TM Wholesale attended AsiaTech x Singapore 2022 for CommunicAsia and BroadcastAsia from June 1 to 3, 2022, to meet with the APAC media community and discuss the recent trends in the  broadcast industry, content, production, as well as eSport, gaming and investments.

TM Wholesale delegates led by EVP Amar Huzaimi Md Deris and TM regional office in Singapore were able to attract a crowd to the booth set up to promote TM Wholesale’s edge services that includes CDN and gaming solutions.   

SD WAN is taking the enterprise by storm. Read on to find the easiest explanation of what SD WAN is, the challenges it solves, and discover the speed and intensity of its growth.

Driven largely by increased digitalisation and raised by the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) wave, SD WAN has garnered a lot of attention in the last few quarters. This is an excellent trend because the technology solves a lot of critical problems organisations face, especially for fast-growing, global companies.

Unfortunately, there is still plenty of mystery around the technology. Despite gaining popularity in 2014 (the technology has been around since 2000), there’s a sizeable pocket of business, and technology leaders and practitioners who are less-than-comfortable articulating its definition, and its benefits to the enterprise.

In fact, a lack of knowledge is the second biggest barrier to SD WAN adoption, according to The Global State of the WAN Report, with 33% of organisations reporting it as a challenge. Another 30% say the “technology’s newness” is a hurdle to adoption.

                                                                                                                                    Source: The Global State of the WAN Report

It is time to clear up these doubts!

Read on and by the end, you will be able to describe what SD WAN is, explain it to your colleagues, list out its key benefits, demonstrate why—and how much—it is being adopted.

SD WAN: The Simplest Explanation You Will Find Anywhere

Imagine you oversee the travel desk for your office. Everyone depends on you to get them from your office in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia to a regional office in Bangkok, Thailand. There are a couple of ways to move people:

● By air (planes)

● By sea (ship)

● By rail

● Or by road

In the SD WAN world, these are called the transport layer, or the underlay (remember those words, we will come back to them). It is the medium on which data travels.

It is important for you to move people cost-effectively, safely, and reliably. To do so you must choose the most optimal route and transport medium based on different types of employees.

Network engineers have a similar challenge. Not all traffic on a wide area network (WAN) is equal. For example, some mission-critical systems require high uptime, while Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) traffic requires a high level of service quality. Network leaders must decide which is the best transport layer to use, based on traffic type, to have the highest cost-effectiveness, security, and performance, for different types of traffic.

Network operations teams also have to move data between more points—not just between KL and Bangkok. On a WAN, they are steering traffic between hundreds of points, using multiple types of transport layers. To do so effectively, they use rules or policies.

But rules need to be changed flexibly because of the exigencies of the real world: Some traffic suddenly needs to prioritised, or a transport layer goes down, for example.

So, network operators need to be agile. This is where SD WANs come in. With SD WAN technology, they can use software to centrally control routers and other equipment which helps them steer traffic, centrally, sitting in one place.

How is this possible? SD WAN introduces a software layer, called the overlay, on top of the underlay. The overlay enables network teams to manage WANs using a central, software-based orchestrator—eliminating the need to provision or program each network device separately (which is why you might have heard of the concept of zero-provisioning.) The overlay and orchestrator are where the idea of abstraction comes in: Network teams are abstracted from the worries of managing the physical elements of a network.

Now from a central location, using a software console, network teams can set up policies that shunt traffic easily, immaterial of the transport layer, which is what the term transport-agnostic means. SD WANs are also application-aware, i.e., they can recognise different types of traffic and prioritise one over the other, intelligently.

The Goodness of SD WAN

As you can tell, there are a ton of benefits from using an SD WAN—especially when you compare them to the more rigid, more expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology that dominates WAN architectures. Implemented correctly, SD WAN offers greater visibility, agility, security, performance, and intelligence than MPLS. Additionally, MPLS is less-suited for the dynamic traffic patterns that arise with the adoption of cloud services. While there is research proving that SD WANs are being adopted at the cost of MPLS, many large enterprises leverage SD WAN to augment existing MPLS set-ups.

SD WAN’s agility and efficiency benefits really begin to multiply when you run a complex, global business that must stitch together hundreds of offices, warehouses, outlets, factories, data centers, and cloud platforms—across many countries. Especially when each country or region offers different types of connectivity, at different price points, at different levels of reliability and security.

Take, for example, a large conglomerate headquartered in Singapore but with regional offices in all the capitals of Asia and Europe, factories in Malaysia and Germany, and retail outlets that run in the hundreds. Introducing new nodes or applying network and security policies—granularly—across such a vast network is arduous, without the automation and the central orchestration that SD WAN makes possible. Transporting data quickly and reliably over long distances, too, is a challenge without the dependability SD WAN offers combined with sturdy connectivity backbone.

It is important to note that not all SD WAN solutions are built equal. For Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), the SD WAN offering that is provided by its global and wholesale business arm, TM WHOLESALE, for example, is especially useful for enterprises with a widespread, multi-geo footprint thanks to its global connectivity. The service offers extensive coverage (over 190 countries!), supports various network topologies (hub-spoke, full mesh, partial mesh), and deployment models (do-it-yourself, co-managed, and fully managed.)

Plus, TM WHOLESALE overlays additional services—including an enhanced security suite which includes firewalls, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), URL-filtering and cloud security, among others—and advanced analytics that uncovers insights to improve SD WAN management and network outcomes.

SD WANs, in general, result in better application performance, improved cost control, enhanced flexibility and security, and greater resilience, among several other benefits. (More on this in a future article, 13 Reasons Why: Your Business Needs to Invest in SD WAN. CTA: Inform Me When It’s Out clicking opens mailbox, pre-populated with sales email to start conversation)

This explains the impressive growth of the SD WAN market. Analyst firm, Futuriom, predicts the SD-WAN market will grow at 34% CAGR and touch $4.6 billion by 2023. An IDC pegged

SD WAN’s market size even higher—at $5.25 billion by 2023. And according to the market research firm, Dell’Oro Group, in the first two quarters of 2021, the global SD-WAN market grew 39% over to the last year.

If you have not started on your SD WAN journey, it is critical to start now. Organisations that delay compound the risk of being left behind in an increasingly digital, cloud-first world. The first step is to create a strategy. If that seems like a big ask, do not worry. TM WHOLESALE has professional services experts who will hold your hand every step of the way, starting with an assessment of your needs based on your unique business environment, and then consult and design an SD WAN architecture tailored to your business.

