Dumb, Insecure, And Unreliable: Bad For Business — Why Is It Good For Your WAN?

What would the world be like without voicemail? We would come back from a meeting to a slew of sticky notes of calls to return. Cellular phones would be little more than glorified walkie-talkies. Customer service representatives would talk to you in person-- but that's a story for another time.

The point is that voicemail is one of those inventions that changed the manner and the effectiveness by which we communicate. In essence, phone companies took the intelligence and functionality of answering machines and integrated it into the phone network. The same principle now applies to private data networks.

Innovations in routing and firewalls - the two intelligent components of any network - are allowing providers to deliver a whole new generation of intelligent networks. These network options are incorporating the intelligence from customer premise equipment (think answering machine) into the overall architecture of the network.

The impact for customers is significant. Intelligent networks are much easier to provision, upgrade, manage and afford.

Affordability is the most significant benefit. New intelligent networks can incorporate varying connection technologies that deliver 30 times the bandwidth or more per dollar versus competing options. The capital costs are also significantly lower, as equipment is minimized at the remote location, and the overall management costs are greatly reduced.

Despite their advantages, intelligent networks have made only modest gains thus far. Many providers still push the value of "dumb networks" - so named because their only function is transmitting information from one location to another.

Telecommunications companies confuse the marketplace by offering dumb networks in the form of virtual private network (VPN) solutions. VPNs rely on the Internet, which is itself a dumb network, as the backbone for data transfer. The market has yet to conclusively demonstrate the true cost of VPNs but many analysts are suggesting that there might be more to the story in regard to total cost of ownership.

This whitepaper explains the benefits of choosing an intelligent network over a dumb network, such as a VPN, and other traditional forms of networking. It also explores how that choice has immediate and long-lasting implications on business operations.