Understanding Quality of Service (QoS).

Before we dive into Dynamic QoS, at its core, Quality of Service (QoS) is a technology designed to manage network traffic effectively. It prioritizes essential applications over less critical ones, ensuring that important network activities, like video calls, receive precedence over lower-priority tasks, such as streaming videos on Netflix.

Goals of QoS

• • Reduce Packet Loss: Ensures data packets reach their destination reliably.

• • Minimize Latency: Decreases the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction.

• • Eliminate Jitter: Avoids variations in packet delay at the receiving end, important for quality in real-time communication

The Evolution of Dynamic QoS

Traditional QoS systems operate on predetermined rules that allocate bandwidth to prioritized applications and create virtual queues for data packets. This method follows a basic first-in-first-out principle, where bandwidth is reserved for prioritized traffic.

Transition from Tradition:

• Dynamic QoS transcends these limitations by utilizing intelligent software to monitor and adjust traffic rules dynamically for optimized performance. Here’s how Bigleaf elevates this process:
• Intelligent Identification: Bigleaf identifies application traffic dynamically.
• Real-time Adjustment: Continuously adjusts QoS policies based on current network conditions to ensure high-priority traffic like VoIP, SSH, and Remote Desktop is not hindered by ISP congestion.

The Business Case for Dynamic QoS

Without effective QoS, network traffic can become chaotic, akin to rush-hour traffic with non-functioning traffic lights, leading to significant performance degradation. Bigleaf automates the identification and prioritization of traffic, eliminating the need for constant manual monitoring.

Benefits for your business:

1. Enhanced Productivity: Optimizes latency, allowing employees to remain productive and focused.
2. Improved Reliability: Prevents disruptions in VoIP calls, video conferences, and VPN sessions, ensuring smooth, reliable communication.
3. Cost Efficiency: Rather than upgrading to more expensive internet lines, Dynamic QoS provides a cost-effective solution by better managing existing bandwidth.

Optimizing Internet Performance with Bigleaf Networks

Many businesses attempt to improve slow internet speeds by increasing their service plans. However, Bigleaf Networks proposes a more strategic approach through Dynamic QoS, which ensures that cloud and SaaS applications perform optimally, regardless of the internet provider or location.

Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS:

As part of our comprehensive SD-WAN solution, Bigleaf offers AI-powered Dynamic QoS to support businesses reliant on stable and reliable internet connectivity across all applications and locations.

Learn More and Get Started

Discover more about how Dynamic QoS can transform your business network for better efficiency and performance:

• Request a Demo from Bigleaf Networks

By leveraging Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS, you can ensure that your business not only keeps pace with modern demands but also maximizes its technological investments

Not so very long ago, we all commuted to and from our offices every day for work, there were cars and traffic and freeways involved. Of course, then 2020 happened and suddenly we all worked remotely and began just commuting down the hallway of our own home instead of down the freeway.  As we enter 2024, hybrid work environments have become more and more common. Many of us now commute down the freeway two or three days each week and down our own hallway the rest of the week. 

While hybrid work is great for things like work/life balance, it presents certain challenges when it comes to basic connectivity. After all, your home internet connection isn’t the same as your office internet connection, and with many of us taking meetings via Zoom or Teams or Slack all day, internet connectivity, stability, reliability, and redundancy have become more important than ever. 

SD-WAN: The Backbone of Modern Workplaces 

At the core of this hybrid work frontier is SD-WAN, or Software-Defined Wide Area Network, which has become the most flexible and efficient solution for modern businesses with distributed networks.  

By separating control functions from physical infrastructure and applying software-defined networking principles, SD-WAN offers increased visibility into network traffic, dynamic path selection for optimal performance, and improved reliability by intelligently rerouting traffic. In other words, SD-WAN makes for a more reliable, stable, and adaptable network as compared to traditional WAN. 

Bigleaf’s Approach to SD-WAN 

By elevating what SD-WAN can be, Bigleaf has become an ideal solution for the intricacies of hybrid work models. For example, Dynamic QoS (Quality of Service) allows you to identify and prioritize certain traffic. What this means is that when you’re working from home you can give the traffic for your Zoom call priority over the kids watching Netflix in the other room, meaning that if there’s a network issue then their TV show might buffer but your video conference will remain crystal clear.  

Another huge benefit Bigleaf provides is Same IP Failover. In other words, you can have one network entirely fail and Bigleaf will switch all traffic to your other network without changing your IP address, meaning no dropped video calls or needing to log back in cloud-based applications, you likely won’t even know a network failure took place. 

These features, and more, add not only to the reliability but also the security of your network, particularly for remote work. Bigleaf also peers directly with over 150 cloud, content, and carrier networks private, direct connections to cloud applications.  

The Future of Hybrid Work 

These past few years have taught us that it really is anyone’s guess what’s right around the next corner. One thing is for certain though: as with life, business will continue to find a way. And business will always require reliable network connectivity. Bigleaf was built to scale right along with your business. From single circuit to multiple circuit to our High Availability solution, Bigleaf can improve your network today and grow with you into tomorrow.  

Whether your business operates in-office, remotely, or hybrid, Bigleaf has an SD-WAN solution to improve and optimize your network connectivity. Learn more today.

This content was originally published as part of our Linkedin Newsletter, Bigleaf Bytes, in January 2024. Subscribe now on LinkedIn.

Keep your internet applications, such as Zoom, RingCentral, and POS systems running without disruption or delay. Bigleaf SD-WAN ensures your cloud network runs optimally on the public internet, eliminating outages and downtime.

Learn how Bigleaf will keep your business operating smoothly.

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Networking is a distinct territory within IT with equally distinct jargon to match. One term you’ve probably heard of is quality of service (QoS) – technology that controls network traffic to ensure the performance of essential applications. 

