Internet connectivity – Bigleaf Networks

How to right-size your internet connection

David McGiffin — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 00:50:32 +0000

Bigleaf customers typically enjoy a big improvement in the reliability and performance of their internet connections. There are other, lesser-known advantages to Bigleaf, too. One benefit is the chance to make better investment decisions when choosing ISP circuit types and services. The business intelligence provided by Bigleaf can help you to right-size internet connectivity while improving access for your entire organization.

Bigleaf provides detailed reports on each circuit, so it’s easy to see how much throughput is needed, and how much is delivered. The in-depth analysis in the Bigleaf Web Dashboard shows which circuit is providing the needed performance and which is falling short. The IT team can make better choices, which sometimes leads to lower total cost of operation (TCO) as well as higher-quality service.

Learn how Bigleaf improves quality of service.

With Bigleaf, you can achieve optimal performance on business-critical applications, to support greater productivity, seamless videoconferencing, responsive e-commerce, and real-time access to point-of-sale systems and electronic medical records.

More bandwidth is not always better

Without Bigleaf, organizations with inadequate connectivity will often follow the ISP’s advice. The ISP typically recommends upgrading to an expensive, broadband circuit, like fiber optic cable. I’ve seen this happen at lots of organizations, both during my time at Bigleaf and in my previous work at an MSP.

While that extra bandwidth may solve many connectivity problems, a gigabit line does not always provide consistent throughput. Users can still experience slowdowns and interruptions. And a high-bandwidth, fiber optic line can cost 4-6x more per month than the original 200 Mbps circuit.

Diversify ISPs and circuit types

A better choice would be to retain the original 100 Mbps or 200 Mbps line and add a second line. The redundancy helps to safeguard against downtime that can be caused by outages. The best option would be to work with more than one ISP and more than one circuit type, such as adding a cable, Starlink LEO satellite, or cellular line to supplement a primary circuit.

By choosing diverse suppliers and circuit types, you further reduce the risk of downtime. One ISP might fail, but it’s unlikely for two to fail at once. Likewise, the physical cable or wire might get cut by mistake in a nearby construction project, but it’s unlikely for two different connections to be disrupted simultaneously.

Add Bigleaf for reliable, high-performance connectivity

Add Bigleaf to connect two, three, or four circuits, and you can achieve better than 99.99% uptime. Bigleaf also optimizes internet connectivity and performance automatically for all your most important applications and use cases.

In many cases, the cost of two lines from two different ISPs will cost much less than one high-bandwidth connection. They provide all the benefits of reliable, stable internet connectivity that is right sized for your needs. Plus, customers can often pay for the Bigleaf solution out of their savings, and still have money left over.

Right-sizing internet connectivity with Bigleaf may not always save money. Some companies break even or spend just a bit more than before, depending on their choices of service and providers. Regardless, they get great value for their money, as they can depend on their internet connections to deliver the always-on, highly optimized performance that keeps their organizations running smoothly and productively.

Learn more about optimizing internet connectivity with Bigleaf.

NW Towers provides reliable connectivity under the harshest conditions with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:07:26 +0000

Many of our managed service provider partners support clients who rely on the Internet to run their businesses, yet operate in remote locations with limited internet connectivity options. Northwest Towers definitely fits this bill. Read their story to learn how they use Bigleaf to provide highly reliable, remote connectivity to their clients, even under the harshest conditions.

Partner profile

Northwest Towers designs, constructs, and supports custom wireless networks for extreme deployments around the world. Their clients span a range of industries, including mining, construction, industrial, commercial, and transportation.

Business challenge

Extremely remote locations with limited connectivity options required reliable internet connections to run business-critical tools and systems without disruptions or downtime.

Solution

Bigleaf provides stable and highly performant internet connectivity that enables remote locations to transmit real-time operations data and telemetry to perform their daily operations efficiently.

