SIP Trunking and Internet On a T1

Lots of smaller companies have T1 lines for dedicated Internet access. They installed these lines after frustration with consumer-grade broadband options didn’t perform well enough or were unavailable due to location. T1 gives them highly reliable, rock solid bandwidth at prices that have declined steadily over the years. They love their T1 lines. What they may be unaware of, however, is that they could be getting both broadband and telephone service over that same T1 line.

Traditional T1 line service comes in a number of flavors. The original implementation for the telephone industry consists of 24 channels of digitized telephone service on two pair of twisted copper phone wires. A device called a channel bank converts the multiplexed digital signal to and from 24 individual analog business phone lines.

A more popular version of the T1 telephone line is called ISDN PRI. It’s very popular with companies that have their own in-house PBX telephone system. With ISDN PRI, you get 23 outside lines plus a switching and data channel that speeds up connections and provides Caller ID for the phones.

Yet another implementation of T1 is the T1 data line. This version supplies point to point data connections between business locations or dedicated Internet access. The bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps for a single T1 line, but multiple lines can be bonded together to increase bandwidth to as high as 10 or 12 Mbps.

Most companies have a T1 line for data or Internet access plus separate telephone service, or one T1 for broadband Internet and a separate ISDN PRI to run the phone system. Smaller companies don’t get involved with multiple T1 lines because they only have a few office phones and don’t need 23 outside lines. They simply pay one phone bill for the number of business lines they have and a separate bill for their T1 service.

An option that may work just as well and save small businesses money is to have both the telephone service and Internet broadband on the very same T1 line. A conventional T1 line isn't intended to do this. It is set up to work as a telephone trunk line or a high speed data line. The configurations aren’t interchangeable. However, there is another flavor of T1 service that does provide the dual function of voice with data.

The traditional name for this service is Integrated T1. The latest offerings are called SIP trunking or SIP trunking with Internet.

What’s the difference? Actually, they are more alike than different. The way it works is that the service provider installs a device called an IAD or Integrated Access Device at each end of the T1 line. This device combines voice and data by converting them to a common protocol, which happens to be IP packets. Once in packet format, the IAD can manage line bandwidth to ensure that voice packets have priority over data packets so that telephone call quality is maintained no matter what sort of Internet activity is taking place.

Line bandwidth is shared. If there are no calls in progress, all 1.5 Mbps is used for broadband Internet. When a phone is picked up, bandwidth for that call, typically 90 Kbps or less, is reserved for that call. The rest is still used for the Internet. Note that the phone calls don’t actually go over the Internet. They simply share the T1 line connection to the service provider. The more calls that are simultaneous in progress, the more bandwidth is reserved for voice packets and the bandwidth for Internet access is proportionally reduced.

This process is sometimes called dynamic T1 or dynamic line service to reflect that the proportioning between voice and data is handled automatically. So, where does SIP trunking come in?

SIP is the switching protocol for VoIP phones. SIP trunking is a process of providing public phone system lines to a VoIP telephone system using the native Session Initiation Protocol. A SIP trunk will connect directly to your IP PBX for IP phones. It can also be configured to offer an analog handoff so you can use the analog business phones you have now.

What’s exciting about SIP Trunking and Internet on a T1 line is that it can often be less expensive than buying a T1 line and phone service separately. One company that specializes in this product is Vocal IP Networx. They can save you money by providing a single telecom bill each month at a cost that may well be less than what you pay now for the same quality of service.

Do you suspect that you might save money by consolidating your telephone and Internet service with one provider? If so, get competitive pricing for SIP Trunking and Internet on a T1 line and similar services and see if this option makes sense for you.

Have Documents Signed In The Cloud

The cloud is responsible for emptying many a server room. Now it’s time to start emptying those file cabinets and the mailing room as well. Next to go is the decidedly old fashioned process of putting pen to paper to sign official documents. No need anymore, now that electronic signature has arrived.

What makes this all possible is a change in the law that establishes the validity of electronic signatures in the US under the ESIGN and UETA laws. Similar laws have been passed in other countries as well. If you haven’t heard of this, do a little research and satisfy yourself that you can switch to electronic signatures on your important documents and have them just as valid as ink on paper.

Electronic signatures free businesses from the time and expense of copying paper documents, sending them through the mail to be signed, and then waiting for the completed documents to be returned and placed in the files. Even FAXed documents have costs and time lags involved. That assumes that the party you want to sign has access to a fax machine. No? It’s a long trek down to the office supply or shipping store to use their fax machine.

All of this activity is now sped up, if not to the speed of light then at least to the speed of the Internet. Don’t bother trying to write your own documents on a word processor and then email them to the person in question. Standard email and its typed signature files aren’t worth much of anything other than easy communication. What you need is a controlled process that meets the requirements of the electronic signature laws but is still painless for both you and your clients.

Such a service is RightSignature. This is a cloud-based service that creates secure, legally binding agreements through an electronic signature process you can use from any Internet connected computer or even a smartphone. Here’s how it works. First you create your document as a Microsoft Word file, PDF, Google Doc or web applications such as FreshBooks. You upload this to your RightSignature account. Then enter the name and email of each signer on the document plus any CC’s that you want to include. Describe the subject of the document, add a message if you wish, and click to send.

Whoosh! Your signers are automatically notified by email that you’ve send them a document to sign. They sign online using their computer mouse or gestures on an iPhone to create a handwritten signature that looks like it was made with a pen. Note that this all takes place online in the secure RightSignature website. When complete, all signers and cc’s get a copy of the document as a PDF email attachment. The document includes a signature certificate which contains the signer information, audit log and unique identification number. The document signed online is stored in a secure archive so you can retrieve it at any time. No more worries about misfiled documents or damage from fires or floods.

In this age of the Internet and the cloud, doesn’t it make sense to gain the productivity advantages of electronic signatures? If that sounds right to you and your business generates documents that need legally valid signatures, then take a 5 document free trial of RightSignature now. See if you can really face going back to the old days of pen and paper once you’ve tried the new electronic way.

Triple Play For Business

One of the hottest trends in consumer telecom services is called the “residential triple play.” This is a bundling that combines three electronic services that nearly every home subscribes to. They are television, telephone and broadband.

The bundling is made possible because one provider can deliver all three at a combined price that is lower than buying the same services from three separate providers. Cable companies are in the best position to deliver the triple play, but the package is also offered by telephone companies and wireless service providers. The advantage for cable is due to the very high bandwidth capability of their HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) facilities.

That’s great for consumers, but what about business? Is there such a thing as triple play for business? You bet. It’s available for businesses with their own business locations.

Not surprisingly, a huge provider of triple play is Comcast. You may know that Comcast is the largest Cable TV provider in the US. Comcast broadband is hugely popular with both consumers and small businesses. But did you also know that Comcast is the 3rd largest phone company in America?

