Leased Line Resiliency - Business Communications

In this episode of Krome Cast: Tech IT Out, we discuss leased lines and the considerations needed to ensure resilience for your business communications.

When it comes to business communications, having a fast and reliable platform is critical, but how do you select which provider offers you the most resilient solutions, and what happens in the event of a failure? 

This podcast features Krome’s Commercial Director, Sam Mager, along with Krome's Pre-Sales Telecommunications Consultant, Jonathan Ledner, sharing their insights into implementing leased lines, the different connection types, and their advantages/disadvantages and the key considerations required to implement a resilient business communication network.

CHAPTERS
00:00 - Welcome & Introductions
00:36 - How does a leased line differ from a standard connection?
03:08 - Leased line service level agreements 
04:55 - How do you achieve leased line resiliency?
05:59 - Failover – What are the options, and how is it done typically?
08:03 - Leased line connection diversity - Resilient Option 2
10:29 - Fault types and their impact
12:08 - The best way to configure multiple sites for resilience (point to point)
14:51 - Considerations needed for the site set-up 
16:32 - Ensuring your backup line is fit for purpose
17:14 - Summary of key considerations for business communications

► ABOUT KROME: Krome Technologies is a technically strong, people-centric technology consultancy, focused on delivering end-to-end infrastructure and security solutions that solve business challenges and protect critical data. We work collaboratively with clients, forming long-term business partnerships, applying knowledge, experience and the resources our clients need to solve problems, design solutions and co-create agile, efficient and scalable IT services.

► CONTACT
 • Telephone: 01932 232345
 • Email: info@krome.co.uk
 • Website: www.krome.co.uk

► ABOUT KROME: Krome Technologies is a technically strong, people-centric technology consultancy, focused on delivering end-to-end infrastructure and security solutions that solve business challenges and protect critical data. We work collaboratively with clients, forming long-term business partnerships, applying knowledge, experience and the resources our clients need to solve problems, design solutions and co-create agile, efficient and scalable IT services.

► KROME WEBSITE: https://www.krome.co.uk/

► SOCIAL MEDIA
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@krometechnologies
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/krome-technologies-ltd
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/krometechnologies/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/KromeTech
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KromeTechnologies/

