Internet Performance – Bigleaf Networks

Allstate Peterbilt & Bigleaf: Ensuring uninterrupted operations across the Midwest

Amy Chan — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:58:02 +0000

Allstate Peterbilt Group, the largest privately held heavy truck dealership group in the upper Midwest, with 26 locations across the region, exemplifies the critical significance of network reliability in today’s business environment. With a steadfast commitment to providing exceptional sales, parts, and service to their home and business customers, Allstate Peterbilt’s workforce relies on seamless connectivity to ensure uninterrupted operations.

Network Connectivity: The Backbone of Operational Excellence

For Allstate Peterbilt, reliable connectivity is the lifeblood of their business operations. Their entire business model, including point-of-sale, inventory management, and service ticketing systems, is hosted in the cloud, making a stable internet connection a critical necessity.

Furthermore, with a significant portion of their parts sales occurring over the phone, any disruption in connectivity can severely impact their ability to effectively serve customers.

Allstate Peterbilt relies on Bigleaf to support the core of their business operations:

Overcoming Connectivity Challenges in Rural Areas

Allstate Peterbilt’s widespread presence across the Midwest, including rural areas with limited internet service provider (ISP) options, presented significant connectivity challenges. Many of their locations, particularly in the Dakotas, could only access a single reliable internet circuit, leaving them vulnerable to frequent outages and downtime.

This not only impacted their ability to conduct business but also created frustrating situations where ISPs would often point the blame back at them, leaving Allstate Peterbilt’s IT team to navigate the complexity of resolving issues that may or may not have been within their actual power to solve.

Bigleaf: A Game Changing Solution for Network Reliability

Through their longtime partners at Fostar, Inc., Allstate Peterbilt discovered Bigleaf, and that’s when their connectivity challenges began getting addressed with remarkable efficacy. By leveraging Bigleaf’s intelligent SD-WAN solution, Allstate Peterbilt gained the ability to seamlessly combine multiple internet circuits, including fiber, cable, and cellular connections, providing redundancy and failover capabilities. The change was like night and day.

With Bigleaf, we can have multiple Internet circuits at every location. Some have more than two, but at least two, and I don’t have to worry about our internet going down anymore. It's been awesome.

Ryan Wuotila

Director of IT at Allstate Peterbilt

Simplicity and Proactive Monitoring: Key Advantages

One of the key advantages Allstate Peterbilt experienced with Bigleaf is its simplicity and proactive monitoring capabilities. Wuotila praised the ease of setup and management, “I didn’t even have to go to the sites. I could call and walk them [my team] through it. So that’s how easy it was when I have part-Sales guys that can do it.”

The Bigleaf Web Dashboard now plays a pivotal role in Allstate Peterbilt’s proactive approach to network management. Wuotila explained, “I usually have the Web Dashboard open and when I see a site highlighted yellow, I can click on it. It’ll show me one circuit’s down but our users don’t even know yet because your same-IP failover has already rerouted the traffic to another circuit. That lets me call it in and get that repaired without the end user even noticing there was a problem. I also get quick alert notifications any time a site is having any issue. That’s a huge plus.”

Wireless Connectivity: Enhancing Reliability in Underserved Areas

To further bolster their network reliability, especially in areas with limited connectivity options, Allstate Peterbilt has leveraged Verizon cellular circuits for backup. Bigleaf allows them to do this easily and allows for a cost-effective and flexible backup option, ensuring uninterrupted operations even in the most remote locations.

“It’s absolutely crucial for us to have different flavors of connectivity because we can’t always get a hardline connection,” Wuotila explained. “We have such eclectic locations, from metro areas with millions of people to places that barely have a post office. To have another tool for backup is really great.”

Bigleaf Wireless Connect

Bigleaf Wireless Connect offers the convenience of adding wireless connectivity to your Bigleaf service, providing a reliable, single-vendor solution for uninterrupted business operations.

Transforming Business Operations with Bigleaf

Bigleaf enabled Allstate Peterbilt to transform their business operations, achieving unparalleled network reliability and continuity. With outages reduced to a minimum, Allstate Peterbilt can now focus on delivering exceptional service to their customers, secure in the knowledge that their network infrastructure is resilient and adaptable.

Wuotila summed up the impact of Bigleaf, “As soon as you install a circuit, it’s displaying in the Web Dashboard within minutes. You can see each circuit up, your speed, how much bandwidth is being used at that moment.”

Unlock the Potential of Bigleaf

Elevate your business operations and achieve unparalleled network reliability with Bigleaf. Leverage intelligent SD-WAN solutions, proactive monitoring, and flexible connectivity options to ensure uninterrupted operations, even in the most challenging environments.

Contact Bigleaf today to learn how their innovative solutions can transform your network infrastructure.

Main Challenges

Limited internet availability
Constant outages
and downtime
Different ISPs at multiple locations
Unresponsive ISPs
and waiting games

Bigleaf Delivers

Aggregating multiple ISP connections
Easy and intuitive setup process
“Single pane of glass” view for all circuits

Final Results

Elimination of service outages
High performing internet, even in rural and limited-service areas
Issue resolution with no user impact

Enhancing quality of life with Bigleaf’s network optimization solution in senior living communities

Bigleaf Networks — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 14:00:00 +0000

In senior living communities, reliable internet connectivity is not only important to residents’ quality of life but also plays a critical role in their health and safety. Bigleaf works with several organizations who support the needs of aging individuals, from traditional senior care residences to assisted living communities to memory care facilities. For these communities, many with multiple locations across county and state lines, ensuring that reliable connection is a complex task.

Addressing “The Internet Problem” head-on in senior living communities

There are over 30,600 active assisted living facilities in the United States alone and the market is expected to expand at a compound growth rate (CAGR) of 5.53% from 2023-20302. When we started working with one senior care facility, they initially consisted of a couple of communities in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. Since then, they’ve added more than 20 new locations. Like most fast-growing organizations they experienced technology challenges, the most glaring centered around what employees and residents referred to as “the internet problem” — the reliability of its in-building Wi-Fi and VoIP phone systems and the impact it had on staff productivity and residents’ quality of life.

Fixing “the Internet problem” has become a fundamental strategic imperative

In a cloud-based system, when the internet goes down, so, too, do the phones. For elderly care communities, that means adult children are unable to call their family members and nurse call systems are rendered inoperable, taxing both staff and residents of each community.

Adding to the challenges, when a company has broadly distributed locations, they rely on different local internet service providers for their cloud-based phone and IT systems; meaning problems can’t conveniently be solved by any single ISP.

When internet problems occur, their IT departments also get hit with a constant stream of internet-related support tickets. Frustratingly, all they can typically do is call their local ISP and hope for a resolution, which doesn’t often come. Rather, they’re given the run around as ISPs try to absolve themselves from blame or responsibility, which leads to frustrated employees and residents.

IT teams tell us, “When the internet is unreliable, people complain. Phones don’t work. Computers slow down. And staff respond by either finding a work around or just ignoring the problem. Then they stop complaining to IT because they assume IT can’t help. They just accept that this is the way it is, which doesn’t allow us to create long-term and reliable solutions.”

Putting network optimization to work for “Mom’s Kitchen Phone”-level reliability

For one of our customers with a lean IT team who manage more than 700 computers across their company’s 38 locations, the IT director ripped out the existing infrastructure and installed new phones and better connectivity. He also introduced redundancy and intelligence into the IT system. The strategy behind this solution was rooted in an unlikely place — his mom’s kitchen phone.

The Kitchen Phone Philosophy is a throwback to the days when the IT director could pick up the phone in his mother’s house and knew it would work every time. He wanted to architect an infrastructure that would give every employee and resident that same sense of predictable performance.

To make the IT system as reliable as his old kitchen phone he needed to redesign the whole system from the ground up by upgrading the Wi-Fi, network, and firewall systems. But he knew that none of that would matter without a reliable internet connection at every location. For that he needed two things:

Redundancy
Something that could make use of the redundancy in real-time without his limited team getting involved.

For redundancy, he added a second circuit to each community location. To manage those circuits, he installed Bigleaf’s network optimization solution at each location. With those two components in place, the communities were equipped with multiple paths to the internet and real-time, bi-directional QoS, load-balancing, and failover to ensure that those paths were used to provide a flawless user experience.

Their network had now become as reliable as Mom’s kitchen phone! And that’s when they began to notice something interesting.

Reaping the business benefits of truly reliable internet connectivity

“Since installing Bigleaf, we don’t get calls about internet problems. We get calls about people thinking that the internet is down. But it always ends up being a computer has lost its Wi-Fi capabilities, or somebody misconfigured something while they were working on something else. The internet just doesn’t go down anymore.”

No longer confined by low expectations, the residents and staff started paying attention to the network again.

“When we would get calls about network problems, we’d ask people about their experience: when was the last time they remembered the Internet going down or where does the WiFi not work in their building. And they’d have a hard time recalling when that was. That was when I knew what we had built with Bigleaf’s network optimization solution was a success — because they started thinking about it again.”

Fixing “the internet problem” has become a fundamental strategic improvement for the company. Shoring up their network meant they now have time to think strategically instead of reactively, as many IT departments are forced to do.

Several IT directors we work with agree, “It allows you to take a proactive approach to technology when you’re not constantly putting out fires. That’s the real value of Bigleaf.”

Since deploying Bigleaf’s network optimization solution we’ve heard from customers that their help desk tickets have dropped an astonishing 30%, even as network usage increased. IT is now seen as a source of solutions and innovations.

More strikingly, this has inadvertently created a competitive advantage for these senior care facilities. The reliability of Wi-Fi and internet connectivity has turned into a key, competitive selling point used to attract new residents and provide comforting assurance to their families that they were all in good hands.

The outcome of the kitchen phone approach, using Bigleaf’s network optimization solution, extends far beyond the network. Staff at senior living facilities can now provide better care for their residents, and their residents experience a better, more connected quality of life.

Ensure internet reliability for all assisted living communities

Enhance the quality of life for residents and staff across various types of long-term care facilities, including assisted living homes, memory care centers, and recovery and rehabilitation facilities.

Maximizing productivity with Bigleaf’s real-time traffic adaptation

Sean Valant — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 14:14:00 +0000

How Bigleaf Helps Keep Your Business Running Smoothly

In today’s fast-moving business world, being efficient and productive is super important. A big part of this is making sure your internet works well, especially for important work tasks. Bigleaf Networks has a smart way to make sure your internet doesn’t slow you down.

Bigleaf Makes Your Internet Smarter

Think of your internet like a highway. With Bigleaf, it’s as if this highway never gets jammed, so your important data (like emails, video calls, and files) moves fast, without any trouble. Bigleaf does this by checking your internet conditions all the time and making changes on the spot to avoid any slowdowns. This means your most important work gets priority and runs smoothly, even when lots of people are online at the same time.

Bigleaf’s smart system doesn’t just pick who goes first; it also quickly changes paths if it sees a problem, keeping your internet stable and quick. This is great for video calls, using online tools, or sending big files. It’s a new kind of technology that’s better than old internet setups, giving you less waiting and more reliability.

Why Bigleaf Makes a Difference

Choosing Bigleaf is like getting a helpful tool that makes sure your business can do its best work without waiting on slow internet. It gives you control and clear insight into how well your internet is doing, which is really important for businesses today. With Bigleaf, you worry less about internet problems and have more time to focus on what your business does best.

Bigleaf’s smart internet help is a game-changer for keeping things running smoothly and making sure your business can keep up with everything you need to do.

Learn More About Keeping Your Internet Fast and Reliable with Bigleaf.

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

The role of SD-WAN in supporting hybrid work environments

Sean Valant — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 17:56:48 +0000

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

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

SD-WAN: The Backbone of Modern Workplaces

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

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

Bigleaf’s Approach to SD-WAN

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

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

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

The Future of Hybrid Work

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

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

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

[Infographic] Plugging into profits: rewiring brick and mortar retail

Sean Valant — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 18:14:11 +0000

Brick and mortar retail has undergone a seismic shift, compelled to adapt in response to the pervasive rise and demand for eCommerce. Businesses are adapting both by recalibrating how they operate their physical locations and by adopting their own ecommerce strategies. They are approaching both methods by leveraging technology.

More than ever, everything is in the retail space is connected, and there’s also more to connect than ever before. Retail businesses have revamped their in-store atmospheres, emphasizing personalization, interactive displays, and in-store events to engage customers seeking more than mere transactions. They’ve also restructured their systematic operations by incorporating handheld devices, scan-and-go technology, and loyalty programs.

Our infographic below shows exactly what retailers are investing in to ensure their bottom line stays healthy and their customers stay happy. What this also uncovers is their heavy dependence on network connectivity and what happens when their network fails.

With the knowledge that over $4 trillion passes through US cash registers annually, let’s take a closer look at exactly how brick and mortar retail is being rewired.

Learn how Bigleaf can protect your retail business today while preparing it for a successful tomorrow.

What does a leaf have to do with networking?

Amy Chan — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 21:28:39 +0000

Nature is the best engineer. We can see that with how leaves feature a naturally redundant system. See how we apply that same concept to our network to deliver reliable internet connectivity without complexity and came up with our name, Bigleaf Networks!

How to scale your network across multiple sites without upending your tech stack

Amy Chan — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:09:33 +0000

IT managers face a lot of challenges when scaling networked systems to multiple locations. The best-known methods include deploying the identical technology stack and processes at each site.

Unfortunately, IT can’t exert control over key aspects of application performance, especially when businesses are relying on cloud and internet-based applications.

That’s because it’s not enough to duplicate the software and hardware stack at each location. In a distributed, networked organization that relies on the public internet, the network itself does not perform identically at every site. So, employees and customers will not enjoy the same experience in every office, warehouse, or site on the network.

Same applications, different performance

For example, connections to cloud-based applications can be perfectly responsive at the company headquarters but sluggish in a branch office, or vice versa, due to any number of factors that are outside the IT team’s control:

Availability. It’s difficult to standardize on a uniform internet connection across the country, even across city neighborhoods. In each geographic location, there may be a limited number and/or different internet service providers (ISPs) with a specific selection of circuit types.
Traffic patterns. Even the same ISP, circuit type, and service package may perform differently from one location to another, due to real time jitter, latency, and packet loss.
Outages. Hardware and software issues, broken or downed circuits, cyberattacks, or power failures can disrupt network connections locally or globally.

