In today’s interconnected world, businesses demand more from their network than simple connectivity. While traditional Internet connections—whether enterprise-grade or broadband—are often marketed as "business-ready," their underlying configurations tell a different story. These connections typically rely on best-effort service configurations, leading to inconsistent performance, packet loss, and a lack of fairness for users.

Fusion’s SD-WAN changes the game by transforming these flawed setups into truly business-grade solutions, offering fairness, packet loss mitigation, and a superior quality of experience (QoE).

Fairness in Connectivity | The Foundation of Business Performance

Most Internet connections are configured with rudimentary traffic management, such as FIFO (First In, First Out) or WRED (Weighted Random Early Detection). These methods do little to prioritize critical traffic or ensure equitable distribution of bandwidth. The result?

Bandwidth Hogs Dominate: Certain users or applications can monopolize resources, leaving others with poor performance.
Unpredictable User Experience: Businesses experience sporadic connectivity, which directly impacts productivity and customer satisfaction.

What is Fairness?

Fairness in networking ensures that all users and applications receive an appropriate share of bandwidth based on their needs and importance. For example:

Critical applications like VoIP, video conferencing, & CRM platforms are prioritized.
Recreational traffic like social media or streaming doesn’t choke the network.

How Fusion Delivers Fairness | How SFQ & FQ-CoDel Improve Business Communications

Fusion’s SD-WAN implements advanced traffic shaping and load balancing across its overlay network. This ensures that bandwidth is dynamically allocated to where it’s needed most, creating a fair and efficient experience for all users.

Effective network communication in a business setting hinges on managing bandwidth fairly and reducing latency. Two powerful tools, Stochastic Fair Queuing (SFQ) and Fair Queuing Controlled Delay (FQ-CoDel), as implemented in Fusion’s SD-WAN, excel in optimizing traffic flow and reducing congestion, resulting in a better overall experience for users and applications.

Stochastic Fair Queuing (SFQ) | Fairness Through Randomisation

SFQ works by dividing network traffic into multiple queues, ensuring that no single flow (a stream of packets between two endpoints) dominates the available bandwidth. Instead of prioritizing specific applications or users, SFQ assigns traffic flows to queues in a pseudo-random manner, distributing bandwidth fairly across all active connections.

Key Benefits for Businesses:

Eliminates Bandwidth Hogging: Prevents a single user or application (like a large file download) from monopolizing network resources.
Improves User Experience: Ensures that all users and applications get a fair share of the bandwidth, reducing frustration caused by slow connections.
Enhances Collaboration: Keeps real-time applications like VoIP, video conferencing, and collaborative tools running smoothly alongside other traffic.

Fair Queuing Controlled Delay (FQ-CoDel) | Smarter Congestion Management

FQ-CoDel takes the concept of fair queuing a step further by addressing bufferbloat, a condition where excessive buffering in network devices leads to high latency and degraded performance.

How It Works:

Fair Queuing: Like SFQ, FQ-CoDel distributes traffic into separate queues to ensure fairness.
Delay Control: It monitors each queue for latency. If a queue’s delay exceeds a threshold, FQ-CoDel dynamically prioritizes other queues or drops packets to reduce congestion.

Benefits for Businesses:

Low Latency for Critical Applications: Ensures real-time traffic like voice and video calls remains unaffected, even during periods of heavy network use.
Better Application Performance: Improves responsiveness for interactive applications, such as cloud-based tools or remote desktop sessions.
Reduced Congestion Impact: Automatically mitigates issues caused by sudden spikes in traffic, preventing performance bottlenecks.

How These Technologies Transform Business Networks

When SFQ and FQ-CoDel are implemented in a business network, they help create a fairer and more responsive environment for all users and applications. This is particularly crucial in environments where multiple users and devices share the same connection, such as small to medium-sized businesses or branch offices.

Example Use Case:
In a business where employees rely on cloud applications for work, a single large download could previously slow down other users. With SFQ and FQ-CoDel in place, bandwidth is distributed fairly, ensuring that critical applications like video conferencing or VoIP maintain their quality, even during peak usage.

SFQ and FQ-CoDel empower businesses by optimizing network traffic to deliver fairness, reduce latency, and improve overall performance. These technologies ensure that every application and user has a reliable experience, enabling businesses to operate more efficiently and productively in a connected world.

Packet Loss | The Hidden Threat to Businesses

What is Packet Loss?

Packet loss occurs when data packets traveling across the network fail to reach their destination. It can happen due to:

Network congestion.
Faults in the last mile (fibre, wireless, etc.).
Equipment issues or poor signal quality.

Why Packet Loss is Devastating:

Real-Time Communication Issues: Voice calls become choppy, video conferencing lags, and streaming freezes.
Data Corruption: Applications requiring data integrity, such as databases, can experience errors.
Reduced Productivity: Employees face delays and frustrations, impacting business operations.

Fusion’s Packet Loss Solution | How a UDP Overlay Transforms Poor Internet Experiences

Fusion’s SD-WAN uses UDP for its overlay network. Unlike TCP, which slows down when packet loss occurs, UDP maintains performance by implementing intelligent retransmissions and bandwidth adaption at the SD-WAN level.

