Since TManage utilizes the public Internet for transportation, whereas Virtela controls the traffic at the PoP, TManage's Quality of Service and SLA may suffer. On the QoS side, the vendor utilizes RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol), WFQ (Weighted Fair Queuing) and IP Precedence for prioritizing traffic, but these protocols can break down at any point on the public Internet and wherever traffic might get routed. To manage portside traffic and help prioritize voice and video data, the routers perform traffic shaping.
TManage's SLA offers pale next to the competitors. The vendor's latency guarantee of less than 150 ms is almost double that of the others. Its stated packet loss of 1.5 percent, though not bad for Internet traffic, is high for corporate traffic.
Managed Branch Office Solution (including Branch Office Broadband Service and Managed Site-to-Site VPN Service). TManage, (512) 794-6000, (877) 929-2967. www.megapath.net
This alternative MCI offering included a managed router at each of our company's sites. Since MCI wouldn't support WAAP's existing equipment, the vendor suggested Cisco or Lucent Technologies that differed from what we specified, with features such as IPsec encryption and built-in firewall capabilities. The $700 initial outlay was the lowest we encountered, but the new routing-equipment costs showed up in MCI's $7,501 monthly fee.
With IPsec, all office-to-office traffic would be tunneled with 3DES over MCI's IP backbone. An out-of-band modem and phone line would be included with each router for management purposes. MCI told us IP VPN service is typically installed within 32 days--sooner than what our other respondents promised.
For network traversal, MCI provided a detailed look at its IP backbone and built-in fault tolerance. The vendor's description shows a well-designed network, broken into three segments--access, regional and transit--which should eliminate downtime for its customers. The access segment is just that: the portion of the network that includes any area's local loops. The regional segment can be portions of the country or even parts of a large metropolitan area, while the transit segment connects all the regional networks together.
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