BlackBerry Fun and Games

Been working hard? Time for a break? Well, then, let's play some Guitar Hero. But no need to go home and fire up your video game console. We're going to play Guitar Hero on our BlackBerry. Anybody looking? Good. Pick your Gibson guitar, pick your favorite character, pick your venue and get ready to shred!

Wait a second. Shred and BlackBerry in the same sentence? Sure. Well, it may not be something you want to do in middle of some terminally serious business meeting. But when you're away from suit territory, why not? If it's YOUR BlackBerry, then you can jolly well put whatever stress relief on it that you want.

BlackBerry. It's not just for corporate email anymore. Or even spreadsheets. Bplay lets you add entertainment to spice up your stodgy smartphone. You can choose from games, themes, wallpaper and music. And it's all just for fun.

The top five games right now are Guitar Hero 3 Mobile, Texas Hold'em King 3, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Golden Tee Golf Mobile Edge, and Sudoku. Or is Call of Duty4 Modern Warfare more your style? Hey, it's good practice for corporate warfare. Tell your boss you need to stay in fighting trim if you get caught playing this one during company hours.

Dress up your stodgy BlackBerry screen with dozens of themes. How about Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia for a Star Wars theme? There's art, college, zodiac, movies and icon themes among the collection. Even Republican and Democratic political themes. Get 'em while the elections are hot.

Along with themes, there is wallpaper to transport you to a better place. That could be anywhere from a tropical beach to the dunes of Mars or the rings of Saturn. Anyplace but cubical wall beige or that phony office woodgrain.

By the way, what sort of ringtone do you have? Wouldn't an MP3 Realtone of your favorite music be a lot better? If you think so, you have a lot to choose from. All the genres including Reggae, Hip Hop, Rock, Country, University Fight Songs, Classical, Jazz and Gospel are represented. Pick the artist and song that represents you best.

What are the hottest cell phone deals available right now, including free cell phones? Use the Cell Phone Plan Finder to check out the top phones and associated wireless service plans.

What Makes a Great MAN

Metropolitan Area Networks were once the realm of telecom companies and major corporations only. But something has changed recently to make access affordable for even small and medium size companies. If you need to communicate between two or more locations in town, you might just benefit from access to a metro network.

Metro Ethernet is the new way to provide data connections in metropolitan areas. This includes major cities and suburban areas. There are two types of Ethernet MAN service. E-Line is an Ethernet Line that connects two locations. A common application is between a main business location and a remote data center. The E-Line is also good if you want to connect to a warehouse, factory or branch office.

The other type of Ethernet MAN service is E-LAN. While E-Line is point to point, E-LAN is for multi-point connections. It's like a LAN, only spread across a city. This is also called WAN or Wide Area Network connections. With E-LAN service, you can connect your main office with multiple branch offices or retail locations, warehouses, factories and other locations in the metropolitan area. E-LAN and E-Line connections are good ways to tie local area networks together into a single, larger company network.

What really makes for a great MAN is a combination of speed, reliability and low cost. MAN connection speeds can be just about any bandwidth, but Ethernet MANs typically mirror the standard Ethernet LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps.

MAN networks typically use fiber optic lines for speed, capacity and reliability. If you want Gigabit Ethernet connection speeds, you'll definitely need to have your building "lit" for fiber optic service. Business locations in major metropolitan areas, where you'll find metro network access, are often "lit" or near a carrier POP, or point of presence. This is especially true for large office buildings with multiple business tenants and colocation facilities where companies house their server farms.

If there is enough bandwidth demand from the clients in your building, carriers will often build-out access connections to "light" the facility. In places where this is too physically difficult or not financially viable, you may still be able to get Ethernet MAN connections using EoC or Ethernet over Copper technology. This is a system that uses existing twisted pair telco wiring to transport Ethernet speeds at 1 to 100 Mbps, depending on distance from the carrier's office.

The best news of all is that competitive carriers have driven the cost of MAN connections far below the traditional telephone company offerings. You may find that using Ethernet MAN service will cost only a fraction of what you expected to pay. How little? Find out using our GeoQuote Ethernet Service Locator service to see what's available for your business address.

HSUPA Joins HSDPA for Cellular Broadband

AT&T is nearly finished building out its upgraded cellular broadband network called HSPA or High Speed Packet Access. Just in time, too. The new BlackBerry Bold and the rumored iPhone upgrade will make good use of the higher data bandwidths that are now online at the cell towers. While most of the attention has focused on the download link, AT&T has quietly been upgrading the upload link also. What does this tell us about the next generation of mobile applications?

HSPA is part of the alphabet soup that is mobile technology. It's a network upgrade to the first installation of high speed cellular data for GSM networks. EDGE or Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution was good for jump starting applications such as video and music downloads, email, and Web browsing. But with speeds at the low end of what is available from DSL, around 230 Kbps, EDGE starts to feel noticeably poky for general Web browsing and streaming video. The HS in HSPA implies something much faster.

There are actually two pieces to the HSPA puzzle. HSDPA is the first and most important for most users. HSDPA stands for High Speed Download Packet Access. The download link has a maximum capacity of 14.4 Mbps or somewhere between 1 and 7 Mbps in practice. It's a huge improvement from EDGE and similar to Cable broadband speeds. Like most data links designed around Internet access, the uplink speed is much less. For HSDPA, it's 384 kbps maximum. That's perfectly acceptable if most of what you do is request Web pages, corporate data packages, software upgrades, email, music and video. The uplink requests are relatively small and infrequent. The big data blast is on the download link.

AT&T has pretty much completed its upgrade to HSDPA and now in the process of adding the second piece of the HSPA service, HSUPA or High Speed Uplink Packet Access. What HSUPA does in increase the uplink capacity from 384 kbps to a range of 500 to 800 kbps out of a maximum theoretical value of 5.76 Mbps. That complements AT&T download speeds of 1.4 Mbps.

Why bother upgrading the uplink? You don't need it for casual Web browsing, but it does have value for uploading larger files or running real-time applications such as mobile video conferencing. It also speeds things like posting to blogs, updating Web sites, or sending photos with high resolutions or video clips. Our impression that the nature of mobile services is changing is confirmed by wireless network upgrades such as HSUPA.

HSPA gives AT&T a fully functional 3G network, just in time to start working on further upgrades to 4G. HSPA has an evolutionary path called HSPA+ that increases downlink speeds to 42 Mbps and uplink speeds to 22 Mbps. Whether that path will be fully exploited remains to be seen, as AT&T is also committed to another technology called LTE or Long Term Evolution that ramps up the data bandwidth to 300 Mbps on the downlink and 75 Mbps on the uplink. This technology won't be fully deployed for at least a few years, giving us time to come up with HD video and other applications that can make good use of these incredible 4G speeds.

Quick Way to Cut the Corporate Phone Bill

With escalating commodity prices and surging fuel bills, many companies are in the big squeeze between rising costs and limited ability to raise prices. Things are moving so fast that it's hard to re-engineer or even rethink business strategy. The most viable solution to maintain profits is simply to cut costs.

At this point all the green eyeshades turn toward the phone bill. Are all those calls really necessary? Really?

Auditing the telecommunications bills is a smart move even when business is humming along smoothly. You can spot charges for unused or unneeded services that can be discontinued at a savings. Even a quick glance will reveal unusual activities such as a few employees who seem to hang on the phone all day making personal calls. But once you've picked the low hanging fruit, the job gets much harder and burns up a lot of time. Is there anything quicker?

Sure, just pay less.

That's right. The fastest way to cut your voice and data services bill is to simply pay less for exactly what you have now. If your telephone and Internet usage have grown along with your business, you might not have thought to challenge the increasing costs. After all, you are using more. But what's also changed over the years is the competitive landscape for digital voice and data. What was the best deal a few years ago may well be far more than you need to pay today.

But isn't finding vendors and going out for quotes even more time consuming than digging into the phone records?

