Five Years Of The Explainer

T1 Rex’s Business Telecom Explainer celebrated it’s 5th anniversary this month, with well over 800 posts since 2004. We started off with a mission to explain the intricacies of telecommunications services and offer competitive service options to businesses. This mission has expanded to include a host of products, services and issues of interest to our readers. As we get ready to enter the second decade of the century, let’s see if we can make sense of what happened in the “aught” years of the Millennium and where we might be going next.

As the name implies, this explainer blog was launched in conjunction with T1Rex.com. T1 Rex came to be because of a new invention in the world of telecommunications. A company called Telarus developed a software process called GeoQuote (now patented) that automates the pricing of commonly used business telecom services. The focus was T1 lines, which are the most common professional grade voice and data connection for most businesses.

Prior to GeoQuote, the way you got a quote for a T1 line was to submit an inquiry form or answer questions over the phone and then wait a week or two while your request was passed through channels and your quote was manually calculated. With the GeoQuote automated quote form on T1Rex.com, a curious business manager or network engineer could enter some basic information online and get a quote that was better than 90% accurate in less than a minute. It’s even more accurate today and there are many more options than just T1 lines.

GeoQuote upended the marketing of telecommunications services the same way that the IBM computer changed accounting, numerical control changed manufacturing, and computer aided design changed engineering. Once automation gets into a process, everything happens faster and with fewer errors. The productivity increases can be orders of magnitude above what they were with the old manual processes. There’s no going back.

We’re all getting a taste of this in our private and well as business lives. Social Networking has emerged in the last few years to revolutionize how we communicate. Remember when everyone wanted to make a website? Hardly anyone builds sites anymore unless they have a very specific business or special interest need. Websites were replaced by blogs. Blogs are being replaced by social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn. Do you still email? Twitter is the new email. It nicely complements and integrates with cell phone text messaging.

Even Twitter may seem like yesterday’s news later this decade. Most cell phones now have cameras with fairly good resolution and the ability to take short video clips. Picture and video messaging are gaining popularity. How soon before there’s a video screen on a service like Twitter so you just click for a short video message? Video and audio won’t replace text, of course. There are too many situations where you need to communicate briefly and with stealth. They’ll simply add another dimension.

Video is the long heralded “killer app” for the Internet. You know what a phenomenon YouTube has been. Now TVs and Blu-ray players come Internet-ready so they can play those YouTube clips on the big screen and also access full length network programs on the Web. You can catch up on many TV shows you missed by watching them on your computer. But you know that you really want to lay back in the recliner and watch them on the TV. That’s going to be common very, very soon.

Video conferencing is breaking out of the corporate conference room and onto the desktop right now. My iMac came ready to video chat with a built-in camera and microphone. Many other computers, including laptops and netbooks, are similarly equipped. As I write this, the airlines are busy tightening security because of terrorist attack that almost succeeded. Some of the new rules are going to make an annoying travel experience nearly insufferable. That, combined with the Great Recession that may linger for years, is going to get a lot of business people and casual travelers thinking about alternatives. In many cases, a convenient video conference can do the job of a personal visit. As this catches on, you can expect a push to improve quality and ease of sharing photos and videos similar to what Cisco calls Telepresence.

Video conferencing is also going to be big on cell phones. If people can walk down the street working their thumbs while staring at text on a screen, they can certainly watch the person they are communicating with in real time. To think that they laughed at Dick Tracy’s wrist TV in the 60’s. We wouldn’t even settle for a screen that small anymore.

Video is what has gotten the telecom carriers scared stiff, and for good reason. Just like the move from email to interactive Web sites forced the upgrade from dial-up to broadband, the move to video and high definition everything is forcing carriers into a bandwidth upgrade. Verizon has wisely started deploying fiber optic to the premises before demand makes it mandatory. The cable companies are deploying DOCSIS 3.0 for the same reason. There will soon be no such thing as too much bandwidth. For business locations, the best answer seems to be Ethernet over copper or fiber. When multiple business locations outside of a metro area are involved, MPLS networks are the emerging leader for high bandwidths at reasonable prices.

It’s the cellular carriers that feel faint at the thought of everyone having a smartphone. Their thousands of towers were equipped to efficiently handle telephone conversations and text messaging. Light duty Web surfing and limited multimedia is being accommodated with 2.5 and 3G upgrades. But they will need 4G and a lot of it to handle the load of HD video streaming on a near-continuous basis. Even the FCC is already wondering if there are more over-the-air TV channels it can repurpose for cellular broadband. There’s a real danger that there just isn’t going to be enough spectrum to go around. At sometime during the next decade you can expect a major fight to ensue over what is the “best” use of the choice VHF and UHF frequencies.

A new technology we’ve just started following is called Poken. It’s wireless, but what’s called near-field wireless. Using low frequencies that won’t be part of the TV/Cellular/Microwaves slugfest, Poken devices exchange information when they touch each other. The idea is to replace business cards and social business cards with an electronic data transfer and a portal to manage the contact information. It nicely supports hot links to your current social networking and business sites, for instant access by those you contact. Poken is already hugely popular in Europe.

Well, this is almost certainly the tip of the technology iceberg. Many exciting developments in the coming “teens” decade haven’t even emerged yet. It’s our plan to be writing about them as they do, and I hope that you’ll be with us for what is bound to be an exciting time.

Networking Multiple Locations

Many businesses, even smaller ones, often have more than one location. So how do you link these various business locations together and back to corporate headquarters?

There are various techniques for doing this. Basically they fall into two categories. You use either a public or a private network to make the links.

The appeal of a public network is made very attractive by the easy access and near universal connections of the Internet. You can pretty much get from anywhere to anywhere over the Internet, with a wide variety of access technologies that range from DSL, Cable broadband, cellular broadband, fixed location wireless, T1 lines, Ethernet and so on. Even dial-up is still an option if your needs for data transfer are very, very modest.

The two big problems with using the Internet to interconnect your business are variable performance and lack of security. The performance issues can be minimized by using professional grade access networks, such as T1 lines. You can use the Internet securely by encrypting your data in a process called tunneling. This creates a VPN or Virtual Private Network over what is actually an insecure public network.

Private networks are as simple as a point to point dedicated T1 line that links two business locations reliably and securely. This line is for your exclusive use. You can add encryption, if you want, for the ultimate in data security.

As you get more business locations, you can link them with additional T1 lines. This gets complex and expensive with many locations, so a star network with headquarters at the center of the star often makes the most sense.

An alternative solution for companies with multiple locations in the same city is Metro Ethernet. Ethernet service can be set up as a point to point data connection or a mesh network that interconnects a number of locations together. Ethernet, where available, offers lower cost and higher bandwidths than traditional telecommunications services.

