Managed Hosting in Clouds and Colos

When it comes to hosting, you have all sorts of options. Most individuals and smaller companies opt for shared hosting. It provides decent performance at a rock bottom price. Once you get too big for shared Web hosting, you’ve got a decision to make. Do you do it yourself or opt for a managed solution?

There was a time when you needed the savvy to run your own web server to even get a site up and running. Now that Linux and Windows hosting has become so common and standardized, there are lots of places to get hosted. Even larger companies that insisted on maintaining control by buying their own servers and rack mounting them in their own temperature controlled data centers are taking a second look at colocation and clouds. Why? It’s mostly about cost but also about resources.

One of the big resource bottlenecks today is bandwidth. Certainly, carriers have kept up with offerings at GigE, 10 GigE, OC-768, wavelengths and dark fiber. What they haven’t done is provide universal access. While competitive fiber optic networks are expanding their service footprints every day, the majority of business locations still aren’t lit and aren’t likely to be in the near future. Ethernet over Copper bridges the gap for some. Speeds are up to 200 Mbps now. EoC is distance limited, however, so that your best chance for service is in a downtown business district.

Move to a colocation facility or cloud service, however, and your bandwidth issues may be over. They may not be if you need a high bandwidth pipe between your facility and the cloud. But if most of your bandwidth demand is coming from Internet users rather than in-house users, colos and clouds look pretty attractive. Cloud providers locate with the same facility at major carriers to ensure themselves of almost unlimited bandwidth. You can do the same thing by packing up your high bandwidth demand servers and shipping them to a colo facility. The best deals are where multiple carriers have established points of presence and are willing to bid for your business.

Another attraction of colocation is jettisoning the capital investment and operating costs associated with running your own data center. The colo has high security, backup power, environmental control and a tech support staff available 24/7. You need to provide the same things. Economy of scale favors the colocation company with its much larger facility and lots of customers to amortize the cost.

Smaller companies may find that they can’t afford an around the clock tech staff nor the investment required to build or expand an in-house data center. A move to a nearby colo center can get them the facilities they need for a monthly fee. But why stop there? Perhaps it makes even more economic sense to forget about having your own hardware at all. Why not pay as you go on everything?

This is the appeal of everything-as-a-service. Hedge your bets by renting rather than buying. You can do that at many colocation centers now. They’ll put a server in the rack for you and keep it maintained. It’s just like having your own hardware except that when you don’t need it anymore, you just walk away. Need a bigger server? Don’t buy one. Simply upgrade your colo service.

The cloud does the colo one better. The cloud philosophy is “why commit to any particular hardware at all?” Why, indeed? In the cloud all services are virtualized. You don’t need to know or care what they’ve mounted in the racks. What you are concerned about is how many instances of virtualized servers you need at the moment. If you find that your demands fluctuate, you can increase or decrease the number of servers or amount of storage almost instantly. The well of resources to tap is nearly unlimited.

The problem now is how to sort out the options. Shared hosting is nearly a commodity these days. Get competitive quotes for colocation and cloud hosting services for your IT operations and then compare with what it costs you to provide the same value in-house.

SIP Trunking Providers Want Your Bandwidth

The telephone industry is changing. Not long ago, the standard setup for most companies was an in-house PBX system managing dozens, hundreds or thousands of phones. For outside calls, the most cost effective approach has been to bring in ISDN PRI trunk lines with 23 local and/or long distance lines each. Even small companies chose key telephone systems that can handle two to six outside lines. Those setups are changing fast.

There are two strong trends in the industry right now. One is cloud based hosted PBX telephone and the other is SIP trunking. They work perfectly together, but you can also have SIP trunking without cloud services.

A telephone trunk is a number of telephone lines all bundled together. This can be a wire bundle, such as a multi-line copper cable. It can also be an electrical bundle on a single line. ISDN PRI trunks, for instance, bundle 23 separate phone lines plus Caller ID and switching on a single T1 line. A SIP trunk is a telephone trunk line designed specifically to work with IP phones in VoIP telephone systems. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching technology used in VoIP in lieu of SS7, which is used in traditional switched circuit telephony.

So, why are SIP trunks such a hot item right now? It’s because a SIP trunk can be connected directly to your network or IP PBX to bring in multiple lines from your VoIP carrier. On a converged local area network, you are already running SIP. Why go to the trouble to converting to another protocol just to gain access to the public telephone network?

SIP trunks are also how you connect to a hosted PBX system as a cloud service. Companies are rapidly discovering that the per-seat cost of a cloud based telephone service is less than they pay now when you count the personnel, operating and maintenance costs of an in-house phone system. With hosted PBX, you no longer have to invest in new hardware every few years and your system is always being maintained and upgraded by the service provider.

It stands to reason that SIP trunking providers want your telephone business, but why do they want your bandwidth?

The reason that your carrier wants to provide you with both telephone lines and Internet bandwidth is so they can guarantee the quality of your phone calls. With traditional telephony, the telephone and computer networks are kept completely separate and cannot possibly interfere with each other. One of the cost saving advantages of enterprise VoIP solutions is that they use the corporate data network for everything. To make that work, you need to prioritize voice packets so that your phone conversations don’t distort or break up no matter what the computers are doing.

When your SIP trunking provider delivers both telephone and Internet service on your trunk line, they prioritize packets using CoS or Class of Service tags. These tags tell all equipment that recognizes them how to handle different types of traffic to ensure service quality. Not all bandwidth providers do this, so if you mix various line services you can wind up undoing your carefully engineered network quality.

There’s also a cost advantage, especially for small businesses who get both telephone and broadband on one line instead of two. You don’t even need IP phones to take advantage of this service. The provider will install an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that can connect to conventional analog phones and your broadband router.

Now that you know why SIP Trunking providers want your bandwidth, why not find out what sort of deal they’ll make to get it? Request competitive quotes for telephone trunking, dedicated Internet access and cloud hosted PBX services now.

Can You Save 50% On Telecom Costs?

Here we are in the midst of an intractable economic recession and you may still be paying twice as much for your business telecom services as you could be. Need a quick and painless way to cut the budget without having to let people go or cut necessary services? OK, then stop paying so much.

If you are anxious to start saving, get a cost savings evaluation right now and then come back to finish reading the rest of this article. I’m going to explain why a 50% savings is well within the realm of possibility for your company.

First, let’s see where the savings are. Nearly every business buys two principal telecom services. These are telephone and broadband Internet. Larger companies, those with multiple locations, or companies in certain fields will also buy point to point or multi-point bandwidth to link two or more locations. Do you have telephone? Do you use the Internet? Do you have a private link to another location? If so, you have a cost savings opportunity.

Now let’s see why these cost savings are available. First, the telephone and networking industry has become more competitive, especially since federal deregulation of telecom services. There are a lot more players than there used to be and they’re all hungry to expand their customer base. That alone accounts for a major slide in long distance telephone rates and digital bandwidth prices. Did the price of a garden variety T1 line drop by half over the last few years? You bet it did.