Network optimization ensures consistency

One way to ensure consistency across multiple locations is to add the Bigleaf Networks optimization platform to the mix. Bigleaf sits outside the firewall, so there’s no need to make changes to established security protocols or other aspects of the tech stack at any individual site.

With a plug-and-play router at each site and a purpose-built IP network in between, Bigleaf monitors and directs network traffic along the optimal path over the public internet to and from the data’s destination. Bigleaf moves cloud network traffic seamlessly around blockages and outages to improve performance and reliability of business-critical, cloud-enabled applications.

With Bigleaf, employees and customers in every location will enjoy reliable connectivity that delivers a consistent user experience.

Bigleaf works with any ISP, any connection type, any technology stack, and any firewall, to connect the network with any cloud-based application or service. IT can continue to deploy a tried-and-true tech stack at every location, including SaaS, VoIP, and other business-critical services.

Bigleaf maintains the network’s stability and resilience, and the consistent network architecture supports optimal system performance in all locations.

Plus, Bigleaf Cloud Connect provides detailed insights into the performance of every circuit at every location, so the IT team can identify risks and prevent any impact on future performance.

Check out the power of network optimization with Bigleaf. Schedule a demo today.

CNI harnesses Bigleaf to improve internet continuity for utility companies

Amy Chan — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 23:14:09 +0000

Computer Network, Inc. (CNI) turned to Bigleaf Networks to reduce the impact of network outages and improve internet continuity, reliability and performance for the utility companies it serves. CNI’s utility management system (UMS) helps to streamline and control operations for more than 200 utility boards and municipalities across the U.S. that together provide water, natural gas, electricity, wastewater, and sanitation services to their business and residential customers.

Like many organizations that conduct business online, utility boards rely on internet-based communications and applications to manage their operations. If the internet connection is unavailable, even briefly, utilities and their customers risk losing access to critical services, in addition to incurring the costs associated with the disruption of ordinary business functions.

Bigleaf mitigates impact of network outages

With Bigleaf, CNI keeps internet connections up and running at its own Cullman, AL-based headquarters and at a growing number of utility company locations. CNI chose Bigleaf for its Same-IP Failover feature, which works in concert with a static IP address while switching traffic in the background from a faulty circuit to a working connection, in a seamless failover.

Some of CNI’s utility clients already maintained backup connections so they could execute a failover manually when one line went down. While this type of redundancy is helpful, many network configurations and policies don’t allow failover unless there is a complete outage. Further, this failover process itself causes an interruption in service.

Bigleaf, by comparison, initiates the failover automatically and instantaneously, so there is no interruption to data transmission or to the user experience. This seamless failover is especially important during session-based applications and technologies, such as VoIP, videoconferencing, or VPNs, when the slightest degradation or disruption of circuit performance can effectively end the session.

Bigleaf also identifies, prioritizes, and routes internet traffic automatically to the path that offers the best performance for each data type at a given time. The transition to a better connection is so smooth that the user will not notice any change, even in the middle of a video conference, internet-based phone call, online payment, or other traffic-sensitive interaction.

“Bigleaf Same-IP Failover solves many of the issues that our clients face. Bigleaf also provides quality of service and load balancing of the clients’ internet traffic.”

Mike McConatha, President, CNI

Works with any ISP, connection type, or configuration

CNI appreciated Bigleaf’s plug-and-play simplicity and broad compatibility. Bigleaf can be integrated easily into existing network configurations, and it works with any ISP or circuit type. This flexibility was especially important to CNI for rural utility clients with limited choices of ISPs and connection types.

CNI can add Bigleaf to the utility companies’ systems quickly and easily, with no change to established network configurations or policies. Many utilities require complex network and security protocols, with established firewalls, virtual private networks, and dedicated connections to payment service providers and preferred ISPs. Bigleaf does not interfere with any of those operations or vendors.

“We wanted a networking solution that was carrier-agnostic, so it can be integrated into any of our clients’ CNI system configurations, with any ISP. Bigleaf gave us that flexibility.”

Jake Morrow, Technical Operations Manager, CNI

With the Bigleaf solution in place, CNI’s clients don’t need to worry about network outages or the frustrating service issues that can result. CNI also uses Bigleaf at its own headquarters office to maintain 99.99% uptime across four circuits: two fiber optic cables, one coax cable, and a cellular router.

The Bigleaf Web Dashboard gives CNI actionable insights on the circuit performance delivered by each ISP and circuit, so any potential problems can be addressed proactively. And Bigleaf support teams are available 24/7 to identify and resolve any urgent issues.

“Bigleaf support has been incredible. When there is an issue, I can call in and typically get it resolved within an hour.”

Randy Bell, Sales Engineer CNI

Are you ready to improve the performance and reliability of your critical, internet-dependent applications? Schedule a free demo and learn how Bigleaf delivers flawless, worry-free connectivity.

How to avoid internet brownouts

Amy Chan — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 22:08:20 +0000

You have a high-bandwidth line for your business internet, and it comes with a service level agreement (SLA) that promises consistent uptime. You’re all set. Right?

Not necessarily. Even when your network uptime satisfies the SLA, you can still have circuit performance problems that are bad enough to derail your cloud-based applications. Technically that’s uptime, but it’s pretty much unusable. And because the circuit is still live, the underlying issues may not even be recognized by the ISP, or even the IT team, and the brownout won’t trigger failover protocols built into most firewalls.

Internet brownouts hurt your business

Unusable internet uptime is like a brownout on the electrical grid. It’s not a full blackout, and your connection is live, but service can be intermittent or too weak to support normal activities. In an internet brownout, your connection can be disrupted by jitter, packet loss, latency, or all three. This can happen for any number of reasons, in peak and off-peak hours. And just as high-energy appliances are most affected during an electrical brownout, your users will notice the poor performance first in the most demanding, time-sensitive cloud-based applications.

During a brownout, your employees’ VoIP calls, videoconferences, and other sensitive, session-based interactions can be interrupted by choppy audio, frozen video frames, and dropped data packets. Customers can’t complete transactions on your website or at your point-of-sale kiosks, and they abandon their virtual or physical shopping carts in frustration. Brownouts are often intermittent, so many users won’t think to complain about them, making it even tougher for IT to detect and investigate the underlying causes.

Unusable uptime averages 573 hours per year

Brownouts are more frequent than you might realize. While monitoring thousands of circuits, Bigleaf discovered that those connections were unable to run business-critical applications properly for an average of 573 hours per year. Add another 31 hours per year of actual downtime, and you have an average of 604 hours per year – representing more than 29% of normal business hours – when your network is hobbled by unusable uptime, brownouts, or worse.

What can you do to prevent brownouts?

The easiest way to keep internet brownouts from hurting your business is to adopt Bigleaf’s network optimization solution. Bigleaf customers don’t experience brownouts. In fact, they rarely notice when their internet connections are slow or choppy. That’s because Bigleaf manages their network traffic automatically, to deliver optimal application performance.

Don’t have Bigleaf yet? Schedule a free demo.

Until you install Bigleaf, here are a few steps you can take to manage the risk of brownouts:

Track unusable uptime. Set a threshold for acceptable network health or use the Bigleaf’s definition: less than 2% packet loss, less than 60 ms of jitter, and less than 100 ms of roundtrip latency. Then monitor your circuits and keep track of the unusable uptime. If you don’t have the right tools to monitor and measure circuit performance, Bigleaf can help.

Failover to a backup circuit. You may already have a backup circuit and a failover process. If not, you should set that up right away. However, most failovers don’t kick in unless the circuit is completely down. Your best bet is to deploy a Bigleaf network optimization solution that will identify subpar circuit performance and redirect traffic to a better connection automatically, initiating an undetectable failover that doesn’t require a change in the IP address.

Inform your ISP. Gather detailed information about the brownout – its causes, duration, and characteristics – and contact your ISP with the specifics. This data is easy to find in the Bigleaf Web Dashboard, and it can help the ISP to diagnose and solve the problem.

Know your costs. Brownouts and downtime can be expensive. Your company stands to lose revenue, your employees will lose time and productivity, and you may need to spend even more time and money to recover data, repair or replace hardware, and upgrade software to prevent a recurrence. Intangible costs can include damage to your company’s reputation and relationships with customers and business partners.

Add up your costs with Bigleaf’s downtime calculator.

What is the true cost of internet downtime?

Amy Chan — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 21:29:34 +0000

Internet downtime can be a huge source of aggravation for any business. Cloud-based applications are unavailable, and employees can’t do their work. The IT team is overwhelmed with support calls.

Even a partial outage or brownout can affect time-sensitive, session-based activities. VoIP calls drop, customers can’t complete their online purchases, and videoconference participants start to look and sound unprofessional during their most important meetings.

Discover your company’s total cost of downtime with Bigleaf’s online calculator.

How can you prevent disruptions due to internet outages and brownouts?

Learn about the costs and risks of internet downtime – as well as unusable uptime – from a seasoned IT pro, when you join Bigleaf in a fireside chat on Wednesday, March 8, with guest Tony Velasco, Director of Infrastructure and Operations at Hanna Andersson, a top manufacturer of children’s apparel.

Tony will provide a view from the trenches, including valuable tips that saved Hanna Andersson thousands of dollars per minute and helped them earn a prestigious Newsweek award for outstanding customer service. And he’ll explain how his company has eliminated the risk of future internet outages, protecting revenue and productivity.

Together with Bigleaf CMO Lori Stout, Tony will also reveal the best practices that support optimal performance of the company’s e-commerce operations and other critical, internet-dependent applications and services.

Watch the fireside chat with Tony and Lori.

[Webinar] Beyond uptime: Evaluating and assessing your internet maturity

Bigleaf Networks — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 03:36:00 +0000

Many IT leaders struggle to determine the connectivity infrastructure needed to ensure the greatest amount of usable uptime, downtime-free failover, and the ideal user experience for their staff. Using a real healthcare business as an example, we’ll explain the Internet Maturity Model framework and uncover best practices to enable optimal network resiliency and usable uptime in your organization. During this webinar you’ll learn: The difficulties businesses face when depending on the public internet to act as their primary network Why complete outages are not the only disruptions to internet-reliant businesses How to optimize for cloud applications using Bigleaf

[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.

Beyond uptime: It’s time to make “usable uptime” the KPI for your company’s Internet

Bigleaf Networks — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 23:52:54 +0000

Internet disruptions aren’t just annoying, they’re creating big problems for your business. Sales calls drop, meetings are interrupted, time is wasted, customers are frustrated—and it’s happening more often than you may think.

For years, we’ve thought about Internet disruptions in terms of “outages” when the internet is just off. But today’s high-performance applications like video chat, VoIP calls, CCaaS and collaboration tools can become unusable even when the internet is technically up. To put an end to the disruptions, we need to understand the full range of these issues, what causes them and how to stop them.

“Uptime” doesn't equate to usable

Your internet can be live, and useless. Don’t believe it? Ask your sales team if they’ve ever been on a Zoom call that had to be rescheduled because of choppiness. Or ask your head of HR if any virtual company meetings have ever ground to a halt because the connection was “unstable.”

In both of those cases, the internet was live. Your firewall would be able to ping its destination and would never think to fail over traffic to another circuit. But the internet wasn’t “usable.” That is to say, the users couldn’t do what they needed to do. For IT, that’s what matters most—not whether the Internet was “up,” but whether it was “usable.”

“Usable uptime” is the new key metric for business internet

At Bigleaf, we’ve built a definition of usable uptime based on thousands of customers’ experience. In its simplest form, our definition of usable uptime requires:

Less than 2% packet loss
Less than 60ms of jitter
Less than 40ms of one-way relative latency. You could simplify this to a more common absolute round-trip latency of 100ms.

For Bigleaf, this equates to a circuit health alarm level of 0 through 2 out of 7, a threshold that’s exceeded more often than you may think.

The cost of unusable internet is huge

In fact, across thousands of circuits, we’ve found an average of 274 hours per year of “unusable uptime”, far beyond the 38 hours per year when the circuits were actually down hard. So for an average business using technologies like Zoom, MS Teams and VoIP phones, their internet is “unusable” for a total of 312 hours every year!

According to Gartner’s downtime cost calculations, that 604 hours equates to over a million dollars in lost productivity and sales every year. So why isn’t every business optimizing for “usable uptime”? Frankly, because it’s been too hard to measure and even harder to control…until now.

Optimizing for “usable uptime” has never been easier

Legacy networking technologies like failover and SD-WAN have traditionally made it difficult or impossible to track, let alone improve usable uptime of internet connectivity. You may have tried a few options yourself over the years.

Every firewall has internet failover built in, but it only fails over when the circuit is down hard, not when it’s live but unusable. SD-WAN showed a lot of promise, but most vendors require manual configuration that’s almost impossible to get right, and it only helps site-to-site traffic. Getting to truly usable uptime requires a different approach. That’s where Bigleaf comes in.

Bigleaf is designed to simply deliver truly reliable connectivity over the internet. Our plug-and-play installation connects you to our backbone network over up to four ISP connection—making those connection work like one singe ISP with a Bigleaf IP block. That means we can provide visibility and control along diverse paths to anywhere your traffic needs to go.

What’s more, Bigleaf’s intelligent software automatically categorizes your traffic and identifies performance issues, allowing it to react in seconds to ensure your users never feel the bumps in the road. No more guessing and testing at policies and configurations. Just reliable connectivity for all your users.

Finally, our web dashboard shows you everything that’s happening across every circuit at every location. That means you’re always in control of the conversation and never guessing when things go wrong.

All of this means that Bigleaf can deploy anywhere, over any ISPs, for any applications, and we can have you up and running in as little as two weeks.

Start optimizing for “usable uptime” at your business

Ready to make usable uptime a reality at your business? There’s no better time than now.

If you already have a way to measure your packet loss, latency, and jitter on an ongoing basis, you can start tracking usable uptime using the definition above. It’s great to get a baseline and see where you’re at.

If you’re ready to make usable uptime the new standard for your IT team, we’d love to show you how you can get there in as little as two weeks.

Learn more about how Bigleaf can transform your business for the better by requesting a FREE demo. If you have any questions, shoot us an email at sales@bigleaf.net or contact us through the website.