► CONTACT
• Telephone: 01932 232345
• Email: info@krome.co.uk

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Krome Cast, Tech-it-Out. I'm Sam Mager, Commercial Director for Krome Technologies, and this week, I'm joined by Jon Ledner, Pre-Sales Consultant and Telecom Specialist. Hi Jon. How you doing Sam, you alright? Yeah, very good, thank you. Good. So today, we're talking about leased line technology, diverse connections and I guess, some of the some of the nuances and differences in how we recommend people ensure their communications are resilient. Okay. Okay. I guess to open with, and this is very much your area of expertise, not mine. And we've talked off camera about some of this, and I've had somewhat an education, I guess to open up with, we're talking about the differences in leased lines communications, I've mentioned that I've just upgraded my home broadband - you have indeed. Yep, you know, stunning, 330mbps of unnecessary download - What are you going to do with that? I have no idea. And 36 of upload, etc etc. But obviously that's pretty fast. And you kind of, think communications back 10 years ago, a 10mbps, or a 100mbps was a lot of money back then, and now obviously, I guess it's consumer technology, but that's really fast. I guess the question, begs, why would that not be suitable for most customers? 330mbps is, you know, an awful lot. It's a good question, and yeah, it's one, one of the ones I get asked the most. The best way to, to compare a residential connection to a leased line, is is comparing, is - use of the road analogy. So if you imagine, so say, hypothetically, our Chertsey office, and our Manchester office, and there was one road that linked them, okay, now, that road has got a speed limit of 70 miles an hour. I'm sorry to tell you that Sam. So that road has got a 70 mile an hour speed limit. Now imagine, there's two scenarios. One scenario is that, yes, it's got a 70 mile an hour speed limit, but there's some road works, and also, there are slow moving lorries going up and down on it. So although it's got a 70 mile an hour speed limit, you're not actually going to do 70 miles an hour, you might do it in little areas. Other people using the road as well, right? Exactly. It's not just our road. It's not just our road. There's a lot of traffic on it. There's roadworks, there's potholes, there's hills, and there's bends. So your average speed really is not going - And now let's imagine another scenario, where it's a perfectly straight road between the two offices, there is no traffic, and there are no potholes. So if you imagine how quickly you would get from office to office - Clearly no more than 70 miles an hour Jon, but - But you would find that on the completely empty road, you would get there a lot quicker. And now also imagine that your job Monday to Friday, 9-5 is moving up and down that road, over a year, how much time you've saved - Okay. moving along that road. So that's the key difference. So that, I guess the technology behind it, is largely similar, but it's the zero contention. So obviously, my connection at home, if everyone in the area is jumping on Netflix, Teams, calls, etc, etc. I've got a lot of people on the road with me. Whereas if I have a leased line, no matter what I'm doing, that's mine. Guaranteed. So if you've got a 100mbps leased line, that service is guaranteed. A residential service, if it goes off, you've got a service level agreement in place, it's not working, so the service level agreement on a product like that, will be, we'll get it fixed by the end of the next working day. Now a leased line, it's 6 hours, it has to be fixed. And that's 24/7. Okay. So you could ring your provider up at 11 o'clock at night on Christmas Eve, and so my lease line has gone off, they've got to get it up and running again with, within 6 hours. Okay. But a basic broadband or basic fibre connection, well, they would, they would start looking at it at beginning of the next day, next working day, sorry. And the other big thing here is, what's actually covered by, so a basic fibre connection it will have, it will be protected against a loss of service, but they they wouldn't look at stuff like slow speeds or it drops out. Leased line, all of that is covered. So that's the fundamental differences between them. It's a key difference, you think just on the SLA piece. We are all, it's so important we're all connected. The way we communicate, people using SaaS based applications, all this sort of stuff, without an internet connection, it's pretty critical, right? So if you're relying on it could be best endeavors next day, that's an awful lot of business that hasn't happened and then again, over, over the Christmas periods or holidays and so on, I imagine that SLA breach gets missed a lot on the residential, but that's tied in and locked in for businesses and that's, that's an imperative. Yeah, it's it's, you know, if you imagine nowadays, an internet connection is just as important as the power going into the building. Yeah. So resilience is a massive thing and, and that also leads us on to the conversation around a backup service. So you've got your primary leased line going into the building. Well, then, one of the things that a lot of companies don't really think about is, do we put in a secondary connection, and you've got resilience, and you've got full diversity. So what a lot of companies do, they say, yeah, we've got a backup. But what they don't do, is they don't actually dissect that and say, well, what have you actually got? So they'll order a lease line from a provider, and they'll say, a provider will say, do you want to backup with that? Yes, I'll have a backup connection, too. But what they end up doing, is they put in a backup connection from the same provider, Yeah. That comes out the same telephone exchange, runs through the same ducting - Yeah. and plugged into the same router. Yes. See where I'm going with this? