Attention: Telephone System Dealers

If you are in the business of selling, installing or servicing business telephone systems, you're going to be interested in a new business model that's sweeping the country. It a way to generate more business without additional up-front expense.

What is this new system? It's the VAR Network. If you haven't heard of it, pay attention because your competitors likely have. In simple terms, the VAR network is an online database system that contains business profiles on thousands of telephone and computer networking dealers. It's fully automated so that when a potential customer does a search to see who can help them with their telecom needs, the VAR Network will automatically notify matching qualified dealers in their area. Each dealer can then choose to pursue the opportunity or let another dealer have a go at it.

So how is this different from other online business directories? It's really quite a step beyond mere listing services. First of all, this is an enormous project designed with the capacity to link thousands of dealers with tens of thousands of potential clients on an intelligent basis. The customer doesn't have to sort through a pile of listings and try to figure out who to call. The system acts as matchmaker and sends the warm lead to only those dealers who are likely to meet the customers needs. Aside from the initial online inquiry, the customer doesn't have to take any initiative to contact dealers.

The VAR Network is also specifically targeted for business to business transactions among telephone system and computer networking dealers and prospects. It's designed by Telarus, a major telecommunications master agency and developer of the GeoQuote(tm) automated T1 and DS3 pricing service. The VAR Network is for Value Added Resellers only.

The VAR Network is intended to supplement or perhaps eventually replace other professional advertising resources you might be using, such as the Yellow Pages, newspaper ads, industrial directories, search engine pay-per-click, direct mail and telemarketing. It also has a more advantageous payment model. While other ad resources require you to pay up-front for leads or mere exposure, the VAR Network makes you a partner with no up-front fees. You join by filling out a short profile about your business and the services you offer. You'll be partnered with professional telecom agent at Telarus who will help you expand your listing and be a resource to ensure your success. Once your profile is online, you'll begin receiving lead notifications from businesses in your service area. It's then up to you to chose the opportunities you want and negotiate with the customer to sell your products and service. For every lead that results in a sale, you'll remit a small percentage back to the VAR Network in consideration of the service. Any leads that don't pan out cost you nothing.

Because of the partnership with Telarus, you'll also have the opportunity to earn monthly residual commissions on T1, ISDN PRI, DS3, and other telecommunications line sales to your customers. Many dealers pass over this business because they aren't equipped to deal with the intricacies of line sales and contracts. Your Telarus partner is an expert in this area and will handle these details with you or on your behalf.

As a business professional, how can you let another day go by without leveraging the additional business you could be getting through the VAR Network? Other dealers near you have already signed up and are receiving leads that you could also be bidding on. Visit the VAR Network now to see how it is organized to help you get more business. Sign-up immediately right on the site. Or, visit the VAR Partner site to learn more about the business opportunity. It could be working for you sooner than you think.

ShoreTel's Brainy Voice Switches Avoid Outages

Enterprise VoIP telephone systems have a lot to live up to. Traditional TDM based telephony has a development history spanning many decades of refinement. The gold standard of system availability is commonly accepted as "five nines" or 99.999% uptime. Any replacement for PBX and Centrex based phone systems has this lofty expectation to contend with.

ShoreTel takes on the reliability challenge with an approach used by high reliability military and aerospace systems. It's redundant distributed processing. The principle is to avoid putting all your apples in one basket. Murphy's Law says that if there is a single component that can take your system down, that's the one that's going to fail and probably at the worst possible time. Designers of high reliability systems avoid single point failures. If something goes wrong, there needs to be another piece of equipment that can take up the slack.

Actually, that's the way the Internet was designed. There are many routers, each with many routes to choose from, distributed over a wide geographical area. You can cut any line or knock out any router and the Internet will automatically compensate. The worst that happens is that traffic will slow if demand exceeds the resources available.

ShoreTel's ShoreGear Voice Switches aren't single point PBX phone systems. The switches are designed to communicate and coordinate with each other to create an IP PBX phone system that is distributed throughout the company. If you knock out one of the switches or it is unreachable due to a local network failure, its peers will take over its tasks to ensure that call processing continues uninterrupted. The same is true of IP phones being handled by that switch. They automatically fail over to another switch at the site.

What about trunk line faults? Multiple ShoreGear-T1 switches will provide PSTN connectivity even if one T1 or ISDN PRI line goes down. Outgoing calls will be picked up by the working ShoreGear gateways.

System expansion is accomplished by adding additional ShoreGear Voice Switches to the network as demand for phones and phone lines increases. This includes adding additional business sites on the network. As more switches are added, they peer to provide a robust distributed phone system.