This is part of the secret to cutting your telecom bill in half. Business telecom services, like T1, DS3, & OC3, are sold on a contractual basis for one, two or three years. You get the lowest prices with the longest contracts, so the three year contract is often the most attractive. You may or may not be contacted to sign another contract when that one expires. If not, your service doesn’t generally just switch off. You go on a month to month basis for as long as you keep paying your bill. Some companies have been paying the same rate for years and years and have given no attention to comparison shopping.

One reason is that when you bought your original service, there was only one game in town and that was the local telephone company. What you don’t realize is that during that time other competitive carriers have started serving your area, likely with lower prices. Unless one of their sales team happens to call, you probably won’t even know they’ve come to town. More service providers means more offerings and better pricing, but you have to know how to get in touch with them.

The is the first way to get a dramatic cost savings. Do some comparison shopping. You still have to know where to find these carriers, who may or may not have an office in your location. You can try the Yellow Pages, but you’ll have to put in some time and effort to make the calls and compare the offers. Chances are, you’ll probably still miss some good opportunities.

The easier and faster way is to engage a telecom services broker who represents dozens of carriers. You pay the same rates you would if you hunted down the service provider yourself, but you don’t have to put forth the time and effort for comparison shopping. You’ll find that you get fast and friendly service from Telarus, Inc. for competitive telecom pricing. Just be prepared for a shock when you see the offers you’ve been missing.

The other reason that major cost savings are available for the asking is that new types of services have proliferated in the last few years. Ethernet over Copper is now a major competitor with T1 lines. You can generally get twice the bandwidth for the same amount of money if this service is available for your location. If you have a T1 line but are only lightly using it for credit card verification, email and Web access, you can probably save half the monthly cost with 3G fixed wireless broadband. This service is available nationwide and, unlike T1, is practical for temporary business locations like holiday stores, construction sites and conventions.

On the telephone side, that T1 line of yours could be doing double duty. SIP trunking and Integrated T1 combine business phone service and broadband Internet access on the same line. Unlike do it yourself VoIP, this is a carefully engineered solution that assures the quality of your telephone conversations regardless of what is happening on the computers or Internet.

Another recent telephone innovation is hosted PBX. Forget paying for all that telephone equipment and incoming lines. All of that is now handled in the cloud. You pay by the seat per month and your system is always functional and up to date with latest features. All you need in-house are IP telephones and a connection to your cloud provider.

For business applications that need to link several locations or more across the country, MPLS networks can’t be beat. You’ll easily save that 50% cost if you’ve grown your network gradually by simply adding point to point lines as you need them.

Got a few minutes? Want to save a bundle on your monthly telecom bills? Then just enter some basic contact information through T1 Rex and explain what you need. A friendly Telarus agent will be in touch at your convenience and send you a complete range of resources that meet your requirements, along with pricing. It doesn’t get easier and it’s hard to save more.

Cloud vs Premises Contact Center Costs

Many very small businesses need nothing more than a local or toll free number to take customer calls. Medium and larger companies have a sufficient prospect and customer base that they no longer ask whoever is behind the counter to take the calls. They’ve specialized that function, installed dedicated technology and moved it into its own office space known as a contact center. There’s a certain cost associated with contact centers and it’s hard to reduce... or is it?

Up until recently, the only other option was to outsource the function on or off shore. Offshore contact or “call” centers have developed a tarnished reputation from overly ambitious efforts to recruit agents with weak English language skills and/or inadequate technical or procedural understanding. Companies now promote their in-house expert customer service staff as a competitive advantage.

But what about the costs? Is there any way to make in-house contact centers more competitively priced with shipping the function offshore? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

The way you can attack the cost monster is with a combination of lower capital and operating expenses plus productivity improvements. The tools to do that are the latest technology located in the cloud.

Traditional contact centers are what is known a premises-based. They’re either a department within your building or located in a facility by themselves. The technology is an in-house PBX phone system that manages all the agent phones and all the outside lines. Newer facilities may have an IP PBX phone system, which serves the same function but is easier to interface to computer systems so that agent’s screens can automatically display customer data in a “screen pop.”

PBX and IP PBX equipment is expensive to buy and costly to maintain. As these systems get older, technology passes them by and they don’t have all the latest features. It also gets harder to find replacement parts and even technicians who understand the nuances of that particular piece of equipment. Eventually, in frustration, capital is allocated to purchase a new system and the cycle starts all over.

The new alternative approach is outsourcing, but this time it’s the equipment not the agents. You keep the people you know and trust right where they are. What you unload is the infrastructure that doesn’t add value on its own. It’s just a tool, a means to an end. By using a cloud-based contact center solution all of the clap-trap moves “out there,” while you have the same or much better ability to serve your customers and sales prospects.

inContact is a trail-blazer in the new field of cloud-based contact centers. What they provide is infrastructure very much like cloud computing, except specialized for contact center operations. The core is a much more than a simple hosted PBX system. It performs that function, of course, to connect each agent telephone with a customer. That agent can be sitting at the desk they have now or pick up and move to another area, even be located at home where they join the operation on a part-time or full time basis. This alone gives you a flexibility to employ excellent prospects who can’t or won’t commute to your facility every day.

You probably realize that your current PBX system has a certain capacity. You have so many phones and so many phone lines. As soon as you get one too many callers, the system starts giving busy signals to the overflow. That means lost sales or irritated customers who are going to think twice about doing business with you again. The cloud system has an enormous capacity that you can tap on short notice. Do you have seasonal peaks in your business? No need to have extra capacity idling during the slow periods just so you can handle the rush. The cloud can scale up and down to meet your varying needs throughout the year.

Oh, but is the cloud as reliable as an in-house system? Probably more so. inContact offers a service level agreement of 99.99% availability through dual redundant data centers located in Dallas and Los Angeles. There are six layers of cloud security to ensure that your data stays private. Unlike other cloud service providers, inContact was a telecom carrier before they were a cloud company. That means they can also provide the highly reliable bandwidth you need to connect your agents to the system, with only one provider to deal with.

How much can you save? It varies, of course, but a recent study shows that total cost of ownership can be 30% less for a few as 50 seats and sliced by over 50% for a 500 seat contact center. Is that intriguing enough to get you interested in learning more and getting complete details on prices, cost savings and features? You may be shocked by what you are missing out on.

How HD Audio Will Transform VoIP

Those of us old enough to remember when phones were analog and switches were mechanical have a soft spot for the clarity of the old school system. There was a distinctness and intimacy to those old time conversations that has long been lost. Well, perhaps lost only for some decades. There’s a new move afoot to give VoIP phone conversations a starting fidelity that will make today’s handsets and cellphones seem like toy walkie talkies by comparison.

The technology is HD or high definition audio. It’s called HD Voice by Polycom, the telephone manufacturer producing IP telephones with this capability built-in. The idea is to reverse the steady decline in voice intelligibility that we’ve experienced with the digital transformation and create a new standard that is superior to anything that has come before.