Bigleaf Networks recognized as a Top Performer among SD-WAN software providers

Bigleaf Networks — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 00:26:11 +0000

In the dynamic yet nuanced world of optimizing internet & cloud performance, staying at the forefront of site-to-cloud SD-WAN technology and consistently delivering consistency is no easy feat.

So, we’re thrilled to be recognized as a Top Performer among SD-WAN software vendors by FeaturedCustomers Winter 2022 Customer Report Rankings, thanks to our SD-WAN solution focused on delivering reliable connectivity for every Cloud, SaaS, and Internet technology.

Following a year of tremendous growth, this recognition is a clear testimony of our dedication to providing SMBs with cutting-edge technology and world-class support at a time when reliable connectivity is more vital than ever. While the world remains unpredictable, thanks to solutions like Bigleaf, the performance of essential cloud and internet-based technologies don’t need to be.

The Top Performer award is granted to vendors “with significant market presence, resources, and enough customer reference content to validate their vision.” Top Performers’ products are highly rated by their customers and go through a thorough grading system created by FeaturedCustomers, the world’s leading customer reference platform for B2B software solutions.

We take pride in industry-related acknowledgments, because they’re a direct reflection of how well our solutions benefit our customers and how they feel about working with us. This, along with our best-in-class retention rate, in part, validates our mission of consistently doing the right thing at the right time for our customers. We strive to continue this positive trend of industry and customer recognition.

As SMBs rely more on cloud- and internet-based technologies, reliable connectivity is a must for SMBs regardless of industry.

One longtime Bigleaf partner, featured in the Winter 2022 Customer Report Rankings, puts it this way:

“Bigleaf’s vision sets them apart – a simple, plug-and-play network solution that delivers internet like a carrier but respects the traffic and your business like a true partner,” says Kyle Holmes, President of Matrix Networks.

Ranking Methodology

The FeaturedCustomers Customer Success ranking uses empirical data from its customer reference platform, market presence, web and social presence, and more.

The overall Customer Success ranking is a weighted average based on a comprehensive list of criteria that comprises three categories: content score, market presence score, and employee score.

Their ranking engine applies, weights, and calculates all the compiled data to provide the final Customer Success Report rankings.

10 Years of providing performance and peace of mind to SMBs across North America and Europe

Bigleaf empowers over 100,000 users and counting, who need truly reliable internet connectivity for every application, every technology, every user, everywhere — over any ISP. Check out our Customer Success Stories for more insights into how we do this.

Things to consider for a better internet failover setup

Amy Chan — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:35:47 +0000

No matter what internet connection or connections you have, they’re each going to have downtime and at times be practically unusable because of performance issues. Based on our customer data, we’ve calculated that ISP connections are providing an average of 93.1% of usable uptime. The remaining 6.9% translates to an average of 604 hours per year of effective downtime. And with so many important business technologies moving to the cloud, even a small amount of downtime is going to be painful and costly.

That’s why having a secondary internet connection that provides failover coverage is more than just a good idea; it’s now crucial for any modern business that relies on the internet.

That said, there are a lot of options and things to think about when choosing a second (or third) internet connection and creating the right internet failover setup for your business — whether it’s the first time your business or organization will have a backup internet connection, or you’re looking for a better and more reliable option.

Your primary goal

What do you want out of your additional internet connection and failover method? What’s most important for your business? Is it…

Getting your uptime percentage as high as possible?
Having the least possible downtime when a natural disaster hits your area?
Improving the performance of a particular cloud technology — like video or VoIP calls, your CRM, or an application that’s specific to your industry or business?
Avoiding interruptions when you fail over from one internet connection to another? For example, making sure VoIP calls or VPN sessions don’t drop.
Something else? Explicitly identifying your main goal or goals will help you make the best decisions for your business and help you explain them to your manager, executive team, or company

All sorts of things can take an internet connection down:

ISP outage
Scheduled or unscheduled maintenance
Natural disasters
Cyberattacks
Human error
Hardware problems or failure
Power outage
Someone cutting a line to your building
Spikes in latency or packet loss that make the internet unusable

Getting the most out of your secondary internet connection(s)

ISP diversity

Even if you have multiple internet connections with a failover option that have so far worked perfectly, you can still have issues. When all your connections are from the same ISP or carrier, they will all experience downtime or serious performance issues when that ISP’s network goes down. When you have ISP diversity, that is, internet connections from different providers, you and your failover setup will have a much better chance of being able to route around issues affecting one ISP or carrier’s network.

Last-mile diversity

Similar to ISP diversity, it’s also helpful to have physically diverse paths in the “last mile” to your offices or locations. For example, you can combine fiber and cable, DSL and wireless, or T1 and cable so you have more than one method for getting traffic in and out of your site. That way, you don’t have to worry about a construction crew accidentally cutting the lines of both your internet connections.

The uptime of different connection types

If your business is in an area with a decent variety of ISPs and internet connection types, you might as well pick the connection types that provide an ISP, last-mile diversity, and the best shot at maximum uptime. From analyzing the uptime of our 1,700+ customers’ various internet connections, we saw these connection types deliver the most reliable percentage of uptime, in this order: fiber, enterprise fixed wireless, cable, copper, T1/T3, other fixed wireless, DSL, cellular, satellite.

Leveraging your internet failover setup

Think about outages and performance

Many traditional internet failover options — like dual-WAN firewalls and BGP routers — only jump into action when your primary internet connection fails completely. They don’t have any awareness of network performance metrics for things like packet loss, latency, and jitter that can make the internet practically unusable when they occur, especially when using Zoom, Teams, or other VoIP services. For many businesses, these performance issues are a bigger and more common problem than full-fledged outages. A basic failover setup will be of little help, as they monitor for connectivity failures, not connection health.

IP address change

When your primary internet connection fails and your traffic is moved to your secondary connection, do you want your users’ IP addresses to change or stay the same? For more simple things like email or loading web pages, a change in IP address isn’t a big deal and your users won’t know that your internet was having any issues. However, many cloud- and internet-based applications aren’t so forgiving.

Here are some of the things that can happen when an internet failover changes your IP address:

VoIP calls drop
VPN sessions disconnect
Virtual desktop sessions drop
SSH sessions drop
Valuable data is lost while people are editing electronic health/medical records, CRMs, etc

Most internet failover methods change your IP address(es) when they move your traffic from one internet connection to another. If keeping your IP address(es) the same through any failovers is important, you’ll want to look at options like Bigleaf Networks or a border gateway protocol (BGP) router.

Active-active or active-passive configuration

When you have multiple internet connections, your secondary circuit(s) can be passive—just sitting and waiting for your primary connection to go down—or active, sharing the traffic load with your primary connection. Traditional internet failover options have an active-passive configuration where the secondary circuit is there strictly as a backup. This helps you avoid outages, but when your internet connection fails over you will likely have some disruptions and dropped sessions when your IP address(es) change. With an active-active configuration, both or all your internet connections are actively carrying some of your traffic at any given time. You can even have different types of traffic routed to the connection that’s currently best, for example, the one with the lowest packet loss for your video conferencing platform and the one with the highest throughput for downloads. Additionally, an appropriately configured active-active configuration is unlikely to suffer disruption and dropped sessions when one or the two connections should fail, or suffer high congestion

Bi-directional Quality of Service (QoS)

Traditional failover options generally have not control over your download traffic. This could be fine for your business, but if you’d like to prioritize important traffic that’s particularly susceptible to internet performance issues over bulk downloads, for example, VoIP or video calls, or to be able to route upload and download traffic on different circuits based on the best path, you’ll want a failover option, like Bigleaf’s, that provides this bi-directional QoS.

Other optimizations

Beyond simple failover—when one of your internet connections goes down completely—there is a lot that can be included in a failover setup to prioritize and route different types of traffic so that your most important technologies work as well as they can. This can be done through either policies and custom configurations or intelligently-powered software.

How much time do you have?

With policies and custom configurations, you spell out all the things you think your failover setup will need to know—from telling it how to recognize traffic for your organization’s most important applications, to what to do if the packet loss on a circuit crosses a certain threshold. This gives you full manual control, but also takes a lot of time and creates opportunities for human error.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your policies and configurations can only be as good as what your team knows about and has the time to update. For example, when an employee uses a new application they didn’t get from the IT team—a potential customer invites your salesperson to a video conference on a different platform, or the new tool a team is trying out—they won’t get the preferred experience they do with the applications you’ve created manual policies for.

Intelligently-powered software

If you include intelligent software as part of your internet failover setup, it can automatically monitor your circuit performance, detect and classify new technologies and traffic types on your network, and route and reroute your traffic to prevent disruptions. Instead of manually creating policies and configurations to try to account for anything that could happen, you can use software that incorporates all the knowledge from the networking experts who created it…the businesses that have already used it.

Adding this intelligence to your internet failover setup is something to seriously consider if you don’t have the time or people to write, test, and debug thousands of lines of policies and configurations, or if the uptime and performance of your cloud-and internet-based technologies is particularly important to your business.

Choosing the best internet failover setup for your business

Internet failover isn’t one-size-fits-all. What’s right for one business may not make sense or be reliable enough for another, particularly if they have a difference in IT staff resources, budget, and how much their business relies on cloud- and internet-based applications.

At Bigleaf, we’ve focused our product and support on making it easy for IT teams to effortlessly increase the reliability of their internet. We invite you to learn more about Bigleaf and request a demo.

Internet Maturity Model 101

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 03:10:00 +0000

Bigleaf’s unique SD-WAN offering provides your customers with an internet HOV lane for key cloud applications. Watch this 30-minute webinar to learn what separates Bigleaf from other SD-WAN players. We talk about our propriety AI for QoS, same-IP failover, and reliable, owned backbone network.

Randi Robison and her experience with Bigleaf: No more compromises

Bigleaf Networks — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 03:08:00 +0000

When Randi Robison, Director of Partner Development – UT, ID for Telarus, started working from home full time, she struggled to work effectively because her internet connection didn’t provide the performance she needed. Her video calls dropped or were so choppy that she had to make decisions like turning off her video or calling in with her cell phone, just so she could participate in those calls. Then she brought in Bigleaf and all that changed. Hear her story.

The cost of downtime

Amy Chan — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 21:16:27 +0000

Unplanned internet downtime can bring your operations to a grinding halt, resulting in lost revenue, productivity, and other costs that are less obvious but longer-lasting. Yet, 19% of B2B SMBs and 27% of B2C organizations say they do not feel their businesses are prepared to deal with unexpected downtime.

Many of those businesses struggle with internet reliability because they simply don’t invest enough in their Internet foundation to support today’s new cloud and SaaS business technologies. IT can’t justify the cost of improving their internet stack because the ROI feels hard to articulate in a way the business can understand. In fact, 38% of SMBs say they don’t know the cost one hour of downtime is for their business.

In this post, we’ll share some of the industry-standard calculations you can use to determine your own cost of downtime. It’s our hope that, by understanding the true cost of downtime, you can make the ROI case for the internet foundation your business needs.

How to calculate your cost of downtime

Gartner provides this helpful equation to calculate the full cost of downtime.

Cost of downtime = Lost revenue + Lost productivity + Recovery costs + Intangible costs

According to a Gartner survey, the average cost of network downtime is about $5600 per minute, which adds up to well over $300K per hour. This is an average calculation. On the low end, Gartner assessed that downtime cost can be $140K per hour to a high estimate of $540K an hour.

These differences can be attributed to several factors, such as your industry, size of your organization, duration of the outage, the time of day of your outage and what’s affected at that time, how much your business relies on the internet, etc.

The hard costs of downtime

Let’s take a closer look at the first half of this equation, with factors that are based in numbers you probably already know.

Lost revenue

Lost revenue = Revenue/hr * duration of downtime (hrs) * uptime reliance (%)

Revenue is one of the more straightforward numbers you can identify as it directly relates to what your business generates. However, you should also consider what percentage of your revenue is affected by downtime.

For example, if your business has retail locations using POS equipment to accept payment, it’s likely that more of your revenue will be affected by downtime. In comparison, if you are running a medical clinic where you have a wider variety of activities that contribute to revenue generation, downtime may not affect your revenue as much.

Gartner often looks at data that relates to larger enterprises. So, the numbers above may not seem like they apply to your small to medium sized business. Let’s look at an example that might resonate more.

Example: 
Let’s think about a call center that makes $4M a year in revenue. As a call center, their employees’ reliance on uptime is 100%. This would calculate their lost revenue at $2,083 for the incident.
Lost revenue per hour = Revenue/hour * duration of downtime (hrs) * uptime reliance(%)

Total lost revenue = $2,083 * 1 * 100% = $2,083

Lost productivity

Lost productivity = Avg. employee salary/hr * number of employees affected * duration of downtime (hrs) * uptime reliance (%)

Lost productivity is related to the cost of your employees’ salaries that must still be paid even when they can’t use the cloud applications that are affected by the downtime. This number can also be affected by uptime reliance. If your employees’ jobs are 100% reliant on your internet being up and running because all the tools they use are cloud or internet-based, then 100% of their salaries will be affected by downtime. Also consider the number of employees that are affected.

Example: 
For this example, we'll keep things simple and just account for the employees who are working the phones. We won't figure in the administrative and other staff, even though their work would likely also be disrupted by downtime. In this call center, we have 75 employees whose salaries average $11/hour.
Lost productivity = Avg. employee salary/hour * number of employees affected * duration of downtime (hrs) * uptime reliance (%)  
Lost productivity = $11 * 75 * 1 * 100% = $825

Adding it up so far

So far in this example, this business is already looking at a cost of $2,908 for this incident, which happened with an hour of downtime ($2,083 + $825 = $2,908).

Let’s tease this out to see what the annual cost would look like.

As part of Bigleaf’s SD-WAN technology, we monitor tens of thousands of internet circuits for performance and reliability. Based on that customer data, we’ve calculated that their connections are providing them with an average of 93.1% of usable uptime, and the remaining 6.9% translates to an average of 604 hours per year of effective downtime.

This probably sounds high to you because the numbers most ISPs talk about refers to “hard” downtime. This is when the circuit is completely unavailable. For example, when you can’t send a ping, the internet connection is hard down. Our calculations show that connections experience an average of 31 hours of this absolute downtime a year.

