Where Competition Is Cutting Telecom Costs

Everyone is on the lookout for cost savings these days. One potential area of savings is in your monthly telecom costs. Telecom expenses tend to be be large and murky. It’s well worth your while to wade in and see what you can spot that is ripe for cutting or re-bidding. You should also be aware that there can be huge differences in what you pay depending on where you are located.

We tend to think that the price of goods and services are pretty much the same no matter where you are. You know that’s not true for real estate. It’s also not true for some telecom services. Location means everything. Let’s take a look at why this is.

We get the impression that telephone calls are all priced at a flat rate. That impression comes from the way cellular phone service is sold. You pay a flat rate for a fixed number of minutes each month. It doesn’t matter where you call, within the US and not overseas. A minute is a minute. You can call from your home office or you can call from a hotel in another state and talk to anyone in the country using the same minutes you use for local calls.

Landline services don’t generally work that way. You pay a monthly fee for dial tone and local calls. You typically pay by the minute for state to state long distance calls. There is also something called local long distance or IntraLATA (Local Access and Transport Area). A LATA is a geographical area handled by a particular phone company. These areas may include more than one city or a city and the surrounding rural areas. Prices for IntraLATA calls vary all over the place, with areas served by smaller phone companies typically more expensive than you’ll find in areas served by larger phone companies in more populous areas.

What’s upset the apple cart on this pricing model is the rise of VoIP service providers. Unlike local phone companies that are tied to their customers by dedicated twisted pair copper phone wiring, VoIP is a network service that is transported by the Internet, a private SIP trunk, or an MPLS VPN network. Your VoIP provider can be a Cable operator in your city or a carrier located across the country. Pricing plans can be similar to what you get from the telephone company or they can be unlimited local calling with a flat per minute rate for all long distance, or even a flat rate for unlimited domestic calling. By considering a VoIP solution, you give yourself more options to match your monthly telecom expenses closely with the type of calls you typically make and receive.

Competition in the line services market is even more intense. Here, the price you pay per Mbps for point to point data links or dedicated Internet access varies widely. In general, the closer you are located to the heart of a metropolitan business center, the better the pricing. Out in the country, your options are few and prices are higher.

A new service that has highly attractive bandwidth prices is Ethernet over Copper. Prices for both EoC and T1 lines are now under $300 a month in major cities, but you may get twice the T1 bandwidth for that price using Ethernet over Copper. You also have the ability to get higher bandwidths, such as 10 or 20 Mbps without having to bring in fiber optic service.

One limitation with Ethernet over Copper is that you need to be within about 12,000 feet, a couple of miles or so, of the service provider’s point of presence to qualify for service. That restricts availability to metro areas. So, too, other competing services such as HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) and fixed wireless tend to have limited geographical service areas and tend to be found in town much more than farther out.

Regardless of whether you are looking for voice, data or video telecom services, or some combination, competition is greater today than ever before. You may not be aware of many options that have recently become available in your area. One fast and easy way to see if you can save on your monthly telecom expenses is to get competitive quotes for telecom services suitable for your business location. This process is fast, easy and free. You may be able to save more than you think.

Fixed Mobile Convergence Includes Android and iPhone

When we think of network convergence, it is generally in terms of engineering the LAN, MAN and WAN to support voice, video and data. Network convergence is at the heart of the productivity and cost savings offered by enterprise VoIP solutions. Even so, there is still one piece missing. That’s the mobile phone. This is where FMC or Fixed Mobile Convergence comes into play.

The idea behind FMC is that cell phones, especially smartphones, are now so ubiquitous that they have to be included in the corporate communications structure or there will be a big hole in the system. It’s especially true for sales people, field engineers, and anyone else who spends a significant amount of time out of the office and away from the desk phone. It’s also true, perhaps unfortunately, that we’re in a 24/7 world where important calls may come in at any time.

Some employees handle this situation with workarounds, such as setting up the office phone to forward to their cell phone when they leave the office. That’s fine when they remember. If not, voice mail becomes the communications method of last resort. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the office phone system extended to include your mobile phone?

Smoothstone IP Communications thinks so and is now making their Mobile Connect app available to both Android and iPhone using customers. What Mobile Connect does integrate your smartphone into the enterprise communications platform. You then have one number, your work number, that rings on both your desk phone and your cell phone. When you place an outgoing call, the Caller ID reflects your work number, not your personal mobile number. Other calling features include access to the company directory, low cost international calling, 4-digit on-net dialing, visual voice mail and one-touch access to listen to and manipulate voice mail messages.

There are also advanced features from Smoothstone’s VoiceMAXX system that carry over to Mobile Connect. These include call recording and centralized call detail reporting.

VoiceMAXX is Smoothstone’s cloud based PBX telephone system. It relieves businesses of the need to invest in and maintain an on-premises PBX system, yet has the flexibility to integrate with and extend an existing PBX.

Cloud hosted PBX is a pay-as-you go proposition that easily scales to include more users as needed. With a cloud solution, you don’t have to over-provision your system to allow for growth. You simply buy more capacity as you need it. You also don’t have the agony of a “fork lift upgrade” that involves ripping out your old PBX and replacing it with a new one of higher capacity, more modern design or more features. All of those capital investment, installation, upgrades and daily maintenance tasks are taken care of by the cloud service provider. You just concentrate on those things that advance the business you are in.

Is your existing business telephone system creaking at the seams, or are you ready for the higher productivity that comes from advanced features such as fixed mobile convergence? If so, learn more and get pricing for cloud hosted PBX telephone services scaled to match the needs of your business, be it small, medium or enterprise level.

Ethernet Services over Copper

Ethernet seems like the logical way to connect networks, but it is only recently that we’ve had the ability to do that beyond the building or campus. Now Ethernet over Copper connection services are proliferating and the costs are often lower than alternative solutions. Just what is Ethernet over Copper and what can you do with it?

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is a technology that delivers standard Ethernet services over twisted pair copper telco wiring. This is somewhat different than simply wiring your facilities with Cat 5E or Cat 6 wiring. Yes, those are also twisted pair copper circuits. What’s different about EoC is that it is designed to run on copper infrastructure that was never designed to support the Ethernet protocol.

Ethernet over Copper in the MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) needs to use the same copper that’s been in place for decades. That’s the beauty of copper to the premises. The costs of construction have already been paid. In fact, at least some of the many copper pair are probably already in use for multi-line telephone service and T1 broadband connections.