There’s a parallel here. Something similar happened in the radio industry. If you’ve ever owned one of those big console radios from the 1930’s or even the table models from the 50’s, you know that AM radio can sound amazingly lifelike. The advent of transistor radios shrunk the size of the loudspeakers, and thus the range of sound frequencies that can be heard. “Tinny” was the word to describe the loss of low end or bass notes. Car radios added their own restrictions by rolling off the high frequencies to reduce noise and static. It took a new technology, FM radio, to expand the frequency range and eliminate the background noise before the term high fidelity could be applied.

Old-timey phones had very few parts. The carbon microphone and electromagnetic earphone were powered by a battery at the phone company and connected to a similar phone at the other end. There were no electronics in the circuit. The telephone company switch was really a mechanical switch that simply connected phones together. The resulting sound had a richness that made local conversations much closer to someone sitting next to you than you hear today.

I remember when I first noticed the difference. It was when the company I worked for upgraded their old phone system with a new digital PBX and desksets. The first calls seemed slightly more muffled, less sparkling clear on the new phones. The effect was subtle, but noticeable. There was no noise or distortion apparent, but something was missing.

What was missing, I later figured out, was some of the audio range in the conversation. It wasn’t digital that degraded phone audio specifically. It started with long distance calling. The analog carrier multiplexing used to load multiple conversations onto copper wire and microwave trunk lines needed filters to keep one conversation from interfering with another. After much research, a frequency range of 300 to 3400 Hz was selected as standard. Frequencies above 3400 Hz add to naturalness, but don’t limit understandability of speech very much. Get rid of them and you can transmit more telephone channels on a trunk. You also get rid of annoying hiss, which is a high frequency phenomena. Frequencies below 300 Hz also aren’t necessary for intelligibility, but certainly give voices and other sounds their distinctiveness. By getting rid of the low frequencies, problems with power line hum getting into phone lines are greatly reduced or eliminated.

This standard was maintained when the industry changed from analog to digital. It kept everything compatible and consistent. Digital technology was a boon to long distance calls, especially overseas. It totally eliminated the noise and crosstalk that were common in the analog era. That advantage went away with cell phones, which can be noisy or even drop out.

Early implementations of VoIP only made matters worse. Packet transmission added distortion from lost packets and variable transmission time or jitter. Latency, a time delay through the network, was almost unknown with analog and TDM telephony. Now it’s not uncommon on poorly implemented systems to have a clipping effect so that you can’t both talk at the same time.

What HD audio intends to do is to lift telephone voice quality to a new standard above and beyond what we’ve ever had. This is accomplished by using a wideband CODEC (Coder/Decoder) to handle the conversion from analog microphone and earpiece to digital transmission. Bandwidth is doubled to 7 kHz with the new standard G.722 Codec and can be extended up to 20 Khz, the same quality as CDs and digital FM radio.

HD Voice is here now. You can get it with Polycom business phones and a service provider like RealLinx that can provide the hosted PBX and carefully managed bandwidth to maintain high quality phone audio. Of course, this only works within an organization that is set up for HD Voice or among users that all have the G.722 Codec available. When one party is using traditional telephone technology, everything defaults to the universal G.711 telco standard and its limited frequency range.

Even so, higher fidelity within your organization can improve conversation intelligibility, including nuances in the voice that are often lost when talking on the phone rather than in person. This can be valuable when budgets and time restrictions reduce face to face meetings in favor of audio and video teleconferencing.

Are you ready to replace an aging phone system or order equipment for a new enterprise or new location? If so, why limit yourself to yesterday’s technology when you can have something that will provide a competitive edge at lower overall cost than you have now? Don’t make a move until you get pricing and features on HD Voice Hosted PBX VoIP telephone systems.

Wireless Internet Access For Farms

There are many advantages to living and working on a farm, but one of the disadvantages is that broadband Internet access is harder to come by. No, DSL and Cable broadband probably aren’t in your future. But there are options available at reasonable prices right now.

It’s true that DSL and Cable are popular with independent professionals, small businesses and home-based occupations. You get a decent amount of bandwidth at a reasonable cost. The one hitch is that these services are distance limited. DSL signals decrease rapidly as you get a mile to two from the telephone company central office. Cable is a wired service that goes only where the Cable company has decided that there is enough population density to justify stringing the coaxial cable. Unfortunately, those factors keep Cable and DSL within or close to the city limits.

What you really want are either line services that don’t have distance restrictions or wireless services that don’t require stringing or burying cable of any type. There are several options that meet this description.

First is T1. This is a telco digital line service first used between telephone company switching centers. The beauty of T1 is that it is designed to be provisioned on two pair of ordinary telephone wires, available just about everywhere. The second advantage is that it was designed to work with regenerator boxes that clean up and boost the signal so that it can go another mile. You can generally get T1 line service miles from the nearest town, although it gets more expensive as you get farther out in the country.

Second is satellite. Satellite broadband service comes from above and needs no wires. All it requires is AC power that can even come from a gas generator or solar panels and an inverter. Disadvantages include the need to get a professionally installed two-way satellite dish installed on your roof and a half-second or so of latency due to the long path up to the stationary satellite. For many email and Web uses, this slight delay from issuing a command to getting data back is no big deal.

A third option is wireless terrestrial Internet service. Many communities have WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers. These tend to be locally owned and have a very limited service area. More often than not, WISPs target rural subdivisions and small towns to get enough customers to justify the cost of the equipment and bandwidth.

One of the most exciting new services is fixed wireless or cellular broadband. This service uses the data channels that every cell phone carrier has available for mobile phones and laptop computers. Accel Networks is a leader in this field and has contracts with the major carriers (AT&T, Verizon and Sprint) to connect with their broadband data channels. By combining the coverage areas of multiple carriers, Accel can pretty much blanket the nation except for mountainous and remote areas of the West where there is no cell phone coverage. If you can get a decent cell phone signal, you can probably get fixed wireless service.

The way this works is that Accel Networks customizes their standard interface box and antenna to optimize the signal strength for your particular location. That gives you a really good chance of getting a solid signal that will deliver decent bandwidth. How much bandwidth? This service is competitive with T1 lines with a minimum rate of 750 Kbps download and 250 Kbps upload, bursting up to 1 Mbps on downloads. This is more than adequate for most farm uses, such as getting agriculture reports, using email, general Web surfing and even watching video clips. It’s not intended for high intensity usage like downloading HD movies or running a server.

What makes fixed wireless broadband service so popular in rural areas is that it is readily available and costs half the price of a T1 line or less. Is this the right service for your farm, ranch or rural business? Get pricing, availability and complete details on fixed wireless broadband now. Installation is fast, often within a matter of days.

MPLS Point to Point Alternative

The traditional way to connect two business locations to send files back and forth is with a point to point data connection. T1 lines have been perfect for this at modest bandwidth levels. DS3 and OCx SONET services work the same way when higher speeds are needed. Ethernet line service is the latest entry into the Point to Point bandwidth space. But have you considered MPLS networks as your best value for the money?

MPLS may seem like an odd choice, since MPLS networks are really targeted for multi-point connectivity in place of older technologies like Frame Relay. MPLS networks are organized as clouds with multiple access points over the service footprint. If you have a dozen or a hundred locations to network, an MPLS solution is likely the best solution by a mile. Yet, there’s no reason you can’t just specify connecting point A to point B as your only connection.

