SD WAN implementations can be tricky, which can undermine the success of your project. But with the right advice and help, it’s possible to reap all the benefits of SD WAN and more. Here’s how to get started—and what to watch out for.

 

If you belong to one of the 92% of companies—which according to the State of SD-WAN Study -is expected to adopt SD WAN, you have probably spent plenty of time learning about the technology.

You have likely read what SD WAN is all about (Article 1), and what its multiple benefits are, (Article 2), especially for global, geographically spread-out organisations. It’s even possible you’ve invested time trying to understand how to select an SD WAN technology provider (Article 3).

Now it’s time to roll up those sleeves and get started. But what is your execution strategy? What are the first steps you should take? And what dangers should you avoid? Remember, this stage—when you are planning an SD WAN implementation—is among the most critical to the success of your project. A lack of a comprehensive plan—one that takes into account different stakeholders, application needs, and skill constraints—can result in SD WAN initiatives that go over-budget, witness delays, suffer from architectural errors, or worse, fail. Badly-planned SD WAN deployments do not address the needs of your business, and can create challenges in the future as your organisation decides to migrate more workloads to the cloud, or adopt a SASE (secure access service edge) model.

Here are three recommendations to keep in mind before you start:

Define Your Goals—and Build a Business Case

This might sound obvious, but it is important to define—clearly and upfront—why your organisation wants to leverage SD WAN. More than a few companies have launched SD WAN initiatives drawn in by the buzz around the technology, and not necessarily grounded in a clear business or use case. This path leads to almost certain unhappiness.

Here are a few use cases—and good reasons—to adopt SD WAN. Which of these most resembles your organisation’s needs?

• We want to connect our branches…better. What are the two biggest worries IT teams have with branch offices? User complaints of sluggish applications, and cybersecurity threats. SD WANs help solve both these challenges. With SD WANs users can connect branches to both cloud-based resources and those in central data centres more directly, more securely, and with more control. This results in enhanced performance of branch applications, higher user satisfaction, and lower costs. Leveraging SD WANs to connect branches improves your ability to monitor network health, and uptime by bringing them deeper into the network management fold. A growing number of businesses are embracing SD WAN because they need to connect branches directly to the Internet and cloud-based platforms, bypassing the data centre. In these cases, too, SD WAN can streamline and simplify break-outs, ensuring greater security and manageability.
   
• We’re migrating to the cloud...more. As organisations deploy cloud strategies to drive down costs, and drive up resilience, business agility and innovation, they come face to face with a fairly big hurdle: Existing WANs. While these—typically MPLS-based—networks served them well when traffic from branches, factories, warehouses, and retail stores, among others, were connected to a central data centre, they began to get in the way when companies adopted cloud services such as Salesforce, for example. Traffic from remote locations is unnecessarily backhauled to the data centre, and then dispatched to the cloud, adding latency and inefficiency. With SD WANs, traffic can be routed directly and securely from any location to cloud platforms, while adhering to policy-based rules.
   
• We want the benefits of increased visibility and centralised management to be…enhanced. With SD WANs, network administrators can utilise software-powered overlays and centralised orchestrators to keep tabs on WANs. This allows SD WANs to offer much better network visibility and management than traditional networking models. The result? You can improve capacity planning and connectivity costs; shrink congestion, resolution and failover time; and increase application uptime and performance. The visibility and control that SD WANs provide also increases flexibility and resilience, renders network management more cost-efficient, and empowers administrators to launch new locations, remotely, in a matter of hours.

   

This is not a comprehensive list of use cases for SD WANs, but it will help crystallise your team’s thinking and help answer a key question: What’s the business case for our SD WAN project? Digging deeper into the reasons you want to adopt SD WAN can help finesse the outcomes you hope to achieve, making it easier to land on the metrics that define success—and ground an SD WAN initiative on a financial basis. Is your business expanding geographically, and will an SD WAN help accelerate the speed-to-value of getting new locations live? What’s cost to the business of not having this capability? Answering questions such as these can often require creating a baseline, which can then serve to better gauge whether deploying an SD WAN will create the right amount of ROI (return on investment).

Start Small—and Learn Fast

SD WAN initiatives can be complex, with many moving parts, and a number of location-specific variables. This is why attempting a big-bang, multi-region roll-out can be fraught with danger. It is strategically sound to start small, observe how applications perform in a new environment, and fine-tune the solution—rather than having to re-engineer a full-fledged SD-WAN deployment.

It is also a good idea because it is important for the long-term success of an SD WAN project to create small wins—at the start—to generate positive momentum within the organisation and its business users.