It doesn't have to be. As a user, you're not really in a position to know where to look or how to evaluate the myriad of competitive options. But there is a professional service that will do this without charging you. It's a network of experienced telecom consultants connected through a sophisticated database system that lets them compare a dozen or more options for any given need. All you do is make a simple online or telephone inquiry and you'll get immediate attention.

Why is this likely to work for your business? Take telephone service, for instance. Your PBX telephone system likely uses or could use T1 PRI digital telephone trunking. This is the standard way to bring in multiple telephone lines to a centralized office phone system. T1 PRI pricing, including combinations of local, long distance, 800 numbers, DID (direct inward dialing) and Caller ID, is highly competitive. You may well be able to get the very same services you have now with the very same usage levels for a lower monthly bill.

The same is true for data services, such as dedicated Internet. In addition, the the standard T1 and DS3 Internet services, Ethernet connections have become available only recently. T1 and DS3 can be had for lower lease rates. If you can get Ethernet over copper or fiber connection, you'll save even more at higher bit rates.

Before you get too embroiled in cutting heads or making panic changes to your business processes, take a quick look at cutting your voice and data telecom expenses by simply paying less. You can do the hard stuff later.

Is Municipal WiFi On The Way Out?

If WiFi hotspots are the greatest for users on the go in airports, hotels and restaurants, then municipal WiFi has to be even better for anyone downtown. Well, it seemed that way for awhile. But with the recent announcement that Earthlink is pulling the plug on its Metro WiFi in Philadelphia, one has to wonder if municipal WiFi is heading the same direction as broadband over power line service. How can this be? I thought this was the golden age of broadband.

Broadband Internet service is actually alive and well and growing like crazy. Narrowband connections, such as dial-up, are now down to under 12% of U.S. Internet users. Broadband penetration has increased 200% since 2002 and now approaches 90% of households. So why can't municipal broadband providers make a go of it?

The problem appears to be in the business model. Earthlink only garnered about 6,000 Philly subscribers out of its expected 100,000 at a minimum. They were asking $21.95 a month for service, with a special deal of half-off for low income households. That doesn't sound like too much, or does it?

What got the idea of municipal WiFi networks going was the early exuberance over WiFi hotspots. When they started popping up all over, line-tethered users rejoiced. They gladly shelled out to be able to use their laptop computers with WiFi adaptor cards on the road or in their favorite coffee shop. Frustrated by the seemingly glacial buildout of broadband Internet by the local telephone and Cable companies, city councils jumped at the idea of being able to leapfrog these seemingly old-timey technologies with the latest and hottest wireless service. As a bonus, they could make sure that low income families could also afford to get broadband access before the digital revolution passed them by.

But a funny thing happened on the way to installing wireless access points on every light pole. The market shifted. Hotels found that their customers were balking at WiFi surcharges when other hotels offered free WiFi. Now most hotel rooms come with free broadband access included. WiFi hotspots have multiplied in restaurants. But not for charge. The free WiFi service is a competitive enticement, not a profit center. People still love their WiFi, but they don't want to pay. They expect it to be free or they'll go somewhere else.

So, are these spoiled users really going to want to pay to use the Metro WiFi downtown? Probably not. They might pay to use it as their home broadband service. But WiFi frequencies don't travel too far and don't penetrate buildings well. Where there is solid service, hungry competitors are waiting as well. That includes those plodding telcos and cable MSOs, who have been steadily building out their networks. They've also been steadily increasing speeds and lowering rates. Even more clever, these wireline companies are bundling phone service, broadband Internet and TV services in discounted packages that really make paid WiFi look pricey.

WiFi may have been the newest and greatest thing a few years ago when these municipal WiFi plans were conceived, but technology continues to move on. Verizon is making fiber to the home a reality. WiMAX is beginning its nationwide buildout with more power and better wide area penetration than even a plethora of meshed WiFi hotspots. The Apple iPhone puts standard Web browsing on your cell phone. Mobile broadband is expanding with the GSM and CDMA systems at each other's throats to see who can increase speeds faster. And don't forget all those free WiFi hotspots. It's very hard to compete against free.

Goodbye Frame Relay, Hello MPLS

When you have multiple business locations and they all need to communicate, what do you do? You can set up private lines to make the connections, but that gets expensive as the number of locations increases. A private network solution called Frame Relay has been popular for its reliability, security and cost savings. But now MPLS networks are the new technology you should consider for higher bandwidths and lower costs.

Frame relay emerged as a cross between the public switched telephone network and point to point dedicated private lines. The idea was to replace the concept of hard wires in "nailed up" circuits with virtual circuits that accomplish the same objective. Circuit switching originated with the telephone companies. It means just what it says. Every time you want a connection, you connect one set of available wires to another until both end locations are hooked together. The circuit stays that way for the length of a phone call or the length of the private line lease. Either way, a dedicated circuit costs you whether you are using it or not.

Virtual circuits are a packet switching idea. Instead of actual wires from point to point, virtual circuits use routers and switches to make sure that information that enters at one port gets to its intended destination without delay or interference. The actual physical paths in the network may be used by many customers during a given time period. However, there is always enough bandwidth in the network to ensure that every virtual circuit acts like it is the only one connected.

The advantage of virtual circuits over physical circuits is the efficiency that comes from greater utilization of the physical paths in the network. These are fiber optic or wireline connections in a metropolitan area or cross-country. The higher the utilization, the lower the cost per user. In other words, you save money using virtual circuits in a private network.

Frame Relay is based on the PVC or Permanent Virtual Circuit. You access the network using a specialized piece of customer premises equipment called a FRAD or Frame Relay Access Device. Within the network frame routers are configured by the network operator to create your PVCs from a list of sources and destinations and your desired bandwidth or Committed Information Rate (CIR).

MPLS or Multi Protocol Label Switching is also a private network arrangement. It's designed to run on the newer IP based networks that are replacing traditional circuit switched or TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) networks. The multi-protocol aspect allows all sorts of traffic to be carried on the network simultaneously. What MPLS layers over the core IP network is a specialized label system. Each label specifies source and destination and quality of service. The labels work something like the virtual circuits of Frame Relay in that they identify where packets are coming from and where they are intended to go. Tag switches also called label switch routers use this information to direct traffic on the network. Like Frame Relay, you use a special device called a ingress or egress router to connect to the MPLS network.

MPLS networks are offered by competitive carriers for transporting voice, data and video from point to point or among multiple locations. The network operator will set up your connections to ensure that you have high enough bandwidth and low enough latency to meet your needs. This level of traffic engineering isn't currently available on public networks, such as the Internet.

Should you stick with your current Frame Relay service or make the move to a MPLS network? Our team of experts can help you compare the options and pick the best one for your applications. You never know. You might just be able to save a bundle of money and get as good or better service as you have now.

The Clever D Block Initiative

In the bandwidth feeding frenzy that was the recent 700 MHz spectrum auction, one small bank of frequencies went unsold. Sadly, D Block did not meet its reserve price and remains assigned to the UHF analog TV channels scheduled for shutdown next February. What makes this sad is that of all the new possible applications for the 700 MHz band, D Block was slated for perhaps the most important role of all in an ingenious plan to bootstrap a new nationwide public service network. So clever was this plan that I think it deserves another look. It might just be the blueprint for how to get other things we want in this less than robust economy.

The origin of the D Block idea goes back to the horrific morning of September 11, 2001. As the Twin Towers came crashing down in New York City, we were shocked to learn that the loss of life was exacerbated by an electronic communications fiasco. Firefighters couldn't even coordinate with police officers because their radios operated on different frequencies. What's more, this problem permeates the entire nation. Public safety two-way radio is an ad-hoc service with no national network. That's what D Block is intended to fix. Combining the D Block frequencies with the current public safety frequencies offers the opportunity to coordinate a suite of broadband and narrowband services that all police, fire and rescue units could access.