How is this compatibility accomplished? Each twisted pair of small gauge copper wire is simply an electrical connection from your building to the nearest telephone company office. Before they are put into service, these are known as dry copper pair. Dry because they have no electrical signals imposed on them. A dry pair can be used as an analog telephone line, one leg of a T1 line, or for a security alarm circuit. It depends on what you wire it to. Take several dry pair and connect them to EoC terminal equipment and you have a high speed Ethernet over Copper link from your location to the telco office. From there it can be connected, usually by fiber optic line, to just about anywhere in the country.

Ethernet services have been standardized like other telecom services. The two most popular are E-Line and E-LAN. E-Line is Ethernet Line service, a point to point connection that ties two LANs together across town or even on other sides of the world. E-LAN is Ethernet LAN service. As the name implies, this is a multipoint service that connects three or more locations in a meshed network. E-LAN can join multiple branch offices with headquarters as if they were all on the same LAN.

Ethernet over Copper bandwidth varies from 1 Mbps on the low side on up to at least 20 Mbps. Some carriers claim 50 Mbps or higher capability over copper. What you need to know, however, is that EoC is a distance limited technology. At the lower speeds you can be up to 12,000 feet away from the carrier’s nearest point of presence. Higher speeds will limit you to less than a mile. This is why Ethernet over Copper is known as a metropolitan service and isn’t generally found in rural areas.

Ethernet is designed to be much more scalable than T-Carrier or SONET services. You can have a 20 Mbps Ethernet port installed but only order 5 Mbps x 5 Mbps service. When your needs exceed 5 Mbps, you’ll be able to call your service provider and request a step up on bandwidth. This may be accomplished in as little as an hour. Compare that to waiting weeks for a truck roll on other services.

Ethernet over Copper is highly cost effective and is starting to displace traditional T1 lines. For about the same money, you often get twice the bandwidth when you choose EoC. That’s 3 Mbps versus 1.5 Mbps. Plus, higher speeds are generally available at reasonable costs over copper Ethernet connections.

Now that you know what it is, could you benefit from an increase in bandwidth or a better bandwidth price? If so, check prices and availability of Ethernet Service over Copper or Fiber.

Colocation and Connectivity in Miami

If you want to connect with South America, Central America, the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, you’ll do well to colocate and connect through Miami, Florida. Telx has all the facilities to help you do just that.

Telx has made a name for itself serving the needs of the financial services industry by providing ultra-low latency connections to the electronic trading floors. Their services range far and wide, literally. With 15 colocation facilities in the United States and global connectivity to more than 800 carriers, you are clearly well connected with Telx.

Let’s take a look at what Telx has to offer through their Miami facility. It’s all about the interconnections. You lease a secure cabinet or private cage to house your servers and other network equipment. Telx supplies the AC or DC power you need, plus the environmental control and physical security. If you want to connect with any other customers of their facilities, Telx technicians will perform a cross connect within 24 to 48 hours. You have choice of media that includes Ethernet copper, DS3 coax, and fiber optic cabling.

What about outside connectivity? You’ll find major carriers located right in the facility, including AT&T, Bell South, Global Crossing, Level 3 Communications, TW Telecom, Verizon Business, and XO Communications, to name a few. You also have access to international cable landings that include ARCOS, ARCOS II, Americas II, Columbus III, Emergia (Telefonica) GlobalNet Brasil Telecom, Maya-1, and Mid-Atlantic Crossing .

What’s more, Telx has a private optical ring to NAP of the Americas, also located in Miami. This ring support all Ethernet, TDM and SONET/SDH services. Through NAP of the Americas, you’ll be able to connect to dozens more of the world’s most important carriers.

Telx is located in downtown MIami in a seven story, 50,000 square foot building structurally designed to withstand natural disasters, including Category 5 hurricanes. It’s located outside the FEMA 100 year designated flood zone and the Miami-Date hurricane evacuation zone. This makes the Telx Miami colocation center a premier gateway for South American and Latin American international voice, video and data traffic.

More and more businesses are taking a closer look at cloud services and colocation because of the connectivity and cost savings available compared to running their own data center facilities. Telx can provide you with a secure location to install your equipment, connections to many carriers that can often be hard to reach from your location and enough competition among carriers to give you the best bandwidth prices you can get. They have a technical staff on duty 24/7/365, something that is becoming a luxury for many companies.

Is colocation right for you? The way to decide is to run the numbers compare your current costs of operation with what you’ll pay at a colocation center. Don’t forget to include special connectivity that you may not be able to get where you are, such as ultra low latency connections. Compare prices and services at data center colocation facilities, including Telx, with friendly expert consultation to help you sort through the myriad of options.



Note: Photo of downtown Miami buildings courtesty of Dtobias on Wikimedia Commons.

Rise Of The Cloud Hosted PBX

The days of the in-house PBX or Private Branch Exchange may be numbered. AireSpring, one of the fastest growing and most innovative of the competitive carriers, is now offering a cloud hosted PBX system they call AirePBX. With AirePBX, the PBX disappears but the phones remain.

In a way, we're going back in time to move forward. In the beginning, all switching was done at the telephone company central office and all phones were connected to the telco switch. Then came in-house telephone operator switchboards and later automated switchboards called Key Telephone Systems (KTS) and Private Branch Exchanges (PBX). What a cloud hosted PBX does is move the switching system back to the service provider.

So, how can you save money by going back to an earlier network architecture? A lot has changed in the last century. For one thing, the monolithic “Ma Bell” no longer exists. There are a lot of competitive carriers vying for your business. That alone offers better pricing options. Technology has also changed. Phones no longer need their own network. With VoIP, the telephone shares the same network as all the company computers, printers and other devices. The fact that you don’t need special proprietary wiring to connect to your phone service provider further increases competitive offerings and available features.

The idea behind a hosted VoIP system or cloud hosted PBX is that the expensive PBX system and its need for constant attention is taken over by a supplier who is in the PBX telephone business. That’s not the business you are in, is it? In fact, having to buy, install and maintain this equipment doesn’t really give you a competitive advantage at all. It’s just one more thing you pay for to get the communications services you need.

This is why companies are more than happy to ditch their venerable PBX in favor of a cloud solution. They are especially open to this alternative if their PBX is temperamental, nearing capacity, too old to be maintained, or too limited in features. Sure, you can go out and buy a shiny new model and do a “forklift upgrade.” Stop and think, though. Do you really want to shell out the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of dollars needed for a new PBX, or would you rather pay as you go?

