1. Contact us or one of our partners to get a quote and sign up for Bigleaf service
2. We’ll gather basic info about your Internet circuits, including speed, type, and any static IP addresses
3. We’ll ship you a pre-configured router ready to be plugged in
4. Connect your firewall and setup your new Bigleaf static IP addresses in it
5. Enjoy your new Internet experience

No, but we have a great network of partners that are glad to help you with that at no cost to you. If you’d like help getting new or different Internet connections please contact us and we can connect you with one of our partners.

Yes, you’ll see several benefits including our Dynamic QoS and advanced monitoring with even just 1 connection. Check out this blog post and video for detailed info.

On all of our current routers we can support up to 4 ISP connections. If you need more, please let us know, we may be able to accommodate your situation.

The goal of the Bigleaf service is to provide the best possible performance with the available Internet resources (circuits), and to provide peace of mind so you don’t have to worry about Internet performance or uptime. Because of that you may see slower speed test results at times than you would without the Bigleaf service. The results of speed tests depend on various factors, including which circuit or circuits the traffic is load-balanced on to by the Bigleaf algorithms, the performance of each circuit at that moment in time, and the overhead of the Bigleaf system tunnels. The Bigleaf tunnels take up approximately 10% of the available speed on each circuit, and additional throughput reductions may occur if circuit performance is poor. However, if all circuits are working well you should generally see at least 90% of the rated speed of the fastest circuit when performing a speed test (averaged over several tests). Additionally, in normal use with multiple traffic types (web browsing, email, VoIP, etc) your traffic will be evenly balanced across all appropriate circuits for the most efficient utilization.

Often times, yes there can be a small increase. All of your traffic will be tunneled through our gateway clusters to ensure that Failover and Dynamic QoS works seamlessly. These clusters are located in core Internet peering exchanges to keep latency to a minimum. You can expect a latency increase of up to 40ms, although 5-15ms is typical. It depends on where you’re located and where your traffic is going. The most important question is, how will latency affect your applications? All WAN or Internet based applications are designed to perform properly with some latency, but will start to degrade above about 100ms-150ms. Bigleaf adds a tiny bit of baseline latency but protects you from the larger latency spikes that could impact your application performance. Our algorithms are carefully tuned, and will typically adapt to protect your traffic against spikes of 15ms or greater latency beyond the baseline.

Yes, in a couple of ways. By default we prioritize all VPN traffic above background traffic like file transfers and YouTube. In addition, we can honor QoS tags that your firewall places on VPN packets to differentiate traffic within the VPN. So for example, if your firewall marks VoIP traffic inside your VPN with a certain DSCP tag, we can match on that tag and prioritize the VoIP above other traffic within the VPN. For more details please contact us to discuss.

We back our service with an SLA, however we can’t guarantee things like the performance of your underlying Internet connections, or the power to your building. Please take a look at the SLA and if you have any remaining concerns contact us to discuss.

Great question! If you contact our support team and we confirm that the router has failed then we will immediately overnight a replacement at no charge. Note, you are responsible to provide surge-protected power to the on-site router, and we strongly recommend that you power it via a battery-backed Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). For more details on equipment failure risks see the Risk Factors White Paper (pdf).

No, Bigleaf provides it as a rental while you’re paying for services. That way you don’t have to deal with warranties or maintenance packages. If you cancel your Bigleaf service then you’ll need to ship the equipment back.