The one possible downside might be cost. Whether a dedicated point to point line service or an MPLS network service makes sense for any given application depends a lot on the distance between locations and whether you intend to order more than one line. Why multiple lines? While some businesses have only two locations to connect, many others have three or more. The most expensive way to make multiple connections is by running point to point lines from each location to the others. A more cost effective approach is to set up a star network with the routing equipment at headquarters and point to point lines fanning out from there to each satellite location. The least cost most flexible solution is often to simply connect every location to a regional or national MPLS network and specify the connectivity within the cloud.

T1 point to point lines became popular because they are relatively inexpensive and offer the security and performance of a dedicated line. You have exclusive use of the 1.5 Mbps bandwidth in both directions. Since the line is “nailed up” to interconnect two locations, security is high. It’s difficult to impossible for snoops and troublemakers to gain access to your private line.

One disadvantage of using dedicated T1 lines is that you are limited to 1.5 Mbps per line, although you can often bond T1 lines together to multiply the bandwidth up to a maximum of 10 or 12 Mbps. Another drawback is that there is no economy of scale. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. They also tend to be priced by distance. A point to point line in town costs much less than a connection from coast to coast. If you need to cross an ocean or international border the cost goes up significantly.

Everything that has been said about T1 lines also goes for higher bandwidth options, such as DS3, OC3, and so on. The cost increases along with bandwidth. Ethernet over Copper or Ethernet over Fiber offers higher bandwidth at lower prices, but is also a dedicated line service. It’s the protocol that’s different between T1 or SONET and Ethernet services.

MPLS networks have a different cost model. The network is based on a privately owned high speed national or international fiber optic network. None of the core network is dedicated to a single customer. It is intended to be shared among many customers to amortize the cost. As such, the cost of a point to point or multipoint connection is more attractive than for a dedicated line service. In-town or close by, the dedicated line may be the cheaper solution. But for locations spaced thousands of miles apart or overseas, MPLS networks have the advantage.

What makes MPLS networks a good substitute for dedicated point to point lines is that the network offers security and guaranteed performance as well as a cost savings. The proprietary nature of the label switching protocol and the fact that access is limited to customers of the network make security much higher than on a public network like the Internet. The network operators establish the virtual paths through the network on a case by case basis. You may be sharing the fiber strands, but you can’t access another customer’s data and they can’t see yours.

Do you have a requirement to link business locations? Be sure to get MPLS network service pricing as well as dedicated line pricing for even a two location hookup to make sure you have the best deal.

IP T1 Line Service

T1 line service has been available for decades. It originated as a proprietary telephone company technology designed as a trunk for transporting multiple phone calls between switching centers. Later, T1 was made available for businesses to support their PBX phone systems. When the Internet came along, T1 lines were pressed into service as dedicated Internet connections. But now we live in an IP world. Can T1 also act as an IP connection?

Yes, it can. That may seem counterintuitive to those who understand the origins and technology behind T1 service. The T-Carrier specifications, of which T1 is the most popular line service, describe a system organized as multiplexed channels 64 Kbps wide. That channel size was optimized to transport a single independent digitized telephone call using PCM (Pulse Code Modulation). Clearly, T1 is oriented toward the switched circuit based public telephone network.

That’s true, but the important thing to remember about digital network technologies is that a bit is a bit. It’s either true or false, one or zero, regardless of the particular physical layer or higher level protocols involved. That means that a time division multiplexing technology like T1 can be used to transport a packet oriented technology like IP or Ethernet with a little protocol conversion.

That’s essentially what’s being done when T1 lines are used for data transmission. It’s been a long time since anything but Ethernet has been the standard for local area networks. Ethernet is an IP technology, based on packet switching. Those packets can be queued up and loaded into T1 frames for transmission through T1 lines and even multiplexed into T3 and SONET frames for longer haul transmission. At the far end, the packets are offloaded and sent on their way through an IP edge router connected to the T1 CPE (Customer Premises Equipment.)

If you want to connect your Ethernet networks over metropolitan and wide area networks, one technology you’ll be interested in is called Ethernet over T1 or EoT1. This is also called EoDS1 for Ethernet over DS1.

DS1 is simply the data service or protocol that runs on T1 lines. The reason there are two designations is that T1 describes a physical line consisting of two twisted pair copper telco loops running at 1.5 Mbps. The DS1 is all the bits formated for transmission just before loading into the actual T1 line. You can take that same DS1 and feed it into an add/drop multiplexer and transport it along with many others on a T3 circuit or a fiber optic service like OC-3. At the other end, the DS1 can be demultiplexed from the other services on the same line and delivered separately.

In practice T1 and DS1 refer to the same thing to the actual user. What’s important is that Carrier Ethernet service can be delivered on a T1 line, albeit bandwidth limited to 1.5 Mbps. Who would want service that slow? Lots of companies need connectivity between locations, but don’t require high speeds. They may be using the service for retail credit card verification, communication with corporate headquarters, or to upload files to their web server. The big advantage they have with T1 lines is that they are almost universally available. If you can get business phone service, chances are that you can also get a T1 line installed. They are connected over the same telco wiring.

The competing service to Ethernet over T1 is Ethernet over Copper. That may seem like a fine line of distinction, but it is important. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) also uses twisted pair copper but a different modulation scheme that offers higher bandwidths but with distance limitations. If you are within a mile or two of the central office that has Ethernet over Copper equipment, you may be able to get 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps or even higher bandwidths from EoC. Some installations are transporting in excess of 100 Mbps over multiple copper pair.

Ethernet over T1 bandwidth can also be improved by adding more copper pair. The process of combining the bandwidths of several T1 lines into one larger bandwidth is called bonding. EoT1 bonding can deliver up to 10 or 12 Mbps to both metropolitan and rural areas, providing the equipment is available.

Are you interested in an IP connection for your computer or converged voice and data networks? If so, get pricing and availability for Ethernet over T1 or Copper now to see how much bandwidth is available for your business locations.

Why Buy a Used Cell Phone?

When most people think of buying a cell phone, they’re thinking in terms of starting new cellular service or upgrading the one they have when their contract expires. There are other times when you might want to buy a cell phone and buying new may not be the best option at all.

How can that be? New cell phones are expensive. You either pay up front to the tune of hundreds of dollars or you let the carrier pay at least part of your phone’s cost. They don’t do that for free, of course. If you want a free or discounted cell phone, you have to commit to a two year contract.

What if you want a different phone before the contract expires? Too bad. You either have to commit to another 2 years, if they allow contract changes at all, or pay the full cost of a new phone. That can easily be $300 to $600 for some of the more popular and sophisticated models.

They option you may not be aware of is to buy a used cell phone. When you buy a used phone, you save a small fortune. If you play it smart, you’re not buying a piece of junk. Get yours through CellularCountry and you’ll get a 100% guarantee that the phone will function perfectly when you get it. Each phone includes a free home charger and battery. They ship from the company the same day as you order and shipping is free on orders over $150.