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so if somebody comes along with a shovel and puts it, breaks the cable - Yeah. we've lost both. So if the router was to fail, you've lost both. Yeah, yeah. So the thing that you need to think about is, you need to think about the path of that connection takes. So for example, one way of doing it, is you can have it where you've got two separate routers, Okay. So you're gonna run the primary into router one, and then the backup into the second right? Yeah. But if they're still running from the same exchange, down the same channeling, etc, the shovel in the road bit is taking them both out? Exactly that, yeah. So think, follow, follow the traffic back and figure out how you can do it. So another way of doing it is, we can provide a connection, where you have one coming from one carrier and one coming from another carrier, into two different routers. So if there's an if there's a network outage, so let's say for example, we route one over Openreach cabling, and one over Virgin Media cabling. Yep. Yeah. So if Openreach gets an outage, fails over, okay. Now, that's a great way of doing it, but there are advantages and disadvantages of doing that. So the advantage obviously, is you're using a separate carrier, so you've got diversity in that way. Disadvantages of doing it, and what not many people realise this, you order a connection with a carrier, other than Openreach, Yep, I was going to push on this, to become kind of aware that most of the infrastructure is BT's right? So at some point, they will traverse BT. Yeah, what you find, is what we call in the game as the lead in, where it literally is the bit of wire going into the building. Is it last mile? last mile, yeah, that's another term used. And so they'll utilise, so you've got no control over that. So when you order the connection, you say, right, I'm going to be smart, and I'm gonna go with two carriers. There's no way that we can say to the network team, we want it routing a different way - So, you go to BT for one, and Virgin for the other. Yeah. Thinking that's diverse, but there's no guarantee they're still not coming at the same exchange. It's a better way of doing it - Okay. yeah, it is a better way of doing it. Yeah. And it's a lot smarter than the first point we made, where everything comes - Exactly, how do you then get around that? Because if you've got, I don't know, how do you round that? You can get round it. Yep there is a way round it. Right, so in my opinion, and most people that do my job, will all agree that the best way to do it, is what we call RO2, Resilient Option 2. Now that is a product that you purchase at a wholesale level, from Openreach. So, Resilience Option 2, is where you have two completely diverse connections coming into the building. So you put in your first leased line, comes out and telephone exchange. Okay, and it comes down some stuff, goes to the distribution, distribution point in the street, the little green box, and then goes into building, into a router. So that's your first connection. Yeah. And then they provision a second connection. And the second connection, first of all, it goes through a different exchange. The traffic routing goes through a different PoP. Yeah, okay. It comes down different cabling, from a different exchange, goes to a different green box on the side of the street, and comes in a different side of the building. So if you imagine that there's your building you've got - So it's fully diverse? Fully diverse. even though it's from the same carrier, BT themselves are offering, I call it separate, just just separate ways in right? So there's completely Chinese walled connections. So the question I have then and as you said, you keep chasing this back, where's the redundancy in using one supplier just using BT? So, it's good question. So, there is always a possibility that the whole of the Openreach network goes down, but it would have to be the whole of the Openreach network. Remember, I'll send you about PoP? So what happens is the first connection route through a southern PoP, Okay, yep. So that's controlling the traffic in the South. Yeah. but the other connection goes through a northern PoP. Okay. Okay. So, they are completely separate in that way. And there is no connection that is fully guaranteed, there is always going to be a point of failure. But what you do in these things is you try and engineer it, so the failure is the least. So it's looking at your kind of 5, 9's of uptime in the infrastructure world and so on. So you can mitigate it as much as possible, but there's, there's always a possibibility. There could be a cataclysmic event or whatever it might be, so you can't guarantee it. Yep. The other thing is aswell, what you tend to find, when you look at outage, when you look at a fault, it can be broken down into two simple things, it's either network or local. Yeah. Okay. Now, if it's a network fault, they tend to get fixed very quickly, because network faults, it affects us. But it also affects hospitals, makes a lot of noise, yeah. Makes a real lot of noise. And you tend to find, those types of faults are measured in minutes or hours. When someone turns up with a shovel, and puts it through a cable outside, it affects just you. Yeah. And you can't make that much noise, and it also involves, you don't fix that with a keyboard, you fix that with someone coming out - Another man in a van. another man in a van yeah, who comes and undoes what the first guy did. So that tends to be, you know, the next day or something like that. Whereas a network issue tends to be a couple of hours. So that, in my opinion, is the most resilient way of protecting your business, against a loss of service. Okay. We're referring to that kind of, a business, a building, a building has uses RO2. So we've got diverse connections in, BT has got north and south PoP, So there's an extraordinary amount of resilience there, so that's safe. I now have a building over there, do I have the, what's the best way for me to, do I just put the same thing? Do I have another - Good question. Over there? What's the best way, and what would your recommendation be if we, hypothetical customer has got two sites or three sites, what is the best way of us arranging these connections for, for resilience, and also take into consideration commercial, because whilst comms pricing has come down, it's still not free, an investment has to be made. And I'm assuming that the RO2 way of doing it, obviously, far higher cost than just having a basic fibre connection, right, but very different service. So what would our recommendation be from a, I guess, a technical and commercial aspect if I've got multiple locations? So a good way, let's say hypothetically, let's say for example, our Chertsey office and our Manchester office, let's use that example again, what we could do, we could be a bit smarter, we could put a leased line in each, okay. But instead