data WANs? SONET, of course. Local and national carriers are eager to deliver high-speed SONET services to your door to meet your bandwidth-thirsty enterprise and e-commerce application needs. But you'll need to know how the technology works before you can make an educated decision about the providers. We explain the basics, from the makeup of a SONET ring to how to keep your data synchronized.
It was one of the first public power utilities to push more than electricity over its power-grid infrastructure, opting to build its own carrier-grade network rather than merely leasing the dark fiber to businesses and carriers. Now Tacoma Power, through its Click! Network division, offers data-transport
services for businesses and carriers and cable-modem services for multiple ISPs. That is in addition to the cable TV service it launched two years ago.
Has managing your network become a mind-boggling experience? If you've got the right skills and some dedicated resources, network-simulation packages can be invaluable. Using these tools, you can run what-if scenarios to determine the correct place to locate a server, provision the right amount of bandwidth or figure out application service levels.
Take control of your IP network with our guide to the Internet Control Message Protocol. In this excerpt from his book Internet Core Protocols, Eric A. Hall explains how to get the most out of ICMP tools.
Wilsons Leather runs an integrated voice-and-data frame relay WAN that links its 550 stores nationwide. The 128-Kbps PVC frame relay network replaced the company's separate voice network and multiple analog phone lines it used for plucking data from its stores after-hours. See the details.
Sonet, a longtime standard for optical data transmission, can move the contents of a CD-ROM from coast to coast in less than a second--an attractive speed for bandwidth-hungry enterprises. Thus the use of Sonet is becoming increasingly widespread beyond the carrier channel, giving rise to the need for a better understanding of its capabilities for everyday business use. Here's a look at how it works.
Interactive Tools
If you're on the hunt for WAN products, scope out our
Interactive Buyer's Guide. We keep current specifications on the products relevant to the enterprise, so you can find exactly the product you need.
Looking for an ISP? CMPnet's ISPs.com lets you search for the best deals from a database of 4,000 ISPs, broken down by area code.
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