A good practice is to run proof of concepts or small experiments at sites that are not business critical. This approach de-risks the business while still serving to help your team understand the potential and non-obvious challenges that are associated with an SD WAN project. It will help answer critical questions such as: How does the new technology affect existing applications? How much automation are we able to achieve? How much faster are we able to deploy new sites? Does SD WAN meet quality-of-service expectations, across a range of employee types? How do different workloads—ERP, CRM, business intelligence, disaster recovery, among others—react within an SD WAN? Remember not all applications have the same needs. Some are sensitive to latency and delays, others to packet loss, yet others to jitter and bandwidth variance.

These smaller, less-risky undertakings form a foundation for learning, which will come handy when you decide to scale up an SD WAN deployment. They also serve as a testbed to help gauge the results of your project, allowing you to monitor how it stacks up against pre-defined success metrics.

Choose a Deployment Model—That’s Aligned to Your Needs

There are a number of approaches to deploying SD WANs. These include:

• DIY (Do-it-Yourself)
• Fully-Managed
• Co-Managed

Each of these strategies have pros and cons, which makes it important to evaluate them and work out the right approach for your specific business.

DIY Approach: Do-It-Yourself models are best-suited for organisations that have IT teams with a deep set of networking skills. It requires that internal professionals—preferably with a mature NetOps practices—are responsible for provisioning, managing, optimising, and troubleshooting SD WANs. This approach, because of its talent requirements, is not very popular.

Managed Approach. These types of deployments come in two flavours: Fully-managed—in which a service provider takes full responsibility of the end-to-end deployment and maintenance of an SD WAN—and co-managed, in which internal teams share responsibilities with service providers. Typically, internal teams are not burdened with day-to-day network maintenance tasks, but are still in charge of important decisions, and sometimes play a role in resolution management.

Managed SD WAN models have, over time, become the pre-dominant way businesses chose to deploy SD WANs, with 77% of organisations opting for it, according to a Survey by consulting firm, Altman Solon.

It’s a popular choice for good reason. Given the technical complexities, and the multi-stakeholder challenges involved in standing up and operating an SD WAN, many companies see the benefits of accessing the competencies and best practices that come with partnering with a managed service provider (MSP).

TM Global—the global and wholesale business arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM)—offers a managed service model, in which it is responsible for the entire SD WAN deployment, from end-to-end. With its professional services, TM Global can help design an SD WAN tailored to your organisation’s constraints and future-plans. Its managed service experts can source, execute, monitor, and optimise SD WANs, complete with a 24x7 contact centre and local field support.

TM Global offers Global SD WAN packages in three flavours: SD-Lite, a cost-effective, Internet-based solution; SD-Pro for businesses which require a mix of private and public links to support both mission-critical and non-core applications; and SD-Flex, an a-la-carte option for enterprises that need the flexibility of working with existing connectivity contracts.

With TM Global, you also get an enhanced security suite; SD-WAN dashboards and analytics to monitor the network; and Cloud-on-Ramp capabilities for improved network performance, especially of SaaS services such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.

TM Global’s SD WAN covers over 190 countries, and supports multiple network topologies, including hub-spoke, full mesh, partial mesh. It offers a range of connectivity types—from 1 Mbps to 10Gbps—including broadband Internet, dedicated Internet access (DIA), mobile LTE, IPVPN, satellite, and global private meshed backbone. Additionally, it has a BYOC (Bring Your Own Connectivity) option.

Speak to a TM Global’s SD WAN expert today. Set your organisation on a path that enables it to tap into the full range of benefits SD WANs can offer including improved network security, manageability, agility, and costs.

 

Learn how edge gaming can boost gaming experience—and deliver long-term benefits to stay ahead of the curve.

 

The gaming market is booming at a rate we have never witnessed before. Consider this: The gaming market will grow at a CAGR of 9.3% between 2020-2027. Globally, today, there are over 1.48 billion players and 55% of those are in the Asia Pacific region.

That puts pressure on gaming providers to stay ahead of the industry. Gaming is a real-time experience. When thousands of players engage in a digitally-intensive, heavy-graphics game at the same time, latency plays spoilt sport.

Data processing workloads are, normally, shared between the user’s console and the cloud. That means, image processing rates have a huge impact on overall user experience.

Today, gaming images have moved from standard definition to HD and now to 4K. As the adoption of VR and AR increases, frame sizes will reach 8K levels.

Cloud gaming alone cannot shoulder this load. The gaming industry needs to configure its networks with edge computing to locate servers as close to gamers as possible.

Edge computing is revolutionising the gaming industry. It’s bringing about a paradigm shift in how gaming is consumed. Here are a few instances of how edge gaming is taking gaming to the next level.

Enhanced Multiplayer Experience

As gaming becomes more accessible and digital, gamers want a more collaborative, real-time, and multiplayer strategy games on any device. Multiplayer games demand increased device processing and drain device batteries.

Also, multiplayer gaming is latency-sensitive and bandwidth-intensive. By matching a gamer to their location and installing edge servers closer to them, latency can be reduced significantly. This, in turn, will decrease lag.