If you have a business with locations spread across the state or country, even operations outside of the United States, MPLS networking may be your highest performance and lowest cost solution. MPLS is a private networking scheme that offers secure connections with guaranteed bandwidth. It’s becoming the core network technology of many large carrier and can transport just about any protocol you need.

So, which networking approach is best for your business? You can get complementary expert consultation and quick quotes for various options through the T1 Rex business bandwidth site.

Get After Christmas Cash From Old Gadgets

Ah, the gift giving season has rolled through like a retail tsunami. You did well this year. There’s really nothing else that holds the excitement of shiny new gadgets under the tree. But there’s nothing that puts a damper on the excitement like an empty wallet and big credit card bills about to land in January. What you can really use right now is some after Christmas cash.

Fortunately, there’s a fast and easy way to bring in some quick bucks without having to get another job or really do any work at all. It’s a win-win proposition because you get paid and reclaim some shelf space in your house at the same time. What you want to do is sell your old gadgets for cash while you can get the most.

Notice that I said old gadgets. You’re keeping the new ones, of course. It’s the stuff they are replacing that can go.

I know. You’re thinking of hanging on to the old model just in case you need it. Really? Are you actually going to re-activiate that old cell phone if you lose or damage your new one? It’s likely you’ll run out and get a replacement pronto. In all likelihood, you’ll never need your old device as a backup. Most electronics goes to the landfill in perfect working order. It’s trashed because it’s obsolete.

Here’s another astounding fact. Many electronic devices that are tossed to the curb have some cash value. Many others had cash value, but it vaporized over time so that now the dusty game or GPS in the basement is worthless. These things continue to pile up and eventually get hauled away as trash where they decay in landfills to pollute the environment.

Electronic circuit boards are an environmental nightmare. They’re full of lead and other elements that leach out over time. The green thing to do is get them to an electronics recycler so the materials can be reclaimed to make new gadgets. The green-in-your-pocket thing to do is get them to an electronics buyer so they be put to good use and you’ll get some money.

What’s the fastest and easiest way to get cash for your old electronic gadgets? Sell or recycle your gadgets online at no cost to you. Gazelle offers fast cash for cell phones, laptop computers, home audio systems, Blu-Ray players, digital cameras, MP3 players, video games, PDAs, gaming consoles, GPS devices, camcorders, satellite radios, calculators, external drives, camera lenses, LCD monitors, projectors, streaming media, and even movies.

How much can you get? Each device has a market value depending on condition and available accessories. You can find the current market value and get a quote in seconds online. If you decide to accept the offer, you’ll get free shipping and packaging. Send it in and a check will be on its way pronto. If it turns out that your gadget has no retail value left, you can still send it in for proper recycling

So, what are you waiting for? Gather up the gadgets that were replaced this year and any others that you have hiding in the closet or piled up in the garage or basement. Get instant online quotes to resell your electronic devices and send them in. Act quickly and you may get the cash before your next credit card bill arrives.

Merry Christmas To All From T1 Rex

Wishing you all the best of the season from T1 Rex. Take a break. Christmas is here!

It Really Knows When You Are Sleeping

Does this sound vaguely familiar:

It knows when you are sleeping,
It knows when you’re awake.
It keeps a record of all this,
And reports to you next day.

Big guy prowling around your house with a list? Animal droppings on your shingles? No, that’s something else entirely. This has nothing to do with naughty or nice. It’s all about the deep sleep.

If you are one of those people who gets up more tired than when they went to bed, perhaps you can benefit from a new technological innovation called Zeo Personal Sleep Coach. It’s a gadget that monitors your sleep patterns and gives you a chart of how restfully you slept overnight. The hardware is coupled to an online self-discovery program that helps you interpret the results. Plus you get guided coaching emails with sleep tips and advice.

The technology isn’t like anything you’ve seen before. You wear a special headband that contains sensors to wirelessly monitor electrical signals produced by the brain. You don’t need to wear any Frankenstein caps or smear goo on your forehead. This is a soft fabric band with silverized-fabric sensors embedded in the cloth. Pretend you’re going out for a jog and put on the headband before you go to bed.

The companion piece of equipment looks like a normal bedside alarm clock. Why, it even shows the date and time and works like an alarm clock. But that’s where the simplicity ends. The display shows a graph of your overnight sleep activity. It shows those times when you were lightly sleeping, deeply sleeping and in the REM sleep cycle. It will compare last night’s sleep with the night before and store up to two weeks of data for your review.

What does it all mean? You can have the bedside display dump the data to an SD memory card and then plug that into your computer to upload the data to an online sleep journal. You’ll get sleep scores to tell you how you are doing and email messages with tips for better sleep. All this feedback is designed to help you solve the mystery of why you aren’t getting the restful sleep you want.

If you just aren’t the type who goes out like a light and then needs a fire alarm to get you up in the morning, you may find that the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach has something to offer. There’s a lot of information on their site, including videos and a complete description of the equipment and how it works.

Sweet dreams!

The LAN WAN Connection Made Easy

The local area network has a standardization and continuity that makes sense. We know what Ethernet is. We know what an RJ-45 connection looks like. Nearly every piece of equipment has the ubiquitous 10/100/1000 Mbps network interface. It’s all so predictable until you try to leave the building. Then you’re up against a whole new set of telephone company standards that you don’t deal with in-plant. Is there any way to make the LAN and WAN worlds come together sensibly?

Not so long ago, you had no choice but to educate yourself in the unfamiliar and perhaps confusing technology invented and institutionalized by AT&T and the telco equipment manufacturers. It’s not a trivial task for network engineers and managers who spend their days talking packets and TCP/IP. You need to make a mental shift to DS channels, T-carriers, SONET multiplexing, channel banks, TDM synchronization, channel service units and data service units. Just figuring out how to efficiently match disparate networks could take some doing.

That was then, this is now. If you have the expertise and enjoy interconnecting dissimilar networks, you can do that and simply order the WAN connections that you need. But if you don’t have that level of expertise or just want to avoid straightening out the incompatibilities, you have more options available now.

One approach is to go with a managed network provider who takes care of the WAN link and the interface to your network. You plug into a managed router provided by the carrier and located on your premises. The routers at both ends and the network connections between them are monitored and controlled by the carrier. You don’t have to worry about what color alarm is going off or if the equipment is properly set to the line specs if you make any changes to your service. You simply plug in to the WAN port and use the service.

Managed router services are available for dedicated broadband Internet service, point to point data connections, MPLS networks for interconnecting multiple business locations, and ISDN PRI to provide telephone lines to in-house PBX phone systems.

