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Enhanced Internet: What is it and how can it help your enterprise?

Bob Kukic

Senior Solutions Engineer

When you think about it, it’s amazing that the everyday internet works at all.

It’s not one network, but thousands of networks having to co-operate on how they communicate and carry each other’s traffic. And those networks are spread across many countries, spanning hardware both state-of-the-art and decades old, crossing every border and connecting every culture. Yet since the days of dial-up, it’s rattled along okay—and for many households and small businesses it works brilliantly.

But larger businesses—particularly those operating in more than one country—have a larger set of criteria (streaming a movie smoothly is the least of their worries). The data they exchange—often 24 hours a day—represents their competitive advantage, their intellectual property, their means of trading. For many, it’s mission-critical: they simply can’t exist without reliable, available, and above all consistent internet to carry business assets like SD-WAN.

Enter Enhanced Internet.

As mentioned in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking, such services operate over-the-top (OTT) of an Internet underlay, improving the performance and reliability of overlay technologies like SD-WAN  and cloud resources by intelligently optimizing the way traffic is routed and handled.

For many large businesses needing connectivity across countries, these services make it possible to run business-critical applications using nothing more than the Global Internet as their network infrastructure.

And as you’d expect, it’s available from Expereo. Formerly known as Cloud Acceleration, we recently renamed it Enhanced Internet to better describe how it helps today’s enterprise. Let’s explore what it does in more detail.

The public Internet is tolerant of faults and slowdowns: long pings, packet losses, and routing errors don’t make it judder to a halt. Many businesses below a certain size simply put up with this, because they’re not aware of how much of this performance-sapping activity is going on. Within countries with good Internet infrastructure, most users simply won’t notice it. However, when your operations go international, and your data starts crisscrossing national borders, these bottlenecks become obvious.

They occur due to the way different countries approach peering. China, for example, has three major telecommunications entities which don’t have robust peering agreements with each other. And in places where decent bandwidth can be surprisingly pricey, like the Middle East—making latency and packet loss a real drag on costs. And in much of South America, network coverage is patchy and asymmetric, with far higher bandwidth often available to residential areas than business zones.  

There are even more geography-specific challenges to using the public Internet to conduct international business. Fortunately, understanding this is the key to finding a solution.  

Enhanced Internet uses several methods to address the challenges of conducting business over the public Internet. This is what’s special about Expereo’s Enhanced Internet, we’ve actually improved the Internet.

Most business internet services use a POP (Point of Presence) to connect to the broader Internet, typically provided by a local ISP. But plain-old-Internet-service treats all user traffic the same, so your data flows on a best-effort basis across the thousands of networks that make up the Internet, with no priority for your traffic over others.

With our Enhanced IP Core, we have created a reliable, flexible and global infrastructure to support your business connectivity wherever you need it.

Our Enhanced IP Core enables bi-directional enhanced traffic as our IP Nodes are positioned where density is at its highest. This ensures we can optimize the best-performing routes for your application traffic.

A key characteristic of Internet Protocol is the way it doesn’t need to establish a “circuit” (two-way connection) before packets of data start their journey; data essentially makes its own way across the internet, bumping along from node to node (known as “hops”) until it reaches its destination. In today’s world, however, letting packets find their own way there isn’t necessarily the smartest way to behave.

While there’s a reason for this—peering is typically cheaper than IP transit—it also means a best-effort broadband connection tends to perform worse than one with an SLA or other guarantees, like Expereo Enhanced Internet. Because the enhanced service “knows” the route that’ll get your data to its destination fastest, and uses it. ) By contrast, with best-effort, your data’s traveling in third class, with all the “internet weather”—packet loss, latency, and jitter—that affects performance.

Not leaving routing decisions to the default BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) process, but actively selecting the best-performing route between the Expereo Enhanced IP Core and the destination. Best of all, that routing isn’t static—if a better route emerges, your traffic can switch to it. Automatically.

There are many benefits to making Enhanced Internet a part of your connectivity portfolio which range from the strategic to the operational.

As you’d expect, these enhancements positively impact network performance. With owned POPs, your traffic gets both the capacity it needs and the priority you pay for; with intelligent routing, its journey across the middle miles of the global internet happens faster; with optimized cloud, your application access is always-on and always-performing. With under-the-surface problems like latency and packet loss now a non-problem.

Enhanced Internet optimizes your SD-WAN and cloud

These days, a huge volume of customer applications reside in the cloud, so reliable connectivity to those data centers is vital. But many businesses rely on the public Internet and its default routing criteria. Enhanced Internet services can help here too.

By “watching” the network as a whole, Expereo’s Enhanced Internet delivers real-time updates on the best-performing cloud application paths—connecting users in the fastest, most intelligent way available, wherever the applications ultimately reside.

As you’d expect, these enhancements positively impact network performance. With owned POPs, your traffic gets both the capacity it needs and the priority you pay for; with intelligent routing, its journey across the global Internet happens faster; with optimized cloud, your application access is always-on and always-performing. With under-the-surface problems like latency and packet loss becoming a non-issue.

Smoothing out the underlay gives you a better-performing overlay. Since many enterprises are adopting an SD-WAN approach that is perfectly suited to an Internet underlay and cloud strategy, Enhanced Internet gives you the best of both worlds.

With Enhanced Internet, you get the low costs and high flexibility of the public Internet, with the high performance and secure connectivity of a private network.

Our whitepaper provides all the information you need about using Enhanced Internet to improve your application performance, team productivity, and see more revenue opportunities. You can read it in full here.

But if you’re ready to talk to Expereo about using our Enhanced Internet solution to improve application performance and free up your teams for more growth opportunities, get in touch today.