The 604 hours a year number above is accounting for both this hard downtime as well as “unusable uptime.” That’s when your internet connection is officially still up but performing in a way that creates a very unproductive experience. This significantly affects all the modern internet-based tools you’re using, such as Zoom or MS Teams. From your users’ perspective, the internet is working but not well enough for them to do their jobs. So, this needs to be included in your downtime calculations.

Example: 
In our call center example, we’ve calculated the cost of an hour’s worth of downtime to be $2,908. That adds up to be approximately $1,756,432 of downtime cost for the year.
Cost of downtime in a year = Hours of downtime in a year * cost of an hour of downtime

Cost of downtime = 604 * $2,908 = $1,756,432

The “soft costs” of downtime

By just calculating the hard costs, our SMB example is already facing more than $1.75M in annual downtime costs. This doesn’t even consider the costs that are less easy to estimate but do factor into your total business cost. While those costs are called “soft” here, by no means is their impact subtle.

Recovery costs

Recovery costs = Repair services + Consulting services + Replacement parts + New hardware + Lost data recovery + Other costs related to repair and recovery

These are costs related to the task of fixing the issue, which can include repair and service costs, replacement costs, and lost data recovery costs. These totals need to be added to your running total. Review your previous years’ expenses in these categories to estimate what you might expect for recovery costs.

Intangible costs

Intangible costs can include a variety of things that have a greater and longer-lasting impact than the hard costs mentioned above. For example, as your IT team focuses on resolving the outage, they lose focus on their strategic initiatives.

Your brand’s reputation and customer satisfaction can also take huge hits, which can ultimately lead to the loss of existing and new customers. In fact, more than 37% of SMBs admitted to having lost customers due to downtime issues.

For some businesses, there can also be fines or penalties associated with any breach of agreement, such as not meeting the terms of an SLA. Others may face fees or payments related to litigation or settlements.

Even without dollar amounts, think about how sensitive your customers and teams are to downtime and the other costs they create for your business.

Use these questions to start evaluating your intangible downtime costs:

Amount of impact damaging your brand and increasing costs to your business

How often are your customers experiencing downtime that significantly impacts how they do business with you?

How easy is it for your customers to go to a competitor for a similar product or service?

How much are your teams having to redirect their focus from business initiatives to fix downtime problems or issues resulting from them?

How frustrated is your staff with their inability to do their work because of downtime?

How much effort do you need to put in to acquiring new customers to make up for the ones you’ve lost due to downtime?

Next steps

Use these calculations and assessments to better understand what downtime is really costing your business. Then you can start to compare your cost of downtime to the costs it would take to mitigate that downtime, such as:

Installing additional internet connection circuits and simple failover
Implementing reactive performance monitoring, Netflow, and/or troubleshooting tools
Investing in proactive tools like Bigleaf, which can provide self-driving systems that use AI to automatically detect and resolve issues

Once you know what downtime is costing your business, it’s time to right-size your digital infrastructure investment. Use the SMB Internet Maturity Model to assess what kind of internet performance your business needs to achieve its operational and strategic goals.

Contact us

Contact us if you need guidance on assessing your cost of downtime or how to right-size the reliability of your connectivity. We can also walk through how hundreds of other SMBs are using Bigleaf to eliminate their downtime costs and getting an SLA-backed 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Guiding your business up the internet maturity path

Amy Chan — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 16:33:57 +0000

Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) spend almost $200 billion per year on new digital and cloud technologies, to improve efficiency, accelerate growth, and enhance employee and customer experience. For these businesses, internet connectivity is no longer a “best-effort” utility. It’s now a strategic business imperative.

Fortunately, the SMB IT community is stepping up their game with a whole new approach to internet connectivity, with new strategies and technologies that deliver the internet performance and reliability their businesses need now.

Bigleaf Networks designed the Internet Maturity Model as a guide for SMBs that need to deliver new levels of internet performance and reliability for their own users. The model describes four stages of maturity that align with the needs of the SMB and support increased adoption of digital and cloud technologies.

Each stage represents a tradeoff among cost, reliability, and speed factors—enabling SMBs to find the right balance.

Stage 0: Single circuit

Let’s assume that every business reading this article has an internet connection. So, we debated whether to include single-circuit arrangements as part of the maturity model. It might be like saying that learning to walk is the first step in becoming an Olympic athlete. In other words, not a helpful or meaningful use of time. (Note: If you feel differently, let us know! We’re always looking to improve the model.)

Still, most folks we talk to have at least a passive backup. So, we’re going to start the official maturity model with…

Stage 1: Basic disaster recovery

Almost every business today relies on an Internet connection to operate some part of their business: phones, Zoom, MS Teams, CRM, etc. So, they need some way to keep running when major outages hit. The most basic way to provide this is Stage 1: Basic disaster recovery.

In this stage, the business has installed a second internet connection, preferably through a different provider and medium, that can be used when the primary is down for extended periods of time. That second circuit is typically integrated using a firewall or router that uses a ping to determine when the primary connection goes down, and that up/down monitoring issues an alert when there’s an outage. When an outage lasts long enough, all business traffic is moved, either manually or automatically, to the backup circuit.

The benefit of this approach is its simplicity and relatively low cost. The business likely has a firewall in place to manage the failover, and low-cost backups are widely available in most markets. But that simplicity comes at a cost.

Basic failover occurs only when the internet is completely down. But poor performance, brownouts and mini-outages continue to disrupt business connectivity even more often than full outages. And when failover does occur, all IP-specific traffic and services need to be reconnected using the IP address of the backup circuit. This can be a time-consuming process sometimes. Plus, the business has to constantly pay for an internet connection that it hopes never to use.

Stage 1 is ideal for businesses that are okay with several internet disruptions per month and just need to know that they won’t be down for days at a time. When users start complaining about performance-related issues that failover can’t solve, IT or the MSP go to work and move on to…

Stage 2: Complaint response

At some point, regular internet disruptions start becoming regular business disruptions. When that happens, IT starts hearing complaints. Sales and support complain that their calls are dropping or choppy. Management complains that video conferences are constantly cutting in and out. Critical SaaS applications like CRM, ERP, and collaboration tools just don’t work as well as they should. IT needs to respond, leading to a stage we call “complaint response.”

Companies in the complaint response stage know that users are unhappy. They know it needs to be fixed. And they feel responsible to solve it themselves.

So internal IT teams or MSPs set to work, with mostly manual tools and their own effort. They dig into the traditional toolbox—SNMP, PRTG, Zabbix, Graphana (for graphing data), Graylog, Netflow/sFlow tools, etc…

Complaint response also involves a fair amount of time talking to vendor and ISP support teams to find out if the issues originate on their end. More advanced teams might even use their own automated traceroute, MTR, or other hop-by-hop network tools to find issues along the path.

With enough work, the complaint-response approach can usually narrow down the potential issues. It might even lead to some best-guess solutions that can reduce the likelihood of complaints, like upgrading ISPs, implementing more advanced traffic handling in the firewall.

Ultimately, though, these solutions rely on manual response before issues can be addressed. As a result, performance and outage issues continue to recur.

Stage 2 may work for companies that can deal with regular, but shorter, disruptions and that have enough IT staff time available to monitor and react to issues. Once the business impact of these regular issues can impact productivity and customer experience, IT and MSPs need to get proactive and embrace…

Stage 3: Strategic alignment

Stage 3 is when we at Bigleaf typically meet folks on their journey.

Sometimes IT or the MSP proactively embrace strategic alignment before deploying a new technology, like VoIP phones, SaaS-based ERP/CRM, or a new cloud-based call center. More often than not, though, businesses are pushed into Stage 3 after spending way too long dealing with complaints in Stage 2.

When the Stage 2 reactive approach falls short, pressure starts building from the C-suite. Sales teams can’t make calls, support teams can’t keep customers happy, entire call centers are down for minutes at a time, doctors can’t access patient records. The moment that business managers can attribute poor team performance to poor internet performance, the company’s internet becomes a strategic imperative. “Good enough” just isn’t good enough anymore. So, IT starts getting out ahead of the problem in Stage 3: strategic alignment.

By the time a business gets to Stage 3, IT or the MSP has usually tried the standard fixes already—more bandwidth, failover, firewall-based tools. Now they’re exploring new ideas and technologies.

This stage starts with a deep dive into the business’ needs. Which applications/technologies are most important? What kind of uptime/reliability does the business need? What are they willing to spend to get it? For many businesses, the internet connection has been seen as a simple utility up to this point. Many realize that they’re severely underspending on connectivity relative to its importance to the business. That opens the door to options IT may not have considered.

For context, the average internet disruption costs a small to midsize company $137 to $427 per minute according to a recent “cost of downtime” study by IDC for Carbonite. That study also indicated that downtime costs ranged between $82,200 and $256,000 for a single incident. Compared with that, an extra $6k-$12k per year site for reliable internet infrastructure is an easy ROI calculation.

With additional budget approved, IT or the MSP needs a way to see and control the business’ entire internet footprint across all their ISPs and applications. Traditionally, they may have used disparate tools to accomplish this. More recently, third-party overlay platforms like Bigleaf allow for this level of visibility and control from a single platform.

Regardless of which approach you choose, this platform should ideally be able to move traffic between circuits without changing the IP address so calls and other session-based traffic won’t drop when moving between circuits. It will also need a backbone network that can manage your traffic across the entire internet path.

Next, that platform has to be configured. Different kinds of traffic need to be identified, prioritized and load-balanced between your different internet circuits. This can be done manually with policies in more traditional systems. But most companies we work with at this stage prefer an automated system that uses AI to detect and resolve issues. By leveraging the AI instead of manual policies, the system can reconfigure on the fly to adapt to any new applications or circuit issues. This means almost no disruptions with almost no work needed, a real win-win.

Stage 3 is where most businesses who rely on internet-based technologies should be. At this point, IT is providing true 99.99% performant uptime. Where AI is used, that uptime is maintained without any additional work no matter what new technologies are deployed. Frankly, what else could a business want?

I’m glad you asked…

Stage 4: Innovation alignment

Once businesses have the reliability and performance of Stage 3, they often start innovating faster and more frequently. With reliable connectivity, the barrier to adoption for new cloud and internet-based technologies drops considerably. This speed and innovation can be a huge competitive advantage for a small or medium-sized business, but it means that IT needs to get farther ahead of the connectivity needs.

Stage 4 is about ensuring that connectivity never slows down innovation. When IT reaches “innovation alignment,” they’re using data to predict the needs of the business 6-18 months in the future so that updates can be made before their needed.

To do this, IT must start using their available data to build predictive models. For instance, if the historical throughput of voice/video data per user is known, IT can use that data to add the appropriate capacity when hiring a new sales team. If the business wants to deploy a new interactive collaboration tool for their remote offices, they can look back at that office’s performance metrics to determine if a higher-quality or additional circuit is required.

At this point, a business may also hire full-time staff to manage internet operations, or at least make it an official part of someone’s job.

For many businesses, this innovation alignment is still aspirational. But getting there can have a dramatic impact on the speed of innovation. Ultimately, isn’t that what the internet is for?

Find the right internet maturity model for your business

There’s no question that you’ll spend more on your internet connectivity as you move up the internet maturity path. Even though most businesses want to deliver Stage 3-level reliability, they’re stuck asking “is it worth it?” Bigleaf’s team has worked with thousands of SMBs to answer that very question, and more and more of them are saying “yes!”

Today’s SMBs rely more on their internet connectivity than ever. If you’re looking to move up the internet maturity path, or if you’re just curious about what the next stage might look like for your business, request a 30-minute assessment today. Bigleaf Networks is here to help.

Building a reliable connectivity foundation for your digital transformation

Amy Chan — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 23:19:27 +0000

70% of organizations have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one, while 45% of executives aren’t confident their companies have the right technology infrastructure in place to implement it.

For the business considering digital transformation initiatives for their employee applications, efforts will only be as successful as the user experiences they create. You can deploy the best applications money can buy and spend all the money you want on WiFi access points, but the user’s experience is only as good as the foundation of connectivity that it travels over.

Despite its vital role in the process, the concept of connectivity relative to digital transformation is not one of the more high-profile topics of discussion. Often overlooked in the planning phase, connectivity can compromise your digital transformation initiative if you don’t get it right.

In our recent webinar, “Building digital transformation success on a reliable connectivity foundation,” we discussed how to ensure that your connectivity foundation will fully support a successful digital transformation.

Rethinking how you look at connectivity

A big part of digital transformation is taking technology out of your server closet and migrating it to AWS, Azure, or data centers where software packages are installed. If you are a multi-site organization and choose to host an application at one of your locations, you have some options because you can put an SD-WAN device at either end to help manage traffic and get some predictable performance.

But a lot of other technologies will live on the internet, not in one of the company’s buildings. These are SaaS applications like Salesforce or Dropbox, VoIP phones like RingCentral, and collaboration tools like Slack. These tools don’t exist in a location you own, where you might put another device at the other end to maintain control. Cloud-based applications effectively place the internet in the middle of your network.

To ensure you can consistently provide a reliable experience for all users, you should rethink how you look at connectivity.

The internet wasn’t really designed for the kind of high-performance business technologies that we use today. Originally, we were mostly transferring small or straightforward files in a variety of ways. These processes were not significantly impacted by packet loss, latency, or jitter. But when your business relies on VoIP phone conversations and real-time video collaboration, a little bit of packet loss can derail an entire meeting.

The distributed nature of the public internet exacerbates the issue because it does not give you a single source of truth or means of control. Visibility is limited into the network that hosts your traffic, and it is often difficult to determine where the problems are, what you can do to fix problems when they arise, and who to turn to for help. This becomes a challenge, and it translates into real pain for businesses on their digital journey. Techaisle, a global SMB IT market research and industry analyst organization, completed a survey that found 69% of businesses are getting monthly connectivity complaints from their users, about everything from dropped calls to poor SaaS application performance. These issues can stop a digital transformation initiative in its tracks because they create friction for adoption, and it kills productivity.

Three pillars of connectivity for digital transformation

Creating reliable connectivity on the unreliable internet means rethinking the connectivity for the new needs of digital technologies. Think of connectivity as having three pillars:

Resilient connectivity — Make sure you have enough capacity for all of your traffic with redundancy built in.
Real-time control — Your system should be proactive and fix things in real time before an application fails and a complaint is registered.
Operationalization — Provide IT with the visibility, alerts, and troubleshooting tools they need to ensure the ongoing success of the connectivity and ultimately the digital technologies.

