New Masergy Service Tackles Woeful Public Broadband Performance

A new network service from Masergy helps to ensure broadband performance in a business world that increasingly uses broadband.

Masergy’s Performance Edge solution provides assurance for on-net broadband. The offering minimizes packet loss on broadband connections and allows customers to observe traffic and forecast congestion.

Ajay Pandya, Masergy’s director of product management, said the vendor developed the service in response to proliferating broadband usage. Workforces turned to broadband in droves last year as government restrictions mandated work-from-home in many cases. Although many companies are returning to the office, remote work will remain a fixture. A recent Altman Solon study commissioned by Masergy found that 60% of companies are considering a hybrid work environment. As a result, broadband is going to play a big role even beyond the pandemic.

Masergy’s Ajay Pandya

Pandya said he sees this trend occurring among the Masegy customer base.

“It used to be 60-70% sites using a broadband uplink. Now almost 90% of sites have a broadband uplink,” he said.

The same Altmon Solon study showed serious dissatisfaction with broadband reliability. Almost half (48%) of respondents said the low costs don’t justify the inferior quality of service.

“There is a need to have some sort of robustness or resiliency built into broadband, especially to run real-time applications,” Pandya told Channel Futures.

How It Works

Pandya said Masergy’s vendor partners are supporting the solution. Fortinet in particular offers a mechanism that provides broadband resiliency. Performance Edge utilizes that mechanism, while adding intelligence from Masergy around traffic patterns.

Customers can use Performance Edge as part of the Masergy SD-WAN or SASE offerings that use Fortinet technology. (Masergy also partners with Silver Peak.) Pandya said Performance Edge also works on legacy services like Layer 2 MPLS.

He added that we can think of Performance Edge as a site enhancement.

“Let’s say you’ve got an SD-WAN device at home. Your home is now a mini-branch. You have a broadband connection with an option for Performance Edge, and let’s say Performance Edge is on. From that point onward, our back-end systems will constantly monitor your broadband. It is going to turn it on or turn it off depending on what kind of congestion is being observed,” he said.

Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK Research, called the service “revolutionary,” due to its ability to make low-cost broadband perform comparably to private Ethernet.

ZK Research’s Zeus Kerravala

“It saves precious IT dollars and removes the productivity uncertainties of working from home all within a SASE environment,” Kerravala said. “This could easily be the biggest networking innovation this century.”

Channel Perspective

Pandya said Masergy built the broadband service with the channel in mind.

“This is an opportunity for new value creation for their customers. Whenever there is any sort of conversation around broadband as the access mechanism for the site they are trying to roll out, this is an addition they can put in. It results in better customer satisfaction at a very significantly lower cost,” Pandya said.