The downside of centralised public clouds is that they are placed far away from the user. That results in high network latency, packet loss and jitter. This increases round trip data delivery times, thereby adversely impacting performance, and gamer churn.

Edge gaming enables gaming companies to process data locally and reduce the distance data needs to travel. This reduces public internet congestion problems, delivering better user experience, greater loyalty, and, as a result, higher profitability.

Augmenting Leader-boards and Player Matchmaking

Matching thousands of players at the same geographic location—and skill level—is a core ingredient of games that attract players.

Edge gaming enables player lists to be stored in servers that are placed close to the client. Players can be grouped more quickly, thereby allowing them to enter games faster, and getting games with low player counts off the ground.

At the same time, gaming companies can optimise the most popular features and face-offs by storing player data and lists of most commonly matched players where they can be accessed quickly.

While players can play a game with anyone across the world, it’s easier to start a quick game with a player who shares the same time zone. Based on data stored on edge servers, a local matchmaking server could throw suggestions for a player to start a game with a known player within their region.

Enabling Powerful Computing Capability

The primary objective of mobile edge computing is to provide storage and computational resources close to a user at the network edge.

Today, most gaming solutions demand enormous amounts of compute, processing and data storage capabilities. But mobile devices aren’t able to keep up with the needs of gamers. The cloud can only do so much.

Gaming requires faster connectivity from telecom providers and internet exchanges. With low-latency networking, the access, availability, and experience of gaming from the end device will improve significantly.

With edge gaming, the network edge is infused with remarkable computing, intelligence, hardware speed and storage capabilities. As more complex and data-intensive games hit the market, the significance of edge gaming will become even more pronounced.

Protecting Game Servers Against DDoS Attacks

Games have always suffered at the hands of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks occur when hackers block a target server or network with traffic and deny access to users. DDoS attacks result in lag, disconnection, and ping spikes, that are disruptive to gamers.

When a gaming system is attacked by DDoS, the entire gaming session becomes extremely slow and unplayable. This gives the attacker immense advantage. A case in point is the recent DDoS attack by Apex Legends players. When they were killed in a game, they would use DDoS attacks to overload the game’s servers and gain an advantage.

A new generation of hyperscale DDoS attacks, spurred on by 5G, are going to give gaming companies sleepless nights. Edge gaming offer DDoS protection. Edge gaming filters data and runs it through a scrubbing process. This ensures only clean data enters a gaming facility, thereby preventing DDoS attacks.

Expanding User Base

As user growth begins to shrink in developed markets, Southeast Asia is emerging as a fertile opportunity for gaming companies looking to expand their foothold.

Edge computing helps companies gain ground in emerging markets throughout Southeast Asia, India, and LATAM—places where gamers are increasingly taking to online gaming. Today, according to a survey by Google , over 82% of Southeast Asia's urban online population are gamers. That’s a huge market by itself.

By leveraging edge computing, gaming providers can bring services to new markets with lower operational cost and scalability. It is crucial for gaming companies to work with an edge gaming provider who has extensive POPs, API integration with ISPs, and compatibility with all devices.

TM Edge Gaming offers exactly that and more. It is a holistic edge gaming ecosystem that leverages TM’s edge facility located closer to the end user to provide a high quality, reliable, stable, and immersive digital gaming experience. TM can double up as a telco provider and an edge gaming provider that delivers an end-to-end solution that ensures gaming services are always on. Another advantage of partnering with TM is that it is a major telco player in Southeast Asia, and can help gaming providers explore this new and emerging gaming market.

Take gaming to the next level with TM Edge Gaming.

 

Providing users with great, engaging content is no longer enough to build a robust service and win loyal users. In an increasingly crowded market, a fast and seamless viewing and download experience is gaining importance as a key distinguishing factor in helping your brand get ahead of the competition. Find out how a CDN can help your organisation improve loading times, reduce bandwidth costs, and increase global availability.

 

In recent years, advances in digital technology have led businesses to seek more effective methods of delivering content. The increased presence of the internet in daily life has allowed more consumers to do their shopping and secure services online. Furthermore, the improvement in internet speeds has made it possible for more complex websites with rich media to become the norm. To add to this, the expectations of consumers have risen as they expect to be able to access services immediately and with little to no delay.

This has resulted in the rise of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). CDNs are networks of geographically distributed servers that enable content distribution to users faster.

Read more: Content market in southeast Asia & why CDN is important.

As businesses strive to meet the demands of ever-growing global audiences, an increasing number are turning to CDNs to ensure quick and seamless content delivery. This is because CDNs provide many benefits, many of which are direct results of how CDNs operate. Some benefits even arise as a consequence of others.

Decrease Server Load

Recall that a CDN is a network of servers located in different geographical areas that are used to deliver content. This content is not stored on one central server but is instead spread out across Point of Presence. This prevents any one server from becoming overloaded, which improves the CDN's overall capacity utilisation, reduces the usage of upstream bandwidth and delivery costs, and improves performance for concurrent users.