Although quality of service is not a new concept, QoS and its latest variations are a hot topic regarding today’s SMB IT infrastructure. But what is Dynamic QoS, and how does it work? Is Dynamic QoS necessary for your business continuity and success? 

Read on as we answer your questions, explain its business implications, and show real-world examples of what makes Bigleaf Dynamic QoS technology an absolute game changer for SMBs. 

Let’s dive in.

What Is [Dynamic] QoS and how does it work?

In a nutshell, quality of service is a set of technologies or tools that manage and prioritize network traffic, ensuring the smooth, consistent performance of high-priority and real-time applications & traffic (even with limited internet capacity). 

These days, business applications aren’t only competing with many types of internet traffic; the applications are competing with one another (whether you work from home or a corporate office). While all apps within a network are subject to the consequences of bandwidth issues and poor connection quality, apps with real-time requirements feel the effects fast – think crappy choppy video conferences and VoIP calls. 

Internet disruptions like those aren’t just annoying for your teams and your customers. When meetings are interrupted or sales calls drop, operations are stalled, costing your business revenue, productivity, recovery & more. In fact, according to the latest data from Gartner, the average cost of network downtime or unusable uptime (when your internet is live but unstable) to your business is upwards of $300K per hour.

QoS mitigates these all-too-common connectivity and performance problems by working to reduce the effects of packet loss, latency, and jitter on a network, prioritizing and routing traffic through circuits in a way to best handle that of your business-critical apps such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, RingCentral, and other SaaS and cloud-based tools for VoIP, video conferencing, and video-on-demand.  

To put it simply, you can think of your internet connection as a massive, multi-lane freeway. When the flow of traffic starts to get heavy, QoS is like the carpool and bus-only lanes reserved for your high-priority apps, resolving traffic congestion.

Traditionally, QoS works by prioritizing packets based on manual policy and configuring routers that create separate virtual queues for each application. Bandwidth is reserved for the essential applications or websites that are assigned priority access. A network administrator usually allocates the order in which packets are handled and provides the appropriate level of bandwidth to each app or traffic flow. 

If that sounds tedious and limiting, it’s because it is. 

Plus, traditional solutions can only allocate bandwidth to internet traffic leaving the local network. Everything beyond the LAN is outside its control. So, traditional QoS solutions are helpful but, again, limited, especially in today’s work-from-anywhere business landscape.

Enter Dynamic QoS

Rather than using legacy, first-in-first-out (FIFO) methods, Dynamic QoS helps improve business-critical app performance by improving internet traffic management capabilities via bandwidth allocation and traffic prioritization techniques automatically. Instead of IT leaders or network administrators manually configuring QoS rules into your network, Dynamic QoS auto-adjusts traffic rules using intelligent software. 

When your Dynamic QoS tools and other SD-WAN capabilities work cohesively, the way the health of your internet connection and bandwidth is monitored, managed, and prioritized ensures the silky-smooth performance of your much-needed business applications. 

Whether you’re working in a household of hardcore gamers and streaming services junkies, or in a busy corporate office, Dynamic QoS recognizes and protects the services using minimum bandwidth + require low latency. 

Since Dynamic QoS reduces disruptions caused by problems like downtime, latency, and jitter, your network automatically becomes more cost-effective. So, your business, by default, becomes more productive.

Is Dynamic QoS really beneficial for business?

In a word, yes. Without proper QoS, network data can become disorganized to the point of causing performance degradation or worse. As mentioned above, that’s a $300K per hour problem that most SMBs can’t weather. 

And with Dynamic QoS, the identification and prioritization of traffic happen automatically, in real-time. So, you no longer need to spend time, and use staff or other resources to consistently monitor all the applications your business uses. 

In general, QoS, especially Dynamic QoS, empowers businesses and end-users by ensuring the cloud and internet apps they rely on work optimally. Optimizing latency allows employees to be as productive and focused as possible while keeping users happy: no more dropped VoIP calls, video conferences, or VPN sessions. 

Clearly, the benefits of QoS and its advanced, dynamic variant are integral to a thriving business. But are all services created equal? Not according to more than 100,000 users and counting who rely on Bigleaf Networks to provide them with truly reliable connectivity daily.

Why SMBs choose Bigleaf Dynamic QoS to intelligently prioritize internet traffic

“Bigleaf has architected a new kind of networking platform to deliver end-to-end connectivity to and from anywhere your traffic needs to go.” 

Like other SD-WAN solutions, we do three things here at Bigleaf. We monitor connectivity, route your traffic, and prioritize it. However, the way we do it here uses intelligent software instead of manual policy and configuration work. So, our customers can simply plug into the Bigleaf service and reap the benefits of performant connectivity almost immediately. 

Notably, the way we provide QoS prioritization across the public internet is unique even among other players in our industry. We can adapt to circuit conditions and bidirectionally control traffic over the internet to assure prioritization for your key applications. This means VoIP and video are always smooth, and those business-critical apps stay responsive even if other users in your network are downloading giant files. 

Our Dynamic QoS also works on a single Internet connection. So, you can still enjoy all the prioritization, circuit monitoring, and proactive alerting benefits Bigleaf offers while sticking to one circuit. 

Our self-driving AI approach utilizes Bigleaf Same-IP Failover and our patented Intelligent Load Balancing that all work together with our innovative Dynamic QoS technology to ensure your cloud applications are constantly performing. 

The benefits and use cases of QoS, especially Bigleaf’s AI-driven, Dynamic QoS, are numerous and make implementation worth the investment for your growing business.

Dynamic QoS: You don’t need more speed, just better prioritization

Let’s check out a real-world scenario that may look close to a situation you’d find yourself in. It’s a perfect example of QoS prioritization in action.  

Bigleaf Networks co-founder Joel Mulkey, an IT visionary, offers a quintessential example of the “less is more” approach. 

