Optus Innovating for Excellence Award 2017 goes to Over the Wire

Over the Wire, a publically listed telecommunications and IT company, has been awarded this prize based on the advancements they have made with Private Mobile Broadband services, particularly for use as an effective and efficient automatic backup service. As a specialist in private IP (MPLS) networks for corporate clients, Over the Wire identified the need for a better mobile broadband option for its business clients, where IPSec VPNs would not suffice.

Private Mobile Broadband

To overcome the drawbacks of the traditional mobile broadband model in network deployment, Over the Wire has worked extensively with Optus, as the mobile carrier, and hardware vendors to create a unique offering – custom built for the Over the Wire network.
 
As a leading telecommunications and IT solution provider, Over the Wire specialises in converged voice and data networks, data centres, and hosted infrastructure solutions for corporate clients. Network availability is a core requirement for businesses, whether it is to private network destinations, voice over IP, or simply to Internet hosted applications. As a result the requirement for reliability has increased significantly in the last decade, with backup connections more commonly treated as an “opt-out” rather than an “opt-in” as they had been in the past.

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Mobile broadband services have added the ability to include a cost effective backup path that is physically redundant to the primary connection, with speeds on 4G connections often being appropriate to cover the base requirements of a business during an outage situation.

Where this solution struggles, though, is in maintaining private connectivity and routing, which can impact businesses with multiple sites or direct private access to auxiliary services (such as data centre colocation or cloud platforms like AWS). Traditionally any private network access over mobile broadband would require an IPSec VPN connection to be established – essentially tunnelling into the private network over a public connection. While this can be effective, efficiency and security are significantly impacted.

The work conducted by Over the Wire has addressed these problems, and delivered a cost effective private mobile data backup service which doesn’t compromise corporate security. By having direct, private access to Over the Wire’s core MPLS network, traffic over the mobile broadband service avoids accessing the public-facing Internet, significantly reducing risk, while also improving performance with lower latency connection. This provides businesses with huge savings compared to alternate backup services, while still giving the sought after redundancy and consistent level of security across the network.

Award Ceremony

The Optus Innovating for Excellence Award was presenting during a ceremony which took place in Sydney and was attended by many of Optus’ wholesale clients. From Over the Wire, Michael Omeros (Managing Director) and John Puttick (Chairman) were present to receive the award from Nitesh Naidoo, the Managing Director of Wholesale at Optus.

About Over the Wire

Over the Wire (ASX:OTW) is a Telecommunications and IT solution provider, specialising in converged voice and data networks, data centres, and hosted infrastructure solutions for corporate clients. They are a service provider who prides themselves on being different; their voice and data network services leverage an MPLS core network spanning from Perth to Auckland, and complement their cloud, data centre hosting, and IT managed services capabilities, to not only give businesses an alternative, but an end-to-end solution partner to work with, and to look after their IT communications needs, with support available 24 hours a day.

Over the Wire recently announced they have entered into an agreement to purchase follow telco, VPN Solutions in a $15.6m acquisition.