Virtela Communications, with locations in 190 countries, offers a cost-effective and secure alternative for WAN communications through its Virtela VPN service. Because Virtela uses multiple carriers on its backbone, it can optimize customer-traffic performance and offer impressive SLAs (service-level agreements) of 70-ms round-trip latency and 0.1 percent packet loss. Virtela also gave us impressive views of network performance using Web reports. We felt safe knowing our state secrets were securely traveling through Virtela's IP network thanks to 3DES IPsec tunnels, and we could save money on less-vital traffic by choosing among three classes of service. Although all the entries in this category can off-load VPN worries, Virtela's ability to do it in a flexible, cost-effective manner separates it from the pack.
FINALISTS: MCI Private IP. MCI, (800) 465-7187, (800) 264-1000. www.mci.com
Qwest Private Routed Network. Qwest Communications International, (800) 743-3793. www.qwest.com
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