MPLS Networks

What is MPLS?

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a supercharged technology that delivers voice, data, and video anywhere over an entirely interconnected private network. It offers a reliable, cost-effective and safe alternative to sharing information and applications between remote workers, partners and offices. With a MPLS network, companies can restructure their operations, improve efficiency and reduce price of ownership.

This service is great for all kinds of connection including:

  • ADSL
  • Ethernet
  • Leased lines
  • EFM

MPLS services are highly scalable, with this technology, it becomes convenient to expand IT infrastructure through different sites, fresh applications and even with employees working in different locations. Multiprotocol Label Switching focuses on traffic by designating tags on data, this allows systems to function more thoroughly and dependably. This is great for companies using delay-sensitive and business-critical applications like VoIP.

Is MPLS right for my business?

Point-to-point circuits or IPsec tunnels used to be the only viable options for a business transmitting data between multiple sites. This proved to be costly and complex, both to implement and to maintain. MPLS allows businesses to create a private network that is fast, reliable and simple to administer.

MPLS is an affordable solution for any small to medium business that wishes to enable its workforce to communicate securely and efficiently between sites, staff, suppliers and customers. Genesis can help you take advantage of the benefits of using MPLS networks, especially if your business requires any of the following:

  • Any-to-any connectivity (i.e. meshed or partially-meshed network)
  • The ability to prioritise different applications
  • Future proof architecture that can rapidly change to business needs
  • LAN-to-LAN or WAN-to-WAN connectivity over private networks
  • Reduced networking costs and improved speed- to- market for its products

The Benefits of MPLS:

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  • Performance: The speed of information transferred between sites will rapidly improve within a MPLS network. Data will not be sent over the Internet and therefore not require encryption/decryption. By assigning labels to data packets, MPLS services can optimise performance of your traffic and deliver guaranteed Quality of Service. Lower packet loss means faster response for applications.
  • Productivity: Business critical traffic (e.g. CRM) will perform more efficiently within an MPLS network, thus improving service levels, staff outputs and customer experience. By simplifying infrastructure and administration, IT staff can focus on functions more closely related to the everyday running of your business.
  • Resilience: With high availability, if a major link in the MPLS network goes down, traffic will quickly route to an alternative path. If an entire site has an outage, the others will not be affected, therefore network downtime is greatly reduced.
  • Reliability: Through ongoing support we proactively monitor your MPLS network, ensuring any infrastructure issues are identified and resolved before they affect your business critical applications. Our technical support team will promptly address any outages and proactively investigate alerts.
  • Security: Information transferred between sites will be done via an integrated private network, not the public Internet, ensuring maximum security for your confidential data.
  • Scalability: Ease of building on IT infrastructure ensures that when your business grows, new sites, remote workers and applications can be rapidly configured and deployed onto your MPLS network with minimal effort and cost.

MPLS Networks vs. Traditional Networking

Traditional technologies such as IPsec made connecting multiple sites both time-consuming and expensive. Making changes to an IPsec WAN requires changing every firewall at every site, the administration overhead increases exponentially with the number of end points.

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Genesis’s MPLS networks offers outstanding scalability so configuring and deploying sites can be done easily and cost-effectively. With MPLS your WAN logically becomes a LAN. This means your remote site or home office are as easy to connect into the LAN at Headquarters as a PC in the same office. Inter-site data does not pass over the Internet, only a single firewall is required at the point of Internet breakout.

 

Data Prioritisation in MPLS

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Genesis MPLS can prioritise your traffic to best utilise the performance of your bandwidth. By assigning labels to the data according to the importance of delivery speed, priority is given to business-critical or delay-sensitive traffic. For example, a real-time VoIP application can be given priority over delay-tolerant traffic such as email, ensuring that the VoIP user does not experience poor call quality, it is features like this that make MPLS services such a great investment for businesses.

 

For more information on our business MPLS networks or for advice on how to set them up, please call us on 0843 504 4180.