Acoustic Couplers – Business Communications for the 70s
Back in the early 70’s, many BBS (bulletin board subscribers) users were using a device called an acoustic coupler to connect to what has today evolved into the internet.  The acoustic coupler was a device that you could connect your computer to and plug your telephone into and so transmit data at a massive 300 baud or 35 c/s (characters per second) and cost anywhere up to £500.

1200 Baud Modems – Business Communications for the Early 80s
In the early 80’s, companies such as RACAL Communications built devices known as modems (modulator-demodulator) that could work at 1200 baud or 150 c/s and cost roughly £1000.00. These rapidly replaced the acoustic coupler and were themselves replaced by modems that reached speeds of 9600 baud. Up until the late 80s, companies such as RACAL and Motorola enjoyed a dominance of the corporate communications market until companies such as US Robotics launched their Sportstar range of modems.  These modems could run at up to 7000 characters per second and well within the affordable range of the average householder.

56k Baud Modems – Business Communications For the Early 90s
Faster speeds and vastly reduced costs soon made access to the worldwide web for companies and householders alike.  However modems suffer from all sorts of problems such as line noise and inconsistent quality and if companies were reliant on their comms systems, they required a more expensive kind of line called a leased line.

However since the mid-90s a new bread of technology was developed and quickly adopted – ADSL.

ADSL – Business Communications for 2000
ADSL cost more than modems but freed businesses up from having to worry about the quality problems associated with modems plus it had much higher speeds.  A typical ADSL speed of 2MB is equivalent to 250,000 c/s.  With ADSL out performing its legacy peers of Dial UP and ISDN and having a greater stability than its Dial Up cousins, it has been a runaway success.

However it is this success that is now causing many businesses major problems and ADSL is now becoming the acoustic coupler of the 70s compared to the available technology today.

ADSL Performance Not Achieving Its Goal For Business

There are two main causes to the poor performance of ADSL.

• ISP’s when offering ADSL offer a contended services of 50:1 and 20:1 connection ratios. Up until the last 3-4 years these limits have never been truly reached.  Today, however if we look at business’s out side of our metro centres there is a real possibility that 50 users are sharing the same line as your business. And it only takes a few to be downloading or uploading significantly large video files to cause a slow down of every other person or company sharing that line.
  
• The ADSL speeds only reflect the actual download speed.  Not the upload.  So the 2MB line speed is only for download.  The actual upload is significantly smaller – typically 384 KB. In other words companies that wish send a lot of emails which contain large attachments will find that this upload speed just can’t cope (not to mention that you are sharing this just as with the download contention ratio).
  

Private Circuits – Business Communications for 2010 and Beyond

Up until recently ADSL has met the requirements of most business’s but this has now reached its limitation with offers of higher and higher bandwidth not meeting the user expectations as business’s begin using connectivity as business enablers rather than just surfing the internet. There are products based on having your own private circuit that have been available to the business market for some time that are capable of carrying increasingly complex and heavy traffic.

These private circuits do away with the whole issue of contended circuits and offer guaranteed bandwidths, symmetric upload and download speeds, prioritised traffic management for applications that use the internet for telephone communications (eg VOIP) and Video Conferencing.

Private circuits are ideal for business’s that want to use the internet as a business enabler such as interoffice connectivity and web-based applications rather than a tool just to surf the internet. The flexibility of these types of circuit include a variety of solutions such Leased Lines, MPLS and LAN extension services. With bandwidths typically starting at 2Mb and going well beyond 1GB, your business is likely to lose its competitiveness if it does not at least consider these options.

The Benefits of a Private Circuit

A private circuit can bring your business the following benefits.

• Guaranteed Bandwidth
• Increased Stability of sharing Applications/Data between offices.
• Traffic Management for VOIP and Video Conferencing.
• Uncontended Connectivity

Conclusion

By Ben Chai

Whilst working at a supplier of broadband services you learn a lot about what can go wrong if people aren’t street savvy.

You Need Presales
This is a very important stage that many people skip because it is at this time that you can find out what you can and can’t do with your lines and whether there will be problems with your exchange.

Your broadband supplier should also obtain information as to future applications that may be put on the network, criticality of communications infrastructure and for example whether other applications such as VOIP will be need at a later stage.

Installation Times
Depending on your broadband supplier and the type of broadband service you will be ordering, it can take anywhere up to ninety days for the whole system to be installed so if your communications line is and important integral aspect of your network then you need to order months in advance of the time that you will actually want the line up and running by.