View Graph A below.  

At Joel’s home, the fastest circuit has about 6 Mbps of download speed. Recently, one of his kids purchased a brand-new video game from the digital distribution service Steam. Notice that the game was downloading during the day, saturating that circuit (red). Yet, throughout the day, that same circuit was the healthiest (in addition to being the fastest). So, our Intelligent Load Balancing placed Joel’s Zoom calls onto the path (green). 

Notice how QoS slows down the lower priority bulk data during those periods, which kept Joel’s Zoom calls perfectly clear. Now that’s how you prioritize traffic on your internet connection, especially one with such limited bandwidth! 

That’s the key value of Bigleaf’s AI-powered Dynamic QoS: it automatically identified the game as a type of traffic that shouldn’t have priority over a business-critical app like Zoom. 

So, there was no need to notify IT of a new app running through his circuit, the team didn’t need to create a new policy, and Joel was able to stay focused and productive, completing his business tasks without distractions.

Now, this was at Joel’s home in the Northwest US. But whether you operate out of a home office or run a multi-site, multi-state enterprise, Bigleaf Networks’ site-to-cloud SD-WAN technology delivers consistency and performance you can count on 

Imagine the same situation at a corporate office, where an employee might get invited to a video conference using an app that IT did not anticipate. Bigleaf Dynamic QoS recognizes that traffic and automatically prioritizes it, just as it would treat other VoIP and video call traffic.    

Find more insights in Bigleaf’s customer success stories.

Dynamic QoS: Optimizing the internet for your business

At Bigleaf, we understand that when it comes to getting work done — no matter what internet provider you’re using, no matter your location, and no matter what kind of organization you run — if you rely on cloud and SaaS applications for business, they need to function optimally. So, we set out to create the most effective Dynamic QoS tools to help deliver the performance you need. 

We provide AI-powered Dynamic QoS as a part of our SD-WAN solution to supercharge businesses throughout the USA and Europe, who need truly reliable internet connectivity for every application, every technology, every user, everywhere — over any ISP. 

Learn how Bigleaf can transform your business for the better by requesting a FREE demo. If you have any questions, send us an email at sales@bigleaf.net.  

In addition to being excellent tools for collaboration, voice and video are also effective network diagnostic tools. With their sensitivity to circuit conditions, interactive voice and video more easily reveal problems with internet performance that other applications can limp through. A certain amount of packet loss and jitter won’t do much to your email or even a file download, but a video call will freeze, distort, and drop. 

These issues reveal that your network likely needs an update. It needs to be reimagined for what we need it to do today…and what we will need of it tomorrow.

Enabling cloud-first business

To run the business the way that they imagined, the leadership of the mortgage service provider TruHome had a vision of improving their telephony system and becoming a cloud-first organization. To support all of that, they needed a more resilient network that wasn’t subject to outages or poor performance. However, moving beyond traditional network transport was daunting, because their call center locations were the heartbeat of their business. 

Although cloud-based voice over IP (VoIP) solutions offered a lot of tempting advantages, any move that would increase the risk of downtime or compromise call quality was a non-starter. Their leadership, IT team, and consultants knew the stakes were high as they forged ahead planning a resilient, multiple-location network. They imagined a network that didn’t just improve their call quality but also positioned them to take advantage of other cloud-based applications for the future.

Data networks that use legacy architecture designed with an on-premise server mindset can hamper the evolution of business technology. Branch offices traditionally used carrier-based circuits on costly, rigid MPLS networks that centralize connectivity and bind together the network reliability of every location. This made sense when business resources were hosted on-premise at a single location. 

Now and into the future, traffic is increasingly going to cloud-based resources, not to a central office. TruHome’s vision of a resilient, distributed network that relied on the internet and cloud-based solutions was a good plan. Unfortunately, the challenges they faced were different than what they were familiar with or prepared for.  

The internet is a jungle filled with potential outages, poor BGP configurations, and flaky routers. The more you learn about how the internet functions, the riskier it sounds to rely on it as your business lifeline every second of every day.

And yet, this is what we do. The good news is that reliable, cost-effective internet performance is possible. With an intelligent software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), businesses can run mission-critical applications in the cloud without worry. As needs and applications change, the business can continue to adapt, all without major overhauls or downtime.

The SD-WAN needed today

The new technologies that enable business operations are less often found at centrally located on-premises servers. Other services are not all at the same location, either: phone, collaboration, transactions, and data originate with different providers that each need to be reliably accessible. 

Networks should be more intelligent, dynamically and autonomously supporting the continuous evolution of business technology. IT teams can’t be focused on the day-to-day changes, particularly for their distributed workforce. SMBs need their IT staff and vendors to be working on long-term initiatives, not constant tweaks to QoS or troubleshooting flaky phone calls.

Organizations, especially SMBs, benefit greatly when they can count on their network to manage their traffic intelligently. The type of SD-WAN needed today understands the current challenges of ISPs and IT teams. It adds intelligence to an organization’s network by autonomously:

• assessing and adjusting to the conditions of a circuit in real-time
• recognizing business-type application traffic and prioritizing it end-to-end across a network, even when new technologies are introduced
• utilizing multiple connections for their best use, from load-balancing traffic across all circuits to delivering redundancy and seamless failover where connections stay up; continuing phone calls and internet access like nothing happened. 

Today’s SD-WAN needs to achieve reliability and resilience without constant personal attention. Business-class traffic should travel reliably across commodity broadband without the need for technical staff to constantly monitor and make complex, manual configurations or compromise on firewall security. 

The Right SD-WAN

The key to the TruHome plan was an SD-WAN that could intelligently optimize how traffic behaved on a network and provide the performance that VoIP and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) required. For it to have long term value, the implementation and ongoing management needed to be simple.