The design of the ShoreGear Voice Switches is geared to support five-nines availability. The boxes are completely solid state, using flash memory rather than mechanical hard disk drives to store data. The operating system is a high reliability embedded real-time control OS called VxWorks from WindRiver Systems rather than the standard PC or server operating system.

Sprint EVDO Rev A in a Flash

You're familiar with aircards, right? These are the plug-in hardwired devices that enable your laptop or notebook computer to access cellular broadband service. Almost all of them are in the form of a PCMCIA Type II plug-in card. Almost. Now there's the Novatel U720 USB wireless broadband card packaged in the familiar flash drive form factor. It works with both PC and Macintosh computers and connects you to the Internet at blazing fast speeds.

The U720 sure looks like one of those pocket sized solid state hard drives. It's actually a bit larger than most of them. The dimensions are 4 x 1.3 x 0.7 inches. Within that package is a cellular modem that connects to the new higher speed EV-DO Rev A where available. Sprint is aggressively rolling out Rev A service with its download burst speed up to 3.1 Mbps and upload burst speed of 1.8 Mbps. In practice, you'll probably get a bit less bandwidth at most times. Even so, this is enviable broadband Internet service even from a landline. But look, Ma, no wires!

The Novatel U720 also supports Sprint's earlier broadband services. EV-DO Rev 0 offers up to 2.4 Mbps download and 153 Kbps upload speeds in metropolitan areas. Beyond that you can still get 1xRTT service at dial-up type speeds. At least you can connect just about anywhere you can get a Sprint PCS wireless signal.

No external power supply is needed. The U720 gets its power via the USB 2.0 port that also handles data transfer. This particular device is somewhat unique in that it works for both PC and Mac computers. Both Windows and MacOS drivers are included on the fast 4-step installation CD-ROM software.

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Unclogging Your WAN May Cost Less Than You Think

The WAN or Wide Area Network is likely the bottleneck in your computer networking architecture and getting higher utilization by the day. Seemingly, the only answer is to spend a lot more money each month to increase capacity. But before you just call up your vendor and tell them to double or triple the bandwidth, let's take a look at what's going on and if there are more reasonable ways to get the results you want.

Most enterprises are on top of their local area networks or LANs. With 100 Mbps, 1,000 Mbps and 10 Gbps switches in the network closets and Fast and Gigabit Ethernet network cards built into just about every PC and peripheral, LAN bandwidth is relatively easy to come by. No so once the network leaves your premises. That's where you turn your traffic over to a telecom provider for transmission within your metro area or cross-country. That's also where the cost per Mbps of traffic has traditionally been the highest. In most cases, the cost of replicating your LAN bandwidth through the WAN is prohibitive. It's also been unnecessary. Internal traffic levels have been much higher than traffic with the outside world. But this is changing.

WAN traffic levels are on the increase for a lot of reasons. The most basic is an increase in business, especially online business. As more and more customers shop via company websites and place their orders online Internet traffic goes up. Online B2B transactions are also on the rise. Not so long ago, most business was conducted via telephone, FAX, and mailed documents. The speed of commerce is now driving companies to Extranets with their suppliers and larger customers. Smaller customers who used to phone-in orders or call for customer service are getting more inclined to manage their accounts online.

A trend toward data center consolidation is exacerbating this situation. As more and more servers and their respective services are brought in-house you need to provide all that Internet bandwidth that was once provided by the hosting company. Other Internet traffic is generated from branch offices and remote workers using the company VPN while they work at home.

A new survey published by Blue Coat Systems identifies such factors as daily backups between data centers, Internet traffic growing as a percentage of corporate WAN traffic, and increasing use of SSL as a standard protocol for secure Web transactions as driving the need for increased WAN bandwidth. Blue Coat supplies WAN optimization appliances that increase the efficiency of WAN bandwidth. Other companies such as Expand Networks, Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems, and Riverbed offer competing hardware solutions.

Another approach is to simply increase your WAN bandwidth to accommodate the increased traffic. But isn't that the most expensive solution? Not necessarily. While WAN optimization hardware can improve the utilization of the lines you have now, a competitive WAN carrier can reduce the cost of your present bandwidth and the bandwidth that you really need. This is possible due to a few factors you may not be aware of.

First of all, the cost of nearly all WAN bandwidth from T1 dedicated Internet, point to point private lines, ISDN PRI for PBX phone systems, and DS3 to OCx for high capacity networking have all come down in price the last few years. If you have been locked into a long term contract or have been automatically renewing without running competitive price checks, you may be paying far more than the current market price for comparable services.

The number of competitive bandwidth vendors has increased dramatically. A new online search tool called GeoQuote introduced within the last four years makes it easy to "play the field" to find the best bandwidth prices available for your particular locations. Compared to calling around or interviewing vendors to ferret out the best deals, this approach is both fast and painless.

