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How Do You Choose a WAN Carrier & Technology?
Giger51 asks: "I'm trying to get a better idea of how a business goes about choosing a carrier & technology for their Wide Area Network. For the last little while, it's been difficult for a lot of the carriers out there. Those difficulties have resulted in questionable accounting practices and bankruptcies. When trying to make the decision, what are the key points that are considered? What technology (IP, Frame Relay, ATM...) are you avoiding or looking for?"
Even in large metropolitan areas there are usually only a few carriers. None of the carriers offer all of the technologies that are out there so, you need to first look at the technologies that are available from the carriers in your area.
The next step, after making a list of the available technologies, is to determine which one you need to use. This is determined by what you are trying to do. Are you setting up an ATM that only needs a 9600 baud connection or are you trying to do multi-site video conferencing that will require several megabits of bandwidth. This will limit your choices further, depending on what is available. Also, general cost of the technology may be factored here but, cost should not significantly affect your decision yet.
Hopefully at this point, you still have at least a couple of carriers to choose from. At this point you must look at reliability, responsiveness, whether the carrier will be around in a year or five years, SLAs and finally cost.Usually you're lucky to find two or more carriers to choose from in the end.
One last note, don't mistake carriers for service providers. There may be lots of service providers to choose from but, when you look closer, you'll likely find that they are all simply reselling the services of one or two carriers.