Real-time control requires building intelligence into your network. We recommend an active-active configuration versus paying for a second circuit that only sits there, idle, in failover mode. An active-active configuration provides the same failover protection and allows you to leverage the connection of both circuits as it can move traffic between those ISPs without being disruptive — for example, moving a Zoom call between circuits without interrupting the conversation.

Rearchitecting your network for resilient, reliable connectivity

In our model, reliable connectivity has three components: capacity, performance, and diversity.

Capacity refers to the total room you need for the type of traffic you have running through your applications, so you should think about capacity in those terms.

This data will help you establish an initial baseline and avoid wasting resources on excess capacity. The key here is to understand your total potential capacity consumption. Some apps are more volatile with respect to consumption, so your capacity needs can vary. You can start small, then increase capacity as you need more.

Enhanced network diversity makes it easier to route around performance issues. Relying on a single carrier leaves you vulnerable, because if that ISP has a problem such as low power at a data center or network equipment overload, it’s your problem. If you run a single connection through a single ISP, you are at risk for losing complete connectivity, but you’re also at risk for performance blips. Those are hard to collect metrics on and can create all sorts of headaches.

Performance has traditionally been all about metrics, specifically uptime. You should consider the variability that can come from a circuit, because there is a lot of real estate between a level seven outage and usable internet connectivity.

From our data, we’ve found that the average business internet connection experiences 2.6 hours of downtime and 47.75 hours of unusable internet per month.

Unusable connectivity directly correlates to an application not working effectively and that impacts your team’s productivity. This is why evaluating performance in this manner is vital to building a strong connectivity stack.

For more detail and color on all of this, watch the recording of our webinar on reliable connectivity for digital transformations.

Intelligent networking solutions can help

Using multiple connections does not have to be hard work. Intelligent network solutions like ours seamlessly maintain connectivity. Bigleaf’s active-active configuration provides the same fail-over protection as a redundant circuit and improves network performance at the same time.

With this resilient base as a foundation, we provide the intelligence to be able to move traffic back and forth between connections and prioritize traffic within those connections. Your users don’t wait for IT to be alerted to a problem, because we leverage tools like self-driving algorithms and AI and solve issues proactively.

The Bigleaf dashboard provides the visibility needed to troubleshoot WAN or internet issues, evaluate bandwidth/speed adjustments, and understand the impact of network performance on application experience.

When IT does need to become involved, intelligent networking makes their job easier by analyzing data anomalies and changes to the network, delivering alerts and creating visibility that will accelerate troubleshooting.

A proven solution, a trusted partner

Bigleaf has depth and breadth of experience helping our customers successfully build reliable, foundational connectivity to match their business needs. Bigleaf combines proven SD-WAN technology with groundbreaking AI to provide that resilient, reliable connectivity needed for successful digital transformation. And we make it easy so it’s not another item on the to-do list for the IT team to tweak or manage. The Bigleaf Cloud Access Network is a global backbone network that allows us to move traffic back and forth seamlessly on the same IP between different ISPs for whatever cloud application you’re using.

Our self-driving AI automatically classifies, prioritizes, and steers your traffic on the right path. Our solution provides alerts, reporting, and diagnostic tools to make sure that your IT team is always in the driver’s seat.

And if you run a lean IT shop, you will appreciate that Bigleaf’s solution doesn’t have any policies to build, test, or update. The Bigleaf AI takes care of that.

If you would like to learn more, request a demo. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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.

Bigleaf adds consistency and management to network performance

Bigleaf Networks — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 21:20:00 +0000

For managed service providers, streamlining and scaling network performance management has become an essential part of their business. However, many have found it’s difficult to ensure reliable internet connectivity and even more difficult to get visibility into issues. This leads to support tickets and Senior Engineers trying to fix things that should just work.

MSPs shouldn’t have to use their top talent to do things that frankly amount to basic day-to-day housekeeping items. They need a solution that allows for visibility into their clients’ networks and reliable internet connectivity. Not only that, but the solution also needs to be scalable. Simply, network performance shouldn’t need to rely on complex solutions and configurations – the approach to connectivity needs to adapt.

We sat down with Craig Anderson, vCIO of PC Miracles, to discuss how his team has used Bigleaf’s SD-WAN to take control of clients’ network performance.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about your background and what you do and what your business does?

A: I’ve been in the MSP space now for 13-14 years. Until recently, I was with a decent size MSP in Massachusetts, and that’s where I learned about Bigleaf and had most of my experience with it. Recently, I made a change to work remotely with PC Miracles out of Detroit and brought Bigleaf into PC Miracles. My experience ranges from running all the operations, service desk, processes for projects, managing the actual managed service, and even to some extent, a little bit of selling. Bigleaf was a major part of my success in this range of experience. We had probably about 100 clients, and I’d say a good chunk ended up using Bigleaf.

Q: What experience first sold you on Bigleaf?

A: When I first saw Bigleaf, a very good partner of mine who got on board early brought it in. We were doing an open house for clients and prospective clients, and they were one of our partners that were there presenting. The partner brought in a Bigleaf router with him, plugged in one of the internet connections into the wall, using our network. He also brought a Cradlepoint with a 4G LTE as a cellular internet backup and plugged that into the other port. He then took a SIP VoIP phone, and hooked it up to one of the cloud services, I don’t remember which one.

And he makes a call, and we can all hear it… he puts it on speaker to a cell phone, and he’s talking and then he just rips the cable out. Just pulls the cable right out of one of the ports, and the phone call, just doesn’t even miss a beat. The SIP conversation flipped right over, over the alternate connection. So, there wasn’t a dropped call and redial, or any sort of loss along those lines.

So right there, that to me was one of the biggest use cases. We were starting to see more clients go to cloud-based VoIP or really anything else that required the network to stay up.

Q: As the technology landscape has evolved this year, how has Bigleaf been a part of that strategy?

A: So, my most recent customers have a lot of site-to-site VPNs. They have very sensitive, based on an old technology, retail database systems, and if a site loses its internet connection and flips over to an alternate VPN on a different tunnel, all the sessions were lost, everything has to reconnect. Because Bigleaf hides all that, it obfuscates the connections, they can’t tell what internet connection they’re on, they just keep going because the packets are magically going over whichever connection and it’s magic as far as I’m concerned. The other big thing about site-to-site VPNs using Bigleaf… You get the single IP. From both an MSP and a customer standpoint, that ease of use is essential.

Any of us can get redundant internet going. Any MSP worth their salt can say, “Hey let’s put your firewall on and let’s put two internet connections on it.” But now we’re going to be able to make that turnkey, we’re not going to need to completely engineer that. We can now get it up to four internet connections without it getting complicated. Your customer is going to get the benefit of combining internet connections. We’re not just saying, “Hey if you’re on this connection, you get a 100 meg, and if you’re on this connection, you get 50 meg. We’re going to aggregate them and you’re effectively getting 150 because it’s using them both together, and you’re not going to need a senior engineer to set up something that is, from the customer standpoint, something that should be basic and should just work.

Q: From an MSP standpoint, what is the most helpful aspect of Bigleaf’s solution?

A: From the MSP standpoint, I personally want it because if you can bring that consistency across your customer base, you’re bringing that ease of management of internet connections to the MSP level. And if I can get to a point where the majority of, or all clients are running this, they’re going to obviously see their own benefits. But then I’m also going to see the benefit of being able to support them more easily and better because they may have whatever carrier is available in their geographical area or at their address—fiber, coax, satellite, 4G, whatever. But I’ve pulled those under one roof and consolidated that into one pane of glass, where we, as the MSP, can see what’s going on and support that and more quickly react or troubleshoot issues and quite frankly have less issues.

We can now pull that all together under one dashboard. That’s really one of the biggest things I found—we have the right quality for VoIP, we have that reliability, and it’s turnkey. You’re not having to engineer it, and when you reduce that complexity, you’re not having to troubleshoot the multitude of things that could go wrong in a more complicated scenario.

Q: What would you say to other MSPs on your experience with implementing Bigleaf?

A: I am one of those partners that can get a little bit technical, maybe more than the average person. But I kind of start to glaze over a little bit when we get too deep in the weeds, and it starts to sound like a lot of work and complicated. One of the big things for me over the years, in that MSP focus, has been scalability and repeatability. You don’t want to have your senior engineers use their best talent to keep things running day-to-day. So, I am very biased towards solutions that are more turnkey, but at the same time capable, you don’t want to give up the power just because you made it simpler. To that end, I wouldn’t be as enthusiastic or I wouldn’t have wanted to pull in Bigleaf as I went to new companies, or even bring it to my customers if I didn’t think we could manage it easily. Bigleaf is very simple to manage. You pull your customers’ internet connections under a dashboard that you have as an MSP, and you have that multi-tenant aspect, and your customers can have their own access.

One of my biggest clients, they have their IT director who wants to see what’s going on with his internet connection. In fact, in addition to Bigleaf’s stability aspect, another big driving force was wanting to have visibility into how well their connections were performing. So again, from the ease of use to management, you can just log in and see that. You have your history, you have what’s being prioritized, how much traffic is going through, all right there. I don’t think I’ve really ever had a day of training on Bigleaf, and it’s not needed even for configuring the solution. I know my team here; I was the only one coming in with experience with Bigleaf. And I’m saying “Alright, guys, I’m going to have this customer deploy Bigleaf.” The engineering team did a little bit of training, but was a bit apprehensive, right? But after they did the install, the feedback was, “Okay, yeah, that was no problem, that was easier than a regular internet cutover would have been. Certainly, easier than a firewall deployment.”

Bigleaf takes care of a lot of it for you. But even the configurations we work with and have to manage ourselves are very straightforward. If your techs deploy a firewall, if they handle an internet cutover, or if a customer gets a new internet connection; Bigleaf is not going to be a problem. And then that visibility and managing it on an ongoing basis, that single pane of glass, you now have it for the internet connections.

Q: If you looked at your business and your client’s network performance before Bigleaf and then after Bigleaf, what are the biggest takeaways?

A: We kind of beat it into the ground, right, on the simplicity, but it just works. Bigleaf makes redundant internet more solid. All the million little corner cases where a failover or redundancy didn’t behave as expected – all of that went away with Bigleaf.

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.

What’s new with risk monitoring and how customers use it

Amy Chan — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 04:57:06 +0000

In our last software release, we introduced Bigleaf risk monitoring, our new feature that uses artificial intelligence to give you fewer, but more insightful and actionable alerts on network issues that pose a risk to your business.

Today I’m pleased to share some improvements we’ve made to risk monitoring.

But first, I want to say thank you to everyone who has turned on risk monitoring so far. And an extra big thank you to everyone who’s sent feedback to our product team at product@bigleaf.net and shared your experience or stories with our support team. (More on some of those later in this blog post.) You make these updates possible and better.

What’s new in risk monitoring

In this month’s release, we’ve continued to improve how Bigleaf risk monitoring assesses the health and performance metrics to provide guidance on how to address the issues that could affect your business and site’s continuity or uptime. Many of the updates included refactor how risks are calculated and how they are associated with companies’ sensitivity levels.

Based on the usage we’ve seen so far and the customer conversations we’ve had, this will further improve how we align the prescriptive nature of our risk monitoring with customer needs.

For more details on what’s changed with risk monitoring, check out the release notes.

How risk monitoring is already making a difference

As soon as we turned on risk monitoring, Bigleaf customers started to report a positive impact. Here are some examples of what we’ve already heard so far.

Discovering an important issue that hasn’t caused a problem yet

One of our customers learned something surprising: One of their circuits had been down for over a month. Because they had a second circuit that Bigleaf automatically failed over to using the same IP, they hadn’t noticed any issues with their internet connectivity and didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary during that time.

As soon as they set up risk monitoring, they immediately received the risk notification that their primary circuit was down. Had that not happened, they would have continued to pay for that down circuit and been at risk of incurring downtime had their remaining circuit failed.

Verifying the network is working as intended

On the opposite side of the customer story above, another customer was able to use Bigleaf risk monitoring to verify that one of their circuits was disconnected, as intended. They had disabled that line because of infrastructure changes they made due to the COVID-19 shutdowns. Bigleaf risk monitoring showed them that no traffic was going through that circuit. That gave them the peace of mind that things were working exactly as intended.

Recognizing small issues that are signs of bigger issues

One of our Bigleaf home office customers had a circuit that was issuing low level latency and packet loss alerts. However, they always seemed to resolve relatively quickly, and they happened in a seemingly sporadic fashion. So, the less technical home user didn’t think that there was a bigger problem at hand. However, when risk monitoring came online, this customer received a risk alert identifying the issues that happened more often than they should, and suggesting that she contact her ISP. When she did, she learned that her hardware had loose connections. She was able to upgrade to a new router and speed plan that worked better, and for a lower monthly fee.

Try risk monitoring and let us know what you think

To turn on risk monitoring, log in to your Bigleaf dashboard, go to your account settings, and create a new alert destination to turn them on. You may also see a pop-up prompting you to set up risk monitoring alerts, and you can choose that option, as well. For more details, check out our post on how to set up and use risk monitoring.

We’d love to know what you think! Send your feedback or ideas for future improvements to product@bigleaf.net. And as always, if you have any questions or need support, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Creating a resilient network: Q&A with Lionakis IT Director Matthew Onken

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 02:59:00 +0000

In today’s environment, having a dependable, resilient network with redundancies and prioritization is a “no-brainer”. We sat down for a fireside chat with Matthew Onken, IT Director for Lionakis, a century-old architecture and engineering firm in Sacramento, CA. Onken researched and implemented a network continuity solution and justified the investment to the Lionakis management team. Onken offers insider tips and insights into the hidden benefits of dashboards and network visibility.

Finally: Resilient and autonomous networking for cloud-focused businesses

Amy Chan — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 20:15:38 +0000

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

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

Enabling cloud-first business

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

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

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

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

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

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

The SD-WAN needed today

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

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

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

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

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

The Right SD-WAN

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

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

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

Resilient and Autonomous Networks to Ignite Distance Collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Case Study] Bigleaf rescues Vern Fonk’s cloud migration

Bigleaf Networks — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 04:42:00 +0000

Learn how Bigleaf solved Vern Fonk’s Internet issues and realize the full potential of their services.