Seems like such a good idea should have been implemented already. But some six and a half years after 9/11, there is still no nationwide public safety network. Why? Building out a whole new network is an expensive proposition. The cost has been estimated to be some $6 to $7 billion. In the big scheme of things, it seems like this amount of money could be included in our federal budget without causing a noticable bump. But in these times of big deficits and slow economic growth, it's hard to get broad bipartisan support for even a project as worthy as this one.

So here's the clever part. How would you like to get that brand new public safety network for free? Well, at least free to the taxpayers. Before you jump up and say that's impossible, take a look at what the FCC tried to pull off in Auction 73. The A, B, C, and E Block licenses were sold to commercial entities for cash on the barrel head to the tune of $19 billion for the Federal Treasury. But D Block was held back. In order to win a nationwide license for this spectrum, bidders had to commit to creating that nationwide public safety network. Why would they do that? Because in consideration for building the public safety network, the winner would get to share the spectrum for commercial gain.

The 10 MHz D Block and the existing 10 MHz public safety spectrum in the 700 MHz band were paired to create a public/private partnership. The reserve price was set at $1.3 billion and the doors swung open to prospective bidders. Everything sold quickly except, you guessed it, D Block. The lone bid was for about a third of the reserve price. Major carriers wanted nothing to do with the idea. A dejected Federal Communications Commission is now soliciting public comments on how to rebid the shunned D Block.

Alternatives include reapproaching Congress for the funds, perhaps delaying any action to see if a new administration might be warmer to the idea. Or simply forgetting the idea of a national public safety network and selling off D Block for commercial usage. But I say not so quick. There may still be a way to get that new network for "free."

It comes down to a matter of incentives. The fact that the D Block auction failed simply means that the terms and conditions weren't attractive enough in this economic environment. The idea still has merit and it could well be the right answer at the right time. Let's face it, as a nation we're strapped. Between skyrocketing oil prices, plummeting housing prices, a credit crunch and anemic economic growth, a public/private partnership might be the most expeditious way to get things moving. But what incentives will do the trick?

The variables to play with are the reserve price, any lease costs for commercial use of the existing public safety spectrum, public financing of the buildout, preferred tax treatment, and perhaps first crack at any new spectrum that opens up. The idea is to sweeten the pot with incentives that don't result in out of pocket expense to the taxpayers. Public financing wouldn't necessarily cost us anything if it were just a matter of ensuring that the monies are available to loan for such a large project at reasonable market rates.

If this approach still isn't enough to make it happen, then a fallback position would be to keep the partnership but have the public kick in some cash. That's not quite as desirable but it is a way to privatize at least part of the massive effort involved in building and running such a system. Can you think of other ways to make this work? If so, make your voice heard to the FCC during this public comment period.

I'd like to see this very clever plan work out for the public safety network because we certainly can use it. Both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina taught us that big disasters can come upon us with little or no warning. We need to get prepared for whatever the next challenge is. Beyond that, there is a model here that might work to solve other problems. I'm thinking crumbling infrastructure, a shortage of domestic energy and water, even more of a stretch into education, employment and crime. The right incentives might just unleash the proven power of business on some of these seemingly intractable public sector needs.

Staying Out of the Clouds

"So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way"

- Joni Mitchell

Clouds are popular in information technology, even in the sunny Southwest. Cloud computing always seems to be in the news these days. Network clouds are seen on every whiteboard and in every PowerPoint presentation. So why would anyone want to avoid flying in the clouds?

To understand that, we need to take a closer look at what's inside those clouds. The cloud symbol, a big fluffy cumulus, has become the standard representation for a large or complex network whose inner workings we don't really need to understand to make use of it. You might remember a cartoon or T-shirt with lots of equations and a cloud with the legend, "here a miracle occurs."

For many users, the miracle of the cloud suits them just fine. Data goes into the cloud, data comes out. As long as everything is working, one cloud is just as good as another. Right?

One company that doesn't think so is American Fiber Systems, Inc. David G. Rusin, president and CEO, takes issue with the "magical cloud" in his white paper, "Clearing up all that is Cloudy." In particular, he takes issue with the idea that Internet clouds are a commodity with similar levels of integrity, presence, reliability and delivery. The same thinking can be extended to point to point and multipoint private networks. Once you draw that cloud on the board, it really doesn't matter who you buy it from. Or does it?

The most obvious differentiator in cloud networks is bandwidth. "Broadband" is one of those loose definitions that bears some looking into. Did you know that the FCC defines broadband as starting at a mere 200 kbps? Few businesses users would consider 200 kbps as being a broadband connection when they are used to T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps and Ethernet at even higher speeds. Even mobile networks are rapidly being upgraded to speeds that are more like 10x that entry level broadband definition.

Bandwidth also has a consistency factor. If you have a dedicated Internet service, you can expect that you'll always have access at the bandwidth you are leasing. But if you are trying to get by with an "information service", such as DSL or Cable broadband, you may find that the speed of your connection varies during the day. That's because these services are oversubscribed to keep the price down and you only get the max speed when there are few other users. When things get busy, you all have to share whatever backbone bandwidth the provider is supplying to the multiplexing equipment.

If you really want to draw a cloud and not worry about it, you need the virtually unlimited bandwidth that comes with fiber optic networks. But all fiber networks aren't the same, either. American Fiber Systems owns and operates metropolitan fiber optic networks in nine cities, including Atlanta, Boise, Cleveland, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, Reno and Salt Lake City. By owning the network rather than leasing parts of it from other vendors including the telephone companies, American Fiber Systems can commit to bandwidth, delivery, redundancy and service reliability and make good on those commitments.

What services are available? Transport services from DS1 to OC192 including Virtual Private Lines (VPL) and Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN), Optical Ethernet from 5 Mbps to GigE or 1 Gbps, Metro Wavelength service with 2.5G and 10G waves, Dark Fiber connected right to your building, and dedicated Internet access in addition to metro connections.

Would your business benefit from high reliability fiber optic bandwidth that you can count on? Our GeoQuote (tm) Ethernet service locator can help you find the best deals for your location from American Fiber Systems and other high quality carriers. Doesn't cost anything to look and only takes a few seconds, so go ahead and see what's available near you.

Landlines Flourish in Business

Consumers may be abandoning landlines right and left, but they are still alive and well in the business world. In fact, landlines are absolutely flourishing in businesses large and small. What sense does this make?

The wireless-only craze has not infected businesses the same way as consumers for a number of good reasons. One difference is that most businesses involve more than one person. More often than not, businesses have a business location where most of the business activity takes place or is controlled. Fixed locations with multiple users who all need to interact is a realm dominated by PBX telephone systems. PBX systems use landlines to connect with the outside world.

Now there are some caveats to this. You may think of landlines as being only twisted pair copper analog phone wires that connect a business location to the phone company central office. This century-old technology no longer dominates the business world. A landline now might be a T1 telephone trunk line that consolidates multiple business lines into a single digital cable. Up to 24 phone lines can be carried by a single T1 line.

An even newer landline technology is the SIP trunk. This is a packet rather than channel based technology that serves IP based telephone systems such as enterprise VoIP systems, including IP PBX phone systems.

Digital landlines can be used for both voice and data. SIP trunk lines often carry both telephone and broadband Internet traffic. So do Integrated T1 lines. Carrier Ethernet service over copper or fiber landlines can provide point to point network connections or multipoint LAN services over extended distances.

So, does this mean that wireless use is insignificant in business settings? Just the opposite. The BlackBerry device is almost part of the corporate dress code... even when there is no dress code. BlackBerry devices and other smartphones are integrated into the enterprise voice and data systems using something called fixed/mobile convergence. There is some thought that this may eventually evolve into all-wireless business networks, but that seems unlikely. Every time there is an incremental improvement to wireless technology, such as HSDPA or EVDO Rev A, there seems to be an even greater demand for higher enterprise network bandwidths. It seems that the solution is a system that will incorporate more wireless access points, cellular and IP wireless telephony, and Gigabit Ethernet connections.