Another service that offers ease of connection and use is Metro Ethernet. You can get mid-band Ethernet delivered on multiple twisted pair copper in many larger cities. Your connection is a managed router that has the special interface required to transport the signal. Ethernet is also available through fiber optic connections

One advantage of Ethernet services is that they tend to be less expensive, in some cases much less expensive, than other telecommunications services. Which type of bandwidth is right for your company? Find out with a quick business bandwidth price and availability check now.

Your Smartphone Business Office

Thanks to the miracle of microelectronics, we have now reached the age of the business office in the palm of your hand. This is great news for the empowerment of employees on the go and independent professionals. No longer are you tethered to a desk in a building just to have your necessary tools available. No longer do you have to lug a ton of equipment to gain mobility. Well, most of us sure don’t.

The key to all this freedom of movement is the smartphone. The smartphone takes a cell phone and adds a computer. They each have their own wireless networks, but can work in concert to help you get your job done.

Your voice connection is through the cell phone. Many business people add a Bluetooth headset to eliminate the weight of holding the phone to their ear, but also so that they can see the screen and use the apps while they are talking.

Here’s a point to consider when you select your phone and carrier. Some 3G smartphones can operate as cell phones and computers simultaneously. The iPhone 3GS is advertised as having this capability. Some other phones on the AT&T network can do this too if they have UMTS/HSDPA capability. But there are other phones and networks can only work in one mode at a time. If you need to actively search the web or enter data as you are talking, make sure that your device can do voice and data at the same time.

What makes a cellphone a computer is specialized software and a broadband connection. Cellular broadband is also called 3G or third generation. Connection speeds similar to basic DSL services are typical. On the small screen, Web pages should load quickly and give you that interactivity you are used to on a larger computer. Some smartphones have virtual keyboards that appear on the touchscreen. Others have hidden QWERTY keyboards that slide out so you’ll have that familiar tactile feedback.

Another thing to note with cellular broadband is that 3G coverage areas are often smaller than voice service areas. If you range outside of the 3G footprint, you’ll still have a data connection but the speed will slow way down. Most carriers have decent 3G coverage in metropolitan areas. It’s when you get out of town that 3G is harder to find. Check coverage maps for the areas where you tend to spend the majority of your time to make sure you have solid network signals and broadband data speeds.

WiFi Internet is even faster than 3G. If you really want blazing fast Web access, get a phone that supports both the carrier’s 3G network and WiFi b/g networks. That way you can park at a coffee shop, enjoy a cup of java and a muffin, and get lots done. Just be sure to find a quiet corner and talk softly if you are going to be on the phone a lot.

There are a couple of accessory services that can enhance your smartphone office. A low cost toll free number gives you a professional image and encourages prospects and clients to call you from wherever they happen to be. The Kall8 toll free service also sends you voice mail and FAX messages as email attachments. You can change the ring-to number from your cell to your home or office phone if desired. That way people have only a single number to remember to get in touch with you.

If you make overseas calls, you know that calling from a cellphone is either very expensive or impossible. But add the Tel3 international dial-around service and you can call from the US to just about anywhere on Earth for just pennies a minute. Now your smartphone becomes an international business phone. If you are going overseas, be sure to get a smartphone that has quad band GSM capability so it will work on foreign networks. A OneSimCard international SIM card can make those calls from outside the country a lot less expensive that they would otherwise be.

If you can make all of this work, you can pack really light for those trips away from the home office. You entire tool set tucks into a shirt or jacket pocket. Checked luggage? What’s that?

Do You Have A Poken Card?

You know how much business has changed since the rise of the Internet. You wouldn’t think about looking for a new job and ignoring all the online employment sites. You wouldn’t consider cutting out ads in the newspaper and completely ignoring the employer’s web sites. In fact, you almost certainly have a website for your own business. You also have email, instant messaging, and accounts for social networking sites like Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn. In fact, you’re proud to say you’ve been proactive in keeping up with the latest developments in technology and the online world. So, where’s your Poken card?

Don’t tell me that you’re missing out on the move to electronic business cards. OK, it’s true that this development is taking off far faster in Europe than in the US. But electronic contact management is here now. It’s just a matter of time before you become a pokenite or are left behind with the crowd that still uses typewriters and those mechanical pop-up address books.

Poken S.A., the Swiss company, has created a new technology with a complete support system that changes the process of exchanging business and personal contact information. It’s often described as an electronic business card because it is a direct replacement for the 3.5 x 2 inch cardboard slips that we’re accustomed to offer at any business encounter. You set up a Poken card to mirror what you put on a business card. But being electronic, the links you publish are active. You also have real, working buttons for your social networks. Here’s a screenshot of my poken card. Online, all the links are active.

The electronic card replacement is only one aspect of the Poken innovation. The real magic is in how you exchange cards. You exchange paper business cards by handing over a physical product. You poken, or exchange electronic business cards, by wirelessly transferring a number code. That code uniquely identifies you and your card, which is stored in an online database. The code you receive is stored, with up to 64 others, in the memory of your Poken device. When you plug the poken into your computer, those contacts are uploaded to your account where you can see them in a list and a timeline display with pictures. That timeline is an excellent memory jogger to help you associate names and faces by when you met them.

Have you been missing out on an important productivity enhancing development? It’s not too late. You still have a chance to get in on the leading edge of electronic business cards for your company, interest group, convention, political organization, or other opportunity to connect people with a common interest.

The Outlier Effect And Your Success

Do you find yourself getting melancholy this time of year? It’s not unusual, especially once the hoopla of the holidays starts to wane and things slow to a crawl. You start to think about what’s worked out for you this year and everything that hasn’t. Then you pick up a magazine or see a story about some hotshot that’s zoomed out of nowhere to stunning success. I guess some people have what it takes and other’s don’t. Or do they?

The book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell bursts the bubble on the mystique of what makes a winner. If you think that they win and you don’t because they’re blessed with an unusually high IQ or exceptional innate talent, you’ll come away with a different view once you’ve read this text. Gladwell’s research rips the veneer off all those success stories that make you more depressed than inspired. You know the ones. There’s a guy who comes up with a bright idea. He puts some effort into it and... Voila! ... enjoys a life of fame and fortune. You can insert “miracle occurs here” for the Voila! moment.

I’ve seen these profiles on TV and always wondered what really happened. Every one of us has good ideas, works hard at least when we’re inspired, and has enjoyed a touch of success. What makes everything go click for some people while it seems to fizzle out for the rest of us?

Outliers are exceptional people. They’re the exceptions, not the rules. We read about them, watch their smiling faces being interviewed on TV and are constantly being told how special they are and how much they have because of it. They must be special. You obviously have to be born with exceptional talent, a genius IQ, a superhuman drive for success or some other quality that will lift you to the top despite adversity or humble beginnings.