What kind of condition are these phones in? Cellular Country offers phones in four conditions. Refurbished means in pristine condition with the manual and box. These are possibly from customers that had buyer’s remorse when they signed up for cellular service and cancelled right away. They might also have simply changed their mind and wanted a different phone after all.

The other three phones fall into the categories of Excellent with very little sign of use, good with normal wear and tear apparent, and fair with a lot of wear on the phone. All of these, from refurbished to fair are fully functional and guaranteed to work when you receive them. Each phone comes with an unconditional 30 day warranty.

Who wants a used phone? You do if you’d like to have another phone for your existing service but don’t want to pay full price. Perhaps you need a replacement for the phone you accidentally drove over in the parking lot. It wasn’t really a good idea to set your phone down on the top of the car while you went looking for your keys, was it? It’s so easy to forget setting things there.

Other good reasons for buying used instead of new include having a phone you don’t mind giving to the kids or one to take on the job site where rough treatment is likely. You may want a phone to take overseas. In this case, you’ll probably want an unlocked model so you can use a foreign carrier while you are away. You do that buy buying a international SIM card that plugs into the card slot on a GSM phone. GSM is the type of phone that works on AT&T and T-Mobile networks.

Would you like a good phone, cheap? If so, consider a used cell phone or smartphone from Cellular Country. Choose from phones that work with your favorite carrier, get an unlocked model, and pick the model and brand that you want at a huge cost savings.

Why NOT to Buy a New PBX

For decades, the standard answer to a failing business phone system or one that had run out of capacity was to install a new PBX in a process known as a “fork lift upgrade.” A new PBX is something like a new car. You get higher performance, greater reliability and more capacity. So now that you are in the market for a shiny new PBX or IP PBX, the best one to buy may be none at all.

What? You mean hang on to that old junker that’s almost impossible to keep running? No, not at all. Don’t go out and spend a thousand dollars or much more on yet another PBX box. Instead, look at a hosted PBX solution.

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP or PBX in the cloud, is a service rather than a product. You simply remove your old PBX and don’t put anything in its place.

Oh, then what do the phones plug into?

The phones will plug into your computer network. Nearly every company has a LAN with Ethernet jacks for each desk and office. You are used to having two separate networks in your company. One for the telephones and one for the computers. A hosted solution is based on a converged voice and data network, which is the Ethernet LAN that you have now. Larger companies have long ago converged their voice and data networks to take advantage of enterprise VoIP solutions. Small and medium size businesses can do the same. What’s important in a converged network is that voice packets have priority over data packets so that phone call quality is maintained regardless of the load on the network.

Clearly, you can’t just plug your old telephones into the LAN. The connectors are different sizes. That’s for good reason. Standard analog telephone equipment is completely incompatible with computer networking standards. There are two ways to resolve this. Either put network adaptors on each phone or replace the phones with newer IP phones that already have standard network interface cards built-in. You’ll probably want to use IP phones because they support more features over the network.

What do the phone lines connect to? There won’t be any outside lines connecting to your building like there are now. In other words, no analog business lines and no ISDN PRI. All the outside lines are connected to the hosted PBX at the service provider. You connect to that service provider using a line called a SIP Trunk. This can be a T1 line or Ethernet over Copper configured for SIP Trunking service.

I should mention that SIP Trunking can be setup to support your current analog telephones and wiring directly. In this case, the provider installs a piece of equipment called an IAD or Integrated Access Device. The IAD splits the SIP Trunk into telephone lines and broadband Internet service. In other words, it supports the two separate networks that you have now.

The whole reason you installed a PBX in the first place was to gain control of your internal calls and manage the sharing of multiple outside lines. The hosted PBX does the same thing from afar. Your internal calls stay on the network so that you don’t pay for office to office calls. Outside calls connect to the public telephone network at the cloud service provider.

A hosted PBX does some tricks that your old PBX doesn’t. You can have offices in many different cities all on the same phone system. You can also have local phone numbers in cities where you have customers but no physical office. Callers may dial a local number in Bangor, Maine and you’ll answer it in Phoenix, Arizona.

A major advantage of hosted telephone services is that you don’t have to come up with large amounts of capital to purchase a PBX system nor hire the staff to maintain it. That’s all handled for you by the service provider. They buy a much larger PBX system and have the staff available around the clock to maintain it and handle any problems that arise. You pay by the month for service, which often includes unlimited local and national calling plus a wealth of features to make office operations efficient. Some providers even include the IP phones in your service plan.

Are you getting ready for a telephone system upgrade? Don’t go out for a bank loan yet. Instead, get a quote for cloud hosted PBX telephone service and see if paying by the seat per month rather than making a big investment makes more sense for your business.

Advantage of Dedicated Cloud Connections

The capital investment and staff cost savings offered by cloud services are encouraging small, medium and large companies alike to move their telephone and IT resources to the cloud. It’s been assumed that a simple broadband Internet connection will suffice for access. That’s turning out to be a disappointment in some cases.

The notion that bandwidth is bandwidth is how we get in trouble specifying metro and wide area network connections. What makes the Internet attractive as a WAN service is that it is almost universally available and the cost is spread over millions, even billions of users. Savvy companies discovered long ago that you could get around the security issues by encrypting your data to create a VPN or Virtual Private Network. The VPN gives you a private tunnel through a public network.

VPNs work great to support remote workers and traveling employees who’s only way to connect with corporate headquarters is through a wired or wireless Internet service. They’re also good for linking multiple business locations, such as branch offices or franchises. With a VPN you can transfer sensitive financial and inventory files among dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations.

Note that we are talking about file transfers. The TCP/IP network protocol was made for this application. All you do is launch the transfer and TCP will ensure that all the packets that make up the file will get from point A to point B intact. If something goes awry and a packet is corrupted, it is automatically resent.

Remember that the Internet was designed for universal access and to be self-healing in the face of equipment failure or line breaks. While TCP/IP is making sure that files are being accurately transfered, the Internet itself is making sure that there is a path available from point A to point B no matter what. While you can expect to transfer data, voice or video files over the Internet, you can’t really expect that this is going to happen without hiccups or in any minimal amount of time. Packets may or may not be lost and require a resend. The path may change from packet to packet. The latency or time delay from source to destination can vary all over the place, or jitter.

The result of this is that real time performance of Internet connections is highly variable. This is no big deal for data file transfers. The time to transfer may vary by milliseconds or seconds for each file. Time sensitive data streams like audio and video need some extra help in the form of buffering. You compensate for unknowable transmission rate variations by filling up a buffer with packets and then clocking them out at a constant rate.

Buffering works great for one-way downloads, but creates havoc for real-time video or audio streams. That includes telephone calls and video conferencing. You can’t have much of a buffer or the latency increases to the point where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. There is a noticeable delay, fractions of a second or longer, that make two-way communication painful at best. Lost packets from iffy Internet connections add distortion that blurs your video and garbles your audio.

The same Internet that seems fast and responsive when searching for information on Google can be maddening when trying to calm down an angry customer on a VoIP phone call that is breaking up. Automated business processes that worked fine over the LAN when the data center was in-house all of a sudden become sluggish in the cloud. It’s not that the cloud isn’t just as good or better than local resources, it’s that you need a better connection.