Let’s take a look at what AirePBX has to offer. You don’t have a PBX system in-house anymore. You just have IP phones plugged into your network and AireSpring provides those. No capital investment required. Each phone has its own voicemail. You can even get visual voicemail. Even though the PBX is hosted remotely, your internal call routing is still free, as are local outside calls. An auto-attendant is included to direct incoming calls. You can set up hunting for workgroups, add toll free numbers and virtual private numbers, have conference calls, and enjoy all the features you’d expect in a modern business phone system.

All of this is fully managed by AireSpring on their next generation IP backbone network to ensure voice quality and system availability. Compared to the often dicey performance of Internet VoIP implementations, this is head and shoulders better. AirePBX is an enterprise VoIP solution that scales easily for small and medium companies, too.

Are you in search of a better business telephone system for your company? If so, you may be surprised and delighted by the capabilities and low costs of the new cloud hosted PBX solutions. Why not get a quote for hosted VoIP phone services and see if you can have the business communications you need without the cost and aggravation of maintaining your own in-house telephone system.

D3 vs DS3 Bandwidth Choices

Medium and larger size companies have long chosen DS3 services to obtain the bandwidth they need for broadband Internet access. Now there’s a new player in the marketplace that is looking to complement if not displace the venerable DS3 connection.

If you need business bandwidth higher than you can get by bonding T1 lines, you already know about DS3. But how much do you know about D3?

D3 is short for DOCSIS 3.0, a cable broadband standard that gives HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) systems a capability that rivals fiber to the premises. It is now possible to get 50 Mbps for business use from cable systems in many cities. Some have 100 Mbps available and more will have that service offering soon. DOCSIS 3.0 can provide 152 Mbps, with even higher speeds possible. Compare that with DS3 at 45 Mbps and you can see why there is a natural competition between the services.

The raw bandwidth specs don’t tell the whole story, however. D3 and DS3 are different technologies with different characteristics. You may find that one or both of these services make sense for your business.

DS3 stands for Digital Signal, level 3. It was developed as part of the T-Carrier specification by Bell Labs for use by the telephone companies to transport up to 672 simultaneous telephone calls between phone company switching centers. When provisioned over coaxial copper lines, it is called T3 line service. If you suspect that T3 is related to T1, you are right. A T3 line can transport the equivalent of 28 T1 lines on its higher bandwidth.

DOCSIS 3.0 has a Cable TV rather than a telephone company heritage. The DOCSIS standard was developed by CableLabs (Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.) with contributions from other companies serving the cable industry. If you have Cable broadband, you are using a DOCSIS modem. It’s only a question of which version you are using. The original was DOCSIS 1.0, which has been supplanted by DOCSIS 1.1, DOCSIS 2.0 and now DOCSIS 3.0.

DS3 is based on multiplexing 672 channels of 64 Kbps each to create total bandwidth of 43 Mbps. Add the necessary synchronization and control bits and you have a bandwidth of 44.736 Mbps. Why so many channels? Each of those 64K channels is just the right size to carry one telephone call. That’s the telco heritage of DS3. Combine all the channels into one large pipe and you have nearly 45 Mbps of digital bandwidth.

D3 is also based on channels. In this case, each channel is 6 MHz wide. That’s the width of one television channel. Everything on a cable system is treated as a TV channel, so broadband services have to fit into those channels to get through the amplifiers and wiring on the system without interfering with any other channels. A 6 MHz channel can transport a 38 Mbps broadband signal in one direction. Cable operators bond channels together to get higher bandwidths. With 4 bonded channels, DOCSIS 3.0 can deliver a download speed of 152 Mbps.

So, are D3 and DS3 the same beyond their different technology heritages? Not really. The telco heritage of DS3 means that it is a dedicated symmetrical bandwidth service. You get 45 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. That bandwidth never varies. It is called dedicated because it is completely dedicated to your needs. Anytime you don’t use the full 45 Mbps, it just sits there and idles while waiting for more data.

D3 is an asymmetrical shared bandwidth service. You get different speeds in the upload and download directions. Download is faster to reflect the fact that most users download more content from the Internet than they upload. Typical business bandwidth services are 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload or 100 Mbps download with 10 Mbps upload. This bandwidth is shared among many users on the system. Thus, you may experience your access speed varying all over the place depending on what other users are doing. If a lot of them are downloading movies or big software updates, everyone’s speed will be slowed.

DS3 service is generally sold with an SLA or Service Level Agreement that describes the expected performance and availability of the service, plus remedies if the provider doesn’t deliver as promised. D3 is a “best effort” service with no specific performance guarantees. Even so, it is in the provider’s best interest to provide adequate resources and service availability to keep the customers happy.

The difference in services are most dramatic when you look at the pricing. You might pay several thousand dollars a month for DS3 service with an SLA. D3 will probably cost you a tenth of that, with no guarantees. Which will work for your needs depends on if the cable system passes your business and if you can live with the variations in performance and lack of guarantees. Some companies have DS3 or even T1 lines installed for their mission critical or performance sensitive applications and D3 for general Internet access and low cost backup to their telecom services.

Are DS3, D3 or both bandwidth services right for your company? Why not talk to an expert consultant that can provide you with prices and availability of DS3, D3, and other broadband options for your business needs? There is no charge for this helpful service and you may be able to realize a considerable cost savings while achieving the same or better network performance as you have now.

More MPLS For MPLS

XO Communications, a major provider of Multi-Protocol Label Switching network services, is expanding network services in Minneapolis (MPLS), MN.

The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area will benefit from a 190 route mile expansion of the XO metro network into the northern and eastern suburbs of Anoka, Blain, Crystal, Fridley, Maplewood, New Brighton and Shoreveiw in the Minnesota Twin Cities. In addition to more points of presence, XO is deploying its Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology more broadly to make this scalable, high speed bandwidth service available to more businesses.

XO has been aggressively building out its 19,000 mile nationwide fiber optic network and promoting some of the hottest communications services, including Ethernet over Fiber (EoF), Ethernet over Copper, MPLS IP-VPN, Ethernet VPLS, Cloud Communications, Hosted VoIP and SIP Trunking solutions. Their capability includes speeds up to 40 Gbps to support the most demanding enterprise applications.

MPLS networks and Ethernet over Copper offer an especially cost effective way for businesses to link multiple branch offices, warehouses, retail outlets and headquarters operations within metropolitan areas and even nationwide. MPLS provides point to point or mesh networking with inherent security. EoC offers fast access over already installed wiring.

MPLS IP VPN networks are built on a technology quite different from what’s used on the Internet. The Internet is all about a public network with net neutrality, ease of access for all, and robust routing to work around equipment and line failures. Security is pretty much “bring your own.” MPLS networks are designed for limited access, quality of service controls and careful engineering of parameters such as latency, packet loss and jitter. Security is a feature of limited access and proprietary switching technology that makes outside intrusions much more difficult.

