This year at work, we were growing and running out seats to put people. We found some space nearby and began fitting it out. Part of this process was figuring out how we were going to connect the main office and expansion office.
Despite being literally next door, we were unable to run a direct fiber cable between the buildings. Microwave (Wi-fi) was not an option either as there was not a good line of sight and building management wouldn’t allow antennas on the roof. So we were left with buying some kind of service to connect the two buildings. We set about looking for services with bandwidth between 10-100Mbps and latency of less than 25ms.
A note on vendor pricing: For a lot of these vendors you can’t really use the pricing they give on the website. That’s basically a “fake price” to prevent competitors from underpricing them. If you bring in the vendor to do a presentation they will basically give you a 30-40% price in exchange for getting a firmer sales lead. If you give some budgetary estimates they may be able reduce it further.
Types of service
Optical fiber
We found a few companies that could provide a direct fiber connection between the buildings and their NOC but the price was very high. HardEther seemed to have much lower pricing than most other options of this type. They could give you a 1Gbps line for around 180,000JPY a month. Another option is KVH.
MetroE / Wide Area Ethernet
Most of the major telcos (Softbank, KDDI, NTT) offer this type of service. They usually offer different plans, like guaranteed bandwidth, guarantee with burst, or best effort. Unfortunately, the plans with even a small amount of bandwidth were usually more expensive than even the optical fiber.
VPN over Internet
Again, most of the major telcos offer this service as well as some smaller telcos (CTC, NTTPC). Basically you get a local loop using FLETs or AU Hikari and they run a VPN tunnel over it with their equipment. They can give it to you as a layer 2 switched link or a layer 3 routed link. Bandwidth/latency are strictly best effort but the price is much lower than the other options.
Service Selection
After evaluating each of the options, we decided to go with KDDI VPN service. All of the competing plans were very similar and the deciding factor for KDDI was that they published latency figures and would be able to bundle the NTT line cost into one invoice. The VPN router KDDI provided was a Fujitsu S ir-g100, capable of several hundred megabits per second of VPN throughput.
We were also going to get an Internet line as a backup in case the KDDI line went down or had problems. There are a lot of options for Internet in Tokyo but most of them will use a FLETs line as the local loop. The KDDI line was using FLETS, getting another provider that used the same FLETS network as a backup wouldn’t make much sense. As our main office was already using a UCOM for Internet access and we have had a good experience with them, we decided to get a 200Mbps line from them.
Results The KDDI line was tested after putting it in and seemed to meet the performance metrics we wanted. We saw latency of around 10ms with some temporary spikes to 70ms and throughput between 30-70mbps. However, a few weeks after users moved into the new office, we started getting performance complaints about the speed of the network. Using Smokeping Looking at the KDDI line stats over time, it had low latency and throughput on off hours but during business hours latency would shoot up, bandwidth would drop, and there was even some packet loss. If you have experience working with Windows file servers or other CIFS appliances, you know that CIFS traffic does NOT deal with high latency or packet loss very gracefully.
We tried troubleshooting with KDDI but eventually came to the conclusion it was just oversubscription of either the KDDI or FLETS network. We decided to try switching over to using VPN over the UCOM lines and got much better results. Latency was consistently under 5ms, most of the time it was less than 1ms. Bandwidth seemed to peak at around 40Mbps; we might have been able to go higher with a different router setup but this ended up being enough for our needs.
Using VPN over the UCOM lines has resulted in consistently lower latency and higher bandwidth than the KDDI line. I recommend this approach over the carrier run VPN solutions. If you have the in-house expertise/equipment to run VPN over UCOM lines, great! If you don’t, you can pay UCOM a bit more and they will rent you the equipment and manage it for you.
[NTT East]