EtherSphere Spans The World With Ethernet

Global Crossing is circling the globe with standards-based Carrier Ethernet services under the umbrella of its EtherSphere solutions portfolio. For multinational corporations and other companies with an international reach, this offers one-stop shopping for a network that unites geographically diverse business locations.

EtherSphere offers a number of Ethernet services that have been established as standards by the MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum). These include Point to Point Ethernet Private Line (EPL) or E-Line and multiple private line or Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL), Point to Multipoint or E-Tree, and Multipoint to Multipoint Ethernet Private LAN or VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service) E-LAN.

This suite of standard Ethernet services accommodates whatever connectivity is needed to interconnect multiple locations. All connections are made using EtherSphere’s Smart Demarcation Network Interface Device (NID). This allows the network to monitor performance end to end, perform traffic management and offer end to end SLAs (Service Level Agreements). Customers have administrative access through the Global Crossing uCommand online portal.

The Smart Demarcation NID supports 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps Ethernet port interfaces. Bandwidth is highly scalable and can be ordered in committed data rates from 1 to 10 Mbps in 1 Mbps increments, 10 to 100 Mbps in 5 Mbps increments, 100 to 1000 Mbps in 25 Mbps increments, 1000 to 2000 Mbps in 100 Mbps increments and greater than 2 Gbps upon request.

There are six classes of services supported on the network that are identified as premium, premium plus, enhanced and enhanced plus, and basic and basic plus. The service level agreements can be POP to POP or end to end with metrics that include frame delivery, frame delay, and delay variation by class of service, plus installation and mean time to repair.

One beauty of Carrier Ethernet is the ability to provide layer 2 switched Ethernet service over wide area networks, including international destinations. VPLS can interconnect data centers and remote locations in a bridged LAN arrangement that includes all of a company’s offices. With simple Ethernet interfaces at every location, connections between LANs are greatly simplified compared to creating worldwide networks using traditional telecom services.

Global Crossing is expanding this popular EtherSphere service to include more than 40 new locations in the United States, Europe and China by the end of 2011. This will expand the carrier and enterprise offers now available in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, Asia and Latin America served by 150 locations served by multiservice edge routers. The expansion in China will deploy EtherSphere Layer 2 VPLS to business centers in China through Global Crossing’s extended reach partner, CITIC Telecom CPC.

Is your company multinational in structure or do you simply need to do business worldwide? If so, perhaps a more comprehensive network solution that links all of your business locations through an Ethernet WAN solution can reduce costs and improve performance. Get International Carrier Ethernet pricing and availability to compare with what you have now.

Talking About Regeneration

You probably realize that there is a distance limitation to sending signals through wires, fiber strands or wirelessly. Your USB and Ethernet cables can be just so long. Yet, we easily communicate worldwide on the Internet and through private networks. How’s that possible?

Signals do deteriorate as they travel. The trick is to boost them from time to time and recreate the original waveform. Analog phone lines use passive equalizer components, capacitors and coils, to compensate for the reactance in the wires that causes the voice signals to sound muffled before they get to the central office. Over longer distances, linear amplifiers boost signals that lose amplitude due to the resistance in the wiring.

There’s one small problem with simply amplifying a signal to bring it back to its original voltage. Amplifiers amplify everything. That includes the signal we want, but it also includes any noise that is picked up along the way. There’s lots of noise that leaks into the wiring. Twisting the pairs of copper wire helps cancel out external fields, but you still get small amounts of power line hum, crackles from thunderstorms, and crosstalk from other wires in the bundle. You boost the faded signal, but you boost the noise by the same amount reducing the ratio of signal to noise on the line. The longer the path, the noisier your signal gets at the end.

Digital transmission offers the opportunity to get around the deteriorating signal to noise problem. Digital signals have only two states, 1 and 0. These can be low and high currents, different polarity voltages or the presence or absence of a light pulse. It doesn’t matter as long as there is a way to tell the difference between the ones and the zeros. If so, you can recreate the original signal and throw out the noise completely.

Here’s a simple example. In the days of the telegraph, the Morse code dots and dashes could only be sent so far using the wires and batteries of the day. One solution is to have telegraph stations with live operators along the line between cities. The first station would send the message to the second, where it would be transcribed and then resent to the next station in line. Because the signal was regenerated completely, it would be exactly the same leaving the second station as it was leaving the first.



Well, in theory anyway. Any mistakes would show up as noise in the signal that couldn’t be removed. Besides being slow and potentially error-prone, this method is laborious. An automatic process is to have a telegraph receiver (sounder) connected to a key and re-transmit everything it receives. This is the familiar electrical relay. It is also a regenerative repeater. The relay repeats everything it receives and regenerates the signal back to its original form.

Sound old-timey? We still use this process for T1 lines. No, there are no Morse code keys in those telephone boxes. It’s all solid state electronics these days. The similarity between Morse code and T1 digital transmission is that they both use binary signals. The T1 line is running at about 1.5 Mbps, a bit fast for telegraphers but no problem for a solid state regenerator. The shape of the signal at the input has been distorted by electrical characteristics of the line and attenuation over distance. It has also picked up noise.

The regenerative repeater determines whether each pulse is a one or a zero and then recreates the string of pulses in the T1 signal at exactly the specified voltage level and waveform of a “perfect” T1 signal. You can’t tell the difference of a T1 signal leaving the telco office and one leaving a regenerative repeater. These repeaters can be placed every 6,000 ft to regenerate the signal back to spec. Five or ten miles out, it looks as good as it did at the central office.

The availability of simple, inexpensive regenerative repeater cards is what makes T1 service so universally available. It doesn’t matter if your business is located downtown or on a farm in the middle of nowhere. If you can get telephone service, you can probably get T1 service. T1 takes two pair of phone wires, one for upload and one for download. Other than that, regular multi-pair telephone cable is all that is required. If no T1 service has ever been installed for miles around, the provider may have to do some construction to install those regenerative repeaters to get the signal to your location.

Are you interested in getting T1 or higher speed line service for your business? It may be less expensive than you think and higher bandwidths are becoming more available. Get pricing and availability for T1 and other line services now and check out your options.



Note: Photo of telegraph repeater courtesy of Daderot on Wikimedia Commons

The Rush To Cloud Service Data Centers

There’s a major migration afoot. It’s a move, almost a stampede, from in-house server rooms to public data centers worldwide. Let’s take a look at what this trend is all about and where it may be leading.

The original reason for companies to consider data center colocation was cost savings. The tradeoff is fairly simple. Instead of your organization building and operating its own data center, you ship your servers, switches, routers and network appliances off to a colo facility. That facility offers cost savings through economy of scale. Instead of each business having to come up with environmentally controlled real estate, fire suppression, backup generator power and high bandwidth connectivity, the larger colocation company provides these facilities for hundreds or thousands of customers.