The idea that the coaxial cable from a Cable company is pretty much the same as the one that connects the TV antenna on the roof is way out of date. Today’s cable is a sophisticated collection of multiplexed channels that carry voice, video and data equally well.

Multiplexing is the technique that divides the 1,000 MHz bandwidth capacity of the coaxial combined fiber and copper transmission facility into neatly spaced 6 MHz channels. Those channels are exactly the same size as over the air TV channels so it’s easy to fit one TV station per channel. However, those channels can be used for other purposes as well.

The two most popular non-TV services on Cable are broadband and telephone. You have your choice of one or more standard business phone lines or an ISDN PRI trunk line that is bundles up to 23 lines for connection to an in-house PBX telephone system.

You probably are using DSL, satellite or T1 lines now for your business broadband service. It’s likely that you’re getting something like 1 to 2 Mbps download bandwidth. DSL can go higher, but your bandwidth decreases the further you get from the telephone company central office. Cable has such high bandwidth capacity, that it delivers business broadband at 50 to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. Comcast’s smallest service starts at 12 Mbps/2Mbps.

You’re probably wondering if you can afford a triple play package? It’s likely you can’t afford not to go this way if you have the type of business where your customers wait on-site, like a doctor’s office or auto service center. That's where the TV service of triple play has its value. There are also packages for businesses like bars and restaurants that serve a walk-in clientele. How much are we talking? About the price of that T1 line will get you faster broadband plus telephone service with basic TV channels included.

What if you don’t need television in your business? Is there such a thing as double play?

Of course. Many, many professional offices, retail stores and quick service restaurants need a combination of reliable phone service and high speed broadband to meet their needs. Get these two services cheaper than buying separately from a telephone company and an Internet service provider.

Can you cut costs while getting the same or better voice, data and video services for your company? It’s well worth your time to find out. Check availability and pricing for bundled business broadband, telephone and TV services now.

4G Wireless Broadband Options

Wireless broadband is on an upward path to take over many of the applications that have long been the domain of wireline technologies. Wireless has the convenience of portability and mobility. What’s held back deployment and more powerful applications is the limited availability and speed of wireless connections. The move to 4G wireless looks to be a potential solution.

4G or fourth generation wireless doesn’t have a strict definition, but it is roughly stated as the bandwidth typical of Cable broadband or Ethernet over Copper business connections. With this level of transmission speed and a city-wide reach, 4G wireless can take over service for desktop as well as mobile devices.

One might throw WiFi into the 4G category. The bandwidth for a, b, g, and n WiFi technologies fall into the right bandwidth category. However, WiFi is a short distance system. It works well within and nearby particular locations, such as homes, offices, restaurants, hotels, airports and even park benches. But you can’t get in your car and drive away with a WiFi connection. It will disappear as soon as you leave the parking lot. In a way, WiFi is more of a PAN or Personal Area Network like Bluetooth.

The higher power wireless technologies, including 2G & 3G are associated with cellular phone service. These are based on using networks of fixed transmitters and receivers arranged as cells with signals that fill-in the coverage between towers. The trick of turning this system into a metropolitan or wide area network is to coordinate the handoff of an existing wireless connection as the user moves from cell to cell.

The most popular wireless technology right now is 3G. It offers bandwidths similar to T1 lines and basic DSL of around 1.5 Mbps on average in metropolitan areas. You may get two or more times this speed if you happen to be near a tower with few users. This is more than adequate for many mobile uses, such as Web browsing, email and viewing video clips on smartphone screens.

Beyond limited speed, 3G also suffers from limited bandwidth availability. It shares channels with cellular telephone on the same towers. Those channels were originally sized to support expected voice traffic. They’ve been overwhelmed by the higher bandwidth requirements of Internet data traffic. That’s why carriers are so insistent on bandwidth caps.

There are a couple of different approaches to 4G wireless. The one taken by the cell phone companies is to view 4G as an upgrade to their 3G systems. There are two differing cellular system that co-exist. One is a US-centric system called CDMA that is used by Verizon, Sprint and others. The other is a more global standard called GSM that is used by AT&T and T-Mobile.

Right now, AT&T and T-Mobile have upgraded their 3G networks to a faster version of the same thing called HSPA+ that delivers up to 6 to 8 Mbps. Verizon has moved to a 4G technology called LTE that offers downloads of 5 to 12 Mbps. Sprint has gone with another 4G technology called WiMAX that delivers downloads in the 3 to 6 Mbps speed range.

As wireless continues to evolve, 4G is expected to move into two camps. LTE is the technology most discussed as a truly universal standard. WiMAX deployment actually predated LTE and has installations worldwide. Both LTE and WiMAX have technical upgrade paths that can boost download speeds to over 100 Mbps and even 1000 Mbps. This is competitive with many fiber services and ensures that 4G wireless will be with us for a long time.

One thing we’re also seeing with 4G wireless is the use of lower frequency bands that can more easily penetrate buildings. These bands came from the re-deployment of those channels from UHF TV as part of a federal auction. Clear offers 4G fixed and mobile wireless service with a telephone option over WiMAX in over 80 cities nationwide. Right now, this service offers unlimited broadband service.

Business Broadband and Phone Comparison

Small and medium size businesses have a need for both broadband Internet access and business telephone service. Years ago, the answer was easy. Order a broadband service from an Internet Service Provider and then go visit the telephone company and order your business phone lines. These are still viable options, but today you have much more to choose from.

Most smaller businesses have limited bandwidth requirements, a fairly small collection of phones and very limited budgets. What often makes the most sense is a bundled service that includes both telephone and broadband service from the same provider. There are two primary bundled services that both offer a cost savings compared to buying your phone and Internet service separately.

The first is the integrated product known as Integrated T1 service or SIP Trunking. They both use the same technique of line sharing but differ in the connection method. Depending on your location, you may get a T1 line or an Ethernet line service.

Integrated services are based on the principle that one incoming line is cheaper than two. Unlike consumer broadband phone services that combine voice and data packets willy-nilly, Integrated T1 and SIP trunks use integrated access devices at each end to keep the voice and data separate. Both give priority to voice packets. When someone picks up a phone or answers a ringing line, the bandwidth to support that phone call is reserved for the duration of the call. When the phone hangs up, that bandwidth is released to the pool.

What’s is the bandwidth pool? That’s what’s used for your broadband Internet service. Let’s say you have an integrated T1 lines and no phones are in use. The full line bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps is used for broadband access. If nobody is using the Internet, say in the middle of the night, that line just runs idle.

The flip side of the coin is when you have a dozen phones in use. Those consume half the bandwidth of the T1 line. Your broadband speed sags to 750 Kbps, which can be no trouble at all for smaller companies using the Internet for credit card verification, email, Web browsing and online ordering.