Before they found Bigleaf, the TruHome implementation was in trouble. The cost and complexity of a cloud-first network with the appropriate security controls was daunting. Knowing what problems the internet would throw at them, the planners were not convinced the architecture would be reliable. There was too much on the line to accept that.

“It’s one thing to run your data applications on ISP circuits and your telephony on a standard carrier separately. If one is down, some operations can still continue. When you are running data and telephony needs over the same solution, that means you must up the ante on your edge network and data circuits. It means you need a topology that allows you to leverage multiple diverse carriers and solves every outage scenario you can throw at it, not just the ones you think to write policies for.”

John Pentlin, Vice President of IT, TruHome

Resilient and Autonomous Networks to Ignite Distance Collaboration

TruHome has been able to realize its vision of a resilient and autonomous network by implementing Bigleaf. 

The Bigleaf Cloud Access Network peers to 150 cloud host providers, bringing cloud resources “closer.” Operations are less vulnerable to the many outages, breakages and slowdowns that occur across the internet.

The Bigleaf equipment and the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network function autonomously, providing intelligent responses to issues on the internet and to new applications brought online. No IT person needs to be available. No QoS rules need to be configured.

Operating as the firewall’s connection to the internet, the Bigleaf SD-WAN solution does not require any modifications to the firewall itself.

With reliable business-class voice and UCaaS over their internet connections, TruHome relies on intelligent, autonomous networks built with Bigleaf. With redundancy that maximizes the function of all connections and dynamically optimizes for mission critical services, they can move into their cloud-based future. 

Want to see intelligent networking in action? Check out our webinar with Lionakis IT Director Matthew Onken, “Creating a Resilient Network.”

On August 30th, CenturyLink/Level 3 experienced a widespread internet outage lasting nearly 5 hours. This not only impacted their network and their direct customers, but it also affected many other ISPs and services that connected to their network, directly or indirectly.

Each year, there are numerous notable internet disruptions like that one, which can bring businesses to a grinding halt. In just the past few months, Comcast has experienced widespread outage, and AT&T internet service was interrupted or slowed throughout Florida.

Events like these affect every organization that relies on cloud-based applications and video-based communications to maintain day-to-day operations and serve customers. Outages reveal the increased power and indispensability of these tools for business and highlight the importance of internet performance — frequently shining a spotlight on poor WAN performance. This can cost a business even more than the estimated $5,600 per minute that Gartner calculated back in 2014.

While outages are show stoppers, they can still be considered relatively rare. However, jittery VoIP, flaky video calls, or lagging ERP and point-of-sale tools are everyday occurrences, with a significant impact on productivity and the bottom line. Depending on the size and nature your operation, poor network performance can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per minute.

It is an ongoing challenge for businesses to keep mission-critical operations running smoothly over internet connections, especially as more tools are regularly spun up as needed at the department, team, or even user level without IT involvement. And as adoption of cloud-based applications and SaaS solutions increases, traditional networks become even more complex and difficult to manage. Network engineers and IT teams are increasingly strained by dynamic technology stacks (cloud-based, on-premises, and hybrid) and a workforce that is more geographically dispersed.

Smarter network operations

Bigleaf offers a cloud-first SD-WAN solution that improves network efficiency, optimizes IT resources, and helps you create a more resilient and dependable network for your mission-critical applications.

We make it easy to build a transparent, worry-free network that frees IT teams from cumbersome network management tasks and support calls. With our intelligent software, owned and operated Cloud Access Network, 99.99% SLA-backed uptime, tier one support, and firewall-friendly design, Bigleaf helps IT teams to deliver solid internet and cloud app performance more easily in an uncertain environment.

Bigleaf recognizes that tech stacks constantly evolve. Apps are deployed and retired almost daily because individual users have different requirements. If a webinar presenter is dissatisfied with one video conferencing tool, you can be sure they’ll deploy a different one next time. These types of changes don’t need to be a four-alarm fire that spurs the IT department to make manual SD-WAN configuration changes for QoS and firewall compatibility. Bigleaf’s intelligent solution makes it easy for businesses to scale and adjust to changes, in many cases automatically, while maintaining uptime and performance.

These applications and technologies represent investments that business need to see pay off every day. That requires reliable performance at headquarters, branch offices, and home offices no matter what tools are being used. Bigleaf meets those needs with redundant, dependable SD-WAN that’s smarter than your average network architecture.

By stabilizing the network for the technology that powers your business, you can rest easy knowing VoIP won’t fail during an all-hands conference call, video won’t get jittery or freeze during the next big sales presentation, and sales and inventory transactions will go through every time.

To learn more about Bigleaf’s intelligent networking solution from a real-world perspective, watch this webinar — Creating a resilient network: Q&A with Lionakis IT Director Matthew Onken.

How to support connectivity for business applications when everyone works from home

The challenges of managing IT for our newly remote workforce cannot be overstated. As the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered our offices, the number of Americans working from home went from 15 million to an estimated 92 million. That means you have gone from supporting one, or maybe a handful of sites, to supporting all the business apps your users need on different devices connected in different ways to different ISPs.

As in-person meetings move to video conferencing apps and files are flying around inboxes and collaboration tools, your users are leveraging more digital apps than ever. They need fluid video and at-the-ready resources, while hooked up to a home internet service that you have no control over. As funny as it is to see the CEO’s video get stuck in an awkward pose during an all-hands call, these connectivity issues are disrupting the key apps that run your business. With the coronavirus pandemic keeping us all at home for the foreseeable future, it’s your role to lead your company to stable, reliable, working internet.

We’re wrangling terabytes on a system built for “Tiger King”

When trying to serve users at home, it’s useful to consider some fundamental differences in home and office internet contracts, infrastructure, and packages.