While the Internet is a wonderful resource for low cost connectivity from anywhere to just about anywhere else, it can fall short of the performance required for latency sensitive applications such as enterprise VoIP, video conferencing, financial trading, and mission critical business processes. XO’s MPLS network is fully managed to provide the required bandwidth and class of service needed to transport voice, data, video and converged network services.

Where Ethernet over Copper shines is in local point to point data links or last mile access to MPLS networks. Carrier Ethernet services like EoC and EoF provide a simple standardized Ethernet interface to company networks. Ethernet services tend to be more scalable than T-Carrier or SONET telecom connections, giving you more bandwidth options and faster provisioning on upgrades. Ethernet over Copper has the advantage of being able to be brought in on existing copper pair telco wiring at speeds from 2 to 20 Mbps. Finally, Ethernet connections are more often than not considerably less expensive that equivalent traditional bandwidth services.

Are you a Minneapolis-St. Paul area company, or a business located anywhere else, looking for a bandwidth upgrade or better pricing on the service levels you have now? If so, have a look at competitive pricing and availability of Ethernet and MPLS IP VPN network services. There are major savings to be had right now.



Note: Photo of downtown Minneapolis courtesy of Susan Lesch on Wikimedia Commons

VoIP Phone Service Provides Flexibility

Small to medium size businesses may be thinking about upgrading their aging phone systems, but uncertain about which way to go. Do they buy a modernized and expanded version of the Key Telephone or PBX system they are using and keep everything else the same, or make the jump to VoIP phone service? What many may not realize is the flexibility of options you gain with VoIP solutions.

What differentiates VoIP from traditional telephone equipment and service is that it is network based. True, even a single line analog desk phone or cell phone is part of a network - the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The public telephone network is a very specific network that does one thing really well. It connects one telephone to another or perhaps one phone to a group of other phones for a conference call. It has its own technology and wiring standards. VoIP, on the other hand, is designed to share standard packet based computer networks.

There-in lies the flexibility of VoIP. You plug an IP phone into a network jack, just like you’d plug in a PC or printer. No separate wiring scheme is needed. It doesn’t even matter where the phone is located. IP phones are known by their unique addresses, not which pair of wires they happen to be connected to.

With analog telephones, you have a choice on whether to connect each of your phones to the telephone company on their own line or to install an in-house phone system to connect the phones and share the outside lines. With VoIP, you can also install an in-house phone system called an IP PBX or extend your network with all the phones to a service provider. This approach is called Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. The connection is called a SIP Trunk.

SIP Trunking gives smaller businesses the option of getting both their phone service and broadband service from the same provider. The SIP trunk can be divided so that voice packets and data packets don’t interfere. Your phone calls are never interrupted by someone download data at the same time. Using one trunk for both voice and data often results in a cost savings over having separate telephone lines and broadband connections.

Hosted PBX services give you the flexibility of locating your phones wherever you want them. This goes beyond just moving telephones around the building. You can have one phone sitting on a desk in New York and other in Seattle, both connected by SIP trunks to a hosted PBX in Dallas. From the caller’s perspective, all of this equipment could be in one building. They have no perception of how geographically spread out this operation is. This capability is also known as a virtual office.

For larger companies, enterprise level VoIP systems handle hundreds or even thousands of phones located at headquarters, regional sales offices and branch offices nationwide. Private SIP Trunks securely transport voice and data among the locations, avoiding telephone company toll charges for in-house calls. The PBX switching system can be located at any particular location or can be a hosted solution. The beauty of hosted VoIP is that you pay as you go. There is no need for an expensive investment in telephone switching equipment nor the staff to maintain and upgrade it. That’s all handled for you.

Can your company benefit from a more flexible communications system, perhaps including mobile phones as well as desk sets? If so, get pricing and features quotes for competing VoIP service providers. Then compare with what you have now and see if you can gain flexibility and perhaps cost savings as well.

From CAPEX to OPEX In The Cloud

There’s a new cost model for Information Technology. It’s a move from high CAPital EXpense or CAPEX to OPerational EXpense or OPEX. What’s driving this change? It has to do with the uncertainty of the business climate and the availability of cloud computing services.

What’s wrong with the way we’ve always done it? The legacy practice of building on-site environmentally controlled data centers and stocking them with server racks, arrays of disk storage and network appliances works very well if you can come up with capital to implement this plan.

There are also operational costs in the form of electricity, bandwidth and staffing, not to mention the near-constant process of patching and upgrading software. Those software packages aren’t cheap, either.

Traditional Information Technology is capital intensive. That hasn’t been a problem until recently because it was accepted business practice and everybody did it. Then along came the “Great Recession” and everything changed. We’ve had a lot less certainty about the economy the last few years. Most companies have responded by hunkering down and minimizing cost of all types. For those that see opportunity and want to expand, there’s a dearth of available financing.

Any wonder why cloud services are multiplying before our eyes? The business climate provides the impetus and the cloud provides the solution. It’s a combination that’s turning a trend into a stampede.

What’s so great about moving out there to the cloud? For many companies, it’s a combination of agility and expense versus commitment and capital. There’s nothing going on in the cloud that you can’t do yourself. What cloud service providers offer is a way to offload, or outsource, the infrastructure, platform, software and staffing that isn’t proprietary to your business.

For smaller companies, buying cloud services gives them a robustness of computing that they’ve never had before. If you are too small to have a dedicated IT staff on duty around the clock, you’re pretty much flying by the seat of your pants. You expect that whatever is working today will still be working tomorrow. When a part of the network or process goes down, you troubleshoot as best you can or get on the phone to a consultant or the vendors. It’s not unusual to have long periods of unplanned downtime.

Not so if you get your computing and perhaps your telephone service from a reputable cloud provider. The core business of the cloud services company is to provide a limited number of services and execute them perfectly. They have the equipment, the redundancy and the staff to make sure things are always up and running. It’s what keeps their many customers buying from them. You may not need an extensive array of servers, storage, software or bandwidth, but you’ll benefit from using the same infrastructure as those who do.

For the larger organization, high performance is a basic expectation. What the cloud has to offer the enterprise is a way to increase and decrease infrastructure resources on demand. You need more virtualized servers? You’ve got ‘em. You need more storage? There’s plenty in the pool to draw from. More visitors creating a demand for more bandwidth? No problem. The fiber optic lines are already in place with more bandwidth than any one company can use.

You simply pay for what you need when you need it. That gives you a tremendous flexibility to pursue new business opportunities with the knowledge that if they don’t pan out, you are not committed to a huge computing investment that must be paid off regardless.