A colo or “carrier hotel”, as they were originally called when the main customers were competitive local exchange carriers, can provide the 24/7 technical staffing that you may not be able to afford. They’ve expanded their suite of services to rent not just rack and cage space, but servers themselves. You no longer have to buy and ship your own equipment. You can rent what you need and have it all set up for you. Even ongoing maintenance can be outsourced to the colo so that your only responsible for the applications you are running.

There is a blending of missions between colocation data centers and hosting companies. The colocation centers have become hosts with the addition of dedicated servers and even virtual servers.

The latest trend in IT is cloud computing and this is where colocation data centers are headed. One good example is PAETEC, a competitive telecom carrier with a national service footprint. PAETEC is known for it’s voice and data services that include T1 lines, DS3, SIP trunking, MPLS networks, OCx fiber optic bandwidth, and Ethernet over copper and fiber connections. Now PAETEC is on a major building spree to nearly triple its 7 data centers spread across the country.

What’s prompting this expansion? It’s all about the cloud. Corporate America has discovered cloud services as a way to control costs, increase flexibility and avoid sometimes unavailable capital investments in infrastructure. The idea of the cloud is very much like the concept of the colocation center with some capability expansions. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows you to rent all the servers and their related facilities that you need. The difference is that the architecture of the cloud is about making it easy to add and subtract resources rapidly. You can do that when servers are virtual and there are massive amounts of networked disk storage to draw from.

PAETEC is offering cloud-based products in their data centers that include dedicated servers, virtual servers, managed storage on demand and more. Hosted Exchange gives companies a Microsoft Exchange E-Mail server with PAETEC technicians and engineers available for support.

Is it time for your company to consider a move to the cloud or relocation to a colocation center to reduce costs and gain access to more resources as needed? If so, get pricing and availability of Cloud and Colocation Data Center Services near your location.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

GTT Expands Ethernet Footprint With PacketExchange

Global telecommunications carrier GTT is moving to expand its Ethernet service footprint worldwide by acquiring Ethernet service provider PacketExchange.

PacketExchange is a London based carrier with an impressive 10 Gigabit fiber optic IP backbone network that covers Europe, the United States and Asia. A good portion of this network was acquired when PacketExchange acquired MZIMA Networks in 2010. The combined resources provide private line services plus MPLS and VPLS networking and peering.

GTT’s acquisition of PacketExchange reinforces the idea that we’re entering the age of Carrier Ethernet. Up till now, the world’s networks have been dominated by telephone company technology for switched circuit operations. The popular T-carrier wireline services and SONET/SDH fiber optic services were all devised to be compatible with time division multiplexed voice and data. The new paradigm is packet switched networks, with Carrier Ethernet gaining prominence.

You see this reinforced by the emergence of Ethernet Exchanges, such as Telx, that offer E-NNI (Ethernet Network to Network Interface). What E-NNI does is create a peering opportunity for IP network operators to exchange data and, thus, expand the reach of their networks. This opportunity speeds up the ability of Ethernet to take over the world’s telecommunications traffic without the necessity of one dominant international carrier to dictate standards.

PacketExchange makes a nice complement to GTT which is already a global network integrator with many POPs (Points of Presence) in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. GTT serves 80 countries in all with a wide portfolio of Private line, Ethernet, DSL broadband, point to point Wireless and managed network services. They are often the carrier of choice for companies that need to interconnect offices across international borders. MPLS network services that are particularly useful in linking multiple locations include MPLS VPN and VPLS services.

Ethernet and MPLS networks complement each other nicely. MPLS networks use a proprietary routing technology called label switching in place of IP routing or SONET/SDH multiplexing. Label switching encapsulates virtually any protocol and transports the packets form location to location. At the network edges, packets enter and leave the network unaltered. This allows MPLS networks to support layer 2 switched services such as Ethernet Private Line and Ethernet LAN. It’s entirely possible using Ethernet access to MPLS networks to create an international bridged LAN that includes locations worldwide.

The power of Ethernet as a universal network protocol to support converged voice, video and data networks is only beginning to be seen. It’s a natural development, considering that corporate LANs long ago standardized on the switched Ethernet protocol. What makes more sense than to seamlessly expand those LANs into the metropolitan and long haul connections necessary to support regional, national and international business.

Does your company have a need to connect multiple business locations, domestically or internationally? If so, take a closer look at Ethernet business bandwidth solutions to support your organization’s technical goals at a cost often lower than with traditional telecom services.



Note: Ethernet switch photo courtesy of Justin Smith on Wikimedia Commons.

Is 1 Tbps The Next Optical Network Standard?

For residential and corporate users just getting comfortable with 100 Mbps broadband, the need for bandwidths in the Terabit per second range seem very far in the future. Not so for network operators. The discussion is getting lively right now as to whether the next optical networking standard speed will be 400 Gbps or 1 Tbps.

What’s driving the need for new higher standards? It’s the inevitable march of technology from Kbps to Mbps to Gbps and soon to Tbps. The last lively discussion was whether to move up from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps or go all the way to 100 Gbps. You’ll notice that the new proposed standards are 10x or one order of magnitude above those levels.

That makes sense because there is something of a “Moore’s Law” that applies to bandwidth as well as computer processing. Moore’s Law, formulated by Gordon Moore of Intel, proposed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year. Despite the fact that no one knew exactly how to do this more than a increment or two into the future, technology advancements have come along on schedule to keep Moore’s law viable for decades. The latest announcement of 3D transistors looks to keep the processing improvements going for the foreseeable future.

What about bandwidth? There is a prediction called Butter’s Law formulated by Gerald Butters of Bell Labs that says the amount of data coming from an optical fiber doubles every nine months. This is complemented by Nielsen’s Law, from consultant Jakob Nielsen, that says that bandwidth available to users increases 50% per year.

Based on this, getting standards in place for faster optical networks needs to proceed quickly. There’s little time to waste before we start talking about 10 and 100 Tbps networks and thinking ahead to Petabit per second networks.

What on Earth is driving these requirements? Is it simply technology gone wild on its own development cycle or is there a real need for such bandwidths. If there isn’t now, there soon will be. It can be summed up in one word: Video.

Video traffic now dominates the Internet. It’s said the Netflix alone may be the largest single application. Netflix might have been first out of the chute when it comes to streaming video content on a massive scale, but it won’t be in that position alone for long. Most new televisions and set top boxes have Internet connectivity built-in. The same is true for gaming consoles, which also make nice video set top boxes.

