Best WAN Strategy

[sketterman]

I have four offices spread out across the United States. Each office has around 100 employees. Currently, we have 4 T1 internet connections (one in each office), and 4 Leased Lines (T1) between the offices for our WAN. Due to the nature of our business users want to transfer bigger and bigger graphics over the WAN. I wondered what the current thinking is on convergence. For example...could I use QoS to separate out WAN and Internet traffic and then just use one connection such as Fiber at 100Mbps?? Any ideas on trends??

[donewald]

Sure you could use QOS to differenciate your users and your internet traffic and do many things based on this (policy based routing/ queuing/ etc). Most are going in the direction of putting everything (Voice/video/data) on one wire and using different queuing and QOS stradegies to accomodate them all. If you have specific question there are tons of documents that can be sent to you on this depending on the direction you are looking to pursue.

Hope this helps,

Don

[sketterman]

Thanks Don. I know that it really comes down to the business needs and that is the hard part. I know budgets shrink and I know that we can sort of "predict" the future needs, but I hate to suggest things to management when I don't know what others are doing. Is convergence a bad thing? In essence...we are relying on the routing protocols and features to control this - not having done that before, I am always a bit leary. What is your take on any of this?