Rubbish! That’s what Gladwell says. When you look deeper into the lives of the outliers, what you find is somewhat ordinary people who were born at just the right time to do what they became famous at and/or were given some exceptional privileges at a tender age. Many pioneers of the personal computer revolution needed to be born around 1955 to be the right age to pioneer it. Any earlier and they would have graduated college and been caught up in a Fortune 500 career ladder. Any later and they would not have had the skill set or experience to participate. Take note that Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim were all born between 1953 and 1955.

Another key factor is the what Gladwell calls the 10,000 hour rule. You need 10,000 hours of practice to be a competent practitioner. Even those rising stars that seem to be propelled by native ability alone got their 10,000 hours in somehow. The Beatles got theirs playing 8 hour gigs in Hamburg long before they materialized on the Ed Sullivan Show. Bill Gates got his beginning at a private school that offered something no public school had at the time -- a computer terminal for students with time sharing on a mainframe in Seattle.

Yes, it does make a difference to be born into families of means versus struggling with crushing poverty or modestly getting by. Having someone of wealth, influence, education, talent or success to mentor you during those early years of interest can supercharge your development. That doesn’t mean every privileged child achieves super success. Some just don’t have the ambition or smarts to be more than mediocre.

Bill Gates wasn’t handed success, but he was enabled by being born at the right time to the right circumstances. He still had to take the ball and run, as they say. There were plenty of other youngsters coming of age at the same time from similar backgrounds that you’ll never hear of.

Some may read this book and find confirmation of their conviction that they haven’t achieved enough and won’t ever because they didn’t get the advantages that accident of birth awarded others. But I actually found this to be a very hopeful and empowering book. It blows away the mystique of “and then a miracle occurs” and basically says that you’ve got what it takes if you want to make a go of it. By understanding the lucky breaks that have boosted others, you may be able to identify what you’ve been missing and find a way to get or compensate for it later in life. The 10,000 hour rule? Hey, this is the first hour of the next 10,000 hours. What will you do to get the most out of them?

Will Ethernet Crush DS3?

Larger bandwidth users have traditionally moved from T1 lines to DS3 bandwidth as their needs exceed the modest T1 line speed of 1.5 Mbps. Often, DS3 was overkill for their applications. The bandwidth jumps 30x from T1 levels, where 5x to 10x would be more than enough avoid network congestion. Now a newcomer called Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet offers scalable bandwidth at often lower costs than DS3 connections. What’s to become of DS3?

In some markets where Ethernet carriers are particularly aggressive, DS3 services are getting beaten up badly. The cost per Mbps can be half as much for an Ethernet solution compared to an equivalent DS3 service. In other places where Ethernet hasn’t penetrated as deeply, prices can be equivalent. What bandwidth prices are available for your location? You’ll have to run a business bandwidth comparison check to find out. Even across town, the answer can be different.

That’s the story at this snapshot in time. Next year and in coming years, the tide is expected to turn significantly in favor of Ethernet. Even traditional carriers have seen the handwriting on the wall and are busy converting their networks from the telephone-oriented TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) architecture to MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks that can easily provide packet switched services such as Ethernet. Newer networks are being designed from the ground up as IP core networks. There’s little interest in expanding the fading circuit switched architecture that has dominated telecommunications for over a century.

What are the advantages of Ethernet WAN (Wide Area Network) services? Network interfacing is a breeze, as the handoff is the familiar RJ-45 Ethernet connector found on just about every piece of networking equipment. It is possible to set up a level 2 Ethernet connection between two or more business locations so that they can all be on one large company LAN. Ethernet can be configured as a line service for point to point connections between two locations or as a LAN service for multipoint to multipoint service.

Scalability is more common for Ethernet services than it is for TDM services. With a scalable service, you can start out with a modest bandwidth of 1 to 5 Mbps and then request an increase with just a simple phone call to your carrier. Bandwidth increments vary by provider, but can be 1, 2.5, 5, or 10 Mbps. Ethernet scales nicely right on up to Gigabit levels and beyond.

For the higher bandwidth levels you’ll need fiber optic connections, of course. But in many metropolitan areas, you may also be able to get Ethernet over Copper or EoC. It is provisioned over multiple twisted pair telco line that you already have installed. That makes installation fast and avoids construction costs. Bandwidths up to 45 Mbps may be available, depending on your distance from the nearest carrier office.

Are you interested in exploring Ethernet bandwidth as an option for your business location? Find Ethernet prices and availability through Ethernet Today and see if it’s to your advantage to switch soon.

Can You Get To The Cloud?

Cloud computing and cloud storage are the emerging architecture for how we’ll all use computers before long. Advantages of doing everything in the cloud include not having to buy or maintain software, automatic backup for stored data, being able to access the same tools and data from anywhere using a variety of devices, and smaller, lighter computers themselves. In fact, your computer might turn out to be a netbook, cellphone or tablet. It sounds promising, but there remains one nagging question. Are you sure you can get to the cloud?

The WAN or Wide Area Network link is the weak link in this chain. If most computing is done locally or by downloading applications from an in-house server, you’ve got control of the system. You only lose your ability to communicate with the outside world when your link goes down. But lose that link on a cloud-based system and your client device becomes the proverbial doorstop -- one that's really too lightweight to make even a good doorstop. If everything you do is in the cloud, you’ve got to have a pathway to that cloud at all times.

Mobile device can get connection redundancy by having two wireless technologies embedded. The primary link is through the carrier’s data network that’s on the same towers used for cellular telephone service. You are more likely to encounter a weak signal area than for the carrier service to fail. But Hurricane Katrina taught us that even well designed wireless systems can go dark if the emergency is dire enough.

A commonly used second path is WiFi connectivity. WiFi has a couple of advantages. There’s almost always a WiFi hotspot, and usually a free one, within walking or driving distance. If the nearest hotspot is down because a line break has shut down all telecommunications in the area, you can simply venture out further until you find a place that’s connected to a different broadband service. It might be inconvenient, but at least you can get to your apps and data.

It’s not quite as easy to work around an outage in a bricks and mortar office or store. You can’t easily just have everybody pick up and move to the nearest coffee shop with service. Instead of depending on someone else for backup, you need to provide that redundancy yourself.

What makes a good backup service? A carbon copy of what you have now is better than nothing, but has limitations. For instance, if a nearby construction activity cuts the wire bundle containing your T1 line, it will likely cut through your second T1 line as well. In backing up T1 or DS3 connections, you want service from two separate suppliers that approach your building from different directions and have no wires or equipment in common. You may elect to set up your routers to use both lines normally but fall back to the single working line when failure occurs. That cuts your bandwidth in half, but everything else continues to work as usual.

