The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part V

Wireless is the bandwidth service that gets most of the press these days, but there are big developments afoot in the wired world as well. We’ll wrap up our look into the next decade of bandwidth with what’s going on with copper and fiber optic services.

It’s no surprise that fiber optic networks are expanding. Some of this expansion is prompted by American Reinvestment and Recovery Act that appropriated $7.2 billion to expand broadband access across the country. Rural areas that have been largely ignored by commercial interests are especially targeted. With funds available for middle-mile fiber runs, competitive carriers are taking advantage of the opportunity to expand their networks.

While fiber is being trenched through the countryside to provide broadband delivery to Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) that serve sparsely populated areas, even more fiber is being routed through metropolitan areas to hookup businesses of all sizes. Government incentives aren’t needed here. Businesses hungry for increased bandwidth either foot the bill for hookups to metropolitan fiber networks or commit to service levels that justify carriers to “light” their buildings for fiber service.

Why the interest in fiber optic connections? It’s not just mobile bandwidth that’s straining at the limits. T1 lines may have been all the bandwidth a small or even medium size business needed to handle email, general web browsing and communication with its website servers hosted elsewhere. Now, 1.5 Mbps seems a bit quaint and inadequate for all the smallest operations. What drives business now is cloud connections, Software as a Service, video conferencing, hosted VoIP and other bandwidth demanding applications.

The transition from 3G to 4G wireless also means that cellular carriers themselves are strained for fast enough backhaul connections. T1 lines works great to connect towers that handled voice calls. When users expect 10 or 15 Mbps of broadband service, fiber optics look like the ideal solution. The cost of construction, once a show stopper, becomes another part of the upgrade investment that’s paid once and offers almost unlimited upgrades for future needs.

Cloud computing is a major attraction for many businesses who find that pay-as-you-go is much easier to justify than requisitions for million dollar data center improvements. No need for racks and racks of servers, the environmentally controlled building to house them, the backup power generators, or the round-the-clock technical staff to keep everything running smoothly. Outsourcing that to a cloud service provider gets rid of those headaches, but adds a new one. How to you connect to the cloud? Low bandwidth, high latency connections will bring your operations to a grinding halt. What you need now is high bandwidth along with low latency, jitter and packet loss as a backbone to your virtual servers on the other side of the country. That means fiber optic lines and probably two of them for redundancy.

Fiber technology hasn’t been static during this expansion. Until recently you had a choice of SONET services from OC3 to OC12 and perhaps OC48. That was it. Now, Ethernet over Fiber is coming on strong as a direct competitor. Carrier Ethernet more closely matches the LAN networks that feed it. It is more scalable to meet changing business needs. Best of all, Ethernet services tend to cost less, often considerably less, than equivalent SONET fiber optic services.

But, wait! The era of copper is far from over. Just when carriers were thinking about decommissioning their twisted pair copper to let it corrode in the ground or be sold for scrap, Bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper gain favor as business bandwidth options. While a single T1 line may be too constrained for many uses, multiple T1 lines can be bonded into a single larger bandwidth service up to 10 or 12 Mbps. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology uses the same twisted pair bundles as bonded T1, but a more advanced modulation scheme. EoC bandwidth is distance sensitive, but can easily deliver 10 or 20 Mbps to most businesses and 30, 50 or even 100 Mbps for short runs. Continuing development incorporating wireless techniques such as MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) for crosstalk cancelation is pushing the limits of copper into the hundreds of Mbps and even to a fiber-like Gigabit per second bandwidth.

The next decade of bandwidth is likely to be dominated by massive fiber optic build-outs for fixed locations, such as office and industrial parks, along with copper solutions to bridge the gaps where fiber doesn’t yet connect. Wireless is clearly headed for a common 4G LTE nationwide infrastructure. Compatibility will be built into portable and mobile devices, perhaps as prolifically as WiFi is now. There may be some surprises in store, such long range and interconnected WiFi hotspots or whitespace transmitters as wireless competitors, high bandwidth satellites covering rural areas better than spotty fiber and cable construction, and the development of much higher microwave frequencies (60 GHz and above) and even infrared mesh networks as new service options.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this speculative look into what’s likely to happen in the next 10 years or so, as our appetite for higher bandwidth Internet and private network connections demand satisfaction. There are many good options available right now to support your current business needs. You may not even be aware of how much development has been going on in your area to increase service levels and reduce costs. This would be an excellent time to get competitive options and quotes for business bandwidth services.

See what's available now in the way of T-carrier and Ethernet copper, SONET and Ethernet fiber, fixed wireless and Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). Get instant bandwidth pricing up to 1 Gbps and fast quotes on other services.



This has been a 5 part series on bandwidth. If you’ve missed any part of it, you can access Part I, Part II, Part III, or Part IV to catch up at any time.

The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part IV

It won’t be long until wireless broadband has commandeered all the spectrum it can between a few hundred and a few thousand MHz. These are seen by the industry as being the most desirable frequencies. They offer high bandwidth capacity, good penetration into buildings and small antennas. Unfortunately, there are only so many of these channels available. Just like in real estate, when all the best locations are bought up expansion continues into whatever is available.

Going up or down the electromagnetic spectrum in search of more broadband capacity has its challenges. As you go down in frequency, up in wavelength, channels have to be proportionally larger to get the same carrying capacity. A 1 MHz channel at 10 GHz seems small. A 1 MHz channel at 10 MHz eats up a huge chunk of that band. At 1 MHz, there would only be room for a single 1 MHz channel.

One way to deal with this is to divvy up your transmissions into hundreds or thousands of smaller channels. This is the principle behind OFDM or Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. The system generates an array of carriers spaced out across the available spectrum. Each carrier transmits only a portion of the data. When those pieces are combined at the far end, you have a single continuous transmission again.

OFDM is the system used for BPL or Broadband over Power Line Internet services. It uses the shortwave frequencies, with some carriers omitted to avoid interference with other services. By using many, many small channels instead of one big one, any packet losses are small and easily replaced. It also offers a way to fit a wireless service into a band that doesn’t have big open chunks of spectrum. Just use the channels you can and combine a bunch of them to create a larger bandwidth service.

BPL may not be going anywhere because other wireline and wireless services are more cost effective competitors. WiMAX uses OFDM, as do LTE, WiFi and digital radio broadcasting. Seems like there is no reason a wireless equivalent of BPL couldn’t be deployed to use available lower frequencies that haven’t been previously considered for broadband use.

Going up the spectrum in frequency is also challenging. The higher you go, the more line of sight transmission becomes. The Ku band that broadcast satellites use from 12 to 18 GHz has lots of capacity, but not much ability to penetrate obstacles. Even tree leaves will interrupt service, as will a heavy rain. Wireless point to point transmissions in the Super and Extremely High Frequency bands is via outdoor antennas within line of sight.

That’s the state of the art today, but does it need to be so limited? Perhaps someone will come up with a way to flood areas with many very low power cells to ensure that a mobile antenna can receive a signal no matter where it travels. That same idea is being put to use now with mesh networks consisting of WiFi radios. Each WiFi hotspot communicates with the radios nearby to share traffic, so you don’t need backhaul connections to a central controller.