A deep-dive into the reasons organisations, such as yours, are adopting SD-WAN, and the benefits they are witnessing.

If you were asked to name the fastest-growing technologies today, it is likely your answers would include artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), analytics and blockchain-enabled decentralised finance (De-Fi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Not a lot of people would put software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) in this category. But that would be unfair.

IDC forecasts that the SD-WAN market will grow 18.9% a year until 2025, making it among the fastest-growing segments of the network market. This growth is driven by incredible adoption rates. According to the 2021 State of SD-WAN Study, “SD-WAN adoption is expected to rise to 92% of companies and 64% of enterprise locations by 2026 with most adopting it for efficiency (38%), cost savings (38%), and agility (34%).”

A Deeper Look at What Is Driving SD-WAN

A confluence of forces—some driven by nature, others by human stakeholders—has produced an SD-WAN tipping point. As an increasing number of enterprises adopt the technology, several industry-watchers have begun to ask whether, in the near future, organisations will even refer to the term SD-WAN, or just merely ‘networks’.

This perfect storm of trends—including real-time applications powered by the trio of 5G, IoT and edge computing; and the need for greater operational resilience driven by uncertain environments and natural disasters—highlight the need for more agile networks. Among the drivers of SD-WAN, there are two stand out: More distributed computing landscapes, and the rise of hybrid workplaces.

“Enterprise applications are more distributed than ever, and now because of COVID-19, the users accessing those applications are more distributed too. As organisations look to support a hybrid workforce and cloud-native network architectures, SD-WAN infrastructure has become a critically important technology for enabling flexible, agile, and optimised connectivity," says Ajeet Das, Research Director, IDC.

Hybrid office configurations are placing a significant amount of pressure on enterprise networks. TeleGeography’s WAN Manager Survey shows that 85% of organisations had the majority of their workforce working remote; with the 80%-20% configuration (80% remote/20% at job sites) being the most popular.

When they looked deeper into the network challenges that these companies faced, the results underscored the need for better network management. (Responses were graded on a scale of 1-5, with 5 representing very challenging).

                                                                                                                       Source: WAN Manager Survey

Greater adoption of the cloud, too, is pushing organisations to adopt more agile networking strategies such as SD-WAN. In a pre-multi-cloud world, enterprise network operations (NetOps) teams would backhaul traffic from remote locations to data centres. This enabled security operations (SecOps), among other aims, to execute security checks on traffic.

But as more applications reside in the cloud than ever, this strategy introduces congestion, delays, and increased costs. Plus, cloud strategies introduce more dynamism than static traditional network architectures can support—making the network a chokepoint for digital transformation. Virtual machines and containers, for example, can be scaled up, but most networks are not this flexible.

The use of cloud solutions and cloud-native tools is just one facet of digital transformation. As enterprises digitalise every aspect of their business from communication to processes, more data flows are going in more directions. All this activity creates intense pressure on wide area networks (WANs).

Modern enterprises require higher levels of application performance and more simplified management to handle more dynamic, more mixed, and more complex networks. With traditional WANs, the burden on network teams (with operational tasks including provisioning, configuring, monitoring and managing) become untenable, introducing high overhead costs, errors, delays, and poor responsiveness.

Additionally, dedicated, private circuits—a default for many large enterprises—are expensive, have long gestation periods, and require more time and more skills to manage. The complexity problem increases exponentially for global companies, which must address the needs of a large number of geographically-dispersed edge locations, many with limited connectivity options, and constrained by the cost and service variables of region-specific connectivity offerings.

The hard reality is that existing WANs are not geared up to take on the needs of digitally transforming organisations.

The Upside of SD-WAN

SD-WANs can help enterprises solve these challenges. SD-WANs introduce multiple network benefits that span across functions, and dimensions.

For NetOps teams, SD-WAN can improve network sizing. Typically, to ensure that networks are well-provided for, network teams will build in redundancy, such as additional bandwidth. Over time, it becomes difficult to assess whether there is a glut of bandwidth. SD-WAN brings more visibility to the network, which allows network teams to better gauge utilisation and requirements, enabling them to trim provisioning. This increased visibility, and the ability to monitor the WAN enables networks teams stay on top of cost, application performance, and congestion levels, among network health indicators.

Plus, because SD-WAN technology allows networks to use back-up transport layers, instead of activating them only in emergencies, organisations get more value from their network assets, which makes it easier for network leaders to defend purchase decisions.

Lower costs are a significant motivator of adopting SD-WAN. According to the State of the Network 2020, it is the top reason enterprises are embracing SD-WAN, say 58% of respondents.

                                                                                                                                          Source: State of the Network 2020

One of the ways, SD-WANs shrink cost is by enabling different data types (mission-critical vs less-mission critical, for example) to be routed on the most cost-effective underlay. Business applications, which require high quality of service (QoS) and security, for instance, can be

prioritised and delivered using more expensive private circuits, while less critical application data can be routed through more cost-effective public Internet paths. This ability to “prioritise business critical traffic” is also an important benefit of SD-WAN, say 46% of network professionals, points out IDG Research.

Then, there is the resiliency argument. SD-WAN virtualises the network with an overlay which allows network executives to cope more easily with drastic changes—like the COVID-19 pandemic, for example—when network traffic shifts. During the pandemic more applications, and traffic, quickly moved to the cloud. SD-WANs also make it easier and more effective to create failover paths, so that when a primary link is disrupted, data flows switch to another route or transport layer, with insignificant impact on users.

SD-WANs create more choice for network teams. With SD-WANs, network engineers can choose from a greater variety of transport layers, mixing and matching, and creating policy-based priorities for data mediums based on specific QoS, security or cost requirements. SD-WANs allow network managers to add nodes to the network more quickly, allowing them to stay aligned with dynamic and unpredictable business needs. SD-WANs also avoid many of the errors that manually configuring traditional WANs can introduce.

With its ability to centrally orchestrate a network, SD-WANs lower the burden on network teams, increasing their productivity and cost-effectiveness, and ensuring that network policies can be pushed centrally or replicated among edge nodes, which in turn strengthens an organisation’s security posture.

