WANs and Provider Network Services

Wide area networks form the connections among geographically separated sites. Technologies are still changing, but the major issue for enterprises is usually on the business and management side: obtaining reasonable rates, quick provisioning, and reliable quality management of what may be a concatenated set of carrier networks. Virtual Network Operators are arising to help with this situation.

Many enterprises are also investigating the potential of using the public Internet as their WAN. By deploying encrypted VPNs, secure connections between sites may be created over an open network.

As the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses is consumed, interest in IPv6 is growing. This technology, although over 10 years old, is still immature and lacking in management and security services. Regardless, many enterprises will be moving towards partial deployment over the next 2-3 years.

Within NTS, the following subjects are covered within this thread:

• WAN services and providers
• Virtual Network Operators (VNOs) and concatenated services
• Internet substitution for private links
• VPNs, including IP Security (IPsec)
• Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS)
• Private networks
• Routing protocols
• Global coverage
• IPv6
• Domain Name System (DNS)

This topic relates to the Network and Telecom coverage area - Planning and building network infrastructure for managing the convergence of voice, video, and data networks.

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