This idea of mesh networks with low power transmissions and short range coverage has application for even higher parts of the spectrum. Above 300 GHz, electromagnetic waves start to be called infrared light waves. Infrared light is the carrier used in fiber optic cables. You can eliminate the fiber and use infrared beams from point to point, as long as you have a direct line of sight. This is called free space optical transmission. With enough emitters and receivers connected in a mesh network, you can create a very high capacity network with decent coverage.

In Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV, we’ve seen how wireless broadband has a near insatiable need for bandwidth and how that may be satisfied by reassignment of desirable channels and more efficient use of underutilized frequencies up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. In the fifth and final part of this series on the next decade of bandwidth, we’ll take a look at wired connections that include both copper and fiber to see what else is in store for business bandwidth.

Is your business running short on bandwidth or simply looking to get a better deal? See what's available for your business location in the way of T-carrier and Ethernet copper, SONET and Ethernet fiber, fixed wireless and Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). Get instant bandwidth pricing up to 1 Gbps and fast quotes on other services.

The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part III

There’s a major conflict brewing between those who have spectrum and those who want it. On one side are the wireless cellular and broadband carriers. On the other side are TV broadcasters, satellite operators, governmental agencies and others with established rights to regulated pieces of the electromagnetic spectrum. There isn’t enough to just give everyone all they want. The marketplace is resolving some of the issue of who has the greater need through spectrum auctions and private sales. At the same time, clever ideas are helping create additional options through more efficient use of existing frequencies.

One such clever idea is to squat on any channel not currently being used. This is the principle behind “white space” transmissions. White space is a term often used in printing. Everywhere on the page not covered by ink is white space, the color of the unprinted paper. Pages with text spread out and empty areas have lots of white space.

You can carry that analogy over to the TV band. Before the days of cable and satellite, you know that there were only a few channels you could pick up with an outdoor antenna. Stations were never assigned channels right next to each other. That’s because early receivers didn’t have tuners that could separate adjacent channels well enough to keep the signals from interfering. The FCC made sure to put at least one blank channel in between each broadcaster in a particular area. Those blank channels were assigned to other cites too far away to interfere. In any given area, there is lots of white space where there are no assigned transmitters in the TV band.

White space transmitters take advantage of this situation by using those unused channels to transmit fairly weak signals that won’t interfere with TV reception. Wireless microphones were one of the first applications to take advantage of this available spectrum, hiding between stations before the switch to DTV. Since the switchover, the idea of using the white spaces in the remaining VHF and UHF TV bands has been blessed by the FCC, although with restrictions. In order to prevent chaos, any device operating unlicensed in these bands must take action to prevent interference to licensed operations. That means consulting a database of assignments maintained by the FCC and listening for transmissions on a channel to ensure it is unused before sending out any signals.

The idea of listening before transmitting is reminiscent of early Ethernet networks that used collision domains before everything evolved to switching. It’s the same as intersections where there are no traffic lights. Each user is responsible to make sure there is no traffic in the way before crossing. As long as everyone follows those rules, there is an amazing amount of spectrum still available that can be used on a shared basis.

Another technique being used to squeeze more performance out of existing bandwidth is being deployed by the cellular carriers themselves. It’s based upon the fact that all cellular towers aren’t used equally. Some are grossly overloaded and others lightly accessed. Those areas of high congestion need more towers, but there aren’t always more licensed frequencies available. Relieving the congestion involves breaking up the existing cells into many smaller cells using lower power transmissions. You don’t need a high power signal when you are standing right next to the cell tower.

These small cellular stations are called microcells, picocells and femtocells. A microcell covers an area about a mile wide, a picocell is 600 feet wide and a femtocell is a 30 foot cell. These small cells can cover a business district, a campus or even a single building to fill in dead spots or congestion in cellular coverage. They can be connected to the rest of the cellular phone system by traditional T1 line, Ethernet over Copper or even a broadband Internet connection.

You might have noticed that picocells have a similar coverage to WiFi hotspots. With the move to 4G for data and even VoIP voice, WiFi may turn into an alternative to the cellular phone networks. WiFi is built into nearly every Internet connected device already. WiFi routers have proliferated in both homes and offices. Many restaurants, hotels, auto service shops, retailers and other business locations already have free WiFi hotspots available. What’s missing is universal coverage and roaming. With cellular, you are free to move about while maintaining your connection. The system takes care of handing off the connection from cell to cell. With WiFi, you need to log into each hotspot individually. A similar system for WiFi plus higher power transmissions and more hotspots could make this a serious candidate for universal wireless broadband, especially free access.

In Part I, Part II, and Part III, we’ve seen how the coming juggernaut of wireless broadband Internet is sucking up all the available spectrum it can find and how more efficient techniques are being developed to make better use of existing spectrum. In Part IV, we’ll have a look at how technological improvements can open up additional bandwidth to satisfy our insatiable broadband appetite.

Is your business running short on bandwidth or simply looking to get a better deal? See what's available for your business location in the way of T-carrier and Ethernet copper, SONET and Ethernet fiber, fixed wireless and Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). Get instant bandwidth pricing up to 1 Gbps and fast quotes on other services.

The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part II

In Part I, we examined the recent moves by both AT&T and Verizon to gobble up as much desirable bandwidth as possible for their insatiable LTE deployments. In Part II, we’ll see that insatiable is no understatement and what’s likely to happen as we get strapped for 4G bandwidth

UHF and microwave bandwidth deals are trading briskly, but soon all the sales that can be made will be. Lucrative prices will lure those who are holding bandwidth from previous spectrum auctions into selling it to larger players who are in full 4G deployment mode. When it’s all gone, then what?

By the time 4G LTE has spread across the nation, user demand will catch up with channel capacity. At that point, bandwidth rationing will occur. You won’t get access in a particular location until someone else moves away from the tower. Even HD video on demand and the online automobile may get stifled by too many users trying to access too few transmissions. Internet based application development that thrives on ever higher performance devices and unlimited bandwidth will grind to a halt. Technology will be stuck in place for the foreseeable future.

That’s the nightmare that both technologists and regulators will scramble to avoid. It’s happening already. The successful spectrum auctions to date have whetted the appetite of government officials, who see a way to generate revenue for the Treasury without disgruntled constituents howling about having to fork it over. The business community loves this capitalistic approach. Big telecom carriers are happy to bid up the prices for each precious channel because they know that the return on their investment will be many times over.

Look for more spectrum auctions in the next decade. The FCC is reported to be scouring every nook and cranny of channel assignments to find pieces that can be sold off at billion dollar rates. I expect that the days of over the air TV broadcasting are numbered. One suggestion being floated is for TV stations to combine their broadcasts on a single broadcast channel using the multi-program capability of the digital TV system. The incentive will be that the station owners can share in the revenue generated by selling off their licenses.

Actually, to say that over the air television is dying is not the case at all. What’s likely to happen is a technology shift away from high power broadcasts using TV industry specific standards to video programming delivered via mobile broadband. Some will raise the alarm that our legacy of free for everyone TV programing is being destroyed. The truth is the most people don’t watch over the air signals exclusively anymore. They have Cable or Satellite that offers the few local outlets plus dozens more non-aired channels. This is one reason why the transition from analog to digital went so smoothly. The set top boxes have no problem feeding either analog or digital sets equally well.