For the business, SD-WAN benefits appear as improvements to application performance, thanks to its ability to adaptatively segment and re-route traffic intelligently. SD-WAN makes it easier to extend the enterprise to the cloud, and the multiple benefits of the cloud. From a profitability point of view, it lowers the cost overheads associated with managing complex networks, such as people and bandwidth. SD-WANs also result in greater business confidence from less downtime, and more agility.

TM WHOLESALE: Supercharging Networks

The more complex and dispersed an enterprise is, the more benefits discussed here apply. For global organisations shifting from more traditional network architectures to SD-WAN, it is important to weigh the costs of an SD-WAN implementation against its benefits. TM WHOLESALE—the global and wholesale business arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM)—can help assess what SD-WAN can achieve, creating a benefits-based business case.

TM WHOLESALE can also help guide enterprises across the SD-WAN lifecycle from professional services to consult and design a network customised to your business; to fully-managed services that includes sourcing and delivery, proactive monitoring, a 24x7 contact centre and local field support.

TM WHOLESALE offers a host of connectivity types 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.

To help accelerate adoption, TM WHOLESALE 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 that for enterprises that need the flexibility of working with existing connectivity contracts.

With TM WHOLESALE, organisations can also add on security services to inspect data, and have access to an analytics portal which offers NetOps teams granular visibility of network health.

Start your network transformation journey with TM WHOLESALE today!

If your organisation is among the hundreds planning to leverage SD-WAN, you have come to the right place. Learn how to spot SD-WAN-washing, the different models to adopt SD-WAN, and what to look out for in a prospective SD-WAN managed service provider.

In 2020, 43% of businesses globally said they installed software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) on part of their network.

What is wrong with this number?

Nothing.

Except that it does not offer the full picture.

In 2018, only 18%, less than half, said they used SD-WAN on their network. And by 2026, SD-WAN adoption is expected to cover 92% of companies—double the 2020 figure.

Now you really get a sense of the momentum with which SD-WAN is being adopted.

And it is a phenomenon that is crossing industry lines. Look at how different industries are taking to SD-WAN.

 

Sectors Reporting Increased Adoption of SD-WAN

Construction/Engineering	56%
Retail/E-Commerce	49%
Consulting/Business Services	49%
Healthcare/Medical	47%
High Tech	46%
Manufacturing	43%
Financial Services	43%
Legal	33%

                                                                                                                    Source: State of Disruption 2021

 

If your organisation is one of the many planning on adopting SD-WAN, here are a few pointers to help you along your way.

 

Watch Out for SD-WAN Washing

 

The meteoric rise of SD-WAN has resulted in many technology providers making inaccurate claims that their offerings include SD-WAN. To be clear, to be part of the SD-WAN club, a product/service must have these characteristics:

Virtualised Control: The ability to separate the control plane from the data plane and create an overlay that can flexibly command underlying physical network infrastructure.

Centralised Management Using Policy: The ability to create policies centrally and implement them on all appropriate SD-WAN devices for greater consistency and efficiency.

Orchestrate Centrally: The ability to optimise network performance centrally, and route traffic over the best physical connection, based on cost, experience and security.

Zero-touch Provisioning: The ability to configure and provision edge devices remotely, shrinking the amount of time and errors that result from manual interventions.

TM’s Global SD-WAN offering addresses all four criteria, enabling it to meet the needs of customers completely.

 

Choose the Best Deployment Option

There are three ways to deploy an SD-WAN: DIY (Do-it-Yourself), Co-Managed, and Fully-Managed.

As the name implies, in a DIY model, internal IT and networking resources take full responsibility for provisioning, managing, optimising, and troubleshooting an SD-WAN implementation. While some organisations opt for this strategy, it is not the most popular, and is typically seen among organisations opting for simpler hub-and-spoke architectures, versus more complex full mesh topologies. Another option the co-managed model, in which both internal teams, and staffers from a managed provider, share the job of running an SD-WAN,

Managed SD-WAN deployments are more common. According to a survey by consulting firm, Altman Solon, “only 23% use a do-it-yourself solution and 77% use a fully managed or co-managed solution. Moreover, 48% of those using a co-managed service expect to offload more of their IT work to their partners.”

What is behind this preference? Primarily, the complexities of standing up and operating an SD-WAN. A full 76% of enterprises surveyed by Altman Solon say their networks have become more complex and that they do not have the internal skills to manage them.

Some challenges include assessing the readiness of on-premises networking equipment, figuring out how breakout traffic from the branch to the Internet will be secured, and diving deep into quality-of-service settings to maximise traffic shaping and path control capabilities, for instance.

In a deployment where a managed service provider (MSP) has full ownership, all these challenges, and more, are outsourced.

TM WHOLESALE—the global and wholesale business arm of Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM)—has a fully-managed service, for example, which takes care of an SD-WAN deployment from end-to-end, across its lifecycle. TM WHOLESALE has the professional services to consult and design a network and experts to source, deliver, monitor, and optimise an SD-WAN, complete with a 24x7 contact centre and local field support. It can also streamline the process of ensuring local Internet breakout traffic is secured.

Managed service providers have the best practices to accelerate the time-to-value of a SD-WAN initiative, and are better placed to solve unique, company-specific challenges

 

Key Criteria in Selecting an SD-WAN MSP

It can be hard for enterprise decision-makers to decide who to partner with, given how critical SD-WAN success is to an organisation’s digital transformation agenda, and the mushrooming number of providers.

Using some of the pointers outlined here, it is easier to separate the wheat from the chaff—the real SD-WAN providers, from the SD-WAN imposters.

Shortening this short-list is tricker and depends on the specific needs of your organisation. But there are some thumb-rules that can help weed out technology providers not aligned to your needs.

Look for providers that:

Offer great security. As security and networking increasingly merge, and more enterprises aim to adopt SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) principles, the ability of an SD-WAN to integrate security is ever more important.

Providers such as TM WHOLESALE, for instance, embed security features into its SD-WAN offering. TM WHOLESALE’s enhanced security suite includes firewalls, intrusion prevention system (IPS), URL-filtering and cloud security, among others.

According to the State of SD-WAN whitepaper from Altman Solon, security; and reliability and performance are the top key purchase criteria for SD-WAN managed services.

 

                                                                                                                                 Source: State of SD-WAN

 

                                       Here are some of the security features enterprises are looking for, ranked in order of importance.

