What is a Wide Area Network (WAN)?
At Progressive Networks we define a WAN as any number of computers privately connected to, yet exterior to, whatever you consider to be your LAN. MANs, PANs, CANs, SANs and WAIs are all very useful distinctions in context, but more often than not merely confuse rather than clarify.

Why do I need a WAN?
Until relatively recently excessively high bandwidth costs and less-than-mature technologies have meant WANs have most commonly been used to interconnect reasonably sizeable LANs. Falling prices and an ever-evolving portfolio of connectivity options, however, mean it is now highly cost-effective for IT departments to link their remote workers, mobile workers, and smaller branch offices into organisational intranets, and their customers and suppliers into enterprise extranets.

What do I need to know about WANs?
WANs are often considered complex because there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution; any optimum solution MUST take into account the following variables:

• Bandwidth – WAN bandwidth can be expensive and it is essential to match requirements with the correct solution. A small office home office (SOHO) requiring 1 hour of access per day, for example, may be adequately serviced by a asynchronous broadband connection. A link between two large corporate offices, on the other hand, is far more likely to require a dedicated high speed solution such as a leased line.
• Ease of management – Typically the initial configuration and on-going management of dedicated lines, for example, is often less complex than that of shared connections.
• Application traffic – Applications continually generating traffic in many small packets (e.g. terminal sessions) will require different solutions to those intermittently generating traffic in very large packets (e.g. file transfers).
• Location – Access to or cost of, certain connectivity solutions (e.g. broadband) are location-dependent.
• Resilience – Back-up connections may be required if traffic traversing a link is mission-critical.
• Access control – As a general rule of thumb the more access to a network is granted, the more access must be denied. Many-to-one connections, therefore, tend to require more granular levels of access control, than few-to-one or one-to-one connections.
• Quality of Service (QoS) – As technology finds new methods of squeezing ever more data through existing connections, QoS is an increasingly important factor in determining the quality of its delivery.
• Scalability – Organizational growth and increasing popularity of multimedia applications mean any implementation must take into account future WAN requirements.
• Budget – All the above variables directly impact cost.

What WAN services does Progressive Networks Offer?
At Progressive Networks we offer substantial expertise at every stage of the WAN development lifecycle from the design and implementation of new projects, to the audit improvement, and management of existing solutions. Our services are by no means limited to, but typically include:

• Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
• Dial-up
• Broadband
• Leased Lines (Point-to-point)
• Long Reach Ethernet (LRE)
• Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)

We also offer the following consultancy services:

• Network Audit
• Network Management
• Design & Implementation