What you want is a dedicated connection between you and your cloud provider. Level 3 Communications is now offering dedicated connections to Amazon Web Services (AWS) running in Equinix data centers to meet the demand from larger corporations. Dedicated connections include Ethernet Private Line, Ethernet MPLS and Wavelength services. T1 lines are also suitable for smaller companies, although Ethernet over Copper may be a lower cost option and offer more bandwidth for the money.

A dedicated connection ensures that you have steady guaranteed bandwidth plus low latency, jitter and packet loss. Security is also improved because access is limited, not publicly available. A well engineered dedicated connection is just like a very long LAN that includes your locations and your service provider.

Are you disappointed with the performance of your cloud services or concerned that quality will suffer if you move from a local data center to the cloud? All you may need to get things working to your satisfaction is a high quality dedicated cloud connection. Why put up with all that aggravation when dedicated connection prices are lower than they’ve ever been? Check prices and availability of dedicated cloud connection bandwidth you need to support your critical applications.

Fast Ethernet over Copper

Fast Ethernet has been a networking standard for many years. You may know it as 100 Mbps Ethernet speed. Nearly every computer, router and switch now has a Network Interface Card (NIC) rated at 10/100 Mbps or 10/100/1000 Mbps. Many smaller networks find 100 Mbps more than adequate. Larger networks use 1000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). The largest corporate and other high performance networks have at least part of their infrastructure running at 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE). Its when you leave the LAN and connect to metro or long distance networks that things slow to a crawl.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same network speed regardless of distance? That way it wouldn’t matter where you were transferring files to or from. The time to transfer would be independent of distance. This is especially important to companies with multiple business locations. The illusion of everyone being on the same network is shattered when it takes ten or a hundred times as long to get information from the remote site as it does within your own building.

What has stood in the way of upgrading network connections to a common speed is cost and availability. Fast Ethernet for MAN and WAN connections have been cost prohibitive for smaller companies. If your location isn’t on a fiber path, getting bandwidth above 10 Mbps or so has been out of the question. Well, not any more.

PAETEC, a major network services provider, is blazing new ground by deploying Fast Ethernet connections over copper as well as fiber. If your buildings are within the service footprint of this new technology you can avoid the budget breaking costs of fiber construction completely. PAETEC uses multiple bonded copper pairs within the same telco conduit to provide bandwidths as high as 200 Mbps.

Chances are that the multi-pair copper conduit is already installed in your building for multi-line telephone and lower speed services like T1. The beauty of T1 lines are that they use standard twisted pair copper telco wire. The major limitation is that the bandwidth is fixed at 1.5 Mbps. You can bond T1s together to get higher bandwidths, up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Technically this works just fine, but it gets pricey because the cost is the price of a T1 line times the number of lines needed.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is much more cost effective. First, the advanced modulation techniques support higher bandwidths per pair of wire used. Second, the cost does not multiply as fast at bonding T1 lines. Third, you can now get Fast Ethernet bandwidth using EoC.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper technology is distance. The higher bandwidths require you to be near the central office that connects to your copper bundle. That’s perfect for businesses with metropolitan locations, especially in major business districts. If you are located out in the boonies, you’ll have fewer options.

Do you need cost effective Fast Ethernet connections to support your business processes? Check Fast Ethernet over Copper availability and pricing now. Fiber and wireless may also be available at lower prices than you imagine. Sorry, no residential service available.

3G Fixed Wireless For Business

We all know how 3G cellular wireless service has transformed the mobile phone into the smartphone. Did you also know there is a fixed wireless service available that uses the same technology? It’s a unique solution to getting business grade Internet access where everything else is too expensive or not available at all.

What the cellular industry has done is to build out a vast infrastructure of wireless base stations all over the country. You can think of these as a blanket of mobile phone coverage and you’d be right. You can also think of this infrastructure as a blanket of broadband coverage. You’d be equally right. The familiar cell towers are transmitting both voice and data signals on different channels through their microwave radio equipment.

On the data side, the 3G (3rd generation) wireless broadband service acts like a collection of Wi-Fi hotspots with much greater coverage and all linked together. You need a wireless modem aircard and a subscription to pick up this service. It doesn’t use the same channels as WiFi. It’s also not free, but for businesses the cost can be lower than other alternatives.

Many small and even medium size businesses use T1 lines that are available almost everywhere. Cost varies with location, but is typically several hundred dollars per month. Fixed wireless broadband can be had for half of that for a primary connection and even less if you only want backup service.

Unlike DSL and Cable, other SMB bandwidth choices, T1 and 3G wireless are available just about anywhere you want service. That includes locations that are off the beaten path if they can still get solid cell phone service. Fixed wireless is unique in that installation can be in a matter of days and you can have it installed at temporary business locations, such as fairs, conventions, and short term holiday stores.

Accel Networks is a leader in 3G fixed wireless for business. Their equipment and system are optimized for consistent bandwidth and high reliability. That includes proprietary RF optimization and RF level management and a proprietary antenna design that maximizes signal strength. This goes far beyond the simplistic design of the USB aircard modems you buy for mobile computing.

The other advantage of Accel Networks is that they have agreements with all three major providers (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon) to ensure extensive signal coverage. You know that no matter which carrier you pick, there are places where you’d be better off with one of the other carriers. It’s a matter of who has the most towers and channel licenses in a particular area. Accel picks the carrier that has the best signal at your particular business location. Since this is fixed service, it doesn’t matter that they’d make a different choice if you were located in another town.

What is 3G fixed wireless best for? Credit card verification is extremely popular. Accel Networks specializes in this technology and offers a layer 2 PCI compliant network meeting credit card industry requirements.

Most small businesses need credit card verification, but many also need general access to the Internet for Web browsers, email, and perhaps automated ordering, inventory, bookkeeping or data transfers between locations. Accel Networks managed broadband wireless solutions offer a minimum of 750 Kbps download and 250 Kbps upload broadband speeds. They also provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that includes 99.9% availability, minimum acceptable data rates, maximum acceptable latency, and mean time to restore.

Is fixed wireless a good fit with your business? Get a complete set of options and prices so you can compare 3G Fixed Wireless For Business with competing services, and then choose what’s right for your situation.

Managed Web Application Hosting

You’d like to make good use of popular web applications for your own business needs, but the idea of running your own hosting, downloading the software and keeping it updated and trying to make everything work is more than you really want to deal with. That’s especially true if you don’t have an in-house IT department. Are you out of luck?

Not at all. What you may want to consider is managed web applications. The idea behind managed services is that someone with the right expertise and resources takes over the burden of hardware and software operations so you don’t have to worry about it. In effect, they act as your IT department. It’s an idea very much akin to the cloud. Somewhere, out there, it’s all being handled and all you have to do is pay as you go.

Managed Web Applications are a specialty of myhosting.com. This is a web hosting company that offers all the usual hosting services plus some others that you may not be able to find elsewhere. One such group of services are managed Web applications for business.

