Sound Transit Fights Congestion — On The Streets And Across Their WAN

By centralizing servers and storage, the IT department could better control access to critical information, including tenders, photos, and workflow documents. However, there was also a downside– Sound Transit's WAN was struggling under the sheer volume of data being generated. This caused application performance to suffer.

"Our WAN was regularly experiencing 80- 90% saturation as workers shared CAD drawings, construction photos, and other large documents with one another," said Garv Nayyar, Senior Integration Engineer. "It was taking excessively long periods of time to upload and download routine files, which made it increasingly difficult to collaborate on time sensitive construction projects."

High resolution construction site photos, for example, typically average 4 Mb in size. It took several minutes to share these files across a T1 link. Furthermore, the performance of Sound Transit's VoIP network was severely degraded as voice calls were competing with other traffic. End users could notice a drop in voice quality as large file transfers were taking place.