Could your small, medium or large enterprise benefit from moving from a capital intensive to a pay as you go expense model for information technology services? Find out by comparing prices and available services from cloud service providers. Then get started at the level that makes the most sense for your organization.

Unlimited International Landline Calls

You know that International phone calls are expensive. That’s why you find making calls on the Internet so compelling. As long as you are making a computer to computer call, you don’t have to pay anything beyond your broadband charges. But what if you want to call from your regular phone line or from your cell phone? Is there any way to talk as much as you want for one low fee?

There is now. The service you want is IBNtel Unlimited Long Distance. It’s a new calling service that works with the phones you have. No need to have the computer turned on or be anywhere near it. You won’t be using your computer for this service. It’s an unlimited long distance telephone service that includes international destinations.

Even long distance calls in the USA are expensive if you simply use the default long distance service from your local phone company. That’s why many landline users have one service for local dial tone and another for long distance calls. Cellular plans pretty much cover all calls within the United States as part of the minutes plan. Just try and call across the border, however, and you’ll get a nasty surprise. Either your call won’t go through at all or you’ll get a big fat charge on your next phone bill.

This is why you need an add-on international calling service. If you call from the US to any other country and need to talk for long periods of time or just make a lot of calls, you’ll get nickeled and dimed to death by most long distance services and most prepaid calling cards. They’re just plain expensive when you don’t use them all at once and a nuisance to keep buying or refilling. Why deal with that hassle when you can just pay one low monthly fee and talk all you want for free after that?

Technically speaking, IBNtel Unlimited Long Distance service is what is called an international dial-around long distance service. What that means is that you “dial around” your current telephone services when you want to make those international calls. You won’t be switching you present local, long distance or cellular service providers. Those plans will still work the way they do now. You simply register the phone you’ll be using and dial a special local access number to get those free US long distance and international calls. Yes, you can register your cell phone can make unlimited international calls. You won’t get charged extra, but you’ll likely be using minutes on your cellular plan as with any other call.

With IBNtel’s unlimited LD service, you make unlimited calls to any landline or cellular phone in the USA, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Singapore or Thailand. For the remaining of the 60 countries on the list, you can make free calls to landline destinations only. Calls to cell phone or calls to countries not on the list have additional charges, although you may find them cheaper than what you are paying now.

How much does this unlimited long distance cost? It’s just $17.50 a month with a 1 year commitment or $19.50 a month with no annual contracts. If you are currently spending hundreds of dollars a month on international long distance, you should check this out at your earliest convenience. It’s just too good a deal to pass up.

Please note that this is a new service and has not rolled out everywhere just yet. To see if your local area qualifies, check for service availability now. If your location isn’t hooked up yet, try back in a few weeks, as new local access codes are in the process of being added.

Boost Ethernet over Copper Speed in 60 Minutes

The new Carrier Ethernet services are known to have a scalability advantage over legacy T-Carrier and SONET telecom services. Soon, it will be possible to crank up your bandwidth in as little as an hour with nothing more than a phone call or Web portal login.

The name of the game in business today is agility. There’s so much uncertainty and day to day volatility in the commercial environment that traditional planning cycles can’t keep up. One indicator of these changing business needs has been the meteoric rise of cloud computing services. The cloud is more than just a way to reduce staffing and avoid large capital investments. Cloud services are offered on an “as needed” basis. If you need more servers or bandwidth, you can get them quickly and easily.

What works in the cloud can also benefit bricks and mortar operations. All companies have a need for WAN bandwidth, either to the Internet or point to point to other facilities. Many companies have a larger need for mesh networks to interconnect multiple branch offices, stores, regional warehouses and the like. Even small concerns with a single office location need voice and data connections to the outside world. Wouldn’t it be great if you could buy the bandwidth you need right now, but respond in a flash if your needs suddenly increased?

That is possible to some extent and will soon be expanded with Ethernet over Copper. EoC, as it is also called, gives you transparent Ethernet connectivity from your LAN to the Internet, a MPLS-VPN network or point to point to another location. Technically, EoC uses dry copper pair (ordinary telco wiring) to transport Ethernet packets from a nearby central office to your location. Two or more pair are employed. The higher the maximum desired bandwidth, the more pair are connected.

There are two characteristics that are making Ethernet over Copper a highly popular connection service for business. First, the implementation uses the same type of copper wiring as you have for T1 lines and multi-line telephone service. Chances are that you already have the required multi-pair binder cable installed and in use. Second, pricing of Ethernet over Copper services is decidedly lower than equivalent T-1 or bonded T-1 line pricing.

MegaPath, a major competitive carrier and leader in Ethernet over Copper deployment, has been offering EoC services from 1,900 central offices where it has co-located the required equipment. They offer speeds up to 3 Mbps, making EoC highly attractive as a T1 replacement service. Over the next year, they will upgrade their terminal equipment at these and additional offices to offer EoC from 2 to 20 Mbps. In special cases, they will have the ability to go all the way up to 90 Mbps with a circuit card change.

The ultimate in flexibility is also on the way. MegaPath is planning to offer an on-demand upgrade from 3 Mbps to as high as 20 Mbps in a little as 60 minutes with no more than a phone call. The next step will be a customer self-service portal so that you can make the change yourself online. No longer will you have to keep extra bandwidth capacity on hand “just in case.” Order what you need for your current operations and then request a rapid upgrade when the need arises.

Could your office, retail store, restaurant or other business benefit from better bandwidth pricing and more flexibility? If so, check Ethernet over Copper pricing and availability. It could be a valuable competitive edge in these uncertain times.

Meshed MPLS Forms a Cloud of Clouds

MPLS networks have risen to prominence lately as replacements for old-school Frame Relay networks that link multiple business locations. MPLS networks are highly popular because of their ability to transport nearly any protocol with high quality and reliability. One remaining wish has been the ability to use a multitude of carriers at various locations and still have them interconnected by a managed MPLS network. That desire has now been realized.

AireSpring, one of the fastest growing and most innovative competitive carriers, is now offering what they call a Meshed MPLS Network. Just what does such a networking scheme do and how is it different from the meshed network connections inherent in any MPLS network?

MPLS networks can be thought of as classic clouds. You connect each of your locations to the cloud by means of a last-mile access network and then instruct the MPLS network operator how each location should connect to the others. These can be private point to point links, a star network with corporate headquarters at the center, or a meshed network arrangement. The meshed approach is highly popular because it allows any location to communicate with any other location at will. You don’t have to be actively managing or even monitoring the network, as the service provider takes care of that.