But don’t most people get their video programming over the air, through cable or satellite dishes? They do for now because those are the mature technologies. The bit switch from analog to digital OTA broadcasting has had a unexpected side effect. Having to buy new sets and make tricky antenna adjustments to receive the digital broadcasts has caused some TV viewers to rethink their options. The latest trend is to forego over the air broadcasts in favor of Netflix and video downloads directly from the Internet.

Far from being horrified, the FCC is considering auctioning off more of the TV spectrum to wireless broadband services. Smartphones and now tablet computers, particularly the iPad, are creating an almost insatiable demand for 3G and 4G bandwidth to support high definition video. There’s a proposal being floated to allow broadcasters to share frequencies taking advantage of the multiple program capability of each channel.

Likewise, Ethernet over Copper and DOCSIS Cable are easily capable of 100 Mbps broadband but start to strain above that. Further technical advances may push the upper limit on copper delivery but it’s just a matter of time before we have fiber to every premises. Verizon is leading the way with its FiOS passive optical service to the home and most medium and large business that don’t have fiber yet are taking a hard look at the lower cost of Gigabit Ethernet, where available.

How about your business? Are you feeling pinched by bandwidth services that are no longer as capable as they were when you installed them? You should know that business bandwidth prices have dropped significantly in the last few years, fueled by new technology developments and high levels of competition in metro areas. You may be able to get a lot more for your bandwidth dollar than you think. If you haven’t checked in awhile, this is a good time to get prices and availability on fiber optic bandwidth services. You may be surprised about what is available today.

Global Crossing Ups Ante On Network Security

What’s a major expense for organizations that nobody wants to talk about? Security breaches. It seems like every few days there’s another big splash in the news about user accounts and credit card numbers being compromised. There’s the direct cost of having to make up for losses, but there’s the larger cost of concerned customers abandoning or avoiding the company out of fear they’ll be the next victims.

These are the security horror stories we hear about. What generally isn’t reported is the espionage and theft of intellectual property that goes on behind the scenes. Your competitive advantage can be neutralized in minutes when key trade secrets and client lists are downloaded by unethical competitors and professional thieves.

Most companies are more attuned to network security than ever before. But is it enough? Judging from breaking news stories and industry buzz, not hardly. This is why Global Crossing is expanding its portfolio of security solutions for enterprise customers.

Global Crossing is well known as a leading worldwide IP network provider serving 40% of the Fortune 500 and hundreds of carriers, mobile operators and Internet service providers. They have the resources and the reach to deal with threats on an international basis. They also have the need, as their customers are prime targets for nefarious activities.

Global Crossings expanded suite of network security measures now includes a new SIEM or Security Information and Event Management platform. This resides in the Global Crossing Security Operations Center (SOC) where a team of security professionals, analysts and engineers monitor and assess network security issues on a full time basis. The reports and analysis are delivered to the proprietary uCommand portal for each customer.

The suite of security features includes a firewall, intrusion prevention service, web content filtering, antivirus and antispam appliance provided by Fortinet. This is augmented by additional professional services that include security policy review and creation, penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, incident response and security assessment and audit.

This is a multi-pronged approach that starts with evaluation and design of policies, procedures and technical measures, continuously monitors for threats, automatically thwarts them in progress and reports the attacks, plus jumps into action to deal with new issues as they arise.

The challenge of network security is that it is a rapidly evolving field with highly motivated and increasingly sophisticated perpetrators pitted against equally motivated security professionals. The more valuable your assets and the more your company depends on network connections and an online presence, the greater the threat to your operations.

Are you feeling the need for improved network security? If you are beyond what out of the box antivirus programs can do for you, a managed security solution may be your most cost effective option. Whether you have a small retail store or a Fortune 500 corporation to secure, get pricing and features of managed network security options new. You’ll likely sleep a lot easier knowing that someone in the security center is watching out for your interests.

Smartphone Charger and Backup Battery

Batteries are the bane of our existence. Can’t live with their pitiful charge. Can’t toss ‘em because then you’re completely dead in the water. Have you been a victim of short battery life? Have you been stranded powerless in the middle of nowhere, especially at restaurants? What you need is the ZAGGsparq 2.0.

ZAGGsparq 2.0 is two devices in one. First it’s a charger for all your USB charged devices. That’s pretty much everything these days. Second, it’s a backup battery with up to four time the charge contained in your device’s battery. Charge it when you have a outlet handy. Use it to power or recharge your gadgets where there are no outlets to be found. Check out this short video to get the overview.



Note that the ZAGGsparq 2.0 has two types of USB ports. One offers an optimized charge for devices that are capable of taking advantage of this feature. The Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod can make good use of this. The other port is a plain vanilla USB charger that works with other devices that don’t use the optimized USB charging specification.

The ZAGGsparq 2.0 is specifically engineered to charge the Apple iPad. Amazingly, it adds an additional 5 to 6 hours of video playback to the iPad. It will also extend the operation of your iPhone or iPod when you are running low but not in situation where you can pull out a conventional charger and plug it in.

You’re looking at a 6,000 mAh Lithium Polymer battery with the power to charge most smartphones 4 times, the yellow LED’s onboard indicate the amount of charge available in steps of 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. You can plug it into any outlet with 100 to 240 VAC @ 50/60 Hz. Maximum output power is 2000 mA (2 Amps) at 5V.

All this fits into a package 3.5 x 3.5 x 1 inch. That’s easily small enough to fit into pocket, purse or other bag. How much does it weigh? Just 8.6 ounces - about half a pound.

Does this sound like just the accessory you’ve been desperately needing? If so, learn more and order your ZAGGsparq 2.0 charger and backup battery now.

Fiber Buildings Offer High Bandwidth

Are you looking to increase your bandwidth connections from the low to medium speeds you can get delivered over twisted pair copper or fixed wireless, on up to the high speeds available only over fiber optic cabling? Would you like to do that while avoiding the often prohibitive construction cost of bringing in new fiber service? Then what you need is a fiber building.

In this case, a fiber building isn’t one that’s made out of carbon fiber construction or anything exotic like that. Fiber doesn’t refer to the construction materials of the structure itself. It refers to the type of telecom services already installed. A fiber building is one that already has fiber optic service brought in and operating. That’s why you often hear them referred to as fiber lit buildings. Lit means that there is laser light shining down those fiber strands and carrying digital payloads.

So, how do you find a fiber building? Peeking in windows after dark won’t work and will probably get you in trouble. You could start calling all the office and industrial buildings in the area and mark the lit building locations on a map. Or you can take the easy approach and use an automated online tool that will do all that legwork for you. It’s called the “Lit Building Locator.” You simply enter the street address of the building you are in now and you’ll get a map of lit buildings in the area and how far they are from you.