You should think about what you need to get by during an emergency. Perhaps less bandwidth will slow things down but can be lived with for a short period of time. A T1 line makes a good backup for DS3 service despite the huge difference in bandwidth: 1.5 Mbps versus 45 Mbps. Since T1 is copper based and DS3 is fiber based, outages that affect one won’t necessarily take down the other.

You should also look at the newer Ethernet services for primary or backup bandwidth. An advantage of Ethernet is that it is often much lower cost per Mbps than traditional carrier grade services. It offers high reliability, and the lower speeds from 1 to 45 Mbps might be available over copper as well as fiber.

What’s the best backup service for your cloud based computing architecture? Check out the variety of bandwidth services available for your location.

Christmas Gifts For Boomerangs

Are you shopping for boomerangs this year? No, not the curved aboriginal hunting tool. These boomerangs are kids that went off to school, tried to make it on their own, and were smacked down by a couple of stock market crashes and a hideous job market in the short first decade of this century. Now they’re back living with mom and dad and trying to figure out what to do next. Hence, the boomerang moniker. So, what do you give a boomerang as a holiday gift?

One good approach might be to give them something that will help them get back on their feet again. Cash is always nice, but it may go as fast as it came. Besides, who has a really significant amount of cash to dole out in these hard times? How about something that can do a lot of good for a little money?

One characteristic of the Millennial generation is that they are tech savvy and like to connect socially. One excellent tool for making connections, including those connections that might lead to a job offer, is a cell phone. But aren’t cell phones and plans a real luxury for someone out of work? Not if you don’t have to pay extra for the phone or buy a separate second service plan.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Your cell phone plan is about to expire. You want a new model phone, anyway. So get yourself a new phone for free and a substantial package of minutes. But don’t buy an individual service plan. Instead, buy what’s called a family plan. You still have a certain number of minutes each month and you get a single bill. But a family plan can have multiple phones on it. Get that free phone for yourself when you order cellular phones and service online and then get a second free phone that you can give to your progeny. Remember, you didn’t pay anything extra to get that second phone. If you can trust them not to hog all the minutes (under threat of being disconnected), you’ll only pay marginally more for the service plan. You can even add a third line for a spouse, all on the same plan.

How about a nice set of business cards to had out to potential employers and anyone who might be helpful? Don’t pay for those either. For just the cost of shipping, you can create a set of 250 custom business cards online for that special someone and have them sent to you ready for wrapping. They can thank you by handing them all out to good prospects in the next year.

Even better than traditional business cards is an inexpensive new gadget called Poken. It’s a wireless USB device packaged as a small character or flash drive. The owner creates one or more business and personal electronic cards which can be shared with other Poken owners. The process involves touching the devices together in an electronic handshake that transfers the contact information. A free personalized online hub organizes the contacts you make and helps you know more about them and how to get in touch. This “Y” generation will easily embrace Poken, as they’ve adopted MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter for social networking.

Do these sound like good presents for young adults living at home? Now that you think about it, they sound pretty good for any age and even those who have already left the nest.

The Sweet Touch of LG Chocolate

Mmmm. I love the sweet touch of chocolate in the morning. Also the afternoon and evening. There’s none sweeter than the Chocolate Touch by LG.

Verizon has another winner on its hands. The LG Chocolate Touch is flying off the shelves this holiday season. Why wouldn’t it? Finally, a candy bar phone that looks like a candy bar but infused with a multimedia soul.

The name Touch is literal. This is the first touch screen model in the popular LG Chocolate line of cell phones. Your control panel is a 3 inch, 400 x 240 pixel high resolution touch screen display. It’s nicely matched to the 3.2 Megapixel digital camera with stand-alone camera features like intelligent shot, panorama, facial makeover and more. It takes fantastic pix, good enough to print as well as share immediately online or via multimedia messaging. By the way, you can print directly to a Bluetooth enabled printer. No computer required.

Sharing online is made easy with social networking shortcut keys for quick access to Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. You can check out your favorite websites and watch YouTube videos with the built-in HTML Web browser. You’ll have 3G access where available on the Verizon Wireless network.

Multimedia capability is inherent in this phone. In addition to picture and video messages, you’ll find support for V Cast Music with Rhapsody and V Cast Videos on demand. The advanced music player lets you listen to your favorite radio station with an FM radio tuner and enjoy quality sound on Dolby Mobile speakers or stereo Bluetooth. The MP3 player supports playlists, Song ID, manual equalizers and other features.

Yes, it’s possible that you’ll become so absorbed in the multimedia goodness that you’ll find yourself in unfamiliar territory. No problem. This phone has integrated GPS support for turn by turn directions with Verizon’s VZ Navigator service.

So, do you have a growing hunger for chocolate of the electronic variety? Would your taste buds start to salivate if I told you that you can get this exciting high tech phone for free online. That’s right, you can get yours free if you hurry. This offer can’t possibly last too long. Check out the LG Chocolate Touch for Verizon Wireless and other hot phone deals now.

Remember that you can can get 2 free phones when you order a family service plan, so check that out if it works for your family. Shop by carrier or check out all of today’s special deals at Cell Phone Plans Finder now.

Poken Around For Business Leads

How do you approach business networking situations? Is it still the old handshake and business card? There’s a new, more edgy approach. It involves leveraging technology to exchange and organize your day to day business contacts. If you’ve been thinking about bringing social media and viral marketing into your business plan, don’t make a move until you discover Poken.

Poken is both a device and a process that upgrades the traditional business card. In the days when your name, title and phone number were king, the little paper handout was all someone needed for their files. But now that everything is computerized in databases and online, business cards, Rolodex files and address books fall short. There are devices out there that will read your card and create an electronic version. But why not go electronic from the start?

Meet the pokenPulse. It looks like the USB flash drive you carry around now. It is. In fact, it functions as a 2 GB solid state memory dongle. But notice something else? That white hand on the side is more than just a logo. It’s a functioning near-field wireless transponder. When two of these devices touch, the hands glow green to indicate that a data exchange has occurred. That’s you and the person you just met exchanging electronic business cards. Do this all day and then download the results when you get back to your computer.

The contact data you acquire is securely uploaded to your own private pokenHub, an online storage for all your contacts plus a timeline based organizer. If you can remember roughly when you met someone or who you were with at the time, you can find the contact you have in mind even if you long ago forgot their name.

Poken is about more than just names and phone numbers. The electronic record also carries email addresses and website links. Your contact will not only discover what organization you work for, but can instantly get the personal and marketing information you want them to have. You don’t have to go about stuffing brochures in their pocket. They’ll be getting the links to your online presence at the same time you exchange names and numbers.

Who can Poken benefit? Anyone who meets people as part of their job... or wants to. This ranges from empowered teams, corporate trade shows, salespeople on the lookout for new prospects, edgy companies looking to expand awareness of their products and services, technical experts wanting to connect with other techies, and so on. If you use a computer and the Internet in your work, Poken can probably enhance what you are doing.