SIP trunking works like Integrated T1 in that both manage the line bandwidth and prioritize telephone calls over Internet access. That way your phone quality is maintained and the variations in broadband bandwidth may not even be noticeable. If they are, you are simply trying to do to much with too small a service. T1 lines can be bonded and Ethernet based SIP Trunks offer a wide range of bandwidths to speed things up.

You might think that SIP trunking implies a VoIP phone system. Actually, you can configure the handoff to your internal phones to be analog, SIP based VoIP or ISDN PRI for a PBX telephone system. Similar handoff options are available for Integrated T1 lines.

A competitor to the integrated services of Integrated T1 and SIP trunking is Cable broadband. The Cable systems is organized differently, with everything assigned to channels. That’s because TV stations have always had assigned channels. Now there are channels on the Cable system that carry stations that have no over the air presence. Other channels can be assigned to carry broadband Internet or telephone calls.

The channelization of cable maintains the separation of voice, data and video so that they don’t interfere. You can order telephone and business broadband from your Cable provider. You can also include TV if you have the type of business with a public waiting room, like a auto service center or doctor’s office.

Which option is best for your company? Compare business broadband and phone options for pricing, features and availability to make the best decision for your particular needs.

Move Your Paper Files To The Cloud

Ever hear of the paperless office? It’s a bit like the flying car. It always seems to be coming, but never actually arrives. Face it. We live in paper-based world and most of us are drowning under a mountain of it. Oh, not you? What’s all that stuff on your desk and in those filing cabinets?

Of course our business activities are more electronic than ever before. Improvements in manipulating, storing and transferring data have done two things for us. One, they’ve made it easier to create more paper documents. Two, they’ve kept us from drowning under an avalanche of documentation that would have grown with the increase of office productivity over the last few decades. Even so, how much time do still spend bridging the interface between paper documents and everything computerized?

The truth is that we burn a lot of time every day copying data from receipts to expense reports, entering business cards into a database or email client, documenting expenses for taxes and general accounting activities. Then those valuable pieces of paper have to be carefully filed so they don’t get lost.

The reason is simple. The only common denominator for everybody is a slip of paper. Someday there will be an accepted electronic exchange format and all that paper will go poof! Then we can leave work early and take the flying car for a cruise around town.

Until that happy day, you’re left with a decision. Do you handle the entry and filing of all those receipts & business cards yourself, hire an assistant to do it for you, or send it to the cloud?

How can paper move to the cloud? Won’t it just fall out and rain down on your head? Not if you do it right. What you need is a cloud based service called Shoeboxed. The metaphor is the classic shoebox that you carry your receipts in to the tax preparer. In this case, the shoebox is stored in the cloud and easily accessed from anywhere you happen to be.

Here’s how it works. You gather up that pile of papers on your desk, including receipts, business cards and other documents, and put them into a secure mailer. Drop it in the mail to Shoeboxed and YOUR desk is now clean. At the other end, your paper based documents will be carefully scanned and entered into a secure online database.

This is more than a mere scanning service. Shoeboxed’s specialty is creating human-verified data extraction so the important data from the page is put into an electronic format that you can easily work with. You can create and email expense reports or export data to programs such as Excel, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Constant Contact, Outlook and more.

What about receipts you get electronically? No problem. There’s a mobile app that lets you email them in or even snap a picture of a receipt or business card with your smartphone and then email it to your personal database.

You’re grinning, now, from ear to ear aren’t you? This sounds a lot better than all that paper shuffling you keep putting off, doesn’t it? Well, wait no longer. You can get a free trial of Shoeboxed right now and see if makes your life easier and frees up time you can put to better use.

Stress Testing For Your Website

You’ve built your website and bought hosting. Now you’ve launched a massive marketing campaign designed to recover all that time and expense through online sales. Everything is going smoothly until, horror of horror, the entire ecommerce enterprise comes crashing down. Worse, yet, it was during huge surge of visitor activity. What rotten luck.

Luck? I don’t think so. You could have known this was going to happen. How? By stress testing your website in advance of the traffic onslaught. Many companies don’t and find the weak spots in their infrastructure the hard way. The most unfortunate get brought down during the holiday rush and don’t recover in time to take advantage of the bubble in shopper traffic.

Don’t let this happen to you. Know where you stand before you find out the hard way. Load testing will tell you in short order how much capacity you really have so you can be sure to handle the traffic that will come your way or beef up the system while you have time.

BrowserMob load testing has the resources to give your web properties a run for their money, so that they can really run for the money when the opportunity permits. This is a cloud based service that make serious load testing affordable for companies large and small. In fact, the best deal of all is a free trial offer. Give BrowserMob a chance to stress test your site and see how it stands up.

The BrowserMob cloud generates massive amounts of simulated traffic using virtual users, real browser users or a combination of both. The traffic comes from a large pool of IP addresses to simulate actual visitors coming in from various parts of the country or around the world.

Not quite sure how to perform this type of testing? No problem. BrowserMob has a world class support staff to provide you with expert testing advice. Some of the features you’ll be interested in are real browsers to mimic the actual user experience, True AJAX support, flash video streaming and a maximum concurrent browser pool of up to 5,000 browsers. The maximum data throughput is over 6,000 Mbps. That’s the type of traffic that could cost or make you a fortune depending on whether your site can support it.

Can load testing tell you things about your website that you’ll be really glad to know? There’s one way to find out. Take a free cloud-based load test and see how it works. Then upgrade as needed to get the basic and premium testing you need to ensure the performance of your web properties.

POTS Phone Service For Multiple Locations

Companies with many branch offices or other business locations spread out over the US, Canada and Puerto Rico can find themselves drowning in paperwork. Is it all the forms they need to file with the government? No, it’s just the phone bill... or should I say bills - lots and lots and lots of phone bills.

How does this happen? It happens a little at a time. First the business is established in a single location. They order business telephone services and dedicated Internet and the bill or 2 bills arrive each month. The manager or someone delegated pours over the bill each month looking for charges that don’t belong there, services that are no longer used, or employee abuse of phone privileges.

Soon the need arises for a branch office in the next state. That office orders its own phone service and gets its own bills. Each month, management at that site spends an hour or so perusing the bill before submitting it for payment.

Now, multiply this activity by 10, 20, 100, or 1,000 locations. Similar paper bills come in on completely separate accounts from completely separate phone service providers. The same reviews are simultaneously conducted. All the bills are separately submitted for payment. Can’t this all be coordinated somehow to achieve greater efficiency? Not hardly. Every locations has its own arrangement with its own incumbent or competitive service provider. Since each account is unique, there’s no commonality to take advantage of.

Now, replace that horror scenario with a single vendor that serves all locations and consolidates all those bills into one bill. This vendor has tools available for Telecom Expense Management (TEM) to make auditing telecom bills, tracking disputes and managing contracts a far easier task. Think of the hours saved when your bills are consolidated.