The one exception may be the independent technical or sales professional who spends more time out of the home office than in it. These people have needs more like individuals than collocated teams. A cell phone or smartphone, perhaps with a cellular broadband enabled notebook computer and a stand alone toll free number, can provide all the electronic communications needed.

Lonliness of the Long Distance Landline

The latest telephone usage statistics confirm what we've already suspected. People are running away from landlines like they're allergic to copper. If Alexander Graham Bell came back to life in his lab today and spilled battery acid in his lap, he'd be screaming for Watson in his prototype transmitter to no avail. Nobody would be listening at the other end of that wire. Now if he had the presence of mind to whip out his cell phone and select the picture of Mr. Watson as one of his favorites, that call would likely go through. Watson, like just about everybody else, has gone wireless.

It's no surprise that most everyone carries a cell phone. They probably have two or three more old ones, sitting in a drawer, that should be recycled. People just love staying connected. They're on those phones even when they shouldn't be. Sit at any stop light and watch the cars turning left in front of you. About every third one has a driver on the phone. Sadly, one too many of those has a cigarette in the other hand is driving with their elbows. Ma Bell would never have sat still for that.

Ma didn't have to. In the days when houses were built with special nooks for the telephone set, you needed wires to make anything happen. Those wires might happen to include a run of barbed wire cattle fence. No matter. It was the requirement for electrical conductors that led to the universal copper pair that runs to every home and business. But the way things are going, you might as well dig up that copper and use it to make pennies. People are abandoning their landlines. Today 30% wouldn't pick up a home phone even if it rang.

My how things have changed. Growing up in our house I remember everyone but my grandmother being thrilled when we finally got off the neighborhood party line and got our own private phone line. I used to watch her comically sitting at the desk with her hand cupped over the transmitter of our one heavy flat-black non-dial telephone set. Neighborhood conversations were at least as amusing as the early TV shows. By the time I became a homeowner, there were outlets for telephones in just about every room including the basement. Your phone was your connection to everyone near and far. You wanted your number printed in the telephone directory so that people could find you.

At my house, we're the kind of people who just wouldn't feel right if there wasn't a telephone hanging on the wall or sitting on the desk. Who isn't? Younger people. Those who have no memory of "number, please" operators or a day when the term "cell phone" sounded like something you'd find in a prison. That's everybody under 30. A third of those have only a cell phone. If mom wants to call, she better have the number written down. It's not published.

There's another group that's somewhere in the middle. They either have regular landline telephone service but don't use it, or they've moved on to the latest technology. Cable companies want to be in the phone business. They offer bundles of TV, phone service and broadband Internet called "triple play". The telephone service actually uses the broadband rather than standard phone wires. This is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. It's big advantage is that you can get more features for less money, especially in a bundled service. It does have the annoying problem of going dead when the power goes out or when the Cable broadband dumps. Then you use your cell phone.

But if you are going to use your cell phone some of the time at home and all of the time while mobile, why bother with a landline or VoIP phone service at all? That's what the younger generations think. Many kids today get their first cell phone when they are in high school, take it to college, and by the time they're out in the world everybody they want to talk to knows their cell number. Why not just keep the cell on at home instead of having a completely different number or a "find me follow me" setup? You don't need finding or following if you only have one number.

Along with landlines, the concept of competitive long distance phone service is fading from the scene. This was one of the first products of phone system deregulation. You could save a lot of money by switching to an alternative provider, and probably still can if you are a heavy landline user. This service was so aggressively marketed that it became a TV punchline for someone to pick up a ringing phone during dinner and say: "No, I don't want to switch my long distance phone service."

Now, what's long distance? Most cellular service plans work the same whether you are calling across town or across the country. You buy bundles of anytime minutes and just make sure you don't go over your monthly limit. If that's a chronic problem, you can now get plans with unlimited anytime minutes.

Long distance still comes into play for international calling. If you have relatives or business associates overseas, you're sensitive to international rates. International minutes are almost always an additional charge. You can keep your costs down by using low rate International calling cards and whatever phone you wish. This is also probably the best justification for VoIP going forward. Simply coordinate with your contacts overseas to use the same VoIP service, and your "on network" calls are free. The Internet becomes the phone line.

Verizon has a interesting approach whereby fiber optic cable replaces your TV coaxial cable, your telephone line, and your DSL or Cable broadband connection. Signals beamed through glass fibers are far faster and more flexible than other technologies. So much so that TV, broadband Internet and telephone service all have their own wavelengths and don't interfere with each other. In this case, the telephone company is taking over the television business and perhaps preserving the legacy of home phone service for future generations.

Metro Ethernet Tipping Point

Metropolitan Ethernet, a service that was unheard of only a few years ago, is reported to be nearing a tipping point that could make it the dominant bandwidth service within the next couple of years. How did that happen and what does it mean for your business?

The Metropolitan Area Network, call MAN for short, is not a new idea. These networks are well established in larger cities as connections to SONET fiber ring services. The ring generally encircles the town or an area of high technology development likely to use the service. SONET or Synchronous Optical NETwork is a telecommunications technology based on time division multiplexing, which preceded the development of IP based packet switched networks.

What's new is that competitive carriers are coming to town with their own MANs, but basing them on the latest Carrier Ethernet technology. Bandwidths are typically the same increments as local area network standards. Basic Ethernet service is 10 Mbps, Fast Ethernet is 100 Mbps, and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE is 1000 Mbps. Intermediate bandwidths may also be available. For GigE Metro Ethernet you'll need to have your building wired or "lit" for fiber optic service. But Ethernet and even Fast Ethernet connections can often be provided using EoC or Ethernet over Copper if you are within a mile or two of the closest carrier POP (Point of Presence).

There are two types of Metro Ethernet service you may be interested in. Point to Point or E-Line service connects two business locations within the metropolitan area. E-LAN service gives you the ability to connect multiple locations in one large network.

What's the advantage of Metro Ethernet over legacy MAN services? First is the ease of understanding and connecting Ethernet protocol services, which IT people are familiar with in LANs. Perhaps more compelling is that the competitive carriers offering these services generally offer bandwidth pricing that is a mere fraction of what you pay per Mbps for TDM based telco services.

TDM or Time Division Multiplexing was the technology of choice when most communications traffic was switched circuit telephony. Today, packet switched data traffic far exceeds classic telephony on networks worldwide. Most new network development now is based on IP standards, including Metro Ethernet and long haul Carrier Ethernet.

What Can GigE Bandwidth Do For You?

Gigabit Ethernet has been steadily making its way into local area network connections. NIC (Network Interface Cards) that were standardized as 10/100 Mbps are now more and more becoming 10/100/1000 Mbps. LAN backbones have been moving to 1 Gbps and even 10 Gbps. If your company is a heavy user of high technology digital processes, you're likely in the Gigabit Ethernet or GigE category right now. What you really need is a way to extend your high bandwidth data transfers out or your local network and across town or across the country at some reasonable cost. Now you can.

What type of companies can benefit from GigE WAN (Wide Area Network) connections? Those with large number of employees, huge customer bases, or applications that generate massive amounts of data. An obvious example is corporate information systems that handle accounting data, documentation, email and human resources for thousands of employees. Even when data was primarily text and numbers, these systems had to process, store and transfer enormous amounts of data. Now that pictures and graphics are more prevalent in the corporate databases, storage and bandwidth demands have multiplied.

Your need for connectivity with the outside world may include ways to interconnect multiple locations within a metropolitan area into a "virtual" corporate campus. Or, you may have a primarily location but a remote data center that handles overnight backups. In these cases, a Gigabit Ethernet MAN or Metropolitan Area Network connection could fit the bill.