The reason for the long installation times is more to protect the service provider from letting you down. The long installation time gives them an opportunity to:-

• Verify that there is sufficient capacity at the exchange.
• Carry out additional work at the exchange if there is no capacity left.
• Carry out additional work at site if there is not sufficient cabling installed.
• Way leave to be resolved. Way leave is the permission that you may need for your broadband supplier to access the building and make any upgrades to the cabling.
• Engineer Lead times.
• New cable may need to be laid for LES and WES Circuits. LES (LAN/SAN Extension Services) and WES (Wholesale Extension Services)
• Line faults which can only be detected once the routing equipment has been configured and installed.

Firewalls
A common issue that is often forgotten when creating branch to branch office communication infrastructures is to open the necessary ports on the firewalls to allow traffic that would normally be banned to enter and leave the office.  If these aren’t enabled, the result will be dropped packets. So remember to configure your firewalls on one or both ends depending on what you’re using your communications lines for.

Risk and Teething Time
Let’s face it things can and in many cases do go wrong - the more complicated the system being installed, the greater the likelihood of teething problems. It is important that you have a backup plan to manage any risk should an installation not go according to plan.

To give you some examples, here are some situations that we’ve encountered where no backup plan had been in place.

• Although Way Leave was granted, the appropriate person had gone on holiday when the broadband engineer arrived and it was critical for the office to have broadband communications that week.  As a result only a limited amount of work was able to be carried out by the customer until the engineer could be rescheduled which was almost a month later.
  
• Without consultation a customer put an extra application on their network. The extra traffic created from the application caused entire office communications to be lost. The upshot was that the communications provider was blamed until a network traffic analysis tool was placed on the network and located the real problem.
• A customer has cancelled their existing line for the day that the new line is to be provisioned.  Due to a line fault the new line has not gone live leaving the customer without any internet communications.

Post Sales

One important factor that customers forget once there line has been installed is the need to communicate with the service provider. If there are any significant changes to be made it is important to inform the service provider, to avoid any degradation or loss of service. An example of this could be that your network and communication lines have always been primarily used for data networks and you decide to introduce streaming video media onto the network, this could have a detrimental effect on your lines due to the high bandwidth overhead that steaming video requires and eventually crash your network.

It would be advisable that before you implement any such changes to discuss with the service providers and see what they suggest before adding extra loading.

In conclusion
Whether you are a small or large business, the above highlight a few of the potential pitfalls when ordering your corporate broadband. If you would like further information and solutions to any of these problems, you can call Lanix on 0870 9508866 or email broadband@lanix.co.uk

It was only twenty or so years ago when the internet was considered something that computer geeks do. Today however, the internet is now home for literally billions of dollars of business communications and woe betide any business whose internet access goes down. Just have a look at the stats on www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm - we’ve got a picture from their site on European stats from December 2007.

In our business, we look after small to medium sized companies and it is amazing the number of calls we get from employees we’ve never even known existed should their internet and email access go wrong. So just suppose for some totally unknown reason your internet access goes down perhaps due to some mess up by British Telecom (I feel a rant coming on here – grrrr). What is your immediate reaction? What is the reaction of your employees?  How much business would not get done?

Let’s now magnify that problem by say a week.  One week later you still have no internet access. How are you feeling now? How long do you think your company can afford not to be without internet access? Anyone who’s experienced this kind of business disaster would be able to sympathise.

In fact if you had the right internet access, there would be no need for all the stress and hassle. There are two solutions:-

• Leased line technology
• Connectivity resilience

Leased Line Technology
Back in the old days, you could have your own dedicated line for internet and branch office connectivity. The problem was that these lines would cost literally tens of thousands of pounds and only the very large corporations had the spending power to afford this technology.  Today however with all the technological advances made you can buy these for a fraction of the cost. Leased lines still cost more than general broadband but they have a tremendous number of advantages such as:-

• No contention ratio (ie your lines are not affected by other companies like you have with ADSL)
• Upload speeds that are as fast as the download speeds (which is just brilliant if you are constantly sending large attachments with your emails)

And many other benefits which are listed in our newsletter on Why ADSL is Limiting Your Business.

However the biggest benefit of having your own leased line technology is to reduce the stress if it actually does goes down – ie you get compensation (you don’t if you have ADSL).  The sad thing is that it can still go down and even though you get compensation it is difficult to truly calculate the effect of lack of business communications.

Connectivity Resilience
Many companies quite rightly spend thousands of pounds on ensuring a working backup of their business data. Some spend more to ensure resilience of their business hardware such as redundant servers, uninterruptible power supplies, hardware clusters and so on. However without any kind of connectivity resilience from a branch office there would be no ability to access this data.