Improve Website Speed and Performance

Businesses that rely on their website's content delivery speed can benefit immensely from CDNs. Any significant delay in page load times can result in users bouncing off the web page, exiting the site, or even moving to a competitor's website.

Businesses can improve website content performance for end-users by using CDNs. CDNs do this by caching content on servers closest to the end-users. The cached content can include HTML code, image files, live video feeds, and JavaScript.

This means that when an end-user requests a page or content on the website, the request does not have to go to the origin server. The end-user can access the web content from the servers nearest to them, which minimises the delay and improves web performance.

Allow Audience Segmentation Based on User Analytics

One potential benefit of CDNs that is often overlooked is their ability to provide valuable insights into the audience. CDNs today handle a significant amount of the world's internet traffic, collecting vast amounts of data on users, including their internet connectivity, device usage, and more. This data can be translated into helpful analytics, which can be used in decision-making.

Analysing user data, such as real-time load statistics, capacity per customer, most active areas, and the popularity of different content assets, can help businesses understand trends and content consumption patterns. This information can be used to optimise the website, improve the user experience, and contribute to more sales and conversions.

Reduce Packet Loss and Lower Network Latency

When transmitting information across devices over the internet, such as from a website to an end-user, it is done through packets. These packets are small units of data that contain information about the network addresses of the source and destination, error detection and correction rules, protocol identifiers and more, along with the application or website data.

Suppose packets must travel long distances and pass through many devices before reaching the end-user. In that case, some packets may be lost or delayed, reducing the user experience quality. This is especially problematic for high-definition video, audio, or live streaming content, which can experience issues such as out-of-sync audio, display distortions, and choppy audio. All these issues can be overcome with CDN solutions.

Enable Advanced Website Security

One of the indirect benefits of CDN services is that they improve website security. By distributing content across their edge servers, CDNs can help avoid web server overloads. This also makes it more difficult for cyber attacks that rely on sending traffic spikes to key servers.

Attackers often target DNS servers in DDoS attacks, where a large volume of requests are sent in an attempt to overwhelm the server and bring down the website. This can cause economic losses and reputation damage and lead to other more severe hacks and attacks. CDNs can help to shield DDoS attacks by distributing the load evenly across the entire capacity of the network and protecting data centres.

Enhance Content Availability

As the internet increasingly becomes media-rich, businesses must ensure their website content is highly available to meet consumer demands. With high traffic comes the pressure to prevent websites from crashing and maintain content availability.

CDNs can absorb traffic and distribute it across the infrastructure, thereby increasing content availability regardless of load. Using a CDN with multiple Points of Presence (PoPs) ensures that your traffic will be uninterrupted even if one server goes down. The top-tier CDNs additionally have load balancing functionality, which allows them to automatically sense availability and redirect users and requests accordingly. This provides 100% uptime for your users.

Contribute to Cost Savings by Reducing Bandwidth

CDNs also help reduce costs by optimising the bandwidth used by a business. If the volume of requests to a website is constantly high, this can consume correspondingly high bandwidth, driving up costs. CDNs help reduce the bandwidth demands on origin servers, reducing bandwidth and web hosting costs for website owners.

A CDN provider can help businesses save on the costs associated with setting up infrastructure, hosting and servers across the globe. With a CDN, businesses only need to pay according to the traffic and amount of requests. Some CDN providers offer self-service and optimisation features that give businesses more granular control over costs and performance.

Increase Audience Reach and Scale Effectively

CDNs allow businesses to reach a larger global audience by making it easier and more affordable to deliver content to users in distant geographic locations. They also help to ensure a consistent user experience, which is essential for customer satisfaction. Happy customers tend to stick around, leading to a snowball effect that accelerates audience expansion and allows businesses to scale into new markets effectively.

TM CDN

With over 90 nodes worldwide and a deep in-country presence in ASEAN, TM CDN offers a variety of built-in features to solve your most pressing delivery challenges, including content protection and asset optimisation. Meanwhile, robust customisation tools and components let you fine-tune your delivery's most minor details and even create unique functionality and flows.

TM WHOLESALE communication services and solutions offer a reliable and secure connection that can help improve traffic control on your local or wide-area networks. You can also use our suite of services to improve application performance and availability or protect your data from disaster. You can choose the option that best meets your needs with a range of services that include advanced IP with Quality of Service routing, to the flexibility of Ethernet, and data networking services.

 

For more information on how a CDN could enhance your business, take a look at TM CDN solutions and our integrated telco services portfolio. Get in touch today for a pricing breakdown and free consultation with a TM CDN specialist.

 

Gaming is changing. The advent of AR and VR, 5G, and the uptick of the multiverse and metaverse, are redefining the expectations of gamers. Find out how edge computing can help you keep up with gaming trends and meet user expectations to stay ahead of the curve.

