What is SD-WAN?
SD-WAN is a solution designed to optimize voice data traffic. Its primary function is to shape bandwidth and intelligently route traffic in order to ensure the highest voice quality. Secondarily, it works to prioritize your most important data traffic based on your policies and create special routing for your most used cloud-based services (e.g. Office 365, Salesforce.com).
Who is SD-WAN for?
An SD-WAN solution is for organizations with remote workers, multiple locations/branches, or workflows that require employees to rely on multiple network types or distributed networks. SD-WAN also benefits organizations that have bandwidth limits and need reliability and stability for both their VoIP and standard data.
Why would I buy SD-WAN instead of just buying an extra pipe?
SD-WAN performs optimization. It ensures that you’re making the best use of your current bandwidth and ensures the optimal path to the datacenter. Think of it this way: if you want your car to go faster, you don’t build a bigger highway, you upgrade your car. SD-WAN is the turbo charger for your voice traffic.
How does it benefit me?
SD-WAN will improve voice quality and it will give you visibility into your network health and troubleshooting ability. With SD-WAN, you could even see where there are issues with the ISP, and be notified that there are service issues related to the ISP rather than having to spend time trying to track down issues that you aren’t in control of.
How does it work?
Prioritization: SD‑WAN prioritizes voice traffic over data to ensure the highest voice quality. When you run out of bandwidth for your standard data, your pages run slow, but when you run out of bandwidth for voice, your calls sound awful, or worse, drop.
Monitoring & Remediation: SD‑WAN monitors voice quality and upon sensing a degradation of voice quality it will automatically do one of two things:
- Packet Duplication:When packet loss is sensed, SD‑WAN will automatically begins duplicationg packets in order to avoid voice quality degradation.
- Delay Transmission:When jitter is sensed, SD‑WAN will delay the sending of packets to smooth out voice quality.
Specialized Routing: When sending the voice packets, SD‑WAN creates specialized tunnels, isolating your traffic from standard internet traffic and ensuring the most direct route between your networks and the data centers.
Distributed Network Optimization: SD‑WAN works to manage and optimize connections between disparate locations and distributed networks, so employees at different locations have the same level of access and network quality.
Troubleshooting: SD‑WAN provides sophisticated troubleshooting functionality that can show you where there are issues and what remediation is being carried out automatically.
The bottom line: If you want your voice traffic to take priority over everything else, and you have multiple locations (or remote workers), call TCS and find out how we can get you started on your path towards uninterrupted calls.
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