NW Towers connects remote locations with Bigleaf

NW Towers specializes in building custom wireless networks with internet connections for remote sites. Many of their clients operate open pit mining sites. Other clients include ports, oil and gas, defense, agriculture, and emergency services. All of them are extremely remote.

In particular, mining operations take place far from population centers. In these remote areas, you typically won’t find any internet connectivity: no ISPs, no mobile phone coverage, and not even ancient copper for your old-school, 2400-baud US Robotics relic.

Yet modern mining operations are exceedingly high-tech. Vehicles, payloads, and other machines and systems are constantly producing data and telemetry needed to optimize operations and promote safety. They rely on real-time data reporting from the vehicles and data processing to keep the entire site moving. When these systems stall, idling large vehicles and highly-paid personnel, the cost of downtime is mind-boggling.

Minimizing these disruptions is why businesses turn to NW Towers. They are a service provider that specializes in bringing reliable connections to remote sites.

Every site has a different profile and calls for a different solution, from Starlink to Viasat to ruggedized LTE modems. NW Towers finds a way to provide even for off-grid sites without electricity on premise. They have developed an entirely self-contained solution delivered on a rugged high-tech trailer that’s equipped with a deployable tower, solar panels, and a diesel backup.

With Bigleaf in place, each NW Towers installation can now offer their clients reliable and resilient connections and manage fewer support calls.

Bigleaf Networks ensures reliable connectivity, even in remote locations. Our advanced solutions provide seamless internet access wherever you are.

The NW Towers solution originally relied on multiple redundant connections, supported by a manual or automated failover process. However, when failures occurred, there was often a significant delay before the backup came online. Those delays caused idle time for valuable personnel and equipment. Such an outage could potentially derail schedules and operations. Additionally, switching to the backup system’s IP address would cause applications to fail, resulting in additional delays.

It’s an impressive and valuable solution that brings high-tech capabilities to the most remote and challenging environments. However, the internet connections in such locations are not the most reliable. NW Towers and its clients will do whatever they can to optimize their internet access and prevent costly downtime.

The solution: Last-mile internet redundancy

For these remote sites, NW Towers needed reliable, last-mile internet redundancy with failover that was not just automated, but transparent to both the local network and the remote connection.

Bigleaf proved to be a perfect solution. Because the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network encapsulates all network traffic in a cloud-based overlay tunnel, clients maintain the same static public IP address regardless of which connection is in use. The remote locations stay connected even during and after a failover.

In addition, Bigleaf Zero-Touch Setup meant that NW Towers was able to ship Bigleaf SD-WAN routers to each remote site. Installation is quick and painless—even with the variations in connectivity solutions used by each client.

The cost of downtime is mind-boggling

With Bigleaf in place, each NW Towers installation can now offer their clients reliable and resilient connections and manage fewer support calls. Sites can transmit telemetry and reporting data in real time, even when their network connections aren’t performing optimally, or even when one fails.

This real-time delivery of telemetry data contributes to business-critical operational insights and helps improve worker safety.

Additionally, intelligent load balancing and Bigleaf Dynamic QoS provide stable, optimal bandwidth while minimizing latency across all available internet connections for each remote site. It’s a whole new level of performance and reliability for NW Towers’ clients.

The future of emergency services

Along with their mining clients, NW Towers plans to introduce Bigleaf into other exciting applications. They envision a future where their pre-packaged solution can be rapidly deployed for emergency services. When natural disasters and humanitarian crises strike, reliable power and internet connections can be some of the most fragile infrastructure elements. Without reliable connectivity, emergency services can falter.

With power and internet in one rugged trailer, service and emergency crews will be more effective and faster than ever. They’ll be able to transmit live video and receive data, like maps and architectural drawings of a site, that will help them respond more quickly to crises, reduce damage to property and infrastructure, prevent further harm, and save lives.

Need highly reliable connectivity at remote locations? Contact us to get started.

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.

[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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