of having two more leased lines as two back as the backups of the two sites, what we could do is we could do a point to point, and the best way to imagine that, is imagine it like a bit of wire joining the two together. But what actually happens is it uses a leased line technology, but it doesn't break out to the internet, it just joins the two together. And then what you can do is you can do some clever stuff with the firewalls. So if Manchester goes off, it then utilises the point to point, and gets its internet connection - so reroutes the traffic, reroutes the traffic. So I don't need the additional connection into that building, so a single connection into each building, and then the point to point, and I just route my traffic - Exactly. to what's available. And also what's quite clever there, is if you've got physical devices in each building, that join together, they're not breaking out over the internet, you're not running traffic over the internet. So they are, so you can also do if you've got servers, for example, I know a lot of us use Cloud, but there was also a big thing about, do we want to use a Cloud and some people are quite into keeping stuff on-prem, but if you've got servers on-prem, they can just backup between each other, and you're not utilising your bandwidth for your internet connection. What about things like latency? Obviously, but is there any is there a certain distance, where actually - distance isn't a thing. You do find, if you're not breaking out over the internet and not utilising the internet, there's less steps. So you are going to have less latency. But to be honest with you, leased lines are so good anyway, you don't get a lot of latency anyway. So you know, so it's, and that's, that's the smarter way of doing things. You know, a lot of people they just say, buy a connection, buy a connection. Sometimes with this sort of stuff, you've got to be a bit smarter. For example, if you go back to that conversation again, about using two carriers, we've got a client at the moment, that we know that, the Openreach comes in one side of the building, and Virgin Media comes in another side of the building. Now RO2 is fantastic and it's best way of doing it. But if you could guarantee the connection comes in separate parts of the building, then you are actually better off using two separate carriers. Okay, yeah. Okay, but that's where knowledge and consultancy comes into it, because we know - It's not your first rodeo Jon, you've done an awful lot of this over the years.(Laughter) Okay, alright. So I guess takeaways from this, I mean, it's, it's interesting the consideration, you're getting there to use things like, the point to point, it makes sense. Technically, it makes sense. Commercially, I'm assuming that it's less expensive to have a single point to point than the extra - Point to point is more expensive than a leased line, Yep. But not two leased lines. Yeah, and again so I would, and you do see the, I'll just add a line and add a primary, I was talking to a customer the other day, I want a 300 and a 100, I want a Gb and all of that, people just put that primary, secondary, but they didn't, you know, I know we've reengaged, had the conversation with them, but it's the actually, let's talk about things like diverse carriers and so on, actually, could we use point to point, can we, could we do that smarter? but for so long, comms has just simply been primary and secondary, give me a quote and not enough thought goes into that, given how important it is. I mean, everyone's using at least one SaaS-based app, it's impossible you're not, with 365 out there, you're using something that is SaaS-based, your internet connectivity is so important to the uptime. The impact of business without the internet these days is through the roof right? So careful consideration has to be given to these sort of things. Yeah, another interesting one, actually, and we're seeing this quite a lot now, is clients are upgrading their primary as the, as the demand on the service gets more and more, they're upgrading the primary and forgetting about the backup. Yeah. And then what happens is the primary fails, and then the backup kicks in. But they're failing over to a backup they provisioned 10 years ago, and they've upgraded that one so many, the primary so many times, and they've not upgraded the backup. And then they go to use the backup and the backup just doesn't work. So that, that is another one we're seeing quite a lot. And that is another one that I'm pushing quite a bit on saying, look, look at your backup. Yeah. And also test it. Of course, yeah, Test it is another one. But in regards to takeaways from this, I think the first thing is, look at your service level agreement. Look at what you've got, find out what your service level agreement is, and then your backup, question your backup. What is, how is your backup actually literally wired up? Yes. Take it apart. Think about how it travels, does it use the same ducting? Ask all these questions, and also an important one, test it. Yeah. Unplug and see what happens. Yeah. Maybe not right in the middle of the day.(Laughter) Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So that but yeah, so the, the main ones, just to recap, the main ones is, first of all, look at your service level agreements, find out what actually does your supplier do, if this thing turns off? Yeah. What are they contractually obliged to do? And look at your your backup connection, what type is it? Is it diverse? Is it diverse? Yeah. Is it just basic resilience? And I guess, also, overall, just look at the way you're currently doing it, because you may have structured the design of that a number of years ago, and now there's a better way of doing it, given the costs have come down, and we can do clever things with point to points and so on. And if you're unsure, call us and speak to Jon and we'll do the hard business for you. I can talk about this stuff all day long. Unfortunately, we're not allowed to. But that's, Jon, really informative as always. I always get a lot out of this, but I've learned something today as always, so thank you for your time. Not a problem. And thank you for joining us on this episode of Krome Cast, Tech-it-Out. If there's anything you'd like us to cover on future episodes, then do leave that in the comments below. And remember to like, subscribe, and share, and join us again next time on Krome Cast, Tech-it-Out.