Enterprises can chose overlay providers, such as Akamai or Internap, that use route optimization techniques to evaluate various route choices among specific endpoints on the Internet, and thereby select the lowest-latency options. However, this means that enterprises must source local Internet access services and Internet routing overlay services, which adds costs.

Several regional network service providers, including NTT Communications, Pacnet, PCCW, SingTel and Verizon, are beginning to offer regional Internet connectivity services. Because these providers control the end-to-end connections, several providers, such as NTT and Verizon, offer SLAs with performance guarantees for latency, packet loss and jitter, as outlined in their published standard offerings.

Enterprises can validate provider Internet metrics with those of leased lines, and can use tools like SmokePing, PingPlotter and Path Analyzer to verify and monitor provider performance. However, when sourcing dedicated Internet services with performance guarantees, enterprise contracts should require ongoing end-end monitoring and reporting, as well as penalty and exit clauses for nonconformance.

Enterprises should also ensure that they are using the appropriate access services. Several options are available, such as consumer DSL, business DSL, T1 and fiber, and Gartner has found, based on our many client inquiries, that performance issues have been caused by access services that have overly high bandwidth contention ratios.

Enterprises seeking predictable and consistently good performance should chose access services without bandwidth contention, such as business DSL.