The Power of the Converged Broadband Architecture

For today’s progressive distributed enterprises, integrating voice, video, and data connectivity onto a single communications platform holds the promise of reducing costs and complexity compared to multiple networks. The promise of convergence is easier said than done due to the many challenges that the distributed enterprise faces, including network uptime, bandwidth limitations, warding off security threats, keeping pace with compliance regulations, and reining in IT budgets. This white paper presents an overview of the advanced networking solutions available from Hughes that overcome these challenges. Based on a powerful, new enabling technology called Hughes ActiveQoS, these solutions enable distributed enterprises to gain the many advantages of a Converged Broadband Architecture (CBA) across all branch locations using affordable broadband.

Challenges of the Distributed Enterprise Network

Today’s distributed enterprises are deploying sophisticated applications at branch locations to drive productivity and revenue gains, which in turn increases the demands on the wide area network (WAN). Additionally, exciting information technology (IT) developments such as virtualization and cloud computing are demanding high levels of application performance and service availability across a WAN. As a result, not only are the added applications straining the network, but also security threats are intensifying, bandwidth is becoming more limited, compliance regulations are escalating, and IT departments are being stretched to their limits, both in terms of budget and depth of expertise.

These new challenges join the old, such as voice anddata convergence. Although selective deployment of VoIP/data convergence at headquarters and main offices has demonstrated significant benefits, pervasive deployment at branch sites of distributed enterprise remains untapped. As a result, true voice and data convergence in the distributed enterprise market, for companies in retail, restaurant, grocery, and hospitality has not happened because it is too expensive. The potential convergence benefits are not sufficient to overcome the costs.

While carrier offerings for IP core networking have evolved to become based on MPLS, last mile access has remained centered around the familiar T1 line. T1 and other leased access MPLS networks deliver a sound convergence platform; however, in the context of distributed enterprises, significant issues emerge in practice:

• Branch networks are experiencing rapid bandwidth demands, and T1 bandwidth capacity is already–or is in danger of—becoming inadequate, particularly when converged with VoIP traffic.
• Ethernet access is touted as the next hot access technology with scalability up to 100 Mbps, but it is still limited in geographic availability to be of real value to the IT executive evaluating choices for the distributed network.

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  • Performance—With built-in WAN Optimization technology, Hughes CBA solutions efficiently utilize bandwidth for the highest WAN performance possible, eliminating costly upgrades and freeing up bandwidth as needed for new and expanded applications. ActiveQoS technology ensures that voice packets are prioritized to deliver high voice quality, end-to-end.
  • Reliability—Blending the most cost-effective mix of wireline and wireless technologies, Hughes CBA solutions provide diverse broadband paths with no single point of failure.
  • Security—Compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards, Hughes CBA solutions offer a flexible range of security architectures and services to meet all enterprise and compliance policies.
  • Traffic management methods that give priority to mission-critical applications and related traffic during “rush hour” congestion
  • TCP and other protocol-specific acceleration algorithms to minimize the effects of network latency
  • Data reduction techniques, including compression and protocol redundancy removal, to improve network throughput
  • Application prioritization
  • Data reduction
  • TCP and Web acceleration
  • Scalable bandwidth

Furthermore, although it is perfectly appropriate for larger branches, the pricing of high-bandwidth leased access delivers sticker shock to the IT manager for large scale deployment.

Transforming Distributed Enterprise Networking

The dramatic price/performance curve and massive scale achieved by broadband networks is illustrated in Figure 21—with unit bandwidth prices plummeting over 40 percent in the past 5 years, while average connection speeds have increased over 20 percent in the last 2 years.2 The Hughes Converged Broadband Architecture employing ActiveQoS technology fully exploits the potential of affordable broadband for distributed enterprises at all branch locations, delivering end-to-end Class of Service (CoS) over broadband VPNs with high security, enterprise-grade manageability, and integral WAN optimization.

The result is a new transformative, cost-effective solution that is ideally suited for enterprises looking to adopt converged private networks at all their branch locations.

The Hughes Converged Broadband Architecture (CBA) employing ActiveQoS technology is an advanced architecture that enables cost-effective data, voice, and video convergence for distributed enterprises. Incorporating sophisticated edge intelligence and backed by enterprise-grade SLAs, Hughes CBA delivers MPLS-like performance over broadband VPNs at significant savings. Equally important, it enables distributed enterprises to meet their most critical business initiatives such as security, cost containment, workforce management, loss prevention, and improved customer experience at every site, regardless of location or network challenges.

By converging all network elements—transport, devices, and applications—into one seamless, reliable network, Hughes CBA with ActiveQoS enables better network performance, higher reliability, and assured security.