 

With more people streaming videos, playing games, and buying things online, Southeast Asia's CDN market is showing the strongest growth momentum. Reducing the time it takes for each piece of data to travel from the host server to the client will provide lower latency and a more optimised user experience. Find out why a reliable content delivery network is a worthy investment if you want to maintain high-quality Web performance and user experience as you grow your online presence.

 

Did you know? 2020 saw a whopping 40 million new internet users in Southeast Asia. What's more? 70 per cent of the region's population is now online. And over 90 per cent of those 400 million strong users intend to continue using digital platforms post-pandemic. This significant uptick in internet usage in recent years has made Southeast Asia one of the most lucrative markets for content providers, application developers, and OTT providers. With a population fast approaching 700 million people and a combined GDP valued at over USD 3 trillion, Southeast Asia is among the fastest-growing economies in the world. Being located at the centre of a dynamic APAC region, operators and content owners must expand their horizons to harness the benefits that come with growth.

Expanding to Southeast Asia: the Opportunities and Obstacles

While in 2021, the online media market in Southeast Asia stood at USD 22 billion, it is expected to grow to a staggering USD 43 billion by 2025. In fact, the advent of rapid technological development, content consumption, and distribution is swiftly driving a sea change in Southeast Asia's Content Delivery Network (CDN) market. The rising demand for Over the Top (OTT) and Video-on-Demand (VOD) services, combined with the increase in demand for enhanced video content and latency-free online gaming experience, is expediting Southeast Asian CDN market growth.

However, delivering top-tier online videos can be challenging. Content files are getting larger, and users expect HD streaming to happen instantly. Broadcasters who value quality are incorporating live streaming CDNs to meet this growing demand.

The modern Web is a mixture of text, images, audio, and video, with data centres around the world supplying information on a 24/7 basis. However – as the internet gets more congested – streaming performance suffers, and end-users grow frustrated.

To combat this problem, organisations are turning to CDNs to provide greater bandwidth, reliability, and security for their content and websites. Used extensively by social media networks, entertainment companies, e-commerce brands, and enterprise businesses, CDNs are quickly (and reliably) making inroads into the Southeast Asian market.

CDN Explained

A CDN allows content providers to distribute content across different geographical locations. A CDN is a network of proxy servers located at various places around the world, which can store a variety of content types such as images, audio, and video files. When a user opens a streaming platform and tries to access a piece of content, the file is usually served from the proxy server closest to their location rather than the origin server. Therefore, enabling faster web performance by locating copies of web content closer to users or facilitating the delivery of dynamic content (e.g., live video feeds).

By reducing the distance between this content and users, the content delivery network helps the website publisher provide faster performance, reduce loading time for its users and control its own bandwidth consumption and costs.

CDN: A vast (Southeast Asia) Market Entry Opportunity

Thanks to high-speed network rollout, reduced data cost, rising demand for video/OTT services, and the surging internet consumption in all formats during and after the pandemic, the next 5-10 years are anticipated to be a crucial growth period for the Southeast Asia digital economy. The disruptive growth is due to the growing number of internet subscribers, the massive mobile internet consumption, and the thriving of e-commerce, live gaming, and online education in Asia, especially in India, China, and Southeast Asia.

Let's take a close look at how content providers stand to benefit from CDNs.

• Localised Data and Seamless Usage:

When you're using a CDN, the content will be served to the website visitors from the node nearest to their physical locations. This way, the data does not have to travel through multiple nodes to reach a web visitor, speeding up the content delivery time. It is important to remember that this method's effectiveness depends on your CDN provider's data centre locations.

• Decreased Bandwidth Consumption:

Web hosting companies charge businesses for the data transferred from the origin servers. A content delivery network can store web content copies closer to the end-users, which would reduce the amount of data needed to be transferred from the origin servers, and in turn, lower enterprise costs and bandwidth consumption.

• Lower Latency:

End-users typically request data from a system, and the system responds by transferring the  data. Latency is the amount of time that elapses between the request and the response. The latency increases as the distance between the end-user and the server increases. CDN servers are located nearer to the end-user, on the "network edge," which reduces latency and improves performance.

• Effective Traffic Spike Management:

When a video goes viral, a successful marketing campaign is launched, a new feature and patch is released, or a limited-time offer is available, the demand for content can suddenly spike. Load balancing can help distribute the demand across web servers so that traffic spikes do not affect website performance.

• Enhanced Cybersecurity:

A content delivery network uses automation and data analytics tools to identify firewall issues, MITM (Man in the Middle) threats, and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

• Amplifies User Satisfaction:

The primary reasons end-users avoid or abandon particular websites are media playback issues, unresponsive applications, and slow load times. A content delivery network minimises these performance issues, leading to increased user satisfaction.

• Accelerated eCommerce:

A content delivery network (CDN) enables faster loading of product pages on mobile and desktop devices, thereby improving the shopping experience. CDN also allows B2B and B2C eCommerce retailers to deliver applications and content, even during peak traffic rapidly.

