Macquarie Telecom offers managed WAN optimisation

Managed services provider Macquarie Telecom has finished beta testing a managed application acceleration service for corporate wide area networks (WAN).

Expected to launch next month, the service used WAN optimisation technology from Californian vendor Riverbed, which also counted Huawei, SAP and HP as both partners and customers.

The technology targeted the application level (Layer 7) of networks. It reduced latency by splitting data transfers into several parts and applying deduplication and compression.

Riverbed founder, chairman and CEO Jerry Kennelly yesterday told journalists that latency was a growing issue for companies with virtualised or cloud assets.

While the Government's $43 billion National Broadband Network promised significant speed increases to Australian premises, Kennelly said fibre signals still spent a tenth of a second travelling from coast to coast.

A user in Perth would thus take about 100 seconds to remotely access a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in Sydney that performed 997 data transfers when opening, he estimated.

"Networks have natural problems," Kennelly said, explaining that data packets could not travel faster than the speed of light.

"Yes, the speed of light is very fast, but it turns out the speed of light is too slow for effective packet computing."

Macquarie Telecom expected its Managed WAN Optimisation Service (MWO) to accelerate applications by up to 100 times.

It promised to double customers throughput, offering to return 50 percent of MWO fees or to double customers' bandwidth at no charge if the promise was not met.

Customers would be able to access application-level performance reports via Macquarie Telecom's online management tool, InView.

Macquarie Telecom's Group Executive of Data Services Glen Noble said the service targeted mid-sized businesses with several connected branches and applications like the Microsoft Office suite.

"Our customers have been demanding a solution that enables them to get the most out of their existing WAN investment," he said.

"It's no longer about network connectivity; people are ringing up about their apps."