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[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.

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[Case Study] Jet’s Pizza adopts Bigleaf Networks cloud-first SD-WAN for failsafe, always-on internet

Bigleaf Networks — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 22:31:00 +0000

Learn how a top pizza chain franchise owner eliminated down internet, slow application performance and missing customer orders with built-in, multi-carrier back-ups from Bigleaf.

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[Case study] New Seasons Market adopts Bigleaf for greater internet reliability and faster connectivity

Bigleaf Networks — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 22:27:00 +0000

Learn how Bigleaf SD-WAN gives New Seasons Market employees ‘always-on’ access to all their cloud-based applications across their multiple locations.

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How to create a network that is resilient against internet outages and issues

Amy Chan — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 16:57:55 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Smarter network operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened with the CenturyLink / Level 3 internet outage?

Bigleaf Networks — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 00:09:00 +0000

You probably noticed or heard that CenturyLink / Level 3 had a big network outage this past Sunday (August 30, 2020). Here are some insights from our perspective running a network that peers with them and many others.

What happened with the internet outage this weekend?

Amy Chan — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 19:53:05 +0000

You probably noticed or heard that CenturyLink / Level 3 had a big network outage this past Sunday morning. Several popular sites and online services were down or unusable, including Amazon, Hulu, PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Steam, and Twitter.

So what happened? Bigleaf’s founder and CEO took a few minutes to share some insights from our perspective running a network that peers with CenturyLink and many others.

Video transcript

Hi, I’m Joel Mulkey, founder and CEO of Bigleaf Networks. You may be wondering what happened with the CenturyLink / Level 3 outage that happened yesterday, on Sunday. We definitely saw that going on. We own and operate our own backbone network and had a lot of visibility and were able to respond to that. I’ll talk you through a little bit of that now.

So we had a couple responses to that. One that was automated. So our SD-WAN software that is managing traffic constantly – 10 times a second – detected that and responded by rerouting customer traffic wherever possible, keeping folks up and running, which was great. We also had a manual response. We have a skilled network engineering and operations team who was alerted and went and dug in and found some optimizations they could make in how traffic was flowing.

And through that, we saw some different customer experiences. So the nature of this issue that CenturyLink / Level 3 had – it was actually the Level 3 network which is now owned by CenturyLink but not fully incorporated – they had this BGP issue. BGP is the routing protocol that runs the internet, and you can think of it as a sort of black hole sort of an issue where, like an onramp on a freeway. If Waze is sending all the traffic to that onramp but there’s actually an accident, this was a similar scenario where CenturyLink was saying “Hey, get to all these networks through me,” yet their network wasn’t functioning right.

And so, it was a very difficult time for network operators – kind of unprecedented with CenturyLink even telling other big carriers, “Hey, shut off your connections to us,” which was a pretty substantial move, disconnecting one of the world’s biggest networks from the internet. But they had about a 4-hour outage, from 4 am Pacific Time to about 8 am Pacific Time.

And we were able to respond to that. So our customers, they saw and experienced – if they had multiple WAN circuits, maybe they had AT&T and something else, generally they stayed up and running. Although because of that black hole-ing, no exclusively. Some customers had outages because their traffic was flowing through CenturyLink and CenturyLink was just dropping it. And then on the content side, if you were trying to reach content that was hosted by CenturyLink, even as one of the paths to that content, you may have been able to not reach it. So it was quite the dramatic moment.

Thankfully, most of our customers stayed up and running, and were happy. If you only had one WAN circuit with CenturyLink, obviously you were down. In that case, I certainly do recommend – take a look at diverse WAN connections, take look at Bigleaf as an intelligent SD-WAN platform that can automatically mitigate these kinds of issues. And let us know if you have any questions. We’re happy to share more about this, what we saw, and how our platform can help. Thanks.

More bandwidth may not solve your home internet problem

Amy Chan — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:00:19 +0000

Here’s why

Internet access at your team members’ homes is different from what you use at the office. When many of us stopped commuting, our data had to start making a difficult commute instead. We once headed into the office where our data had an easy route to the ISP network point of presence (PoP), but now the data from home offices makes the long journey, packet by packet, via the network version of country roads and residential streets.

Covering more ground means traveling through a lot of neighborhood cable that typically receives far less regular maintenance and upgrades than the infrastructure that supports businesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re using copper, broadband, or fiber. Signals can degrade as they make their way through all the devices and junctions between the home and the ISP’s connection to the internet backbone. You end up responding to calls from frustrated home workers about choppy Zoom conferences, dropped Skype calls, and frozen Dropbox uploads.

More of us are working from home, and it looks like the trend will be for a lot of people to transition permanently to remote work. Residential internet is frustrating and making our jobs harder. What can we do to fix it?

More bandwidth sure seems like it would help

It might not

First, ISPs provide their business clients with more robust fiber connections and trusted digital protocols like frame relay, MPLS, and metro ethernet. Their service level agreements (SLAs) assure businesses of uptime, speed, and quality of service. This isn’t something ISPs can just spin up in homes overnight for tens of millions of telecommuters.

With a 100 Mbps residential internet package, people aren’t getting a dedicated 100 Mbps pathway all the way through their ISP’s network for every minute of the day. They’re sharing the pipe with their neighbors who are also all working from home, while their kids watch Disney Plus. ISPs oversubscribe their network, supporting usage based on historic data so they don’t over-purchase their own connection to the internet. This is cost-effective in a normal environment, but not when every house on the street now has two home offices, a distance learning classroom, and an entertainment theater. Even if bandwidth is added, the oversubscription issue remains, as does all the typical problems with the network between home and the ISP — meaning remote workers will still experience lag, jitter, and downtime.

And don’t forget that data goes in two directions. Your home internet probably has much less upload speed than download speed, usually something like 15-20 Mbps upload versus 100 Mbps download. This makes sense, because until now, the typical home subscriber was much more concerned about Netflix in 4K which requires far greater download versus upload capacity than a Microsoft Teams videoconference, which needs both.

What if we upgraded to a symmetrical 100/100Mbps fiber line? Fiber is not the silver bullet one might think it is. Even businesses using fiber still typically experience over an hour of downtime each month: fifty minutes where packet loss, jitter and latency make the line unusable, and an additional nine hours of degraded performance.

Throwing more money and bandwidth at the problem is no guarantee. If you don’t first determine for sure if traffic performance between your home and the ISP is the root cause, you could be buying a solution that won’t work.

You can do a quick test of the connection to determine where the problem lies. Load up a business application like Zoom or MS Teams and turn off all the other internet devices in the house. If this eliminates the performance problems with the business app, see if there is LAN QoS available on the router. That may solve the problem. If not, then you may have to upgrade to a larger service.

Related: What is QoS and how do we know if it will help us work from home?

Most home internet provides plenty of bandwidth

On a 12Mbps residential internet connection, regular use often fails to saturate available bandwidth.

If you have a typical home broadband connection and it is healthy, you actually shouldn’t need to reduce the family to shadow puppets and whittling during work hours to preserve bandwidth.

If your business applications can’t function properly regardless of who else is on the network, the ISP is making the best effort to get your packets there on time, but it is falling short.

The problem could be issues of jitter, lag, and delay on the ISP’s network. A larger pipe will have the same problems, just cost more. The network beyond your reach is sub-optimal and the new demands of working from home are revealing its weaknesses.

Bigleaf Home Office

Bigleaf’s SD-WAN technology helps organizations address these problems and provide their employees with reliable internet access and application performance in their home offices, even with residential connections.

Bigleaf Home Office auto-detects application needs and adapts in real-time to internet performance and connectivity of home offices. Unlike traditional policy-based SD-WAN solutions, Bigleaf provides the uptime and performance needed, through automated and dynamic QoS, without the complexity and risk of manual configuration.

Making home internet work

Amy Chan — Tue, 12 May 2020 16:00:19 +0000

Making Home Internet Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their home network is a black box

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

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

Give your traffic the right of way

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

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

Speed test results don’t tell you much

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

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

Bringing the office home: Create healthy home networks with Bigleaf Home Office

Amy Chan — Wed, 06 May 2020 18:40:33 +0000

Sometimes a product happens when you least expect it. That’s what happened with Bigleaf Home Office, a service specifically geared for those of us who are now (or have been) working from home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to diagnose and solve home internet issues

Amy Chan — Tue, 05 May 2020 22:15:36 +0000

Diagnosing Internet Issues for the Home Office

Residential internet connections can be a source of frustration for home office users. To a user, phone calls, email, and other internet activity appear seamless and automatic. But behind the scenes, each of these are broken down into packets of information delivered individually over a complicated tangle of interconnected computer networks – the internet.

The internet is a “best effort” network; it does not guarantee that a packet of data will get to its destination in a particular time frame – or even in the right order. When working at home, residential internet connections can quickly run into use cases they just weren’t built for. A residential connection’s best effort might not be good enough for business applications.

The result will be slowing or loss of packets at the bottlenecks. Best effort is usually fine for file downloads where a momentary bottleneck won’t even be noticed, but more time-sensitive tasks like video conferencing and screen sharing will definitely feel the impact. This slowing will manifest as lag, jitter, frozen screens, and even dropped connections.

Locating the Source of the Problem

When there’s a problem with a home office’s internet connection, the first instinct might be to call the ISP. But before you get to that point, there are a lot of things you can do to isolate and treat problems within these networks.

The first step is to determine whether the problem is in the local area network (LAN) or actually with the internet service’s wide area network (WAN). This will help you narrow down whether you focus on issues within the home network or if you have to call the ISP.

One way to do this is by testing the network connectivity with the classic network diagnostic tool, ping. Ping tracks the time it takes for a short message to reach a destination and return. For this test, pinging the default gateway address on your LAN and a location on the internet will let you see whether the issues start inside or outside the LAN.

1. Open a terminal

To use ping, have the user open a terminal or command prompt on their computer.

Mac

Click the magnifying glass in the top right of the screen or press the Command button + Spacebar.
The Spotlight Search bar appears. Type terminal and then press Enter.

Windows

Click the Windows button and then type CMD.
In the results, click Command Prompt.

2. Determine the gateway or router

The quickest way is to find the gateway address is to type tracert bigleaf.net (or on a Mac traceroute bigleaf.net) in the terminal window and press Enter. The first address that appears is the LAN gateway.

Upload vs download speed and why it matters in your home office

Amy Chan — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 04:12:02 +0000

If you’ve experienced choppy Zoom or Teams calls in your home office, you’re not alone. According to a recent report by Waveform, an estimated 13.2 million of those who work from home are experiencing Internet connectivity issues daily.

You may be asking, “But I have a 100 Mbps connection. Isn’t that enough to run Zoom reliably?” Well, that question may not be as straightforward as you think.

If you have a cable or DSL internet line to your house, you probably have less upload speed than download speed. You may have bought a connection with 100 megabits per second (Mbps) of download capacity but only 15-20 Mbps of upload capacity. That means you could have plenty of download speed, but not nearly enough upload speed to handle all of the traffic in your home.

This graph shows a 100/15 Mbps internet circuit in a home office setting. Upload traffic is exceeding capacity several times each day.

Unfortunately, ISPs don’t always do the best job explaining the difference between your upload and download speeds, leading some to believe that they have a lot more internet capacity than they do. So, in this post, we’re going to dig into the realities of upload speed vs. download speed, how to determine what your upload and download speeds really are, and what you can do to keep limited upload capacity from ruining your calls.

What is internet speed?

Internet connections are usually referred to by their “speed,” or how much data your internet connection can transfer per second. Speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps.)

When you signed up for the internet connection at your home or business, you probably signed up for a specific speed package like 100 Mbps. So, that means that your connection can send up to 100 megabits of data each second, right? Well, kind of.

Download speed vs. upload speed

Data goes in two directions — download and upload. Many internet connections have a lot more download speed than upload speed like the example speed package we mentioned above with 100 Mbps of download speed and 15-20 Mbps of upload speed.

A typical home cable internet connection with very different download and upload speeds (100/15 Mbps)

Your download speed refers to how long it takes to download data from a server. Streaming movies, downloading files, or reading emails are all activities that rely (almost) entirely on downloading data.

Upload speed is the same concept, but for data that you’re sending to a server. Uploading a file to a website, sending email, and posting a photo to Facebook all involve uploading data.

If you’re on a video conference, using a SaaS application, or playing an online game, you’re relying on both download AND upload speeds. These kinds of applications need to be able to both receive and send data in real time to avoid choppiness or lagging. That means a maximum upload speed of only 10-15 Mbps could be very problematic, especially if you have a Zoom call, a FaceTime call, and a file upload all happening at the same time.

How can I determine my real upload and download speeds? Fortunately, there are several free tools that can show you in a few seconds what your home internet speeds are. For example, speedtest.net is a tool that runs in your web browser. With one click, you’ll get a simple readout showing your upload and download speeds in Mbps.

An example of a speedtest.net report

These browser-based tests do have limitations, however. First, the test relies on flooding your connection to see how much traffic can go through. This can impact other traffic and limits it to a point-in-time measurement. Also, because the test is run from your browser, the results can be impacted by your WiFi performance. To get a better idea of your true speed, it’s a good idea to run the test in multiple places in your home to get a better reading.

Ultimately, the most reliable speed test can be done from an edge solution like Bigleaf that can connect in both directions to and from a dedicated backbone network.

What can I do to prevent upload restrictions from impacting my calls?

If you have determined that your upload speed is the cause of your poor video conference or call performance, you have a few options.

The quickest solution is to simply reduce the amount of upload traffic on your network. This may solve the problem in the short term, but may not be sustainable if you have multiple people in the home who need to be on calls, joining online classes, or using SaaS apps at the same time.

You can also upgrade your internet connection, giving you more upload speed. This is a straightforward solution. However, it will only solve the problem as long as your upload traffic stays below the new speed threshold. Anyone who works on highways will tell you that, if you add another lane to the road, the usage will eventually increase to meet the capacity.

