VoIP and UCaaS – Bigleaf Networks

Telehealth patient experience depends on a healthy internet connection

Amy Chan — Thu, 25 May 2023 19:52:55 +0000

Virtual medicine, including telehealth, started to take hold in healthcare organizations long before 2020, but its use was limited by state regulations, insurance rules, and preference to specific medical specialties and situations.

Technology was also a limiting factor until recently. Telehealth services surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, to support social distancing for the duration of the public health emergency. Post-COVID, telehealth remains popular, as patients, practitioners, and healthcare organizations appreciate the convenience and cost-effectiveness of remote care. In 2022, the U.S. market for telehealth services grew to more than $35 billion and it is expected to continue expanding rapidly.*

While this model of remote patient care offers many benefits, it also creates new technology challenges for the IT pros who deal with choppy and dropped calls that degrade the patient-provider experience.

Telehealth services are particularly challenging for IT pros because the real-time interactions between providers and patients depend on a secure, flawless internet connection. The connecting circuits are not controlled by the HCO’s IT group directly, but IT is nevertheless responsible for maintaining a stable connection with 100% uptime to support telehealth effectively.

Telehealth – and connectivity – fill many essential roles in the modern healthcare organization:

Remote consultations

Homebound patients rely on telehealth visits and many others prefer the convenience of these remote consultations with healthcare providers. However, any disruption, such as frozen or jittery images or poor sound quality, can interfere with important discussions about symptoms, diagnoses, and proposed treatments.

Access to medical specialists

Specialized medical expertise can be unavailable locally, especially in rural or underserved regions. Telehealth can bridge this gap by connecting patients with distant medical specialists. Reliable internet connectivity ensures smooth communication so patients and doctors can share medical records, diagnostic images, and other essential information.

Health information exchange

Patients benefit from coordination among the healthcare professionals on their care team. Video conferencing tools make collaboration more effective, as providers can share observations, test results, and treatment choices interactively across different healthcare organizations and geographic locations. A smooth, seamless internet connection supports these vital interactions and preserves the practitioners’ valuable time.

Online communities

Virtual support groups and other online communities give healthcare providers more ways to connect with their patients and offer guidance and motivation. These interactions may be conducted through interactive or asynchronous chat as well as video conferencing.

In summary, internet connectivity is a critical component that makes telehealth possible. Telehealth – and network health – support effective and efficient delivery of services to patients regardless of their location or personal mobility.

Bigleaf Networks provides end-to-end optimization to maintain flawless operation of telehealth and all internet- and cloud-enabled medical technologies.

Schedule a demo to learn how Bigleaf helps healthcare organizations to succeed in the cloud.

* Global Market Insights, “U.S. Telemedicine Market.”

Ensuring Superior VoIP and UCaaS Session Quality for Kinect Communications with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:49:02 +0000

As the world grappled with the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses faced a new reality where digital connectivity became the lifeline of operations. Internet bandwidth, once abundant, turned into a critical resource, especially for services that require real-time communication like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). In our comprehensive video feature, we highlight Charlie Slaughter, the CEO of Kinect Communications, and his strategic partnership with Bigleaf Networks—a collaboration that proved to be a turning point amidst these challenges. He turned lemons into lemonade by improving VoIP and UCaaS session quality with Bigleaf.

Charlie Slaughter encountered a pivotal moment during the height of remote work demands. He recalls the intense struggle for bandwidth, “I couldn’t even make a phone call,” a sentiment that captures the frustration many faced. But with Bigleaf’s SD-WAN solutions, not only did he conquer these obstacles at home, but he also saw Kinect’s services transform, marking a remarkable 42% growth in revenue. This growth was fueled by the enhancement of VoIP and UCaaS session quality, showcasing how resilient networking solutions can drive business success.

Watch our in-depth video to witness Charlie’s firsthand account of how Bigleaf’s innovative technology elevated Kinect Communications’ service quality, ensuring their clients experienced uninterrupted and clear communications.

By integrating Bigleaf Networks into their infrastructure, Kinect Communications could offer their clientele high-quality VoIP and UCaaS sessions, pivotal for maintaining connectivity in a time when physical distancing measures were at their peak. “Whether they know it or not, they need it,” Charlie stated, emphasizing the often-understated necessity of robust network solutions.

Further into the video, we delve into how Bigleaf not only met but exceeded expectations during an era where every byte of bandwidth counted. The implementation of Bigleaf’s services at Kinect Communications became a game-changer, turning potential operational chaos into an opportunity for growth and stability, especially by improving VoIP and UCaaS session quality.

Learn more about the Bigleaf difference and read Charlie’s success story. Discover the innovation that drove Kinect Communications to not just survive but thrive during the bandwidth battles that came with mass remote work scenarios.

Charlie’s experience is a testament to the critical nature of dependable internet solutions. Bigleaf’s commitment to quality and customer service makes it a trusted partner for businesses navigating the complexities of cloud-based communication technologies. It’s a story of triumph over adversity, of leveraging the right technology at the right time to ensure business continuity and growth.

In the realm of VoIP and UCaaS, session quality and integrity is paramount. Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS and intelligent load balancing are just two of the many features that have enabled Kinect Communications to deliver outstanding service to their customers. Charlie’s words resonate with the countless others who have come to rely on Bigleaf for maintaining superior service quality: “Quality of service is a direct reflection on me, whether it’s my problem or not. So it’s extremely important to me.”

For those looking to strengthen their organization’s networking foundation and ensure the highest quality of service in VoIP and UCaaS sessions, Bigleaf’s solutions provide peace of mind and tangible results. The video and accompanying success story are not just promotions but serve as essential case studies for the benefits of robust SD-WAN solutions in a demanding digital landscape.

To understand how Bigleaf can support your business in overcoming connectivity challenges and enhancing your service offerings, we invite you to schedule a free demo today. Join the community of businesses like Kinect Communications that have taken their operations to new heights with Bigleaf Networks.

VoIP provider credits Bigleaf for 42% revenue increase

Amy Chan — Tue, 02 May 2023 21:55:04 +0000

After more than 15 years of integrating and installing advanced VoIP and UCaaS systems, Charlie Slaughter discovered Bigleaf Networks during the pandemic.

“I had all my kids back home and we were all quarantining in the same household,” he explained. “Everybody was on Zoom for school and meetings, and I couldn’t even make a phone call.”

Charlie set up Bigleaf in his home, “and the rest is history,” he said. Ever since then, Charlie, the founder and CEO of San Antonio, TX-based Kinect Communications, has added Bigleaf to every customer quote.

“I’m a huge believer,” he continued. “I add it for all my customers because they need it. Whether they know it or not, they need it.”

Charlie credits Bigleaf, along with an LTE cellphone router solution, for a 42% increase in Kinect’s monthly recurring revenue.

“Bigleaf is phenomenal,” Charlie asserted. “It’s selling like hotcakes, because it works.”

Charlie’s enthusiastic advocacy led to recognition as a 2022 Top Performer in Bigleaf’s managed service provider (MSP) channel.

Worry-free failover

Bigleaf’s Same-IP Failover has saved time, money, and aggravation for Kinect and its customers. In one example, Kinect’s website displays praise from a happy customer, a police department technology manager in the Gulf Coast resort town of Aransas Pass. Thanks to Kinect and Bigleaf, his department’s internet-based services kept running during a major outage that took out network and cell connections.

“Yesterday, a major fiber line was cut. This took out our primary internet connection along with one of the cell carriers. If it was not for our backup fiber and the SD-WAN solution, we would have lost most of our services. Instead, employees had no idea we had lost our primary connection until they got home and found the internet to be out citywide.”
– David Offalter, Technology Manager, Aransas Pass Police Department

Easy to integrate and manage

As an integrator, Charlie appreciates Bigleaf’s ease of installation and autonomous operation. “There’s very little hands-on. That’s important to me because I don’t have a big staff,” Charlie explained. “So, it’s a huge blessing for me to be able to ship a product [to the customer], plug it in, and it just pulls down that configuration file.”

Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS is another key feature that prevents headaches for Charlie and his team at Kinect. It works in concert with Bigleaf’s circuit monitoring and intelligent load balancing to identify and prioritize network traffic automatically, routing each type of traffic to the optimal circuit based on its capability and availability. There’s no need for manual policies, so Kinect can rely on Bigleaf to deliver reliable internet and cloud application performance.

According to Charlie, his company is held responsible for the customers’ network performance: “Quality of service is a direct reflection on me, whether it’s my problem or not,” he said. “So it’s extremely important to me.”

Charlie also benefits from Bigleaf’s monthly performance reports, where he can review any outstanding issues across all customer locations.

“I don’t go through every one of those reports. But the ones that I need are there at my fingertips,” he said. “The report shows up in my inbox, and I don’t have to think about it. It’s nice and convenient.”

“Phenomenal” product and service

“The customer service team at Bigleaf really has been phenomenal,” Charlie enthused.

“When I call, someone answers the phone any time of the day or night. And that means everything to me,” he explained. “Because there are days I wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning and I need to talk to somebody about something that I couldn’t necessarily get to the previous day, an upcoming installation or something.

Charlie recommends Bigleaf to MSPs, systems integrators, solution providers, and other value-added resellers, to support their customers’ VoIP, UCaaS, and other cloud-based applications and services.

“Honestly, if you’re looking for a phenomenal product that requires very little effort other than to go out and install it and sell it, this is the SD-WAN solution that I would recommend to anybody,” he said. “And I have, actually, to be quite frank.”
– Charlie Slaughter, CEO, Kinect Communications, San Antonio, TX

To learn more about delivering reliable, resilient network performance, schedule a free demo today.

For a better customer experience, focus on network health

Lori Stout — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 17:55:28 +0000

I just celebrated my first 100 days as Bigleaf’s CMO. Before joining this company, I worked in the restaurant tech industry, but I’ve spent most of my career in the world of unified communications and contact centers. I developed and implemented marketing strategies for world-class customer experience (CX) companies like NICE, Talkdesk, and Vonage.

Bigleaf is a network optimization provider in the SD-WAN space. At first glance, that seems like a departure from my UCaaS and CCaaS background. But in fact, I’m experiencing the sensation of coming “home” to my CX roots. This doesn’t feel like a brand-new industry.

Here’s why.

Companies lose $1.6 trillion a year to bad CX

Yes, that’s trillions — with a “t” — according to a consumer survey from Accenture. And if you put on your consumer hat for a minute, that figure doesn’t seem so implausible. How many times have you tried to connect with a company, only to be put on hold? Or you were routed to agent after agent, then got disconnected and had to start the process again?

Or maybe you’ve started an online chat with a customer service representative that takes you down a winding path, where you provide your account number, describe your problem, wait… and wait… and wait… while “the agent is typing,” only to be cut off. Then you have to start the whole process again with a new agent.

