Internet Service Providers looking to provide their own whitelabel SD-WAN product have several criteria to meet when selecting their vendor. From technical questions regarding infrastructure and hardware, to efficiency and scale of your offerings, SLX has narrowed down 5 questions you need to ask when selecting your SD-WAN vendor.

For most SD-WAN vendors, the ability to failover to a standby connection requires constant monitoring of standby links and their heartbeats. Consider this when using cellular connections as standby connections. How will data usage affect costs per site – are you making money? While most SD-WAN vendors average a Gig of usage per month, SLX SD-WAN only uses 250MB per month. This is more than acceptable to confidently provide your customers with Cellular connections such as 3G, 4G, LTE and 5G using data caps. Mitigate extra Data usage costs and provide your customers with peace of mind.

Channel Bonding hardware capabilities and costs can determine pricing and market penetration. Sourcing hardware and controlling costs is crucial when deciding price points. But what kind of performance are you expecting from varying hardware options available today? SLX SD-WAN runs on x86 devices with real world throughput of 250Mbps for Celeron, 750Mbps for i3 and 1120Mbps for i7 processors. Not only is throughput efficient with these processors, they are also cost effective. For example, an i7 device at $600USD or lower can achieve throughput north of 1Gbps. Other vendors require hardware at costs above $2000USD to achieve the same results, leaving you with little margin and out-priced for most markets.

In the era of decreased IPv4 availability and heightened costs associated to them, any SD-WAN deployment needs to be efficient when using IPv4 at the controller and end customer locations. Can you afford to tie up unused IPv4 addresses? SLX SD-WAN has demonstrated 400 non-WAN end costumers on a single server/controller. To deploy that many endpoints, SLX SD-WAN uses a /23. Other SD-WAN vendors require as much as a /21 to support the same number of edge devices.
At $15/IP, the difference is about $18,000.

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Twelve Products Enabled by SLX SD-WAN

Twelve Simple products for ISPs looking to increase profit margins, get more creative with service offerings and solve more customer problems.

Without the need for a massive investment in infrastructure, service providers can leverage SLX SD-WAN to solve customer bandwidth issues.

The following twelve simple products help ISPs up-sell and cross-sell existing customers as well as attract new customers – all while increasing profit-margins, stickiness and their value in the delivery of services to customers. Customers are leveraging the Cloud and SaaS applications – and they  need help ensuring that their network stays on, performance as expected, and adapts to fluctuations in quality.

This document outlines how SD-WAN features can be deployed affordably and creatively to give customers improved network uptime, cleaner bandwidth for video-conferencing and other apps, and faster networks through bonded internet connections.

12 products you can build, market and deploy today!

Go to market with products your customers will love.

Independent ISPs can combine LTE with a Broadband connection to improve customer uptime and compete against Rogers and Bell in Canada.

With businesses all around the world starting to get their “mojo” back (retail opening back up, restaurant patios being physically enlarged, hair salons welcomingback the shaggy (and those that need to fix their home-haircuts), the need for a reliable network that supports cashless transactions is increasingly necessary. The service industry need an affordable network solution that won’t let them down.

Sure, an enterprise could fork out $1000/mo. for a Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) connection to get a guaranteed uptime SLA. But how, for the SMB space, can a service provider offer anything more reliable than broadband if they don’t own the infrastructure, or can’t provide an uptime SLA? 

Combining two broadband connections (from different networks) using SLX SD-WAN would give a customer 99.99% uptime, for less than half the cost of a DIA connection.

What’s more, SLX SD-WAN is delivered on a static IP, which means that a transaction or an application session won’t fail or have to be re-initiated – it will survive the outage. Unlike Rogers’s Ignite with LTE, ISPs offering SLX SD-WAN can provide same-IP, session-persistent failover for customers.

If your customers are now reliant on supporting cashless transactions and ensuring operations run smoothly while they adapt to their “new normal”, SLX SD-WAN should be in their communications closets.

Open up new market opportunities by bridging the gap between broadband (90 minutes of downtime/week) and DIA (1 minute of downtime/week) with an affordable alternative.