New bandwidth products have also been introduced in the last few years that may be more appropriate to your needs. MPLS networks can be good replacements for Frame Relay networks in connecting multiple remote sites. Carrier Ethernet solutions offer a more technically efficient way to transfer data from one corporate LAN to another. Internet-based secure VPN connections may work as well as dedicated private lines but at a much lower lease cost.

What is the most cost effective solution to unclogging your WAN? Our team of technical consultants would love to evaluate your current WAN costs and provide you with competitive quotes that might make your eyes pop.

Who knows? You may even wind up increasing the performance of your Wide Area Network and actually paying less than you do now. It can happen.

Gigabit WiMAX Could Offer Wireless Fiber Bandwidths

It's pretty much a slam-dunk that massive bandwidth requirements have one transport technology available and that's fiber optic carriers. Oh, there are flavors of fiber transport to pick from. You can employ SONET-based metro and inter-city rings, coarse and dense wavelength multiplexing to light-up dark fiber, or long haul IP transit services. Over very short ranges, such as building to building links, free space optical systems can be highly cost effective. But how about point to multipoint where fiber hasn't been trenched? Or what about high bandwidth mobile?

Fiber is the new copper and Gigabit WiMAX is going to be the new microwave. WiMAX hasn't even gotten its legs yet, but the IEEE is launching an initiative to increase mobile wireless bandwidths to 1 Gbps by 2009. The new standard will be called 802.16m. Why, you might ask, is an order of magnitude increase in WiMAX bandwidth called for at this early stage?

The applications, they are a changin'. What looked like broadband a few years ago is starting to look like too small a pipe today.

Let's take a look at the story on WiMAX. WiMAX is specified as having 70 Mbps of bandwidth and a 70 mile range, although not both at the same time. There is a bandwidth / distance tradeoff. Even so, many users will be able to get 1 to 10 Mbps service within a metro area or decent broadband Internet service in rural areas. One application of WiMAX is replacement service for DSL or Cable Internet. Think of WiMAX as a really, really big WiFi hotspot and you've got the idea. Another intended use is for cellular backhaul. Right now every cell tower needs one or more T1 lines to connect to the mobile switching office. As cellular data rates increase, like they are with EVDO Rev A, more and more lines are needed to keep up. Fiber might be a better match to the increasing bandwidths. Yet many cell towers are out in the boonies where the only fiber is in the foodstock for farm animals. Cellular operators eye WiMAX as a way to get the backhaul bandwidth they need without prohibitive construction costs.

All of this is well and good except that bandwidths of 500 Kbps to a few Mbps are yesterday's news, not tomorrow's. Have you noticed that major Cable operators have been voluntarily bumping up the bandwidth of their broadband services. Insight, a major operator in the Midwest, is running ads promoting its 10 Mbps service. Verizon is moving even faster with its fiber-to-the-home FiOS service. They're up to 50 Mbps and counting. AT&T is jumping to get 25 to 50 Mbps over legacy copper using advanced DSL techniques.

None of this has to do with surfing the Web or even downloading music. That was the impetus for the original move to broadband Internet service. Dial-up was fine for email, but VoIP and streaming anything demanded an order of magnitude speed increase. Even that is proving to be too little. It is estimated that much of the ISP bandwidth today is consumed by video downloads, not audio and certainly not by users casually reading Web pages. The emerging killer-app is going to be a bandwidth killer application. It's high definition streaming and on-demand video. In other words, television.

Bill Gates was once convinced that 640 KB was all the RAM a personal computer would ever need. For text processing it was. Now you can't get by with less than 1 GB for Vista. That's over a thousandfold or three orders of magnitude increase. The same factor applied to bandwidth takes us from 56 Kbps dial-up to 56 Mbps broadband. It's even more dramatic when you consider that the early 640 KB PCs had 300 bps modems.

In the consumer arena, the big bandwidth sink is going to be HDTV everywhere. Over the air broadcast is the small piece of this action. The rest will be streaming and video on demand over wired networks. These are Cable MSOs and telcos competing with Cable, plus Internet video services and mobile video. Mobile devices want a piece of this action and are starting to get it now over cellular broadband such as EVDO and UTMS or EDGE. WiMAX will support the lower rate, lower resolution streams. But Gigabit WiMAX can support a real television-like experience.

In the B2B space, Gigabit WiMAX can truly make the desktop workstation mobile. This can include huge business file transfers, video conferencing, medical image transfers, backup and recovery, and software downloads. Other wireline or P2P microwave applications such as audio and video broadcast remote pickup might also find high bandwidth mobile wireless service a good match.

The IEEE is targeting the end of 2009 for implementation of Gigabit WiMAX. I'm wondering now if the 10 Gig WiMAX initiative will launch any later than 2008.

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