Benefits

Resilience
Overlay networks let you put some of your eggs in a different basket. If you have a business-critical use of your existing network which you don't want to endanger by experiments with, say, web traffic, you can use an overlay network to separate the two types of content. If you underestimate the bandwidth required for the web access and the overlay network becomes congested, your critical applications will remain unaffected.

Diversity
An overlay network can run on existing communication channels using existing network infrastructure, or it can run using a completely new connection path. This additional path can have asymmetric bandwidth (such as many DSL technologies, which offer a high download rate from the Internet, but a relatively low rate for return data) or even be
unidirectional (such a satellite downlink). In either case, the overlay network provides independent policy enforcement to control bandwidth usage and offer reliable transport of data. The policy can be changed easily, to scale bandwidth use up to the maximum supported by the underlying communication equipment, or to reduce it in times of contention.

Flexibility
Because all use of the overlay network is managed by Equiinet's TrafficPilot™ solution, it is possible to change the network's behavior without changing any hardware. If a vital new software upgrade has to get out to all branches in the next hour, the TrafficPilot Enterprise can throttle web access until the crisis is over. Or if an impending announcement means that intranet web access is likely to soar when some news gets around, that part of the overlay network can be optimized in anticipation. This could mean reducing the flow of other routine traffic, such as background file replication, or it could mean buying temporary extra bandwidth. Satellite links can offer special short-duration burst rates for this scenario; TrafficPilot Enterprise can accommodate this with simple reconfiguration at the head-office site.

Efficiency
Unlike any common Internet protocol, TrafficPilot™ is able to take full advantage of satellite transmission's unique ability to broadcast one packet to all destinations at no additional cost in time or money. At the boundaries of the overlay network, existing TCP-based protocols are invisibly translated to and from Equiinet's own broadcast-efficient
file transfer protocol. Once a web page is read at one branch, it will be instantly accessible at all other branches, automatically and without consuming one extra byte's worth of bandwidth.

Transparency
A major concern when deploying new equipment in a large or complex network is how much disruption it will cause. Adding an extra communications link often means hours of battling with arcane router configuration commands---at every branch! The amount of work involved, and the thought that all those commands might all have to be un-done if things don't work out, can be a major disincentive to change. An overlay network hides all the complexity away from the rest of the network because the TrafficPilot™ does all the intelligent routing internally. It can do this invisibly by presenting itself to the LAN simply as a straightforward web, email and file server. In a recent pilot study, TrafficPilot™ was able to remove all Internet traffic from the customer's existing low-bandwidth leased-line network, provide a new file distribution service and replace the existing broadcast TV service while not disrupting the customer's critical web- and IP-based transaction communication. It was able to do this with absolutely no changes to existing branch routers and just one change to the proxy settings of each desktop PC.