Few things make this mild-mannered marketer more incensed than a business that doesn’t value my time. And I’m not alone.

84% of consumers believe that the experience they receive from a company is just as valuable as the product or service they purchase. And yet, fewer than half those companies say they have the technology required to deliver a great experience.

Now — putting your business professional hat back on — what can we do as product and service providers to elevate the customer experience? How do we deliver as a brand?

Protect CX investments

Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is currently a $113 billion industry, growing at a rate of nearly 20% a year. Contact center as a service (CCaS) is a $5 billion industry, growing 17% annually. And the average organization spends over half a million dollars per year on CX technology. It has never been more important to protect those investments with complementary technologies that offer a high value. And if the protection comes with a comparatively low price tag, a positive return on investment is assured.

Bigleaf provides that protection, supporting your internet-dependent CX with reliable, performant connectivity. And this is where my new mission as CMO at Bigleaf intersects with the customer experience industry I’ve grown to love and obsess over for the past 15 years.

Downtime adds to costs and risk

I was shocked to learn that internet downtime incurs a staggering $5,600 per minute in costs to an average business, according to Gartner. In addition to the obvious risk to revenue, downtime erodes employee engagement, brand reputation — and yes, customer experience.

More bad news: Even when circuits are up, they don’t always perform as expected. The Bigleaf team discovered that uptime is fully usable only about 93% of the time. The remaining 7% translates to an average of 604 hours per year. For 31 of those hours, the circuit is completely unavailable. And while the circuit may be up for the other 573 hours, it’s barely usable. So, for more than 90 minutes per day, on average, you get jittery phone calls, disconnected chat sessions, and frustrated customers.

During that unusable uptime, the circuit can’t support CX tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or other session-based and cloud-based service channels. From the users’ perspective, your technology is just not working well enough for them to do business with you.

Even worse, it’s nearly impossible for IT teams to quickly pinpoint the cause of the internet blackouts or brownouts, given the complexity and siloed nature of today’s cloud technology stacks.

Prevent CX failures with Bigleaf

Fortunately, Bigleaf provides an easy-to-implement, affordable solution to these and other network performance issues, so you can preserve the customer experience you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Bigleaf is a plug-and-play network optimization solution that:

Offers reliable, flawless connectivity and consistent user experience across all applications and locations, intelligently and automatically.
Installs in minutes and starts to work immediately, integrating seamlessly with established network and security policies and technologies, including your existing ISPs, firewall, and regulatory compliance setup.
Provides 360-degree visibility into performance of each circuit, to identify potential problems and solve them proactively—often before you even know there’s an issue.

For your CX investment, an intelligent, omnichannel customer experience is only as strong as your internet connection. And after conversations with IT teams from businesses of all sizes, the best piece of advice I can offer is to be proactive.

Start now to protect your network, your customer experience, and your bottom line. Waiting for problems to surface before you take action is like waiting to buy car insurance until after you’ve had an accident.

When you’re ready to see Bigleaf in action, we’d be happy to offer you a demo of our web dashboard and the eagle-eye view it provides into network operations. And if you’d like to hear about Bigleaf straight from your IT peers, check out our library of customer stories . They provide specific examples of the critical role network optimization plays in customer experience.

I’m looking forward to even more innovation from the Bigleaf team in 2023. It feels so good to be “home.”

[Video] Starlink comparison against fiber, cable, LTE, and GEO Sat, plus static IP via SD-WAN

Bigleaf Networks — Thu, 19 May 2022 22:31:43 +0000

Recently Bigleaf founder Joel Mulkey got hold of the latest high-speed, low-latency, low-earth orbit (LEO) technology, Starlink. He conducted a hands-on comparison of how the technology performs against fiber, cable, LTE, GEO Sat & static IP via SD-WAN. See how they did.

Today I’m going to talk about low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite, like Starlink, and how you can use that for business connectivity needs. I’m here at my home office and notably, I don’t have any landline connectivity. I have a fixed wireless circuit from a local regional wireless ISP or WISP, a cellular option, LTE connection, as well as a geosynchronous satellite option. And so, we’ll add to those a LEO Sat through Starlink and take a look at what it does.

Setting Up Starlink

To install Starlink, you first use their app to scan the sky to see if the location that you’re planning has a clear view of where their satellites will be flying by.

*Welcome to my networking rack here in the house. In here, I’ve got a switch and my Bigleaf router, my SD-WAN router, and there’s three WAN circuits connected. We’re going to hook up the fourth today!*

We can see here, I’m logged into the Bigleaf Web Dashboard. I pulled up my house. And on the overview page, I can see I have three WAN circuits configured so far. What I’ll do is I’ll go into our configuration tab here, go into edit mode, and I’ll add a new WAN circuit. You can specify geostationary or low earth orbit for your satellite type and the platform will adapt accordingly. And just a moment ago, the tunnels came up.

Comparing The Data

We now have some graph data.

I want to address a few questions I think might be running through folks’ minds. First, how do I think about Starlink versus most landline type circuits, fiber cable, DSL, that kind of thing?

I think the health alarm data we can see is really useful to know how these comparisons sit. If I was to go pull up another customer site, which I’ll do here.

So this location, we have some Comcast fiber. This is in Oregon. This is a typical fiber health graph. Literally nothing. This circuit above here, this is a cable circuit, looks pretty clean as well. Users are not going to notice too much of what’s going on here. You’ve got a little bit of jitter upload and download at times. I would say this is pretty squeaky clean for a cable circuit. You can see them totally clean sometimes, but this is a nice cable circuit. We see them with plenty of packet loss and other issues at times. We’ll take a look at another location here. This top circuit here is again, Comcast fiber. So we can see, it looks pretty clean. There’s a couple blips. So, this one could be user impacting. This is middle of the day. You have basically a mini outage.

Then Frontier Fios. We’ll take a look at that one. Again, looks pretty clean, a couple blips there, not too big of a deal.

So back to my house: If you compare those graphs against the Starlink graph for the same time period, it’s got periods in the middle of the night where it looks pretty clean, but during the day, there’s definitely a lot of variability. And that’s what I would probably highlight.

With most wireless type connections, they’re going to be more variable than a landline circuit. Yet, they are also a great redundancy path. Throughput wise, that can vary as well. So, fiber’s typically going to offer you more throughput than what we’re seeing with Starlink, which is around somewhere between 60 and 120mg down and upload is very variable up from zero to 15 megabit up at my location here.

Let’s take a look at other health paths like ViaSat. ViaSat is a geosynchronous satellite, and we can see that quality wise, it’s actually very good! Now this graph doesn’t reflect the absolute latency of the path to traverse to geosynchronous orbit and back. The latency that our platform measures is in the form of relative one-way latency. So, our technology does some things to adapt for that, knowing that geosynchronous satellite does have that higher latency, just kind of in the background.

You might wonder, well, what’s difference between geosynchronous satellite and low earth orbit satellite? I drew a cute little diagram here to show that. (4:22)

So, if you’ve got my house, the red depicts essentially what is happening with the lower earth orbit, where there’s a shorter path from my house to the satellite, to the ground station, which then is connected via fiber to whatever data I’m reaching, some data center, whereas the geosynchronous satellite is a much larger distance. So, the reason the latency is much lower is because it’s taking a much shorter path, just geographically.

The time of flight of the RF signals is reduced.

Compare Against LTE Circuit

Now, if we compare against the LTE circuit I have, the LTE circuit is much more consistent in its behavior and much lower in packet loss, but the throughputs a lot less. And when I’ve tested here, I’m getting about 4mhgs each way on that circuit max.

And then lastly, the fixed wireless circuit I have from a local residential fixed wireless provider. We can see that during times of load, there is significant jitter and packet loss. I’d say it sits in between the LTE and the Starlink as far as variability.

So, all in all, each wireless circuit does have its pros and cons. And you need to look at what’s available in your area and trade-offs of throughput and performance characteristics.

Static IP Address

Now, what about a static IP address? That’s something that a lot of businesses need to be able to deploy with certain use cases, VPNs, or hosting a server, that kind of thing. And none of the circuits that I have, have a standard static IP address.

They’re all using a DHCP provided NAT IP address. And the nice thing is with Bigleaf Networks, I actually have a static IP block. Bigleaf creates a tunnel across each of these circuits and delivers a single public static IP address over them. Just like you would get if you had BGP in a carrier-grade enterprise environment.

The nice thing is with Bigleaf Networks, I actually have a static IP block. Bigleaf creates a tunnel across each of these circuits and delivers a single public static IP address over them.
Joel Mulkey

So… What About SD-WAN?

Lastly, do you need SD-WAN to make use of lower earth orbit like Starlink?

Well, looking at the health of the circuits at my home here, I would say YES. If I had just this one circuit, or even if I had multiple circuits with a less sophisticated load balancing QS mechanism, I wouldn’t be able to do things like voice calling or Zoom — those sorts of sensitive applications — in a reliable manner.

And we could see examples of that here. I had some Zoom calls this morning, all this green saying VoIP was the Zoom traffic. And we could see that the SD-WAN platform really had to adapt hard to make best use of that. So, here’s my LTE circuit that used that for upload traffic.

This was around 10:30 to 10:50 AM and we could see that the alarms were fairly low at that time — level two jitter was all that it was seeing. The down link looks like, in part, on the fixed wireless circuit around 10:40 to 10:50 timeframe. (6:50)

It’s kind of jumpy because it was I think moving the traffic around and it’s likely because alarms varied. So, there’s some traffic that ended up on the fixed wireless, and then other traffic ended up here on the Starlink circuit at that time. So the platform was adapting to make sure that each packet was writing over the best possible circuit.

If I didn’t have that in place, my Zoom quality would not have been as good. Now, would it have been unusable? In this case, no. Starlink alarms aren’t terrible at that time.

If they were level four or five, yeah. At that point, that’s when people are unclicking their video. They’re going to just audio or saying, “Hey, can I call you on the phone?”

More On Starlink x SD-WAN

Another SD-WAN feature of note that Starlink really will need to be successful in the business environment is something that can provide QoS over very variable bandwidth circuits.

Via Iperf testing through the platform, we can see this is download testing. This is just raw Iperf traffic varying between 50 megabits a second up to 100. (8:44)

In the upload direction, we see traffic varies even more considerably, 9mgs down to 1mg.

Important: If you just have a static QoS policy applied to the circuit saying it’s 10mgs or something, that QoS isn’t going to work. The traffic’s going to hit constrictions within the Starlink service, get buffered and either dropped or delayed. So, you need a platform like Bigleaf that can detect that variability and bandwidth, adapt to that, and ensure QoS prioritization through that path, even as conditions change!

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think Starlink and low earth orbit are fantastic technologies. I’m really excited about what they bring to bear for folks in rural areas like me and businesses that can’t get good landline connectivity or need a really solid redundant path that offers more throughput than LTE can!

