Media Centre
Are you paying too much for old technology?
High speed Ethernet broadband for wide-area networks is faster, more flexible and more cost-effective than its predecessors; however many enterprises continue to pay a premium for outdated telecommunications technology.
Modern applications are bandwidth hungry and legacy technologies such as Frame Relay, ISDN and ATM are expensive when calculated on a per bit basis. Supporting new applications on legacy systems really doesn't make sense when newer and more economical alternatives, such as Ethernet, are available.
Ironically, although carriers are happy to keep selling legacy technologies to businesses, they themselves are moving away from them. For example, British Telecom recently revealed a plan to ditch its ATM network in favour of IP, in some cases including fibre connections direct to customer premises.
Similarly, Telstra is reportedly about to begin the conversion of its core network to IP over fibre. According to ABN Amro, Telstra currently controls 61 per cent of the Australian traditional data market driven by its monopoly position in the ISDN market.
ISDN is sometimes sold as a business-grade service for lower capacity links, however in reality, it provides very little bandwidth for the money. It made some sense when positioned against dial-up modems running at 28kbps, but in Australia it has traditionally been priced at levels which appear designed to protect more profitable alternative products.
For example, ASKO Appliances was able to get eight times the bandwidth compared with previous ISDN links between its five capital city offices for the same price, by switching to Uecomm's Ethernet VLAN service.
ASKO's main reason for switching was value for money, according to IT manager Ian Lapham, and Uecomm delivered the best "bang for buck" when the offerings were analysed over a five-year period.
"While other carriers were closer to Uecomm's price than the incumbent supplier, the benefits such as the flexibility of Ethernet over fibre was preferred to alternatives such as DSL or Frame Relay. Also, the technology is stable and well-suited to the company's needs," said Laphan.
"Scalability is another feature important to ASKO, whose data traffic has grown by 40 percent in the last two years. The ability to obtain additional bandwidth up to 100Mbps on request to Uecomm, without additional installation work or equipment upgrades, was yet another advantage of the Ethernet over fibre service."
ASKO is now considering the use of VoIP and is close to choosing a technology supplier. The magnitude of the anticipated cost savings on voice communications created throught the use of VoIP means the company effectively gets its inter-city data networking for free.
Similarly to ISDN, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has severe limitations in today's demanding and technology reliant business environment.
ATM is costly to deploy and manage. ATM devices have complicated router configurations, which increase the amount of time necessary to `tune' configurations and manage their performance. Additionally, upgrading ATM connections to higher bandwidth levels is costly compared with the relatively inexpensive scaleability of Ethernet.
Prior to 2003 Museum Victoria maintained Uecomm Metrofibre (dark fibre) connections between its museums utilising ATM technology to support a host of bandwidth-hungry applications, including video and audio streaming for exhibits and documentaries.
According to David Methven, IT Manager, Museum Victoria, implementing Uecomm Ethernet VLAN allowed Museum Victoria to deliver a VoIP solution that resulted in significant cost-savings by sending the voice traffic over its own inter-museum network, rather than over the public ISDN network. The Museum also to further enhance its actual savings by utilising a single network for both voice and data traffic.
"Our network is also simple to manage, primarily due to the simplicity of Ethernet technology and our familiarity with the existing PABX infrastructure, " explained Methven.
The solution is used by more than 450 Museum Victoria employees, who have noted no changes in both their user experience or voice quality. The solution provided operational simplicity and eliminated the need for expensive ATM equipment.
"The solution provides a seamless service for users, with no degradation in quality," Methven said.
Another common legacy technology still being used, Frame Relay, transports traffic across a fixed point-to-point data circuit. According to IDC, nearly half of U.S. enterprises use Frame Relay interconnect circuits as their primary inter-site wide-area network connection technology.
If your bandwidth requirements are low, this technology is relatively cost effective, however it starts to get very expensive at higher bandwidths. This becomes a significant issue as companies of all sizes increasingly deploy more high-bandwidth applications, such as voice, video, networked storage, videoconferencing, and hosted applications. To deploy these applications, companies are looking for a high-bandwidth, low-cost, reliable service.
Proven as an ideal source of low-cost, scalable wide-area network bandwidth, Ethernet is a much better choice than ATM, ISDN or Frame Relay as it is simpler, faster, more flexible and substantially lower in cost for high volume applications.
By Brendan Park
Brendan Park is the Director, Strategy for Uecomm, Australia's specialist fibre broadband carrier. Uecomm's network is among the most advanced fibre optic networks in the world. The widespread CBD and greater metropolitan reach makes the data network one of the most extensive in Australia.