It isn't always the largest companies that have the highest bandwidth demands. Hospitals and Medical Centers may be large or modest in size. But if they are generating radiological images and need to transfer them instantly or as close to instantly as possible, a GigE WAN connection is no extravagance.

Other organizations that are heavy data generators include video production houses, especially in high definition. HD television, movies, commercial advertising and the like can suck up as much bandwidth as you can provide. So too can engineering firms who are generating large architectural drawing packages or system simulations. It takes high performance computing equipment to generate the data in the first place. Transferring it in real-time requires bandwidth way beyond what normal business applications demand.

If your need to to share data between facilities in different cities or create an Extranet that includes key customers, you may find yourself bumping up against the limits that even a DS3 connection gives you. That's 45 Mbps, once considered a large amount of bandwidth. A logical upgrade is to move to SONET fiber optic carrier services. OC-3 offers 155 Mbps, OC-12 will give you 622 Mbps, OC-24 doubles that to 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 tops out at about 2.5 Gbps. These are classical fiber based telecommunications services, but they are definitely old school. Especially when it comes to pricing.

The new option is Carrier Ethernet. As the name implies, this is the same Ethernet as you deploy on your local networks. It's available now in speeds that range from classical Ethernet at 10 Mbps on the low end, Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE at 1,000 Mbps. Pricing from competitive carriers with regional and national footprints is a fraction of what you'll pay for the equivalent SONET or T-Carrier bandwidth.

What level of bandwidth makes economic sense for your company? Find Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and GigE services available near your location now.

BlackBerry's Bold Move to HSDPA

Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry wireless devices, is introducing a new model called "Bold." Some of its bold features include a higher resolution display, 1 GB on-board storage memory, 624 MHz processor, and 2 Megapixel digital camera. But its boldest move is in its wireless connectivity. It has blown past the common EDGE data services in support of tri-band HSDPA plus Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g. No longer is email going to be enough for enterprise users. Now it's desktop-style Web browsing and streaming video.

A related story that's buzzing in the media is that the Apple iPhone is selling out in places without apparent restocking. The best guesses are that Apple wants to unload current stock before the arrival of the new improved iPhone with, you guessed it, HSDPA cellular broadband.

So, what is HSDPA and why is it the big news instead of cool looking phone designs? HSDPA implementation is a move toward a faster mobile Internet to support higher bandwidth applications. Not mentioned as much is that it is also a way to nip WiMAX in the bud before it takes over as the mobile broadband standard. Within the last week, Sprint and Clearwire's struggling WiMAX effort got bankrolled by a consortium that includes Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks.

AT&T certainly can't sit still if it intends to be a wireless powerhouse. Indeed, it has been upgrading its cellular network from EDGE technology that barely qualifies as broadband with download speeds of around 100 to 200 kbps. The replacement is HSDPA which stands for High Speed Download Packet Access. HSDPA tops out at 14,400 kbps or over 14 Mbps. That's faster than most Cable broadband services and even many business wireline Internet connections.

The BlackBerry Bold, the Apple iPhone and other smartphones have included Wi-Fi access capability as a way to access the Internet and company networks in areas where cellular service is spotty. A better reason is to get decent access speeds when you just can't stand the poky performance of over the air data services. With the upgrade to HSDPA, it's likely that the WiFi capability is going to get less of a workout. The availability of broadband on the go is just too appealing.

HSDPA is a data transmission technology unique to GSM cellular networks. In the U.S., AT&T is the major network using GSM. But the "G" in GSM means global. People don't just buy GSM phones because they like AT&T service. They also like the ability to use their phones overseas, especially on business travel. T-Mobile is the other major network using GSM in the U.S.

The other two major carriers, Sprint and Verizon, are based on CDMA instead of GSM. They are both digital cellular services, but are technically incompatible. Your phone is either CDMA or GSM, but unlikely to work on both. Sprint and Verizon have been aggressive about rolling out their own wireless broadband data services known as EVDO. The Rev A version of EVDO has a download burst speed of 3.1 Mbps, with an upgrade to speeds similar to HSDPA in the upcoming Rev B.

RIM has upgraded the color display on the BlackBerry Bold to be a half-VGA with resolution of 480x320 pixels. This is similar to the resolution of the iPhone, but not physically as large. Instead, the Bold uses the lower portion of its stylish case for a full QWERTY keyboard. But the high resolution display and high speed wireless data connection underscore that the importance of text is going to be increasingly augmented by streaming video in the corporate environment.

What are the hottest cell phone deals available right now, including free cell phones? Use the Cell Phone Plan Finder to check out the top phones and associated wireless service plans.

Fixed Wireless for Point of Sale Authorizations

Just about everyone uses credit cards these days. That means the credit card authorization terminal is every bit as important as the cash register for today's retail businesses. What helps to make for a fast and pleasant transaction experience could be the means of connection. If you are still using a dial-up terminal that shares a phone line with your office telephone and FAX machine, the dirty looks from your customers as they stand there and wait is probably all the encouragement you need to be looking for an upgrade.

T1 lines have come down in price dramatically over the past few years and are the broadband connection of choice for many small to medium size businesses. They may still be a little pricey for many smaller retail operations that aren't heavy users of the line. But what else can you get? Dial-up Internet access is universally available but hideously slow. DSL is not always available, nor is Cable broadband. Satellite is a better option, but it requires some serious professional installation work. How about wireless?

There are WISP or Wireless Internet Service Providers, but coverage is pretty hit and miss. You need a direct line of sight to the nearest tower. What would be really nice is something like cell phone service that seems to be available just about everywhere. Even better, how about a business service that uses multiple cellular carriers to give you fast, reliable access in over 90% of the U.S.?

Accel Networks offers just such a service. What they've done is to combine broadband wireless data services from the four leading wireless companies serving the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. Chances are that there is one or more cellular towers providing reliable data service to your location.

These wireless services offer 3.5G, 3G or 2.5G performance, depending on the carrier. A 3 or 3.5G data service gives you 768 kbps bandwidth with bursts up to 1.4 Mbps. Upload is 384 kbps with bursts to 512 kbps. This is very similar to DSL and satellite performance. If you are in a more sparsely populated area, you'll probably get 2.5G service which still gives you 120 to 140 kbps download and uploads. That's far superior to dial-up and without the wait for modem connections.

Accel Networks claims cashless transaction times of 2 to 4 seconds using their network. They have also been certified by VISA for meeting all the payment card industry (PCI) requirements for data security. They'll ship you the hardware in as little as 3 days and you can likely get it up and running yourself in under an hour.

The Accel Networks fixed wireless broadband service is useful for general retail, quick service restaurants, table service restaurants, banks, fuel tank monitoring, hospitality services, pipeline monitoring, convenience stores, retail petroleum and other applications. In fact, this service is also used by companies for network continuity in the event that their primary WAN services goes down.

Are you in need of better voice and data connections for your business? Find out how little it costs for reliable, professional grade telephone and broadband solutions right now.

Do You Build Wide Area Networks?

In your business installing corporate data networks, do you build networks that span multiple locations around town? How about coast to coast? Well, why not?

A quick answer might be: "We don't have a spool of wire big enough."

Well, I know where you can get one. You won't need a huge trailer to haul it around. You won't even need any trenching equipment. That's all taken care of for you. You won't have to work any harder but you will make more money.

What makes this possible are two recent developments. First is the availability of Metro and Carrier Ethernet services from competitive carriers. The second is a business arrangement whereby you can include Ethernet WAN services in your network planning and get monthly commissions based on the bandwidth usage of your clients.

Metro Ethernet is a WAN or Wide Area Network service that is available between business locations in a particular city. Carrier Ethernet extends the Ethernet connection between cities, even multiple locations nationwide.

What network bandwidths are available? They are the same as LAN speeds on wired networks. You can order 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, and even 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. The cost per Mbps goes down as the speed goes up and is considerably less than what your clients pay for telco data services such as DS3 or SONET.