For business-critical use cases, I would combine it though with SD-WAN and another circuit, if you have, and we’d be more than happy to help you out with that at Bigleaf Networks.

Thanks for that walkthrough, Joel. We really appreciate it!

You can learn more about making the Starlink Satellite part of the connectivity plans at your business & see how Bigleaf can improve your connectivity for all your connection types by requesting a FREE demo. If you have any questions, send us an email at sales@bigleaf.net.

What Is Dynamic QoS? Prioritize internet traffic intelligently & seamlessly

Bigleaf Networks — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 21:57:20 +0000

SaaS, cloud, and internet technology users rejoice – thanks to Bigleaf Dynamic QoS, your business-critical applications will still perform seamlessly no matter what’s going on in the background.

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.

7 ways to increase your business’s internet uptime

Amy Chan — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 17:32:22 +0000

In today’s world, one of the easiest and most common ways for a business to lose money — through lost sales, decreased employee productivity, or frustrated customers — is for the internet to go down in any of its offices or locations. Because most of the important applications businesses depend on are now cloud- and internet-based, when the internet goes down so does everything from your VoIP phones to your CRM to your security alarm systems.

Fortunately, improving your internet uptime is more of an attainable goal than it used to be. Here are seven things you can do today, this week or this quarter to significantly increase the uptime at your offices or business locations.

1. Switch to a connection type with less downtime

Every internet connection will experience some downtime, but there are some that generally experience less. We analyzed the data from 1,500+ customers here at Bigleaf and found the average uptime percentages for various internet connection types:

Connection type	Uptime (%)
Fiber	96.034
Enterprise Fixed Wireless	95.412
Cable	95.123
Copper	93.040
T1/T3	92.983
Other Fixed Wireless	92.473
DSL	89.243
Cellular	85.251
Satellite	75.568

Before you just switch your one internet connection to fiber because it has the highest uptime here, keep in mind that even at 96% uptime, an average business is experiencing about 29 hours of downtime per month. So while upgrading from copper to fiber or from a T1 line to cable can help, it isn’t good enough for most businesses. Plus, not all those connection types are available everywhere, so switching to one with better uptime may not even be an option in your location.

2. Get an additional internet connection

Without a doubt, getting more than one internet connection is one of the most effective ways to increase your uptime. Instead of putting yourself at the mercy of one connection and the average amount of downtime associated with it — say, 4% for fiber — you can use two or more connections, so you have a failover option if your primary connection goes down. When you have two connections with lower uptime — like 93% for copper and 85% for cellular — having a backup in place will almost certainly give you better uptime than if you had just one connection, even if it’s fiber.

3. Build in last mile and ISP diversity

If you have multiple internet connections, but they’re all from the same ISP or carrier, you may still have downtime when there’s an issue on their network, because it would affect all your connections from that provider. When you diversify the ISPs you have plugged into your sites, you give yourself a better chance of being able to route around issues when one connection is affected. That can help bring your uptime as close to 100% as possible.

You’ll also want to think about redundancy in the last mile to your offices and locations. For example, we recommend using physically diverse paths, such as fiber and cable, DSL and wireless, or T1 and cable. That way, if a construction crew accidentally cuts the physical line to your building, you would still have another internet connection to fail over to.

4. Maintain the same IP address when you fail over

It’s common for companies that have multiple internet connections to have one that’s just there as a backup. This is often referred to as an active-passive configuration because one of the connections is actively being used, while the other will only be used when their primary connection fails. While this is certainly better than not having another connection to fail over to, it isn’t ideal. For one thing, you’re paying for a second connection with enough capacity for all your traffic, even though you won’t be using it most of the time. But more importantly, this active-passive configuration means you can’t move traffic between your ISPs or carriers without a change in your IP address — and then anyone on a video conference, VoIP call, VPN session, or other session-based application will have their call or session drop. Additionally, your users will experience downtime with your other cloud- and internet-based applications while you manually change your IP address.

When you have same-IP address failover, your traffic will automatically move to your second connection and keep your employees and customers from even noticing the switch. Plus, this setup will allow you to leverage an active-active configuration where you’re using both connections at the same time and traffic is being routed down the one that will provide the best performance for each application.

5. Socialize your disaster recovery plan

The next time your business experiences a disaster — like a flood or power outage — that takes your essential systems or internet down, you’ll almost certainly be able to get things up and running faster if you have a documented disaster recovery plan that your staff is familiar with. Your disaster recovery plan should identify potential problems, spell out how to prevent or solve them, and make it clear what your team’s roles and responsibilities are.

When you have a disaster recovery plan for your cloud- and internet-based technologies, you will be much better prepared to handle problems that come up and minimize downtime and disruption to your business operations.

6. Consider partnering with a managed service provider (MSP)

If your IT team is small or overburdened (or you don’t have one), enlisting the help of an MSP can be a helpful way to improve your uptime and free yourself up from worrying about internet outages. Many of the medical offices, professional services firms and local government municipalities we work with turned to an MSP to keep the technology they and their customers rely on working at all their offices or locations. If you’d like to find a trusted MSP in your area, email us at sales@bigleaf.net and we’ll connect you.

7. Get there faster with SD-WAN and AI

While you and your team can do many of these things to improve your uptime on your own, you may decide it makes more sense to let an SD-WAN do the heavy lifting so you can focus on other priorities.

Here at Bigleaf, we combine proven SD-WAN technology with groundbreaking AI software to automatically steer your important application traffic around internet issues. This way you can give your users an ideal experience and maximize your uptime and application performance without spending time creating and updating policies or manual configurations. To learn more about Bigleaf, check out our product page or request a demo.

Is there something you’d add to this list? Email us at stories@bigleaf.net.

Why uptime is critical for healthcare and how to increase yours

Amy Chan — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 17:31:09 +0000

Effective and efficient patient care depend on uptime

In today’s medical offices and clinics, many of the applications and technologies you rely on are now cloud- and internet-based. There are numerous advantages to this for you and your patients, but if you don’t have the uptime you need, it’s almost impossible for you and your team to use these technologies to provide the best quality of care.

Here are some of the biggest reasons uptime is so important for healthcare organizations, followed by seven concrete ways you can improve your uptime.

Electronic health and medical records aren’t just a nice-to-have

To treat your patients safely and effectively, your providers need to be able to access their electronic health/medical records — and update them — at any time, in real time.

If they can’t, there’s a good chance this downtime will make appointments take longer, introduce potential issues if notes are stored offline, or otherwise affect the patient’s overall experience.

Telemedicine and virtual care stop without reliable connectivity

If the internet at your medical office or clinic goes down, so do any virtual appointments your providers were having with patients. And your internet doesn’t even have to go down for your video calls to drop — performance issues like jitter, latency, and packet loss can topple them, too. Odds are, these interrupted appointments will leave you with frustrated patients and backed-up appointments.

Scheduling is important for both your patients and business

Internet downtime adds to the challenges your patients and staff face when trying to schedule and manage appointments in real time, via VoIP phones or online. When this key function operates consistently you can avoid frustrating the patients or overwhelming your staff.

Patient communication shouldn’t be put on hold

Your team needs a reliable way to communicate with patients and your patients need to reach the team, to share test results, answer follow-up questions, and provide treatment recommendations. And everyone will be happier and healthier if that communication happens at the right time and without interruption.

Uptime matters for a lot of other reasons, too

So many work activities rely on the internet in one way or another. You need reliable uptime to support billing, data, and communicating with a pharmacies, among many business-critical tasks.

Ways you can improve your healthcare organization’s uptime

Change your connection type

All connections experience downtime, but some connection types are more reliable than others. Looking at the data from thousands of Bigleaf customers, we found these average uptime rates for different connection types:

Connection type	Uptime (%)
Fiber	96.034
Enterprise Fixed Wireless	95.412
Cable	95.123
Copper	93.040
T1/T3	92.983
Other Fixed Wireless	92.473
DSL	89.243
Cellular	85.251
Satellite	75.568

Keep this in mind: a single fiber connection typically has the best uptime at 96%, but the remaining 4% can pencil out to 29 hours of downtime per month. That is a lot of disruption for most businesses — especially for healthcare organizations. So, while upgrading from something like copper or cable to fiber can help, it isn’t enough. Plus, some of these connection types may not even be available in your area, so those particular upgrades wouldn’t be an option.

Get multiple internet connections

If you haven’t done it already, get set up with more than one internet connection. That’s one of the most effective ways to improve your uptime. Instead of putting yourself at the mercy of one connection and the average amount of downtime associated with it — at a minimum, 4% for fiber — you can implement two or more connections with a failover option that can take over when your primary connection goes down. Even if you have two connections with lower uptime percentages — like 93% for copper and 85% for cellular — having a backup in place will almost certainly ensure more reliable uptime than if you had a single fiber connection.

Increase your ISP and last-mile diversity

If all your connections come from the same ISP or carrier, you may still experience downtime when there’s a problem on that carrier’s network. When the carrier has a problem, it will affect all of your connections. Instead, it’s best to vary the ISPs you have plugged into your sites. You’ll have a better chance of routing around issues when one connection is affected, so you can keep your uptime as close to 100% as possible.

You’ll also want to consider redundancy in the last mile to your buildings. For example, we recommend using physically diverse paths from unique providers, such as fiber and cable, DSL and wireless, or T1 and cable. That way, if someone with a backhoe accidentally cuts one physical line, you should still have another working internet connection.

Keep the same IP address when a circuit goes down

It’s common for companies that are using multiple connections to have one that’s just there as a backup. This is referred to as an active-passive configuration because one of the connections is in use while the other is idle, waiting to be activated only when the primary connection goes down.

While this is certainly better than not having another connection at all, it isn’t ideal. For one thing, you have to pay for a second connection with enough capacity for all your traffic, even though you won’t be using it most of the time. But more importantly, this active-passive configuration means you can’t move traffic between those ISPs without manually changing your IP address. During a manual failover, anyone on a telemedicine or video call, VoIP call, VPN session, or other real-time application will have their call or session drop. Additionally, your users will experience downtime with other cloud and internet applications while you manually change your IP address.

When you have same-IP address failover, your traffic automatically divert to your second connection and keep your staff and patients from even noticing the switch. This setup will also allow you to leverage an active-active configuration. That’s when you’re using both connections at the same time and traffic is automatically routed down the circuit that will provide the best performance for each application.

Document and share your disaster recovery plan

Should your healthcare organization ever experience a disaster — like a flood or power outage — that takes your essential systems down, you’ll almost certainly be able to get things up and running faster if you have a written disaster recovery plan that your staff knows and understands.

Your disaster recovery plan should identify potential problems, lay out steps to take to avoid or solve them, and clarify your team’s roles and responsibilities. When you have a disaster recovery plan for your cloud- and internet-based technologies, you will be much better prepared to handle problems and minimize the downtime that could disrupt your business operations.