Download your free Failover Sales Sheet

With 25 staff using VPNs to connect, the download and upload bandwidth requirements on their head-office (where those files and applications are hosted) have increased substantially. Their broadband usage has flipped on its head – whereas people were pulling and working on files locally, the network needed only to host downloads in the form of online research, Office 365 and the like. Now, the network has to handle each employee actually pulling down data from their servers.

But speed isn’t the only issue now. With so many people requiring access at the same time, an internet outage is now a complete disruption to revenue (again, those billable hours) and causes significant disruptions to project timelines, lost work due to sync-ing issues, and more.

Remote Employees + On-Premises Files and Applications = New Bandwidth Requirements.

So what does all of this mean? It means the head office is becoming the data center, and there’s a need for more bandwidth to be able to improve employee productivity. Where before users were accessing files over the LAN, network requirements have to consider the bandwidth in and out of the office. The same new network requirements exist for any business customers that have remote employees.

Unfortunately, I had no cash on me and my barber actually had to let me leave with a free haircut. Awkward for both of us, but most unfortunate for my barber. It wasn’t even the first time it had happened to him either. Sound familiar?

High-Availability Internet for all businesses

Businesses of all sizes rely on cloud applications to perform day-to-day business operations. Whether it’s payment gateways, food delivery apps (Uber Eats, Foodora, etc.), or in this case – staffing/scheduling apps, the need for reliable Internet is crucial to a business’s success. But with limited broadband options available to some businesses, the option to purchase reliable connectivity can be out of reach…Until now.

Your Business. Always-on.

SLX SD-WAN ensures your business is always-on by smartly combining multiple Internet connections to a SLX SD-WAN device and deliver up-time no single connection can provide. For example, with SLX SD-WAN my barber can keep his existing cable broadband connected to a SLX SD-WAN device, providing Internet for his payment and booking software. He can now connect a second Internet connection such as an LTE by tethering his phone or a dedicated mobile hotspot modem.

When his cable broadband goes down, his backup mobile connection activates Instantly, keeping his Internet connected with no downtime whatsoever. Once his cable broadband comes back online, the mobile hotspot will be put on standby and business can continue uninterrupted. In fact, he may not even know he had an outage.

With SLX SD-WAN, using two or more different Internet connections ensures that your network is always-on. Business owners can achieve nearly 100% network up-time with SLX SD-WAN and multiple Internet connections. Now, less well-provisioned rural area businesses can achieve high-availability Internet.

Consider the impact downtime has on your business:

What does downtime mean to your business?

Small ISP owner? sales-person? Skip to the bottom and download a free sales sheet you can take to your next customer telling them how they can bond multiple Internet connections for faster speeds. And why they should consider doing so.

“I feel the need.. the need for speed!”

Editor’s note: Yes, I appreciate that speed and bandwidth are not the same, but for the sake of getting your eyes on this post, I chose Tom Cruise and not a picture of plumbing.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that network bandwidth requirements are soaring. Largely unchecked, applications are improving user experiences by increasing the amount of data required for their use. As those applications get better (more plug-ins, clearer video, sadly more tracking technologies..), and as more users elect to use them, the strain on a business’s network can get out of hand.

Even Slack, the hyper-popular messaging application – it needs 600kbps for a 2-person conference call (in upload and download).. and a whopping 4Mbps for a 4-person call.

So sure, you might have 600kbps of upload bandwidth to spare for slack, but if you consider all of the other applications that may be running simultaneously, your “available” bandwidth may start to dwindle. How much bandwidth does each user’s email-related activities need? What about their phones? web-browsing? file-sharing?

One Ring Networks, an ISP in Georgia posted a pretty good bandwidth calculator here. In it, they list a bunch of common applications and help you identify how much bandwidth you’d need per user for each simultaneous session. It adds up pretty quickly. Here’s what we need in our office (at peak!):

1. Slack for our daily stand-up: 1.2Mbps down, 600kbps up.
2. Web Browsing (6 users): 6Mbps down/up
3. Email (6 users) 6Mbps down/up
4. Music Streaming: 0.3Mbps down

Total: 13.5Mbps download (minimum) and 12.6Mbps upload. 13.5Mbps download isn’t necessarily tough to find, but what about getting the 12.6Mbps upload?

