Broadview Networks Selects Packet Design Solution

Broadview Networks, a business communications service provider, has selected and deployed VPN Explorer, an IP/MPLS VPN routing analysis solution from Packet Design, Inc.

Officials with Packet Design (News - Alert) said that Broadview will use VPN Explorer to manage their IP network, which provides business customers with VoIP, Internet, VPN and MPLS-enabled data communications.

Broadview Networks (News - Alert) installed VPN Explorer earlier this year to monitor its large router network, which runs the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway (News - Alert) Protocol (BGP) and Multi-Protocol BGP (MP-BGP) MPLS VPN routing protocols. 

Company officials said that VPN Explorer uses a technology known as ‘route analytics’ that lets the company's network engineering staff look at otherwise hidden aspects of routing behavior – undetectable by conventional SNMP-based management tools – and understand its impact on network reliability, redundancy, and customer service delivery.

George Carey, managing director of ISP Operations for Broadview Networks, said the need for more visibility into IP and MPLS VPN routing has increased with the growth of Broadview’s service portfolio and the expansion of network. 

“Our IP backbone network has grown to support many diverse services, including more than 50,000 OfficeSuite™ hosted IP phone stations, SIP trunking, multi-site MPLS networks, Internet access, and managed network ad end user security services,” said Carey, in a statement. 

Carey said that the company’s customers are primarily businesses that entrust company the with their critical data and voice communications, and that are very sensitive to any service disruptions. 

“For example, on a typical business day we handle upwards of a million busy-hour voice call attempts. As our customer base grew, our staff needed greater management visibility to continue delivering the best-in-class service experience that our clients are used to receiving,” he said.

According to company officials, VPN Explorer has made a significant impact on the time it takes to investigate and resolve issues, particularly with complex MPLS VPN services.

“Increasing efficiency through better intelligence and automation is a mantra within Broadview. MTTR is a key performance indicator that we constantly aim to improve in order to advance our customer responsiveness and lower operations costs,” said Carey.

Carey said that traditional network device management solutions didn’t really help the company troubleshoot network problems because they could only tell the status of individual routers.

“We have found Packet Design’s network management solution to be an excellent tool for automating the collection and analysis of network-wide IP and MPLS VPN routing information. It has made a real difference in speeding up our response and resolution times for customer issues,” he added.

Broadview’s Carey said he liked the fast up-time that Packet Design’s solution gives them right out of the box. “We were able to install it in about 15 minutes and it was running smoothly and productively in practically no time. Also, since it’s vendor-agnostic and uses standards-based routing protocols, we didn’t need to perform expensive software customization in order for VPN Explorer to operate in our network environment”.