Consider working with a managed service provider (MSP)

If you don’t have a dedicated IT team, or they’re stretched thin, enlisting the help of an MSP is one way to improve your uptime and free yourself up from worrying about it. Many of the medical offices, senior living centers, clinics, and other healthcare organizations we work with turned to an MSP to keep their mission-critical technology working at all locations. If you’d like to connect with a great MSP in your area, email us at sales@bigleaf.net and let us know where you’re located.

Get there faster with SD-WAN and AI

While you and your team can do many of these things to improve your uptime on your own, you may decide it makes more sense to let an SD-WAN do the heavy lifting so you can focus on other priorities.

Here at Bigleaf, we combine proven SD-WAN technology with groundbreaking AI software to automatically steer your important application traffic around internet issues. This way you can give your users an ideal experience and maximize your uptime and application performance without spending time creating and updating policies or tweaking manual configurations. To learn more about Bigleaf, check out our product page or request a demo.

Is there something you’d add to this list? Email us at stories@bigleaf.net.

How Microsoft Teams performs with and without Bigleaf’s SD-WAN

Amy Chan — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 16:55:44 +0000

Video call quality has become business-critical

It’s become abundantly clear how fragile and finicky video calls can be, which is to say that sometimes they aren’t abundantly clear at all. Odds are, you’ve been on countless calls where someone’s audio was garbled or choppy or their video froze.

It’s not so bad when your video quality falls off a cliff with friends on a virtual happy hour, but it’s downright painful when it’s your sales rep trying give someone a demo, your support technician helping an important customer, or whatever calls are most critical to your organization. Video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and BlueJeans have become one of the most important applications a business runs.

We all know video call quality is a challenge, but the solution is often more elusive. It may seem that the problem originates with the platform itself, with an individual computer, or with the bandwidth limitations of your ISP circuit. Those are rarely the sources of the connectivity problems, however.

Adding bandwidth doesn’t solve video quality issues

Anyone who’s tried increasing bandwidth to solve call quality issues has learned that bandwidth doesn’t fix the problem with video and VoIP calls. Instead, the issues typically revolve around packet loss, jitter, and latency.

The answer is ISP diversity and intelligent software built for site-to-cloud environments

To improve the underlying issues that impact video and audio quality — packet loss, jitter, and latency — what you really need is ISP diversity, plus intelligent technology that will automatically manage your traffic to take advantage of your multiple circuits. That combination helps to ensure that your sensitive traffic isn’t degraded by ISP congestion.

With more than one internet connection, your traffic can automatically be identified, prioritized, and routed down the best path at any given moment. And whether you have one internet connection, two, or more, your most sensitive and important traffic (e.g. video calls) can be prioritized over everything else with Dynamic QoS.

Testing it out

We’ve heard from many of our customers that Bigleaf solves their video call issues — and we know it’s made a huge difference for our own company, because we have Bigleaf in our office and homes. But it’s not always clear why. So, we took a look at some data to help illustrate what Bigleaf does that improves video call quality.

We used the statistics dashboard within Microsoft Teams to conduct a side-by-side comparison test. We held meetings with Microsoft Teams for two weeks and collected all the performance data to see how things worked with Bigleaf doing what it does best. Then, a courageous Bigleaf employee disabled their Bigleaf device to collect the performance data for Microsoft Teams video calls without Bigleaf.

The difference was obvious — and painful — for that employee. In several meetings, video calls were effectively unusable. No one could understand them, they appeared pixelated, and the audio cut out so they couldn’t understand what other people were saying. The quality was so much worse that they couldn’t stand running the test any longer. They still managed to collect five days’ worth of data using Microsoft Teams without Bigleaf.

What the data looked like with an unoptimized internet connection

When you’re experiencing audio and video quality issues with some of your video calls, what’s happening behind the scenes? Here is the data from using Microsoft Teams with Bigleaf disabled:

Metric from Microsoft Teams	Result without Bigleaf
Average video frame rate	18.5 frames per second
Average video low frame rate call percentage (the average percentage of call time where the frame rate is less than 7.5 frames per second)	44.6%
Average video local frame loss percentage (the average percentage of video frames lost as displayed to the user for streams)	27.5%
Average audio degradation (average network Mean Opinion Score degradation for streams, which represents how much the network loss and jitter have affected the quality of received audio.)	0.55
Average overall network Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for streams, which represents the average predicted quality of received audio factoring in network loss, jitter, and codec.	3.74
Average packet loss	0.017
Average jitter	8.5

A few things to point out here:

Of all the time they were on a video call, 44.6% — nearly half — of the time, their video frame rate was below 7.5 frames per second. For comparison, the frame rate you will see on TV and in movies is typically 24, 30 or 60 frames per second.
That MOS of 3.74 puts it into “fair” territory.

What the data looked like with Bigleaf

How did things look with Bigleaf in place? Here’s the data:

Metric from Microsoft Teams	Result with Bigleaf
Average video frame rate	20.6 frames per second
Average video low frame rate call percentage (the average percentage of call time where the frame rate is less than 7.5 frames per second)	2.3%
Average video local frame loss percentage (the average percentage of video frames lost as displayed to the user for streams)	7.3%
Average audio degradation (average network Mean Opinion Score degradation for streams, which represents how much the network loss and jitter have impacted the quality of received audio.)	0.27
Average overall network MOS (average network Mean Opinion Score for streams, which represents the average predicted quality of received audio factoring in network loss, jitter, and codec.)	4.02
Average packet loss	0.01
Average jitter	4.1

The Bigleaf difference

Putting that all together, here’s what things looked like before and after Bigleaf, and what that difference was.

Metric from Microsoft Teams	Result without Bigleaf	Result with Bigleaf	Improvement with Bigleaf
Average video frame rate	18.5 frames per second	20.6 frames per second	11%
Average video low frame rate call percentage	44.6%	2.3%	95%
Average video local frame loss percentage	27.5%	7.3%	73%
Average audio degradation	0.55	0.27	51%
Average overall network MOS	3.74	4.02	28%
Average packet loss	0.017	0.01	41%
Average jitter	8.5	4.1	52%

Bigleaf optimizes ISP diversity and makes it simple

Historically, the technology used to make multiple internet connections work like one has been very expensive and complicated to set up.

Bigleaf changed all that. Setup is as simple as connecting our plug-and-play router. Then the intelligent software automatically detects and adapts to any internet performance and connectivity issues, to keep your business-critical applications running smoothly.

Your most important traffic will be prioritized automatically and delivered over the best possible circuit at any given time. When one of your internet circuits has an outage, your applications will seamlessly failover to your other circuit without your IP address changing. This ensures that your applications won’t drop. And thanks to Bigleaf’s owned and operated Cloud Access Network, your traffic will never hit the open internet unprotected.

See the difference for yourself

If you use Microsoft Teams and Bigleaf and would like to replicate the test we did above, start by setting up the call quality dashboard to access all the data. Then you can unplug your Bigleaf device — for as long as you can stand it — to compare your call quality stats with and without it. We can’t honestly recommend that part, though.

Better yet, check your Bigleaf web dashboard to see how much uptime you’ve gained and what Bigleaf has been doing to improve your internet connection, and the quality of your voice calls, video conferences, and all the other applications you rely on. You can see how many minutes or hours of additional internet uptime you’ve had thanks to Bigleaf, as well as how many minutes or hours when you avoided network performance degradation or other significant problems that could lead to dropped calls and other issues.

Want to learn more about how Bigleaf could help your company or your clients? Request a demo.

Why medical offices and care facilities rely on Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 19:06:03 +0000

Healthcare is moving to the cloud

More and more of the day-to-day operations of the typical medical office, assisted living facility, clinic, and care facility rely on the internet. They’re turning to cloud-based tools to more efficiently and effectively connect providers, patients, and data.

Patient medical records and communications are being managed digitally. Phone systems are using VoIP so medical professionals can be contacted whether they are in their office, on rotation, or even at home.

Through cloud-based technologies, medical offices are connecting their phone, messaging, and email systems to their appointment scheduling, billing, prescription refill, and referral tools. And more providers are offering telemedicine visits as an alternative to in-person appointments. All of these interactions are 100% dependent on the internet working on their end.

Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations struggle with internet that just isn’t reliable enough.

An SD-WAN can optimize your connection to the cloud — without touching PHI

An intelligent software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is a cost-effective way to optimize your internet connection so you can make sure all of your important cloud-based apps work when and how you need them. There are different types of SD-WANs that have different advantages, though, so it’s important to pick the one that is best suited for your needs.

Bigleaf’s SD-WAN was built for the cloud, with a unique Cloud Access Network that controls traffic from your location both to and from the application source in the cloud. Our intelligent software auto-detects your application needs and adapts in real time to internet performance and connectivity issues before they impact your business — without technical complexity or need for expert staff.

And because many companies and organizations have very intentional security measures in place to protect sensitive information, we designed the Bigleaf SD-WAN to sit outside of the firewall. So, you don’t have to disable any of its features or change any configurations. This makes Bigleaf a popular choice for anyone who handles protected health information (PHI) and has to think about HIPAA compliance.

Here’s how a few Bigleaf customers are using our SD-WAN solution to make things better for their staff and patients:

Senior living community wanting to improve their residents’ quality of life

When a new IT director started at a company that operates several senior living communities on the East Coast, they quickly learned the internet connection was unreliable at many of their communities — and that it was much more than a minor nuisance. Like many companies, they have a cloud-based phone system, and when their internet goes down, so do the phones. That means residents can’t call or receive calls from family members. Nurse call systems are also rendered inoperable.

The IT director’s small team was getting a constant stream of internet-related support tickets. Unfortunately, all they could do was to call the local ISP and hope for a resolution. But this often ended with very little support and led to frustration among employees and residents.

The IT director knew they needed a reliable internet connection at every community location. To accomplish that, they added a second circuit and installed Bigleaf’s SD-WAN at each location. With those two components in place, their communities were equipped with multiple paths to the internet, plus real-time quality of service (QoS), load balancing, and seamless failover to ensure that those paths were used to provide a flawless user experience.

A plastic surgery office starting to offer televisits

When the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders started, this plastic surgery office in the Pacific Northwest started offering televisits, or virtual video appointments, so they could continue serving their patients. They used their existing internet connection, but since it was shared with others in their building, it would slow down when several people tried to use it at the same time.

As a result, televisits often suffered from lag and video quality issues that made it difficult for the doctors and patients to communicate and understand each other.

It became clear that they needed an optimized and reliable internet connection to effectively offer televisits to their patients while also running all of their critical business applications, including a cloud-based electronic medical records platform. The clinic’s administrator talked to their network consultant and telecom agent to get their ideas and advice. They decided to connect through two solid fiber lines and deploy Bigleaf’s SD-WAN solution.