Who is this vendor? It is Ernest Communications, the nation’s largest telecom company that specializes in large multi-location POTS accounts through the United States. Ernest began in earnest, if you will, as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that opened the door to competitive local phone companies using the resources of the Public Switched Telephone Network. Since then, they’ve installed the facilities needed to give you reliable and affordable analog business phone service anywhere you locate.

Why analog? Isn’t the world going digital? True, large organizations are migrating to enterprise VoIP to converge their multi-location voice and data networks. This is a sophisticated process that offers cost and productivity improvements IF you can afford the capital expense involved and IF you have the resources to engineer, install and maintain the facilities.

Most smaller companies have only a handful of phones, maybe a dozen or two at each location. Some have only a single phone or a few multi-line desk sets that they picked up at the local office supply store. Their data network is a broadband connection to the Internet, if they even have one. What does the IT staff do all day? What IT staff?

These businesses are quite happy with traditional analog telephony, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. It’s reliable, voice quality is excellent and pricing is reasonable for a few phone lines. This is where Ernest Communications excels. They can do something other companies can’t. They can get you analog phone service for all locations you have and then consolidate the bills and offer extra benefits like blocking of 3rd party charges, elimination of hidden fees and highly competitive long distance rates.

If one or more locations is large enough to have an on-site PBX system, Ernest can supply a dedicated local PRI service to bundle up to 23 outside lines on one standard digital trunk line that plugs right into a jack on your PBX box. Are you using both telephone and Internet? Ernest offers Integrated T1 circuits that combine 6 telephone lines plus dynamically allocated broadband data on a single T1 line. They supply the Integrated Access Device that makes this system work.

Could you benefit from having a single competitive service provider who can get you excellent rates for each of your business locations, with service customized to meet your requirements and a consolidated bill to make telecom management easier? If you have multiple locations dealing with multiple phone companies, you should get competitive quotes for analog POTS telephone, Integrated T1 and ISDN PRI service that covers all of your needs with easy inclusion of future business expansion.

Can You Believe 200 Mbps EoC?

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology is wildly popular as a way to get mid-band Ethernet connections without the time delay and expense of having to bring in fiber optic service. Sometimes seen as a stopgap approach, EoC now challenges fiber services on a permanent basis.

One of Ethernet over Copper’s target markets is businesses using T1 lines or new ventures looking at T1 services. T1 is a standardized, reliable and affordable telecom service that delivers 1.5 Mbps over one or two pair of twisted copper pair telco wiring. T1 is a telephone trunking technology that has been pressed into service to also carry data packets.

EoC takes on T1 by providing more bandwidth for the same money using the same twisted pair copper wires. These are leased line telco connections that are already installed in nearly all businesses and being used for telephone and perhaps Internet service.

EoC is a newer technology than T1 and more aligned with the computer networking industry than the public telephone system. More efficient modulation techniques and fierce competition from competitive service providers are what make Ethernet over Copper a real bargain for dedicated Internet service, MPLS network access and point to point private lines.

What bandwidths are available from EoC? Entry level is typically 2 to 3 Mbps, priced at similar levels to 1.5 Mbps T1 lines. It’s fairly easy to upgrade that service level to 5, 10, 15 or 20 Mbps. T1 line bonding provides a bandwidth growth path for T1 users, but gets expensive and unworkable above 10 or 12 Mbps. Companies that need higher line speeds move to DS3 and SONET services, such as OC-3 fiber optic. Once you have fiber optic service installed, upgrading bandwidth is fairly cut and dry. It’s just a matter of being able to afford the much higher lease prices.

Where things get dicey is when fiber optic service isn’t available anywhere in the area or is a mile or two away and it’s up to you to pay the construction costs to bring in the fiber. That can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars and maybe higher. Faced with this dilemma, many companies choke on the quote and either decide to do without or move to a building that is already lit for fiber.

Ethernet over Copper is now providing an upgrade path without the need for fiber construction. Just a year or so ago, the upper end of EoC was considered to be 50 Mbps. Above that, you go to fiber. Intellifiber, a subsidiary of the competitive service provider PAETEC, recently launched 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper service and is reported by Carrier Ethernet News to have installed 200 Mbps EoC service for one customer.

A bandwidth of 200 Mbps exceeds the OC-3 SONET fiber optic bandwidth of 156 Mbps and is plenty for many medium size and even larger businesses. Companies moving to the cloud, streaming video, transmitting high resolution medical image records, engaged in computer aided design work and the like need such high bandwidths. Some will need to press on to Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE to meet their needs. That’s definitely fiber territory... for now.

EoC works its magic by bonding as many as 8 to 16 copper pair to get the higher bandwidths. Unlike T1, the Achilles heel of higher line bandwidth is distance limitations. You need to be within a mile or so of the central office to realize 100 Mbps or higher EoC. Lower speeds can be engineered farther away. Even so, many potential users are close enough for EoC and have the copper bundles running into their buildings. It’s fiber that still isn’t installed.

Are you frustrated by the lack of fiber connectivity at your current business location? Why not take a look at prices and availability of Ethernet over Copper service as a bridge to higher bandwidths or a permanent replacement for fiber optic lines.

$8.33/mo Small Business & Residential VoIP

What’s the best deal in VoIP phone service for residential and small business users? No, it’s not the ones you see advertised on TV. In fact, you’ve probably never heard of this phone company. It’s something of a best kept secret that needs to be shared.

I’m going to tell you how you can get unlimited “free” calls to the US and Canada, plus an hour of free international calling every month, plus a free 2nd line for the astounding price of $8.33 per month. No, you don’t have to plug your phone into your computer to make this work. This is a broadband phone system that works with your router or modem and shares your Internet connection with your computers. The phones will receive calls or let you call out regardless of whether your computer is on or off.

The company you want to know is Phone Power. Their expertise is in Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP communications. They can handle all size businesses, but this special offer is targeted at the vast majority of telephone users. Those are homes, home offices and small businesses that need only a couple of phone lines.

The way this works is by using an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor. This is a small box about the size of a wireless router or cable modem that Phone Power leases you for free while you maintain your service. There are two network connections on the back. One you plug into your broadband modem. That’s the WAN connection that hooks to the Internet. From now on, the Internet will do double duty as your phone line as well as your computer line. The second network jack is for your computer or router. In other words the ATA sits between your modem and computer equipment so it can maintain voice quality with both phones and computers are being used.

There are two regular phone jacks on the back of the ATA. Two? Yes, you can plug two phones into the box and use both of them at the same time. This is a feature you don’t generally get with any phone service. It’s always one line or you pay double for two lines. Phone power gives you two “cloned” lines for the same price. The reason they are called cloned is because both these lines share the same phone number. Both phones will ring with a call comes in. But, you can call out separately and make two independent calls through the magic of VoIP line cloning. Pretty handy in a business office or at home with loquacious teenagers.

By the way, no special phones are need. Use a standard desk phone or cordless phones with multiple handsets and one base station. They all work just fine.