In addition access to data and software may not be all that employees require to effectively get their work done.  More and more businesses are reliant on internet connectivity to perform a multitude of tasks perhaps for example to connect to an online business application such as salesforce.com or a specialised business application such as online risk assessment software.

If your business cannot afford to have a loss of internet connectivity for more than half a day there is a strong need to consider installing some resilience for internet connectivity. There are a number of types of connectivity resilience these include:-

• Standard failover
• Failover to Different Pops

Standard Failover

Standard failover involves the purchase of two or more internet lines.  The lines can be configured that if one were to fail the other line would automatically take over and provide an alternative connection. Depending on your business requirements the secondary line would not necessarily need to be as fast or as costly as the primary line. The objective of this type of failover would be to give continued access whilst the primary line is repaired and brought back up. For example, a small company may aggregate two leased lines or a leased line together with a broadband connection. Larger companies can often use the same consolidation/failover product to aggregate multiple leased lines.

The problem with this type of failover is that it doesn’t take into consideration a fault at the Point of Presence (POP) – this is the box that hosts your leased lines at the telephone exchange.

Failover to Different POPs / Exchanges

As discussed in the previous paragraph some companies may need that extra bit of resilience, for example if your internet line and your backup internet line was connected to the same Telephone exchange or POP (Point of Presence) and there was a power outage at the location this would be a single point of failure for your lines and thus both your primary and secondary line would be down and your company would be without access to the internet.  The consideration in this scenario would be to connect your internet lines to different exchanges or POP’s thereby eliminating the single point of failure.

Therefore although the exchange/POP for your primary line may have failed the secondary line would still be working as it would be connected to an exchange/POP that is still up and running.  Many corporate companies are considering this scenario for their business continuity and disaster planning if for example there was a terrorist attack in close proximity to the local exchange/POP. 

The down side to this is that it comes at a significant cost due to the extra cabling that is required to be connected to exchanges/POP’s that are geographically further away but the justification for companies is really how business critical is internet connectivity to your business.

Failover Testing

Once your company has decided to go for a business continuity solution for your internet connectivity, it is essential that you test everything works - just as it is important to test that your data back-ups are restoring properly.

Just imagine how much stress would be caused when the day comes where, for whatever reason, your primary line fails and your company cannot connect to the internet because no-one has bothered to test whether the secondary line worked.

One of the fundamentals of failover solutions is to regularly test that the resilience works because if you aren’t performing regular tests Murphy’s Law dictates that it won’t work when you actually need it. Business continuity plans need to be put into place to test the resilience of your circuits on a regular basis. These tests can be organized with the assistance of your ISP. 

Another factor in ensuring that your failover lines are constantly working is to ensure that your ISP monitors your secondary lines as well as your primary lines. Then if there is a problem it can be addressed prior to the secondary line being needed.  After all what is the point of paying for something if it doesn’t work. 

In Summary
If your business is heavily dependent on internet access for line of business solutions, email and general internet access, you should at least investigate the various costs to keep the access going in case of a disaster.

If you have any further questions please contact broadband@lanix.co.uk.

ADSL common place in the Business Market.

Since the late 1990’s a boom has been seen with the introduction of ADSL connectivity the market place offering connectivity superior to the dial up and ISDN services of yesteryear. With the successful growth of ADSL in the market place it has become a must have for Business and home users alike to meet the demands of the online community that has now developed.

Up until recently ADSL has met the requirements of most business’s but this is now come to a head with offers of higher and higher bandwidth not meeting the user expectations with business’s using connectivity as business enabler rather than just surfing the internet. In the business market the usability of ADSL is reaching its limits.

ADSL performance not achieving its goal for Business

With ADSL out performing its legacy peers of Dial UP and ISDN it has become a victim of its own success, ISP’s when offering ADSL offer a contended services of 50:1 and 20:1 connection ratios and this is most likely cause of poor performance. For the best example of this is to look at business’s out side of our metro centres where there is a real possibility that 50 users are sharing the same line as your business. You may have recently seen advertisments for higher speeds of up to 8Mb but in true reality there are very few users that can benefit from these higher speeds due to geographical location from the exchange, and line quality.

With new products being introduced all the time to improve business systems one major area that is overlooked by business is the upload speeds that are offered on ADSL circuits. This has had an impact when adding further demands such as VOIP, Video Conferencing, business critical systems and Inter Office connectivity.

Business’s demands have grown on our connectivity to the internet and ADSL in the shot time it has been around at not been able to meet these expectations.