The one fly in the ointment is that you need to contract with one MPLS network provider for all your connections. That service provider will take care of getting the access connections, even if it means subleasing copper or fiber from another carrier. But what if you already have contracts with carriers to provide MPLS mesh networks for particular geographical territories?

This can happen easily if your company grew by mergers and acquisitions. It can also happen in decentralized organizations or conglomerates of businesses that haven’t traditionally had a need to connect with each other. Not all carriers have a nationwide footprint. It’s common for some carriers to be strong in parts of the country and not have a presence at all in others. All of this results in the head-scratching problem of how you tie together disparate WAN networks.

This is the problem that AireSpring’s Meshed MPLS Network solution addresses. Their MPLS Mesh (tm) creates a NNI (Network to Network Interface) that ties together multiple carrier solutions running at T-1 or higher speeds into one MPLS Virtual Private Network. You then have the choice of linking all of your sites into a single IP network or segmenting your data into multipole secure networks. Note that the segmenting can now be logical and not geographical.

Meshed MPLS technology gives companies a flexibility that they haven’t had before. You can now pick and choose which carrier you want to serve which locations to minimize your telecom costs. Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms ensure that you can converge your entire network for voice, data and video. Your critical business applications will get the prioritization that they need for high quality performance.

Are you frustrated with your current hodge-podge of disparate telecom services that don’t quite perform the way you need and cost you a small fortune? It’s time to take a look a consolidating all that with a more advanced networking solution. Get MPLS network service pricing and features for all your business locations now. You’ll likely find you can have higher performance and lower cost at the same time.

Where Hosted PBX Solutions Save

Business telephone systems range from the very simple with a few phones and a few lines to complex private branch exchanges that support multiple sites. The new approach is a hosted PBX that makes things simple again. But do hosted PBX solutions really save anything and can they maintain voice quality?

With the simplest arrangement of a single landline phone connected to the local phone company, there really isn’t much to manage. You pay so much per month for “dial tone” that makes your phone work and gives you typically unlimited local calling. You have the option to switch to a different provider for long distance service or use a dial-around service for international calling. These are options to save you on the per minute calling rates.

The basic analog or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone service seems simple because all the complexity is at the other end of the wire. What you don’t see or have to deal with is the intricacies of connecting your line to any of billions worldwide or to even more billions of wireless callers. If you have, say, 3 business locations with 1 phone each, they talk to each other by dialing up the desired location just like any other phone number.

Businesses found out just how complex the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) was when they got big enough to have lots of desk phones and a dozen or more outside lines. What many companies did was to buy their own telephone switching system called a PBX (Private Branch Exchange.) The advantage of having your own PBX system is that calls within the company stay on your own wiring and you don’t have to pay the telephone company to connect them. That includes more complex PBX arrangements with digital tie lines that connect multiple locations in a private network. Once again, the motivation is to keep as many calls as possible off the public network to avoid “toll” charges.

Many companies have rued the day the got into the telephone business. PBX systems are expensive to buy and need constant updates as employees move within the company. There is also maintenance activity for both the PBX and its telephone network wiring.

Hosted PBX is a fairly new service that offers to offload the expense of in-house phone systems. It only became possible when most companies installed Local Area Networks for their computers and the price of private digital lines became affordable. The enabling technology is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In this case, Internet refers to the technology standard and not necessarily use of the public Internet.

Hosted PBX refers to using a large PBX telephone system that is located or hosted by a third-party service provider. This PBX is big enough to handle the telephone traffic of many different companies to gain an economy of scale. In a way, this is similar to going back to the days where each phone was individually connected to a local telephone company that took care of call switching.

So, where does the cost savings come from? Network consolidation is one area. Both telephones and computers run on a single converged voice and data network. There are no separate telephone wires. This network is extended to the hosted PBX provider using a private digital line called a SIP trunk. You are not tied to a particular service provider. There are many competing hosted PBX solutions and that competition is another way that cost savings can be offered.

The private SIP trunk helps to maintain high voice quality because it provides the characteristics of low latency, jitter, packet loss and congestion, along with quality of service mechanisms that keep data packets from interfering with voice packets. You can also buy Internet based hosted PBX services at lower costs, but the vagaries of the public Internet can introduce distortion and clipping in the conversations.

Do hosted PBX solutions offer a real cost savings for your company? It depends on how many seats you have, what features you want and what your existing system is costing you. If you are close to replacing an aging PBX or one that has run out of capacity, the economics highly favor hosted solutions. To decide for yourself, get competitive pricing on hosted PBX solutions for business. It may come down to whether you want to pay as you go versus investing in your own in-house phone system.

Why Managed IT Services Are So Popular

There’s been a profound shift in the way information technology services are implemented. What’s happened recently is that service providers have entered the realm of managed iT services en masse. Some of this has been a direct result of the rise of cloud computing. Other offerings have been a recognition that both staffing and capital are much more restricted than ever before.

Call it the business environment wrought by the Great Recession or call it a paradigm shift in technology. The upshot is that companies are taking a much closer look at procuring more and more of their IT services through colocation, cloud computing, or managed network services.

Just what makes managed IT services so attractive? To some, it’s a way to put the monkey on somebody else’s back. To others, outsourcing wins the make versus buy cost tradeoff. For many other business, there is so much volatility in the economy that it just makes sense to pay as you go.

Cloud computing fits the pay as you go model perfectly. You know that running your own data center involves buying lots of equipment, installing it in racks located within an environmentally controlled room, and then managing a continuous stream of patches, upgrades and trouble tickets. It’s also a balancing act. If you buy too little in the way of processing or bandwidth, you run the risk of being unable to serve an unexpected surge of customer orders. Buy too much and it sits there unused, but costing just the same.

When you “rent” in the cloud, you have an almost unlimited pool of processing power, storage and customer bandwidth to draw from. There is an expert staff that keeps everything running smoothly 24/7 without your involvement at all. Best of all, you pay for what you need while you need it. Scaling up or down can be done rapidly. There’s less pressure to correctly predict short term business activity when you can adjust on the fly as needed.

Hosted business telephone is another huge growth area for managed IT services. It’s come about for the same reasons that pushed cloud computing in to the limelight. Any business that needs more than a few handsets and outside lines finds itself becoming a small independent phone company. The cost of a PBX system to manage all the in-house and outside connections can run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. You traditionally connect it to all those desk phones through its own network and then have staff to manage the moves, adds and changes.