Right out of the box, Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS prioritized the clinic’s mission-critical applications above the rest of the traffic. Bigleaf’s intelligent load balancing utilized the two internet connections to provide real-time traffic shaping and steering that improved stability. This minimized the jitter, packet loss, and latency issues that had affected video call quality — so now the televisits just work. Plus, the other applications they rely on are working better, too.

A primary care clinic tired of phone outages

This clinic in the Rocky Mountains relies heavily on their phones, for everything from scheduling appointments to reminder calls and communicating with patients about lab results or follow-up care. Their old PRI phone system relied on a T1 internet connection that would go down for long periods of time, which had a very real impact on their business and their patients.

In a little over a year, their phones went down three times for more than a day each time — with one outage lasting three days. The office manager at the clinic had talked with their telecom company multiple times about the outages. The telecom replaced several parts that were supposed to fix the problem, but the clinic continued to experience entire days of downtime.

After that three-day outage, the clinic’s office manager was fed up. Fortunately, the managed service provider (MSP) who manages their IT and internet connection knew just how to help.

Since the clinic already had a very reliable fiber line, the MSP recommended that they move to a cloud-based phone system supported by Bigleaf’s SD-WAN. Even with the single circuit, Bigleaf’s SD-WAN would manage their sensitive VoIP traffic and deliver the reliability they needed. The MSP’s recommendation was highly credible and trusted because his company used Bigleaf, too.

Give your staff and patients reliable internet

Today, a reliable and optimized internet connection is crucial to avoiding disruptions to your business operations and ensuring quality patient care. It’s the difference between things like your phones, telemedicine appointments, and scheduling system working well and keeping your business running smoothly and being frustrated daily while dealing with issues like garbled audio, freezing video, and applications that lag and can’t keep up.

If your office, clinic, or care facility is struggling with internet issues, you can solve the problem with Bigleaf’s SD-WAN — and it’s probably simpler than you think.

Have a question or want to learn more? Don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to help.

Fix bad video and VoIP calls for good

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 02:55:00 +0000

Today, employees increasingly rely on VoIP calls and video meetings to get work done. It’s common to experience poor connections, dropped calls, or internet outages where these tools don’t work at all. This results in lost business, employee frustration, and hurts your brand image. Fortunately, new technology provides a simple, cost-effective way to solve these issues so employees can stay connected and worry free.

[Case study] TruHome goes all-in on cloud telephony with Bigleaf SD-WAN as the foundation

Bigleaf Networks — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 04:45:00 +0000

Learn why John Pentlin, VP of IT at TruHome, moved their 200+ call center reps to a cloud-based phone system, the networking challenges they faced, and how Bigleaf helped them along the way.

PDF Title

Download

[Case study] Allen Lund removes network cost and complexity with Bigleaf SD-WAN

Bigleaf Networks — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 22:37:00 +0000

Learn how Bigleaf helped solve Allen Lund Company’s connectivity issues so they could have the quality and uptime they needed with the flexibility and cost savings the cloud provided.

PDF Title

Download

4 common VoIP call problems you can end forever with SD-WAN

Amy Chan — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 17:41:59 +0000

As companies ditch their landline phones for VoIP, it’s usually not long before the random VoIP call problems begin and their IT/Ops teams find themselves getting “the complaints.”

You know the ones:

“I was in the middle of a negotiation and the call dropped!”

“It was horrible, we all sounded like we were eating bees!”

“We never used to have these problems with our old system!”

Like a good team player, you call the VoIP provider and they tell you it’s a problem with your ISP. So you call your ISP and… you guessed it… they suggest you call your VoIP provider. It’s not that they’re trying to be unhelpful. The reality is, neither of them has the visibility they need to diagnose the issue. Which leaves you right where you started, dealing with a lot of frustrated users.

At Bigleaf, we solve these exact problems for thousands of companies. Let’s walk through some of the most common VoIP call problems. You’ll learn:

How to diagnose the VoIP call issues
What’s causing them
How to fix them forever

What your users are hearing

VoIP calls generally suffer from one of four VoIP call problems:

Dropped calls are just what they sound like. Line goes dead, and usually, one person keeps on talking for 5 minutes not knowing that the other caller isn’t on the line.

Choppy calls are when whole or partial words get cut off mid-sentence. The call sounds rough and uneven. This makes conversation difficult and can be a real pain on sensitive or contentious calls.

Robotic calls are when the person’s voice sound’s glitchy and lacks a natural human quality. This makes it hard to understand what’s being said and, on a personal note, sounds really unpleasant.

Laggy calls are when there is a long delay from the sender to the receiver, making it seem like the receiver is taking a long time to respond. This usually ends with both parties talking over each other.

The problem isn’t your VoIP system, it’s your internet

Believe it or not, your internet connection, even the really fancy one that you pay a fortune for, is consistently down or slow. Even when circuits are up, they don’t always perform as expected. According to Bigleaf data, internet connections are down or unusable for an average of 604 hours a year caused by outages and unpredictable issues like packet loss, jitter, and lag. Any of those could cause VoIP call quality issues.

Most companies don’t realize this because traditional internet applications are designed to handle internet blips and drops gracefully. Broadband connections are like roads that are full of potholes, speed bumps and cracks. Conventional applications like websites and file downloads are like Cadillacs that glide over those imperfections to the point where you may not even know they exist. VoIP and UCaaS, on the other hand, are like Ferraris. They operate at the edge of performance and even a little bump can show up as a call quality issue.

In other words, you’re having VoIP call problems because broadband internet connections like cable and DSL aren’t able to handle the performance needs of VoIP on their own. So, about fix?

The solution is network optimization, but how?

To make video and VoIP calls work flawlessly, you need a layer of intelligence that can automatically detect those pesky internet outages and problems that cause unusable uptime, and make real-time adjustments to ensure that they don’t affect your calls.

The good news is that there is network optimization technology that can help. This technology uses software to control traffic over one or more internet connections, intelligently prioritizing and routing your network traffic to ensure optimal performance and uninterrupted VoIP and video calls.

However, there is also bad news. There are several solutions to choose from. Most are designed for site-to-site networking, making it difficult to determine which one will work best to fix all your VoIP and video call issues.

Here are a few questions you can ask to make sure you’re choosing the right solution for your VoIP system:

Can the solution detect changes in your internet connection performance in real-time?
This is critical because the quality and throughput of your internet connection are continually changing. Without real-time detection and adaptation during an ongoing call, it’s nearly impossible to guarantee uninterrupted VoIP and video performance.

Does the solution automatically adjust QoS policies to changes in your internet connection conditions in real-time?
Without this capability, you’ll have to set your QoS to a static speed and policy. If it’s set for your peak internet speed, your VoIP and video calls will suffer when performance drops. If you set it for the low end of your internet performance, other traffic will be blocked even when there’s plenty of bandwidth to handle it.

Will the solution provide failover and optimization for any VoIP or video call provider without manual configuration or policies?
If not, you may end up with an expensive and ultimately ineffective deployment that fails at the last minute.

Will your non-VoIP and non-video traffic get the same core benefits?
If your users get a great VoIP and video call experience but a poor experience with other key applications, they’ll end up frustrated and upset. Consistency is key.

We designed Bigleaf specifically for the needs of cloud-based technologies like VoIP, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. We can address all of those issues and end your VoIP and video call problems for good. What’s more, you’ll get those same benefits for all of your cloud-based applications (Office 365, CRM, ERP, etc.) as well as the visibility you need to right-size your connections. Our technology plugs right into your existing firewalls and doesn’t require any changes to your security that could open you up to data breaches and compliance issues.

End your VoIP and video call problems now

If you’re ready to put an end to your VoIP and video call woes, there’s no reason to wait. Bigleaf can typically deploy routers to any number of locations within days. So request a quote today, and you’ll be quickly up and running with enterprise-grade connections over broadband internet.

No more dropped calls. No more choppy calls. No more complaints.

Improving UCaaS with purpose-built SD-WAN

Bigleaf Networks — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 03:40:00 +0000

Learn how to deploy any UCaaS platform with a reliable connection to the Cloud.

PDF Title

Download

Bad calls are hurting your business

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 03:26:00 +0000

Dropped calls, choppy video, robovoice, annoying echos – all these are symptoms of bad VoIP.

PDF Title

Download

It doesn’t take much of a network issue for it to be noticeable with VoIP and video calls.

What can you do to fix the situation?

View this eBook to learn:

Why SD-WAN is VoIP’s best friend
Why a firewall alone won’t help
What features to look for in an SD-WAN solution
How Bigleaf SD-WAN technology can dramatically improve VoIP and video performance

Non-profits and businesses transform communications with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 15:00:08 +0000

How to transform communications with Bigleaf

Work-from-home and social distancing trends accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as organizations found new ways to connect with their customers, partners, and vendors in the new environment.

Many of their plans revolved around new or increased reliance on VoIP and UCaaS, with solutions including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and GoToMeeting. Common issues arose with the internet-reliant systems, including calls that sound choppy or robotic, or drop altogether, as well as outages or lag that affect the performance of VoIP phone calls, video conferences, and screen shares in collaboration apps.

Bigleaf worked with a number of business and non-profit organizations to address performance problems they faced with VoIP and UCaaS solutions.

Worry-free video conferencing for church services

During the pandemic, churches and places of worship were not always able to host in-person services. Some turned to video conferencing technology, like Zoom. Even after the pandemic, Zoom services have continued as a convenience for homebound congregants. During the Zoom call, it was critical to have a reliable internet connection so the service would not be interrupted, and there would be no time to deal with any technical issues during the service itself. Plus, most churches did not have on-site technical support staff to handle any problems in real time.

Bigleaf was able to provide a straightforward solution for churches and other organizations. They were able to install and maintain the Bigleaf solution without technical expertise. Bigleaf’s owned and operated Cloud Access Network is fully redundant and peers directly with apps like Zoom, so the churches can have faith in their internet connections and offer uninterrupted services for their congregants to enjoy remotely or in person.

Reliable voice and video calls for medical offices

Many medical offices and other healthcare providers redesigned their patient interactions due to the pandemic. Telehealth visits became a vital part of patient care, adding new requirements to strained phone and video call capabilities. The phone systems were also critical to management of patient appointments, prescriptions, and general consultation, and in some cases, phones were used on-site for curbside check-ins.

One healthcare provider contacted Bigleaf to help upgrade their system to accommodate new services and capabilities. They were running an old T-1 PRI line, which kept going down as often as 3x per day over a 15-month period. On one memorable occasion, the line was down for 3 entire days.

All of this downtime resulted in lost appointments and much frustration. It jeopardized the clinic’s potential to provide critical care. The old system couldn’t support a normal workload, and it was totally inadequate as a basis for the new patient communication model that was required to serve patients during the pandemic.

The medical office switched over to a fiber line and added Bigleaf to support the performance-sensitive, cloud-based VoIP and UCaaS cloud applications. Bigleaf provided the stability needed for the new voice- and video-dependent systems and processes.