This is unlimited service, right? You bet. You pay a very modest monthly fee for VoIP service and you can call all the numbers in the U.S. or Canada that you like. That’s right, Canada too. Most phone services charge you extra long distance fees for calls across the border. Phone Power also gives you 60 minutes of free international calling per month and has very low international rates for countries not included or if you want to talk more.

Oh, there is one caveat. This is for typical residential and small business users. Call centers are NOT included. If you are running a call center and need an enormous call volume, EnterpriseVoIP.com will take care of your needs. Anything over 5,000 minutes per month will trigger an overage charge of 2 cents per minute by Phone Power.

So how do you get all this for a measly $8.33 per month? It’s a current special offer (may not last) that costs $199.95 per year with a second year included free as a new customer promo. Do the math and you’ll see that you are paying just $8.33/mo for unlimited phone service. Don’t want to prepay for 2 years? OK, there are other plans where you can just pay by the month for a higher, but still bargain, rate.

Does this sound like the right price and the right phone service for you? There are a tremendous number of calling features bundled-in that you would otherwise have to pay extra for with other companies. No contract, no activation fee, no equipment charge, no per minute charges. Plus a 30 day satisfaction guarantee so you can be sure the service works for you with your particular broadband provider. Learn more and order Phone Power Small Business and Residential VoIP service now, while you can get such a fantastic deal.

For Green Hosting, Come to Papa

When it comes to green hosting, your papa knows best. That’s your HostPapa, of course.

HostPapa offers extraordinary values on website hosting to begin with. You can pay less than $4 a month on the 3 year plan, while getting a free domain, no setup charges, the ability to host unlimited domains, plus free ad credits to get your web marketing efforts kick-started.

Oh, but what the restrictions on storage and bandwidth? There are none. You have access to unlimited disk space and unlimited monthly bandwidth. Why, it’s almost like being the in the cloud, but with an ultra-low fixed monthly fee. All this and green, too?

What’s the green story? You may have heard that data centers are huge energy users. It’s a double whammy. First you pay for the electricity to run the servers and appliances. Then you pay again for the electricity it takes to keep the equipment cool. If you don’t keep everything in balance, the equipment fails and you are offline.

It would be nice if all that energy were being created from renewable energy sources. But, sadly, most data centers run on whatever happens to be available without regard to the type of generation. That includes many web hosting companies. They’re in the business of hosting websites, not worrying about where the electricity comes from and what it may be doing to the environment.

Well, HostPapa doesn’t feel that way. They believe in powering their servers with renewable energy sources. They might like to put up their own wind generators, but that’s not practical in most locations. An excellent alternative is to support wind and solar projects that wouldn’t otherwise be practical. You do that by purchasing renewable green energy certificates, also called green tags. Those certificates put green energy in the grid to offset coal and gas fired generators elsewhere.

HostPapa has purchased green tags equivalent to 100% of their energy consumption. Those tags come from wind, solar, and animal waste to energy projects in the Pacific NorthWest and Canada.

With HostPapa you can feel good about your environmental choice of Web Host and get an excellent deal on hosting at the same time. In addition to the standard hosting plan that works for most users, HostPapa also offers a reseller account for those want to set up their own private branded hosting services or anyone with multiple domains who wants to keep them completely separate. A reseller account is like a bundle of hosting accounts, each with its own control panel plus a master control panel for the providers.

Reseller hosting can be used to support any number of websites. The limitation is the amount of disk space and bandwidth in your account. You can start with the smallest account that will accommodate your suite of websites and upgrade as you need more room or bandwidth.

Lots of web hosting companies have a flurry of hosting plans with a myriad of different options. HostPapa simplifies this with just a standard webhosting plan with unlimited resources plus a scalable reseller plan. They also offer a special service to create a mobile version of your site. If you have customers or clients that use iPhones, Blackberries or other mobile devices, you can make it easy for them to do business with you by offering a site optimized for mobile users.

Are you interested in green hosting at a highly attractive price with all the features you need to host your sites on the Web, check out the offers from HostPapa.

NobelDialer Makes International Phone Cards Painless

International phone rates have come down over the years, but not that much. Many people have adopted the prepaid phone card as a way to get bargain basement prices for their international phone calls. But phone cards can be a pain to use compared to just direct dialing the number you want. What would be ideal is the rates of a prepaid card with the dialing convenience of a standard long distance plan.

NobelCom has come up with an app for your favorite smartphone that makes the dialing easy again. It’s called the NobelDialer and it’s free. You have your choice of downloads for iPhone, Android or BlackBerry.

What does the NobelDialer app do? It automatically dials the access number, PINs and destination numbers for the calls you want to make. You can call your address book contacts or do a fast dial through a favorites screen. It maintains a built-in list of access numbers and call history. The NobelDialer even works with PIN-less calling cards to use ANI or automatic number identification by the service provider. If you need help, there’s a toll free number to call for assistance.

Here’s how to use the NobelDIaler. You download and install the application software for the particular brand of smartphone you own. It comes customized for iPhones, Android phones and BlackBerry devices. Then launch NobelDialer and follow a one time 3 step setup wizard to get started. What then? Start calling. Enter the country code and destination number. You don’t need to include the “011” or “+” portion of the international number.

You don’t change your long distance service or make any changes to your cell phone plan with NobelCom. This is an add-on service that you use only when you want to save money on long distance phone calls. In most cases, this means calls to another country that either cost a fortune with your current phone service or are blocked completely.

NobelCom specializes prepaid calling cards like the ones you find at convenience stores, but with more options and better rates. Prepaid calling cards can give you excellent calling rates, such as 1.2 cents per minute to France or China, 13.4 cents per minute to Afghanistan and 3.9 cents per minute to Iraq. Calls to Mexico start at 2 cents per minute, with Italy and South Korea at a mere 1.4 cents per minute. Is it possible to call overseas for less than a penny a minute? Yes. Call the United Kingdom for 0.9 cents per minute. All of these are advertised rates on the NobelCom site as of this writing.

There’s a real art to maximizing the potential of prepaid calling cards and NobelCom helps guide you through it. Every card has a certain rates and conditions. Some have rock bottom per minute rates, but charge you a weekly maintenance fee. Some have a connection fee. Rounding can be to the nearest second, minute, or multiple minutes. That’s important if you make a lot of short calls. You don’t want to make a dozen 1 minute calls but have them rounded to 4 minutes minimum. If you are going to make just one or two calls for an hour, then the rounding isn’t so important.

You can call to just about any country or from any country on Earth with prepaid calling cards. It’s just a matter of picking the right card to meet your needs. If you have a smartphone, don’t forget to get the NobelDialer and really make dialing a fast and easy process.

Low Latency WAN Options

Many companies have added low latency to their list of requirements for WAN (Wide Area Network) connections. Why has latency suddenly gained such importance and how do you get low latency?