Content Delivery Network and TM Global

As content becomes increasingly large, dynamic, and diverse, end-users expect faster, more flawless delivery than ever before. With over 50 CDN nodes within ASEAN alone, TM CDN has comprehensive built-in capabilities to solve delivery challenges, including content protection and asset optimisation, as well as robust customisation tools and features to fine-tune delivery details and even create unique functionality and flows. TM CDN solutions ensure top-notch reliability and speed for your content while keeping operating costs and complexity to a minimum.

If you're ready to partner with a top-tier CDN provider, check out TM CDN and our integrated telco services portfolio. And learn how TM CDN can play a major role in deciding the success of your web applications and websites.

 

When you consider embracing global ethernet services, what comes to mind? Is it saving money on staff and hardware costs? Or is it more about access to a global market and the ability to scale as needed? Perhaps there's a little of both. Regardless of why you're considering global ethernet services, you need to do your research first. Here are some things that need to be considered before making the leap.

 

Between 2019 and last year, the global internet capacity grew by 35%. IoT, Cloud, Mobility, and other high-growth applications are also constantly evolving, making access to information and data more important than ever before. Today’s enterprises require a network that can keep up with the demands of this new digital age. To meet these needs, it is vital for businesses, small or large, to choose a global ethernet service provider that is ready to provide the reliable high-speed connectivity they need wherever their users are located.

Ethernet services powered by a private global Ethernet over Multiprotocol Label Switching (EoMPLS)/Layer 2 network is a secure and reliable way to connect geographically dispersed locations over the public Internet. It provides organisations with a communication network that is completely dependable, fast, flexible, and cost-effective. Global ethernet can provide scalable and fast transport for data, voice, and video traffic across all major industries: energy, financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and government.

It is evident that ethernet services are one of the most important parts of a business’s network. So when you choose a global ethernet service provider, it's really important to make sure they can provide you with enough bandwidth, high-quality care and support, fast speeds, and fair prices. There are many different things to consider when choosing an ethernet services provider. TM WHOLESALE, a premier communication solutions and services company in the ASEAN region, lists the five key criteria you need to consider.

Network Coverage and Reach

Network coverage is the lifeblood of any organisation. Whether it's a major corporation or a small business, connecting and sharing information with all parts of an organisation irrespective of the location is vital for success. This includes employees as well as customers, vendors, and partners. So if you are looking forward to building your enterprise network or want to expand your existing network to meet the demands of your business, check the network coverage offered by the service provider. Do all of your desired locations fall under the network carrier’s footprint, and can they offer international coverage? The reach and coverage of the service provider will directly impact issues such as latency, jitter, resilience, and cost.

Network Project Management and Monitoring

Network engineers and managers face many challenges every day. One of the most daunting of these is managing large networks, especially those with multi-site or international elements. Complex networks require constant maintenance to run smoothly. Proactive management can result in reduced costs and downtimes, as well as enhanced security. Businesses need to understand the details of pricing and the scope of services offered under this category before signing on with a network management company; do they monitor the entire network? Can they provide managed services, freeing up internal IT staff?

Complete Network Security

The pandemic has amplified the cybersecurity fears of Singapore leaders. According to an IBM Institute of Business Value report, 77% of Singapore executives plan to prioritise cybersecurity over the next two years.

All the devices of your business are connected to each other in one way or another, which means they're all vulnerable to security breaches. Whether it's a laptop, smartphone, tablet, or wired computer, network security is an important issue that you must always be aware of in order to keep your data safe. A weak connection can allow hackers in and compromise your sensitive information. Businesses need to review the security capabilities of their global ethernet service providers closely. For example, businesses should ensure that their service provider has access to a dedicated security infrastructure to support and monitor the network. Security experts are necessary for monitoring and maintaining uptime to guarantee that the business’s data remains secure.

Compare SLAs and Check References

Another way to evaluate the capabilities of a service provider is to check the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) offered. According to TM WHOLESALE, a well-written SLA sets the expectations right from the onset - what services will be provided and under what circumstances. They also provide a framework for how any problems or issues will be handled and resolved if they arise. Most established providers in the market will offer SLAs. If they have been around long enough to have a proven track record, most providers will be willing to back their services with an SLA. It is worth comparing service level agreements of several network providers to get the best deal. You can also look at their existing clients and check references from those to evaluate their performance.

Class of Service and Quality of Service

Companies must evaluate and understand the Classes of Service (CoS) offered by the carrier. The way a carrier consolidates and prioritises various types of traffic will affect Quality of Service (QoS). It is important that these CoSs match your business requirements, and the contract with the service provider clearly defines and states these service commitments.

 

While the points mentioned above form a base to shortlist a good global ethernet services provider, other considerations should be made. The routing protocols used by the provider, staff expertise, partnerships with 3rd parties, and future scalability capabilities all must be taken into account when choosing a provider.

