There are so many new products available for broadband connectivity right now, Fiber to the Cabinet, ethernet last mile and Annexe-M bonded DSL – to mention just a few, that when it comes to rolling out a new branch office (or indeed relocating a head office), you’d be forgiven for getting a little dizzy in trying to choose which one to use.

We’re in the middle of planning a datacentre move at Pluss Connect, and luckily for us the available connectivity options at the new site are varied. So what should we choose?

Well we currently have a 10Mb leased line from Virgin Media and a 50Mb from BT. The 10Mb line costs us £12k a year and the 50Mb about £18k. So I’m thinking it might be a good idea to put my money where my mouth is and prove how clever (and cost effective) Peplink Routers can be and engineer a MPLS alternative.

We already have a pair of Peplink 1350 Balance routers in our datacentre providing VPN link bonding across the two leased lines as well as inbound load balancing for internally hosted web servers/services. So what if we put those 10 free wan ports to better use?

We can get BT infinity at the new site and installed one last week for testing purposes. It syncs at 20Mb down and 15Mb up (although BT limits upload bandwidth to 10Mb at the moment). We can buy BT Infinity for £26/circuit – so easy sums, for 10 circuits, that will give us 200Mb Down and 100Mb up when bonded (minus 5% VPN bonding overhead) its going to cost us £260/pcm and that works out to £3120/year!!!

Now that’s awesome value for money! Plus we get built in failover/high availability (across all the Infinity circuits AND the leased lines), and we can use all the external IPs for internal services (like web/voip cloud hosting).

That’s a saving of nearly £9k a year over a 10Mb leased line at our address. Ok, I realise we already have a pair of 1350 routers, but even if we didn’t at a list price of 5k each, we’d pretty much break even in year one and in year two we’d be saving the £9k (and the next year and the next year)…

BT are already talking about bandwidth upgrades to their Infinity product offering and these will likely be FREE OF CHARGE as they upgrade their network. When was the last time your ISP offered to upgrade the bandwidth on your leased line for free?

So our plan is to cancel the 10Mb Virgin leased line, retain the 50MB BT circuit and then bolt on 10 BT infinitiy circuits giving us a bonded bandwidth total of 250Mb down and 150Mb up. It is going to be great and I’ll blog about the install here when we do it.

To find out more about Peplink Routers and how they can help you save money whilst providing higher bandwidth contact me or take a look at Peplinkuk.com for more information. You can buy Peplink routers online from the shop at Pluss Connect.