The clinic did not have on-site tech staff so they needed assurance that their systems would work autonomously. They were also planning to switch from a server-based electronic medical record (EMR) system to a cloud-based application. Worry-free internet was a requirement for that transition, too.

Bigleaf provided the performance they needed during the early days of the pandemic, with room to grow their digital infrastructure to accommodate future needs.

Protecting quality of service for business-critical applications

Even after the pandemic, many organizations continue to rely on video conferencing technology and voice calls to interact with remote colleagues and customers.

One technology development company built out new office space with several “Zoom Rooms,” to help teams interact with remote coworkers or maintain physical distance in the office environment. Video calls and conferences are critical to the company’s operations.

Meanwhile, some of the company’s employees stream YouTube videos and other bandwidth-intensive apps while they work. These apps can hog network resources and disrupt VoIP and other sessions.

VoIP and UCaaS traffic is very sensitive to internet performance, and the company needed to ensure that they would continue uninterrupted. Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS and Cloud Access Network work together to prioritize the business-critical applications automatically.

Bigleaf detects and responds to change in the available circuit throughput, when sensitive traffic can be affected, and prioritizing both inbound and outbound VoIP and UCaaS traffic ahead of the bulk data transfers such as YouTube traffic. Bigleaf Dynamic QoS detects the bandwidth bottleneck in the paths to and from the customer’s site and adapts QoS to ensure traffic isn’t buffered in QoS-unaware ISP routers.

Better VoIP and UCaaS with Bigleaf

For those and other organizations, reliable VoIP and video calls continue to be critical to their success. To accomplish their goals, they depend on the internet. And their internet connectivity depends on Bigleaf.

To learn more about Bigleaf’s role in VoIP and UCaaS system performance, watch this on-demand webinar, Fix Bad Video and VoIP Calls for Good. Or contact us for a free, 30-minute demo.

Why are calls garbled?

Amy Chan — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 15:42:28 +0000

When you’re in the middle of an important video conference, the last thing you want is for participants to end up looking like 8-bit video game characters and sounding even worse. In our informal surveys, 80% of IT departments are dealing with quality problems for video and VoIP calls from their team members’ home offices. This is not surprising. As we’ve discussed before, residential internet connections that support these calls aren’t built to support sustained typical business use, and with more people working from home, we’re all now experiencing this first-hand.

So, while we know that video and VoIP problems are often caused by poor internet connections, there are other culprits too. In this article, we will give some examples of quality problems so you can determine what the real culprit might be and how to resolve it.

When your equipment is to blame

Sometimes, the main culprit in bad calls isn’t the internet connection at all: it’s the computer and its attached peripherals. When we are lucky, the problem is simply a configuration issue or a minor setting.

Voice is too quiet or volume too low

If the person on the other end of the conversation is reporting that they can’t hear the other side, frequently this is because the audio settings on the computer aren’t set correctly. The audio input needs to be turned up.

Popping, crackling, or distorted voice

If the opposite happens, and the audio is turned up too high, voices will come across to the listener with buzzing, popping, or cracking noise. Too much signal is being pushed through the computer and is distorting the audio.

Fuzzy voices or lots of background noise

Many computers and laptops come with low-quality microphones that just can’t do a good job picking up voices or differentiating between the speaker’s voice and background noise. In some cases, this isn’t the microphone’s fault but the nature of the environment – noisy surroundings are going to crowd into the call!

Luckily, there are a lot of external computer microphones and headsets on the market that are still a huge step up from the built-in mics in most laptops. You can find very affordable USB and Bluetooth microphones easily that are a sufficient upgrade. Look for noise cancelling capabilities. Make sure the application gets configured to use the new microphone or headset.

Blurry video or poor video color quality

Just like many laptops and computers come with low-quality microphones, so it is with webcams. Poor quality webcams send low-resolution video, fuzzy video, or just bland and washed-out video. If there is a nicer webcam plugged into the computer, make sure it’s selected as the default video input device in the video conferencing software.

Choppy voice, blocky video

Video conferencing can be processor-intensive work, and if a computer is already overloaded, it might not be able to keep up with the demands for computing power. This manifests in a number of ways. Software can freeze up, voice can become choppy or non-responsive, and video can become blocky or just stop all together.

Some of these symptoms look very similar to problems caused by internet issues. The operating system’s task manager or process manager can be used to determine if the computer is being over-burdened by too many running applications. Look for spikes in CPU and memory when the video call is in process.

Diagnosing network problems

Once you’ve ruled out issues with the computer and peripherals, it’s time to turn your suspicions to the internet connection. Video conferencing and VoIP can have some of the most stringent performance requirements of all Internet traffic. Different VoIP implementations respond in varying ways to the network issue, so performance may be poor and unstable. Here are some examples of what internet connection problems might look like.

You can’t always spot your own problems

Barring hardware problems, everybody sees their own video just fine. Since local video doesn’t have to travel over the internet and pass through extra processing, compression, and routing, each participant in a video conference sees their own video feed in the highest possible definition with as few problems as possible.

While this allows everybody to make sure they don’t have spinach in their teeth or a stack of dirty dishes in the background, it also prevents a participant from noticing issues with their own internet connection. They need somebody on the other end to tell them if something is going wrong.

The big freeze

When video or audio freezes and the computer isn’t to blame, there has been a network interruption or outage. Maybe this is just because the home router or WiFi access point needs to be rebooted, but even more often, there is a connection interruption somewhere between the computer and the video conferencing service.

Blocky video and reduced video resolution

If the video gets blocky, or especially if it changes to a lower resolution and gets grainy, this means that somewhere on the internet, there are connection and bandwidth issues. These are frequently temporary or intermittent problems, as internet nodes and video conferencing software will already be working to repair them. This is one problem that can frequently seems to resolve itself in a few moments.

Robot voice

The same internet conditions that can cause reduced video resolution can also contribute to “robot voice”. You know it when you hear it. The person on the other end of the call will sound like they’re out of a bad 1980s music video, with long drawn-out noises and over-processed, electronic tones.

Most VoIP and conferencing software will do its best to make up for reduced bandwidth and connection problems to keep the video and audio in sync, and those software corrections lead to the robot voice effect.

Delay and stutter

As streams of data travel across the Internet, sometimes data can arrive at its destination at unpredictable times and even in an unpredictable order, called packet jitter. It can take the computer a while to put packets back in order. Jitter shows up in voice and video as really bad delay or stutter.

Internet protocols are designed to handle this sort of issue, so most of the time you won’t even notice occasional jitter. However, sometimes the delay gets so bad that conference participants start talking over each other. This is definitely indicative of an internet connection problem.

Directional problems

Since each participant in a video conference has a different internet connection, each can experience quality problems in completely different ways. This means that just because you are receiving blocky, laggy video, that doesn’t mean the person on the other end is experiencing any problems at all. Her download may be delivering you in smooth crisp HD but her upload is sending her image and audio through a poorly performing or too-small of a connection, creating a really disruptive experience for you. It’s important to let others know when you’re experiencing audio and video issues so that everybody can have the opportunity to improve their connection.

What can you do about call quality problems in the home office?

Depending on the issue you’re facing, the solution could be as simple as purchasing a new pair of headphones or having your at-home employee reboot their ISP modem. However, if the problems stem from the performance of their residential internet connection and home network you don’t control, Bigleaf Home Office can provide your employees with reliable internet access to ensure worry-free call quality from their home offices.

Learn more about improving call quality

Check out this recorded webinar “Fix bad video and VoIP calls for good” to learn how to solve common issues and enable a worry-free connection.

TruHome builds a cloud-based call center with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:32:44 +0000

TruHome builds a cloud-based call center with Bigleaf

John Pentlin, VP of IT at TruHome, removed a roadblock from his company’s cloud journey with help from Bigleaf Networks.

Every day, IT leaders like John are moving critical business technologies like voice communications to cloud-based systems because of their reduced cost and increased flexibility. However, this transition leaves many IT leaders looking for more stable and reliable internet options to keep cloud technologies up and running as intended.

John sat down for an interview with Bigleaf and shared his reasons for moving TruHomes 200+ call center reps to a cloud-based phone system. He described the networking challenges his IT organization faced along the way and how Bigleaf has helped him to meet those challenges.

Read the full TruHome case study to get all the details. If you’d like to see how Bigleaf can help your company improve cloud performance and user experience, drop us a note or request a quote to get started.

Onward Communications fixes UCaaS call quality with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 18:44:08 +0000

Onward Communications fixes UCaaS call quality with Bigleaf

Tricia Ward of Onward Communications had just moved one of her large, multisite customers to a hosted voice service when call quality issues threatened to derail the deployment. The customer had moved from MPLS to fiber internet with redundant circuits at all sites.

The carriers couldn’t explain the voice issues, and the UCaaS vendor was reporting great MOS scores. No one could figure out why the customer was experiencing call quality issues or how to solve the problem.

That’s when Tricia brought in Bigleaf Networks to track down the problem, solve it, and ensure that it didn’t happen again. Tricia sat down to tell us the whole story, and the cameras were rolling.

Video Transcript

Tricia: So, the customer I’d like to talk about is a transportation logistics firm that I’ve been working with for about the past seven years. They were on a legacy MPLS network. They were growing. They were acquiring new locations, and they really wanted me to come in and look at improving the network and helping them with their applications across all their locations.

We had just installed the network, all fiber, now we were installing hosted voice, and as part that endeavor, we decided that we should probably put in some redundancy. We also put in various cable circuits and fixed wireless circuits across the country.

So the customer has a great network. Now, it’s robust. It’s going to meet their needs.

They’re operating across the hosted voice platform and they start having issues. They start having a lot of dropped calls. They start having latency, jitter, all of the things you don’t want to have happen in your voice network.

We turned in trouble tickets with the carriers and the carrier said, “Oh no, there’s nothing wrong with our network.”

We turned in trouble tickets with the UCaaS provider and they said, “No, we have great MOS scores.”

The customers said, “Well, it’s not our local area network because we know that works.”

We were almost at our wit’s end. I thought about what I could do, and I had a relationship with a company in Portland by the name of Bigleaf. I knew their product fairly well and I knew that they had a portion of their product that dealt with analytics.

Jeff: Bigleaf is an SD-WAN service provider with a very specific focus on purpose-built connectivity to the cloud. Customers moving line of business applications to cloud and SaaS environments and helping them architect their network accordingly.

Tricia did reach out. She reached out to us, not asking, “Can your SD-WAN fix this?” but rather “I have a problem. Can you guys help?”

We get these calls from partners from time to time where there’s a problem and it’s obvious what the one thing is. There’s something wrong where the partner needs help and the customer needs help.

What can we do? Our attitude was there was gonna be one of two outcomes. The perfect outcome would we could just drop in Bigleaf’s service and the problems would go away. But we felt from what she was describing that probably wasn’t going to the case. There was going to more to it than that.