Latency is the time it takes for packets to get from one place to another. The latency on your LAN probably isn’t a worry. The latency on your long haul WAN connections may well cause you big problems. For some specific applications, minimizing latency is the holy grail of networking.

Latency and bandwidth aren’t directly related. You can have low speed connections with very minor latency. You can also have screaming Gbps connections with horrible latency. What drives latency is distance, network architecture, and equipment design.

Here’s an example of a network setup where you can’t do much about latency. Consider television remote broadcasts. These are the ones where a van with a satellite dish on top parks at the scene of a news event. It really doesn’t matter where in the world the van and the studio are located. The TV signal is going to have a considerable latency or time delay. You see the effect all the time. If the anchor and the field reporter don’t wait a second before they respond to the conversation, they’ll talk right over the top of each other.

Why is this? It’s because the signal is being sent from the truck dish to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit at 22,236 miles above the Earth (mean sea level) and back down to another dish at the studio or network headquarters. That means the electromagnetic waves have to travel a minimum of 44,472 miles up and then back down. In practice, the distance is longer because the signal isn’t going straight up and down. Now, consider that the speed of all signals in space is 186,000 miles per second and you have at least a quarter second delay one way or a half second round trip. Any equipment in the path or additional landline connections only makes it worse.

This is why satellite broadband works great for one way TV broadcasts but terrible for VoIP conversations. One way streaming is unaffected by latency. Two way anything is definitely affected. Data file transfers aren’t terribly bothered by going through a satellite because the latency is often small compared to the transfer time. But video conferences can be awkward and real time gaming is an exercise in frustration.

The point is that if you worry about latency, stay off geosynchronous satellite connections. Even your landline and undersea connections are affected to the tune of at least a millisecond per 186 miles simply due to the speed of light. Actually, you’d never even get that minimum latency value because light slows down in copper wires and fiber optic cores. The electronics that switch and route your path will also each add a small amount of latency to the total.

So, what differentiates a low latency connection from one that doesn’t concern itself much with latency? What you want is short paths between locations and a minimum of equipment in between. That suggests private networks, not the Internet. The Internet is designed for universal access and self-healing in the event of problems. Latency is an afterthought at best.

Many of today’s top MPLS networks are engineered to minimize latency. There are relatively few label switches to route the traffic and the networks have sufficient bandwidth to prevent congestion that backs up data flow and makes latency worse. You’ll want a network that has fiber runs as direct to your locations as possible to minimize path length. If MPLS will do the job, it has definite cost advantages and can give you mesh network connections so that all sites can easily communicate.

If latency is your number one priority, you’ll do even better with direct private line connections especially designed to minimize latency. These fiber paths are as close to a straight line as you can get and there is little in the way of electronics to slow things down. The one hitch is that these connections are primarily found between major international destinations, especially those like London, Frankfurt, New York and Chicago that are financial trading centers. High speed financial trading is the number one application driving the deployment of ultra low latency fiber optic services.

Do you have a business need for lower latency connections or even a critical need to minimize latency on long haul links? If so, get availability and pricing on Low Latency Fiber Optic Networks to check your domestic and international options.

Pay As You Go Broadband

Do you realize that there are millions of frustrated Internet users who don’t have broadband yet? You do if you happen to be one of them. WiFi hotspots and public access computers are fine up to a point. But you really want and need broadband on the privacy of your home computer or when you are on the go. What do you do when you can’t get DSL or Cable broadband?

One excellent answer is to go wireless. This is what every smartphone does. But what about that desktop computer? It needs a wire plugged in the back, doesn’t it?

Not anymore. Many of today’s computers, like the Apple iMac, have wireless connectivity built-in. It’s there to make it easy to locate your computer wherever you want without the hassle of drilling holes in the wall or floor and stringing wires. Most everyone connects their broadband modem to a WiFi router to enable all sorts of devices, such as game consoles, laptop and notebook computers, Internet-enabled TVs and tablets. So, why don’t you just connect your computers to the Internet by WiFi?

Nice idea, but unless you happen to live in a restaurant or hotel, just where are you going to get a WiFi broadband signal? From a DataJack MiFi, of course.

The MiFi is a beautiful device. It’s about the size of a deck of cards. Inside is a rechargeable battery, a WiFi hotspot that connects up to 5 WiFi enabled devices, plus a 3G wireless radio. The broadband signal is provided wirelessly from a myriad of 3G cellular broadband signals that are available in most populated places and some areas out in the boonies. You can check coverage to see if the signal blankets the areas where you live, work and roam. If so, you’re in luck.

But, wait a second. Doesn’t 3G broadband require you to sign a two year contract and go through a credit check? If you march into a cell phone store and demand service, that’s exactly what happens. There’s another alternative, however. That’s the DataJack 3G nationwide wireless network. DataJack offers 3G broadband service on a pay as you go basis. That means an affordable price, no contract fees, no credit check and no deposit required. Best of all, you can use DataJack to provide broadband to your desktop as well as your laptop and tablet computers.

You have a choice of connection device. You can buy a DataJack USB device that looks like a flash drive and plug it into the computer you want to power with broadband service. It even has a microSD memory card slot so you can take files with you like you would with any USB memory drive. Unlike a standard flash drive, this one lets you take 3G broadband to whatever computer you like.

The MiFi is a bit larger, but even more powerful. Some tablet computers and other devices are enabled for WiFi but don’t have USB jacks. The MiFi lets you set up a personal WiFi hotspot at the push of a button. Include your friends and colleagues or use all the capacity for yourself. When you need to move on, push the button again and slip the MiFi into your pocket.

The DataJack wireless broadband solution is ideal for many Internet users who either can’t get wireline broadband services or just don’t stay put in any one location enough to justify paying line charges for service they only occasionally use. It’s also great for mobile users who don’t want the commitment that comes with cellular contracts or the rejection of not having a great credit rating. Other users will find it’s a great backup service that keeps you connected when the Cable or DSL goes down.

The one caveat is that this service isn’t for heavy Internet addicts. If you are always downloading video programs, every song you can find or large software packages, you’ll find the 5GB monthly fair use limit restraining. For most everyone else, this is plenty of capacity for Web browsing, email, downloading content, order entry on the go, playing games and streaming video clips.

By the way, what broadband do you have when you leave town? Little or none with standard wireline services. With DataJack, you have broadband wherever you have signal coverage nationwide. Now, that’s Internet you can take with you.

Does this sound like the type of Internet service that would work for you? If so, learn more and get your DataJack 3G Wireless broadband device and service now.

Advantages of SSL VPN

Computer security is in the back, if not the front, of every Internet user’s mind right now. Hacking, security breaches, identity theft and malicious bots are terms that show up in national news reports as well as user forums. Everything moving to the cloud is adding to the anxiety of anyone who has sensitive data and wants to keep it personal and private. Little wonder the interest in virtual private networks is greater than ever before.

What is a virtual private network and why would you want that instead of an actual private network?