• Data has a harder path to travel to residences. ISP points of presence tend to be closer to offices than homes. This means that there’s more infrastructure between your home and the closest internet ‘hub,’ increasing the chance of something breaking or slowing down your data.
• Residential ISP contracts don’t have the service level agreements (SLA) that are usually a part of your business service. Your sales development rep Clara is now mission-critical from her home office, but does not have the power to enforce an SLA for service to her two-bedroom unit in the burbs.
• You generally don’t use all of your bandwidth at home and neither do your neighbors. ISPs build their business model on oversubscription: selling more bandwidth potential than they can actually provide because they know it is unlikely for all of it to be used – sometimes at 40 to 1. Now we are all working from home, and their calculations are way off. They become a bottleneck.

Their home network is a black box

At the office, you know your equipment. You probably installed and configured much of it yourself. Maybe you named some of your favorites. It’s OK, we see you. The point is, you are in control of your stack and you know how it works. Your users’ home LAN and the ISPs WAN may as well be a black box and you have no way to figure out what’s going on with it.

Your customers (a.k.a. team members working from home) have their own customers – the other family members who are using the network for learning and entertainment. The LAN can have all manner of devices and configs. How do you troubleshoot a connection you can’t see?

Give your traffic the right of way

The solution to internet connectivity problems is to prioritize the important business traffic above apps that are not business-critical. Sometimes, all it takes is a manual approach: Having your user identify the traffic hogs on their connection and curb their use – human or machine. This might be unpopular in the household, so for most users, you’ll need a more sophisticated solution. Configuring the user LAN’s Quality of Service (QoS) settings on their residential routers can help (if the router has a QoS capability), but only for problems that originate in the home. It won’t resolve issues between their ISP modem and the servers that host key business applications.

Bigleaf Home Office is a software-defined wide-area network, or SD-WAN, based on technology we have effectively delivered to support office environments. To optimize existing ISP service in the home office, Bigleaf Home Office automatically detects the needs of business applications and intelligently adapts traffic in real time. It supports single circuit connections that are typically found in homes and can also use two internet connections to load balance traffic and perform automatic failover.

Speed test results don’t tell you much

When users encounter a slowdown, their first port of call is frequently a web speed test like speedtest.net. When the results come back saying everything is peachy, they think their problem must have been a blip. We have found that some ISPs actively prioritize speed test traffic to reduce the number of angry customer calls. These popular tools can’t be relied upon to give you what you need to know to support them effectively.

With our technology, you get real-time and historical data and insights about what’s happening across your home office connections. So, when the call comes from a remote worker with internet or application issues, you’ll know what to do. Read about Bigleaf Home Office or request a demo if you want to learn more.

We had always wanted to develop a home office solution, but there were some challenges holding us back that would need to be solved before we could release it. When the sweeping stay-at-home mandates hit and led more than 92 million people in the U.S. to work-from-home, we knew we had to expedite our efforts to support them. We realized that these new remote workers would not only have to share their internet connection with their families and housemates, they would have to count on their residential ISP lines, which can often be unreliable. Amidst all the other distractions business workers might face at home, we wanted to help them stay productive with their work, without having to deal with problematic internet connections and compete for bandwidth with non-business applications.

Bigleaf Home Office prioritizes the traffic most critical to your online calls (VoIP/Video) and business applications over less critical things like file transfers or video streaming. The Home Office product, like our business offering, does this by segmenting the traffic into different classes and prioritizing them accordingly. This means that while someone is watching Netflix or transferring files, your Zoom call (or similar) remains uninterrupted and is given the performance it requires.

While a common belief is that SD-WAN solutions require a second circuit to work. Bigleaf Home Office also works effectively with a single circuit. Not only does it manage QoS prioritization in the home office LAN, its connection to our Cloud Access Network allows it to monitor the circuit outside the home network and adapt in real-time to varying broadband capacity–to make sure key applications don’t drop or lag. 

Based on Bigleaf technology, Bigleaf Home Office uses intelligent algorithms, instead of policies, to automatically identify and prioritize business app traffic. This, alongside a streamlined installation process allows everyone from highly technical to not-technical people to successfully bring the service online in their homes.

We initially rolled out Bigleaf Home Office in March of this year and focused our efforts to help those who most critically needed the service via our Essential Services program. We have since helped companies across the US bring the Home Office service online and ensured their business applications performed as reliably as needed. Now, with so many more of us working from home, the need and focus of having home offices operate with the same efficiency and performance as business offices is more necessary than ever. 

In addition to making Bigleaf Home Office more broadly available, we’re also announcing a new, larger service package of 1000Mbsp down/ 100Mbps up. Now, whether you are running a 80/10 Mbps DSL line from a rural ISP or a more robust fiber line, there is a service package to fit the needs of remote workers to make sure they do not get interrupted or lose productivity. 

This is all in thanks to those of you who have contacted us and provided us with your feedback to help shape what we made available. It is a part of our DNA to constantly engage and ascertain how well our product is fitting your needs and solving your problems. We value these interactions with the highest regards and it is through this feedback that we are able to become aware of new needs or missing components of our product line.

To get more details on Bigleaf Home Office or the new bandwidth package, please reach out to your Channel Sales Manager, or contact us at 1-888-244-3133. If you’re not a Bigleaf Customer yet and would like to learn more about how we can help ensure performant uptime across your home offices, request a demo today. 

To address these issues, people have been switching their home Internet plans to fiber because increasing their speed and capacity seemed like the logical thing to do. However, even with this type of upgrade, we’ve continued to hear about stuttering application performance and the message, “your Internet connection is unstable,” popping up on peoples’ screens. 

For example, one person we talked to was still experiencing problems even after he had upgraded to a symmetrical 100/100 Mbps fiber line. This didn’t make sense to him as he thought that such robust connection would big enough to handle video conferences for two people working from home, even with a child streaming 4K videos.