                                                                                                            Source: 2021 SD-WAN Managed Services Survey

 

Have service portals: Customer portals and analytics are critical components of a co-managed model. They allow network teams to monitor their networks, tweak controls, adjust configurations, and extract insights from analytics to optimise performance or head-off potential challenges.

TM WHOLESALE offers SD-WAN dashboards and advanced analytics which allow you to monitor the overall health of your SD-WAN network, as well as view statistics and reports related to SD-WAN features.

According to Futuriom, 78% of network teams say, “co-management and self-service customer portals are key features of an SD-WAN managed services offering.” The report also adds: “This is an area where SD-WAN MS (managed service) will be quickly differentiated. The capability to offer dynamic customer portals and management interfaces complete with analytics will be key to winning SD-WAN services.”

Are Cloud Ready: More enterprise workloads are being migrated to hybrid and multi-cloud environments and it is essential that SD-WAN managed service providers can ease this transition.

In fact, Futuriom’s survey points out that it is the second most important feature enterprise buyers are studying when deciding on an SD-WAN partner.

 

The Most Important Features in an SD-WAN Managed Service Offering

 

 

With TM WHOLESALE, this is not a challenge. Organisations can leverage TM WHOLESALE’s global private network and Cloud-on-Ramp capabilities for improved network performance, especially of SaaS services such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.

Double-clicking on each of these capabilities will give you a sense of the granularity that a service provides—an important factor in decision making. For example, do all the points of presence (PoPs) a service provider offers have the same capabilities? Sometimes not all the PoPs on an impressive map will have the same security capabilities.

Remember, not all SD-WAN offerings are equal. TM’s Global SD-WAN, for example, offer extensive coverage—over 190 countries—and support various network topologies, including hub-spoke, full mesh, partial mesh. TM WHOLESALE can also offer a range of connectivity types—ranging 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.

Internet Protocol (IP) Transit services optimise network efficiency, enable global reachability, provide consistent digital experience, improve network performance, and enhance customer experience. But what really is IP Transit, how does it work, and why do organisations like yours need it? Here’s a deep dive into IP Transit and why it is essential for digital transformation.

What would it take to connect all of humanity, 7.9 billion of us, to the Internet in 10 years?

The good people at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have an answer. Or two.

US$428 billion and, to some extent, IP Transit.

At its most basic level, the thread that runs through the Internet, the one that is often relegated to the background, but is critical for the functioning of a modern, connected world—and your business—is, among other things, IP Transit.

Without IP Transit, organisations, and the world at large, would have been operating in a fragmented, disconnected, and isolated environment. It is the power of IP Transit that has been instrumental in creating a borderless world.

There are multiple benefits of an IP Transit service. It optimises network efficiency and improves network performance. It enables organisations to expand customer base by providing global reachability and increase eyeballs. It also provides consistent digital experience with uninterrupted access, thereby enhancing customer experience.

Within your organisations, cloud-based services, and new and emerging technologies are constantly reshaping your businesses, enabling digital transformation. Moreover, in the near future, enterprises will have to adopt 5G and edge computing.

And these technologies will require fast, reliable, and secure connectivity, which in part, will be powered by IP Transit.

But what is IP Transit, how does it work, and why do you need it? A deep dive into IP Transit will help organisations like yours understand how your business accesses the Internet and how your customers connect with your services, enabling you to better customer experience, optimise network efficiency, improve performance, and save costs.

Demystifying IP Transit

IP Transit is a service where an internet Service Provider (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, enterprises need to connect to all the autonomous systems (more on this later) out there. They can’t do this alone. They need to avail the services of an ISP who has access to reach any network on the Internet.

Simply put, any time you want to send or receive information across the Internet, you need to ‘go through’ single or multiple third-party networks. IP Transit makes this possible.

The quality of IP Transit, that is speed, consistent digital experience, global reachability, and optimum service performance also depend on the ISPs ‘Tier status’. As ISPs are classified into a 3-tier model that categorizes them based on the type of Internet services they provide, it is critical for organisations to partner with Tier 1 ISP that has global and regional reachability.

That is because global and regional ISPs open up the world of global Internet connectivity. A Tier 1 ISP has access to the entire Internet solely through its free and reciprocal peering agreements. It doesn’t pay transit fees to anyone and can reach anywhere on the internet quickly and cost-effectively.

But before we go any further, we will have to get a little technical to understand what an Autonomous System is that makes up the entire Internet.

The Role of Autonomous Systems

As mentioned earlier, an Autonomous System (AS) plays a major role in the functioning of IP Transit. The system can ‘autonomously’—without depending on a third-party—decide who to exchange traffic with on the Internet.

An AS represents a set of IP routing prefixes that belong to a network and are managed by one or more network operators on behalf of a single entity or domain. Essentially, each AS is given a unique number, called an Autonomous System Number (ASN). What this means is when an organisation owns an ASN, it can use that to establish a single gateway point to the Internet.

You might be wondering how AS communicates route information and steer traffic between each other. Enter BGP or Border Gateway Protocol. BGP practically runs the Internet. When networks interact with each other, they need a mode of transport, a ‘gateway’ to communicate, to send and receive a message. BGP makes that possible.

There are two types of interconnection mechanisms that allow AS, that is equivalent to the Internet network to connect directly and indirectly over the Internet: Peering and Transit.

In the networking space, organisations seem to use these words interchangeably. When, in fact, they are different. Let’s find out how.

For starters, both IP Transit and Peering are modes of connection between different network entities.

In IP Transit, one entity pays another for the ‘right to transit’ its upstream network. That makes one entity higher than the other as both parties do not benefit equally from the exchange.

Protecting Against DDoS Attacks

While the Internet is a gateway to new opportunities, it is also a breeding ground for cyberthreats like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks have the power to bring down not just individuals or organisations but an entire country. DDoS attacks overload servers or disrupt network services by overwhelming them with access requests.

For instance, the infamous Mirai and Mirai Dyn attacks rendered the entire country of Liberia offline in 2016, and threatened to bring down the Internet infrastructure of the United States. Apart from these, there have been several attacks on large cloud providers such as AWS and Google in 2020. Here’s a list. There’s no wonder then that, according to a Cisco study, the total number of DDoS attacks will double from 7.9 million in 2018 to over 15 million by 2023. These attacks lead to downtime, increased bandwidth costs, and lost customers, which eventually lead to severe financial losses. That’s why, it is crucial for ISPs, telecom companies, and enterprises—that want to leverage IP Transit—to ensure they prevent their network from DDoS attacks. Choosing an IP Transit provider that has expertise in preventing these attacks with Clean Pipe services (more on this in our subsequent blogs) is imperative.

