Money-Back Guarantees For Extranets
IP-based virtual private network (VPN) services, or extranets, are fast becoming a commodity purchase from national ISPs and long-distance carriers. AT&T, MCI, Sprint and UUNET Technologies are now offering packaged VPN services. These include money-back guarantees for network uptime, extra encryption layers, customized applications and new dial-up remote services. These providers also promise that their private Internet backbones--on which each of these services is based--will have worldwide reach over the next few years.
For Sprint's service, two business partners, each of which must have a connection to Sprint, are joined at a router at Sprint. Through the router, Sprint implements access lists and filters to connect the partners. UUNET's service requires that two business partners buy an extra T3 or T1 link and two customer-premises Cisco routers (sold by UUNET) for every site with a new feature for encryption. UUNET then turns on the encryption feature in the router and authenticates the partners to one another. All the new services have variations on these themes, plus dial-up options.
Some of the carriers have drummed up early buyers for the services, though the question of how bright the future will be for these new VPN services looms large because there's still a long way to go in terms of performance. Four areas crucial to any private network that are worth paying for: dial port availability, network uptime, trouble response time, and end-to-end latency. The first three seem doable, but the fourth is the killer sticking point.
David Goodtree, director of Internet research for Forrester Research, says no one has come close to delivering end-to-end-latency. "If the network can't get bits through, who cares if it's up 100 percent of the time?" Goodtree says.
UUNET seemed to be the best-of-breed, at press time, when it comes to latency guarantees. "We guarantee 150 milliseconds for latency," says Ralph Montfort, UUNET's manager of network products. |