The answer revolves around our desire for universal connectivity. Most companies started connecting to other locations using private line services, such as T1, DS3 and OC3. These are point to point connections that are reserved for your private use. Only you and the network operators have access to those wires and the data they are transporting. It’s fairly difficult for third parties to tap a private line and examine the packets moving back and forth.

Private lines are defined as private, but that’s not really good enough for high risk companies such as banks and brokerages. To thwart even the most dedicated line “tapper,” they encrypted their data to ensure it stayed private. Encryption is a process that takes plain text and jumbles it in such a way that it appears to be indecipherable nonsense to anyone looking. At the far end of the link, the text is decrypted and returns to its original form.

Private lines are great for communicating within organizations or with a select few suppliers, vendors, consultants and so on. But what if you want to interact with the public at large? For that you need a public, not a private, network. That’s exactly what the Internet was created to do.

The advantage of the Internet is that it connects to nearly every place and every person on Earth. That’s also its weakness. The same universal connectivity that makes it easy for billions of potential customers to reach your website makes it equally easy to do mischief or outright crime. If there was only a way to make the connection between you and your customer secure while still using the public Internet.

That solution is called the VPN or Virtual Private Network. A public network connection can be made virtually private by encrypting the packets that travel between two locations. Your particular stream of traffic is scrambled while the rest of the traffic flowing through the same network connections could be transmitted in the clear.

SSL or Secure Socket Layer is a popular technique to provide the encryption between source and destination. What makes it so popular is that SSL is supported by all modern Web browsers and many other programs, such as Email clients. There is no need to buy or configure separate encryption software used in other VPN approaches.

Anyone with an Internet connection and browser can connect securely to any site that supports SSL. The resulting connection can be called a SSL VPN. It only persists for the length of the session, but can be established at any time. You know that you are on a secure link because the address starts with https: rather than http: The “s” means secure.

Adding SSL to a site involves buying a digital certificate from a trusted certificate authority. That certificate attests to the fact that the site in question is who it says it is and not some impostor. The secure site presents the certificate to the client to prove legitimacy. It may also ask the user for authentication, such as user ID and password, to prove that the user is also legitimate.

What sites use SSL? Most any site handling financial transactions, such as banks, online stores that accept credit cards, webmail providers, cloud storage providers, remote access services, most sites that store personal data and require user logins, and businesses using the Internet to connect remote locations and home workers.

Do you need to provide secure connections for your business? If so, look into the costs and features of Affordable Virtual Private Network solutions. One or more may be just right for your particular needs.

Get Cash For Your Used or Broken iPhone

Look at the condition of your old iPhone. Darn right you replaced it. What good is the best smartphone in the world when the screen is cracked? There’s only one thing to do now - drop it in the trash and fuhgeddaboutit. Right? WRONG!

Throw away that iPhone and you are committing two unforgivable sins. First of all, you are throwing away money. Second, you are polluting the environment. Why do that when you can get cash for used or even broken iPhones?

Unbelievable, but true. There is company that will actually present you with offers for your old iPhone whether it works or not. Of course, the better the condition the more you get. But even old junkers are worth a little something. Compensation ranges from a few dollars on up to over $100 cash. I just checked the some typical compensation values and it actually says you can get over $100 for a functioning iPhone 4S. You won’t get a hundred bucks if you toss it to the curb in last week’s trash, now will you?

By the way, sending in your old iPhone won’t cost you a cent either. You just enter your contact information on a quick online form and tell them what iPhone you have and its condition and, in most cases, one or more buyers will send you a pre-paid mailer. Put your iPhone in the mailer, send it off, and wait for your moola to arrive shortly. When you think about it, that’s not much more trouble than taking out the trash and it pays a lot better.

Here's something even better. This not only works for iPhones, but all sorts of other smartphones, too. You can get cash for tablets, digital cameras, MP3 players, game consoles and e-readers as well as a wide variety of smartphones and feature phones.

Even so, you’ve got an old iPhone in the desk drawer, don’t you? Well, it’s time to get paid. Check the offers, select the best one for you and request your pre-paid equipment mailer now. Then do one more wonderful thing. Donate that found money to a good cause (like this one). You’ll feel even better.

IP Exchange - The Final Piece For VoIP

It’s no secret that the world’s telephone communications are on a fast path from circuit switched to packet switched networks. Large businesses have embraced enterprise VoIP as a way to improve productivity, reduce costs and future-proof their in-house telephone systems. Small and medium businesses are taking a close look at SIP trunking as a way to get high quality telephone and broadband service as a bundle. Consumers have taken matters into their own hands by moving to Cable broadband-telephone bundles or third party VoIP services. Yet, the PSTN persists.

What’s holding up this house of cards? Right now every VoIP system and service is an island unto itself. You’ll more often than not find that on-net calls for any particular VoIP service are free. On-net means on that particular service, unrelated to location. This is because the provider owns the network and doesn’t have to pay anyone else to handle the traffic. They are making money through the monthly fee they charge their customers for the VoIP service itself.

The same is true for large companies with their own enterprise VoIP systems. One of the big cost advantages of VoIP is that you can eliminate the separate telephone network and use your data network to transport voice, data and video. Another savings comes from keeping your voice traffic on your own network, not just within an office but also between locations. Avoid the public telephone network and you avoid the per minute charges to use it.

Therein lies the rub. The only common link between all telephones on Earth is the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Its legacy is based on switching analog phone circuits to make the phone to phone connections. Long haul circuits have long since gone digital, but a very special type of digital. The phone conversations are digitized according to an international standard, G.711, and packed into rigidly synchronized channels called DS0s. A DS0 is 64 Kbps and is the same whether being transported on a T1 or PRI trunk line right on up to a fiber optic OC-768 cable. Cellular phones have their own network standards, but are designed to interface with the PSTN to hand-off traffic.

The heart of the PSTN is both its technical specs for connecting analog and digital conversations and its switching systems called SS7. Nowadays the switching signals have their own separate paths between switching offices in a hierarchy consisting of local central offices and tandem offices that connect the local offices into one large universal network. If you want to connect with any phone on the PSTN, you need to send the signals according to the SS7 protocol.

VoIP comes as an outgrowth of the computers networking industry rather than the telephone industry. Its technology is based on IP packets and SIP switching rather than pulse code modulation channels and SS7. As you might expect, you can’t directly connect one system to the other. Analog and VoIP phone systems, including business PBX systems, connect or “terminate” their calls to the PSTN. The PSTN SS7 switches take care of getting the conversations connected from one proprietary network to another. Each time a call has to traverse the PSTN, there is a small but significant per minute access charge.

TW Telecom, a major competitive carrier, is looking to give the telephone system a nudge in the direction of eliminating the SS7 switching step. According to a recent report in Connected Planet, they are asking the FCC to classify voice calls over IP as a telecom service rather than the current status as an information service. That would get incumbent telephone companies, the heart of the old Bell system, to connect phone calls on an IP to IP basis. The benefits would include higher voice quality by eliminating the protocol conversions and lower network compensation costs.