There are a couple of new trends working to make the arguments for continued over the air (OTA) broadcasting moot. Viewership on both Cable and Satellite is dropping, not as a reversion to OTA, but as a migration to the Internet for television content. Self-proclaimed “cable cutters” drop their subscription services in favor of downloading their favorite shows from network Web sites or from video subscription services such as Netflix.

The other trend is technological. The TV and the computer are merging. At the same time that cable cutters are downloading episodes of last week’s sitcom to their laptop computers or smartphones, other viewers are accessing Internet content on their living room TVs. Right now, that’s via content aggregators like Netflix and YouTube. Eventually, though, flat screen TVs will be able to access any Internet content from any site. What’s missing is a comprehensive guide that makes it easy to find, schedule and time-shift record the shows you want. Apple’s rumored Siri-based TV might be the solution. When programs on your local TV station, Cable, Satellite and the Internet are equally accessible, then OTA is just one more option on the scheduling screen. The majority of OTA viewership will eventually be via built-in WiFi or LTE broadband wireless rather than DTV transmissions.

It seems just a matter of time, perhaps within the next decade or even two, that UHF broadcast transmitters will start being shut down and the towers sold for scrap. In their place will be hundreds or even thousands of other shorter towers with cellular antennas and base stations creating LTE cells. Local stations will consolidate as a cost savings measure and the opportunity to sell their frequency license assets for considerable profit. Large urban stations with enormous OTA audiences will the last to go, eventually operating as “nightlight” services until viewership shrinks to insignificance. What might happen is multiple frequency consolidation initiatives, like the vacating of half the UHF band during the last spectrum auction. OTA stations will be corralled into a smaller and smaller broadcast band to clear more spectrum for sale.

In Part III, we’ll continue our look at how the 4G wireless bandwidth crunch will be mitigated by making more efficient use of available spectrum.

Is your business running short on bandwidth or simply looking to get a better deal? See what's available for your business location in the way of T-carrier and Ethernet copper, SONET and Ethernet fiber, fixed wireless and Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). Get instant bandwidth pricing up to 1 Gbps and fast quotes on other services.

The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part I

The recent disintegration of the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile might seem like a victory for consumer choice versus telecom monopoly, but it was never really about that. Even if these two GSM carriers became one, there would still be the counterbalancing force of CDMA carriers Verizon and Sprint. It wasn’t about owning the space. It was about owning the bandwidth.

Is there any doubt in your mind about this? OK, consider that no sooner had the deal fallen apart than AT&T went out and bought $1.9 billion worth of spectrum from Qualcomm with the FCC’s blessing. Verizon just announced that they bought $315 million of 20 MHz AWS spectrum from Cox right after buying $3.6 billion for 122 spectrum licenses from Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

What’s with the bandwidth buying frenzy? It’s all about mobility. There are two laws of physics that must be dealt with to satisfy our appetite for everything on the go. First, you have to use wireless spectrum. You can’t be trailing a wire everywhere you go, even if it is a nice fiber optic cable. Second, the more bandwidth you want to support the applications, the more bandwidth you need to transmit through the air.

Not all bandwidth is created equal. We’ve gotten used to cell phone services delivered on the lower microwave frequencies around 2 GHz. The next deployments will be over the old TV frequencies around 700 MHz. That’s significant because the higher up the spectrum you go in MHz and GHz, the less those transmissions can penetrate into buildings. Light is really nothing more than a really high frequency transmission in the same electromagnetic spectrum. Just about anything will stop a light beam. At the other end of the spectrum are VLF (Very Low Frequencies) around 100 KHz that go around the Earth, hugging the surface. Those are used to synchronize our “atomic” clocks with national standards in Colorado.

The other thing you should know about the spectrum is that if you want more Mbps you need more MHz. If you want Gbps of Internet bandwidth for your mobile device, you need GHz of spectrum to carry it. This is why VLF isn’t much good for anything but sending low bandwidth voice and data long distances. Microwaves have the capacity to transmit massive amounts of data, but they tend to be line of sight. Even heavy rain or tree foliage will stop satellite TV in its tracks.

This is where life gets tough for the FCC. AM radio stations are flickering off and going dark one by one, but those frequencies aren’t of much use for video transmission. Shortwave radio is being usurped by the Internet. Only problem is that the shortwave channels don’t have massive data carrying capacity, either. What’s really desirable are those juicy frequencies between 200 Mbps and 2 Gbps. That range includes UHF television and GPS satellite bands. Note the big squabble between LightSquared’s 4G broadband and the L band GPS satellite systems. Both services want the same band around 1500 MHz for different purposes and they can’t both be there without interference.

What AT&T bought from Qualcomm was UHF channels 55 and 56, formerly assigned to broadcast television and repurposed for Qualcomm’s FLO TV. It wasn’t hard to see this coming. FLO TV was an idea that came too late. Who wants to buy a separate device that only picks up a few video channels now that you have a smartphone or tablet that can get anything over the Internet? AT&T will dump the FLO technology and press those channels into service for LTE, the 4G mobile broadband standard.

Mobile Internet is becoming a black hole for spectrum and 4G is the standard that will try to feed it. Nothing else is fast enough, although WiMAX and EVDO could be if they had the momentum behind them. It appears that nearly all carriers, including WiMAX pioneer CLEAR, are headed to the LTE standard within the next few years. Everything else will shutdown from lack of available transmission channels.

What everybody wants is a single big pipe from the Internet to whatever they are using. That could be a smartphone, a laptop or tablet computer, an Internet-powered radio, weather radar and information system in their car, high definition television set or applications still to come. Giving them that without turning over the airwaves completely to the Internet will be the challenge.

In Part II, we’ll take a look at what is likely to happen next in the battle for bandwidth, especially in the lucrative UHF TV spectrum being jealously eyed by cellular carriers for 4G expansion.

Is your business running short on bandwidth or simply looking to get a better deal? See what's available for your business location in the way of T-carrier and Ethernet copper, SONET and Ethernet fiber, fixed wireless and Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). Get instant bandwidth pricing up to 1 Gbps and fast quotes on other services.

Last Minute Online Gifts For Good

It’s the night before Christmas,
and all through the house,
the screams from the office
have upset your spouse.

You made a gift list
and checked it your best.
How could you have forgotten
your brother out West?

It’s a last minute panic,
driven by fear.
Is there anything out there
that can save you this year?

On Google, on Yahoo, on GoodSearch, on Bing!
Visit the K.I.N.D site and you’ll find the right thing.
Now only will you deliver that gift that you should,
You’ll be doing young students a whole world of good.

Instead of calling your brother
to say that you’re sorry,
give a desk in his name
to a kid in Malawi.

A desk will be built,
creating local employment.
A child gets off the dirt floor,
creating school time enjoyment.

Right now you contribute,
in a process that’s swift.
Your brother gets an e-card,
acknowledging your gift.

This couldn’t be easier,
it sure fills a need.
Relax now at Christmas,
you’ve done a good deed

Making a donation to a good cause in someone’s name brightens the day of 3 people. You feel good doing it, the person whose name you are giving it in is both surprised and delighted, and the charity that you help improves the life of a person or animal, perhaps all year long.