What can Business’s do avoid the pit falls of ADSL

There are product that’s have been available to the business market for some time now that are capable of carrying increasingly complex and heavy traffic.  Business are now looking to private circuits which have become more affordable and widespread.

These private circuits do away with the whole issue of contented circuits and offer guaranteed bandwidths, symmetric upload and download speeds, priorotised traffic management for applications such as VOIP and Video Conferencing.

Private circuits are ideal for Business’s that want to use the internet as a Business enabler rather than a tool just to surf the internet. The flexibility of these type of circuit of many solutions such Leased Lines, MPLS, Lan extension services. With bandwidths typically starting at 2Mb and going up to 1Gb and beyond can your business not afford consider these options.

The Benefits of a Private Circuit

A private circuit can bring your business the following benefits.

• Guaranteed Bandwidth
• Increased Stability of sharing Applications/Data between offices.
• Traffic Management for VOIP and Video Conferencing.
• Uncontended Connectivity

Conclusion

In conclusion the growth of this technology look set to provide increased efficiency and cost saving benefits when implemented correctly with the correct solution for your business needs. The opportunities are only now starting to being maximised that the internet can offer business. ADSL technology is unable to keep up with these demands, and now is the time to consider is ADSL right for your Business!

Slow internet access?  Ben Chai looks at the terrorists to access speed.

Working in a support company half my life has given me a number of insights. One common question we get asked here is “Why is my internet access so slow?” In the majority of cases it has nothing to do with their internet connection so in this special report we look at the top six reasons why a user’s internet system is slow and how you can increase the speed. Sometimes however there is nothing that can be done for example during peak internet traffic times your system will be slow because everyone has just logged on to the internet.  In the UK, these peak traffic times are the morning when people just log on. This article makes the assumption that you have a minimum of a 2Mb/s connection.

Insufficient Hardware
Lack of memory, slow processor speed, slow graphics card, slow network card and other hardware can affect how fast web-pages are loaded and how fast emails are sent. Of the above, the most common cause of slowness is lack of memory. If you do not have enough physical memory your access speeds will be slow. In modern windows based systems the ideal amount of physical memory you should have for optimum internet usage is 2GB with 1GB being the absolute minimum.

Memory Loss
Following on from insufficient hardware, we have memory loss. You can lose memory to other applications, memory leaks and malware. If you are likely to load many pages from the internet or will be sending large email files, you should close down and unused open applications as these all use memory which could be used by your browser and the websites being accessed by that browser.

The hardest to locate are memory leaks and malware. Malware is anything on your PC that shouldn’t be there. The most common are viruses, adware (ie pop up ads) and spyware (which looks at your internet habits and can collect personal data). In 2007, we had a slew of systems from different customers that had become so infected by spyware that they were taking over fifteen minutes to just load the browser. Your defence to this is to get a good antivirus package that supports anti-spyware and anti-adware.

Poorly Configured Browsers
Most people leave their browser settings at the default but did you know that with a little tweaking you can speed up your internet experience. For example, figure 1 shows the settings I use with Internet Explorer 7.

Figure 1

When configuring your browsers, note that the larger the Temporary Internet Files storage, the faster your access to websites as their initial settings will be loaded from the storage area rather than using up your bandwidth to download these frames.

In addition, note that I have my temporary internet files stored on a separate hard disk. This will speed up loading of the web-pages as there is no competition between internet explorer and my operating system versus loading the web-pages.

On a side issue, have the folder on a separate partition or hard disk makes it much easier to manage.

Misunderstanding of Transfer Speeds
There are several misconceptions about stated transfer speeds. In my previous special report on broadband I showed how to calculate actual broadband speeds. The most common misconception is that many people believe that the speed quoted to them in bits is actually the speed in bytes. For example many would think that a 256Kb/s line sends over 256 kilobytes per second.  As you can see from Table1, 256Kb/s is actually only 31KB/s which is equivalent to a standard piece of paper with thirty lines of text on it.

Other misconceptions on quoted download speeds include:-

• The download speed is the same as the upload speed.
  This is not true with ADSL lines, where the quoted download speed is substantially faster than the upload speed.

• No understanding of transmission overhead.
  On Ethernet networks, data is typically sent in 1500 byte packets. For each packet sent or received there is transmission overhead which gives a whole host of details such as where the packet is from and where it’s going to. These are known as packet headers. The minimum packet header size is approximately 50 bytes depending on the nature of the packet. In other words a minimum of approximately 3% of the data sent is actually header information and has nothing to do with the actual data.  This can become significantly larger depending on any other protocols you are using.