Where is Ethernet service available? Right now it's in larger metropolitan areas, including downtown business districts and the suburbs. Higher speeds are available to buildings "lit" for fiber optic service. However, standard and even Fast Ethernet services are often available over copper wireline within a mile or two of the carriers POP (Point of Presence). This is known as EoC or Ethernet over Copper.

You can easily find where the lit locations are near your business interests by using the GeoQuote (tm) Ethernet Mapping Tool.

Go ahead and recommend this service to your clients if all you want to do is help them find Ethernet and other business voice and data connections. But if you'd like to profit by determining your client's requirements and entering the quote request in a special form that gives you credit for the sale and an ongoing commission for every service that you help your client lease, then learn more and join the VAR Partner Network now.

Where Have All The IPs Gone?

"Where have all the IPs gone? Gone to users every one."

- apologies to Pete Seeger

Have you heard? The Internet is full. In just a couple of years it will have completely maxed out. That means no more users, no more Web sites, no more anything. They'll have to put a bouncer at the door. Nobody else gets in until somebody leaves. "Here, take a pager and we'll call you when it's your turn." Is this anyway to run an Internet?

Wait just a second. Don't they call it the World Wide Web? How come this grand global resource is already at capacity? It's not bandwidth or availability of connections or the price of computers that's the issue. It's addresses. Just like airline seats, there's an available number of places to squat on the Internet. When they've all been handed out, that's it. They're all gone and there aren't any more.

This limitation lies in the design of the Internet Protocol itself. We're currently using Internet Protocol version 4 or IPV4. Back in the dawn of the Internet, when it was the outgrowth of a government research program and used primarily by universities, a 32 bit address field looked like more than enough to accommodate the foreseeable number of users. The 4 bytes of addressing creates a little over 4 billion addresses. It's 4,294,96,296 different numbers to be precise. You'll recognize them in the familiar dot notation used for IP addresses, such as 127.0.0.1. That one is especially familiar because it is reserved as the local host address for the computer you happen to be using. Reserved addressed are one of the reasons there is a shortage, but not the big one.

The problem is that the Internet took off way beyond the designer's imaginations. Everybody is on the Internet or will be just as soon as they can afford a computer or time at an Internet cafe. How many of us? According to the World Internet Usage Statistics, it's now 20% of the world's six billion plus population or 1.36 billion users and growing like mad. North America has a 72% usage rate. It's just under 14% in Asia, and they have the bulk of the population. So there's 1.36 billion users right now and room for 4 billion. Where's the problem?

To find the bottleneck, let's see where all those addresses are assigned. IP addresses are assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and operated by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). They have the addresses arranged into blocks identified by the first set of numbers or octet. In the localhost example, 127 is a first octet number. Class A networks have first octet numbers from 1 to 127. These are for the largest networks, such as those operated by a large organizations or governments. Class B networks have the range between 128 and 191. Class C networks, the smallest, have the range from 192 and 223. Class A networks are rare because there can only be 126 of them, less the reserved numbers. Each class A network can accommodate over 16 million hosts. Each class C network can have 254 hosts. A corporation may have one or more blocks of class C addresses assigned to it.

This assignment into blocks ranging from 254 to over 16 million at a crack has been part of the problem. Some organizations were assigned many more addresses than they are actually using. That wasn't much of an issue until the growth of the Internet began to make large unassigned address blocks in short supply. At that point the strict class system was abandoned in favor of giving organizations what they need but not letting them sit on thousands or millions of unused addresses. Even that wasn't enough to free up sufficient address space forever. In fact, we probably would have run out by now if it wasn't for NAT or Network Address Translation.

NAT is what is built into your router. You may get one static or dynamic IP address from your ISP, but your network could have a dozen or a hundred devices attached. The router keeps track of who is asking for what on the Internet and multiplexes, or shares, that single IP address among all the users on the network.

Even with NAT, it is estimated that we could still run out of IP addresses by 2010 or perhaps push that out another 5 to 7 years by making organizations give back any unused address space they've been assigned. That kind of scrounging might help temporarily, but it will never solve the problem. It's not just users logging into ISPs that grab all the addresses. Many IP addresses are used by Websites and email servers. Newer devices such as IP security cameras may have their own IP addresses so you can call them up remotely. Wireless access points and anything else that connects to the Internet wants its own IP address, either globally or locally assigned.

What we really need to solve the problem is more addresses and the way to do that is to expand the address space with a new version of the Internet Protocol. IPV6 does just that. Internet Protocol version 6 is the designated replacement for IPV4 and it is in the process of deployment. The U.S. Government hopes to be completely on IPV6 by the middle of this year. China is going the same way for its Next Generation Internet. How much extra will become available by using IPV6? It's not double or even ten or a hundred times, like you might expect. No, the designers of IPV6 weren't going to get caught short this time around. The IPV6 address space is 128 bits wide. That's not just 4 times the size of the 32 bit IPV4. The way it multiplies as you add bits makes IPV6 capable of trillion, trillion, trillions of individual addresses. Take all you want, there's plenty to go around.

IPV6 is just what's needed to enable the everything-Internet society. Your computer, cell phone, television, refrigerator, and nanny camera can all have their own addresses. Hey, chip your dog and make him Internet enabled. Or chip yourself. Oh, that's going to be an issue. NAT provides a convenient way to keep hackers and other outsiders from knowing what's on your network and how to get to it. One of the challenges of moving to IPV6 is going to be maintaining privacy in a world where everything could have a unique registered address and be track able from anywhere in the world via the Internet. But it's still better than having the Internet closed due to over capacity.

Why GHz is So Last Century

GigaHertz. It's a billion cycles per second. It wasn't that long ago when we used to be impressed with MegaHertz. A PC that ran at 100 MHz was really something impressive when yours was running at 20 MHz. Now that every processor has ramped up to over a GHz, anything tagged MegaHertz seems ancient. But what if GHz is just a step on the way to something even faster. When we get to THz or TeraHertz, GigaHertz is going to look like yesterday's news. But, honestly, who needs a TeraHertz anything?

Back in the days when personal computers were young, it was said that Bill Gates chose 640 KB of RAM as the upper limit for the Microsoft Operating System because it was so much that nobody would even use it all. That actually made sense when the first 8-bit personal computers had a 64K memory limit. I remember drooling at the thought of 64K when 16K was all I could afford. Since 640K is 10x the 64K max used in early PCs, it stood to reason that it was plenty for the text, spreadsheet and word processing applications of the time.

The problem came when software technology advanced, as it has a way of doing. Now people wanted graphics and pictures in addition to plain text. Desktop publishing really helped this along. When the Internet opened up to the general public, and especially e-commerce, the hardware fell way, way behind the applications demand. It's taken a couple of decades to get to the point where PC platforms have matured and every ad you see doesn't boast of more RAM, hard disk space or processor speed. The one exception seems to be the Microsoft Vista operating system, which still brings relatively new computers to their knees.

The current benchmark is Giga-everything. Your computer needs a couple of Gigabytes of RAM, a few hundred Gigabytes of hard drive and a GigaHz or two of processor speed for GigaFlops of processing power. Internet bandwidth is playing catch-up, but going the same way. A single Mbps or a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps just isn't enough anymore. We want 10, 100 or 1,000 Mbps. Yes, a full Gbps doesn't seem to be too gluttonous to demand for high tech companies with high demand or cutting edge services.

In the meantime, the world is moving on to Tera territory. You can buy 1 TB or Terabyte hard drives now in many consumer electronics stores. That's 1,000 Gbps. Internet backbones are being upgraded toward Terabit per second capability to handle the deluge of packets that will soon be coursing through their fibers. Will processing and memory keep up?

A recent news report unveiled a development at the University of Utah that engineered a waveguide/splitter capable of working with frequencies in the 0.3 to 10 THz range. Supercomputers have processing powers in the tens and hundreds of Teraflops (thousand billion floating point operations per second). Intel and Cray are now working on supercomputers capable of operation in the Petaflop range or quadrillions of flops.