Speaking of edgy. The pokenPulse is just one model of the Poken device family. It’s popular with technical people and executives. But if you want attention, consider wearing one of the Poken characters, such as the Ninja, Space Alien, Panda, Cave Man or Vampire. People are going to ask what that is around your neck and that gives you an opportunity to converse. Others who are already Poken-enabled will instantly recognize you as someone in the know and worth meeting. Take a second and give them the “high four” with your Poken character. It will likely turn out to be a valuable exchange.

My MPLS Network Can Beat Up Your Frame Relay Network

When it comes to interconnecting multiple business sites, you have a choice in technologies. Popular options include point to point dedicated T1 lines with corporate headquarters in the center of a star network, VPN over dedicated Internet connections, Frame Relay networks or the newer MPLS networks. Now, how to choose?

The Internet VPN approach is popular because of its relatively low cost, especially when you need to connect to many traveling or working from home employees. You implement it with a software application that encodes your data while it traverses the Internet. Performance is hit and miss, as is the Internet. Even with encoded packets, the lack of security on the Internet makes IT managers a bit squeamish when it comes to sending the most sensitive company data through these connections.

Point to point T1 or DS3 connections are inherently more secure, as you lease the entire capacity of the channel for your exclusive use. These are nailed up connections that simply idle when you are not sending data. You can also encode your data with a VPN solution for the ultimate in security. But there’s a price to be paid, and that is one of higher cost.

Cost is what Frame Relay networks were designed to address. A Frame Relay network is a privately run network that only serves its clients. There’s no access for the general public. You access the network through a FRAD or Frame Relay Access Device. This specialized hardware sends your data through PVCs or permanent virtual circuits. These are assigned paths through the network cloud that only connect endpoints you specify. In addition to limited access, the assignment of PVCs creates a level of security well beyond what you have in a piblic network. You can also encrypt your data to make it extra secure.

Frame Relay networks were designed to interconnect computing centers before the age of the Internet. The frame takes the place of the Ethernet packet. Network speed is typically in the range of 56 Kbps to T1 speeds of 1.5 Mbps.

An upgrade to the Frame Relay concept is MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching. Like Frame Relay, an MPLS network is privately run and serves only subscribing customers. Also like Frame Relay, access is through a specialized piece of equipment known as a Tag Router. Your packets, which can be data, voice, or video, have “tag” attached to them as they enter the network. All routing is done using the tags. Just about any protocol may be transported on this tagging system. Class of service can be specified through the tags to ensure that real time protocols avoid any delays. You may also choose to encrypt your packets for extra security.

MPLS networks can run at any network speed and are being adopted by major carriers as the multipoint to multipoint technology of choice. For this reason, MPLS is fast replacing Frame Relay. For new applications in connecting multiple sites nationwide or even worldwide, MPLS is generally your best choice. With competition in the carrier market for this business, prices may be more attractive than you would expect. How good are they? Find out with an MPLS Network price and availability check now.

What Is The Real T1 Line Speed?

When we talk about a T1 line, we’re talking about a dedicated bandwidth connection that runs at 1.5 Mbps in both directions, upload and download. But is it exactly 1.5 Mbps or something in that range?

The 1.5 Mbps designation is a shorthand. The T1 line actually runs at a bit rate of 1.544 Mbps. But you don’t get to use all of that. The bandwidth that is available for your use, called the payload, is 1.536 Mbps.

So, why the odd numbers and where does the rest of the bandwidth go? To understand that, we need to deconstruct the T1 line and see what’s going on in there. A little history will also provided some valuable insights.

T1 is one of several technical specifications for a family of services known at T-carrier. It’s an invention of Bell Labs that was originally meant for the phone companies. Back in the 1950’s all phone lines were either analog copper or analog signals riding on radio carriers in a process called frequency division multiplexing. It worked something like the AM radio band today. If each telephone call is like a radio station, then the radio band can hold lots of different stations assigned to different channels. You pick the one you want to listen by selecting the proper frequency or channel.

As you know, analog based frequency division multiplexing has its limitations. Stations interfere and there is often atmospheric noise. If you remember making long distance calls 40 or 50 years ago, you’ll also remember that there was a lot of hiss and you could sometimes hear other calls interfering through a process called cross-talk. Those effects went away when digital telephony was installed.

T1 lines use standard twisted pair copper wiring but the signals are digital, not analog. It starts with a stream of bits arranged as 24 channels of 8 bits each, being sampled at 8 KHz, for a total of 64 Kbps per channel. Multiply 24 channels by 64 Kbps and you get 1,536 Kbps or 1.536 Mbps. Aha! That’s the payload value of a T1 line.

What’s important about having so many 64 Kbps channels? It turns out that each 64 Kbps channel is exactly the right size to carry one telephone call. The channels are each designated DS0 and the collection of 24 is called a DS1.

That all makes sense, considering the telephone company heritage of the T1 line. But what causes the difference between a 1.544 Mbps line rate and a 1.536 Kbps payload?

Subtract those two numbers and you get 8 Kbps. Those 8,000 bits per second are the overhead needed to run the line. T1 lines are precisely synchronized at both ends so the terminal equipment knows where the channels are in the bitstream. It’s actually one framing bit in a total frame of 193 bits being sampled 8,000 times per second. That one bit per frame keeps everything in lock-step and is also used to support error detection and notification.

So, when you hear that you’re getting 1.5 Mbps bandwidth on a T1 line you now know that your actual usable bandwidth is 1.536 Mbps. More importantly, it’s a full duplex service offering both upload and download bandwidth of 1.536 Mbps. That bandwidth is maintained by the line at all times for your exclusive use. Whatever you aren’t using at the moment idles while waiting for the next payload bits.

What can you do with a T1 line? They are the most popular digital business connection for point to point data connections, broadband Internet, digital telephone service or a combined voice and data service called Integrated T1. How much does it cost to get one of these highly reliable services for your business? Check T1 line prices and availability for your location now.

FlexTelONE Offers Four Calling Services in One

Here’s an international calling service that combines four different calling services into a single account that you can easily manage online, while saving money in the process.

FlexTelONE bundles calling card, conference calling dial around and a follow me locator service. Lets have a look at the features and benefits of each of these services.

The calling card offers both US and international origination, a feature that’s especially important to international callers. The rate is just 5.9 cents per minute for all US domestic calls and 8.9 cents per minute for calls from Canada. You can also access the calling card system from over 50 countries with much lower rates that you’ll pay if you simply use a hotel’s long distance service. You register your phone for calls within North America and the system will automatically enter your 14 digit calling card pin for you. Why, it’s almost as easy as just picking up the phone you have now and dialing “1.” The difference is that your cost per minute on those long distance and international calls will be lower.