Well, that would be true if the fiber internet connection itself was always running 100% optimally. If that were true, then yes, the 100 Mbsp both ways should have no issue transferring that traffic back and forth, making all those applications run without interruption. But more than a year ago, we investigated the performance of fiber lines that our business office customers were using and discussed in our blog post, “Busting the fiber myth: It’s not the ‘silver bullet’ of internet connections.”  

What we found was that the average fiber connection has downtime, instability, and degraded performance several times per month. More specifically, based on the data of our business office customers, we found that fiber connections:

• Had over an hour of downtime per month on average 
• Were unusable for an additional 50+ minutes per month, where the circuit was live, but performance issues (packet loss, jitter, and latency) were so bad that performance-sensitive applications like VoIP wouldn’t run
• Experienced almost 9 hours of degraded performance each month 

This all totaled up to an average of more than 10 hours of downtime or degraded performance per month on fiber optic circuits.  

To combat all of this, for the 40% of our business customers who were using fiber last fall, Bigleaf performed an average of 222 QoS speed adjustments on fiber circuits in a single month. This means Bigleaf automatically detected and prioritized business application traffic for VoIP, UCaaS, CCaaS, and remote desktops in real time—protecting the traffic and ensuring uptime and application performance over the highly-variable fiber internet connections. 

As we’ve started to deploy Bigleaf in home offices, we’ve seen how this same unreliability affecting business-grade fiber lines also affects residential fiber lines—creating business application and performance issues for everyone who works from home.

Learn more about how Bigleaf for the remote office can help you proactively address this unreliability and create a more effective home office.

Want to learn more about Home Office networking?

Watch our on-demand webinar, “Making home internet work for your business applications” or follow us on LinkedIn to get more content and notifications of upcoming webinars.

Sometimes the internet breaks. 

Over the course of two hours on 24 June 2019, the internet broke down for most of the United States. Popular websites and apps were inaccessible on browsers and phones.  

The cause was achingly human while also being deeply technical. It is called a route leak: A Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route list that was intended as a map to guide traffic between a few networks was published to networks that should not use those directions. It is like all the rush hour freeway traffic being routed to a suburban side street.  

As a result, traffic for 2,400 networks was unfortunately sent through the network of Allegheny Technologies in Pennsylvania. Their infrastructure was not up to the task and most requests failed. 

BGP is one of the many arcane arts that usher traffic across the internet. The “inter-net” is a connection of many autonomous networks, and BGP provides rules for how to get from here to there by moving data from one network to another. A BGP route is somewhat like the turn-by-turn directions you get from Google Maps, only it tells data how to get from a server in Bellevue, Washington to your customer support desk in Trenton, New Jersey.

Propagation of a bad BGP table is preventable. This was clearly an error that everyone agrees never should have happened, but it did. And while the Allegheny incident was a high-profile breakage whose source we can identify, this sort of thing happens in harder-to-diagnose ways all the time.  

Due to the nature of internet infrastructure and the laws of probability, they are inevitable. The internet will break, connections will drop, services will fail for no obvious reason. 

The more you know about how the internet functions the more difficult it is to believe that it works at all. Along with leaky BGP routes, services depend on DNS, content delivery networks, cloud service providers, and a variety of technologies run by different companies falling well beyond the reach of the customer support or sales person whose web browser is displaying a cute “504, timed out” message instead of the new customer’s loan document.  

Where does that leave your business operations, particularly now that cloud-based SaaS applications are taking over?  

If your vendor is not taking your concerns about outages seriously, they clearly don’t know much about the “modern” internet. 

The concern naturally increases when the risks are greater. The closer the cloud-based solution is to customer engagement where customers are won and lost, the more reasonably nervous you would be about uptime.  

• If you are a car dealer and your parts lookup is cloud-based, short downtime is awkward and undesirable.  
• If your customer-facing staff rely on a scheduling system based in the cloud, downtime is an absolutely terrible prospect.
• If your medical clinic’s electronic health records or electronic medical records are cloud-based, downtime is completely unacceptable. Significant downtime needs to be beyond belief.    

For some locations, such as many rural and suburban areas of the US, the internet breaks worse and more often. When considering a cloud-based or SaaS solution for a business, concerns about downtime are legitimate and substantiated. Regardless of the technical advantages, inconveniencing customers isn’t worth it. Putting the weak links of the internet between the business and customer interaction at the service counter isn’t worth it. 

As technologists, we can’t just complain and shirk connectivity. These applications are the key to being competitive in the modern marketplace. We have to make cloud solutions functional and reliable. They simplify business operations, keep technology up to date, and save money.  

Despite everything fragile and subject to failure between that key service and our users, we have to create resilience the right level of resilience.  

Key Network Issues for SaaS Deployments 

• Uptime and bandwidth 
• Management and support requirements 
• Security 

Uptime and bandwidth 

Some things you don’t want to know, such as how many problems the internet has at any one time. Not every issue makes the news, but even very short incidents can cause problems for mission-critical real-time applications. A hiccup at the ISP can be enough to drop a call or tangle up a customer service response.  

A study of Bigleaf router performance data shows that a typical single-ISP business experiences 3.5 hours of internet downtime a month. What’s more, they experience an additional 23 hours of severely degraded service from jitter, low throughput, and other internet problems that don’t register as downtime but the effect on applications – and thus customer experience – is the same. It is downtime by another name. 

Calculating management and support 

When networking gets critical, the solutions can be very involved. They can become a problem in themselves. When deciding on quality of service (QoS) settings to optimize a Voice over IP (VOIP) system, are you impacting another mission-critical system? Is YouTube video downloading important to a business operation or can you lower its priority? Do you have to manually tweak and then stress test these applications to see how they interact?

As new applications emerge and the business develops new expectations of network performance, maintaining the network, troubleshooting problems, and new installations can be significant time and budget burdens.   