The most popular fiber optic bandwidth service being requested now is Metro or Carrier Ethernet. The beauty of Ethernet is that it is the same protocol that you are already running on your corporate LAN. That makes interfacing very easy. Fiber optic Ethernet services include Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) at 1,000 Mbps and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) at 10,000 Mbps. In some cases 40 Gigabit Ethernet is also available for the most demanding applications.

You should be aware that there is another type of fiber optic service that is also installed in “lit” buildings. This is the traditional telecom service called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. Bandwidth services include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 at 2.4 Mbps. Higher speeds include OC-192 at 9.95 Mbps that is compatible with 10 GigE WAN-PHY and OC-768 running at 40 Gbps.

Which fiber service should you choose? There may or may not be a choice. Once a fiber service is brought into a building, competing services generally choose other buildings to light up. Any particular building may be lit for SONET or Ethernet. There is a service called Ethernet over SONET, including 10 GigE WAN-PHY, that can give you the protocol you want even if your building is set up to legacy telco standards. Another reason that customers are asking for Ethernet is that it tends to be less expensive per Mbps than SONET services, where available.

Are you looking for more bandwidth? Why not check for fiber buildings and see if yours or one nearby is lit? If close, you may be able to get a carrier to make the necessary installation with no or discounted construction costs if you will be ordering a high bandwidth level. Perhaps you can find other tenants and pool your request to make the installation even more attractive.



Note: Photo courtesy of Diego Silvestre on Wikimedia Commons.

Cloud Communications Advantages Explained

Many companies are scratching their heads, wondering if it makes sense to move their communications to the cloud. XO Communications, a major competitive networking and telecom services provider, has a quick explanation of just why moving to the cloud makes sense. Take a minute and a half and see if this looks like something you should be doing...



XO’s Enterprise Cloud Communications does for multi-location businesses what basic hosted PBX services do for the SMB. It gets the organization out of the business of owning and managing a telephone system and into the role of a service user, albeit a sophisticated one.

By moving to a cloud hosted PBX and connecting via the extensive XO network from each location, you gain advanced features while keeping your calls “on net” to avoid telco toll charges. In addition to the usual local and long distance calling with standard business phone features, you gain high definition voice and video enterprise-wide and the ability to move calls seamlessly from your mobile phone to a fixed phone. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) lets you make and receive calls from any device at any location with only one phone number, dial plan and voice mailbox.

Regardless of how many regional and branch offices you have and where they are, you may be able to integrate your entire operation in the XO cloud and avoid the headaches of capital investment, ongoing maintenance, full time staffing and periodic upgrades. All of that responsibility moves to the provider and you have peace of mind of knowing what it’s going to cost per employee per month.

Does cloud communications sound like it might be the right next move for your company? If so, get complete features, pricing and consultation for cloud networking services now. There are advantages for all size companies from small offices on up to the largest corporations.

MegaPath Merges Integrated and Hosted Voice

Telephone switching has migrated over the decades from the local telephone company to the enterprise and now out to the cloud. MegaPath is building a bridge from in-house phone systems to cloud telephony by adding hosted services to their Integrated Voice services. This could be the cost effective transition you’ve been looking for.

If all you are doing is buying a few analog business lines from your local phone company and running them through a small business phone system you got at one of the big box office stores, you’ve pretty much got what you are going to get. Small companies have a way of growing to become medium size companies, however, and a two or four line system with a half dozen desk sets is quickly outgrown.

This is where most businesses call in a local phone system dealer who installs and maintains a particular brand of business phone system. With an in-house PBX (Private Branch Exchange), you’ll be adding more outside lines but now you have the opportunity to shop around. You can get your analog lines from a competitive provider or move up to digital trunk lines to save money once you get more than 6 to 12 lines.

MegaPath, a major competitive carrier with a nationwide service footprint, has a service called Integrated Voice specifically tailored to SMBs with their own PBX systems. They provide the outside lines that connect your PBX system to the world. The interface can be traditional analog lines for smaller systems, T1-CAS or ISDN-PRI digital trunks for medium and larger systems, or SIP Trunking for the newer IP PBX systems that support enterprise VoIP.

The Integrated feature of Integrated Voice is that you get both telephone and broadband service over the same dynamic DSL, T1 or Ethernet connection. This is a bit different from simply adding a third party VoIP service to your broadband service. With Integrated Voice, the combined data/voice is carefully managed to ensure that voice packets have priority over data packets so that using your computers won’t cause the telephone calls to break up. Any time a phone wants to make or receive a call, the bandwidth for this is reserved from the Integrated pool. Bandwidth not used for phone calls is automatically assigned for broadband Internet access.

Integrated Voice services are popular with small to medium size businesses because nearly every business needs both telephone lines and broadband Internet access. You can pay for these separately or have a more efficient and cost effective solution that combines the two.

Hosted Voice is a different animal. With hosted services, you no longer have a PBX system on your premises. Instead, you use a much larger PBX that is located at your service provider. It’s as if the service provider has become the new phone company. All you have in-house are telephones. These can be traditional phones that connect to an adaptor called a voice gateway or SIP Phones that are designed to connect directly to your network.

Hosted Voice services, also known as hosted PBX, are popular with companies that haven’t invested in their own PBX system or want to avoid the capital outlay for a needed upgrade and the ongoing maintenance headaches. All of those issues move to the service provider. As a user, you don’t perceive that the phone system is in the cloud rather than in the basement of your building. You may also enjoy advanced features such as remote worker, find me/follow me, simultaneous ring, auto attendants and hunt groups that weren’t available on your old PBX system.

MegaPath has been offering both the Integrated Voice and Hosted Voice services. What they’re doing now is giving businesses the chance to add Hosted Voice features to their Integrated Voice service as an overlay to their lines or trunks. This offers the opportunity for companies to gain more features almost instantly without the headache and expense of completely redoing their phone system right away. It’s something of a hybrid cloud approach where some of the equipment is on-site and some is in the cloud at the service provider’s facility.

Are you interested in upgrading your current business phone system with more advanced features or getting a better price on phone lines and trunks? If so, check out Integrated and Hosted Voice Services for business locations to find the mix that works best for you.

Wavelength Services vs Dark Fiber

Fiber optic services are popular for high bandwidth metro and long haul connections. They typically start about 100 Mbps and go on up to 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and occasionally 100 Gbps bandwidths. But what if you find that fiber optic bandwidth services are too restrictive for your needs? There are a couple of alternatives. One is leasing dark fiber routes and the other is wavelength services. Let’s see how they compare and why you might find one more attractive than the other.