Once enterprise VoIP became feasible using converged voice and data networks, the dedicated phone network was no longer needed. The IT staff could manage the phone equipment too. But why pay for equipment at all? Just extend your LAN with a SIP trunk to a managed service provider and that expensive central switch, the staff needed to keep it running and all the outside phone trunks become something you can rent by the month.

Do you have a dedicated remote data center for backup storage and disaster recovery? It’s a form of expensive insurance you can’t do without unless there’s an equivalent alternative. That alternative is encrypted cloud storage. You have the protection against outages without having to buy and maintain the asset that gives you that protection.

IT departments have also been expected to manage WAN bandwidth, even to the extent of creating their own MAN and WAN networks using dedicated point to point lines. All that grief goes away when you use managed Ethernet and MPLS network services. The service provider has the responsibility of keeping the packets flowing, even in the middle of the night.

Is your company ready to consider managed IT services as an alternative to doing it all yourself? Perhaps you just want to shop for the best deals on these managed services. Either way, get availability and pricing for competitive Managed IT Services now and see how much you can save.

Low Cost Cloud Backup For Business

Many companies are taking a hard look at what cloud services have to offer. Not all businesses have their own data centers or on-site public-facing web servers. But all businesses generate important data that they can’t afford to lose. Think about what would happen if a tornado, flood or fire came sweeping through and destroyed all the paper and computer files in your office. How badly would that hurt you? What if your hard drive simply crashed? They do that, you know.


Fortunately there is an easy way to protect yourself without getting into a costly outsourcing contract. Simply backup your important business files to a secure location quickly and cheaply. The service you are looking for is called MozyPro.

Mozy is a cloud services company that specializes in low cost online backup solutions for both individuals and businesses of all size. Their business product is called MozyPro. It’s used by over 70,000 businesses right now. Why? Because it’s an affordable pay-as-you-go solution with no setup fees, no hardware to buy and very little in the way of management needed.

Compare that to remembering, or trying to remember, to backup your hard disk drives. You know you’re going to forget occasionally. Even if you don’t, will all of your files be backed up when disaster strikes or will it have been too long since the last backup? By the way, where are you going to store those backup disks or tapes? In an office safe? In a file drawer? Bad idea. For disaster recovery, you want copies of your files as far away from your business location as possible. It’s unlikely that disaster will strike two geographically unrelated areas at exactly the same time.

Here’s how MozyPro works. You get a Web-based administrative console and software for each Windows or Mac user, or server that you want to backup. These simple tools allow you to select folders and files to backup to the secure Mozy data center. You can also set automatic or scheduled backups and restore files and folders as you wish. The simplest approach is to tell MozyPro to automatically backup files while your computer is not in use. That way you’ll be sure backups are up to date.

But how secure is this process? Mozy is part of EMC Corporation, the largest provider of data storage platforms in the world. Their servers are located in world-class data centers located around the world. They are all SAS70 or ISO 27001 certified and, where applicable, adhere to European Union Safe HArbor Privacy Principles. Prior to transfer, your data is encrypted with military-grade data encryption and then sent to the data centers via 128-bit SSL connection. You can choose a managed encryption key or a personal key for added security.

Here’s something else you might like. Windows user can use a feature called Mozy 2xProtect to backup locally to a USB or external drive in addition to online. You’ll have a copy of your files nearby in case of an oops, but also a remote secure copy in case of a major disaster.

How much does all of this cost? You buy licenses for your computers and servers and pay by the month. Desktop licenses are $3.95 a month plus $0.50/GB per month for each user. Server licenses are just $6.95 per month plus $0.50/GB per month for each server. You’ll get a special deal if you sign up for an annual or biennial subscription rather than just paying by the month.

Have you had that uncomfortable feeling that you aren’t as well protected as you should be? Mozy offers pretty cheap insurance to help your business keep running no matter what. Learn more and sign up for MozyPro Online Backup For Business now. You’ll sleep a lot easier.

Infrastructure as a Service Providers

Cloud computing is generally acknowledged to comprise three levels. These are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The most basic of these and the foundation of the others is infrastructure in the cloud.

Infrastructure is pretty much what it sounds like. This the basic hardware and operating system software to make it work. Competition for infrastructure in the cloud is that same infrastructure in your own data center. So, why would you want to up and move to the cloud?

There are good business reasons for IaaS. Infrastructure is expensive to buy, it requires constant attention and frequent maintenance, and it starts going obsolete almost as soon as you have it installed. Computing infrastructure is also finicky. It needs a special temperature and humidity controlled environment, physical security and fire protection, and large amounts of both operating and backup power.

There’s also the matter of how much to buy. You certainly need enough resources to accommodate your anticipated daily activities. How about the unforeseen? It’s not that unusual for a company’s product to catch on suddenly, resulting in a flurry of unexpected orders. The same is true for any content that goes viral. One day you’re coasting along at a modest level of activity. The next day the word is out and your servers are brought to their knees by a sudden flurry of new users. All of the social networking sites have experienced this phenomenon at one time or another.

Cloud service providers offer a way to address the limitations of local data centers, often with a considerable cost advantage. Cloud infrastructure providers build a business on scale. They create a large data center with racks full of virtualized and dedicated servers. These are connected with pools of disk storage, security appliances, and multiple diverse network connectivity. All of this is housed in a high security, environmentally controlled facility with both battery and generator backup power.

Doesn’t this sound like what you’d find at a colocation center? Indeed, there are many similarities between colos and cloud service providers. One major difference is in elasticity. An elastic resource is one that can grow and shrink at will. When you install your equipment in a colocation facility or rent equipment and services from them, it is on a well defined contract. Certainly, you have the ability to change your requirements as business conditions improve or degrade. But there’s going to be a time lag of days, weeks or longer to make the necessary changes.

Cloud services are based on a model of utility computing. You don’t need to ask your electric company to give you more or less power. You simply turn equipment on and off. Only when your requirements exceed the maximum capacity you have installed, do you need to ask for a different level of service.

Infrastructure as a Service is based on a pay for what you use basis. The cloud service provider has far more servers, disk drives, Gbps of bandwidth and other resources that you can possibly use. Their economy of scale dictates that they serve many customers, each of whom has no awareness of the presence of the others. Your services are partitioned so that no other user will take your resources or interfere with your operation.

The advantage to business users is that IaaS gives them the resources they need, when they need them, at a cost that reflects actual usage and not spare installed capacity. Capital investments and perhaps difficult to obtain financing are not required. Staffing levels are reduced because the service provider takes care of operations and maintenance on a 24/7/365 basis.

Could your business benefit from using some or many cloud services? You can have a good basis to compare with what you are doing now by getting prices and services from cloud computing providers now.

