Over the past couple of years costs have become more critical than ever. Yet sometimes reliability can be far more important than costs. Saving a few dollars pales in insignificance to preventing service failures or non-delivery. You wouldn't book a flight that was fifty percent cheaper, for example, if it also had a fifty percent lower chance of getting you safely to your destination.
The same applies to Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Speed and reliability are the major issues. For internal connections, any slowdowns bring business operations to a crawl and can lose a company many new customers. Most users simply won't tolerate a delay of more than a few seconds.
This is why, according to a survey of IT and network managers conducted by TeleChoice, service reliability and service performance were the two most important attributes in selecting an ISP, with reliability coming in number one. And what about price? It lagged far behind in fifth place.
Service reliability and performance are particularly important when it comes to generating the new clients a company depends on to grow its revenue. Fortunately, performance problems that influence new business can sometimes be offset by well planned marketing, good pricing and superior customer service.
"For B2C companies, if they have a good brand, performance and availability they will not have as big of a hit," says Jeb Bolding, Senior Analyst for Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado. "If I buy books from Amazon, and it's down for ten minutes, I'll still come back to Amazon in ten minutes rather than going to Barnes and Noble."
Of course, it is impossible to build that type of brand loyalty in the absence of reliable connections. Last year hundreds of thousands of customers were stranded by the shutdowns of service providers such as Jato Communications, Northpoint Communications, and Rhythms NetConnections. But there are also the internal losses caused by slowdowns or lost connections. Here is an actual example.
Kevin Schulke, a Computer Specialist for the United States Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), is responsible for maintaining a network that connects the service's 23 sites throughout the country to headquarters in Washington, DC. But the network had no centralized monitoring or management tools in place.
"The worst case scenario was when a device on the wide area network was down," explains Schulke. "All data connectivity was lost, but nothing was telling me that the link was having problems to begin with. I relied on the users to inform me of the problem but, if they weren't using the Internet at that time, they wouldn't spot it either."
This would mean that a connection could be down for hours before Schulke would hear about it, and then he would still not know which connection along the line was causing the outage. To move to more proactive management of the network, he implemented a low-cost network management system, which gave him color coded maps showing which elements are performing according to specification, which are slowing down and which have failed. This, combined with trending data, lets him locate and correct network problems before they start affecting the end users.
Ensuring reliable connections, then, basically requires three steps. These steps are: determining the level of service needed; choosing an ISP that will meet those requirements; and then constantly monitoring the performance to ensure that the service levels are being adhered to. Let's take a closer look at each of these points.
Selecting an Connection Speed
The first element of selecting an ISP is finding one that provides the proper bandwidth. Any given enterprise is likely to use more than one type of Internet connection. It may have dedicated lines running between its main datacenters, while smaller offices may be using some type of DSL connection. Additionally, you have to take into account remote workers and telecommuters. Externally based employees are at least going to need a dialup connection if not some form of wireless or broadband hook up. It is important, therefore to understand what types of connections are available and at what speeds.
Selecting a Vendor
Once you have determined the capacity you need at each of your locations, it is time to decide which vendor or
vendors will best meet your needs. Even if you just contract with a single company, behind the scenes it is all
a matter of agreements. When you drove to work this morning, you may have traveled along a series of surface
streets and freeways owned and maintained by various cities, counties, the state and perhaps the federal government.
Sending a data packet is no different. The line connecting your office may be owned by the local phone company, and the data then goes through one or more backbone providers such as Qwest, MCI (formerly UUNet), or Global Crossing, before going again to another local service provider for delivery. The ISP may be nothing more than a broker who strikes the deals with all the providers of the routes along the way. Even the individual packets that make up a single data transmission may travel by different routes owned by different carriers.
There are at least 6500 ISPs to choose from worldwide, though that number changes daily with new mergers, buyouts and bankruptcies. There are several online resources to help narrow down the list. These include Internet.com's The List (www.thelist.com) which gives the types of connections available from different suppliers. ISPWorld (www.ispworld.com) has a directory giving detailed information on the exact services offered by ISPs and the cities where each of these services is available.
Once you have determined the providers which do offer the needed bandwidth in the right locations, it is a matter of narrowing it down to the best price and services. Elements to consider include:
Monitoring Performance
In a perfect world, at this point the ISP would just take over and you wouldn't have to worry about Internet connections ever again. This isn't a perfect world and so you must keep constant tabs on the quality of the connections.
One way is through use of Network Management System software. This is how Peter Bloom, Director of Technical Services for the Jewish Home and Hospital of New York, kept the connections running at full speed between the datacenter and the four medical facilities.
When there was a problem with one of his T-1 lines, the provider (Verizon) kept telling him that there was nothing wrong on their end. So he installed WebNM from Somix Technologies, Inc. (Sanford, ME) to locate exactly where the problem was. "The first time I brought up WebNM, it showed me that two of my T-1s were down so I was able to get on Verizon to fix it," he said. Such a system also will identify over and underutilized connections to identify when additional bandwidth is needed or where capacity can be reduced to save money.
While this approach works for monitoring point-to-point connections, ensuring a good user experience for Internet users requires monitoring all aspects of the connection from the user's point of view. The user doesn't know or care about whether there is an overloaded router, he only cares about how fast his web page loads, and this is a mix of the application speed, the server load and all the network elements connecting the end user to the web server.
"In order to differentiate between the responsibilities of the ISPs and the company," explains James Moore Product Manager for Candle Corporation (El Segundo, CA), "it is vital to be able to measure performance and availability from transaction start to finish and at all points along the path, both internally and externally."
His and other companies make software which monitors such elements as response time, availability, serviceability and reliability for the application as a whole. When any of these are affected, it can help locate the application, server or connection which is at fault.
Mercury Interactive Corporation (Sunnyvale, CA) offers a service that continually monitors response times from up to five hundred locations around the world by firing synthetic transactions at the web server and notifying its customers whenever there is a problem. In this way, the company can detect whether a problem is related to just a particular location, so traffic can be rerouted, or whether it is a system-wide problem.
Making the Connection
By taking the time to examine the different types of services available and putting in place a system to monitor actual ISP performance, you have a good foundation for a successful Internet experience. But, even so, selecting the right ISP can still be a bit of a "hit-or-miss" proposition.
The area is undergoing rapid change both in terms of the types of connections and who is providing them. At this time, Global Crossing and Williams Communications are undergoing bankruptcy reorganization. Other telecoms have had their credit rankings dropped to junk bond status. But, regardless of who is still in the business at the time you are looking for a new provider, the above steps will help with selecting an ISP and ensuring that it will continue to meet ones needs.