Lesson 7-3: Choosing WAN Products

and Services
The Many Trade-Offs of WAN Design
● The choice of a WAN technology depends on a combination of many factors. Some of
these factors are more important to some organizations than others, which makes each
WAN design a highly customized solution. A few of the most important factors that
influence a WAN technology decision include:
● Number of Nodes
● Location of nodes
● Private versus public
● Type of traffic
● Availability
● Security
● Reliability
● Redundancy and fault tolerance
● Cost versus performance
 Cost
● When a WAN link is implemented over public facilities, its cost depends on the type of service it offers.
The price of switched services, such as frame relay, varies according to the volume of data the network
carries. One of a designer’s challenges is determining cut-over costs between public and private line
service. When evaluating the cost of WAN service, it is important to consider the total cost of a
particular technology, including:
● Equipment – A lower price for a link may be offset by the need to buy expensive devices to use it.
● Maintenance – For financial reasons, some companies prefer to own as much of their
communication equipment as possible. However, ownership also requires ongoing maintenance and
upgrades. Thus, many companies find it worth the expense to subscribe to a switched service, and
let the telecommunication company worry about repairs and improvements to network devices and
transmission media.
● Management – The more control a company has over its WAN, the more experienced people it
need to keep it running. If a company is unwilling to hire experienced WAN technician, a switched
service can be an attractive choice.
Performance
● WAN links come in a wide variety of data rates. These are summarized in the Point-to-Point Link
Table. Typically, as speed increase, cost increases.
● Switched services provide more
flexibility in connecting WAN
nodes.
● Dial-up or dedicated connections
are still necessary to reach the
switched network; however, after
the switched network is accessed,
you have any-to-any connectivity.
● The Switched Networks Table
summarizes the data rates offered
by the most common switched
services.
Comparing File Transfer Times
● These data rates clearly show which services are faster than others.
However, without some first-hand experience with different types of
connections, a speed figure alone does not tell us much about the
performance a user can expect.
● Thus, when comparing WAN services, it is often helpful to compare their
performance on a common task. For example, assume a bank transfer
many files between its two offices in the same city. These files average
approximately 5 megabytes (MB) in size, thus a network designer could
evaluate various Wan services by calculating the time each one would
require to move 5MB.