Bonding Internet Connections:

Fiber providers will tell you to wait for Fiber to be available. Cable providers can turn your bandwidth up fairly easily. For those users that are cost-conscious, or haven’t got access to high-speed cable or other, we suggest bonding.

What is bonding?

Bonding is a technology that combines the bandwidth of multiple Internet connections. It’s not new, but we thought we’d try

In the image below, the top graph shows two Internet connections that are live at a given site. In this case, each connection is capable of doing about 10Mbps. The green line is the actual bandwidth of that connection during a speed test.

SLX Channel Enablement Inc. announces its plans to eke out marketshare in the increasingly popular SD-WAN space

SLX Channel Enablement Inc., a young SD-WAN company started by a few veterans of the space, understood that the key to a sustainable product was to create as much of a hands-off experience for customers and distribution partners as possible. What they’ve created is astonishingly brave.

SD-WAN, touted by most as the “next big thing” in Networking, is the ability to more smartly and efficiently leverage WAN/Internet links and software to create cost-saving networking solutions that are easier to deploy and manage than traditional Wide Area Networks.

“Everyone’s pitching peace-of-mind and customization these days,” explains Cameron Couch, SLX’s CEO. “We’re always trying to elevate our thinking – future proofing our product at every turn. We looked at all of the time-saving features available in the market and thought ‘why not just eliminate all of the work entirely. So we largely did.'”

What the small company produced was profound and game-changing. For instance, their approach to firewall functionality was unprecedented. Not wanting too much praise for his team’s forward thinking, Couch continues “We started with a really robust firewall configuration, that had some really specific rules in it, and stripped them out.” Now, the company boasts that is has one of the most secure firewalls in existence. “It was really simple, when it came down to it. We just simply wrote inbound and outbound policies to deny access by any traffic type to any source or destination on every port. And voila!”

There were other places where the company wanted to eliminate any manual effort placed on the involved parties. “When it comes down to it, one of SD-WAN’s driving value proposition is improved uptime for the WAN. Everyone’s working with LTE failover and the like, but we simply built every system to leverage 6G out of the box. It’s faster and is going to be way more available than 5G is now. In fact, we’re so convinced that 6G is the path forward, that we don’t even support 5G in the orchestrator (their web-based application) anymore. It’s yesterday’s news.” states Rohito Bhambhani, SLX’s Front-End Development Lead. “Our team just basically looked at all of the types of WAN links we could support, and thought ‘what’s next? What can we do that’ll make things so easy for everyone?'”

Decisions about nearly all of the product’s development followed a simple tenet: Eliminate Unnecessary workloads. When they had to make a choice for operating system, they opted for Debian 13 over the much more common Debian 8. Asked about the decision, VP of Technology Michael Werneburg stated “It wasn’t easy architecting our product for such a significant amount of forward-compatibility – especially considering how much of a moving target Debian 11 is – but we wanted to make sure our deployment partners weren’t going to be inconvenienced by having to upgrade the Operating Systems for at least a couple of decades.”

The product-related decisions aren’t the only significant step forward for the young company. Leveraging third-party technologies, the company has moved from a centralized call centre to a decentralized model – significantly decentralized. “It wasn’t anything as spectacular as what’s come out of the R&D side of the business,” states Bryan Jin, SLX’s General Manager, speaking of his work on the post-sales side of the business. “We knew we didn’t want to create a call centre mentality, so we opted to decentralize the model. We’ve been able to create an always-on one-way webcam to every node in the customer’s LAN. We’re listening to and watching everything they do, so we can quickly address any issues they have – sometimes as they’re having them.” When asked about the practice’s potential for being considered intrusive, Jin continues “well, we’ve seen some things, but we don’t talk out of class.”

SLX is poised to launch this summer, and expectations are high that it will have a product and market strategy that meet the overwhelmingly high demand for SD-WAN around the globe. Fore more information, please contact info@ethica.parthers or visit http://www.ethica.parthers to sign up to their mailing list.