The conference calling feature allow you to host conferences with both domestic and international participants. No reservations are needed. The system is available 24 hours a day so you can work with time differences around the world. You can call in for direct access at 4.9 cents per minute or use the US toll free access at 8.9 cents per minute or 9.9 cents for Canada. With the classic domestic bridge, you can have up to 16 lines where everyone dials into the conference. With the enhanced international conference, you can have up to 30 lines where you dial out to include international participants at rates depending on the origination country.

FlexTelOne service also works as a dial-around long distance service from any phone. That means you don’t have to change your current long distance service provider. Instead, you simply dial a FlexTelONE access number when you want to use the service, enter the international number you wish to call and enjoy lower rates than with your current provider. This service works form a home or business landline and you can also use a cell phone to make those international calls.

The follow me locator service offers a simple traveler’s call forwarding to wherever you happen to be. The calling party that wishes to locate you must access the system from North America. But you can be located at any valid domestic or international number.

Does this sound like the business or personal calling service that you’ve been looking for? If so, learn more and sign up for the FlexTelONE calling card, conference calling, dial around and follow me locator service now.

Business Cards Go Green With Poken

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Going to slip under the sea
As the ocean warms and the nasty storms
Are convinced we can’t do three-fifty.

The start of the climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark this week has me waxing lyrical. Despite the deniers and the cynics who are convinced we can no more get to 350 ppm of CO2 than we can stop sucking high fructose sugar water in the handy 2 liter travel bottle, I remain hopeful. People nay-sayed acid rain until it started dissolving war memorials and everything else made of stone. Then we up and stopped it in a matter of a few years. This, too, will be dealt with.

With green the theme, I’m onto something that may well change the way we network. No, not a threat to Ethernet. This is about person to person networking. You know, the kind where you all get in a room and start passing around business cards. In just a matter of minutes you have absolutely no idea which face goes with each card or what these people really have to offer. Isn’t there a better solution in these 2.0 everything days?

There sure is, and it’s gaining momentum as we speak. It’s a technical solution consisting of a small hardware tag and a complementary online portal in the cloud. Is there any doubt that technology would once again step up to save the day?

The solution I’m talking about is called Poken and it rhymes with token. The token is a small plastic device that looks either like a standard USB flash drive or a cartoon character. It your choice of whether to go hip or go square. They work the same.

Each device has a big white hand with four fingers. It’s looks so friendly. That’s by design, of course. When you meet someone else that has a Poken, you touch their hands together. They start glowing green to indicate something electronic is going on. That something is a data transfer over a low frequency near field comm link. You send them a small data dump that has your name, phone number and social networking links. They reciprocate by sending you the same. It’s all stored in the Poken.

When you are done for the day or just get into an upload mood, you pull out the hand and plug it into a USB jack on your computer. You are automatically connected to the pokenHub, a personalized portal that uploads the contact info stored on your Poken and displays it in a timeline format. If you can remember about when you met somebody or who you were with at the time, you can likely find them right away and see just what they’re all about. Data transfers and your portal are secured. That’s handy if you don’t really want to admit knowing some of these people.

This probably isn’t the end of business cards as we know them. After all, we still need to use something for a bookmark. Or do we? That Amazon Kindle and the new Barnes & Noble e-readers are about to pull the plug on book printing. In a few years... who knows?

If you’d like to learn more about Poken and perhaps get your sales, marketing or project team connected, then you should Meet Poken. If you are more of a lone wolf, you can simply order one of these for yourself and use it at clubs, class reunions or other get-togethers where you may want to rekindle and old friendship or get to know someone new. Will they Poken you? Of course. Who can resist a three eyed space alien, a panda or a vampire that hangs around your neck?

Holiday eCards For Business

Paper cards are so passe. So are stamps. This is the electronic age where everything is digital, online and paperless. Well, except for holiday cards. You still have to find someone with a cursive flourish (that means pretty handwriting not a foul temper) to sign dozens or even hundreds of them. Then there’s the licking and the stamping. It all seems so preindustrial. Well, there’s a good reason for that... it is preindustrial. Isn’t there something more appropriate for the 21st century?

You bet there is. It’s called the e-card. Just like email replaced postal mail, e-cards replace paper cards.

But isn’t an e-card rather impersonal? Compared to what? Are you still writing personal and business letters longhand with a quill pen? Do you melt wax and stick your ring in it to seal the parchment? Oh, and do you have a rider on horseback standing by to deliver your message in style? If so, congratulations Sire. I defer to Your Majesty’s devotion to tradition.

For the rest of us who don’t think of knights in shining armor when we hear the term “chain mail,” the digital greeting card holds many advantages. It’s fast, it’s cheap, it doesn’t require much labor to support the holidays, and it’s green. Millions of us have discovered that ecards work great for personal and business greetings. Without the expense and overhead of sending cardboard through the mail, you can expand your e-card list to include more recipients. You can also send them more frequently than just the traditional once a year card blizzard.

If you really want to do ecards right for business, find a service that can really give your company something special to wow suppliers, employees and customers. Why send some lifeless piece of paper when you could be sharing classy color designs with custom messages, live links, photos and even a video?

Video? Oh, yes. The YouTube age is upon us, Ebenezer. With that in mind, please make any video you include a tasteful message for the season and not something raucous from last year’s holiday party.

Here’s how it works. You select the perfect design from a supplier's exclusive collections. They’re as pretty as anything you’ll find in a store. Or, you can upload a company photo or your own ecard design. You can even have your creative team design a custom collection of ecards to specs that can be hosted in their system and made available to your employees so they can help with the distribution of cards including their own messages.

Pretty fancy, right? It gets even better. Some ecards even have an accompanying web page that includes your company logo, additional message, links back to websites of your choice, a photo collection from some happy times at the office and room for a YouTube hosted video.

How much will all of this set you back? Much, much less than that mail cart full of square white envelopes on their way to the postal truck. Pricing is determined by the size of the organization. For an all-inclusive service fee, you’ll sometimes get unlimited ad-free eCards, Web Pages, and the online system you need to manage your greeting activities. Custom design services are available if you need them. You can even have the supplier print, stamp and mail traditional cards if tradition is still too dear to your heart.

The holiday card season is upon us. If you dread the thought of it, investigate how you can create eye-popping electronic greetings that your employees, customers and suppliers will be talking about long into the new year.

Poken Enhances Face to Face Social Networking

When you meet new people and want to get contact information, what do you do? Grab a napkin and scribble down their name and phone number? Write something on your hand and hope you don’t sweat it off before you get home? Present your little cardboard business card?

