SD-WAN technology has previously been the empire of Enterprise business. Now a SD-WAN for SMEs is available for smaller Australian businesses that need the features SD-WAN brings.

Aspire Technology Group (Aspire Technologies) commissioned CommsChoice to implement an SD-WAN solution for its customer, leading Australian recycled plastic manufacturer, Replas.

Replas has three distributed sites across Victoria and was using Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) with a dedicated IP managed solution including radius connections to provide phone and data services to multiple sites.

The MPLS service was plagued with problems, and so Replas commissioned Aspire Technologies to explore what options were available to see if they could improve network speed, latency and overall performance.

Aspire Technologies considered a number of alternatives to MPLS including a dedicated fibre network with a 4G failover solution. Glenn Phelps, Aspire Technologies said, “In addition to fibre, we looked at SD-WAN (software defined wide area networking). Though fibre is traditionally the premium solution, we faced potential networking and IP addressing issues that were basically insurmountable. Because the CommsChoice SD-WAN allows multiple internet links to transit a single static IP address, it made our decision to partner with CommsChoice an easy one.”

Tristan Plummer, CTO, CommsChoice, said that the CommsChoice SD-WAN makes creating a secure WAN over multiple, inexpensive internet connections a reality. “Our SD-WAN for SME’s and Enterprise uses Dynamic Multi Path Optimisation. This means the SD-WAN will automatically use the best available path for the traffic. A link could be disconnected mid VoIP call and the call won’t even drop out. The SD-WAN would just re-route the voice packet over the next best available internet path. Because the SD-WAN issues the IP address, the internet link used is irrelevant.

Benefits of SD-WAN for Replas and Aspire technologies include:

- 100% uptime for customers

- Throughput speeds of over 160Mbps on concatenated 100Mbps links

- Reliability, speed and transparency of the network on single or multiple sites

- An easy to manage, fast to deploy and smarter way to build and run a network

- Visibility of the entire network via the Velo Cloud Orchestrator.

“CommsChoice build redundancy into our SD-WAN by using multiple carrier links and multiple technology types. This gives us assurance of service in the event of a carrier network failure and allows network administrators to choose the most cost effective and suitable internet connectivity options for each site based on the budget available for the network,” said Plummer.