Security in all things 

Security has to be a part of every conversation now, and the resolution of our network challenges is no exception. The perimeter firewall is a centerpiece of current network security strategies. Particularly in regulated industries with compliance requirements, the business needs to have control over their firewall to keep rules and monitors up to snuff. Network solutions can interfere with existing firewalls and potentially provide a new attack vector. 

The Uptime Reality 

Bigleaf Networks was built with all of these concerns in mind. Our SD-WAN platform allows clients to seamlessly use multiple ISPs for higher reliability and performance of their network making them more reliable than any one ISP by itslef.

In the course of our business, we have a window into the reliability of the internet. In a recent month, all the circuits that our clients used averaged 92.5 percent reliability. That is not measuring just major outages but also moments when throughput, errors, or jitter is preventing the internet from being usable. 

Our data also shows the solution: with Bigleaf  implemented, uptime at the client location was 99.88 percent.  

Bringing a business-critical SaaS application into the office is exciting but scary. There are no guarantees in this world, but using the right SD-WAN solution means that, the next time someone transposes a couple numbers on a BGP table, your operation is more likely to stay up and running. 

Spoilers: The answer is a big “yes.” In fact, 39% of the circuits currently used by Bigleaf customers are fiber. But since we monitor all our customers’ internet circuits 10x/second for outages and performance degradation, we thought we’d dig into all that data in aggregate to see exactly how reliable fiber internet really is and how much Bigleaf can actually help.

For this analysis, we’re focusing on fiber internet performance relative to performance-sensitive cloud applications like VoIP or UCaaS. Specifically, we looked at every fiber connection that Bigleaf monitored in the month of September and took the mean (filtered for outliers) of each of the following metrics:

• Downtime (mins) – The connection is completely unavailable.
• Unusable uptime (mins) – The connection performance (packet loss, jitter and latency) is so bad that something like a VoIP call could not sustain a connection.
• Degraded uptime (mins) – The connection performance is bad enough that performance-sensitive applications would be affected (e.g. calls would be choppy, echoey or robotic).
• QoS Adjustments – Number of times that Bigleaf algorithms had to reduce effective circuit throughput to because the carrier-rated circuit speeds were not being delivered fully and cleanly. These adaptations were required to ensure that sensitive traffic was prioritized, providing proper application performance.

The resulting data was a little surprising, even to us. Here’s what we learned.

Fiber makes up almost 40% of the circuits used by Bigleaf customers

This wasn’t surprising to us as fiber is a wildly popular option for business internet. Many of our customers will use fiber with a less expensive cable or DSL line that can be utilized for commodity bandwidth and failover.

That begged the question: for those with fiber lines, how often was a second circuit needed to handle failover? Turns out that…

Fiber connections had over an hour of downtime per month on average

This didn’t seem right, so we checked the data twice. Across all our customers’ fiber lines, even after filtering out those that were down for days at a time, there was an average of 62.92 minutes of outage time during the month of September.

It’s important to note that those 62.92 minutes were very likely in small increments of a few seconds or minutes. If someone was downloading a file during an outage like that, it might resume eventually. But if a sales rep was on a VoIP call during one of those outages, the call would drop. If we assume an average of 10 seconds per outage, that would mean that a company using VoIP over fiber risks as many as 372 dropped calls per month.

But at least fiber circuits are reliable when they’re up, right? Well…

Fiber connections were unusable for an additional 50+ minutes per month

Beyond the hour of total downtime, the average fiber line experienced another 50.6 minutes per month where the circuit was live, but performance (packet loss, jitter, and latency) were so bad that a performance-sensitive application like VoIP wouldn’t be able to run.

This is almost as bad as having a dead circuit, but with one added challenge… if you’re using a dual-WAN firewall for failover, it would still see this circuit as live and it wouldn’t fail over. This means that, in order to get your calls and applications back up and running, you’d either need to manually change to another circuit or use an SD-WAN like Bigleaf with a second circuit to fail over seamlessly.

So we’re up to almost 2 hours of application downtime per month on the average fiber circuit. What else could go wrong? Sooo…

Fiber connections experience almost 9 hours of degraded performance each month

Beyond being effectively down for an hour and 50 minutes per month, we measured an additional 531 minutes (about 8.9 hours) of time when packet loss, jitter, latency and throughput were bad enough to affect application quality.

For someone who relies on a VoIP phone to do their job, that would translate to 8.9 hours of choppy or echo-y calls. Not a great look for their company.

The situation would be even worse if Bigleaf wasn’t able to correct for circuits where the rated speeds don’t match the actual speeds…

Bigleaf performed an average of 222 QoS speed adjustments on fiber circuits

Bigleaf automatically detects and prioritizes performance-sensitive traffic like VoIP, UCaaS, CCaaS, remote desktop, etc.. For any application prioritization to work, network devices must know how fast the circuits are that traffic is flowing through. Bigleaf’s patent-pending Dynamic QoS detects variance in circuit speeds in real-time, and adjust automatically, ensuring real QoS control over the highly-variable internet. Each time our algorithms detect that the circuit isn’t delivering the rated speed, our systems perform a QoS adjustment to adapt to that and protect traffic.

Since we’re up to an average of over 10 hours of downtime or degraded performance per month over fiber, it’s no surprise that Bigleaf is making an average 222 QoS adjustments per month on those same fiber lines. Those connections simply don’t deliver their rated bandwidth at all times.

In other words…

Moving to fiber internet isn’t a silver bullet for your internet performance issues

That’s not to say that fiber won’t be an improvement over your existing ISP. Clearly, a lot of Bigleaf customers use and stick with fiber as their primary internet circuit.