These enormous speeds will be achieved initially by bundling or paralleling existing technologies. It's much less expensive to use thousands of off the shelf microprocessors to build a supercomputer than try an engineer THz individual processors. Tbps transmission rates will come by bonding the bandwidth of multiple wavelengths within a fiber and multiple fiber strands within a bundle. But eventually, technology will catch up and these performance levels will seem mundane and available off the shelf.

As in the early days of PC computing, it seems a bit hard to understand why business and home users will be demanding Terabyte and TeraHertz gear. The real problem to seeing what the future requires is our outdated benchmarks. To put advances in speed "into perspective", researchers often boast about how fast their new development can process or deliver the entire works of the U.S. Library of Congress. Oneupmanship is now how many Library of Congresses per second can be handled.

Is anyone really wowed by this type of claim anymore? The truth is that the entire collection of written works in any library or even the world is only so big. Text storage, transmission or processing is as inappropriate a benchmark today as it was once computers got color graphics screens. A better measure might be how many YouTubes or Hollywood studio libraries can be handled per second. In the age where everything is going toward high definition video, Tbps, THz and TB are no longer technical extravagances.

A few days ago, I had a chance to see a demonstration of Mitsubishi's 3D HDTV televisions. These are normal DLP sets with the addition of an infrared emitter and LCD goggles. In 3D mode, the two lenses of the goggles are toggled in sync with picture fields that are slightly offset. What you see is a full color full resolution TV scene that reaches out from the set almost to your nose. Most of the program material now is cartoons and horror films, but it looks like game consoles will support this technology in the near future. How long before Monday Night Football is televised in 3D?

Even more impressive is a new development by Mitsubishi that eliminates the goggles. They use a linear array of 16 video cameras, 16 PCs for processing and 16 projectors to display the scene on a special lenticular screen. The prototype is a little clunky, but it's real-time 3D. Getting it packaged into something that will sell is just a matter of engineering and manufacturing. So, how much bandwidth do you suppose we'll need when everybody wants big screen 3D television, videos and games in their home? How about 3D telepresence? It's coming to a conference room near you. Sooner than you might expect.

Are you ready for more bandwidth, lots more bandwidth for your business? See how little you'll pay today for even Gigabit Ethernet connections. TeraE is going to take a little longer.

Smart Grids Picking the Bones of BPL

Have you been waiting anxiously next to your electrical outlets for the day when they'll spring to life with broadband Internet service as well as AC power? That day may never come now. It looks like Broadband over Power Line or BPL is fading fast as a consumer or business high speed Internet connection. Much to the chagrin of Amateur Radio operators who have been buzz kills about trying to kill the buzz in their shortwave receivers, BPL isn't going away. It's morphing into a communications service of, by and for the utilities. Perhaps therein lies a compromise that everyone can live with.

The tipping point for BPL deployment may have come with the recent story in the Dallas Morning News that Current Communications is shutting down its BPL service in Dallas that was intended to serve 2 million homes. Well, shutting down isn't quite the right terminology. It's only the consumer Internet users who are going to be kicked off. The installed transmission networking equipment is being sold to Oncor, the Texas electric transmission and distribution company. The existing BPL, plus some planned expansion, will become the communications backbone of Oncor's Smart Grid.

What's a Smart Grid? You know that electric utility power plants are connected to one of several wide area power grids that blanket the nation. That's not exactly a dumb grid arrangement, but if you've been the victim of a power blackout or brownout you might just call it that. The power grids are heavily managed to make sure that electrons being pushed into the wires by thousands of generating stations are matched with an equal number of electrons flowing out of the grid to power homes, factories, businesses, hospitals and street lights. There's a lot of measuring and watching going on, but it's still a very operator intensive control system.

Most of this has to do with the nature of electrical equipment. Over the last century there's been lots of standardization imposed. But it's mostly copper wires, mechanical circuit breakers, electromechanical relays and contactors, and encapsulated transformers lovingly referred to as "pole pigs." Then there's the really big stuff that transports Megawatts at hundreds of thousands of volts across the countryside. Still, lots of copper, iron core transformers and electromechanical switching.

The idea behind a "smart" power grid is to add two-way communications and control to equipment on the electrical grid. That may start with residential and business utility meters that can be read remotely and be expanded to let the power company switch on and off certain customer owned equipment. Some utilities are doing this with air conditioners to reduce line loads so the system won't overload on hot summer days. You let them control your AC usage. They give you a break on your electric bill. Hot water heaters are also being eyed for load management.

Smart Grids can be enhanced with intelligent equipment that will help them manage the diversity of alternative energy generators that individuals and corporations are connecting to the grid. The consumer is becoming a producer. If this trend takes off as expected, management of all these new solar, wind and hydro micro power plants could become a challenge to power companies used to ramping a relative handful of large power generators up and down. With a Smart Grid, they can make sure that the right amount of electricity is coming from and going to the right places, and that the myriad of small scale producers are properly compensated for their contributions. Under computer monitoring and control, kWh rates can vary by day part or even minute by minute.

Ultimately, computer control over a grid communications network can let the electric grid become self-healing. When one circuit, switch or transformer fails, the system can absorb the blow and re-route currents so that consumers stay powered. Why, it's almost like the Internet. Only with lots and lots of power. If you've ever seen the armada of cherry picker trucks lining the roadway after a major storm, with guys in buckets switching connections using long insulated poles, you know how far we are from a truly self-healing grid.

Who's one of the big names in Smart Grid technology? Why, Current of course. If BPL does wind up getting shorted out by huge costs, interference complaints and rapidly advancing alternative DSL, wireless and fiber optic Internet services, Smart Grids can likely sop up all the power line communications capability that Current and others can provide.

But how do you make BPL a good spectrum neighbor? That might prove to be both contentious and tricky, although there is hope. BPL technology is based on OFDM or Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. That's a transmission technique that replaces one large carrier signal, like a TV or radio station, with dozens or hundreds of smaller carriers spaced up and down the spectrum. The FCC has said that BPL operators have to shut down individual carrier frequencies that cause interference to other services. But a Smart Grid that needs just enough bandwidth to monitor and control what needs controlling may not be as demanding as a consumer impatiently trying to download a full length movie. With clever spectrum management, it might just be possible to transmit utility signaling data on open wires without overpowering weak radio signals that others are listening to.

The Ethernet Next Door

Life is tough when you're bandwidth limited. You spent what seemed like a fortune years ago to get a T1 line from the phone company. It was fantastic at the time, but now business has grown and everything seems to be slowing down on the network. You asked them for more bandwidth and they just laughed. You couldn't possibly afford to get access to their fiber optic SONET ring. If you can't afford it, how can your competitors afford it? Why don't they seem to be as constrained as you are?

What they know and you're about to find out is that there's a new business broadband service in town and it's right next door or down the street. Your current provider is not about to tip you off because they want to hold on to your business and the big premium you pay them for Internet access. What's really sad is that you could be getting all the bandwidth you need and for a lot less money than you think. Not only could you match your competitors' performance, you might just leapfrog them.

This new service really isn't so hush-hush. It's just being deployed so fast that it's not well known right now. It's not your traditional telecom service, either. It's an extension of the networking standards you are already using. It's Ethernet.

We've used to thinking of Ethernet on the LAN but having to go to a completely separate protocol for access to the outside world, especially the Internet. Even point to point connections have to be converted from packets to channels on a telecom carrier's service, right? That's been the case, but it isn't any longer. Now you have the option to extend your LAN to join up with your other facilities as Ethernet all the way. You can also use Ethernet as access to dedicated Internet service.