Fiber optic bandwidth services are standardized, packaged services that offer either SONET or Ethernet connectivity from point to point. You may think of them as private line services, but chances are that you are not the only customer riding on the fiber strand. At lower bandwidths, such as OC3, you are probably being electrically multiplexed with other users to create a much larger bandwidth signal that is more cost effective to transport. If you are using a 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps service, you are still sharing the strand with other users but optically multiplexed using wavelengths.

One problem with these pre-packaged fiber optic services is that they generally limit you to a particular protocol and speed. If you change your mind, it can be time consuming and costly to change or upgrade your service. For this reason, some companies have decided to become their own bandwidth providers by leasing dark fiber and lighting it up with equipment they own. This gives you the ability to have multiple protocols running on the same fiber at whatever bandwidth makes sense. When you want something different, your own engineering staff reconfigures or changes out the equipment one each end. There’s no waiting around for carrier personnel because you are the carrier. The dark fiber is just an empty pipe, as the name implies.

The trick to having multiple protocols on one fiber is called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. It’s somewhat akin to the idea of electrical multiplexing in that many different signals can share the same transport mechanism. However, technically it is quite different. WDM uses multiple wavelengths or colors of laser light that are separate enough in frequency to be distinct. All of these colors, also called lambdas, exist in the infrared portion of the light spectrum that is seen as nearly transparent through glass fiber.

Think of WDM as shining a whole rainbow of laser beams down a fiber optic cable where they are detected separately at the other end. Each beam is independent of the others. One color doesn’t care that it is running Ethernet and the next color up is carrying SONET or ESCON. They don’t see each other and don’t interfere.

Since WDM is an established technology running on just about all carrier fiber optic networks, there is no reason why you can’t just lease an entire wavelength instead of a service running on that wavelength. That’s fairly easy to do these days because many networks have excess wavelength capacity available. You can have your own wavelength running a high bandwidth Ethernet service (10 GigE) or 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps SONET.

Why lease a wavelength instead of dark fiber? For one thing, you may not need the entire capacity of the fiber or all those wavelengths you can create yourself. There’s considerable capital cost in purchasing the WDM systems for each end of the fiber that you can avoid by just leasing the wavelengths you need by the month. Capital expense and network management then become the service provider’s problem.

Dark fiber may not be available for the entire route you have in mind or you may be planning to install your own fiber in a particular area. Until it is ready, you can make good use of existing capability by leasing wavelength services as long as needed.

Dark fiber, wavelength services, Gigabit Ethernet or OCx SONET. Which is right for your needs? Get comparative pricing and availability of fiber optic services now to do a good trade off analysis.



Note: Photo courtesy of Sandia National Labratories.

DROID 2 Global is a World Phone

What would you call a smartphone with a 1.2 GHz processor that can make and receive calls from over 200 countries? You’d call it the DROID 2 Global.

Just a second. This is a phone for Verizon and yet it works worldwide? How to they do that?

Verizon has excellent coverage in the United States and is the preferred carrier for tens of millions of users. The one little hiccup is that most of the world operates on the GSM standard and Verizon works on CDMA. It’s pretty much a VHS/Betamax argument. The two standards are mutually incompatible. So how does a Verizon phone work overseas?

Ah, the trick is to make it two phones in one. The Motorola DROID 2 has built in support for multiple networks. It covers WCDMA 850/1900/2100, CDMA 800/1900, GSM 850/900/1800/1900, HSDPA 10.2 Mbps (Category 9/10), CDMA EV-DO Release A, EDGE Class 12, GPRS Class 12, and HSUPA 1.8 Mbps. That’s pretty much everything you can use for telephone calls, Internet access and messaging.

Your DROID 2 comes with CDMA international roaming, but you’ll need to activate a pre-installed SIM card and a Global Service plan or feature to enable roaming outside of the US when using GSM and UTMS networks. You’ll want a global data plan so you can message and access the Web in those 200 countries, with 3G speeds in 125 countries. Why, it’s all the comfort of home!

Oh, by the way. The GSM feature doesn’t work on AT&T or T-Mobile networks here in the States. Verizon isn’t about to have any part of that.

Multiple network access may be the future of cell phones, at least in the near term. The idea of multiple incompatible networks is an idea who’s time has come and gone. Technology has advanced to the point where you can have both CDMA and GSM access designed into the same device. Look for this idea to spread to tablets and other 3G/4G devices.

The way things are going, it looks like most 4G wireless data networks are going to be LTE in a few years. Yet, WiMAX is enjoying popularity too. Next we need LTE/WiMAX dual-mode transceivers for smartphones and computing devices.

What other tricks does the DROID 2 Global have up its sleeve? A slide-out QWERTY keyboard for one. That makes high speed messaging and email a lot easier. The camera is a 5 Megapixel model with a dual LED flash and DVD-D1 video capture.

You also have the ability to make your DROID 2 Global a 3G mobile hotspot so you can share your data connection with up to 5 other devices.

This is truly a breakthrough smartphone design with a lot of advanced features for the Android user. Did you catch the 1.2 GHz processor? That should make your apps scream!

Are you interested in owning a cutting-edge phone with international capability? If so, learn more and order your Motorola DROID 2 Global for Verizon Wireless now. You can also browse the extensive selection of Android and other smartphones and feature phones, all at significant discounts and some even free.

MAN and MEN - Metropolitan Networking

When your local area network expands beyond the property that you own or lease, what you need is a MAN. That’s MAN as in Metropolitan Area Network. Let’s take a look at what the MAN is all about and how you use one or more to expand your company network.

The idea behind a metro network is that many offices, medical centers, manufacturers, governmental bodies and retailers have multiple locations within the same geographical area. Within a particular building or campus, you are free to install as much wiring as you want. But what happens when you need to get that connection across town?

The legacy answer is to lease point to point dedicated circuits from a telco provider. These can be T1 lines, DS3 for higher bandwidth or very expensive OC3 and above optical connections. Essentially, you create your own metropolitan networks from leased lines and routers that you install and manage.

It turns out that many, many businesses and organizations need this same service. This opens the opportunity for a metro network operator to install the necessary fiber optic cabling, add-drop multiplexers and other equipment to create a publicly available resource that meets the needs of most businesses in the area. By connecting to the MAN instead of building your own network, you can save considerable cost. You’ll also likely have additional resources at your disposal just in case your bandwidth needs suddenly increase.

Metro networks have more inherent security than the Internet in that there is no general public access. The residential users downloading movies and browsing the Internet or looking for mischief have no real need for the MAN and aren’t willing to pony up the price of a connection. Certainly, you have the ability to encrypt any packets you send through the MAN to improve security even further.