Latency
Latency is the distance to the destination and is measured in milliseconds. So the further away the site, the longer the latency and therefore the longer it will take for your system to receive the data. To calculate the latency of a site you will first need to know that packets are transferred from router to router until they reach their destination server.  The number of routers that a packet has to go through is known as a hop count. The total distance is measured by examining the latency of each router transference (or hop). This can be done by using a trace routing program. As an alternative, Apple, Linux and experienced windows professionals will use the an internal operating system command called tracert to find out how far away a web server is. See Figure 2 for an example.

Unfortunately in today’s technological world, due to security reasons, many routers have this information turned off so you can only guestimate what the exact latency is.  AS a rule of thumb think 25ms for every hidden router. You can see a hidden one in Figure 2 where it is
represented by three *.

Packet Loss
There are a whole host of reasons why packets you’ve sent can go missing; a router crash, overloading of your ISPs equipment which eventually causes your packet to time out as it can’t get through to name just a few. Due to the nature of how the protocol used by the internet, TCP/IP works this can cause major problems with sequencing and TCP acknowledgements.  Suffice to say that if your system has experienced a packet loss, then it the majority of cases it is faster to drop the connection (ie close down the connection to the web-site) and try again.

In Summary
To get the most speed out of your lines,

• Ensure that you have adequate hardware and that it is properly configured
• Close all un-necessary applications whilst accessing the internet
• Don’t save all your emails to be sent at the end of the day during peak internet traffic hours
• If your browser is struggling to access a web-site, try restarting the browser

This special report has been sponsored by www.Lanix.co.uk – if you would like to receive a white paper on how to avoid the pitfalls when ordering broadband systems, please email broadband@lanix.co.uk

Ben Chai is a renowned international IT expert and trainer having been editor of over ten IT magazines and taught a wide variety of courses in security and Microsoft products. He is co-owner of incomingthought.com and the content director for www.itproportal.com

There seems to be a shroud of mystery surrounding corporate connectivity. Much of this confusion has been created by the tele-communications industry themselves by the creation of a multitude of acronyms and standards.  This special report is designed to help you quickly understand the newer standards in leased lines, the benefits that are provided by each one and so provide you with a quick guide to working out which line would be correct for your business.

A Byte out of Bits
Before we begin lets get you up to scratch on bits and bytes. There is a common misconception that if for example you download a 10MB file over a 2Mb/s line you should get it in five seconds. This is actually incorrect as the file is measured in mega bytes but you actual line is measure in megabits.  There are eight bits to a byte so when you purchase a 2Mb/s line you are actually subscribing to a 250,000 bytes per second line (ie 2000000/8).  Therefore a 10MB file would actually take forty seconds to download if we assume that 10MB is equivalent to 10,000,000 bytes.  (In fact it’s actually 10485760 bytes but let’s try to keep things simple!) The table below gives you the actual calculations.

So as you can see from the above table a 2Mb/sec line is actually equivalent to roughly a 250KB/sec. Note how bits is written compared to bytes ie:

• two megabits per second is written 2Mb/s and
• two megabytes per second is written 2MB/s

ADSL - Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line
First, let’s deal with something many of us already know about – ADSL or Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. The traditional ADSL line has or ADSL1 has a maximum speed of 2Mb/s. However if you read the tiny print you would see that this only applies to the downstream speed (ie files you receive).

What is never made clear is that your upstream or upload speed is typically 256Kb/s ie a mere 31KB/s. You can see that if your business sent a lot of email or was constantly uploading large files to the web that this upload speed would just be too inadequate for most businesses. Hence when purchasing an ADSL line it is important that you ask what the upstream speeds are.

Current limitations of ADSL are:-

• Must be enabled in local exchange
• Can only be used over copper,
• Poor Upload Speeds
• at time of writing it has a maximum speed of 8Mb/s
• No SLA

ADSL prices fluctuate but typically cost £180 per annum.

SDSL – Symmetric Synchronous Digital Subscriber Line
SDSL has a major advantage over ADSL in that you have the same upload speed as you have for download. In other words if you decide to purchase a 2Mb/s line you will get this speed for both upload and download speeds. In general this is the ideal for any business dependent on emails and uploading of information to the internet.

Current limitations of SDSL are that

• Must be enabled in local exchange
• can only be used over copper,
• at time of writing most ISP only offer speeds of up to 2Mb/s

SDSL typically costs around £3580 per annum.

