DC-Net MPLS VPN-based data networking services for government provide managed, secure communications at a range of access speeds from 2 Mbps up to 1 Gbps and costs to fit your agency’s budget. This government-only service includes 24 x 7 x 365 network monitoring and support, and a quality of service (QoS) service-level agreement (SLA).

With the VPN (virtual private network) managed service, your traffic is secured and separated from other customers’ traffic on the network through the use of VPN tunneling.

VPN services enable data quality monitoring and prioritization—ensuring that real-time critical applications, such as voice and video, are queued first. It is also less expensive than traditional leased lines or remote access servers.

Features and Benefits

• Multiple access and port speeds—VPN services offer link speeds of 10 Mbps, 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 1 Gbps, with 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps increments
• Dual-homed, diversely routed paths; built in disaster recovery
• Access and transport bundled in pricing
• Dedicated 24x7 network monitoring and customer support
• Prioritization of real-time sensitive data; guaranteed quality of service and packet delivery suitable for all traffic (including VoIP)
• Demonstrated 99.999 percent network uptime; network performance and availability backed by SLA
• Internet connectivity
• Secure government-only network
• Direct connectivity to District government data centers, services, and resources for District government customers
• Direct connectivity to carrier hotels, available public and private peering points for interconnection and offsite data storage/recovery
• Private connection to other District government and community anchors on network
• Metro Ethernet backbone with core ring speed of 10 Gbps, OC-48 SONET backbone with sub-50 ms failover and architectural design that allows for easy site expansion.
• Prices lower than commercial service providers

Technical Overview

DC-Net VPN services provide secure, reliable transport of critical applications across a high-speed IP backbone infrastructure. The network uses industry leading switching and routing protocols, primarily the Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol. MPLS adds performance and resilience; including the ability to assign performance guarantees for each VPN tunnel.

Our backbone metro fiber rings run the Synchronous Optical Networking Technology (SONET) protocol supporting aggregate speeds of 2.5 Gbps. The protocol runs the Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) technology which enables load-sharing and path-protection between redundant fiber routes. Automatic failover in case of a fiber break or electronic failure happens within 50 ms without affecting any customer traffic.

At remote sites, Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) are used to identify sets of devices (computers, phones, video conferencing) as having access to a particular communications channel and a particular type of access.

Agency traffic flows over VPN connections between customer remote sites on Access Rings, the main office site, and the OCTO data center. Remote sites have fully redundant fiber from the site to the backbone carrying Ethernet traffic. At the DC-Net fiber optic Metro Ring hub sites, this communication channel is connected to a VPN tunnel to traverse the SONET backbone to the data centers and/or another location, such as a main office. Metro Rings are fully fiber optic and have full physical path redundancy.