Virtela VPN. Virtela Communications, (877) 803-9629. www.virtela.com
If you're wedded to the notion of using a carrier for your IP VPN services, you'll be pleased to know that Qwest came in a close second to Virtela. Qwest's offering is based on a private routed network. It requires no additional hardware at WAAP's premises and provides all the VPN functionality at each of the PoPs. As such, its price is competitive--$3,000 for the initial installation and $4,350 per month. Qwest's only requirement, for the Cisco Systems gear we specified, was that our routers be configured with IOS 11.2 or 12.0(7), since these versions provide built-in encryption and tunneling. Easy enough.
Qwest provided a clear network description and explained how traffic would traverse the network from site to site or the Internet. This gave us confidence. All our site-to-site traffic would be encrypted by either DES (Data Encryption Standard) or 3DES (Triple DES) over the network, and all traffic to the Internet would go via NAT (network address translation) through one of Qwest's firewalls. With this method, each remote site could send traffic directly to the Internet without first going through the corporate site.
Installation would take about 45 days; only TManage's installation time was longer. To its credit, however, Qwest was the only respondent that provided and explained options on how the cut-over would be performed.
Qwest, like our other respondents, offers a browser-based reporting system, Qwest Control, which covers everything we would expect. Qwest Control also lets customers view firewall and NAT policies, as well as reconfigure those policies on the fly. Invoices can be viewed, and online payment is available.
Although firewall changes can be made on the fly, the same is not true for bandwidth changes. According to Qwest, these changes require five to 10 business days, assuming the loop bandwidth is available.
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