A Bone of Contention
An important factor when purchasing ADSL and SDSL lines are their contention ratios.  Contention ratios are the number of people who share your line. So if you have a 10:1 contention ratio, it means that ten other businesses or people are using the connection with you. Now you can quickly see that the ideal contention ratio is 1:1 or zero contention which is essentially, your very own leased line.  Otherwise your traffic speed could be affected by the amount of traffic that other businesses are sending. If you have ever regularly experienced slow internet speeds at specific times of the day this is due to other users on your line. The higher the contention ratio, the greater the number of businesses sharing the same line and potentially the slower your line can be.

Leased Line Technology
A leased line or dedicated line is a permanent telephone connection set up between two points for private use. Leased lines are dedicated lines (ie have 1:1 contention ratios) and are typically used to connect two geographically separate branch offices together. As they work over fibre optics, they have none of the copper limitations of SDSL and so can have speeds up to 100Mb/s.

Leased lines typically cost three to five times more than SDSL lines.

In Summary
If you are looking at purchasing internet or branch office connectivity, your three main options are:-

• ADSL which is only good if you have very minimal uploads (ie you don’t send many emails or the files you send are quite small).
• SDSL which gives good upload and download speeds which is excellent for SME businesses
• Leased line technology if you require upload and download speeds over 2Mb/s

This special report is sponsored by www.lanix.co.uk.  If you would like a follow on report on components that affect your broadband speed and how to resolve them please email broadband@lanix.co.uk

Ben Chai is a renowned international IT expert and trainer having been editor of over ten IT magazines and taught a wide variety of courses in security and Microsoft products. He is co-owner of incomingthought.com and the content director for www.itproportal.com

Businesses all over are finding that their communications are beginning to slow down as they add more next generation applications such as VOIP, Video Conferencing and NET 2.0 applications onto their networks. Even without these applications, companies can experience network slowdown due to:-

• Inefficient network structures.
• The existence of older cabling within their enterprise.
• The over burdening of leased line connections that link their branches to their headquarters.

The best solution would be to get network cabling that can cope with the additional burden however this may not always be practical or even feasible from a cost perspective.  However all is not lost.

Since the introduction of VOIP technology there has been a number of tools developed to ensure that when using the network for conversations you don’t experience:-

• Delay – If you were having a normal telephone conversation you don’t (normally) experience delays in voice transmission.
  
• Jitter – this is when some of the packets are delayed whilst others are quite happily sent onwards resulting in the conversation being out of synch.
  
• Lost packets – in other words you can hear some parts of the conversation but not others because due to an abnormally long delay the network has given up trying to transmit the packet and simply dropped it.

CoS and QoS Tools

CoS or Class of Service allows a network to classify a service and hence give it a priority on the network.  So for example if you have VOIP, email and say Oracle database traffic, you might give VOIP a high priority class, email traffic a low priority class and the Oracle database a medium priority class. Now when there is a lot of VOIP communication, it will get priority instead of being delayed by the email traffic.

The problem with CoS is that it doesn’t guarantee the quality, so you may still experience lost packets, delays and jitter.  For example, we have only listed three applications –if they were all set to high priority classes and there was too much traffic we would experience delays, jitter and lost packets.

This is where your QoS (pronounced Qwas) tools are important.  QoS (Quality of Service) enables you to build on top of CoS to manage traffic flow so that there is not for example too much traffic on the network.  QoS uses a variety of techniques such as reducing the amount of information that is allowed to be transmitted from a workstation. These techniques are designed to reduce any burdens placed on the network by having to deal with for example too much traffic and thereby cause problems such as packet loss and timeouts.

Summary
Before placing VOIP traffic on your network you will need to ascertain whether your network will be able to cope with the additional traffic and whether CoS and QoS will be required. This is a vital step lest you begin to lose emails and data.

Where has all the Traffic Come from ?

Since the take up of Web 2.0 applications, distributed applications and the increased use of VOIP and Video conferencing, the landscape of the traffic on your network has completely changed from the old days of file and print and data traffic. In fact many companies are now facing a new technological challenge from the additional amount of network/internet traffic generated today. Many are actually seeing bottlenecks between LAN’s (Local area network) and their WAN’s (Wide Area Network eg internet connectivity) and wondering where all the extra network loading has come from?

If we were to examine a company’s network, we can quickly break this down into the following categories:-

• Traditional print and data traffic (ie a user retrieves their document from their home directory on a server or sends a print job to a network printer)
• Management traffic (ie applications designed to help manage the servers such as back-up utilities or sophisticated programs such as Microsoft Operations Manager, workstation management applications such as Microsoft SMS
• Leisure Traffic e.g. MP3 downloads, Internet Radio, instant messaging, web browsing and online gaming
• Hosted Application e.g. applications that utilise the WAN to pass data.
• Server Replication e.g. data to be replicated over multiple sites
• VOIP - Voice Over IP, essentially telephone over your WAN
• Intranet/Internet traffic due to changes in user habits so that users actually carry our more tasks online.