About TM WHOLESALE

Leading Malaysian telecom service provider, such as TM WHOLESALE, offer IP Transit services via AS4788 with regional upstream, direct peering, content localization capabilities and valued added services such as Clean Pipe and Selective Routing features. TM WHOLESALE has the largest Internet subscriber base in Malaysia, and is one of the biggest regional ISPs in Asia. TM owns close to 30 submarine cables spanning over 300,000 km worldwide. It offers extensive global reachability and direct connectivity to the Internet.

In our subsequent blogs, you’ll learn how IP Transit and TM WHOLESALE’s services merge to create new possibilities for your business not just today but also for a future that depends on digital transformation.

IP Transit service is your gateway to the Internet and a host of new opportunities to expand your business, gain new customers, and increase profitability. The success of your IP Transit strategy depends on which provider you choose to consider for IP Transit services. Here are five traits you should look for in your IP Transit provider before investing in them.

IP Transit services enable organisations, ISPs and telecom companies to reach the wider Internet and provide faster, better, and uninterrupted access.

But in order to ensure that, you need to partner with an IP Transit provider who has robust offerings, a secure IP Transit gateway, interconnections with other Tier 1 providers, extensive reachability, and reliable support that is able to scale with your company’s needs and growth.

Here are five traits that you must look for in your IP Transit provider before investing in their services.

1. Global and Regional Reachability

Tier 1 ISPs are in the driver’s seat of global and regional Internet connectivity. A Tier 1 network can reach every other network on the Internet with its own infrastructure.

This allows organisations to handle traffic at high volumes, with a stable performance level, irrespective of connecting between two states or two continents. Tier 1 providers are usually large ISPs that can offer robust networking power at affordable and competitive prices.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM WHOLESALE, one of biggest regional service providers in Asia, offers extensive reachability and connectivity to ensure optimum service performance.

2. Extensive Points of Presence

Points of Presence (POPs) is where two or more networks or communication devices share a connection.

Partner with a provider who has extensive PoPs and wide reachability. This enables low latency between regions.

The more number of PoPs a provider has, the more resilient and redundant your connectivity becomes. This also ensures you take advantage of multiple protection paths and diverse routing options.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM WHOLESALE’s core IP backbone network spans 28 major cities around the world. It has over 6Tbps of global IP backbone and peering capacities which is diversely routed on different submarine fibre cables and focused on providing connectivity within and to/from Asia.

3. Owns a Single ASN

Autonomous System Number (ASN) is a globally unique number that defines the path to the owner’s network.

You need one ASN for global operations. Most of the big global networks operate a single-AS strategy.

Partnering with a provider who has a single ASN enables you to get a direct interconnect with Amazon AWS, or the Microsoft Azure Peering Service (MAPS), or other cloud platforms.

Providers with single ASN have the freedom to control performance settings between two paths and decide which route is faster to reach target networks. This leads to full independence, redundancy, and allows them to choose the upstream most suitable for their—and in turn, yours—own setup.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM IP Transit service is specifically designed to provide a very high performance of global and regional connectivity through a single ASN (AS4788). TM single ASN4788 network enables global reachability and regional connectivity. AS4788 network reaches more destinations and ensures short hop connectivity.

4. Enables Robust Security with Clean Pipe

The public internet is prone to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. In fact, worldwide, DDoS attacks are among the top 10 cyber threats.

Clean Pipe is specifically designed to detect DDoS attacks. Clean Pipe defends against volumetric attack and application-layer attacks. On-premise network security, on the other hand, only handles threats once they have reached your network. Clean Pipe detects and prevents them before they reach the network.

For businesses handling sensitive data, Clean Pipe enables DDoS protection and also protects transactions and applications.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM WHOLESALE provides Value Added Services with its IP Transit that includes Clean Pipe.

5. Provides Direct Peering

When providers partner with other ISPs and directly connect to their networks, they reduce the number of steps or hops they need to reach their final destination.

Direct peering is an interconnection of two separate networks to exchange traffic directly. Essentially, your company’s provider, let’s call this network A, connects directly to another CDN or ISP, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, network B. Once Network A and B are connected, these two networks communicate directly with one another.

As the name suggests, Direct Peering connections bypass the public Internet to provide direct access to CDNs and ISPs, reducing latency and improving overall network

performance. It ensures your Internet connectivity doesn’t get disrupted despite the usage of popular applications.

The TM WHOLESALE Advantage: TM WHOLESALE provides direct peering services with major Internet backbones and content providers.

TM WHOLESALE is a leading Malaysian telecom service provider that offers IP Transit services via AS4788 with regional upstream, direct peering, content localisation and Tier 1 capabilities and valued added services such as Clean Pipe and Selective Routing features.

TM WHOLESALE has the largest Internet subscriber base in Malaysia, and is one of the biggest regional ISPs in Asia. TM owns close to 30 submarine cables spanning 300,000 km worldwide. It offers extensive global reachability and direct connectivity to the Internet.

That’s why organisations that want a fast, reliable, and secure IP Transit connection should consider partnering with TM WHOLESALE and benefit from its extensive reachability, secure services, and more.

IP Transit provides businesses like yours, ISPs and Telecom companies access to the global Internet, widening your product portfolio, expanding customer base, and increasing profitability. But building your own IP Transit gateway is complex, expensive, and time consuming. Here are seven reasons you should partner with TM WHOLESALE for your IP Transit needs.

We’ve been talking about IP Transit extensively in our previous blogs and eBook. We deep dived into what is IP Transit, its benefits, its use cases, and how it can make a significant difference to your business.

The next step is to evaluate your IP Transit needs and zero in on the IP Transit provider you should partner with. This is among the most crucial decisions you and your business needs to make. In a highly competitive market, it is critical to identify an ideal IP Transit provider that is reliable, secure, and has extensive reach, among other aspects.

TM WHOLESALE is striving to provide organisations with IP Transit services that are catapulting them to the pinnacle of digital transformation.

TM WHOLESALE focuses on domestic and international wholesale business, offering a comprehensive suite of cutting-edge communication services and solutions in connectivity and beyond. With extensive global connectivity, network infrastructure and collective expertise, TM WHOLESALE aims to serve not only as a gateway for the world to Malaysia, but more broadly, to the region.