TW’s actions are the first step in a process of creating IP Exchanges, similar to Ethernet Exchanges that share traffic between network providers and extending the reach of all Ethernet networks. It’s a matter of standardizing protocols and fees so that you have a level playing field without technical hiccups. It’s not the end of the beginning, but the beginning of the end for SS7.

Cloud Hosting vs VPS

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are a hosting solution for web sites that have grown beyond shared hosting service but don’t quite require the expense and support that comes with running a completely private server. Now there is another choice that lets you scale up and down rapidly and lets you pay only for what you use.

That answer is cloud server hosting. We’re hearing a lot of buzz about cloud computing versus running your own data center. Many companies never got to the point of investing in an full-fledged in-house data center. They don’t even get to the point of installing a rack in the back room with a few servers for web hosting, email and the like. Why? Because outsourcing all that to hosting services has become too attractive.

The smallest companies, like those run by independent professionals, small retailers, design firms and others, most likely begin with a customized template site offered by a local web services company that also provides the hosting. As they grow beyond the “brochure” site stage or want to get into their own design and hosting, they sign up with one of the low cost hosting services you find online, such as HostGator. When you’re paying less than $4 a month for a hosting plan, there’s not much incentive to do it all yourself

How can companies offer hosting for so little and still make money? The low cost hosting plans are all in the category of shared hosting. The control panel gives you the illusion that you have a server all to yourself. Not by a long shot. There can be dozens or even hundreds of other websites that you are unaware of all on that same server. Your only indication that others are using resources is that the site may run slower at times. If you use too many resources, you hosting company may contact you to say you’ve outgrown the shared hosting plan and need to move up to a virtual private server.

What’s a virtual private server? It’s the intermediate step between shared hosting and having a dedicated server all to yourself. A dedicated server gives you a complete machine with processor, memory and disk storage all under your control. It also means you have to pay for and manage an expensive resource. If you don’t need all those those resources, they just go to waste. If you need more, you have to contract for a larger dedicated server or a cluster of servers. That gets very pricey very fast.

VPS hosting takes advantage of virtualization software. A physical server is logically partitioned into a number of virtual servers. Each one looks and acts like a stand-alone physical server. Only you and your hosting service know that you are running a virtual server rather than a private one. The cost is much less because the physical hardware is being shared among multiple virtual private servers.

Virtual private servers not only give you more resources, but you’ll also get full root access so you can install whatever software you want and customize it to your heart’s content. You still have the limitation of sharing a physical machine and the difficulty of scaling up or down if your requirements change.

Enter cloud hosting. The idea behind cloud computing is that someone else has created a gigantic pool of resources that includes processors, RAM memory, hard drives and bandwidth. Rather than sell you a fixed chunk of this pool, they rent access to it. The same virtualization principles that you have with virtual private hosting apply, but the resource pool is nearly infinitely deep. That means you can easily scale to meet your current needs and ramp up or down later on if things change.

Cloud hosting servers are available with your choice of Linux or Windows operating systems, guaranteed commitment of CPU cycles, RAM and hard disk space, hardware redundancy for high reliability, full root/administrative access, dedicated IP address, automatic nightly data backups, and the ability to add familiar control panels such as cPanel and WHM. For all this you pay by the hour for what you use and there is no commitment, contracts or setup fees. If you don’t need one or more servers, just cancel them without penalty.

What type of hosting works best for your company? Most organizations will do well to compare VPS, collocated private servers and cloud hosting options. Get prices and features to decide the best solution for your business.

Pair Bonding Boosts T1 and EoC Speed

Like many businesses, your company may be pushing the limits of the bandwidth that has worked well for years. An increase in business activity, more employees, business automation or a move to cloud services can all result in higher bandwidth requirements. So, how can you increase the speed of your lines without breaking the bank?

Perhaps the first thing to consider is simply ramping up the bandwidth of the line technology you have now. But isn’t a T1 line fixed at 1.5 Mbps? Indeed it is. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one T1 line. You don’t really want two separate T1 lines for point to point connections or dedicated Internet access. What you really want is a way to combine the bandwidth of those two lines so they act like one larger line.

There’s a standardized process in place for doing this called bonding. When lines are bonded, their bandwidth is merged so that you don’t have to worry about which line is carrying the traffic. They both are sharing that traffic.

For copper technologies, bonding is also called pair bonding. That terminology comes from the fact that the physical layer of this network connection consists of twisted pair copper wires. These are the familiar telephone wires that are bundled in cables called binder groups and run from your business location to the nearest telephone company central office.

Copper pair can carry telephone calls or digital data. The old school way of transporting computer data was to use analog modems that converted the binary ones and zeros to audio tones to mimic a voice conversation. The upper limit to this approach is a very low bandwidth of around 56 Kbps. Get rid of the analog modems and transmit the digital signals on the copper wire directly and you can get much higher bandwidth.

T1 have been the mainstay of business bandwidth over copper pair. This line technology runs at 1.5 Mbps using two pair, one for transmit and one for receive. Since T1 was invented, more efficient modulation schemes have been devised that further increase the bandwidth that can be carried by twisted pair copper. These newer modulation techniques are now used to transport T1 on one or two copper pair. They can also be used to transport a competing technology called Ethernet over Copper.

Pair bonding will boost the bandwidth you can get over copper by pressing more pairs into service. It stands to reason that 4 pair should delivery more speed than 2 pair and 6 or 8 pair will boost that speed even more. It’s a lot like superhighways. The more lanes you have, the more traffic you can carry.

T1 and Ethernet over Copper bandwidths are not the same. T1 was invented first and intended to be synchronized with the public switched telephone system. It has a rigidly fixed 1.5 Mbps bandwidth per T1 line. You can bond a second T1 line and get twice the bandwidth, or 3 Mbps. Three lines gives you 4.5 Mbps, four will give you 6 Mbps and so on. T1 line bonding tops out around 10 or 12 Mbps. It’s hard to get more pairs to bond-in and it gets expensive. The cost of bonded T1 is the cost of a single T1 line (one or two pair) times the number of lines you have bonded.

Ethernet over Copper doesn’t have a fixed bandwidth. It varies with distance. The farther you are from the central office, the less bandwidth can be carried by this technology. The solution for higher bandwidth is to bond more pair. Typical EoC speeds are 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 15, and 20 Mbps, with others often available. In some cases, Ethernet bandwidths up to 100 Mbps are available using bonded copper pair.

Since both T1 and EoC bandwidth is determined by pair bonding, how do you pick one over the other? The best way to make that decision is to get competitive bandwidth quotes for your exact location. Compare the bandwidth and price for each type of service and see which makes the most sense for you.



Note: Image of twisted copper pair courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.