This year, we’ve been especially intrigued by the K.I.N.D: Kids in Need of Desks project that is a cooperative project of Lawrence O’Donnell on his MSNBC show, “The Last Word,” and UNICEF. What makes this project so compelling is that for a mere $48, you can have an entire desk built in Malawi and delivered to a classroom in need. This desk will be used for years, perhaps decades, to improve the learning of kids who now sit on the floor and write in their notebooks the best they can. It’s amazing how such a small contribution on our part can make such a huge difference in the lives of youngsters and adults in the third world. Adults? Yes, the adults are hired to build those desks out of metal pipe and wood on-site in Malawi. When ready, they load the desks into a truck and deliver them to delighted students at one lucky classroom. The next load goes to a different classroom.

You can read more about this K.I.N.D project, see the happy faces of the school kids in Malawi and watch a video about the project. Then, go to the K.I.N.D. donation page and contribute what you wish in your own name or for anyone else you want to honor. Your donation will be processed instantly online and an e-card from K.I.N.D. will be sent to the recipient of your choice.

Did someone say it was too late to buy a last minute gift this year? Ho, ho, ho. There’s always time for giving on the Internet. For the animal lover on your gift list, have a look at "I Want a Baby Elephant for Christmas."

Happy Holidays!

DS1 Bandwidth vs Ethernet

DS1 is a popular WAN bandwidth service for business, although you may know it by it’s more popular name, T1. Let’s have a look at what you get with DS1 and what you can do with it. We’ll also compare DS1 with another popular bandwidth service, Ethernet over Copper.

Actually, DS1 and T1 aren’t exactly the same thing, although most of the time the terms are used interchangeably. They are defined in the same family of technical specifications developed by Bell Labs. This is the T-carrier digital line service introduced as a replacement for analog carrier telephony. While designed for the telephone industry, DS1 and T1 have since greatly expanded their application into data connections for point to point private lines and dedicated Internet access.

Just what does DS1 mean? The term DS1 or DS-1 stands for Digital Signal 1. It is a time division multiplexed set of channels that are also referred to as timeslots. Each channel is 8 contiguous bits. The collection of 24 channels lined up end to end amounts to 192 bits. These are send out as a serial bitstream from transmitter to receiver. How do you tell the channels apart? One additional bit is added to the front of the pack to act as a synchronizing or framing bit. The sync bit says “start a new frame here.” The first 8 bits are channel 1, the second 8 are channel 2, and so on.

The DS1 frames repeat 8,000 times per second. This frequency isn’t arbitrary. It was selected to be just fast enough to adequately sample an audio signal that ranges from 300 to 3,300 Hz. You’ll recognize that as the voice range allocated to telephone calls. To avoid distortion, you need to sample at least twice the highest frequency with a little extra margin for filtering. The combination of 8 bits or 256 different levels times an 8 KHz sampling rate gives each channel a bandwidth of 64 Kbps. The string of 24 channels equals 1.536 Mbps. Add the framing bit (1 bit times 8 KHz) for another 8 Kbps and the grand total is 1.544 Mbps. There is where the T1 bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps (rounded) comes from.

This is what is going on inside a DS1. Each of those 24 channels is called a DS0. You can use them separately to carry 24 separate telephone conversations or combine their capacity to carry 1.536 Mbps of data payload. There is a special service called Integrated T1 that uses some of the channels for voice and some for data. This gives you both telephone and broadband Internet service on the same T1 line.

DS1 is the digital signal that rides on a T1 line. The line is a physical transmission system. It was originally specified as two twisted pair copper phone lines, one for transmit and one for receive. The signal on the line consists of alternating positive and negative pulses that represent the logical “1” level and zero voltage representing a logical “0. Nowadays, other modulation schemes like HDSL and HDSL2 may be used to increase transmission distance and reduce the number of pairs needed from two to one. Regardless, these are all called T1 lines.

There is now a competing line service called Ethernet over Copper (EoC). It uses the same twisted pair copper wiring as T1 lines, although the termination equipment on each end is different. Both T1 and EoC can combine multiple copper pairs to increase bandwidth. Ethernet, itself, is not a channelized protocol. Instead, it uses packets to transmit voice, data or video.

T1 is highly reliable, reasonably priced and almost universally available due to its deployment on the telephone infrastructure over half a century. Ethernet over Copper is also highly reliable and less expensive than T1, where available. You can typically get 2 to 3 Mbps EoC for the same price as 1.5 Mbps T1. Ethernet bandwidths can easily go up to 20 or 30 Mbps, while bonded T1 lines are limited to around 12 Mbps. The limitation of Ethernet is that the signal fades rapidly with distance. You need to be fairly close to the telco central office that terminates your copper pair to get the higher bandwidths. In some areas, Ethernet services are still not readily available.

Would you like the best deals on voice and data service to support your business? If so, get instant online prices and availability on DS1 and Ethernet bandwidth services for your particular location. Higher bandwidth services are also available with excellent pricing.

Copper First, Then Fiber Bandwidth Solution

What do you do when you really need to get your business connected, but fiber optic service installation just isn’t going to happen soon enough? One option is to adopt a two-stage process that gets you going now and then steps up to the bandwidth you really need when it's available. The key is utilizing two different technologies to take advantage of their strengths.

Fiber optic bandwidth, either SONET or Ethernet, will get you the bandwidth you need for any conceivable application. The low end starts around 50 or 100 Mbps and goes up to at least 1 Gbps, with many locations eligible for 10 Gbps Ethernet (10 GigE) or OC-192 SONET (10 Gbps).

Copper bandwidth, either T-Carrier or Ethernet, will get you the bandwidth you need much faster. That bandwidth, though, is going to be a lot slower than what you can get with fiber. T1 lines are reasonably priced, available almost anywhere, and can be installed in a matter of weeks. The base bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps. Not enough to even consider? Then multiply that bandwidth by bonding additional T1 lines. You can get 12 Mbps over T1 by bonding 8 T1 lines together to act as one big bandwidth pipe.

An alternative is Ethernet over Copper. This service uses the same twisted pair copper telco lines as T1, but has a more efficient modulation scheme. You can easily get 10, 20 or 30 Mbps using 8 copper pair. EoC technology trades off bandwidth and distance, unlike T1 which is 1.5 Mbps no matter how far you are from the central office. If you are within a mile from the CO and the office is properly equipped, you may be able to get 50 to 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. Those speeds are starting to get competitive with OC-3 (155 Mbps) and Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps).

If fiber is what you really want, you could be looking at months to complete the installation. That’s especially true if the metro fiber is running down one side of the highway and you are on the other side. Or, if the nearest fiber connection is blocks away in the city. It’s much faster if your building is already “lit” for fiber optic service, even if you are not a subscriber. Adding customers to an already existing fiber installation is relatively easy. It’s also reasonably fast and easy if there is a fiber lit building next door.

You’ve got the idea that fiber installations aren’t a given for any particular business location. Not yet, anyway. Some estimates are that less than 25% of all business buildings are lit for fiber optic service. On the other hand, nearly 100% of all business buildings are already being served with copper telco lines. Most often these are multi-pair bundles installed for multiple line telephone service. Unused pairs can be quickly pressed into service for Ethernet over Copper or T1 line service. After all, they are already hooked up at both ends of the cable run.