Bigleaf Home Office can automatically identify and prioritize business traffic on your home network, making better use of limited upload speed

If you rely on communications tools like Zoom and MS Teams throughout the day, we recommend using a tool that can prioritize that traffic. These tools, like Bigleaf Home Office, can identify business and communications traffic and ensure that it’s first-in-first-out. So, if you do hit your upload speed limit, file downloads may be slowed but your calls and video conferences will run smoothly in both directions.

How are home internet and business internet different?

Amy Chan — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 18:15:21 +0000

Even before COVID-19 sent people home to work, the trend was clear: an increasing number of workers were using home internet connections for business. Over the last five years, the number of remote workers has grown 44%. There is no sign that the trend will slow. With COVID-19 restrictions affecting many businesses, there has been a huge surge in remote workers. Home internet connections that were once nearly abandoned from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm are now flooded with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Bluejeans, Office365, email, and VOIP traffic.

This increase in the amount of traffic on residential internet circuits is showcasing problems caused by oversubscription and network congestion. This has suddenly highlighted a topic that most people never really had to think about before now: a home internet connection is different from your connection at the office. Why is this, and how is it affecting the user’s internet experience?

You aren’t commuting, but your data is

Remote workers’ new commute distance might be a 20-foot hallway to the spare bedroom, but once they open their laptops and log in, their data has to travel a more complicated route. Due to geography, logistics, and economics, most residential areas are connected to the internet differently than business areas.

With a residential connection, data is being routed down residential streets and across neighborhoods. Residential areas are typically located far from internet backbones, which means there’s a lot more cable to cover with far less regular maintenance and upgrades.

All the devices and junctions that stand between an individual home and the ISP’s connection to the internet backbone are more points where things can go wrong. Whether copper, broadband, or fiber optic, more cable and connections degrade the signal in ways that can delay and scramble traffic. For the home user’s internet traffic, that translates to more potholes, red lights, and mysterious traffic jams on the Information highway.

Businesses typically install more robust fiber connections and more expensive services like frame relay, MPLS, and metro ethernet. Plus, businesses tend to be closer to ISP network points of presence, which means there are fewer connections and cable to pass through. In addition, ISPs provide service level agreements (SLAs) for businesses, promising uptime, speed, and quality of service. A business connection doesn’t involve as many changes in media, shared resources, or weather-beaten equipment.

Another major difference between residential and business internet connections is the ratio of downstream bandwidth to upstream bandwidth. Business connections tend to offer symmetrical or near-symmetrical service with the same speed for download and upload. Residential connections, on the other hand, are typically asymmetrical, favoring high download speeds for streaming video, games, media consumption, and other download-heavy usage patterns. Luckily, most business users at home will not experience problems with asymmetrical connections unless they are regularly uploading large files or otherwise pushing out a lot of data.

Residential oversubscription

Everybody loves it when their commute is free of congestion, but most would agree that it would not make any sense to build a freeway to every driveway. We build smaller, residential streets where the traffic demand is not that high. These feed into freeways that have much higher capacity. ISPs provide access to the internet for all their subscribers in much the same way.

When a customer signs up for a 100 Mbps ISP modem service, they are not buying a dedicated 100 Mbps pathway all the way from their home to the ISP’s network. Instead, ISPs oversubscribe residential networks, using historic data to understand what the average usage is across their subscribers. Since residential customers can rarely afford their own dedicated business lines, ISPs work to reduce residential internet costs by supporting only the usage they expect to see.

When there isn’t a sudden surge of people working from home all day, oversubscription is a cost-effective plan that provides more than sufficient internet bandwidth for all of their residential customers.

Oversubscription contributes to many bandwidth problems that business users will face on residential internet connections. At peak usage times, oversubscribed circuits hit maximum bandwidth and the end users will quickly notice. When the shared residential network is maxing out because of oversubscribed bandwidth promises, that will manifest for the end user as latency, jitter, lag, and poor connection times.

The long and the short of residential internet woes

Residential internet connections – whether cable, DSL, or even fiber – are in reality shared connections that are typically further away from central ISP internet hubs. Business connections, on the other hand, tend to be dedicated connections that are closer to central ISP hubs. The shared, distant connections lead to lower reliability, unpredictable speed, and greater number of glitches for residential internet service.

With automatic QoS, high reliability peering, and informative monitoring, learn how Bigleaf Home Office optimizes home internet for business.

Making home internet work for business applications

Amy Chan — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 14:59:30 +0000

We’ve been fielding lots of questions from Bigleaf partners and customers looking to get applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to work reliably over residential internet. So we asked Bigleaf’s Founder & CEO, Joel Mulkey, to join us for a 30-minute chat/Q&A to discuss the most common issues and answer your questions.

When we asked the audience, “Have you heard complaints about home internet performance from team members or clients?” we weren’t surprised to find that 84% answered “Yes.” That’s because there are legitimate differences between home and business internet that can cause issues for your business apps.

Watch the recording to get the full story on:

Home vs office internet
Challenges for business applications
Diagnosing issues with apps like Zoom
Available solutions and tools

If you’re having issues running your business applications over home internet, we may be able to help. Check out Bigleaf for the remote office and let us know if you have any questions.

Is fiber the answer to my home internet problems?

Amy Chan — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 22:04:54 +0000

Beginning in mid-March 2020, 88% of organizations have encouraged or required their employees to work from home. Since then, many of our coworkers and personal friends have felt the impact of this shift in their daily jobs, notably in the performance of applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams over their home Internet connections. Skype calls were completely dropping, Zoom meetings were choppy where video was stalling and audio was dropping out, apps like Slack were just freezing, and connecting to the corporate VPN was just plain frustrating.

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

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

This 100/100 Mbps home fiber internet circuit was experiencing 42 ms of latency and 10% loss, more than enough to disrupt a Zoom or MS Teams call

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

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

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

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

For the 100/100 Mbps fiber customer, Bigleaf was able to automatically protect the business application traffic so that it was prioritized over the 4K streaming video traffic, eliminating dropped Zoom calls.

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

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

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

Want to learn more about Home Office networking?

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

Bigleaf multi-gig speed packages scale with you

Amy Chan — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 19:59:03 +0000

Today’s modern business is deploying and relying on cloud-based applications, VoIP, and video-based communication mediums at an increasing rate. This expanded use puts strain on limited network resources and readily highlights poor WAN performance. Many small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are also beginning to experience the need to scale and are feeling increased pressure to ensure uptime and performance beyond their LAN for the first time.

In recognition of this need in the market, Bigleaf has launched two new high-bandwidth packages, for 2 Gbps and 3 Gbps.

With our new services, you can add additional bandwidth as your business requires, all while continuing to enjoy the same superior traffic and uptime performance benefits that the Bigleaf platform already delivers.

New router hardware is available to service these multi-gigabit packages for new and existing customers looking to scale above 1 Gbps. The new multi-gig capable router (CPE) has an expansion slot that provides four additional 10 G SFP+ ports for WAN or LAN use. These ports on the expansion card can leverage fiber transceivers or direct-attach cables.

Bigleaf is very serious about business internet connectivity and performance, and we’re committed to helping your business scale. If you’re interested in getting started with a Bigleaf 2 Gbps or 3 Gbps package, contact your Bigleaf sales partner or send us a message.

Are you new to the types of problems that cause issues with Internet connectivity and performance? Check out the “Crappy internet” blog post to learn more about these challenges and Bigleaf’s solutions.

Getting Started

Bigleaf customers can get full documentation of our features by sending a request to support@bigleaf.net. To get more details on these new high-bandwidth packages, contact your Channel Sales Manager or call 1-888-244-3133.

If you’re not a Bigleaf customer yet, request a demo today to learn how we can help ensure performant uptime across your organization.

ITC builds proactive solutions for a reactive marketplace

Amy Chan — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 17:02:06 +0000

ITC builds proactive solutions for a reactive marketplace

When a company’s VoIP call quality declines or its video conferencing system experiences a lag, the most common remedy is to install a bigger and more expensive internet connection. But bumping up bandwidth is rarely the fix. The problems persist, and the complaints continue.

MSPs like ITC rely on Bigleaf Networks to solve these and other connectivity problems. In fact, they’ve learned to solve network issues before their customers even realize there’s a problem. That’s a superpower that enables the MSPs to enhance customer value and reduce the cost of internet-related support calls.

SD-WAN changed ITC’s customer interactions

Founded in 1989, ITC provides a broad range of technology solutions including: managed IT, situational awareness, structured cabling, unified communications, video surveillance, wireless networking, voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, and other cloud applications and premises-based, always-on technologies.

“Many companies, even today, approach IT reactively,” said Keith Studt, president of ITC. “They find themselves relocating offices, going through a merger or downsizing. And as the deadlines for those events get closer, they realize they have a need and an opportunity to reassess their IT systems.”

Telephony is at the heart of many of the clients ITC works with. According to Studt, one of the drivers for reassessing their IT platforms is performance — dropped VoIP calls, inconsistent connectivity and, ultimately, lost clients. Clean, reliable connectivity with resiliency or redundancy is paramount for many of ITC’s customers.

So, ITC turned to Bigleaf to make their clients’ networks more reliable and, for some, more affordable.

“We try to educate our customers that internet connectivity is the weakest link that causes a problem with cloud services, whether that’s their voice, email, or CRM. So, if we can enhance that experience, and provide them the connectivity and business continuity, even in the worst of conditions, everybody wins,” Studt said.

No two companies’ problems are the same. So the MSP’s team needs to understand every client’s unique business requirements and design the most effective solutions.

Studt says he has noticed a surprisingly large number of competitors who believe the cloud means simply plugging in a device and expecting it to work.

“We go into client engagements with a primary goal of understanding what it is we’re trying to accomplish, where they make their money, what it is they do well, and how can we complement that or increase that or help them without changing how they do business,” said Studt. “We show our clients trends and things that they can leverage to help them become more profitable and create an all-around mutual relationship that allows both sides to win.”

Better network visibility enables ITC to provide proactive service and higher value

“We were losing clients who were using a particular Internet provider in our territory,” Studt said. “And given the rural area we service, there weren’t a lot of other connectivity options. We were stuck.”

To deliver the reliable connectivity, ITC needed to provide the cloud solutions their clients needed.

ITC turned to Bigleaf to eliminate customers’ routine performance issues. Studt quickly discovered that Bigleaf provided powerful, unanticipated benefits.

“Bigleaf gave us visibility to see when problems were occurring so we could inform the customer and also gave us the quantitative data to be able to point specifically to the carrier causing the issue,” said Studt. “That visibility has been incredibly beneficial to our business and to the service we are able to provide our customers.”

While ITC can’t stop provider outages from happening, Bigleaf keeps the outages from affecting internet performance. It also enables ITC to identify issues quickly and communicate them to customers proactively.

“With Bigleaf, we’re able to call customers before they call us,” said Studt. “It’s definitely put us in a place where we have a more intelligent solution than our competitors.”

Chaos becomes a competitive advantage

Before partnering with Bigleaf, Studt’s team used a chaotic deployment of laptops to track down connectivity issues. Bigleaf’s firewall-friendly, on-site router and dedicated backbone network can control traffic both to and from the cloud, providing ITC with end-to-end visibility and control.

The move to Bigleaf has given ITC an advantage over competitors and opened opportunities to increase revenue with existing clients.

“We had one client whose circuit was consistently causing 3 hours-long service outages outside of normal business hours,” Studt said. “Nobody knew because, obviously, they weren’t there. But then it started to happen during the day when people were working. Because we had visibility and could pinpoint the problem at the source, we were able to upsell that client to a much more powerful and profitable enterprise-grade fiber connection.”

That visibility means ITC doesn’t need to chase after network providers, track outages, or diagnose root causes. Bigleaf saves time and stress for ITC’s small staff and customers.

“It would be great if every site had rich connectivity and redundant connections, but that’s not the reality of today’s internet,” Studt said. “Being able to give customers proactive, quality service because of the visibility Bigleaf provides helps them see the value of what we offer.”

MSP Convergence boosts customer satisfaction with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 20:56:20 +0000

MSP Convergence boosts customer satisfaction with Bigleaf

The cloud has fundamentally changed how small and mid-sized businesses think about their internet connection. Internet continuity is now a critical component of daily operations, employee productivity and customer experience. Yet these businesses still suffer daily frustrations, including dropped VoIP calls, grainy video conferencing, and unresponsive applications — all caused by underperforming internet connectivity.

MSPs who manage IT for these businesses need to be able to address these frustrations with a response that’s better than “we’ll let you know what the ISP says.” MSPs who leverage redundancy and intelligent software can provide their customers with the internet continuity and application experience that they expect.

But how do you ensure that continuity and experience without the pitfalls that have made traditional networking solutions so unappealing?

The answer according to one MSP? “Start the conversation now.”

Eric Gray, founder of Portland, Oregon-area MSP Convergence Networks, explained how his team relies on Bigleaf Networks to start a better conversation around internet connectivity — making internet continuity a reality for his customers.

As an MSP, how did you know that your customers needed a new strategy for internet connectivity?

It really started when our customers began moving technologies like VoIP phones, Microsoft 365, and video conferencing into the cloud. When our business started, we were the cost side of IT. Keep the server running. Keep the network working. Make sure the internet is plugged in. Now our conversations are way more focused on the application layer and keeping those cloud applications running the way they should.

Vendors have done a great job convincing those customers that moving to the cloud is easy. But to actually migrate a critical business application to the cloud without disrupting productivity requires planning and infrastructure. Networking is the piece that often gets overlooked in that process.

I’ve inherited clients who failed to plan their network properly for cloud applications, and it shows in the support tickets they send us. As those support tickets increased in regularity, we knew we needed a solution.

It sounds like that kind of negative customer experience could be a big challenge for MSPs. Have you seen that?

Absolutely. For the most part, our customers operate under all-you-can-eat agreements, and we have over 9,000 users. Anything we can do to make the phone not ring or a ticket not come into our system is time worth saving. It also generally means that our customers are more satisfied, always a good thing in the competitive MSP market.

Outages are the most obvious problem to impact customers’ cloud technologies. But we’ve found that a lot of the complaints come from more subtle internet performance issues like packet loss or latency — problems that still read as a live internet connection, but that make phone calls sound awful or keep applications from working the way they’re supposed to.

