March 23, 2021 | 4 min read
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Tips to deploy SD-WAN in South America

Expereo team

Just like with China, connectivity in South America presents a special challenge for the multinational enterprise. But its issues aren’t precisely the same. For one thing, you’re trying to establish consistent connectivity across 13 different countries instead of just one. For any enterprise rolling out Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), however, the biggest issue arises from the gaps between local and regional with poor peering between POPs.

Because while the region enjoys deep-rooted cultural and linguistic similarities as you cross borders, the same can’t be said of its infrastructure. It can be harder to ship a product across Brazil than to another continent from Brazil. Some large towns have a single road or telecoms tunnel in and out; others may only be reachable by riverboat or mobile connections.

“It’s not about local internet provision—it’s about peering problems in and out of country.” –  says Salim Khouri, Director of Global Solutions Engineering at Expereo, during a webinar.

Expereo can help its South American customers close those gaps with an approach familiar to anyone in the region: building effective relationships. Keep reading to see how!

How to tackle South America’s peering challenges

From Brazil’s forested mountains to Chile’s dry deserts, the lower half of the Americas combines bustling cities with vast rural areas. Broadband Internet access within local areas can be strong, with local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) providing excellent wired and wireless services to a media-hungry population.

But that’s precisely the problem. On the whole, South America’s ISPs concentrate on what consumers what; providing content, with disproportionate attention given to download speeds from local hubs.

Which means your rural processing plant may get great Netflix to entertain its workers, but the office SD-WAN is throttled to the point of uselessness, because your local ISP isn’t peering effectively to the ISP your HQ across the country uses.

So while physical infrastructure can be sparse or limited in choice, it isn’t the whole problem. The real issue is logical infrastructure—the peering arrangements between telcos and ISPs that make overlays like SD-WAN solutions feasible.

Why is effective SD-WAN difficult to achieve in South America?

Of course, in a continent dominated by extractive industries like mining and forestry, the production facilities you want to connect are usually in remote locations. Which means the Internet underlay for effective SD-WAN is rarely where it’s most needed. Worse still, the problem isn’t limited to peering within each country. Peering to neighbouring nations and beyond can be hit-and-miss too.

This matters hugely to enterprise-scale networking requirements. Because to commodity businesses like agriculture and mining, the cost equation is fundamental.

If connecting two locations—say, a mining center deep in the rainforest with a city on the coast—the difference between a T1 or MPLS and straightforward business broadband isn’t a cost factor of 2x, 5x, or even 10x. Connecting the two sites by business Internet instead, as an underlay to your SD-WAN, can be fifty times as cost-effective. If you do it correctly.

So how does Expereo do it?

Expereo’s international relationships enable better peering

The solution is just good business. Two local ISPs, in a mining town and the coastal city for example, may perform brilliantly in their local markets because they have an incentive to do so. Their customers are screaming for streaming media.

But without any great reason to peer efficiently to each other, they won’t.

Expereo’s solution? To put that incentive in place, by building relationships with local ISPs across the region and introducing them to new opportunities. One big business customer can be worth a thousand consumer accounts. By connecting those in-country experts to the needs of Expereo customers, peering capacity can improve dramatically.

Case in point: In a two-site example from Brazil, the number of hops between sites went down from seven to just two. Across a thousand miles of rainforest!

We leverage local knowledge for effective SD-WAN

So what’s needed is to build profitable relationships between interested parties. The good news: Expereo has built those relationships for you. That means your SD-WAN can enjoy MPLS-beating performance for a fraction of the cost, thanks to this attention to detail going on quietly behind the scenes.

With over 20,000 endpoints under management worldwide, Expereo can tell you which ISPs have the strongest peering arrangements. And which can provide the best underlay for your SD-WAN.

Ready to enhance your SD-WAN connectivity in South America?

A great SD-WAN overlay needs a great underlay. Expereo helps you make the right connections and decisions across the vast continent, no matter how remote or rural your locations or how far apart your hubs. And we can help you scale, from two ISPs a few hundred miles apart, to a network of sites spanning the globe. You get great user experiences, no matter where you’re located!

If you’re active in South America and finding T1 or MPLS doesn’t work for your business case, speak to Expereo today to see how we deliver great network connectivity for other customers in the region.

Get in touch and we’ll find the best SD-WAN deployment options for you.

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