What type of applications are available? WordPress is a popular application for high performance blogs. It’s an open source content management system that lets you create unique blog designs and even entire websites. A wealth of plug-ins add features that would be costly for you to develop yourself.

A competing content management system is Joomla. It is widely used for website creation and even corporate Intranets. Like WordPress, Joomla is open source, which ensures extensive worldwide support.

Have you heard of Moodle? It’s an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. Moodle is open source software designed for education. It can be called a course management system, learning management system or virtual learning environment. If you have a need for in-house training or want to offer online courses, Moodle can be the framework that makes it possible. Moodle lets you interact with tutors and other students, participate in online discussions and access resources such as libraries and digital reading rooms.

How about a bundle of applications? myhosting.com offers a Community Hosting Bundle that includes Mediawiki, Wordpress, Joomla and phpBB, an Internet forum or message board application.

What you get with Managed Web Applications is an all-in-one package that includes the hosting with your applications all set up and ready to run. No worrying about how to download and configure software. That’s taken care of for you. You simply signup and your application is ready to go.

Upgrades are handled automatically, too. You know how easy it is to get out of date with patches and upgrades. Procrastination alone almost guarantees that you’ll never keep up with the changes. With a managed solution, you don’t have to. Updates are automatic, although you can decide when it’s appropriate to apply them.

Support is another big advantage of Managed Web Applications. Sure, you can get a lot of open source software free. Then buy your hosting and make them work together... if you can. If not, who is going to help you? You have large communities of users on forums and you can spend endless hours getting exactly the help you need. With a managed solution, help is as close as the phone, email or chat anytime you wish.

Are you interested in expanding your use of Web applications but don’t have the resources to get set up and running in-house? Take a close look at the cost effectiveness and simplicity of Fully Managed Web Applications from myhosting.com.

Flat Rate vs Per Minute Toll Free Service

Nearly all companies that sell to the public have or need toll free telephone numbers. People come to expect a toll free number for ordering or customer service. If they have to pay to call you, they may think twice and go elsewhere. It’s a bit like free WiFi. There are so many places that offer it that the ones that don’t seem less desirable. But, did you know that there are two types of toll free services to choose from?

The two fundamentally different approaches to toll free number service are pay per minute and flat rate. Flat rate means you pay a fixed amount each month regardless of how many or few calls come in.

Note that as the business owner you pay for all calls that come into your toll free number. The caller isn’t charged, and that’s the way they like it.

The way pay per minute services work is that the meter starts running as soon as you pick up a ringing toll free call. An excellent service that works on the pay per minute basis is Kall8. For each minute that you are on the phone with a customer or prospect that calls in on your toll free number, you pay 6.9 cents per minute. That rate applies to all calls coming in from the lower 48 US states. Calls from Alaska and Hawaii have a surcharge.

What happens if you don’t have any toll free calls during a particular month? In that case, you pay just the fee to maintain your number. It’s $2 for 866, 877 or 888 numbers and $5 for 800 numbers. All of those prefixes are toll free. Some companies prefer actual 800 numbers because people know what an “800 number” is. Others are fine with the newer 866, 877 or 888 numbers that are also toll free.

For your, say, $2 per month you have exclusive use of your toll free number. It will ring to any phone that you program it to. It’s not a separate line with a separate telephone hooked to it. For instance, you can program your toll free number to ring to your cell phone while you are out and about, change it to ring to your desk phone when you are in the office and even change it again to ring to your home phone so you don’t miss calls in the evening or overnight.

Some other features you get with your Kall8 toll free number are voice mail that you can use the conventional way or have your messages sent to you as audio files attached to email messages. You can block calls from people or areas you don’t want to deal with, conduct conference calls with up to 25 participants and receive FAX messages to your toll free number. The messages can be read online or sent to you as email attachments. That’s a lot of capability for a mere $2 a month.

The competing service is flat rate toll free. A good example is iTeleCenter toll free service that costs $49 a month. For that you get to pick your number from a list of available toll free numbers that are ready to use. You also enjoy 30 features that include online faxing, follow-me call forwarding, and voicemails sent to email or text messages at no additional charge. What’s more, there’s a 14 day free trial so you can see if you like this service before you commit to it.

It should be noted that “unlimited” calling is actually limited to a fair usage amount of 1,000 minutes per month. If business booms and you talk more than this, you’ll pay an overage charge of 4.9 cents per minute. That compares to 6.9 cents per minute for each minute on Kall8.

So, how do you choose between the two toll free services? The pay per minute plan works well for companies with widely varying phone traffic each month or for startups that don’t expect many calls for a long while. Your expenses expand at the same rate that your business grows. However, if you get lucky and your phones ring off the hook you’ll be paying more than you would with the flat rate plan.

Flat rate toll free service is great if you don’t like surprises and want to know what to budget for incoming calls each month. If you are a very small operation and it takes forever to get business going, you will pay more during the slow times than you would with pay per minute toll free service. However, if all of a sudden business takes off, you have the protection of the flat rate. Even overages will cost less than on the pay per minute plan.

Backup and Recovery For All Businesses

Let’s face it, businesses are vulnerable. Not just to the vagaries of the economy or whims of the environment. Your greatest vulnerability may be sitting on your desk or mounted in the racks of your data center. Without backup and recovery, you are one violation of Murphy’s Law away from major headaches.

What is most at risk? Your data. At one time, all business records were on paper and the big risk was fire. Today, most business records are electronic and the big risk is corruption or erasure. One thing that can go wrong is that somebody accidentally changes or deletes something important and there is no copy. Another is that an entire day’s, week’s or longer data set is wiped out by a disk crash. Once again, no copies means you have to start all over to recreate what was lost.

Don’t depend on backup CD ROMs or DVDs written whenever somebody remembers to create them or has some free time. You expect the rest of your business processes to be more robust. Give serious consideration to doing the same for your valuable electronic data files.

Acronis specializes in backup and recovery for all size businesses from home offices right on up to major corporations. They offer backup and recovery across the network and for standalone Windows servers, Linux servers, workstations, and online backup. Other solutions include server disk management, server system deployment, recovery for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Exchange SBS, recovery for MS SQL Server and workstation system deployment.

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 is based on a unified platform consisting of a suite of modules that work together to support disaster recovery, data protection and migration. Together they perform single-pass backup and de-duplication for all your files, folders, applications and operating systems. This includes coverage of disks, files, virtual machines, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. Backups can be targeted to tape, disk storage or the cloud.

The latest migration, of course, is to the cloud. Acronis Backup and Recovery Online gives you secure and cost effective offsite data protection. Why offsite? While local storage protects you against disk failure or accidental file deletion, it won’t help if a flood or tornado comes roaring through town. Your precious backup tapes and disks can easily be smashed all over the countryside along with your other computing assets. That’s why you should consider offsite storage.

In fact, the most efficient and robust solution can easily be a combination of onsite and offsite backup. Why? While offsite backup gives you protection against complete loss of your local facilities, you are dependent on a bandwidth link to get to your data. Most companies have far more LAN bandwidth than they do WAN bandwidth or Internet connection bandwidth. In-house bandwidth is relatively cheap and 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps can be had for commodity prices. Once you leave the building and depend on a third party provider to connect you across town or across the country, the cost of bandwidth gets pricey fast.