Hughes ActiveQoS—Core Enabling Technology

ActiveQoS is the key enabling technology developed by Hughes to achieve high quality convergence over broadband where real-time traffic such as voice is not normally prioritized and supported consistently. CoS markings are typically ignored by generic broadband networks, and variable performance renders edge prioritization ineffective. This has two significant consequences on branch traffic. First, real-time traffic is impacted by packet loss and jitter within the network; and second, lower priority traffic enters the WAN and degrades the performance of high-priority, mission-critical traffic.

A key enhancement to the Hughes WAN Optimization offering, Hughes ActiveQoS resolves these issues by intelligently monitoring the bandwidth over the WAN and balancing the proper volume of traffic sent through the pipe to ensure that voice, video, and real-time data can all get through. Hughes ActiveQoS balances upstream and downstream traffic to network capacity on a site-by-site basis, and is scalable to any number of sites. As a result, real-time traffic is actively prioritized while packet loss, jitter, and latency are reduced—resulting in significant cost savings.

WAN Optimization for Application Performance

WAN Optimization is a suite of capabilities that seeks to optimize network utilization and accelerate a broad range of applications accessed by distributed enterprise users via a variety of methods, including:

Hughes CBA provides a wide range of high- performance and cost-effective broadband access options at even the smallest of branches in a typical, multi-site distributed enterprise. Hence, any enterprise WAN serving multiple branches with standard broadband access can now enjoy big-pipe, MPLS performance without the attendant price premium via:

Hughes WAN Optimization accelerates a broad range of business applications over the network by staging data in local caches such as hard drives, compressing and prioritizing data, and streamlining chatty protocols. These processes derive higher throughput and improved performance over the existing bandwidth. As a result, enterprises realize improved application performance, easier migration to cloud- based services, virtualization—and ultimately a better return on investment.

Harnessing the Power of VoIP

As described, Hughes CBA delivers real-time CoS over broadband, enabling high-quality VoIP services. Hughes Enterprise VoIP enables businesses with branch sites to take advantage of sophisticated voice and data applications without incurring costly networking charges. Enterprises can enhance the customer and workforce experiences with advanced VoIP features and perform sophisticated data mining for improved marketing efforts with detailed call records.

Hughes VoIP also enables cost reductions at multiple levels. At the transport level, economical broadband replaces costly T1 lines. At the telephony level, hosted VoIP can yield a savings of 30 percent or greater over traditional POTS lines. In addition, SIP (session initiation protocol) trunking provides savings through the use of networkwide concurrent paths for enterprise-level trunk optimization. And at the business level, benefits include common management of enterprise-wide calls, flexible call control, and VoIP PBX features such as Web portal administration and advanced call routing capabilities from a cloud-based solution.

In addition, large distributed enterprises typically must deal with many service providers to meet the voice and data needs at all their locations. Hughes Enterprise VoIP enables enterprises to avoid these headaches and consolidate all their voice and data nationwide under a single vendor.

Key Business Initiatives and Applications with Hughes CBA

An important aspect of Hughes CBA is that it enables a myriad of layered solutions such as Digital Media, Guest Wi-Fi, and Rogue Wireless Scanning to address the challenges of the evolving distributed enterprise. As shown in Figure 6, the top layer of the Hughes CBA with ActiveQoS, rendered in dark blue, indicates core network functionality. The middle layer (red) illustrates an extensive range of business applications enabled by Hughes CBA, and the bottom layer (light blue), illustrates how Hughes CBA enables tailored industry solutions.

The Branch of the Future

Tomorrow’s stores and branches will look very different—equipped with customer- and employee- facing digital signage, rich communication and interaction with in-store shoppers, handheld point- of-sale devices, interactive kiosks, and rich media training for associates to name a few. Hotels will provide guest Wi-Fi, in-room entertainment, and interactive kiosks as a matter of course. And quick service restaurants may offer dynamic drive-thru, digital menu boards, and tabletop ordering options.

The key to achieving this branch of the future is the convergence of all network elements into a single seamless network and linking solutions to enterprise strategies. As shown in Table 1, Hughes CBA-enabled applications are matched to key business initiatives.

Conclusion

With the Hughes CBA with ActiveQoS, enterprises are discovering the enormous benefits of convergence over broadband. By converging all network elements —transport, devices, and applications—into one seamless, reliable network, Hughes delivers MPLS-like performance over affordable broadband technology. Leveraging Hughes proprietary WAN Optimization and ActiveQoS technology, Hughes CBA enables expansive bandwidths, high availability and security, superior application performance, and true network flexibility at every site. In the future, Hughes CBA will also deliver mobile applications over cost-effective broadband.

Setting the next-generation standard for enterprise private networks, Hughes CBA with ActiveQoS enables the enterprise to do more with less, exploit its existing networking infrastructure for greater performance and capabilities, and affordably improve its competitive position by deploying the latest applications— ultimately transforming the WAN into an essential asset to serve the enterprise branches and stores of the future.