Looking at Project Fi from Enterprise IT Networking Perspective
When I heard about Google’s Project Fi, which is a “meta” MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), I immediately signed up for their trial. Project Fi uses other service provider networks, in this case Sprint, T-Mobile and Wi-Fi networks wherever available, to provide a single service experience to Google Fi mobile phone subscribers.
The idea of using several networks is not new. As a matter of fact a much grander concept, WAN Virtualization, has been around for a while and Mushroom Networks has been spearheading this approach for over a decade with business applications in IT networking. Approaching network resources with an overlay umbrella layer is a smart approach – somewhat reminiscent of storage virtualization, or even server virtualization concepts where the underlying physical resources are managed by an overlay software layer, with the goal to present a single interface to the higher layers.
With this approach you can mix and match various WAN connections and have smart resource allocation within a software layer that manages those interface resources for various objectives. As an example, you can combine interfaces for faster speed or you can have flow-based aggregation where you can switch flows between WAN links midstream, without losing the application flow and hiding the switch from the application layer itself.
With Software Defined WAN / Software Defined VPN type approaches, the SDN enabled WAN can morph and learn over time to adopt better algorithms for resource allocation to optimize the application experience.
We believe SD WAN is the future way of deploying, operating, managing and optimizing WAN enterprise networks.
Cahit Akin, CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.