What this means in practical terms is that you can get your files back a lot faster over your own network than you can bringing them back on the cloud. For a single small file, this is no big deal. But if you lose a Terabyte disk, it can be awhile before you have it restored through your telecom link.

Acronis addresses this security vs accessibility conundrum by offering an integrated solution that combines their Backup & Recovery 11 software with their online cloud product. Most backup solutions do one or the other, not both. This integration means that your administration efforts are made easy, while you enjoy the benefits of convenience and protection.

Are you a bit squeamish about what could happen to your business if technical or other disaster strikes unexpectedly? Sleep better knowing your data is protected. Check out Acronis Backup and Recovery Solutions now.

Cost Performance Advantage of Ethernet over Copper

Most businesses have some type of bandwidth connections for credit card verification, email, online searches, location to location data transfers, procurement, research and a host of other needs. These connections run the gamut from information services such as DSL, Cable, satellite and wireless, to telecom services like T1, DS3, OC3 and Ethernet over Fiber. The new player, with cost vs performance advantages you should consider, is Ethernet over Copper.

Why Ethernet over Copper? First of all, this is a protocol that most closely matches what is running on nearly all networks today. That is, Ethernet. Most other services were designed back in day when voice was king and the public switched telephone network dominated worldwide communications. That’s no longer the case. The world has not only transformed from analog to digital, but has also moved from telephone conversations to email, texting, video downloads and streaming, search and Websites.

Voice landlines are on the decline. While users increasingly choose cellular calls, businesses are transforming desk phones to enterprise VoIP and carriers are quietly converting their core networks from circuit switched to packet switched architectures. Even the next generation of smartphones may choose VoIP over LTE rather than continue the proprietary GSM and CDMA voice channels. All of this means an increasing stampede toward Ethernet as the universal networking protocol.

Using Ethernet instead of some other telecom protocol improves network efficiency since no conversions are required and interfaces are simpler. It also enables Ethernet strategies such as layer 2 switching vs layer 3 routing to connect geographically separate LANs on one large bridged network. This strategy works not only in the metro area networks, but also nationwide through metro networks and worldwide through Ethernet exchanges. We’re not far from the day when Ethernet will the common denominator and all networks will be IP over whatever’s at the core.

Now you know why it makes sense to run Ethernet rather than some other protocol, such as T-carrier or SONET. But why Ethernet over Copper?

The beauty of Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is that it makes good use of existing infrastructure to avoid construction costs. Business phone lines and T1 line connect using twisted pair copper wire bundles that are routinely installed for every business. Ethernet over Copper uses the very same installed copper. How this works is that the EoC provider installs the EoC equipment at the central office and compatible customer premises equipment at your location. In between, they simply lease the unpowered or “dry” copper pair that is already in place. In most cases two or more pair are utilized.

There’s a correlation between how many copper pair are connected and the speed of your line service. The more pair, from 2 to 8 typically, the higher the bandwidth. The modulation efficiency of this equipment yields higher bandwidths than you get from T1 lines and typical DSL or satellite links. A very popular entry level EoC service is 2 or 3 Mbps. That’s easily increased to 10, 15 or 20 Mbps in most locations. Even 50 and 100 Mbps over copper is not unheard of.

The one tradeoff is speed for distance. The closer you are to the telco office where your copper terminates, the higher that bandwidth you can achieve. In unusual cases, your location is extended more than 2 or 3 miles and EoC service won’t work. In those cases, you may still be able to get Ethernet over DS1 using the same transmission technology as T1 lines.

It’s true that you can get higher download bandwidths using Cable broadband or some wireless services. However, upload bandwidth on these services tends to be maybe a tenth the download speed. Ethernet is symmetrical, meaning that upload and download speeds are the same. This is important if you upload large files or operate on-premises servers.

Beyond technology, pricing is a big advantage for EoC vs T1 and even fiber optic services. Remember that Ethernet over Copper can deliver large bandwidths that delay or even avoid the expensive construction of fiber optic connections. EoC typically delivers twice the bandwidth of T1 for about the same price. At higher bandwidth levels, the cost savings is even more striking.

Could your business benefit from EoC service? Find out by checking prices and availability of Ethernet over Copper bandwidth for your business locations. Sorry, no residential service available.

Cloud Based Services With Free Trial Offers

Many businesses are looking to the clouds as an opportunity to save capital investment and ongoing operating and maintenance costs. This is a hot field, with vendors scrambling to get in and establish themselves in the space. But how do you know what services are right for your needs?

It’s especially important for small businesses with limited resources to be sure they are getting the most for their IT and telephone dollars. One way to be sure is to try before you buy. With that in mind, we’ve complied a selection of cloud based services that offer a free trial period before you make a commitment.

Atlantic.Net offers a free trial of cloud hosting as an alternative to virtual private servers. Their platform is designed to let you build, test and deploy Windows or Linux servers in the cloud in a matter of seconds. You can run whatever software you need and pay by the hour for only the resources that you use. Atlantic.Net is committed to 100% uptime on their SAS 70 certified hosting solution.

BrowserMob offers a free trial of website load testing in the cloud. It’s important to know what your ecommerce or other web properties can handle before you miss an important sales opportunity because your site crashed from too much traffic. Run concurrent tests with real browsers, not simply HTTP requests. This service scales up to 5,000 concurrent browsers and 500,000 users with over 6,000 Mbps maximum data throughput to to handle the largest sites. Responsive expert testing advice helps you get results quickly.

Do spend a lot of time and money sending documents out for signature? RightSignature offers a 5 document free trial of their cloud-based document signature service. Rather than faxing or overnight mailing paper documents and waiting for them to be signed and returned, signers go online and create legally valid electronic signatures. You simply create your documents using standard office tools and then upload them to RightSignature. Then send out an email message with a link to your online document. The system creates a document signature certificate with signer information, audit long and unique ID number. Archiving is online, too, so you never have to hunt for a document again.

The rest of your paper documents also belong in the cloud. Shoeboxed offers a free trial of their document scanning and storage service in the cloud. This is perfect for anyone in business who deals with expense report receipts, business cards and other day to day documents that pile up on the desk. You can scan and file it yourself or Shoeboxed will do it for a very reasonable price. You just drop your papers in a secure mailer and soon they’ll show up on a secure online database. More than mere scanning, the actual information on the page is loaded into the database where you can export it to Excel, Salesforce, Outlook or other program of your choice.

Customer service is important for any company. Assistly offer a free trial of their customer service cloud solution. You get a month to see if it isn’t far better than your current methods of finding and responding to customer queries. This system includes social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as traditional email and toll free number contacts. As an integrated solution, everything you need is right there at the operator’s station in one easy to use tool.

Other services, from online meetings to toll free telephone, also offer free trial periods. Watch for free trial opportunities any time you shop online for business services. These are a great way to become confident that you are getting the right service at the right price.