TM WHOLESALE offers IP Transit services via AS4788 with regional upstream, direct peering, content localisation, and value added services such as Clean Pipe and Selective Routing features. 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 reachability and direct connectivity to the Internet.

Here are seven reasons why you should partner with TM WHOLESALE for your IP Transit needs.

Strong Global and Regional Presence

It is imperative that your IP Transit provider has global reachability and coverage in order to enable access to the global Internet. The unbeatable reachability of Tier-1 ISPs enables you to connect to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world. It is important for your IP Transit provider to have a strong global and regional presence. With TM IP Transit you can extend reachability and ensure short-hop connectivity to global content. TM IP Transit is one of the biggest regional Tier 1 ISPs in Asia. TM IP Transit enhances connectivity with global IP networks and Internet hub infrastructure through major domestic and international gateways.

Extensive and Large Backbone Capacity

Ensure you partner with an IP Transit provider that has extensive PoPs in strategic locations across your region and beyond. TM IP Transit provides network connectivity through TM-owned backbone for Asia, Asia-US and Asia-Europe. PoPs are hosted in carrier-grade facilities.

Connected to Content and Eyeballs Platforms

Your IP Transit provider needs to have access to prominent and relevant CDN, ISP, and telecom platforms to reach a wider audience and provide uninterrupted services to your customers. TM IP Transit is connected to seven major content and eyeballs platforms including ISPs, transit providers, mobile operators, content providers, search engines, cloud providers, and Web and gaming firms.

Robust Security and Operational Efficiency

The internet is a breeding ground for cyber-attacks. IP Transit services, in particular, often fall prey to DDoS attacks. These attacks overload servers or disrupt network services by overwhelming them with access requests. These attacks lead to downtime, increased bandwidth costs, and lost customers, that eventually lead to severe financial losses. Ensuring robust security is a must for organisations opting for IP Transit services. TM IP Transit delivers a complete carrier-class security portfolio and time-critical performance through a dedicated security monitoring portal.

Flexible Service Options

Flexibility is key in any service you choose. But with IP Transit, the additional services that you could access strengthens its potential. Bundling other solutions that complement IP Transit services provides you with the flexibility to pick and choose a package that best fits the needs of your organisation. TM IP Transit gives customers the flexibility of selecting value-added services and add-on solutions that seamlessly accommodate dynamic business needs. For instance, customers can bundle services with colocation services, security services, and access services.

Network Support and Monitoring

The success of any IP Transit implementation significantly lies on network efficiency. Ensuring network optimisation, constant support and monitoring is the responsibility of the service provider. Partner with a provider who is willing to carry the burden and headache of handling the network. TM IP Transit enables visibility and real-time performance reporting of IP Transit services with 24/7 customer support.

Service Level Guarantee (SLG) Options

Today, customer experience is a competitive differentiator. If your experience with an IP Transit provider is satisfactory, it will also positively impact your customers. That’s why you should partner with an IP Transit provider that ensures customer satisfaction is a priority. TM IP Transit offers high quality SLGs, customer satisfaction and rebate options based on Network Latency, Packet Delivery, and IP Port Availability.

As more organisations accelerate digital transformation efforts and future-proof their business, laying a strong connectivity foundation is essential. IP Transit services help create that foundation to enable organisations like yours to manage cost to serve, business diversity and scalability to accommodate your changing business needs. TM IP Transit services are empowering organisations to take the next step towards digital change quickly, cost-effectively and without constraints.

From interconnecting data centres to speeding up performance of cloud-based applications to delivering real-time rich media content, the use of International Ethernet Private Line (IEPL) is ever increasing. Here are five compelling reasons why you should adopt it.

The explosion in the amount of data being produced and consumed across the world is putting unprecedented demands on the connectivity infrastructure of global carriers, enterprises and hyperscalers. This demand to access ever increasing amounts of data—often in real-time—is coming from multiple sources such as the need to speed up cloud-based applications, delivering rich media content, increased online collaboration, and real-time data backup to an offsite location for business continuity to name a few.

International Ethernet Private Line (IEPL) with its low latency, high-performance, secure, reliable connectivity is ideally suited to meet the connectivity needs of global carriers, enterprises and hyperscalers. Here are five compelling reasons why your business should adopt IEPL.

Speeding up Cloud-based Applications

Enterprise applications, be they mission critical applications like ERP, CRM and SCM or collaboration applications like email and video conferencing, or business applications like analytics and business intelligence are increasingly being hosted on public and private cloud infrastructures.

With the people accessing these applications—be they employees or partners—being located far from where the apps are hosted, these applications tend to suffer from latency and lag thus impacting user experience, application performance and employee productivity, which have a direct impact on the business. As a result, there is an urgent need to speed up these applications, which demands better and faster connectivity.

By using IEPL to connect your on-premise network where your employees are located with the cloud where your applications are hosted, you can significantly speed up application performance by eliminating latency and improving reliability.

Data Centre Interconnect

Businesses increasingly have two or more data centres to meet the needs of disaster recovery, business continuity, and regulatory and compliance requirements. This is because if by any chance the primary data centre site goes down, users can be routed to the backup or standby data centre, or the data replicated on to the secondary data centre can quickly be recovered and applications can be restarted within the defined outage window and without any data loss.

This, however, requires the organisations to have reliable, high-speed, low latency connectivity between the data centres. IEPL is the ideal choice for interconnecting the various data centres as it provides a reliable, scalable, low latency connectivity solution.

Delivering Rich Media Content

Buffering—be it while watching a streaming video or while on a video conference call—can be hugely frustrating.

Since rich media content and collaboration applications demand high amounts of bandwidth and are highly sensitive to latency, they need to be delivered from the core to the edge to the end users in real-time and without any drop in quality. Failure to do so would lead to poor user experience leading to a direct impact on the business, be it in the form of unproductive employees or frustrated customers.

By using IEPL to haul the traffic as close to the users as possible—be it to your on-premise network or from the core to the edge—you can cut down latency and reduce the strain on bandwidth at the user end, thus greatly improving application performance and user experience.

Real-time Backup

Real-time data backup to a secure off-site location, be it for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes or for regulatory and compliance reasons, is increasingly becoming a burden on the stretched IT resources of organisations. Establishing a secure and reliable connectivity between the on-premise network and the off-site backup facility is critical to ensure that this requirement is met.