Many Metropolitan Area Networks are built from SONET rings, which are fiber optic networks organized as rings with many access points. Usually there are at least two fiber rings sending traffic in opposite directions. The idea is that if one strand fails, the other redundant strand will maintain the network. A ring arrangement is a good fit with most metro needs. The ring circles the business district and includes important industrial parks, hospital campuses, office complexes and the like.

The newest development is MEN as a specific type of MAN. MEN stands for Metropolitan Ethernet Network. This network is based on the Ethernet protocol, although it may be running on a SONET core network or a native IP network. As a user, you are able to get Ethernet service in the metro area.

What makes Ethernet so desirable? Metro Ethernet is based on standards established by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) so that you know what to expect when you order a particular Ethernet service. There are two services of particular interest to most business users. The first is E-Line which is a private dedicated point to point connection between two locations. You use E-line the same way you’d use a T1 line, except that you have many more bandwidth options and the price per Mbps is often much lower than traditional telecom services.

The other service of note is E-LAN, a private LAN service. But you already have a LAN, right? Not like this one. E-LAN is a metro network version of the LAN. It connects the individual LANs at each of your metro locations to make one large bridged LAN connecting all of them in a layer 2 meshed network. It’s as if all those different buildings were really just different departments in the same building.

How do you connect to the MAN? Typical methods include T1 lines, DS3 and OC3 or OC12 fiber last mile connections. However, if you want to take advantage of Ethernet services like E-LAN, you’ll need EFM or Ethernet in the First Mile. You can use Ethernet over Copper for bandwidths from 1 to 100 Mbps. Higher speeds require Gigabit Ethernet or 10 GigE fiber optic service.

In some downtown areas, there is such as thing as a fixed wireless MAN. This is different from 3G and 4G cellular wireless intended for smartphones. Fixed wireless operates on private licensed frequencies with directional transmission from the service provider to all-weather terminal equipment mounted to the roof of each customer. High speeds, excellent security and fast installation characterize fixed wireless MAN.

What type of metro networking will work best for your business or organization? The best way to evaluate your choices is to get a list of available services and pricing for Metropolitan Area Networks serving your location.

Telx Cloud Exchange Reduces Service Lag Time

The idea behind cloud services is that you can shut down your local data center and rent everything you need in the way of infrastructure, platform and software from a service provider somewhere out there. You’ll save a ton of money and the users will never know the difference. Except some of them do notice a difference. Things can bog down in the cloud.

How can that be? One premise of cloud computing is that there is a near infinite well of resources to draw from. You need more processing, you bring it online almost instantly. You need more disk storage, you take it. After all, there is plenty to go around. So how can responses that were snappy when the data center was in the basement become sluggish when the same facilities are in the cloud?

It all comes down to connectivity. Everybody knows that electrical signals move at the speed of light, right? You might guess that’s so fast that it shouldn’t make any difference if the wire is a hundred feet long or a thousand miles. At the speed of light a human can’t possibly detect the travel time of electrical impulses over wires and fiber optic cables. That’s right, isn’t it?

It sure sounds nice in theory, but in practice the speed of light isn’t infinite and the speed of communication signals never gets near light speeds anyway. Remember that the speed of light so often quoted is in a vacuum. That’s 186,000 miles per second when your laser beam is shooting through space. On terrestrial circuits, 186,000 miles per second translates to 186 miles per millisecond or 10 milliseconds for 1,860 miles. Those signals can’t even go that fast because any medium slows them down. You’ll be lucky to go 2/3 as fast, or a millisecond for every 124 miles.

Are we forgetting something? You bet. There’s no such thing as communicating over one long strand of pure wire or fiber. There’s circuitry at both ends and amplifiers, regenerators, add-drop multiplexers and other equipment in-between. Those will add milliseconds or tens of milliseconds more.

That’s still nothing compared to what happens when packets are routed on the Internet. They get from point A to point B alright. But they seldom go in a straight line. They go from router to router to router to router and eventually to the destination. There’s no guarantee the next packet will take the same route as the last one. There’s also no guarantee that the packet will even get there intact. Oh, one is missing? TCP/IP will resend it and all will be well. The file being transferred will certainly be intact at the other end, but how long did it take to replace all the lost packets and wait for traffic jams congesting certain nodes?

Cloud providers and companies sensitive to lag time, also known as latency, are taking a close look at colocation to have the shortest and most direct communications paths possible. A step beyond even standard colocation facilities is the new cloud exchange service from Telx. It’s branded cloudXchange and it may be the future of data centers.

Telx’s breakthrough comes in inviting cloud service providers to move in with them, literally. A service provider can locate their infrastructure in one or all 15 Telx facilities. What they gain is access to a wealth of carriers who have created point of presence within the Telx facilities and major corporations, content delivery networks and others who are just down the hall in the same building. For long haul connections, Telx has access to low latency fiber routes between data centers and to worldwide destinations.

This may be where we’re all headed. Instead of every company having its own server racks connected directly to the corporate LAN, most infrastructure will be outsourced to a cloud service provider or collocated in the same building to form a hybrid cloud. User connectivity will be over high speed dedicated lines, perhaps just to the nearest colo facility where service providers will have a portion of their infrastructure. A separate Internet access path will be available to browse the Web, share email with outsiders, and connect with consumers.

Are you a user or provider of cloud services who is unhappy with their networking connections? Perhaps you can benefit from an upgrade to higher bandwidth, lower latency connectivity to get rid of the lags that are plaguing your business processes.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

Gigabit Ethernet vs SONET

With the expansion of video content and moves to cloud services, business bandwidth now easily pushes the Gigabit per second level. This certainly means a move from copper to fiber optic services. But did you know that there are two types of fiber optic bandwidth to choose from? They are SONET and Gigabit Ethernet.

SONET is the original fiber protocol developed by the telephone companies to transport large numbers of simultaneous telephone calls between switching centers and internationally. SONET stands for Synchronous Optical NETwork. There is an international version of this protocol called SDH for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy. Together they are often referred to a SONET/SDH.

SONET’s origins go back to the initial development of digitized telephone conversations and the transmission of these a groups using trunks known as T1 lines. The larger T3 lines can carry the equivalent of 28 T1 lines or a data bandwidth of 45 Mbps. There are no faster copper telco standards. The next step up is OC-3 at 155 Mbps. That’s enough to transport 3 DS3 circuits and, indeed, the protocol is designed to easily multiplex and demultiplex lower level services. When you order a DS3 today, it will be transported most if not all of the way multiplexed into a OC service. A device called an ADM or Add-Drop Multiplexer gets the service on and off the optical network.

