Mr Scaffold, an Australian scaffolding company had a problem: none of the connectivity options available could deliver the throughput their temporary sites needed. Due to security (navy base) and the temporary nature of the sites, getting access to a permanent high-throughput fixed-line was not an option. Also, they did not have the line-of-sight to connect to the local fixed wireless provider. Our partner, Fusion Broadband offered an alternative: mobile broadband – with a twist.
Because a single mobile broadband connection was too slow, Mr Scaffold turned to link aggregation technology from Fusion Broadband; bonding together connections from multiple mobile broadband dongles. The company rolled-out Fusion’s service at all the temporary sites, combining cellular options from Telstra, Optus and Vodafone.
As a result, Mr Scaffold is now able to get secure connectivity at each site, with enough upload to satisfy their usage requirements. For Fusion, solving this bandwidth problem for temporary sites led to a bigger opportunity: fixing Mr. Scaffold’s entire network with SD-WAN. With the needs of their temporary sites met, Mr Scaffold now set their sights on addressing the core problem – a sub-optimal organization-wide conventional VPN setup. For instance:
- Uploading worksite photos and accessing their Microsoft Exchange server was too slow
- In some locations, the VoIP phone system that was rolled-out was unusable because of latency and jitter
Fusion Broadband offered a cutting-edge alternative: a software-defined wide-area-network (SD-WAN). It’s a solution that would enhance Mr Scaffold’s WAN without the disruption commonly associated with overhauling existing network infrastructure. What’s unique about Fusion’s SD-WAN offering is that it can work in parallel with and use existing network infrastructure (so you can get started right away).
The system bonds and accelerates existing network connections and provides latency and jitter avoidance. And, since it’s 100% transparent to the customer’s network as well as all protocols, there’s no need to reconfigure every device on Mr Scaffold’s network. Each of Mr Scaffold’s sites is now part of a dynamic WAN that performs like a Layer-2 WAN to support their VoIP app and all of their other applications and users. Also, by swapping the conventional VPN setup for Fusion’s SD-WAN, the customer now has a private WAN utilizing cost-effective public Internet connections, complete with traffic-shaping and link behavior mitigation.
Private WAN, Public Internet
A Layer-2 like WAN using the public Internet with many additional benefits over the traditional VPN solution:
- No technical expertise required to setup, install and maintain the solution
- No additional VPN equipment required
- Fusion’s SD-WAN is permanently on, unlike a VPN which has to establish a connection
- No VPN bandwidth overhead to worry about
- Provides QoS and compression boosts (which cannot be done with a traditional VPN)