Those “things not working the way that they’re supposed to” problems are a bigger strain on the business than most MSPs realize. Those are the complaints that your service desk techs spend hours, days, weeks or months of energy trying to troubleshoot. Best case, you lost a lot of time and money in solving the problem. The worst case is your help desk thinks they’ve solved the problem because it went away, then the customer has the same problem and gets in touch with a different help desk guy and then another. That can go on for months because no one ever gets to the root cause of the issue until one day, the client gets pissed off. Then, as the MSP, you look bad because you didn’t put two and two together.

Sounds painful. What networking conversations could MSPs have with their customers to avoid all that?

As MSPs, we think in terms of disaster recovery and continuity. When you’re on-prem, it means redundant servers and BDRs. When you shift to the cloud that goes away. You now need to think about internet links and what your disaster recovery and continuity plans are for those.

You can’t just rely on one internet connection anymore. You need two connections or more. And if you have two, you need to think about things like load-balancing and instant failover. That means you need something like an SD-WAN solution to manage it.

That’s a conversation that should happen ahead of time, but folks don’t tend to give it the attention or care about it until they have a failure or a bottleneck. Then they care.

Did you try other SD-WAN solutions before Bigleaf?

At first, we tried to integrate a second circuit using the SD-WAN technology built into our customers’ firewalls. That felt like it should be an easy fix, but there were some inherent problems in that approach.

In that scenario, you’re selling it as a failover concept, but it doesn’t automatically failover because of the change in IP addresses and routing. So we’d say, “Yeah, we can put in this second link on this second port on your firewall, BUT when the internet goes down you’re gonna have to call us and we’re gonna have to reconfigure DNS. If you’re going to be down a whole day, we’ll do it. But if you’re gonna be down an hour, you’re better off just living with the outage. It was not elegant, to say the least.”

Not only did the customers not like paying for an internet connection that they were not using. But they would forget about our conversation. Then they’d get hit with an outage and ask us, ‘Why am I paying for this second circuit if it’s not going to help when the primary goes down?’ So they’re basically paying for a link just to sit there. They’re paying for a connection that you hope they never use, and it’s just not a good situation for the customer.

What impact has Bigleaf had on your business as a Managed Service Provider?

The value that Bigleaf has to an MSP goes beyond revenue and sales. It’s about having the phone ring less and having fewer support tickets come into the queue. It’s about having customers that you just don’t have those outage conversations with.

Anything that saves my team time frees up resources to add another client without adding more resources. An MSP is always trying to improve that, and Bigleaf fits right in there.

Here’s a real-world example. Early on a weekend morning, one of our clients had a major internet outage. They’re a 24/7 operation, so they started pinging us on Sunday at 2:00 AM. They were paging us every hour for updates and waking up my on-call person and my guy was hitting a breaking point because there was nothing we could do. It was a telco issue. He emailed back and said, “Would somebody please get a Bigleaf in here?”

When I hear that from one of my techs, all I think is: “Why don’t we have a redundant internet and Bigleaf in there?” If they had Bigleaf and a redundant internet, my guy would have never been woken up in the middle of the night. By having that conversation with the customer earlier, we could have avoided frustration for both the customer *and* my tech.

Any final thoughts for other MSPs who might want to consider Bigleaf as a solution for their customers?

Rarely does technology just work. I’ve never had an employee complain about Bigleaf, and I’ve never had a customer complain about Bigleaf. I keep waiting for it to stop doing what you promise, but it just freakin’ works.

Crappy internet: It’s a bigger problem than you think

Amy Chan — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 16:42:54 +0000

If you’re responsible for IT at a small or mid-sized business (SMB) you know this pain all too well. It starts with a support ticket that the phones aren’t working right. But when you go to check them, they’re working fine.

You call the ISP and wait on hold for hours only to have them say, “There are no issues on our end.”

You call the VoIP provider and they tell you to call the ISP.

You’re left waiting until the next complaint with no idea how to fix the issue. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole that leaves end users frustrated. New technologies start to look like bad choices, and IT pros are left with an embarrassing problem they can’t fix.

Cloud and SaaS technologies are enabling a wave of growth and innovation for SMBs and mid-sized enterprises. Whether it’s UCaaS, Office 365, a point of sale (PoS) service, or an industry-standard SaaS app, cloud technologies can transform a business, making it more innovative and competitive. These technologies have something else in common: they all need a reliable connection from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to work properly.

Unfortunately, as most have experienced, almost all ISPs have trouble providing a reliable and performant connection. The complex nature of the internet causes every ISP to have occasional outages and performance issues. In turn, those issues wreak havoc on end-user experience in the form of dropped VoIP calls, choppy video conferencing and unresponsive apps. These issues erode user confidence, reduce productivity, and prevent organizations from implementing and adopting the new cloud-based technologies they need to compete.

So how do you end the cycle? Well, let’s start by taking a look at some of the root causes at play, some of the traditional approaches that have failed and how a new technology like Bigleaf could fix it all.

Outages are only the beginning of your problems

A quick visit to Downdetector demonstrates that there are always ISP outages somewhere. Sometimes outages last days, more often they’re over in seconds. Either way, outages are a major disruption. But as annoying and visible as they are, outages aren’t the real culprit of most ISP-related business disruptions.

This outage map for a prominent carrier is indicative of broader ISP issues experienced on a daily basis.

Most user complaints are caused by ISP performance issues that are far more common than outages. Latency and packet loss show up in choppy VoIP calls. Jitter can make calls sound robotic. These kinds of performance issues happen when the network is overloaded or a partial outage causes packets to re-route over sub-optimal paths. Problems like these create costly, time-consuming disruptions in a business precisely because the underlying issues are almost impossible to detect and resolve.

Let’s put these outages and performance issues into perspective. According to Bigleaf’s own monitoring data, the average ISP circuit suffers 3.5 hours of downtime in a month. That’s pretty shocking. But what’s more surprising, and frankly more concerning, is the 23 hours of “unusable” performance in a month.

“Unusable performance” happens when packet loss, latency and jitter are so bad that you can’t make a VoIP call, run a video conference, or use a real-time application effectively. So that’s almost a full day — or three full business days — of total disruption per month.

So, with those two challenges in mind, we’re now talking about more than 24 hours each month where sales can’t make calls, customers can’t reach support and productivity grinds to a halt.

A lot of us tend to assume these ISP issues only happen in places like Drain, Iowa or the middle of the Mojave Desert because of lack of choice. The reality is that business and tech hubs like Denver, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and much of the Bay Area are also danger zones for many prominent service providers because of oversubscription and aging infrastructure.

But it’s been this way for decades. What’s the big deal?

Unreliable internet isn’t just an IT annoyance, it’s a companywide problem

Many SMB and mid-size enterprises tend to overlook these bandwidth and performance issues until it’s too late. You can overlook a faulty ISP if Dan from accounting experiences buffering while watching a cat video at lunch. But there will be organization-wide heartburn if the CEO’s conference call fails while he’s presenting to the London branch about their new GDPR mandates.

Quite often, a high-profile failure like this leads to frustration across the organization, and the onus of that failure typically falls squarely on the IT department or MSP. As you might remember from the intro, that process rarely turns out the way we might hope. These technology failures continue, eroding trust in that tech personnel and casting doubt on the new technologies themselves.

We’ve found that application reliability drives end-user adoption of new technologies. When you roll out mission-critical software that doesn’t function right, that impacts every corner of your organization in the form of downtime, lost revenue, and erosion of trust from customers.

Why wait for an embarrassing disaster to learn that your ISP is hindering new technology adoption or frustrating your colleagues and customers?

It’s time for a cloud-first *approach to internet connectivity***

Whether your business is already knee-deep in Cloud applications or just starting out with VoIP phones, you need a reliable network for them to ride on, one that is 100% dependable for both today’s usage and tomorrow’s demands. The real goal here is to build an architecture that transforms commodity broadband into enterprise-grade service and does not send you diving for the antacid all the time. We call this a Cloud-first approach to internet connectivity

It starts with redundancy. Since every ISP has outages and performance issues, it’s essential to have multiple ISPs connecting you to your critical Cloud applications. Instead of betting on one big fiber circuit, diversify across a smaller fiber and cable provider. It’s great to have a 4G circuit for diversity in the worst-case scenario.

Redundancy can’t prevent disruption in real-time if it’s not managed in real-time. Your dual-WAN firewall can failover in the case of a hard outage, but any calls or session-based traffic will drop. Even then, you’re only using one connection at a time, and not to the best effect. Luckily there are new intelligent technologies like Bigleaf SD-WAN that auto-detects your application needs and adapt to changing ISP conditions in real-time. It monitors circuits constantly, prioritizes your most important apps and ensures that ISP performance never impacts the end-user experience.

No technology stack remains static for long. When more new apps are deployed and traffic patterns change, your network should adapt without having to change policies or configurations. With Bigleaf SD-WAN, performance-sensitive traffic is instantly classified and prioritized over functions such as bulk file download. This isn’t based on static app-specific rules, but instead intelligent auto-adaptive heuristics and algorithms. In other words, no matter what technologies you adopt your network will always keep up…and the CFO’s London conference call is never derailed by Dan’s cat video.

With the right solution, it’s possible for SMB and mid-sized enterprises to realize the same performance, redundancy, and reliability enjoyed by enterprise-level corporations. With a cloud-first network purpose-built for your needs, you don’t suffer from daily internet woes.

With the right solution, everyone in your business receives the same cloud-ready Internet. VoIP and UCaaS perform flawlessly regardless of outages, packet-loss, jitter, or lag. Critical apps never fail because their traffic is always prioritized. Your users never feel the impact of ISP issues and your cloud technologies always perform the way they should.

Because we do ask a lot from our ISPs, it is critical that we strengthen them with technologies capable of delivering enterprise-grade, worry-free service — improved performance for every app, anywhere in the world.

You can finally solve the “crappy internet” problem.

SaaS at the Business Edge: Are Your Downtime Fears Justified?

Amy Chan — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 17:02:59 +0000

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications have clear advantages. They have great pricing. They are convenient and easy to manage. You get cutting edge technology. However, to get them implemented we have to overcome a very valid objection:

Sometimes the internet breaks.

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

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

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

This 80-year old metals manufacturing company was not meant to be a major hub of the Internet, but for two hours in 2019, it was! (Source: Wikipedia public domain)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Network Issues for SaaS Deployments

Uptime and bandwidth
Management and support requirements
Security

Uptime and bandwidth

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

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

Calculating management and support

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

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

Security in all things

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

The Uptime Reality

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

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

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

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

Busting the fiber myth: It’s not the “silver bullet” of internet connections

Amy Chan — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 16:29:00 +0000

For decades, we’ve been conditioned to believe that fiber internet is something of a silver bullet. When a business has internet performance issues, they’ll commonly get the question, “What do you expect when you don’t have fiber?” So, it’s no surprise that folks ask us quite often whether Bigleaf customers still use our service after moving to fiber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiber connections experience almost 9 hours of degraded performance each month

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words…

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

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

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

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

Internet Performance – Bigleaf Networks

Allstate Peterbilt & Bigleaf: Ensuring uninterrupted operations across the Midwest

Network Connectivity: The Backbone of Operational Excellence

Allstate Peterbilt relies on Bigleaf to support the core of their business operations:

Overcoming Connectivity Challenges in Rural Areas

Bigleaf: A Game Changing Solution for Network Reliability

Simplicity and Proactive Monitoring: Key Advantages

Wireless Connectivity: Enhancing Reliability in Underserved Areas

Bigleaf Wireless Connect

Transforming Business Operations with Bigleaf

Unlock the Potential of Bigleaf

Main Challenges

Bigleaf Delivers

Final Results

Enhancing quality of life with Bigleaf’s network optimization solution in senior living communities

Addressing “The Internet Problem” head-on in senior living communities

Fixing “the Internet problem” has become a fundamental strategic imperative

Putting network optimization to work for “Mom’s Kitchen Phone”-level reliability

Reaping the business benefits of truly reliable internet connectivity

Ensure internet reliability for all assisted living communities

Maximizing productivity with Bigleaf’s real-time traffic adaptation

How Bigleaf Helps Keep Your Business Running Smoothly

Bigleaf Makes Your Internet Smarter

Why Bigleaf Makes a Difference

The role of SD-WAN in supporting hybrid work environments

[Infographic] Plugging into profits: rewiring brick and mortar retail

What does a leaf have to do with networking?

How to scale your network across multiple sites without upending your tech stack

Same applications, different performance

Network optimization ensures consistency

CNI harnesses Bigleaf to improve internet continuity for utility companies

Bigleaf mitigates impact of network outages

Works with any ISP, connection type, or configuration

How to avoid internet brownouts

Internet brownouts hurt your business

Unusable uptime averages 573 hours per year

What can you do to prevent brownouts?

What is the true cost of internet downtime?

[Webinar] Beyond uptime: Evaluating and assessing your internet maturity

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

Setting Up Starlink

Comparing The Data

Compare Against LTE Circuit

Static IP Address

So… What About SD-WAN?

More On Starlink x SD-WAN

Conclusion

What Is Dynamic QoS? Prioritize internet traffic intelligently & seamlessly

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

Enter Dynamic QoS

Is Dynamic QoS really beneficial for business?

Why SMBs choose Bigleaf Dynamic QoS to intelligently prioritize internet traffic

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

Dynamic QoS: Optimizing the internet for your business

Beyond uptime: It’s time to make “usable uptime” the KPI for your company’s Internet

“Uptime” doesn't equate to usable

“Usable uptime” is the new key metric for business internet

The cost of unusable internet is huge ​

Optimizing for “usable uptime” has never been easier

Start optimizing for “usable uptime” at your business

Bigleaf Networks recognized as a Top Performer among SD-WAN software providers

Ranking Methodology

10 Years of providing performance and peace of mind to SMBs across North America and Europe

Things to consider for a better internet failover setup

Your primary goal

Getting the most out of your secondary internet connection(s)

ISP diversity

Last-mile diversity

The uptime of different connection types

Leveraging your internet failover setup

Think about outages and performance

IP address change

Active-active or active-passive configuration

Bi-directional Quality of Service (QoS)

Other optimizations

How much time do you have?

Intelligently-powered software

Choosing the best internet failover setup for your business

Internet Maturity Model 101

Randi Robison and her experience with Bigleaf: No more compromises

The cost of unusable internet is huge