• Information can be compressed. A lot of what we pull and send across the network is capable of being compressed – often by a factor of 2 or 3 times – so less data to send should result in better performance.

So, we need a solution that brings as many of these capabilities together as possible in order to minimise the impact of just utilising the internet.

There are a number of players in this market, each of which has slightly different approaches. But Wan acceleration specialist companies, including Riverbed, Expand Networks, BlueCoat, Packeteer and Silver Peak, are up against the networking companies such as Cisco (which acquired P-Cube) and Juniper (which acquired Peribit).

This is a big possible market, but many businesses are unaware of the problem, and many techies shy away from addressing it. Solutions have become far more affordable in the past year or so, and many of the companies involved are coming through with very affordable small office solutions.

If your company has more than one office, and is dependent on providing Wan access to centralised solutions, Quocirca recommends that you look at what the Wan acceleration vendors have to offer.

More Quocirca reports exclusively for vnunet.com readers: