IP transport is the engineered delivery of IP traffic across a service provider’s network between your sites, data centers, and cloud on-ramps. If you’re asking what is IP transport, think private, policy-driven connectivity—not generic internet access. Carriers build it on underlays like MPLS, Ethernet, or optical, with an IP layer that prioritizes traffic and guarantees performance.
In practice, IP transport underpins global WANs, mobile backhaul, and latency-sensitive apps. The value is control: you define classes of service, routing preferences, and security segmentation so business-critical traffic gets treated like it matters.
Key characteristics:
- Predictable performance: Latency, jitter, and loss managed by class of service.
- Traffic engineering: Steer apps over optimal paths with SLAs.
- Isolation & security: VRFs/segmentation keep environments separate from the public internet.
- Resilience: Diverse paths and fast failover protect uptime.
Our take? IP transport is the fabric for mission-critical connectivity—built for consistency when “best-effort” just won’t cut it.
Designing a private, policy-driven network across regions? Explore our Global WAN Services Guide to see how the right mix of underlay and overlay turns IP transport into a predictable, secure backbone for your apps and users.