With that in mind, here’s a two step solution that I’ve seen work when a business needs both high bandwidth and fast installation. What you do is work with a carrier that has both copper and fiber technologies available. That’s fairly common now. Have them install bonded T1 or Ethernet over Copper at the highest bandwidth they can quickly install. At the same time, place an order for fiber optic service at the bandwidth you really need. The trick is to get an agreement that you can drop the copper service without penalty once your fiber service is turned up.

By working out this type of arrangement, you may get as much as half the bandwidth you need on a fairly quick schedule. By the time you get used to doing business on the copper lines, your fiber will be cut-in and it will seem like someone opened the bandwidth floodgates. You’ll only have to pay for one service at a time, although you might think about it and keep the copper connection as a backup for your fiber if the budget permits.

Do you have a situation that needs special consideration for connectivity? There may be more options than you think. Get consultation and bandwidth option prices and provisioning times now.

Copper Bandwidth Connections Push 1 Gbps

Just when you think they’ve wrung all of the speed possible on ordinary twisted pair telephone wire, clever engineering demonstrates that we haven’t hit a bandwidth ceiling yet. Would you believe 1 Gbps copper business service?

It’s not available in your office park yet, but it’s on the way. Chinese networking and telecommunications company, Huawei, has a prototype Giga DSL system that can deliver a combined rate of 1 Gbps line speed within 100 meters of a remote terminal (RT) cabinet. It scales down to 500 Mbps if you can connect within 200 meters of the cabinet.

This follows another Huawei project called SuperMIMO that uses four twisted copper pairs to deliver 700 Mbps over 400 meters. You might recognize MIMO as the WiFi 802.3n antenna technology used to extend range using multiple antennas for both transmitter and receiver. MIMO stands for Multiple Input Multiple Output. The ideas is that radio waves bounce around and interfere with each other and themselves in an effect called multipath distortion. With more than one antenna and some intelligence in the system, you can sort out the wave patterns and recreate a clean signal.

So what does wireless transmission have to do with copper wires buried in the ground? For business telecommunications, such as multi-line telephone, T1 and Ethernet over Copper, the twisted pair lines are not installed individually. Instead, collections of them run together in binder cables with 50 pair or more. The twisted conductors cancel out most electromagnetic interference for low speed transmission, such as analog phone and dial-up Internet access. Higher speed signals, such as EoC or T1, can transfer to other pairs in the cable creating crosstalk interference. This is where MIMO can reduce that interference between wired paths in the cable just like dealing with multiple paths through the air.

Other telecom equipment vendors have been active in this field as well. Alcatel-Lucent has their own approach called DSL Phantom Mode that delivers 300 Mbps over two copper pairs. Over longer distances up to 1 km, it can deliver 100 Mbps. With 1 km spans, this system would work well for Ethernet over Copper in business districts and industrial parks.

Alcatel-Lucent’s breakthrough is something called a phantom circuit. These circuits were used in the early days of wired communications to transmit more telegraph signals or telephone calls. The principle is that two phone lines, consisting of one twisted pair each, will carry two separate telephone calls. But if you connect a circuit between them, that can be used as to carry a third telephone call or telegraph signal. Interference is eliminated by using transformers on each end of the lines and connecting the third circuit between center taps on the transformers. Since the lines are balanced, they don’t notice this third or phantom circuit riding along on the same copper.

Alcatel-Lucent also uses bonded copper pair to increase bandwidth carrying capacity and VDSL2 vectoring to cancel the cross talk between multiple lines in the same bundle. Like MIMO, vectoring employs digital signal processing to analyze the effect of interference on signals among copper pairs on a symbol by symbol basis. This is something that was out of the question before high speed DSP became affordable. By throwing enough mathematics at the signal waveforms, it is now possible to make finer and finer corrections to maximize throughput of any wired or wireless transmission system.

What’s driving such a fury of investigative work into leveraging century old copper connected to telephone company central offices? Bandwidth demand is ramping up exponentially right along with the processing and storage needs of big data. The move from local data centers to the cloud also means that faster network lines are needed for WAN as well as LAN connections. Fiber speeds are increasing, too. But fiber only reaches 75% of business locations, at most, and is expensive and time consuming to install. If existing copper can be made to meet the increasing bandwidth demand, businesses can rapidly increase their MAN and WAN network speeds using connections they have now.

Are you feeling pressed for speed on your network connections? Both copper and fiber solutions are available now that weren’t in place even a short time ago. Check Ethernet over Copper and Fiber bandwidth prices now and see what’s available for your business location.

Cyber Security Threat Protection In the Cloud

In days of yore, when castles were in vogue, the nobles found that massive stone fortifications were not enough to secure them from determined invaders. What they did was to ring the castle grounds with a deep water-filled ditch called a moat. This effectively prevented sieges from battering rams and tunneling under the castle walls. The lesson here is that your infrastructure is much easier to defend if you don’t let the bad guys anywhere near the main line of defense.

Now let’s fast-forward to the 21st century and see how these medieval lessons-learned can protect our networks. Our massive stone castle wall is now a firewall. It’s effective in preventing most penetrations into the network. Like real stone fortifications and wooden gates, that firewall can only hold out so long against massive assaults at the network edge. What we need is a modern day moat. This is an electronic moat, of course, and it needs to surround our network but not be in it. Where can we get that layer of protection? How about in the cloud?

The cloud might just be the perfect first line of defense for local networks. It’s an idea that makes so much sense that MegaPath, a major networking service provider, is taking exactly that approach in a solution they call Unified Threat Management (UTM). This suite of managed security services can be implemented completely in the cloud, completely on-site or within a hybrid private/public configuration.

MegaPath’s UTM suite is offered in the form of Security as a Service (SaaS). It’s a multilayer approach that can easily fend off unsophisticated attempted break-ins and stand up to higher threat blended attacks. This suite also coordinates security alerting, logging, reporting, compliance and response.

What’s in the SaaS suite? It starts with an advanced firewall that features deep packet inspection with up to 500 firewall policies. Intrusion prevention features multi-layered and blended attack detection that handles both known and unknown threats. A powerful anomaly detector identifies and stops zero-day threats to all network types, including wireless.

No good network security system would be without anti-virus and anti-malware these days. This one has both signature and rules based blocking. Anti-spam deals with the onslaught of unwanted messages and deletes or simply tags them depending on your policy. There’s nothing like having to work your way through hundreds or thousands of spam messages each day to kill employee productivity.

Speaking of productivity, just what are all those employees browsing on the Internet anyway? Make sure their time is spent on company sanctioned activities with white and black lists and policy-based content filtering. Web application control goes a step further to give you precise control of apps like IM, chat, and voice or video on social media sites.

You’ll have data loss prevention with real time detection and prevention of your sensitive company data being transferred outside the company. That includes credit card, healthcare or financial data that is literally worth its weight in gold. Vulnerability scanning checks internal and external IP addresses to find and fix vulnerabilities in real time. Quarterly scans are implemented for PCI compliance. File integrity monitoring watches for unauthorized access or changes to critical system or configuration files.