Traffic Shaping

The best solution would be to get network cabling that can cope with the additional burden however this may not always be practical or even feasible from a cost perspective. One alternative method that has worked effectively for many is a technique known as traffic shaping.

Traffic shaping involves three stages:-

1. Analysing the traffic on your network.
2. Categorising and prioritising the critical network traffic.
3. Ensuring a system of flow control to reduce network traffic when the network has reached a critical stage.

So in order to optimize or guarantee performance, traffic shaping needs to be implemented to control your computer network by lowering the speed of delivery (similar to having traffic lights) and/or increase the usable bandwidth (similar to increasing the size of a road). In addition, it is important that you prioritise certain critical packets e.g. VOIP data normally has the top priority and will take priority over web browsing traffic to prevent the users’ VOIP call from being interrupted.

Traffic Analysis
In order to prioritise your network traffic you will first need to determine what type of traffic you have on your network using a traffic analysis tool to help determine:-

• The types of traffic on their network
• The quantity of each type of traffic
• The location of each type of traffic
• The priority that each type of traffic should be given

If you are a computer whiz then traffic analysis can be carried out using some of the free network analysis tools available such as Microsoft’s Netmon utility that comes with the Windows server products or alternatively ethereal from www.ethereal.com. Alternatively there are many more sophisticated but costly tools that can quick analysis tools.

Categorising and Prioritising
Once you have determined your traffic statistics, you will then need to think about the criticality and priority of each type of application and the user of the applications.

Depending on the size of your business, the traffic on your computer network can be a lot like the traffic in a village, town, city or even country.  In each of these places there are a variety of methods that will help reduce road congestion and traffic.  Network traffic prioritisation and control tools are similar to the methods such as traffic lights, bus lanes, bicycle paths, traffic wardens and roundabouts.

For example, voice, video-conferencing and certain line of business products will need to have a high priority as they cannot stand a delay in the communication whereas email may take a medium priority and someone’s U-tube connectivity may use the lowest priority. From an employee perspective the CEO’s communication may have a higher priority than a junior clerk’s and so on. The diagram below gives a rough idea of how traffic should be prioritised.

To prioritise network traffic, a CoS (Class of Service) device or tool is required to give a network packet a priority, so for example if you have VOIP and email, you might give VOIP a high priority class and email traffic a low priority class. Now when there is a lot of VOIP communication, it will get priority instead of being delayed by the email traffic.

The problem with CoS is that it doesn’t guarantee the quality just priority.  So if there is too much high priority traffic, your network will still be overloaded. This is where another tool known as QoS (Quality of Service) is used.

Controlling Your Traffic

Quality of Service (QoS)
It is the job of your QoS tools to ensure that your network isn’t underperforming or conversely isn’t overloaded with too much traffic. As we cannot widen the cable trunking for your network traffic, one method that QoS uses is to reduce either:-

• the amount of packets that is sent from your computer
• the size of the packets sent from your computer

More specifically, traffic shaping is any action on a set of packets (often called a stream or a flow) which imposes additional delay on those packets such that they conform to some predetermined constraint (a contract or traffic profile).[2] Traffic shaping provides a means to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network in a specified period (bandwidth throttling), or the maximum rate at which the traffic is sent (rate limiting), or more complex criteria such as GCRA.

Summary

One of the great problems with blogging is that you need to have someone who is totally focussed on producing fixed amounts of blogs per month and they need to be constantly there or else the blog dates can make your web-site look dated.

However I haven’t been totally absent.  Over the last few months, I’ve been working with one of the more well-known, Lanix consultants, Welsh based - Dipit Mistry, in producing podcasts and newsletters on Broadband.

Here are links to two of them:-

Podcast on what type of broadband businesses dependent on email and internet access should be looking at purchasing.
http://network.itproportal.com/articles/2008/04/04/adsl-and-dsl-what-are-differences/

A special report on the business communications minefield
http://www.itproportal.com/articles/2008/02/07/business-communications-minefield/

Perhaps you recognise one of the following:

“Hello my back-up failed to run last night and its now jammed”. 
“BT has recently installed a new line for us but our internet no longer works.”
“Printer 12 has started printing strange characters on the left.”
“We’ve rebooted our router but people still can’t get to the internet.”
“An elephant has got stuck in my hard disk….”
“We’ve just begun to use VOIP on our network but everything has slowed down.”
“Hi our M drive has gone missing can you fix it?”
“Someone’s messed with my computer and its displaying text upside down now”
“Can you reset John’s password?”
“We ran a restore but now we seem to have lost our active directory….”

