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Why Not Add Bandwidth?
Adding more bandwidth does not necessarily improve the end performance of an application over the WAN.
The performance profile of many applications is defined by the latency of the connection. Adding more bandwidth will help with the concurrency of the connection but will not improve latency. This is because most protocols have an element of serialization meaning that they require a response to a packet of data before they can send the next one. Clearly with more bandwidth more 'conversations' can happen at the same time but more bandwidth can not speed up the time it takes to send and receive a packet of data.
WAN acceleration does address the latency issue by being very selective about the data that is sent over the WAN at both a protocol and application layer.
Many protocols such as CIFS (Windows file share) were not originally designed to perform well over a WAN connection. They are very serialized and 'chatty', meaning that a very large amount of serialized control traffic is required to send a relatively small amount of data. A WAN accelerator can reduce the amount of data transmitted over the network by using low level compression and caching. In addition it can emulate the end point. This means that it can respond to a lot of the control type traffic locally. The two WAN acceleration devices can have an optimised conversation using an efficient propriety protocol designed for the WAN. The other end point can reassemble the data and reintroduce the chatty control traffic.
This is a very high level explanation but it aims to give the reader an idea of how the visible effects of latency can be reduced using this type of technology and, point out that in many cases, adding more bandwidth will not solve WAN performance issues.
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