Yearly, we hear it from a brand new enterprise Vast Space Networking (WAN) vendor (or maybe another acronym): “The enterprise WAN is altering! This time is completely different!”
Though a few of what this week’s WAN vendor du jour is parroting could also be true, the enterprise WAN has been altering for many years, pushed by waves of expertise change alongside altering enterprise wants.
On this submit, we’ll dig into the emergence of enterprise WANs, how they’ve modified over time, and what the most recent technology of WAN expertise is emphasizing.
Emergence of the enterprise WAN and MPLS expertise
Enterprise WANs emerged within the ’70s and ’80s, permitting enterprises to construct their very own non-public, safe knowledge networks spanning massive geographic areas, enabled by the digitalization of telecom networks and progress within the utilization of laptop techniques.
Early WANs consisted of leased telecom traces utilizing body relay for knowledge transmission and personal department trade (PBX) techniques for voice communications over the identical leased line infrastructure. These authentic enterprise WANs have been extraordinarily rigid and required the enterprise to design, supply, and function every element of the WAN, however they did work!
Within the Nineteen Nineties, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) expertise emerged, providing higher flexibility and scalability than body relay. MPLS supported greater bandwidth ethernet connections, supplied improved high quality of service (QoS), turned cheaper over time, and supported converged voice/video/knowledge providers on the identical line.
Additional, MPLS was supplied by telecom carriers as a managed service providing, making it simpler to roll out and handle than old-school WAN tech, which required fulsome enterprise administration. It is no shock that MPLS turned the dominant enterprise WAN expertise within the 2000s…
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