It’s easy to make decisions centered only on the bottom line. However, you need to consider your business’s needs and goals and how those needs will change in the future. After all, your global ethernet will form the backbone of your business for a long time to come.

TM WHOLESALE is a leading global provider of connectivity, data, infrastructure, voice, and multimedia services. Learn how TM WHOLESALE’s communications and connectivity solutions help organisations take an integrated approach to adapting and accelerating their digital transformation initiatives.

For more info about TM WHOLESALE’s Global Ethernet, click here

EVP TM Wholesale, Amar Huzaimi Md Deris was invited to speak on APAC's Next Network Hub on September 9, 2022, at Equinix's Asia Peering Forum, representing TM alongside other APAC telco leaders from Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

In response to the discussion on Singapore's current space/power limitations and DC moratorium, among others, Amar emphasized how TM is prepared to attend to the global requirements for network and connectivity into APAC and ASEAN specifically, leveraging extensive infrastructure.

“Malaysia is already well-established within the global submarine cable network. For TM, which strives to be the nation’s preferred network infrastructure provider, we possesses 30 submarine cables with reachability and extensive regional coverage spanning over 320,000 kilometres, from Malaysia to Intra-ASEAN, to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This is also in line with our aspiration to position Malaysia as a digital hub. Hence we believe that we are the ideal service provider upon whom you can trust to deliver reliable, diversified and uninterrupted global connectivity solutions.”

IP Transit services and internet exchanges (IX) are changing the way we communicate every day. They are opening up new opportunities for organisations to expand their reach, enhance customer experience, and increase profitability. Find out how IP Transit and IX are redefining business across the world. 

 

We are increasingly living in a connected world. The power of connectivity, brought about by the Internet, touches every fabric of our businesses and our lives so seamlessly that we no longer remember how the world existed so long without it. Today, it is the oxygen on which our economies, society, governance, and businesses run.

This became more evident when the COVID-19 pandemic hit us and brought the entire planet to a standstill.

But as they say, the show must go on. And, thanks to the Internet, it did.

It was, at a difficult time such as the pandemic, that we began to recognize the real significance of the Internet. Without the Internet, there would have been no semblance of business-as-usual. Without the Internet, work-from-home would have remained a distant dream. And without the Internet, businesses would have had to shut their doors and bid farewell to productivity, revenue, and profitability—even their existence.

But just the Internet was not going to cut it. Two forces came together to ensure businesses thrive in the new normal: IP Transit and Internet Exchanges (IX).

IP Transit is a service where an ISP allows traffic to pass through its network to reach the rest of the Internet—or its final destination. In order to access all Internet routes, businesses need to connect to all the autonomous systems out there. They need to avail the services of an ISP who has access to reach any network on the Internet.

At an Internet Exchange or IX, networks connect and exchange traffic, as the name suggests. It is a physical network access point through which primary network providers connect their networks and exchange traffic. The primary aim of an IX is to keep local Internet traffic within a confined area, improve the quality of service, and cut costs. Simply put, an IX offers a neutral local network where any carrier, ISP or network operator can connect and exchange traffic.

Let’s look at how IP Transit and IX empower businesses with a host of advantages.
 

The Benefits of IP Transit and Internet Exchanges

IP Transit and IX provide several and far-reaching benefits for businesses and wholesale companies.

With IP Transit, businesses like yours, can build an international digital footprint and establish a robust digital connection with customers, partners, and investors across the world. IP Transit services also enable global reachability, provide consistent digital experience, optimise network efficiency, enhance customer experience, and improve network performance.

They provide businesses with the ability to expand their service portfolio and reach new markets. They offer superior peering services that reduce the number of hops, enabling businesses with faster bandwidth.

Take for instance why minimising hops is crucial for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and telco carriers. Today, ISPs, and telco carriers are constantly thriving to meet the changing needs of businesses through extensive coverage, guaranteed performance and operational efficiency. IP Transit and IX  interconnect eyeball networks with minimal hops, provide access to an extensive number of direct connections and the global routing table.

IP Transit and IX, enable route optimisation and high-performance networking and empower businesses with the necessary throughput for critical business transactions. The availability, flexibility and scalability of IP Transit services and IX allow businesses to bring new applications to market quickly and cost-effectively.

Gateway to the World: IP Transit

TM Wholesale, offers IP Transit services with Clean Pipe, Direct Peering, single ASN, and Tier 1 capabilities. TM has the largest Internet subscriber base in Malaysia, and is one of the biggest regional ISPs. TM owns close to 30 submarine cables spanning over 300,000 km worldwide. It offers extensive global connectivity with other Tier 1 providers and direct peering with major content providers and OTTs. Recently, TM Wholesale added 2 new PoPs in East Malaysia.

