Broad Media tested the SD-WAN service from iTried and Fusion Broadband South Africa as a solution to our office Internet needs, and we were very impressed with the service.
As an online publisher and media company, we require a reliable internet connection that is accessible throughout our office at all times and for all users. Unfortunately, most internet connections incur some downtime, which can cause problems for our teams at critical times. Historically, we have overcome this challenge by implementing multiple internet connections throughout our office – each of which uses infrastructure from different ISPs.
Our primary connection is a 100Mbps business fibre connection that should offer consistent uptime, but does not always deliver. We have two different 5G backup solutions that have been fast, but unreliable – especially during load-shedding or bad weather. We also have slower LTE connections, but these suffer from similar problems to our 5G connections. While this redundancy has ultimately ensured our teams can always connect to the Internet, the solution requires that we jump between different networks at critical moments – which is not ideal.
We have tried an inexpensive load balancer, but it struggled under high loads, and could not always correctly identify an offline network. We finally settled on using it as a simple failover device, but even then it was usually much quicker to manually jump onto a different network.
Testing iTried and Fusion Broadband South Africa’s SD-WAN product
iTried and Fusion Broadband South Africa recently reached out to us to test their SD-WAN product and service, which promised to solve all our problems. We opted for a 400Mbps node, which can combine up to 5 different internet connections and promises to handle a combined speed of up to 400Mbps without a problem.
They also offer larger nodes for up to 7 connections and 1Gbps combined speed. We combined our fibre connection and our two 5G connections and used our existing Wi-Fi 6 mesh network to deliver this combined connection throughout the office.
The SD-WAN product bonded these connections on the fly, delivering the sum of their speeds to our teams. When a connection struggles with speed, latency or packet loss, the product automatically detects this and limits its use until the connection recovers – ensuring a quality experience for all users.
This alone would solve all our internet problems, but the service goes further by adding many enterprise-grade security and network quality features.
For example, our network could be set up to prioritize VoIP traffic, as we often have critical online meetings, and these should never be interrupted by someone starting up a large download. It was also interesting to access all the product’s monitoring features on the Illuminate portal, which identifies all the devices and traffic on the network and sorts it for easy analysis.
Through this tool, social media platforms and other unwanted sites can be blocked to ensure optimal productivity, and we could identify devices using VPNs or accessing the Tor network – which may be used for malicious purposes. This dashboard also highlights devices with weak encryption, which often is the case with devices that need to update their security software. We only encountered a single configuration issue during a week of testing, which was immediately handled by the helpful support team who had helped us set everything up.
Awesome results
According to the network log, we were spared from 6 different network outages across the week of testing which totalled almost 114 hours of downtime. We never noticed any of these outages, as our connection remained rock solid throughout.
We are also able to get even faster speeds than those promised throughout the testing period, with the fastest recorded speed test reaching 733Mbps with very high CPU usage. The speeds we saw were faster than anything we have ever experienced on each of the individual networks, and between this and the fact that we avoided significant downtime, it is clear that iTried and Fusion Broadband South Africa’s SD-WAN solution is an incredible product.
As an automated install and forget SD-WAN solution that can be installed in minutes, it removes the complexity and provides a bundle of benefits that a business really needs and delivers a high return on investment.
Click here to learn more about iTried and Fusion Broadband South Africa’s SD-WAN product.
As mentioned by MyBroadband