Helpdesk can be one of the most exciting or one of the most boring places to be depending on the day and time of the call and of course who’s making the call. Most calls we can resolve quickly by remotely connecting to the customer’s system and on occasion we need to come on site or have a machine delivered to our premises for repair.  Now don’t get me wrong here, the Lanix technical support love receiving your calls as we can then pay our staff more.  However out of the kindness of their hearts (and wage packets), they have these suggestions to help reduce the calls and hence your bills.  The three most common problems and fixes are:-

Lost internet connectivity? 
Try rebooting your internet routers. Before doing this have us show you what to do.  It is a very simple job but you definitely don’t want to do this whilst people are for example connected to a server.

Printer not working?
Of course you’ve checked that the printer is turned on and the paper tray is firmly pushed in and perhaps you’ve even rebooted the printer but have you checked the printer cable is firmly in on both sides of the connection?

Nobody in our Company can Connect to the Server
Try rebooting the router first.  If this does not work, then try rebooting the server. These are simple jobs but get our chaps to chow you how its done first just to prevent accidental corruption of data.

Many times you never see people behind the scenes who in some small or large way contribute to the overall well-being of your company. In all likelihood if you have good management they’ll know exactly who that person is and what they do and every so often management will make some sort of toast to the special-ness of these unsung heroes.

Which brings me to Jim. In all likelihood you will never meet Jim.  If you are lucky and call very early you may even speak to him! Jim is our facilities manager – a grandiose title for us bearing in mind that actually we’re quite a small company (less than 50 employees). But this is actually exactly what Jim does. He ensures our facilities are clean, functional and from a temperature perspective, habitable! Bulbs blown, air-conditioning broken, shelves required and computer systems needing to be repaired – That’s Jim!

One of the unique aspects of Lanix is that we have no sales staff. Well I tell a lie, I kind of do a bit of sales but more in a markety sort of way and most of the time I’m phoning up my buddies in sales and marketing and asking how to ask people for orders or the presentation aspects of sales and marketing literature. But other than that, the guys here are technical and admin. 

It’s not that we haven’t tried to recruit a sales person… we have but time and again have failed on numerous occasions.  Our first few attempts revolved around giving them high basics (because they would tell us how good they were) and commissions if they hit various targets. In doing this we lost a lot of money and so we’ve now given up on this approach and the last few times someone has said they’d sell our systems for us – we’ve asked them to prove themselves first. If they hit the targets that they say they can hit, then we’ll give them the basic along with the commission. It is surprising how this approach seems to weed these people out so much that today we still don’t have any sales people.

So how on earth do we get orders in?  Well mostly its word of mouth or people responding to promotions like the one we currently have for a free laptop under the promotions tab. Oh and by the way if you are a sales person seeking employment, we’d love to hear from you but please note the last paragraph before applying.

“Hello we bought a network card from you recently and we are trying to get our TalkTalk modem to work with it. We’ve spoken to the technical support at TalkTalk and they definitely think it’s your network card that’s the problem….”

Honestly we love our jobs here at Lanix but sometimes the tech support departments of other companies can be quite misleading.  TalkTalk should know better than to even allow a customer to try and attach a modem to a network card. We’ve seen this from other support departments such as BT, Dell and so on where the customer has called us telling us that XYZ support department has told them that its due to some other piece of software or hardware. In fact it is the reason why we prefer our customers to purchase everything from us.

One place – One call – No fobbing off – Lanix.

Perhaps this should be our 2008 slogan?

So here I am…Mr Business Consultant in charge of helping our illustrious managing director get to where he wants to go to. If only I had a GPRS system for this….and why does he always want to stop off and view the scenery.  It is interesting how different businesses grow and at different paces depending on the philosophy of the directors. For example some directors are ruled by their achievements and targets – you can see their eyes glaze over immediately you begin to talk about anything not related to where they want to go. Others like to enjoy the journey, are very people oriented rather than results focussed and as long as the business is generally going in the right direction and they are enjoying life, then missing the odd result is fine.

In this case our director, Dr Chris Kwok is a very people based person who would rather have a chat about football, golf or whatever is happening in your neck of the woods…and if you want to buy some stuff well…that’s all well and good…To give you an example of this, how many small businesses have yearly Christmas parties catering to over 100 people.

Chris will say things to me like….Ben if we grow that’ll be fantastic but the most important thing is to enjoy the journey. If we make lots of money that’s great. If we don’t that’s great too, as long as we have enough to enjoy ourselves.