Managed logging and security information management round out the MegaPath SaaS suite. These collect data and provide the alerting, reporting and archival you need for proper management. Portal based workflow management and tracking demonstrates due diligence in meeting organizational security policies and compliance reporting.

Are you feeling a bit vulnerable with the limited firewall and virus protection you have now? Sadly, the cost of one major breaking can far exceed the amount you’d spend preventing it with an effective cyber security solution. Now would be an excellent to investigate managed security services from MegaPath and other top tier network service providers.



Note: Photo of medieval castle and moat courtesy of Christophe.Finot on Wikimedia Commons.

Optical Wireless Broadband To 1 Gbps

One problem larger organizations have is how to link multiple facilities within a sprawling campus or a metropolitan area. This gets especially tricky when metro fiber connections are hard to obtain or it is difficult to run conduit even on your own property. Have you considered optical wireless?

Optical Wireless Broadband (OWB) is a high speed alternative to fiber optic cabling. Like fiber optic solutions, OWB uses infrared light to send packets from source to destination at bandwidths up to 1 Gbps. What’s missing is the glass fiber.

If you don’t use fiber to carry the optical signals, then just what do you use? Air. That’s right, just send the light beam through the air without a conduit to constrain it. Broad Sky Networks has a solution called iBeam that does just that. It creates reliable point to point Optical Wireless Broadband links that provide up to 1 Gbps of bandwidth over distances of up to 1.6 km per link.

You can imagine how easy it is to interconnect all the buildings on your university, medical or research campus using OWB technology. After all, these buildings are certainly within line of site of each other. That’s a requirement of iBeam technology. If the beam is blocked, the data is cut off.

An advantage of iBeam over short range free space optical transmission solutions is that it extends over a kilometer and a half between source and destination. That lets you cross busy thoroughfares, rivers, lakes, business districts, residential areas and so on. You may have already priced construction efforts that run fiber optic cabling on poles or trenched underground. Has that been a show stopper in your plans to interconnect facilities with high bandwidth services? iBeam can be the solution that gets around those limitations. Actually, your infrared beam goes right over the problem areas with no right of way issues, no frequency coordination and no RF licenses needed.

Speaking of RF, there is one situation where you may want to employ a radio frequency solution. Infrared light is blocked by heavy fog and other severe weather conditions. If you can’t see the building you are connecting with, the iBeam probably can’t either. If you are connecting near the distance limits of iBeam or are located in an area known for heavy fog, Broad Sky Networks offers a iBeam RF+ backup system to maintain your signal. In addition to the standard iBeam equipment, an 802.11n radio system is installed as a backup link. You’ll recognize that designation as the latest high speed WiFi standard. In the even of an optical outage for any reason, the OWB link will automatically switch to the RF+ radio backup. Your bandwidth will temporarily go from 1 Gbps to 100 Mbps, but you’ll still have connectivity.

For special coverage needs, Broad Sky has a patented mesh network solution. Their Optical Wireless Broadband Point to Multi-Point architecture (PtMP) is unique in the industry. This technology can help you expand your current wired or fiber network quickly and easily with a combination of conventional network connections and optical segments.

Are you frustrated with a lack of affordable conventional solutions to connect multiple buildings on a campus or metro setting? Optical Wireless Broadband may offer the solution you’ve been needing. Get pricing and availability of a wide variety of optical and fiber bandwidth connectivity solutions to meet your particular business requirements.



Note: Picture of Keck telescope laser beam at night courtesy of Paul Hirst on Wikimedia Commons.

Handle Big Data With Big Bandwidth

We are said to be entering the age of big data. Just what is big data, why is it different than any other type of data, and what are the ramifications of having big data on our networks?

Big data is exactly what it sounds like. It refers to datasets that are so huge that they overwhelm normal database management tools. We’re not talking megabytes or gigabytes here. Those are easily handled by off the shelf tools. Big data is terabytes, petabytes, exabytes and zettabytes. If you don’t know what those are, just know that each named step up in size represents an increase of 1,000 times.

Where is all this big data coming from? It’s not the sort of thing you generate typing on your PC. Big data comes from computer generated simulations, process and financial modeling, research projects and sensor data acquisition and processing. Computer animation and video processing in high definition and beyond can spit out terabytes faster than you know what to do with them.

What is all this big data going to do to your network, especially your WAN network? Check out this video from Level 3 Communications to get a feel for what’s on the way and how you can deal with it...



As you can see, WAN bandwidth is likely to be the big choke point for big data. It’s because we’re used to dealing with relatively small files and modest applications such as video conferencing and VoIP. We're also used to handling incremental growth in bandwidth needs by scaling up bandwidth services we are already using.

Big data is going to change that. Instead of incremental change, we’re talking step changes. Bonding more T1 lines or moving up to a DS3 service isn’t going to do the trick. You’ll need fiber, and likely a fiber optic solution that has a lot of room for growth.

Fortunately, there a lot more fiber options available today than even a short while ago. These include Ethernet over Fiber to 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps and even 40 Gbps. Carrier core networks are now moving to 100 Gbps as quickly as they can. Other options include wavelength services over Dense Wavelength Division Modulation (DWDM) at up to 10 Gbps per wavelength and dark fiber that you can light yourself.

Are you feeling the pinch of too little WAN bandwidth right now, or see it coming in the near future? If so, this is a good time to check out your options from carriers that have the capacity to support your big data network needs. Get competitive fiber optic bandwidth options and prices for whatever capacity your business needs.

Best VoIP Providers For Business

Have you been thinking about making the move from multi-line analog or PRI trunk phone service to VoIP, but unsure about how well it will work? Here are some ideas and recommendations about what you can achieve and how to proceed successfully.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is also called “network voice” to distinguish it from traditional wireline phone service. The key word is “network.” VoIP is designed to run on computer networks rather than the proprietary telephone technologies we’ve been using for the last century. In fact, on the network, voice is just another service running along with data, video and streaming audio. Every service generates packets that are transported from source to destination using routers and switches on the network.

This presents a huge cost savings opportunity for larger businesses. Having one network to carry all traffic saves over having to maintain separate telephone and data networks. It’s less of an issue for smaller companies, although there are also cost savings in having one service provider connection instead of different telephone and broadband lines.

Where VoIP has gotten a dicey reputation is from using the Internet as both a telephone line and a broadband data service. The Internet wasn’t designed for high quality two-way voice conversations, so it’s a hit and miss proposition as to how good the voice quality of your conversations will be. Some calls may sound as good or better than the best analog line. Others will sound distorted and slightly delayed so that you and the other party cut off each other’s conversations. Residential users may not find this variable performance all that annoying, so they’re happy with the savings they get from dumping their analog landlines in favor of using their broadband Internet connection for both phone and computer service.

Business users who want clear conversations with their customers at all times have some better performing options available. Medium and larger companies will opt for a private line or MPLS network connection to their phone system provider. This is also called a SIP Trunk after the Session Initiation Protocol standard used for VoIP switching. A SIP trunk can support multiple simultaneous phone conversations, similar to an ISDN PRI trunk that is used with in-house PBX telephone systems.

Note that the type of VoIP service we’re talking about here is remotely hosted telephone switching at a service provider’s location. This is also known as Hosted VoIP, Hosted PBX, or communications in the cloud.