Lame!

Just as FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter have enabled online social networking, Poken is bringing face to face contacts into the 2.0 era. They do it with a little device called a Poken. A Poken is something like a token. Actually, it’s more like an amulet. It’s magic power comes from the electronics inside.

For most people under the age of geezer, one of the many standard Pokens with the big hand will work just fine. But if you are concerned that less progressive CEOs at the Country Club will point and laugh at that panda hanging around your neck, there are business grade Pokens available. The PokenPulse looks like any other USB flash drive. If anyone observes you touching flash drives, they’ll just think you’re in a secret society and become insanely jealous. You can decide if you want to let them in on the secret or just watch ‘em suffer.

Could Poken be the next craze in business and social networking? I can see this taking off at trade shows, business networking events, job fairs, speed dating and anywhere else lots of people want to share info with lots of other people. Has it piqued your curiosity? If so, learn more and get your own Poken right now.

XO Launches SIP for Multi-Location Businesses

XO Communications, a major competitive carrier, is now offering a solution for businesses with multiple locations to enjoy the benefits of enterprise VoIP throughout their far flung operations.

SIP trunking is fairly well established as a way to connect business locations to a telephone service provider for network efficiency and cost savings. XO expands on this idea with a multi-site SIP trunking solution. Instead of having each location separately connect to a remote service provider, the branch offices, warehouses, and other locations can now use their existing WAN (Wide Area Network) to connect SIP phones back to a home office IP-PBX system. Internal calls stay on the corporate network. Outside calls are transfered on a SIP trunk to XO, where they are terminated to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).

What does this mean for you as a business owner or network services manager? It’s an opportunity to reduce costs by reducing the number of PBX systems needed to support all your locations. There is also a cost advantage in eliminating local voice trunks to connect with customers and suppliers. If you are now maintaining separate voice and data networks at each location, you can merge them on to your existing WAN or use the XO MPLS IP-VPN solution as a cost effective voice and data WAN network.

A more subtle advantage to this arrangement is that each location will have access to the total trunk capacity of the organization rather than a local limitation. Locations can burst above their normal call capacity by sharing idle voice trunk capacity from other locations across the enterprise.

Once a multi-location or distributed enterprise SIP trunking strategy is in place, it becomes much easier to add additional locations. The basic infrastructure for handling enterprise wide telephony and connection to the outside world is already available. You simply need to add the telephone services for the new location incrementally.

This enterprise SIP solution is ideal for larger corporations or other organizations with many sites. But it could also work for any chain store, movie theater, gas station, quick serve restaurant or other franchise type business model where the home office manages voice and data for the individual stores. The efficiency of scale can offer considerable cost savings over “reinventing the wheel” at every location.

Do you have a multi-location business or distributed enterprise that might benefit from a cost savings through improving the efficiency of your voice and data networks? If so, it is certainly worth your while to take a closer look at enterprise VoIP solutions, including the new XO enterprise SIP offering.

FastE and GigE WAN Connections

The need for business bandwidth is growing, but corporate budgets are not. So, does that mean that businesses will be stifled for throughput and perhaps lose customers to slow performing ecommerce websites?

No. There’s a telecom bandwidth solution available that can give you the extra network performance you need to keep up with productivity and customer satisfaction demands. That solution is Ethernet.

Standard Ethernet connections at 10 Mbps are readily available over both copper and fiber optic cable. But higher speeds are also available. These are Fast Ethernet or FastE at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE at 1000 Mbps. You’ll notice that these line speeds exactly match the common LAN speeds of 10/100/1000 Mbps. Yes, you can get WAN connections to match your LAN speed so that your network performance is consistent regardless of whether packets are traveling in-house or across the country.

In rare cases, it may be possible to provision FastE service over bonded copper pair. But that only works if you happen to be very close to the carrier POP or Point of Presence. The usual way that FastE and GigE service are brought into the building is by fiber cable. If you already have a fiber connection, you may find that you’ll save considerable cost by switching your WAN service over to Ethernet.

If your building isn’t yet “lit” for fiber, it may still be possible to have fiber brought in at little or no construction cost. It all depends on the bandwidth demand. For instance, if you happen to be in a large office building with many business offices that could benefit from higher bandwidth options than the T1 lines that they typically have now, a carrier might be interested in lighting that building to get the ongoing bandwidth business. The same is true of industrial parks where modern manufacturing and warehousing businesses need high speed connectivity. Don’t automatically write off high bandwidth services just because you don’t have them now. Telecom carriers have gotten very competitive and may well want to enable you to get their higher performance services.

What can Ethernet connections do better than conventional telecom services? First, there is improved network performance because the protocol is Ethernet from end to end. There’s no need to convert between Ethernet and other protocols and suffer the inefficiencies that come from that process. The interface is trivially easy. It’s the same RJ-45 connector that you use for all your network connections now. You can get Ethernet for point to point connections or multi-point to multi-point to connection your far flung business sites. Dedicated Internet is also available.

By far, the most popular reason to switch to Carrier Ethernet services is the cost savings. You may find that you’ll spend half the cost or less per Mbps when you switch over to Ethernet. Sound interesting? Explore the FastE and GigE WAN connection options available for your location.

When Sales Dry Up

Most businesses from independent professionals to major corporations have experienced a softness in sales during this economic recession. So, what do you do when sales dry up? Do you have a strategy to bring in more prospects or generate more business from the clients you already have? Here’s an idea that may help. Watch this 20 second video and see what you think.



Yes, make it really easy for sales prospects and current clients to call you and see if your phone doesn’t ring more often. You do that by offering to pay for the call. That’s what a toll free number does. It tells people that if they call you from wherever they happen to be that you’ll pay for the call no matter how long it is.

But isn’t that expensive? Not nearly as much as you might think. First of all, the cost of the service is pretty inexpensive to begin with. You can get a toll free number for $2 and pay just $2 a month to maintain the service. Beyond that, you’ll pay 6.9 cents a minute for calls from anywhere in the 48 U.S. states. Calls coming in from Alaska and Hawaii are a bit more.

There are a couple of other points to remember, too. First, since the calls are coming in to your phone, you control the conversation. If it isn’t of value, cut it off. Most calls are going to be worth their weight in gold. After all, the only people calling you are those interested in your services. You’ll have a hard time beating 6.9 cents per minute for warm leads, especially if you are selling a professional service or a product with significant value.

In fact, the cost of this service is so low that you can hardly afford not to give it a try. Order a toll free number and you’ll be ready to use it in a matter of minutes. Print it on your business cards, stationary, flyers, brochures and hang tags. Publish it on your website, in newspaper and magazine ads, or on radio and TV. See if it doesn’t make a significant difference in your business. Learn more and order your low cost toll free number now.