The big player in what's called "Carrier Ethernet" is a company called XO Communications, headquartered in Herndon, Virginia. XO is a billion dollar company with more than 4,000 employees and 90,000 customers, including the government, businesses nationwide and even other carriers. They have nearly a million miles of metro fiber installed, with 18,000 miles of inter-city fiber links and a thousand central office locations. There are 3,000 fiber-fed buildings on their network.

But that's not even the most exciting news. XO is also a leader in both wireless Ethernet and Ethernet over Copper technology. Why is that important? Because not every building is "lit" for fiber optic service. A big office complex with lots of high tech tenants will find it worth their while to get fiber cables pulled-in from the nearest carrier POP or Point of Presence. But many other businesses find the construction costs too daunting.

That's where alternate delivery technologies come to the rescue. New modulation techniques make it possible to carry Ethernet connections over the same copper telco lines normally reserved for telephone services and T1 connections. XO is able to provide business customers beyond the reach of its fiber network with EoC (Ethernet over Copper) connections at speeds from 10 Mbps to 88 Mbps in the 75 metropolitan markets it serves.

Another option in 36 major metropolitan markets is fixed broadband wireless service in the 28 - 31 GHz spectrum. Where wireless access makes sense, it completely avoids the construction hassles of wireline drops. Ethernet speeds from 10 Mbps to 155 Mbps are available using this technology.

I've saved the best news for last. Ethernet service from XO and other competitive carriers is much, much less expensive than what you'd expect to pay for high bandwidth data services. How much less? How about 50 to 90% less per Mbps? If that sounds attractive, use our Ethernet WAN Search service to see what's available for your business location.

Is LTE too LATE?

Mobile wireless standards seem to be a hodge podge of alphabet soup technologies. There's 1xRTT, EVDO Revs 0, A, B & C, GPRS, UMTS, HSDPA, EDGE, and LTE. Why so many? For the same reason that there was Pentium I, II, III and IV, just to mention a very few of the CPUs that came and went in the last quarter century. While PC designs have achieved a certain level of maturity, wireless broadband is still scrambling up the learning curve. The latest that has mobile content providers drooling is called LTE. But is LTE really the next big thing or is it too LITE or too LATE?

The acronym LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. But evolution of what? GSM data networks, that's what. Even beyond GSM networks. It's intended to be worldwide standard for mobile communications created by the the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a collaborative project among telecommunications organizations. In the long run, or should we say long term, LTE will supersede a potpourri of other standards including GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, HSUPA & HSPA+. Some of these are familiar. Others you may have never heard of. If LTE evolves fast enough to kill off these lower species, you may never get familiar with them.

Perhaps the most familiar of this group is EDGE or Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution. This is the wireless broadband standard implemented in the Apple iPhone. AT&T is the largest GSM carrier in the United States. It's a well established technology, but just barely qualifies as broadband. Download speeds are up to 237 Kbps, typically half that. This is why iPhone users are screaming for 3G.

HSDPA or High Speed Downlink Packet Access would be the next upgrade. This standard picks up where EDGE leaves off and ramps broadband speeds up to a theoretical maximum of 14.4 Mbps. Quite an increase. In practical use, the download speed you'd experience is likely to be half that or less. Still, Mbps instead of Kbps. Who could ask for more?

At some point, you'll be the one asking for more. We're use to stifled bandwidth and especially stifled mobile bandwidth. That's why we've settled for "mobile" browsers, text messaging, and email. The nice thing about the iPhone is that if you run out of patience waiting for pages to load, you can always get a coffee or some lunch and use the restaurant's free WiFi to get some decent bandwidth. But then it's time to hit the road again and there goes your Internet experience.

Deploying HSDPA and its upgrades will support today's applications. You'll be able to get mobile performance that feels similar to WiFi hotspots. But carriers will still be playing catch-up as customers become enamored with new high bandwidth applications, such as HDTV, and wonder why they still feel stifled.

Carriers such as AT&T with plans to deploy LTE networks hope to get ahead of the curve. That's what the "long" in long term evolution implies. Imagine having 300 Mbps download speeds at your command. That's along with 75 Mbps upload. True, that's likely to be the performance you'd get right under the tower with nobody else on the channel and no breezes blowing. But still, it's 300 Mbps.

Interestingly, the real powerhouse wireless technology being touted for mobile applications has a maximum download speed of about the same 75 Mbps that LTE offers on the upload channel. That's WiMAX. WiMAX is on its way and we might see Sprint's network in operation this year. That is, if the money holds out.

LTE offers another intriguing characteristic. It has low delay times or latency. How low? How about 10 msec? You're lucky to get under 100 msec on wireline Internet services. The high speed link coupled with low latency characteristics makes LTE a good candidate for lots of new applications, especially real time applications. That suggests not only VoIP telephony but high resolution video conferencing as well. Also real time gaming, television and video on demand, medical imaging and engineering file transfers.

I think it's clear that LTE is certainly not LITE when it comes to performance. It's not too LATE either. WiMAX is taking its good old time rolling out and EVDO Rev C, which might also be a competitor, is also nowhere to be seen. That leaves a nice window of opportunity for LTE just as higher bandwidths are starting to become necessary for more demanding applications.

Fiber to the Boonies

Rural broadband has been something of an oxymoron ever since dial-up Internet service started to go the way of the buggy whip. Major metropolitan areas were the first to get an entire smorgasbord of connectivity options from DSL to Cable broadband to T1 to SONET fiber optic rings to FTTH to DS3 and Ethernet over Copper to GigE and even point to point Wireless. Out in the sticks it's been dial-up or satellite all along, although T1 line prices have finally become reasonable for business users. Fiber Optic services down country lanes? Not a chance. Everybody knows that it's uneconomical to provide fiber optic connections in rural areas. Or do they?

It seems that conventional wisdom has been turned on its head according to the director of an organization that's actually deploying fiber optic broadband in Vermont's Upper Valley. Dr. Timothy Nulty's ValleyFiber is doing what they said couldn't be done. They're bringing fiber to rural families and businesses. I guess we better add a new acronym to the technology lexicon: FTTB - Fiber to the Boonies.

So what's the magic here? Are these people onto something or are they going to go broke when the great fiber optic buildout bubble bursts in maple syrup country? Looking at the numbers in the story reported by Telephony Online, I think they've discovered a sweet spot in the broadband marketplace. The cost for FTTP connections is said to be $1,600 in Vermont cities and $1,800 in rural areas. That's less than a 15% premium for those farmsteads. What gives?

Ah, it's not the cost of connections that the real killer. It's the cost of passing the homes. The number of houses per mile in rural areas is about 12% of the density in town. That means lots and lots of fiber miles to provide universal service. But there are mitigating circumstances. Ever notice all the telephone poles when you're driving on those country roads? They were put there for universal telephone service, but there's plenty of pole space to carry fiber optic cables as well. That's cheaper than trenching or trying to find some way to pull cables in built-up urban areas.

The other magic is in the subscription rates. When your other choices are dial-up and satellite, fiber broadband looks mighty attractive. In Vermont they're seeing pre-subscription rates of 50% which is expected to go as high as 80% upon deployment. That's so high that ValleyFiber is considering installing drops to every home as they deploy the fiber cables.

Perhaps this is the wake-up call that the age of broadband has finally arrived. Perhaps the light will come on, either over our heads or on the router, that digital connectivity is a utility just like electricity and telephone service. The government got behind rural electrification, but rural broadband access has been largely ignored. If universal electric service makes the country stronger, then it stands to reason that today's crying need for universal broadband service is also a national asset.

Fortunately, it looks like local areas and regions within states can leapfrog most of today's broadband services and get themselves hooked up with something that has enough bandwidth to support what they'll need for the foreseeable future. Triple-play telephone, television and broadband Internet are a nice place to start. Medical imaging, TelePresence, and colocation services could soon follow. Wouldn't it be ironic if entrepreneurs chose their start-up locations in rural Vermont just to get reasonably priced bandwidth. Makes that country air smell all the sweeter, doesn't it?