I pay $30/month for my 4Mbps internet connection at home. Yet many businesses pay about $1000/month for a 1.5Mbps WAN link between HQ and their branch office. How can this be?

Yes, there are significant technical differences between my internet connection and an enterprise WAN link. In the simplest terms, the WAN link’s bandwidth is reliable, while my internet connection’s is not. Businesses need reliability, and have to pay through the nose to get it, leading to a mushrooming of WAN optimization products. These generally use various compression or traffic shaping techniques to extract more juice from a skinny WAN link.

Talari Networks addresses the high cost of WAN links from a different angle. They have developed an $8k appliance that enables businesses to cobble together multiple cheap, unreliable connections (like my internet connection) to create a reliable WAN link. Their proprietary algorithms perform continuous monitoring of network traffic conditions, automatically load balancing traffic across multiple paths and dynamically re-transmitting & re-routing packets in the event of link failure or poor latency.

Cheap WAN links will be a boon for bandwidth-hungry applications like video conferencing, VoIP and ERP/CRM. More fundamentally, they introduce flexibility into how enterprise applications can be architected and deployed.