Clayton’s VPN proves lucrative

An alternative to VPN for smaller companies is delivering 33 percent of one ISP's business DSL revenue a month after release.

Kylie Hutchison, product manager at Pacific Internet, said the company's new private network offering was already proving popular, especially with retail and wholesale sector clients. “We released it to the sales guys about a month ago and this month the private network is delivering 33 percent of our business DSL revenue,” she said.

"Pacific Internet sold 118 of the 200 private network connections it has sold this year in September."

The rest of Pacific Internet's business had continued to perform normally so the 33 percent represented growth overall, she said.

Pacific Internet's new private network offering -- known as PacNet -- enables small businesses to connect multiple sites to a secure WAN. Smaller businesses were attracted to the security and flexibility of VPN but often baulked at the cost of the hardware, Hutchison said.

“It's almost exactly like a VPN, but without the hardware. We can manage it with our network but it still has the same flexibility and with more the security of a lease-line approach,” she said.

Traditional lease-line options such as frame relay had a corporate-level up-front cost, she said, but “considerable benefits”. “We've done a compromise between the two,” Hutchison said.

Other private network offerings exist in the market but Pacific Internet claims its own offering is less restricted by technology and does not require specialised hardware.

The ISP uses its own existing infrastructure to allow access to the private network from DSL, ISDN, modem and leased lines but not cable. Pacific Internet can also support secure remote access for teleworking and mobile workers over its national dial network.

The PacNet private network offering would be available both direct and through the reseller channel, Hutchison said.