Small companies can also benefit from Hosted PBX service even if they have only a few to a few dozen telephones. In this case, the SIP Trunking provider supplies your business with an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that uses the SIP trunk to deliver both telephone and broadband Internet service. Unlike residential broadband phone service, the SIP trunk keeps the voice and data packets from interfering with each other. That maintains your voice quality on telephone calls. The phones have priority. Any bandwidth they are not using is automatically assigned as broadband Internet bandwidth. With some providers, you may also elect to plug existing analog phones into the IAD. This is called an analog handoff.

Another service that can provide both Internet and telephone service is Cable business broadband and telephone bundled service. You have one line coming into your office in the form of a coaxial cable. This cable carries telephone, broadband Internet and even television. Quality of service is maintained by keeping the telephone, television and Internet services in their own channels on the cable. Your phone service is VoIP technology, but your phone calls never touch the Internet. They just ride their own channel of the cable to a switching system that connects to the public telephone system. Note that to make this work, you need to get both your business broadband and phone service from the same Cable provider, like Comcast.

Are you interested in learning more about the advanced features and quality of service protections for VoIP service? Get features and pricing from the best VoIP providers for business telephone service now.

T1 Line With Instant Wireless Backup

You know how it can get you nuts when your business broadband goes down right in the middle of something important. That’s why many companies opt for telecom-grade T1 line service instead of “best effort” information services like DSL and Cable broadband. While highly reliable, T1 lines aren’t immune to outages either. An equipment failure or careless backhoe operator can made your line go dead when you least expect it.

One way that companies build in redundancy against line losses is by ordering diverse T1 service. In other words, they order two lines from two different providers. The only problem with that is the bundle of twisted pair copper leaving their premises is owned by the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC). All those wires travel together right into the same central office. Chances are that when one line is severed in a local mishap, they all are.

Cbeyond, an innovative company in IT and communications services, has a better idea. They offer T1 line service with a wireless backup option. The way it works is that your normal bandwidth is supplied through the T1 at 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download. If that connection is lost for any reason, your broadband service instantly transfers to a wireless broadband connection using a cellular provider aircard. While using that channel, you’ll have typically 600 Kbps to 1.1 Mbps download speed and 400 to 800 Kbps upload speed. That should keep you going for the few hours that it typically takes to repair a T1 connection.

You might rig up something like this yourself using a MiFi or wireless modem aircard that you can get from any of the cellular carriers. The difference with Cbeyond’s line backup service is that it offers an automatic failover. You don’t have to notice there is a problem and then bring on another service. Cbeyond keeps your same IP address for both the wired and wireless connection. They can do that because the switchover is accomplished in their network cloud. You also have unlimited data capability while on the wireless backup. Most wireless carriers won’t even sell you an unlimited plan anymore.

One more advantage of the T1 wireless line backup from Cbeyond is that it will cost you less to add this option than go out and contract for a separate wireless service to make your own backup.

Cbeyond is an Atlanta company that serves Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, Detroit, San Francisco, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Seattle and Washington, DC. If you are within their service footprint, you can benefit from their extensive suite of business communications services. Those include local, long distance and international phone service, plus mobile phones. In addition to voice and broadband, Cbeyond offers messaging and collaboration, data backup and security, and virtual and dedicated cloud servers. Their Multinet MPLS service securely connects branch offices, customers, employees and suppliers on one virtual network.

Do you have a special situation that just doesn’t seem to be supported by your current telecom service provider? The advantage of working through a telecom broker, like Telarus, Inc., is that you have access to dozens of top rate providers with services that you may not even be aware of. Get complementary phone consultation along with competitive prices and service options to meet your specific requirements.

Vocal IP Networx Offers Free SNMP Monitoring

You’re probably used to ordering T1 lines and other bandwidth solutions. You also know that it’s up to you to know when your service is available and not available. Sometimes that’s a bit tricky because you buy the line service from one carrier, install a edge router you get from another vendor and load up the network with firewalls, servers and other devices. It’s a good thing that you are around to monitor all this 24/7. You are available 24/7 aren’t you?

Large corporations have round the clock IT staffing and their own network operations centers (NOCs). Medium and smaller size companies wing it overnight and plan on dealing with issues as they arise. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get some help in monitoring your network operations without it costing you a fortune?

Vocal IP Networx, a leader in IP telephony solutions and services, may have the answer to your need. They are offering free 24/7 SNMP monitoring of every circuit and deployed customer premises equipment (CPE) supplied by Vocal IP Networx. Their state of the art NOC keeps close watch and responds to outages and potential devices failures, even before a problem manifests itself.

Here’s something even more impressive. Vocal practices what they call “open book” management, meaning that you, as a customer, have access to their monitoring system via a secure Web portal. No need to wonder what’s going on when you can log in and see for yourself anytime.

Here’s some of what Vocal IP Networx monitors: Processor load, current memory use, priority queue levels, overheating, bandwidth utilization and spikes, plus interface errors.

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. It is an industry standard protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). When SNMP is running on a network, there are 3 components involved. The first is the managed device, of course. That could be a router, firewall, switch, server or other network element. Agent software is installed on the managed device to gather the data and process it for presentation. At the other end of the line is Network Management System (NMS) software that queries the managed devices.

You may have hear of Vocal IP Networx as a provider of high performance hosted PBX business telephone solutions. One good reason that they enjoy a high performance reputation is that Vocal goes way beyond just providing a switching system for your SIP phones. They offer the entire solution, including private lines, dedicated Internet access and nationwide MPLS service.

Having control of the WAN network plus the managed network devices is a huge advantage in ensuring quality of service. The SNMP monitoring is just part of that. Engineering the solution in the first place to ensure that traffic is properly prioritized into classes of service and that there is sufficient bandwidth and minimal latency, jitter and packet loss is what it takes to confidently go with hosted communications services for your important business needs.

Would you feel more confident knowing that your service provider is monitoring not just the equipment at their end, but the entire network back to your facilities? That’s available as a free bonus when you select Vocal IP Networx as your provider. Get competitive quotes for Vocal IP Networx and other high quality service providers for WAN bandwidth line services and hosted VoIP phone service. You may be surprised to find out that you can get higher performance and more reliable service for what you are paying now.



Note: Image of network operations center courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Call Centers Move To the Cloud

Hosted PBX systems are becoming popular alternatives to in-house telephone system upgrades. More and more businesses are discovering the advantages of having their phone switching done in the cloud. So, why aren’t call centers doing the same thing?

In fact, some company contact centers are already well entrenched in the cloud. The smaller or more distributed the contact center, the more it makes sense to make the move from premises to hosted phone system. It’s been harder for the larger call centers to do likewise. Why? Because the phones are only a part of what they need. In addition, call centers need Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) functions to create customer “screen pops” and management monitoring and control software.

The days on on-premises call center systems may be numbered. Cloud based services have become more sophisticated. A decade long pioneer in enterprise VoIP solutions, Smoothstone IP Communications, now offers a system with unlimited scalability and the more advanced functions that call center managers need.

