Vonage, best known as a voice-over-IP (VoIP) provider, is announcing today that it has deployed software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology from VeloCloud to improve redundancy for its business customers. Vonage has some active customers using the new SmartWAN, with general availability set for January 2016.

SmartWAN is designed for businesses with a high demand for unified communications — voice, data, and/or video. Vonage delivers its communication services via the cloud.

The initial promise of VoIP was that customers could eliminate land lines and use one broadband connection, whether private MPLS or shared HFC cable, for all their needs. But Vonage VP and Chief Technology Architect of Business Engineering Sanjay Srinivasan says that in recent years, businesses have gone back to two broadband connections to ensure redundancy in the event of outages or other problems.

With VeloCloud’s SD-WAN, Vonage is using the two connections to constantly determine the best path to send packets, a technique VeloCloud calls dynamic multipath optimization and on-demand remediation.

Besides quality-of-service (QoS) benefits, the technology maximizes bandwidth resources across multiple locations or a single location. It also provides direct access to cloud-based applications and simplifies deployment of services.

VeloCloud’s technology uses its own customer premises equipment (CPE), so Vonage doesn’t have to buy the SD-WAN hardware.