You’ve probably guessed that OC stands for Optical Carrier. There are a number of optical carrier levels that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.24 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.49 Gbps, OC-192 at 9.95 Gbps and OC-768 at 39.8 Gbps. When you hear about 10 Gbps SONET, it is an OC-192 service. The 40 Gbps that many carriers use for long haul transmission is OC-768.

What about intermediate rates? Not all levels between 1 and 768 are defined. Others, such as OC-9, OC-18, OC-36 and OC-96 are standardized but not generally offered in service.

SONET/SDH is set up in ring arrangements with two separate fiber strands for each ring. They are redundant circuits, so if one fails the other can pick up the load within 50 mSec.

Ethernet is a completely different protocol developed by the computer industry rather than the telephone companies. It is based on packets rather than telephone channels. Most LAN connected devices have a NIC or Network Interface Card that supports 10/100/1000 Ethernet. That means the device can run at 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps (1 Gbps). Corporate LANs may now run at 1 Gbps with some parts of the network using 10 Gbps or 10 GigE.

The equivalent of Ethernet in the LAN for local networks is Ethernet WAN or Wide Area Network. Switched Ethernet used for WAN applications is also called Carrier Ethernet. If the service is local to a particular city or metro area, it is often called Metro Ethernet or Metropolitan Ethernet and the network is referred to as a MAN or Metro Area Network.

Like telco services, Ethernet may be delivered over copper or fiber. Twisted pair copper telephone line can be used up to 100 Mbps. That speed is also available over coaxial copper cable through Cable systems. Beyond that, fiber optic connections can deliver 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps for business applications.

Ethernet is designed to be far more scalable than SONET. Instead of ordering a particular service level, such as OC-24, you order an Ethernet port capable of handling a maximum speed, say 1 Gbps. With the port in place, you can pay for Gigabit Ethernet if you need that much, or you can order 250 Mbps or 500 Mbps Ethernet and upgrade quickly and easily when the need arises.

Which fiber optic service should you order? In general, Ethernet is less expensive per Mbps than SONET. Sometimes the price savings can be dramatic. The one sticking point is that you need to have the service installed in your building. You may have one or the other services now or nothing at all. The cost of construction to bring in the right fiber from the right carrier can outweigh the monthly lease costs. You should know, though, that Ethernet can often be carried on SONET and that competitive carriers are hungry to get new buildings on their networks. These factors can affect the availability and pricing of fiber optic services to your building.

Fiber optic build-outs are progressing rapidly and the demand for high speed bandwidth increases. Even if you went out for bids a year ago, the situation may have changed for the better since then. The best thing to do is get new prices and availability for fiber optic bandwidth services for your particular business location.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

Cable, T1 and EoC

Today, there are three excellent broadband options for the small to medium size business. They cost roughly the same, but offer different options. Which do you choose? Let’s take a closer look at business-class Cable, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper.

We’ll start with T1 lines because they are the mainstay of SMB connectivity. T1 lines come in several flavors depending on what you want to do with them. They’re all based on the same technology developed by the telephone industry half a century ago.

T1 is a T-carrier technology based on transmitting digital signals over ordinary twisted pair copper wiring. It takes two copper pair to make one T1 line. One pair is used for upload, the other for download. When used for telephony, one pair is talk and the other is listen. The speed of the digital signal on the line is 1.5 Mbps. This doesn’t vary. The equipment at each end of the line is synchronized to maintain a steady bit rate regardless of whether anything is being transmitted or not.

Originally, the purpose of this arrangement was to transmit telephone calls in channels called DS0s. There are 24 channels on a T1 line. You can use them separately or combine all the channels to make one large broadband pipe. The most common T1 telephone line now is called a T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. It has 23 separate phone lines plus one channel for signaling and Caller ID.

A broadband T1 line delivers a fully symmetrical bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. The upload and download speeds are the same. This line can connect directly between two business locations as a private line or it can be used to connect to the Internet or another network, such as a MPLS cloud network. When used as an Internet connection, the arrangement is called a dedicated T1 Internet connection. Dedicated means that the full bandwidth is always available for your use only.

The most direct competitor to T1 is now Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet over Copper uses the same twisted pair telephone wiring that T1 lines use. The main difference is that the equipment on each end uses a more advanced technology to transport higher bandwidth through each copper pair. Often multiple pair in the same binder cable are used to bring in a higher bandwidth EoC service.

Ethernet over Copper is available is bandwidths from 1 Mbps on up to typically 20 Mbps. In some areas, it is now possible to get speeds as high as 90 or 100 Mbps delivered over copper pair. Those are bandwidth levels that have demanded fiber optic connections until recently. EoC is also designed to be highly scalable. You order and EoC port at the speed you ultimately expect to need but only sign up for the speed you need now. In the future, you can have that speed raised by simply calling your service provider and the change will be made in days or even hours.

A comparable service priced the same as a T1 line is 2x2 Mbps Ethernet or 3x3 Mbps Ethernet. Those designations mean that you get the same speed for upload and download, just like with a T1 line. Note that the bandwidth is as much as twice as high, however.

The third option is business class Cable broadband. This service is offered by Cable TV companies, such as Comcast, that also provide consumer broadband. The coaxial cables used for Cable TV have tremendous bandwidth capacity and can easily transport broadband as well as television signals. You connect via a Cable modem. The latest Cable modem standard is DOCSIS 3.0 that can deliver 50 or 100 Mbps to business users.

It may seem amazing that you can get 50 or 100 Mbps for the same price as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line, but there are some differences in the services. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. You’ll find that your bandwidth varies during the day depending on how heavily other users are uploading and downloading. Also, Cable bandwidth is not symmetrical. You may be getting 100 Mbps in the download direction, but your upload path will be only 10 or 15 Mbps. That may not matter if you are primarily accessing Web pages or watching video clips. It could be a problem if you expect to be transmitting video service or uploading very large files frequently.

Cable does have one extra advantage in that you can get what’s called a “triple play” service. That’s broadband, telephone and television all on the same cable for one bundled price. This is especially attractive to businesses that have waiting rooms for the public, like doctor’s offices or auto service facilities. There are special bundle prices for public businesses like bars and restaurants.

Which bandwidth solution is best for your business? Why not get prices and availability for Cable broadband, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper for your business location? Then pick the solution that makes the most sense for your applications.



Note: Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Computer Tech Support Online

You know how it is. Your new computer runs just fine for the longest time. Then something goes wonky. Now what? You try checking it out as best you can, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything obvious amiss. Well, there are those 3 inch thick manuals at the bookstore. Or, you could pack it up and haul it to the big-box service counter and hope they can find what’s wrong. Oh, that’s going to cost big time and who knows when you’ll get your computer back. Maybe you should just live with the problems... or is there a better option?