But if your goal is to guarantee uptime and performance for your company’s applications, fiber may be a disappointment. There’s no one perfect internet circuit type currently available. In fact, our data shows that fiber is really no better than several other circuit types when it comes to outages. That’s why so many businesses rely on Bigleaf to leverage multiple circuits to create a dynamic, intelligent, active/active connection to the applications they rely on.

We hope this data was helpful. If you have any internet performance-related questions, let us know and we can blog about that. To see how Bigleaf can help you with your own internet outages and performance challenges, contact us today for a consultation or free 30-day trial.

This is Joel here, Founder and CEO of Bigleaf, and that’s a question I got tired of having to find answers for. Back when I came up with the concept for Bigleaf, I had grown sick of implementing fancy new load balancers and multi-wan routers for customers, just to be disappointed by all the caveats and false promises. Look at the marketing materials for those devices and you’ll see terms like “Seamless Failover”, and “Intelligent QoS”, yet those promises fall empty in almost all cases, except for specific lab environments that aren’t seen in the real world.

Bigleaf is different. We’re passionate about truly providing effective internet optimization. One of the features we use to do that is our patent-pending Dynamic QoS Prioritization. Our QoS implementation is different that others in a number of ways, which we’ll explore in this 2-part blog series. This first post addresses our higher-level philosophical thoughts about QoS, and the 2nd post will be more of a technical deep-dive.

Bigleaf QoS Concepts

Below are the 5 overarching concepts that go into our QoS Prioritization design.

Smart Sacrifice

You will make sacrifices in your network implementation. Cost, reliability, speed, quality, relationships, and a number of other factors influence how you build your internet and cloud connectivity. At Bigleaf we believe that the cloud calls for a new priority ordering of sacrifices. You’re going to spend hundreds, thousands, or more each month on your cloud applications, and you need connectivity that’s worthy of those apps. We built the Bigleaf QoS system to sacrifice a tiny bit of network latency and cost, so that you can see huge gains in reliability and performance. You no longer have to settle for caveats and poor performance.

Internet Path Visibility

To provide effective QoS a network system needs to know about as much of the path as possible between the application and the users. As you move to Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology like Bigleaf, this is even more crucial. Networks can’t adapt to what they can’t see. Application developers are getting more creative about solving network problems via protocols like Multi-Path TCP, however only the network layer can provide QoS Prioritization, so it’s a crucial place to have visibility. Bigleaf extensively monitors the entire path that your traffic takes from your office all the way to our gateway clusters in the core of the internet. No traffic takes other paths, all of your traffic runs along the path that our monitoring traffic uses, so there are no hidden un-monitored “brownouts” or outages for lower priority applications.

Total Control

QoS doesn’t work unless you control all the traffic passing over a network path, in both directions, along the whole path. This is crucial. You can carefully configure QoS on your router or firewall, with lots of complex settings and rules, and not realize that it’s completely ineffective. And it’s really hard to test QoS properly, so you likely won’t even know until your co-workers complain of VoIP quality or other application issues.

Why is this? Here’s why: There are 2 primary traffic protocols on the internet: TCP and UDP. TCP is like a phone conversation, it goes both ways, and if someone’s talking too fast you can tell them and they’ll slow down. UDP is like a TV show, one-way, if they’re talking too fast then you’re out of luck, the show is useless. The only way to provide effective QoS prioritization is to have total control of download and upload traffic, for all protocols, including UDP.

An on-site load balancer, router, or firewall has no control of inbound UDP traffic (yes, their marketing literature is misleading). Some very expensive on-site devices will attempt to control inbound TCP traffic via hacks of the protocol’s return traffic, but this is only part of the traffic flow on the circuit, there’s still uncontrolled UDP traffic that will destroy QoS. It’s like you’re trying to have a phone conversation, but the TV is on really loud so you can’t hear and there’s no way to turn it down.

Bigleaf controls all traffic, TCP, UDP, and every other IP protocol, end-to-end between your office and our gateway clusters. Total Control for real QoS.

A Creative and Evolving Ruleset

Complexity ruins many great intentions. Do you have time to manage QoS rules all day long, or do you need to deal with business-critical work? Yes, it’s fun to geek out at times and tweak knobs and settings, but that fun quickly turns in to a hassle (or outright failure) with typical complex QoS implementations.

We take a different approach: plug and play ease. Our standard ruleset is creative, correctly handling new applications automatically in most cases. And as the ruleset evolves those changes propagate automatically to all sites, so you benefit continually from improvements. If you do need to get geeky to accommodate some esoteric application we can manage that via custom per-site rules, but our standard rules meet almost everyone’s needs well.

Real-time Adaptation

QoS only works when network devices at each end know how fast the network path is. This is a little-known fact, but it’s crucial for effective QoS. Network devices have to manage traffic flowing into a circuit so that the circuit doesn’t become saturated: full of traffic. If circuit saturation occurs then the devices trying to implement QoS are effectively doing nothing, their rules are no longer controlling the network prioritization. Yet almost all network QoS devices are completely naive of changing circuit bandwidth.

When using broadband circuits, or even SLA-backed circuits like T1s or fiber, the speed of the path between your office and the remote destination is often variable. Speed can be affected by issues along the whole path, last-mile, middle-mile and peering problems. Your internet QoS is ineffective if it’s based on a statically set speed.

Our patent-pending QoS implementation is Dynamic – it adapts to changing circuit bandwidths in real time to ensure that high-priority traffic like VoIP and other real-time applications experience true prioritization across the full path from your office to our gateway clusters in the core of the internet.

You Need It All

Without all of the concepts above, correctly implemented, and carefully managed, QoS across the internet is impossible. With Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS you get the best possible experience for your VoIP and Cloud traffic in a simple-to-use service. Please Sign Up for service, or Contact Us with questions.

Check out Part 2 where we dive into some technical details about the above topics.

Feature and Last image by MattysFlicks