IEPL provides a cost-effective, scalable, low latency solution to connect the primary network with the off-site backup facility, irrespective of whether the backup facility is a near site one or at a distant location. Since data can be transferred instantly and securely, IEPL is the ideal choice to meet this need and reduce the burden on the IT staff.

Dedicated Connectivity

A dedicated low latency, reliable, scalable connectivity is key to the smooth functioning of your network. It is the grease that ensures smooth delivery of critical applications and reliable and timely data transfer.

By using IEPL, businesses can avoid the bottlenecks and security breaches that plague the public Internet and other shared connectivity options. With IEPL, traffic that otherwise might have taken a convoluted route, via a patchwork of public networks, can now flow more efficiently to its desired destination over a dedicated low-latency connection.

On an IEPL connection, your data travels securely over a well-maintained private path, managed and monitored by a single service provider. That’s an experience that no other type of connectivity can deliver.

From interconnecting data centres to speeding up performance of cloud-based applications to delivering real-time rich media content and applications to orchestrating real-time data backups, IEPL is increasingly playing an important role in solving the critical connectivity needs of many organisations.

TM WHOLESALE’s IEPL services are designed to deliver flexible, low latency, scalable, reliable, high bandwidth access solutions to meet all your critical connectivity needs. With high SLAs and an extensive global coverage, TM WHOLESALE is your one-stop-shop for your critical connectivity needs.

Identifying the right service provider is easier said than done. But there are some attributes that can help you in the selection process. Here are some tips to identify the right service provider for your IEPL needs.

Once organisations have understood the power of International Ethernet Private Line (IEPL) and the need for it, they need to choose a service provider who can meet their requirement. Realising the full potential of IEPL means taking this extra step—partnering with the right service provider.

With a single service provider managing the crucial connections to your office, cloud providers, backup facilities, and other locations, it is crucial to do proper research and identify a service provider who can offer the services and features that will be most beneficial to your business.

But how do you identify the right service provider? What are the attributes you should look out for? Here are some tips to identify the right service provider for your IEPL needs.

Extensive Global Network

Your offices, backup facilities, cloud service providers in all probability are likely to be geographically dispersed. If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be a need for an external service provider to connect them. You obviously don’t want to select a service provider who can only connect a part of your locations and want a service provider who can connect all the locations.

Hence, it’s important that the chosen service provider has an extensive global infrastructure with a broad geographic reach, has access to multiple submarine cable systems, has a good terrestrial network, and has multiple cable landing points and points of presence (PoPs) so that this single service provider can meet all your present and future needs.

Scalability

While theoretically IEPL services are scalable from 1 Mbps all the way up to 100 Gbps, not all service providers offer this level of scalability. Many service providers are constrained by their infrastructure to offer only limited scalability.

But the limitations of the service provider should not compromise your company’s growth and ambitions. You don’t want to be locked into a service that won’t easily support your company’s growth or can’t quickly scale up or down with seasonal spikes in business. Hence, the ability of the service provider to scale the services as per your need and be flexible enough to accommodate your requirement is key.

Connectivity to Cloud Service Providers

Direct connectivity to the cloud to speed up cloud-based applications is one of the key use cases for IEPL. Since most organisations have workloads or applications hosted or running from multiple clouds, connectivity to major public clouds is critical.

However, not all service providers have or offer direct cloud connectivity, especially to multiple public clouds. This can be a deal breaker as it will mean relying on multiple service providers. Hence, it’s important that you choose a service provider who offers direct connectivity to multiple clouds, including all the major public clouds.

One-Stop-Shop Solution

Apart from IEPL, organisations have different types of connectivity requirements—from SD-WAN to IP Transit to CDN to meet different requirements. No one wants to deal with different service providers for each type of connectivity need. They need a single service provider who can meet all their connectivity requirements and avoid the hassle of dealing with multiple vendors.

Hence, it’s important that the chosen service provider has the ability to bundle other services such as SD-WAN, IP Transit, IPVPN, and CDN apart from IEPL to meet all your connectivity requirements as a one-stop-shop provider.

Reliability and Security

Reliability and security are key to any type of connectivity and more so in the case of IEPL as it is the preferred form of connectivity for mission-critical and sensitive data transfer. Organisations can’t risk any downtime in connectivity especially when their business is at stake. Advanced monitoring and management features help service providers improve their reliability, security, and performance. However, not every service provider uses these features.

Hence, it's important to check the reliability and security offered by the service provider before deciding to use their services.

Cost-Effective

Cost always plays an important part in any purchase decision, be it for a product or a service. With all other things remaining the same, it becomes the deciding factor in the selection of a service provider. However, many service providers have hidden costs—such as additional charges for scalability or uptime or meeting specific SLAs—that are not overtly visible while making a purchase decision.

Look for these types of hidden costs when deciding on a service provider to avoid any unpleasant surprises in the future. It’s better to go with a service provider who is completely transparent in pricing and doesn’t have any hidden costs, even if they might seem more expensive in the beginning.

SLAs

Service level agreements (SLAs) are critical for any type of service and more so when it comes to critical connectivity requirements. They come in various forms, from uptime to latency to time taken for remediation of issues, to name a few. While all service providers will talk about SLAs, look for specifics within that because that’s what will matter on a daily basis. Look for service providers who offer high levels of SLAs and are transparent with it. That’ll be the difference between a smooth, seamless connectivity and a frustrating experience.

TM WHOLESALE: Your Ideal Partner

TM WHOLESALE’s IEPL services are designed to deliver flexible, scalable, reliable, high bandwidth access solutions for the demanding networks of global carriers, enterprises and hyperscalers to achieve a competitive edge in today’s connected world. With more than 150 cable landing points, 28 PoPs, access close to 30 submarine cable systems, TM WHOLESALE’s IEPL services connect 39 countries across the globe and provide cross-border, end-to-end managed bandwidth and dedicated connectivity at high-speed.

With a global footprint and partnerships with other major global solution providers, TM WHOLESALE can be a one-stop-shop for all your connectivity needs and can bundle other services such as IP Transit, Global Hosting, Global SD-WAN & TM CDN with IEPL.

Besides, TM WHOLESALE offers a seamless service scalability with options to increase the bandwidth from as little as 1Mbps all the way to 100Gbps, so that you pay only for what you need.

