Managed Public Networks!

The Internet as it stands today is by far the biggest network that mankind has ever seen and I am sure it would continue to remain that way as it grows in size and reach everyday. It has matured from a young and not so very serious network, that was used for applications like mail and news exchange to a very serious network. The Internet is now the backbone network for many companies, who have decided to move away from their stand-alone infrastructure. It now carries traffic that is critical and important for many of these companies. Offshoring of outsourced activities means that companies promise timely deliveries to their customers with better quality than when it was done in-house and at much lower costs. We all know they are betting on their network performance and their connectivity to the Internet!

With this kind of criticality, network performance is something that has to be carefully managed and monitored. Thanks to the service providers and the undersea fiber cables that were quickly submerged during the Internet boom, reliable international connectivity is no more a point of discussion. Companies now have the option to choose the undersea cable paths, the back-up path and the exit point for their traffic.

Service providers across the globe have sunk in a lot of time, effort and money to ensure quality connectivity on the public backbone. Hardware manufacturers have supplemented their efforts by incorporating Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities in their equipments. All of the newer network equipment, small or big, at the core or the edge, doing routing or a specialized function, supports QoS. QoS helps companies to define the quality that they need from the network right from the point where the data is generated. This means quality can be managed right from the company's premises till the point where it is handed over to the end destination. Service providers can partner with other networks to ensure that QoS is handled end-to-end.

If QoS is a technical tool for managing quality, Service Level Agreements are a non-technical tool for agreeing upon performance parameters with service providers and monitoring them. Typically parameters that impact network performance are availability, packet loss, latency and jitter. It is possible for customers to get a guaranteed network connection with all of these parameters monitored and reported by the service providers. To facilitate high availability connections to the Internet, service providers also have multiple points of presence within the same city to provide companies with the option of connecting their local loop (last mile) to more than one point of presence.

The Internet is a collection of the entire service provider networks and with so much focus on quality, reliability and network performance from them, I am sure in due course it will outperform stand alone networks. It's just a question of time before the Internet becomes more synonymous with private corporate networks, than what it is right now.

- C.R. Srinivas