The client is a financial services company described as one of the leading mortgage financing companies in Rhode Island. Over the years its IT department has steadily enhanced customer service, adding online loan status updates for borrowers, a VPN, Citrix thin clients and email, all of which the company treats as mission-critical applications. The company also runs multiple mission-critical web applications for remote sites and, according to its IT Director, keeps adding new ones to that list.

The company ran multiple mission-critical web applications and needed WAN redundancy to keep them online. It also wanted to control the routing of IP traffic based on data type and application, sending each kind of traffic down a specific path with set priorities.

Asked what would happen if the WAN failed, the IT Director answered that there is an incalculable cost. All remote sites and the company's other mission-critical WAN applications would be down, and something new is added to the list of mission-critical web applications almost every day. Beyond direct losses, the Director pointed to associated soft costs that are difficult to measure in hard numbers but would stop the company from functioning properly and have potentially detrimental effects on productivity.

The company first looked at Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as the route to a fault-tolerant WAN. After analysing its needs it concluded that BGP could not provide the traffic-control tools it wanted, and that even a BGP expert cannot force the protocol to do things it is not built for. Paying a second ISP for a redundant wired line was also substantially costlier than a burstable wireless connection.

The company deployed FatPipe WARP, which its IT Director described as "the only answer" to the administrative cost challenges the company faced and which the company came to see as "the only choice". WARP allows end users to bond any type of IP data line in any combination, so the company paired its primary Ethernet connection with a burstable wireless connection that runs on a different backbone and service provider, achieving WAN redundancy without paying for a second ISP.

FatPipe WARP's patented Policy Routing, SmartDNS and RAIL technologies give the company the IP data route control that BGP could not offer. Because wireless is not as fast as Ethernet, the company routes email over the wireless link while core web traffic stays on Ethernet, and it can direct traffic by application and type as new services are added.

The IT Director reported that WARP was easy to install and simple to manage, especially compared with the mysteries of BGP. Easy installation, management and network adaptation were cited as big benefits alongside faster data transmission and the added redundancy. Since implementation, both the Ethernet and wireless connections have failed at different times; the Director said the company does not even notice when the wireless link goes down.

• WAN redundancy achieved by bonding the primary Ethernet line with a wireless backup through FatPipe WARP
• Application-based route control: email travels over wireless while core web traffic stays on Ethernet
• Avoided paying a second ISP, which was substantially costlier than the burstable wireless connection
• Both Ethernet and wireless links have failed since deployment without users noticing the wireless outages
• Easier to install and manage than BGP, with faster data transmission