We felt it important to be very transparent and honest front in saying, “Here’s what we think we can do.” and, more importantly, “Here’s what we think we can see.”

Nobody really knew if this was a LAN issue, an internet issue, a voice provider issue. We felt that if we could get in the middle of it we could use SD-WAN, hopefully, to fix the problem, but more importantly to identify where these things are happening and who needs to take responsibility for what to get ultimately to resolution at the end the day.

Tricia: So we got a Bigleaf demo unit into their location. Talked through the process. Put it in place, and all of the sudden it was as though a light turned on. They had actual statistics that were helping prove out the various problems in the network, and it turns out it wasn’t just one problem.

Jeff: It wasn’t any one person’s fault. It wasn’t any one thing. We were able to identify some issues coming out of network. We could point to the customers and say, “Hey we see this. Can you work on that?”

We were able to identify some issues on the circuits which was hard data that could be taken back to the carrier and say, “Here’s what we’re seeing. Can you work on that?”

And we were also able to identify issues between the carrier and the voice provider and say, “Hey guys, it looks like there’s a problem over here. How do we fix this? How do we get this all together?”

And nobody was sitting there saying, “This isn’t my fault. It’s your fault.” It was, “how do we get this fixed? How do we make the customer happy at the of the day?”

Tricia: It just completely transformed the experience that the customer was having, so much so that they bought Bigleaf for every location without even thinking about it.

Jeff: To a certain degree, not fixing the problem immediately made for a better relationship. Working side-by-side with everyone involved, we were able to put everybody on even ground and ultimately show our value beyond just a single service you drop in at one location to fix one little thing.

Tricia: Everybody who wouldn’t take ownership before all of a sudden had evidence standing in front of them and said, “Oh we better take some ownership of this problem.” And so today they have all locations operating with primary internet connection with their secondary network connection for redundancy and a Bigleaf router in-between, managing and monitoring what’s happening in their network. And they look at those statistics daily. I know that for a fact.

Jeff: You need to think of support when you’re thinking of service. They go hand in hand. In my experience, the best relationships have come out of challenging situations. You need to be able to take the opportunity to help someone, to really drive the relationship home, and create more value long-term.

Tricia: With the support Bigleaf gave and with the tenacity that they attacked the problem, it has really transformed the customer’s business. And in fact, they did not replace anything in the solution. They were just able to make the necessary tweaks. To make the solution right.

Ensuring a Successful UCaaS Migration With SD-WAN

Amy Chan — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:26:37 +0000

For this month’s SD-WAN in Action, we’re talking with Bobby Mohanty, the Chief Product Officer for Star2Star Communications. Star2Star provides mid-market customers with a full spectrum of unified communication solutions. Depending on the size of the customer, the customer’s needs, maturity level and scale, Star2Star delivers its complete UC solutions through premise, cloud and hybrid deployments.

We recently spoke with Bobby to learn more about Star2Star’s customers, the unique challenges they face as they move to cloud-based UC solutions, and how SD-WAN is helping make that cloud journey more successful.

Q: So, what does the average Star2Star customer look like?

Bobby: When you look at the market we service, there are three to four broad segments, all of which fit into what most would refer to as the mid-market.

At one end of the spectrum of those segments are companies that would be classified as large companies — enterprises in the classic definition — though they may not look a lot like the traditional enterprises we know. They may have hundreds or thousands of locations where they use our solutions to deliver and reach out to their customers and interact. Retail is a great example of this kind of business. We’d refer to them as Distributed Enterprises.

They are enterprises in terms of thought process and business maturity, but at a given location they are very much an SMB.

At the other end are true SMBs. One and two site companies across any vertical market.

Between those two extremes is a growing segment of mid-sized companies. They have hundreds or thousands of employees across 50-200 locations.

Q: How do their requirements differ?

Bobby: All of these segments are moving to the cloud. The differences lay in the resources they have availability and the importance of those cloud technologies to the company.

If you go on the small biz side, that’s very much a cloud play. Connectivity and reliability of that internet connection are critical. When you come into the middle of that spectrum, connectivity and reliability are still critical, but you now have a need for greater resilience and uptime – things that have a real dollar impact on the company. And if you go to the far left of that spectrum, the requirements are very similar in nature, but there’s now a cost factor because you are deploying solutions across a much greater footprint.

Q: When you think across that spectrum, are you seeing trends in cloud adoption at those various levels?

Bobby: In certain scenarios, we’re seeing customers push to go to the cloud as fast as possible. We’ve also seen some hesitancy among some segments of the market worried that leaving on-premise behind might affect quality.

As you go up the market, the cloud is better understood, and customers have more resources and sophisticated IT departments.

In the UC space, the move to the cloud has been going on for multiple years. It’s a given. The low end has already moved. The mid-market acceleration rate has increased over the past couple of years.

Q: What’s driving that acceleration?

Bobby: As on-premise solutions are coming to end of life or requiring major support, that’s triggering the move for many companies. As PBXs reach those trigger points, customers are no longer holding out. They’re moving into a UCaaS, cloud and SaaS model.

The cloud is exposing the hidden enterprises. Companies with enterprise aspirations but an SMB IT staff.

Q: Relative to the move people are making, what are the big objections that you are seeing in the market when those conversations are happening?

Bobby: When you get into those, it’s typically not a tradeoff between I want a PBX or I want a UCaaS. They’ve already made a decision that they want to look at a cloud provider. The question is now which provider. In the mid-market, the reseller plays a huge role. The customer is depending on their knowledge and experience.

It’s no longer just answering a phone call. Now that same network connection is handling things like your customer service notifications. This underscores the need for a company’s infrastructure to be robust and reliable because things other than a phone rely on it. Things the company couldn’t do before, like provide support across voice, chat and social. Our customers aren’t only moving to the cloud to do cloud based solutions, they’re adding things to their business that rely on their network functioning properly.

What we do is solve business problems. That’s really what our customers come to us to help them with.

Q: What are some of these new use cases?

Bobby: It’s not that some of these things could not have been done or weren’t available. They weren’t integrated. And they required a level of expertise not commonplace in many of these hidden enterprises. They were separate, individual solution stacks that brought inherent costs with them. Working with Bigleaf, we’re able to properly integrate and package those components into integrated solutions.

For example, we rolled out a 4G solution. It’s been an absolute hit with our customers. It’s a networking solution, but it’s providing a backup capability customers need. We’re able to deliver it as a single solution set. It’s a big differentiator for us. If a customer is purchasing a UCaaS solution from us, it’s rolled in. For a few pennies a user, they now have a complete network backup. They aren’t managing multiple vendors.

Another use case we’ve seen emerging is emergency management in the context of after-hours support. Middle of the night, someone calls in and your service is down. We built out a solution set to help them manage that. We see 10-15 variations of these needs all the time. Same with integration into third party systems like CRM or ERP.

Q: What are some of the connectivity challenges you are seeing in your conversations with customers?

Bobby: The fundamental nature of the internet hasn’t changed. When we started offering the service 8 years ago, the quality of the network was obviously unreliable. Things have improved a bit. At the same time, so has demand.

One of the most fundamental things is basic traffic management and control. As companies move more and more services to the cloud, they are realizing that a single connection model isn’t the smartest way to go about it. We’re starting to see customer go to multiple connectivity options. SD-WAN becomes a fairly natural choice. We’re also seeing customers deploy wireless as a safety measure. Whether they run real traffic or not, a lot of our customers view it as a cost effective insurance policy. In the event something really bad happens, they want the option even though it’s a more expensive solution.

Q: Which is where Bigleaf fits in, right?

Bobby: We view Bigleaf’s SD-WAN solution as complementary to what we do. If it’s purely voice optimization, our Starbox does a great job. If there are other things that are relevant and critical for the customer, either optimization of other apps within the network or deploying to a pure cloud, we position Bigleaf as our SD-WAN solution.

Interestingly, most of our deployments are on the hybrid side. Bigleaf gives us better control and flexibility, as well as preserving failover. For many customers, that’s very valuable to add that layer on top. There are incremental feature type things, but the broader attraction is extending load balancing, prioritization and visibility beyond voice and keeping it plug and play. Ease of use was one of the big reasons we chose Bigleaf. We already offered a solution that had some of the same features SD-WAN brought to life. What we were looking for was the right solution to do all the things a modern enterprise was looking for. Not only optimize the voice, but optimize the data in real time and ensure the customer is always up and always running and that their business is architected the right way. That’s what’s important to us.

Advantel moves contact centers to the cloud with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 14:45:58 +0000

Advantel moves contact centers to the cloud with Bigleaf

Advantel Networks is a Bigleaf partner who has been delivering leading integrated voice and data solutions to clients around the world since 1984. Along with traditional voice, VoIP, and security, several of Advantel’s customers look to them for contact center solutions.

As is the case with other communications technologies, many of those contact center customers are looking to make a move to a cloud-based solution. Advantel’s Director of Contact Center and Business applications, Loganathan “Loga” Sivasundaram and Rick Giesea, Senior Account Manager for Cloud and Network Services, explain how they help Advantel customers to adopt cloud-based contact center as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions with Bigleaf.

Loga Siva
Director – Contact Center and Business applications, Advantel Networks

So, what’s driving the demand for CCaaS among your customers?

Loga: We have several large to medium-large enterprises for whom customer experience and customer journey mapping is a critical competency. For a good majority of them, contact center solutions aren’t just about customer service, but also customer acquisition on the front end. We see this a lot in the retail space with large online retailers and manufacturers. They are constantly challenged with the question of how much of my technology do I keep in-house versus more flexible cloud-based options.

I would imagine this is where CCaaS comes into your discussions with them.

Loga: Absolutely. For these companies, it’s about managing call load and unforecasted or seasonal traffic volumes. To do that, they are looking at people like us who can help them build the seasonal infrastructure they need.

But it’s more than building infrastructure. They don’t want to invest a lot of capital expense (capex) into technology that’s only needed for a brief period of time. Timing is of the essence. They need options available when it is least expected.

The elasticity of cloud-based services is essential for our customers to allow them to scale up and scale back down as needed. We’re able to jump in to put the technology services in front without them having to alter their existing business process or culture. Continuity is critical.

When you look at your customer landscape, are there specific events that trigger the decision to move to the cloud for things like CC?

Loga: Primarily it’s volume. Everybody operates at a threshold. For some it’s volume. For others it’s cost. When they hit their limit, that’s when they make that first call for the cloud.

Are there things you’re seeing that prevent people from making a move to Cloud?

Loga: Sometimes it’s just time and effort. A little bit of it is culture, too.

If I take this technology outside of my organization, will I lose control? Will I lose people?

The truth is they don’t lose control. It just requires their existing team to manage those new services in the cloud. There’s a shift in how that team’s expertise is put to use.

Rick Giesea
Senior Account Manager Cloud and Network Sales, Advantel Networks

How does connectivity manifest itself in this move to the cloud?

Rick: Traditionally, when you look at an organizational WAN topology, services used to be centralized either at the customer or in an outside data center. You operated on MPLS and everything was secure over that WAN, and it was somewhat easy to manage. Now with organizations moving services to the cloud and relying on the public internet, that’s where issues arise. How good is my internet connection? Do I need a backup connection? How do I ensure connection quality? That’s where SD-WAN and Bigleaf come into play.

70 percent of our customers have a distributed geographic footprint. In the Bay Area, it’s a fiber-rich market. Good internet is generally available. But when you look at other areas of the country where people are relying on a broadband connection for all of their business communications, that’s where the quality of the internet isn’t so great. It creates problems.

That distributed footprint must add operational as well as technical complexity.

Rick: We and others like Bigleaf specifically because Bigleaf’s SD-WAN is carrier-agnostic. Especially with the types of customers we have that are distributed across multiple locations in different regions with different providers. Bigleaf’s ability to connect to a diverse world of services is a huge differentiator.

As contact centers are no longer only phone calls, a lot of times doing chat or email, that must add to the complexity.

Loga: It does. It’s also the most significant focal point for organizations that tie revenue to call center performance. CCaaS is one of our primary areas of focus. SD-WAN is a must-have part of the conversation.

Rick: Bigleaf is an excellent fit for these customers because it can automatically identify the different kinds of traffic, even from a single CCaaS provider, and ensure that it’s prioritized correctly. As companies continue to move these kinds of technologies to the cloud, that prioritization is key to ensuring a successful rollout, enthusiastic adoption and, most importantly, successful customers.

—-

Our thanks go to Loga, Rick and the whole Advantel team for sharing their expertise and insight. If you have any questions for Loga or would like to learn if Advantel could help with your own contact center challenges, reach out to them today at 800-377-4911 or visit their website at www.advantel.com.

To share your own partner perspective in a future Bigleaf spotlight, contact stories@bigleaf.net. To learn more about Bigleaf’s network optimization solutions, schedule a free demo.

QoS over the Internet for VoIP and Cloud Apps, Part 2

Joel Mulkey — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 16:06:44 +0000

This is a follow-up to the 1st post of this 2-post series on our Dynamic QoS Prioritization. This will be more of a technical deep-dive on QoS and how our implementation works.

Bigleaf QoS Concepts, In-Depth

Let’s dive into the details, through all 5 concepts discussed in the previous post.

Smart Sacrifice

Legacy network appliances (routers, firewalls, load-balancers) provide a self-contained device that attempts to provide useful control of traffic at one point in the network path. These devices provide high efficiency (there is no tunneling overhead) and sometimes low cost for basic versions, yet sacrifice in almost every other area. For more details on how they compare, check out this comparison against Bigleaf.

Then there are the newer Software Defined Networking (SDN) entrants in this space such as Bigleaf. Some have adopted the term “SD-WAN” to describe use of SDN across Wide Area Networks (WANs). Unfortunately, just like “Cloud” can mean many things from private VMs to public-facing SaaS services to Hosted VoIP, SDN and SD-WAN are marketing terms that vary widely in meaning. Some use them to describe simple features like cloud-based device administration, while others use them to mean fully separated control/data plane architectures, and everything in between.

So the question you need to ask is, what are the sacrifices or tradeoffs they are making? Buzzwords don’t matter, the experience for your users does. Unlike other offerings, we at Bigleaf sacrifice a little bit of speed and latency for vastly improved reliability, performance, and user experience.

We do this by tunneling all user traffic through our gateway clusters. This means there’s tunnel overhead (typically about 8%) and a geography-dependent latency increase (typically 5-20ms). Internet-based applications don’t even notice the tiny latency increase, and with broadband circuits so prevalent, the tunnel overhead is basically meaningless. However, what this tradeoff gains us is Seamless Failover of all applications, effective QoS across the public internet, and everything else you read about on this website, without caveats.

Internet Path Visibility

Typical load-balancers and firewalls decide if an internet circuit is up or down by pinging Google or some other IP address out the circuit. If the pings go away then the circuit is down.

First issue here: Up or down, on or off, that’s the granularity available. Real-time applications like VoIP and VDI require far more delicate treatment than this, as they are sensitive to even 1% packet loss.

Second issue: Varying internet paths. Thanks to internet routing protocols like BGP, once traffic leaves your office it can take many internet paths, it’s “The Web”! This is a neat tool for viewing how hugely internet paths can vary. Below is a screenshot showing an example of why this is an issue.

The big dot is your ISP, some of those other dots are the stuff you’re trying to interact with on the internet. Notice how there are a gazillion paths? Just because the path to Google is clean, does not mean that path to your business-critical applications is clean, or even up!

So SD-WAN fixes this right? Not in many cases. With most other offerings, the providers will tunnel some of your traffic back to their cloud servers, but not other traffic. This is a huge issue when quality comes in to play. As this visualization shows, the path tunneled back to their cloud datacenter(s) may be clean, while other paths are nasty or even offline.

Here at Bigleaf we recognized that we can’t sacrifice visibility of what the internet is doing to your application traffic. We absolutely have to know what’s going on at all times for all traffic. Because of this, we tunnel all traffic back through our gateway clusters, your traffic and our monitoring traffic. This ensures that we have fine-grained details on performance of the full internet path that your traffic is taking into the core of the internet. With Bigleaf, the path our monitoring traffic takes is the same as almost the entire path to your VoIP provider, to Google, to Salesforce, and everywhere else.

We monitor that path 10 times per second with custom monitoring packets that our on-site router and gateway clusters pass back and forth. This gives our SDN algorithms packet-loss, latency, jitter, and capacity data for each direction along the whole path, updated in real-time.

There is a small portion of the internet path that we don’t fully see and control – the path between our gateway clusters and the endpoints your traffic is flowing to. Typically that path is just a few hops away on the backbone of the internet (which tends to be the most reliable portion), and with many networks it’s only 1 hop away over connections that we control.

Total Control

The state of QoS on most internet-facing routers and firewalls is sadly very broken. Users think they can check an “enable QoS” checkbox, put in a few rules, and have something that works. As mentioned in the previous post, inbound QoS is basically uncontrolled with on-prem-only solutions due to UDP traffic (and often TCP traffic too).

To get around this issue, we implement control at both ends of the internet path. For upload traffic we control everything at our on-premise router, nothing too special there. For download traffic though, we control all traffic in the core of the internet, at our gateway clusters. These gateway clusters are located in carrier hotels, essentially datacenters that are core internet peering points. We operate our own network rather than using cloud providers like Amazon where resources are shared. These decisions ensure that customers have the lowest latency to the endpoints they are trying to reach, and that we have complete autonomy to run the network in a way that provides maximum performance with no compromises.

In our gateway clusters and on-premise routers we classify user traffic into 6 different categories, rate-limit and queue traffic as needed to ensure proper QoS prioritization, and then send it out through our tunnels. Those categories are:

VoIP
Hi-priority Interactive
Med-priority Interactive
Low-priority Interactive
Bulk Transfers
Default

Because this is happening at both ends (your office and the core of the internet), we have full QoS control over almost the entire internet path. When we say that our QoS works you can believe it, and we’re glad to help you test it if you’d like.

A Creative and Evolving Ruleset

The six QoS priorities above are useless without rules to classify traffic into them. There tends to be 3 widely used philosophies to QoS rules:

Have none
Have none, except for a few specific ones for those really sensitive applications
Use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for super-fine-grained control with thousands of rules

#1 obviously is no good. #2 is getting better, but there are lots of basics it leaves uncovered. Maybe business critical applications will work OK, but users may hate the rest of their internet and cloud experience. #3 could be effective, but do you want to maintain that, and do you want to pay for hardware powerful enough to run each traffic flow through thousands of rules?

We’ve come up with a better, more creative method. We have a base ruleset that covers almost all applications, not solely with specific rules but also with other methods that identify traffic beyond basic ports and protocols (but without the overhead of DPI). This ruleset provides an excellent experience for almost every customer and application situation.

However, we acknowledge that any fixed ruleset won’t meet every need, and it needs to change over time. That’s one huge benefit of Bigleaf’s SDN technology – it evolves. When we update the ruleset with new optimizations, those get implemented on your service automatically. You get the benefits, with no additional cost or work. And if you need something custom that our base ruleset doesn’t handle then we can also implement custom per-site rules.

Real-time Adaptation

This part is pretty crucial. Without real-time adaptation, nothing described above matters. If the network devices at each end of a path don’t have accurate speeds set, then they can’t buffer traffic and prioritize it – other hops along the path will do that, almost surely without regard to your desired QoS priorities.

Pretty much all routers/firewalls/load-balancers are rather dumb about speeds for QoS. They either assume that the speed or throughput capacity of a given network path is equivalent to the speed of the port that it’s connected to (e.g. a 100Mbps ethernet port), or that if a speed is set in the UI for the port (e.g. 40Mbps) that the speed will never change. Internet paths are often congested though. Cable circuits experience heavy congestion in the last-mile. DSL and Ethernet-Over-Copper circuits often experience middle-mile backhaul congestion, and all circuits are prone to varying bandwidth due to network failures and peering congestion.

So how should this be fixed? We spent a lot of time back when we started Bigleaf working on this problem, because it’s not easy to solve. A few SDN-type solutions run a bandwidth test at boot-up or device set-up to evaluate the circuit throughput. The problem with that is that throughput changes! Consider a typical 50M/10M Cable circuit. At varying times it may have capacity like this:

6AM: 50M/10M
9AM: 43M/6M
2PM: 47M/7M
8PM: 39M/9M

Theoretically you could just set the QoS rate-limiting settings to 39M/6M for this circuit and have success, but what if you set it wrong? And what about all the bandwidth you’re wasting during better times? That’s not good enough for us.

We created a patent-pending mechanism that automatically adjusts the QoS rate-limiting settings as circuit capacity changes. This ensures that for both download and upload, you get the most possible speed from each internet circuit, without sacrificing constant QoS that’s always prioritizing traffic, even during times of ISP congestion. Our devices at each end are the only devices buffering traffic along the path, so we control the QoS priority.

QoS is One (big) Piece of the Bigleaf Solution

If an ISP circuit is so congested that there’s no “clean” bandwidth available, there’s just constant packet-loss, heavy latency, or bad jitter, then we’ll move your traffic off that circuit using our Intelligent Load Balancing. But for most situations Dynamic QoS is a game-changing feature that enables effective use of over-the-top services like VoIP and VDI across the public internet.

Please Sign Up for service, or Contact Us with questions.

Header image by Ministerio TIC Colombia
Last image by MattysFlicks

QoS over the Internet for VoIP and Cloud Apps, Part 1

Joel Mulkey — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 19:14:34 +0000

But does it actually work, in real life, consistently?

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