“Route-Optimization” Explained
Many colocation providers are touting “route-optimized bandwidth” as a value add to their clients. They say it makes their bandwidth better and more reliable, automatically optimizing traffic for customers. However, this is just one way to interpret what a route optimizer actually does.
Providers will say the units route around brown-outs, decrease latency and prevent jitter. This is true, these units can indeed provide this functionality. However, why should a seemingly reputable provider’s backbone uplinks be experiencing brown-outs, latency, or jitter?
“Route Optimized” bandwidth sells for significantly more than regular bandwidth. This means you are paying the “route-optimized” rate regardless of the actual end cost of the uplink your traffic ends up routing out of. Think about that for a second… If this provider has two uplinks, Uplink A at $10/Meg and Uplink B at $40/Meg, they will still charge you $60/Meg whether you go over Uplink A OR Uplink B.
“Who cares, it’s optimized and worth it!”
This is where things get tricky. Contrary to popular belief, a truly quality uplink does not experience the brown-outs, latency, and jitter problems these devices are designed to remediate. The souce of the misconception lies in consumer education.
Instead of only purchasing high-quality uplinks to only high-quality, albeight more expensive, backbone providers, these companies buy a small quantity of high-quality bandwidth and then augment it with bargain basement, low end connectivity. In essence, they are using “route-optimization” to justify charging customers $60/Meg for $10/Meg bandwidth. thus increasing their profits and pulling the wool over customers’ eyes.
This is not to say that all providers running route optimization products are swindlers, some offer extremely high end product. However the additional cost of the route optimization device is not trivial and certainly passed on to customers. Instead of investing in people-power, education and technical training, providers lazily throw money at the “magic box” to fix all their problems. In the end, it’s up to the customer as to whether they feel like paying extra for the magic box or not. Add the Marketing Department to this equation and you can see why expensive, “route-optimized” bandwidth sales are all the rage today.
Proper tuning of routers can result in exceptional convergance time in case of link failure, and careful selection of properly engineered uplink providers can ensure consistently low latency and high throughput. Even if a problem were to occur, I personally would prefer knowing that a flesh and blood person stepped in, determined the cause, and remedied the situation permenantly, while perhaps also performing additional checks on other systems to ensure similar problems will not occur in the future.
But hey, that’s just me.