What’s more? TM IP Transit delivers a complete carrier-class security portfolio and time-critical performance through a dedicated security monitoring portal. It also enables visibility and real-time performance reporting of IP Transit services with 24/7 customer support. It offers SLAs with KPIs of high quality, customer satisfaction, packet delivery, and IP port availability.

With TM IP Transit you can extend reachability with peering relationships with other global Tier-1 ISPs to ensure short-hop connectivity to global content. TM IP Transit is one of the biggest Regional Tier 1 ISPs in Asia.

Connecting Malaysia & ASEAN : TMiX

TMiX is the newest regional Internet exchange in Malaysia. It delivers unmatched performance and experience allowing businesses to grow and extend access to the Malaysian market and beyond, while ensuring the highest levels of customer experience and cost efficiency.

It is an open and neutral platform established to help Malaysia-based providers, international carriers, content providers, OTTs, and hyperscalers peer and physically connect to an IX point in Malaysia. TMiX ensures domestic traffic does not have to take indirect international routes, making it more cost-effective for users.

TMiX is designed as single Point of Interconnect (POI), via TM AS4788, to reach extensively into Malaysia. With a total strength of 62 nodes—TMiX ensures high-performing connectivity across Malaysia. It poses a significant cost benefit for smaller ISPs by reducing the dependency on costly international links. This translates into cost efficiency for TMiX customers.

Today, as more businesses like yours, gear up for digital transformation—to enhance customer experience, enable competitive differentiation and innovation, and achieve profitability by adopting new technologies—IP Transit and IX will play a significant role in breaking connectivity barriers and opening up a world of opportunities.

 

Collaboration signifies TM’s commitment to expand cloud gaming in the ASEAN region, leveraging Radian Arc’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Edge Point of Presence

 

TM Wholesale, the domestic and international wholesale business arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), today announced a partnership with cloud infrastructure provider Radian Arc to expand its cloud gaming offerings in Malaysia and other ASEAN countries. 

The collaboration will see both parties leveraging each other’s strengths to provide users with high-quality content and cloud-gaming experiences.  

Through this partnership, both companies will collaborate to deploy a new point of presence (PoP) in Malaysia, utilising Radian Arc’s proprietary GPU Edge technology. This PoP will enhance TM Wholesale’s cloud-based gaming solutions as well as other real-time applications that use similar technology.  

The availability of this robust platform ensures that these central processing units (CPUs) can provide relevant applications at a lower cost to serve.

Following the rollout of the cloud gaming platform, TM Wholesale and Radian Arc intend to make an array of cloud-based applications, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IOT) accessible to users in order to accelerate digital transformation and adoption, which is pivotal to Malaysia's digital aspirations. 

Radian Arc is also partnering with cloud gaming platform Blacknut to bring their games catalogue to the region, reinforcing TM Wholesale’s vision of providing better cloud gaming solutions. Through this partnership, TM Wholesale will be able to offer over 500 family-friendly premium games to service providers, with lower latency and faster start times for their customers. 

Commenting on the collaboration, Amar Huzaimi Md Deris, Executive Vice President of TM Wholesale said, “TM Wholesale has always been committed to promoting Malaysia's transition to an advanced digital economy, and given the meteoric rise of cloud gaming, we’ve shifted gears to put this into a higher drive.

“Our collaboration with Radian Arc is among our efforts to fulfil the demands of the gaming industry, while exploring opportunities in other emerging technologies such as cloud and edge computing, and ensure customers enjoy high-quality digital experiences. 

“This is in line with our aspiration to position Malaysia as a regional digital hub and expand our reach via edge computing platforms to provide better user experience for next-generation applications and games,” he added. 

“As we continue to expand access to cloud gaming around the world, we want to find partners who can elevate our service offerings to telcos and improve the gaming experiences we provide to players,” said David Cook, CEO of Radian Arc. “The collaboration will also look into possibilities for future applications leveraging TM’s extensive network coverage, allowing us and Blacknut to improve the quality of cloud gaming for customers in Malaysia and the surrounding regions.”

The collaboration with Radian Arc symbolizes a new era of gaming for TM, harnessing the benefits of GPU Edge technology to deliver high-quality digital experiences to end users.
 

TM Wholesale returned to Atlanta for International Telecoms Week 2022 (ITW), led by Executive Vice President Amar Huzaimi Md Deris.
 
During the event, which took place from May 9 to May 12, 2022, TM Wholesale promoted key products such as TM Edge Services, Data solutions including IP Transit, and Global SD-WAN via a virtual exhibition booth in addition to having dedicated physical meeting rooms to discuss voice and connectivity solutions with customers.
 
Taking advantage of ITW as one of the world's largest gatherings of communications executives from all sectors of the global communications industry, TM delegates, comprised of TM Wholesale's management, products, and sales team, as well as the team from TM's regional office in the United States, have the opportunity to engage with carriers and operators from new markets.