The power of a UDP-based overlay lies in its ability to maintain performance, even in challenging network conditions like packet loss or congestion. Unlike TCP, which slows down when packets are lost or delayed, UDP handles communication more fluidly by not requiring acknowledgment of every packet. This makes it a superior choice for ensuring a smoother and more consistent experience—whether you're connecting from a hotspot at a café or managing enterprise-grade SD-WAN.

Why UDP Overlays Work Better in Unreliable Environments

Using a VPN with a UDP overlay on a public hotspot not only enhances security but also provides a better experience by bypassing TCP’s latency-inducing retransmissions. Similarly, SD-WAN solutions like Fusion's leverage UDP overlays to improve network performance.

The secret to UDP’s success in SD-WAN is that it provides the foundation for mechanisms to:

Adapt to Packet Loss: UDP continues transmitting packets without waiting for acknowledgments, reducing delays caused by lost or delayed packets.
Mitigate Congestion: By not overloading the network with retries or excessive retransmissions, UDP overlays maintain a consistent flow of traffic.

Avoiding the Overhead of Legacy Solutions Like FEC & Packet Duplication

Some solutions attempt to address packet loss by implementing mechanisms like Forward Error Correction (FEC) and packet duplication. While effective in certain scenarios, these methods introduce significant technology burdens:

Increased Resource Consumption: FEC requires additional processing power for encoding and decoding redundant data, which can strain network equipment.
Wasted Bandwidth: Packet duplication sends the same data multiple times, consuming bandwidth unnecessarily.

Instead of piling on these resource-heavy solutions, Fusion's SD-WAN employs bandwidth adaptation, a streamlined and effective method that avoids these pitfalls.

How Bandwidth Adaptation Works

Fusion’s SD-WAN dynamically adjusts the data flow based on real-time network conditions. This approach allows the system to:

Reduce Transmission Rates During Congestion: Prevents overwhelming the network by intelligently throttling non-critical traffic.
Maintain Quality for Critical Applications: Ensures that voice, video, and other real-time applications remain clear and uninterrupted.
React to Packet Loss Without Overcompensation: Adapts bandwidth usage to current conditions, ensuring efficiency without sending redundant or excessive data.

This crisp and clean approach optimizes performance without placing unnecessary demands on resources. Businesses benefit from smoother connectivity and improved user experiences while keeping network infrastructure lean and efficient.

Whether you're streaming from a café hotspot or managing enterprise networks, the principles of UDP overlays demonstrate their superiority in handling unreliable environments. Fusion's SD-WAN takes these principles to the next level, offering an intelligent, resource-efficient solution that adapts to loss and congestion with precision—ensuring performance without unnecessary complexity or costs.

Fusion’s SD-WAN provides a seamless experience that allows critical business applications and real-time traffic to remain unaffected, even on unreliable connections.

Quality of Experience (QoE) | Elevating Business Connectivity

While many telcos claim to offer Quality of Service (QoS), these solutions are often:

Complex to Configure: Require extensive manual setup.
Provider-Specific: Ineffective across different ISPs.

What Makes Fusion’s QoE Different?

Fusion’s SD-WAN offers a Quality of Experience solution that is:

Agnostic Across Providers: Works seamlessly, no matter the underlying Internet service.
Automatic and Bi-Directional: Traffic prioritization occurs in both directions, ensuring upstream and downstream performance.

How Traffic Control Works:

Advanced Traffic Filtering: Fusion’s SD-WAN intelligently classifies traffic into priority levels.
- Real time: VoIP, video calls, and business-critical applications.
- Interactive: ERP systems, file transfers, etc.
- Bulk: Social media, downloads, and non-essential applications.
Real-Time Traffic Optimization: Ensures crystal-clear voice calls and uninterrupted video, even under network strain.
Bleeding Off Unnecessary Traffic: Non-critical traffic is deprioritized to make way for essential business functions.

Fusion’s Unique Value | A Comprehensive Package

While some of these features may be found in competing SD-WAN solutions, Fusion’s offering stands out due to its comprehensive integration and cost-effectiveness. Here’s why:

Fairness for All Users: Dynamic bandwidth allocation creates an equitable and productive network environment.
Packet Loss Mitigation: Intelligent overlays maintain performance, even on suboptimal connections.
Unmatched QoE: Automatically prioritizes business-critical traffic in both directions, ensuring seamless operation.
Resilience and Reliability: Combines multiple Internet providers to deliver uninterrupted connectivity, regardless of outages or performance issues on individual circuits.
Cost-Effective Deployment: Fusion delivers enterprise-grade features at a price point that works for businesses of all sizes.

Wrap

The myth that Internet connections are inherently "business-grade" has been busted. Traditional setups rely on brute-force bandwidth rather than optimizing performance. Fusion’s SD-WAN revolutionizes this approach with fairness, packet loss mitigation, and unmatched quality of experience.

By choosing Fusion, businesses not only overcome the limitations of raw Internet connections but also gain resilience, reliability, and performance in a cost-effective package. Upgrade to Fusion’s SD-WAN today and experience the difference in true business-grade connectivity.

Ronald Bartels ensures that Internet inhabiting things are connected reliably online at Fusion Broadband South Africa - the leading specialized SD-WAN Last Mile provider in South Africa. Learn more about the best SD-WAN in the world: 👉Contact Fusion✈️

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🈺What Makes SD-WAN Truly Business Grade?🕴️