Technology to Maximize Internet Network

The best advice I can give you is to stick to one large ISP across all of your sites, and pick that ISP for reliability, not primarily price.

Most network problems happen between vendors, when your traffic on ISP A is handed off to ISP B for delivery. If you have two large ISP's, they do this handoff at a "private peering" point, there is sufficient bandwidth, and everything works. With smaller ISP's, your traffic may go through a public peering point, resulting in increased traffic congestion, and increasing the chance for lost packets.

Using a large ISP at all sites means that the traffic between your sites travels the entire time on their backbone, which usually means better results.

QOS guarantees are useful only in that an ISP will not offer one unless they do not project a problem. Many or most are written so that they would have to be down for days before you can collect on it.

Good luck.

Consistency in ISP is definately key. Also, when looking to increase internet performance consider the addition of proxy servers for web caching on your end. This will take a considerable load off of the internet connections if you have a considerable amount of that sort of traffic. You can also implement layer 4 switches (3com has some nice superstack 4400s out now) which will allow you to prioritize traffic locally, providing faster access to the corporate applications from the internet connection.

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