The Lippis Report

Wide area networks are very slow to change, with the Internet boom of the late 90s ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨perhaps" the only exception. Large site connections are dominated by frame relay, but it took over a decade to achieve this dominance. And the telecommunications industry have been talking about broadband for over twenty years. But with all the economic fiascos of the last three years, broadband – both residential and business – is taking off and expanding rapidly. The FCC reported in late June ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ√Ä√∫03, that at the end of 2002, there were 19.9 million high-speed connections in the United States, up 55 % from ´01. While cable operators dominate broadband deployments, the regional phone companies have found religion and are investing heavily. For example there are over 200 people under Michael Daigle, VP network planning at Verizon Communications, www.verizon.com that are chartered to install 10 million DSL lines this year covering nearly 80% of Verizon subscribers.

So what does broadband and IP Telephony have to do with each other? A lot. For one, they are both being deployed in the same exact types of locations: telecommuters, small to medium offices and regional sites. Also they need each other. At the same time IP Telephony requirements for multi-site connections are growing, broadband deployments are wide enough now to fill that IP Telephony need. With broadband growing in geographic coverage to support many remote sites, its large bandwidth priced attractively, is often more than adequate to support both voice and data flows, ushering in the promise of convergence in the wide area. The implications of this trend are huge. As broadband becomes the preferred connectivity option for remote connections the entire wide area structure of enterprise networks will change.

Four Ring or Two Ring WAN Model?

Think of four concentric circles with each circle representing a category of wide area connectivity, the traditional WAN model. The center circle is the core wide area backbone that links up headquarter and regional sites primarily with frame relay and private lines. The next ring is regional site connectivity, followed by small to medium size offices. The final ring is telecommuters. IP Telephony over broadband is changing the concentric ring model into a two-ring structure of core and everything else.

Case in point. A few large insurance concerns, which I can´t name, link over 1000 small offices with frame relay for data and 1MBs for voice. These small offices link to regional sites, then to headquarter facilities in the traditional four-ring concentric circle model. Driven by economic efficiency edicts and multi-site IP Telephony requirements, they rethought their WAN. They captured the cost of their frame relay and voice network and compared it to installing a DSL and cable modem in every remote site. One company already had a Cisco 2600 router providing VPN service and Avaya IP Office solution deployed. They added the cost of a Proficient Networks route control device to measure performance over the DSL and cable modem to guide traffic over the best link by controlling the BGP tables in the Cisco 2600 router. The ROI analysis justified this new DIN broadband based WAN structure.

Nearly 300 remote offices are being brought on to the new wide area network supporting multi-site IP Telephony calls and data traffic. The DIN WAN structure is being driven by multi-site IP Telephony requirements and the trading off of expensive wide area circuit cost (frame +1MB vs. broadband) for inexpensive capital cost (Avaya IP Office, Cisco 2600, Proficient Route Control). The reduction in circuit cost for broadband more than pays for the equipment cost. Small offices now have the ability for VPN connections to regional sites, headquarters or other small offices, which shifts the WAN structure to a two-tier ring model.

IP Telephony Changes Connectivity Dynamics of Remote Access

The remote access part of the WAN has very specific requirements due to its broad access and, frankly, its remoteness. Remote access is expensive from a TCO point of view since wide area links are long and many, there are usually little to no IT expertise in residence, making operations and trouble shooting difficult, and equipment cost can run up with the number of remote sites. Also security is a major concern since each remote site offers access to enterprise resources to unauthorized personal or intruders. Add the huge up tick in IP Telephony deployments over the past two years in small to medium size offices and you have the emergence of a new set of networking requirements.

Point of fact, in less than 12 months Avaya has shipped over 12,000 IP Office deployments! Even Mr. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco told me at an N+I Cisco reception that Avaya has benefited from the IT spending slowdown by giving it time to focus on IP Telephony. In short the IT spending slow down elongated the IP Telephony sales cycle, thus creating time for strategy and product development, which Avaya capitalized on. And capitalized it has. Phil Hochmuth, a Senior Writer, for Network World Fusion, wrote a story on 07/25/03 that documents how Merrill Lynch swapped out Cisco´s IP Telephony gear for Avaya´s.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0725merrill.html. It seems that Merrill was concerned about security, reliability and proprietaryness with their Cisco IP Telephony installation to the point where they wanted a converged networks that supported TDM and IP Telephony voice technologies that worked together. If Merrill´s approach to convergence is systemic in the industry, then we may expect to see a shift in IP Telephony installations going toward those companies that have both IP Telephony products and services plus a large installed base of TDM gear. This is surely good news for Avaya as proof that it´s strategy is working and benefited from the slow down. It has recently signed deals with IBM for global IP Telephony services and with HP for the bundling and distribution of HP´s ProLiant ML310, ML330 and DL 320 servers to run Avaya´s IP Office software in the small to medium-sized business market segment. Avaya has also introduced a series of security gateways that bundle security and IP
Telephony features addressing key requirements for extending remote site IP Telephony deployments with headquarters..

Avaya´s New Security Gateways

Avaya introduced the SG5, SG5X, SG200, SG203, and SG208 security gateways that span from telecommuter to headquarter deployments. It´s clear that Avaya has learned from its 12,000 installs of IP Office since the features bundled within the SG are not obvious until you analyze the dynamics of the remote IP Telephony market. Bundled into the SG products are VPN, firewall and IP Telephony support. The SGs support Avaya´s VPNremote and VPNmanager software. They also support H.323, which is key in contact center applications. Enterprise managers had to leave ports open in firewalls to support H.323 traffic creating security risks and vulnerabilities. NAT for remote IP phones behind firewalls is a huge problem for telecommuters or remote contact center personal who have broadband connections supporting IP Telephony. If a local firewall or router administers an IP address to an IP phone how does that phone connect into an enterprise network? Having NAT address translation allows the remote offices to be configured centrally, so when plugged into the local network they get dial tone. The SGs also boast automatic QoS and bandwidth allocation for IP Telephony traffic plus survivability through DoS protection, and VPN failover. To minimize on the operational cost of managing remote IP Telephony installations the SGs have central security policy management software for configuration and change management, which are then automatically distributed to gateways throughout the network.

Expect to see many new product introductions this fall from across the industry that support this new two-ring WAN model. Who would have thought that voice, not data, would drive a sweeping change in wide area network structure. So what should you do about it? Here are some suggestions.

A Road Map

First, like my insurance company case study above, tabulate circuit cost from all remote sites including telecommuters where you either have or plan to have IP Telephony deployed. Send out an RFI (request for information) requesting service providers to map your remote sites against their broadband coverage. You want both DSL and Cable. In your RFI request the itemization of installation and circuit cost. Review and tabulate your IP Telephony multi-site requirements. Do you need firewalls, VPNs, H.323 and SIP support, NAT address translation, route control, routing, QoS, DHCP, bandwidth management, etc.? While the last list may seem a bit daunting, the good news is that products are bundling these features to make it easier for deployment. Once all the analysis is complete and the ROI works then it´s time for installation and deployment. Some IP Telephony companies have
large service organizations that can perform system test, deployment and operations management. If your network is large this may be the only option. If done right, once complete you´ll find that the new DIN WAN will be more responsive and lower total cost of ownership too.