In addition, TM WHOLESALE provides unmatched support and high service-level agreements with detailed specific performance guarantees for uptime, latency and other key metrics to ensure optimal performance of business applications and data transfer. TM WHOLESALE is also one of the most cost-effective service providers of IEPL solutions, both in the APAC region and across the world.

Connecting multiple international locations used to involve choosing between a number of technologies and protocols like X.25, Frame Relay, ATM, SONET/SDH. However, over the last decade or so, Ethernet services have become the ideal choice. Read on to find out why.

Connecting multiple locations and enterprise networks used to involve choosing between a host of different technologies and protocols like X.25, Frame Relay, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET), Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) and mastery over them. This was needed as the internal Ethernet system was not capable of taking data beyond the local area network (LAN) and over longer distances.

However, over the last decade or so, Ethernet services have rapidly evolved and have become the most viable option for businesses to connect their various locations and networks. The emergence of standardised Carrier Ethernet services offering both point-to-point and multipoint connectivity services has given organisations needing to connect their various international locations and networks a cost effective and reliable solution. In addition, by routing traffic via a dedicated network of sub-sea and terrestrial optic fibre cables, they significantly reduce latency levels.

As a result, International Ethernet Private Line (IEPL), a secure, reliable, low latency, point-to-point connectivity solution offered by Carrier Ethernet service providers, has become the preferred choice for organisations and is dominating the market for due to a variety of reasons.

Unmatched Price-Performance

The introduction of new technologies into the networking topology, and the resultant complications arising out of that, not only increase the overall costs but are also marred by performance issues. For instance, the X.25 protocol has restricted performance capabilities; Frame Relay, though designed for better performance, can be expensive both in terms of the rental and the hardware required to convert a local Ethernet-based IP network to Frame Relay; and ATM over SONET/SDH can be prohibitively expensive even though it can provide speeds of up to 40 Gbps. All these issues impact the price-performance of these technologies and protocols.

IEPL services on the other hand offer relatively inexpensive bandwidth and can support speeds from 1 MBPS all the way to 100 Gbps, thus powering the needs of all kinds of businesses—from digital platforms to cloud service providers to telecom operators to financial services and media and entertainment firms. With unrivalled global connectivity delivered via subsea optic fibre infrastructure, IEPL provides high-performance reliability and availability at low latency levels.

In addition, the cost of Ethernet-based equipment like routers and switches—be they installed at the customer end or at the service provider end—typically tend to be far lower than similar equipment used in other technologies like ATM or Frame Relay. This lower cost of equipment coupled with better performance and reliability ensure that IEPL services provide the best price-performance for point-to-point connectivity.

Increasing Hunger for Fast Bandwidth

With the explosion in the amount of data that’s being produced and consumed across the world—research firm IDC predicts that data volume will grow to 175 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025, up from about 65 ZB in 2020—the demand for high-speed, low latency bandwidth is increasing exponentially.

This is exacerbated by the widespread adoption of the cloud—be it public, private, or hybrid—and the ever-increasing reliance on better collaboration and faster communication requiring constant sharing of critical data, often in real-time, by organisations to run their operations and functions.

This has made IEPL, with its low costs, greater flexibility, and easy management, look considerably more attractive to organisations.

Quality of Service

Quality of Service (QoS)—including high-reliability and low latency—is always a key consideration for connectivity since it is fundamental to providing unfettered access to mission critical applications and services. Thanks to the ubiquitous nature of IEPL, it’s standardised protocol, abundance of inexpensive bandwidth, capability to support high-speeds at low latency, and the ability to define varying levels of priority for different types of traffic—voice and video traffic can be prioritised over regular data—over the same bandwidth, mean that IEPL is an ideal choice to ensure quality of service to end-users.

In addition, organisations have the choice to use dynamic provisioning of bandwidth to handle peaks and troughs in demand so that they only pay for the bandwidth they use rather than provisioning for peak load.

Ease of Implementation

Since it is based on a relatively simple protocol, IEPL is easy to implement, manage and operate, and as a result is faster to roll out compared to other types of connectivity options. The use of a single technology also results in the consolidation of network services resulting in a streamlined infrastructure and protocol.

Because it operates under a uniform protocol, IEPL avoids unnecessary protocol conversions thus greatly reducing the number of skills required for implementation and management of networks.

As a result, a single, familiar Ethernet interface enables convergence over a common network infrastructure, ensures faster roll out, simplifies operations, eliminates complexity, and avoids the need to have multiple skills.

Uniform Technology Adoption

Ever since the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), a global industry alliance, pioneered the development of Carrier Ethernet and defined the standards, operators across the world offer a uniform, standardised set of services that address the two basic types of connectivity—point-to-point and multipoint over a dedicated network.

This has meant that traffic of an organisation can be hauled or routed over networks of multiple carriers in different parts of the world without any drop in data or latency or quality of service and gives network managers complete visibility, access, and control over their networks.

As a result, a point-to-point IEPL connection can stretch across the backbones of multiple Carrier Ethernet vendors and organisations aren’t tied down to the footprint of a single provider. They have the choice to build their networks by using the services of multiple carriers and can easily transfer from one carrier to another without the need for any expensive change of equipment.

By avoiding unnecessary protocol conversions and offering a standardised high-performance, low latency, high-speed, reliable connectivity to any part of the world, connecting multiple international locations is easier, faster, and cheaper, courtesy IEPL. They are ideally suited for a wide range of critical enterprise applications such as latency-sensitive storage applications, financial trading programs, rich media applications, collaboration and video applications, and for direct connectivity to the cloud.

With low latency levels, high quality of service levels, the choice to dynamically increase or decrease bandwidth depending on changing requirements, and the ability to define varying levels of priority for different types of traffic, IEPL is an ideal choice for connecting multiple international locations.

TM WHOLESALE’s IEPL services are designed to deliver flexible, low latency, scalable, reliable, high bandwidth access solutions for the demanding networks of global carriers, enterprises and hyperscalers to achieve a competitive edge in today’s connected world.

With more than 150 cable landing points, 28 PoPs, and access to 25 submarine cable systems, TM WHOLESALE’s IEPL services directly connect 39 countries across the globe. Besides, partnerships with other major global carriers and solution providers ensure that TM WHOLESALE can be a single solution provider for all your international connectivity needs.