SMB Cloud Computing Portfolio

Cloud computing has come to the enterprise in a big way, but how about the small to medium size businesses? Does anyone offer a portfolio of cloud services that make sense for these companies?

Just such a collection of integrated cloud services is now available from Broadview Networks. Broadview is a communications provider serving the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States. They offer a wide variety of connectivity that includes the popular T1 and bonded T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Metro Fiber Ethernet, MPLS networking, SIP Trunking and even POTS lines.

What makes Broadview Networks particularly interesting as a cloud services provider is that they already have the connectivity you need to get to the cloud. Many cloud computing companies offer only the infrastructure, platform or software as a service. It’s up to you to figure out how you’ll reliably connect to their cloud. Broadview can give you both the services and the high reliability connections that make it all work seamlessly.

Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX, moves the telephone switching system and its network out of your facilities and to the service provider. Your handsets connect directly to your LAN, along with your PCs, printers and other network equipment. An advantage of Hosted PBX is that you don’t need the capital investment, maintenance and dedicated staff to have an enterprise phone system for your business. That’s all handled by the service provider.

Broadview Networks offers Hosted PBX for the SMB, but also has a new portfolio of cloud computing services. These include Hosted Business E-Mail, Office Anywhere, Hosted SharePoint, Cloud Backup and Recovery, and both Virtual and Dedicated Servers. All of these help you increase productivity without the traditional capital expenditures.

Broadview’s Hosted Business E-mail is a managed email solution that gives you enterprise-grade e-mail functions that include contacts, calendaring, notes, tasks and folders. If you wish, you can expand this functionality with Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 to gain shared contacts, cross-user tasks, distribution lists, group calendaring, plus archival, compliance and eDiscovery options. You control everything through an administrator portal that lets you quickly and easily add or delete e-mail boxes.

Office Anywhere uses Citrix 6.0 to virtualize your desktop environment so that user applications and data reside in the cloud. This is especially valuable for mobile workers and business with multiple locations, in that documents and applications can be accessed through a simple Web browser anywhere in the world. No need to worry about individual file backups. All data is automatically backed up in the cloud and easily recovered when needed.

Broadview’s Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 helps your team collaborate in a secure real-time environment. That includes road warriors, home-based employees and remotely located colleagues. The SharePoint environment lets them collaborate and create as if they are all located in the same room. Team members can view, comment and edit the same document, speeding the process of document creation, review and revision.

Do you still want to maintain your own servers or create a hybrid public and private cloud with some of your own equipment augmented by on-demand cloud services? Either way, you need a robust backup and recovery system to protect your valuable business information files. Broadview’s Cloud Data Backup and Recovery gives you the ability to backup your data to a high performance data center in the cloud. You’ll have secure off-site disaster recovery and backup with on-demand provisioning of extra storage. In addition to backing up your mission critical servers, you can also backup up employee’s workstations and laptops from anywhere in the world. No need to worry about losing a laptop and its valuable data or suffering an untimely disk failure. Your data is easily recovered from the cloud so you can continue operations.

Broadview is also a colocation hosting services provider. They offer virtualized or dedicated servers secured in SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers. You have your choice of Windows or Linux operating systems running on HP and Cisco servers.

Have you been curious about what a move to the cloud can do for your business? Regardless of size, there are cloud services scaled to meet your needs. Check out pricing and availability for SMB cloud computing services now to assist your tradeoff analysis.



Note: Background cloud photo courtesy of NASA Goddard.

5x5 Mbps Ethernet over Copper Saves Money

Many companies wish they had more bandwidth, less telecom expense or both. There’s a new service called 5x5 Ethernet than may be just what you are looking for.

Ethernet services are fairly new on the scene. Prior to Ethernet becoming fairly common, your best bandwidth options were T1 lines and fractional DS3 bandwidth. Occasionally, fixed location wireless service has been available for locations with a nearby line of sight path to their service provider.

How do Ethernet services change the options mix? You can often get more bandwidth for less cost with Ethernet, including low bandwidth services over copper.

You’ll hear Ethernet services described as Metro Ethernet, Carrier Ethernet or by their bandwidth level. For instance, 5x5 Mbps Ethernet means a dedicated speed of 5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. That symmetry is similar to what you get with other telecom services, but much different than the consumer oriented information services such as DSL and Cable broadband.

Symmetrical bandwidth is important if you expect to do file transfers between locations or backup your data to the cloud or a remote data center. Asymmetrical services with low upload speeds were designed for Web browsing. When you are requesting Web pages, there is a lot more data coming down than the few commands you are sending up to the server. That’s also true for video streaming, but not for video conferencing. In general, any two-way activity benefits from symmetrical bandwidth.

If you are currently using a T1 line or a few of T1 lines bonded together, sometimes called fractional DS3 bandwidth, you may well find that EoC or Ethernet over Copper is much more cost effective. You’ll get the same high quality of service that you expect from T1 or other telecom services. You’ll just pay less.

How much less? Let’s say that you want 5 Mbps symmetrical bandwidth to meet your need for file transfers, video conferencing, or dedicated Internet access. You could get close by bonding 3 T1 lines together to get 4.5 Mbps or 4 T1 lines for 6 Mbps. With T-carrier service, you need to move up in 1.5 Mbps increments.

The problem is that there is no economy of scale with T1 lines. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. Three lines, the number needed for 4.5 Mbps bandwidth, will cost you 3x the T1 line price. You also have to have new lines installed any time you want to increase bandwidth. There’s no cost savings in having extra capacity available.

Ethernet pricing is more than competitive with T1. You can often get 2 Mbps Ethernet for the same or less cost than a T1 line. Sometimes you can even get 3 Mbps for that price. Your 5x5 Mbps Ethernet will likely cost somewhere around twice the cost of T1 service but give you over 3 times the bandwidth. You might even do better. The reason these cost figures are vague is that pricing for both T1 and Ethernet is highly dependent on what services and competition are available for any particular business location.

Another thing you should know is that Ethernet over Copper uses the same twisted pair telco wiring that brings in T1 service. The technology uses multiple pair to increase bandwidth. That technology is also much more scalable than T-carrier services. What you want to do is install an Ethernet port capable of the bandwidth you expect to need for the foreseeable future. Then order the bandwidth you need right now. You should be able to quickly and easily increase your bandwidth at any time by simply contacting your service provider. No additional installation or construction delays should be necessary.

Are you ready to get some real numbers comparing Ethernet to T1 and DS3 services? Get pricing and availability for 5x5 Mbps Ethernet over Copper and other bandwidth services now.