Indeed, there is. Have you thought of trying an online tech support service? Most problems aren’t hardware failures where somebody has to heat up a soldering iron. Your trouble is most likely some misconfiguration or one of those pesky viruses that slow everything to a crawl and try to steal your personal information.

These are the kind of problems that are suited to remote diagnosis by technical experts with specialized software tools. You’ll give a support tech temporary access to your computer via the Internet and they’ll run a diagnostic suite to analyze your system status. Once the root cause is found, they can also fix it remotely. Your computer will never leave your desk and you’ll be interacting with your support technician. That sounds a lot better than having someone in a back room poking around doing who knows what whenever they happen to get around to it.

Are you frustrated with your slow or otherwise non-functioning PC? If so, why not give the experts at Tee Support a try before you unplug everything and drop it off for weeks at a computer store? Start a FREE PC Health Checkup Now! Who knows? You could be back in business within the hour.

MPLS VPLS Offers Virtual Private LAN Service

Nearly every business has its own LAN or Local Area Network based on some combination of wired and wireless Ethernet. For businesses with a single office, everything is self-contained other than a single broadband connection to the Internet. What about businesses with many locations that include branch offices, franchises, warehouses, factories and data centers? Each of those locations also has its own self-contained LAN. The question is how to best connect them together.

There are all sorts of schemes used to provide inter-office connectivity, including using the Internet as a VPN or Virtual Private Network. Other companies, seeking more security or higher performance have created their own private networks using dedicated private lines from each location back to headquarters. This is an elegant, but both expensive and management intensive solution. Is there anything better?

The introduction of MPLS networks created the opportunity for companies to get out of the proprietary network business and turn that traffic over to a privately run network that could interconnect their many locations in a secure and high performance fashion. There’s a substantial cost savings involved because MPLS networks aren’t dedicated to the traffic of only one customer. The cost of the network is amortized over the entire customer base, reducing the cost for each.

Isn’t this the same as using the Internet to communicate? Not by a long shot. The Internet is a public resource that allows easy access to anyone and everyone with the modest price of a connection. There are no performance or security guarantees. Even so, for connection to the general public, the Internet is a terrific bargain. It’s just that you may not want your internal company communications on such a public network.

MPLS networks have inherently better security because they don’t use IP routing in their core. Instead they use a proprietary system called label switching that determines how packets get from one location to another. It’s all very deterministic and programmed by the network operator to ensure that each company’s data is visible only to that company. Resources are managed to ensure a committed level of bandwidth and technical characteristics such as latency, jitter and packet loss.

It sounds like MPLS networks are ideal for interconnecting business locations. In fact, MPLS networking has been growing rapidly and now includes the ability to connect to sites nationwide and even internationally. The quality of service controls make it particularly well suited to support latency sensitive applications such as VoIP telephony and teleconferencing.

VPLS is a particular service offered by MPLS networks. It stands for Virtual Private LAN Service. Like any MPLS network, it interconnects two or more locations anywhere served by the network. But VPLS has some unique characteristics. It’s not just a mechanism to transport traffic. It’s a system that interconnects multiple LANs as if they were all part of a single bridged LAN. In other words, two offices on opposites coasts are just as close on the network as if they were right down the hall from each other.

With VPLS, companies can truly create virtual organizations that are co-located on the network if not physically. There are a couple of technical requirements that must be met to do this. The virtual LAN depends on everything being connected through layer 2 switching rather than layer 3 routing. That means you’ll need Ethernet connections to the MPLS network. These can be Ethernet over Copper, Fiber, Fixed Wireless, or DS1 (T1) connections as appropriate. VPLS arrangements are also meshed by nature. They operate on an any-to-any basis, just like you’d expect on a LAN.

Does a VPLS network sound like what you need to interconnect your business locations? If so, get prices and availability on MPLS VPLS Ethernet Virtual Private LAN Service for as many locations as you need to support.

100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper Rivals Fiber

Ethernet over Copper is rapidly taking over from T1 lines as the bandwidth service of choice for low to medium speed applications. Multiple copper pair can support bandwidths of 20 Mbps up to 50 Mbps in some locations. Beyond that, it’s assumed that fiber optic service has to be brought in. Not any more. Now there’s 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper available from Paetec.

Twisted pair copper has a legacy of connecting central offices to telephone sets for over a century. The enormous installed base of copper connections makes this an extremely valuable resource even in the era of digital communications and fiber optic cabling. The problem is that unshielded small gauge copper wire loops were engineered to carry low frequency audio signals up to several miles. It’s a tribute to clever engineering that these same pairs can be repurposed to carry high frequency digital signals.

Paetec is applying Ethernet over bonded Copper Products from Overture Networks as the technology behind this amazing bandwidth fete. Overture acquired the technology when it purchased Hatteras Networks earlier this year. Their HN product series can deliver up to 15 Mbps per copper pair depending on distance. By bonding up to 32 pairs, bandwidths approaching 500 Mbps can be achieved. Typically, the equipment is used to support user bandwidths from 10 to 100 Mbps.

Speeds in the hundreds of Mbps, even up to 1 Gbps, over copper have been announced in experimental setups. Now, you can order 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper as a standard bandwidth service. This is particularly significant in that 100 Mbps “Fast” Ethernet is a standard LAN speed. By extending this into the MAN and WAN, the bandwidth speed bump experienced when exiting the office is eliminated. Two locations can share files as if they were side by side in the same building.

Ethernet over Copper technology has been gaining in popularity as the need for higher speed network connections increases. Business automation, medical file transfers, video transport and the move to cloud based services is rendering low bandwidth connections obsolete. T1 line used to be considered a broadband service at 1.5 Mbps. Now many companies need at least 10 Mbps to get their jobs done. So, too, wireless backhaul was fine using T1 lines as long as the traffic was voice and low speed data. Since 3G and 4G have become so popular, slow backhaul is no longer acceptable.

Why not just switch to fiber optic service with it’s unlimited bandwidth? Someday that will be the case. Right now, ready fiber access is available in core business districts and colocation centers. Many metropolitan buildings remain unlit for fiber. Small and medium size towns are relatively fiber-poor. Yes, there is a lot of fiber construction underway. But why pay a king’s ransom and wait six months to a year when there are multi-pair copper cables already run into your building? By employing Ethernet over Copper technology to take full advantage of that existing wiring, you can have higher bandwidths now without enormous construction costs.

Can high speed copper-based bandwidth be the solution that works best for your company? Find out by getting availability and pricing for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet over Copper service for your business locations.