Smoothstone’s ControlMaxx lives in a set of geographically distributed data centers monitored by a 24/7/365 Network Operations Center (NOC) to ensure that the system is up to date and available. Monitoring of Quality of Service (QoS) and security is proactive. The system is based in the cloud, but integrated into your business processes and applications.

The ControlMaxx Call Director allows you to manage your inbound numbers and how they route. You can base this on geography, time of day, holiday schedules, and even in response to disaster recovery plans if trouble strikes your facility. The point is that you have control to adapt call flow patterns on the fly as business conditions dictate.

Call Queuing can be set for agent priority, call distribution, music or message on hold and overflow conditions to better manage your agent staff and minimize caller hold times.

Management can record or monitor calls without disrupting the agent for the purpose of quality assurance, training or compliance. You can record both individuals or call groups and then retrieve them through a simple interface

Call Reporting has the status and analytics you need to manage your call center, including reports by queue, by agent, by call or by path. Combined with recording and monitoring functions, this reporting gives you the tool set you need for efficient call center operation.

The agent can be set up with an Agent Desktop Client, a PC application that gives them access to real-time queue/call statistics and alerts, call status, transfer capabilities and secure chat. The screen pop functionality integrates with your CRM software, such as Salesforce.com.

A combination of cloud based call center technology and high bandwidth low latency connectivity enable you to establish a call center of any size and staff it anywhere it makes sense. That includes existing call center facilities, satellite offices worldwide and part time or full time homeworkers. With communications in the cloud, you have a flexibility to adjust resources beyond what you normally expect.

Do you run a large call center or company contact center that is costing a pretty penny and may have scalability or maintenance issues? Before you go out and raise capital for a big construction project, give cloud based call center solutions a closer look. You might very well get more performance at a lower cost than with what you have now.

600 Mbps Ethernet vs OC12 SONET

Organizations requiring fractional Gbps bandwidth have traditionally turned to OC12 SONET fiber optic service. It’s still an excellent high speed option, but you should also take a look at 600 Mbps Ethernet service. You may be surprised how the two competing connections compare.

OC-12 (622 Mbps) is the next step up from OC-3 (155 Mbps) in the SONET optical carrier hierarchy. You’ll find this service readily available in Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) and as a dedicated Internet access connection for mid-size Internet service providers. Large organizations also have OC12 bandwidth connections, especially those with thousands of employees on-site or a need to support high bandwidth applications like medical image transmission or video production and distribution.

Not too many years ago, OC12 was considered a good choice for a carrier fiber optic core network. Now, most regional and national carriers have moved up to OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps or OC-192 at 10 Gbps. Long haul and undersea fiber lines are running at OC-768 (40 Gbps) and moving quickly to support 100 Gbps.

OC12 is most often deployed on a protected SONET ring topology, with two counter-rotating fiber rings. If something in one ring fails, either equipment or a cable break, the other ring will pick up 100% of the traffic within 50 mSec.

Note that an OC12 service is probably not the only traffic on a particular fiber strand. At 622 Mbps, OC12 comes nowhere near using available bandwidth of the fiber. SONET is designed as a Time Division Multiplexed (TDM) system that can easily add or drop common OC service levels such as OC3 and OC12. In addition to the electrically multiplexed services on the fiber, each fiber may also be optically multiplexed into a dozen or more wavelengths using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) equipment.

Carrier Ethernet over fiber is based on packet switching rather than time division multiplexing. Without the strict synchronized channels of TDM, Ethernet is far more scalable. You can order 600 Mbps Ethernet as a replacement for OC12 SONET. You can also order 500 Mbps if that is all you reasonably need. Even more importantly, you can start increasing bandwidth to 700 Mbps, 800 Mbps, 900 Mbps and 1 Gbps as business requirements dictate.

With SONET, the service provider will install a managed router as Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that includes an interface module specifically designed for the particular OC service level you have installed. The modules for OC3, OC12, and OC48 will plug into the same port on the router, but they are not interchangeable. You need to match the particular interface to the OC service level. That becomes important when you want to implement a service change. The provider will need to roll a truck to either swap out interface modules or completely replace the CPE router.

With Carrier Ethernet, your service provider will install a managed router that can support a particular port speed. For Ethernet over Copper, this is likely 100 Mbps. For fiber, you are likely looking at 1 Gbps, although you can often get equipment rated to 10 Gbps if you expect to be upgrading to that speed level in the foreseeable future. With a 1 Gbps port, you can order whatever service level you need between, say, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps, in 100 Mbps or smaller increments. No equipment changes are needed as you change service levels within that range. You simply call your provider and tell them to increase bandwidth and you’ll see it happen within a few days, sometimes within a few hours.

Beyond scalability, Ethernet has a cost advantage over SONET in most situations. Sometimes the cost difference is dramatic, even half the cost, for Ethernet versus SONET of the same bandwidth. The one limitation that you’ll run into is that SONET has been around a lot longer and is more available than Ethernet over Fiber. Even so, competitive carriers have been aggressively building out their IP networks and may have fiber service closer than you think.

Do you require fractional Gigabit bandwidth services? If so, it is worth your while to compare 600 Mbps Ethernet to OC12 SONET for cost and availability. The same advice is true for other service levels from T1 copper bandwidth on up to 10 Gbps and higher.

Top Enterprise Cloud Solutions

To cloud or not to cloud? That is the question for most businesses, including mid-level and large enterprise organizations. Let’s take a look at the most popular cloud solutions and what they can do for your company.

When we think of cloud computing, the first thing that comes to mind is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Would you be surprised to know that Amazon launched this suite of services nearly a decade ago? Amazon was early in recognizing that it had developed enormous data center resources to power its own ecommerce applications, and that it could generate additional revenue by renting out underutilized resources to other companies. It’s an attractive proposition to companies that haven’t made a similar investment and cringe at the thought of the amount of capital investment involved.

The two most popular AWS services are Amazon EC2 and S3. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers scalable virtualized private servers. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) complements the servers with online storage. These services typify what is known in the cloud industry as IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service. This infrastructure represents the physical servers, disk drives, operating system software, interconnections, power and environmental controls that you would normally install in your own data center facility. Instead of buying, operating and maintaining all of this hardware, you rent it from Amazon or another cloud service provider.

A major difference between cloud solutions and other ways of getting the job done is that the cloud is sold on a pay-as-you-go basis. There is no up-front capital commitment nor a standard monthly rental fee for a particular set of hardware. That differentiates moving to the cloud from simply packing up your equipment and moving it to a colocation center or renting the necessary assets from the colocation provider. The cloud isn’t about physical resources, it’s about virtualization. Mind you, the cloud service provider does, indeed, have massive physical resources in the form of racks and racks of servers and disk drives as far as the eye can see. What they do is divvy up these resources using virtualization software so that you seem to have one or more servers to yourself and all the storage you need.

Virtualization is what makes the cloud so nimble. Instead of having to make a month by month commitment to a physical server, you can deploy virtual servers as fast as you can set them up using a browser-based control panel. If business slumps or you are simply moving into a lower demand time of the year, you can release some of those servers and watch your charges go down. You pay for each server by the hour or number of CPU cycles used. Likewise, you buy storage by the MB or GB without concern for what drive is going to hold your data.

Like infrastructure, software can also be rented using the cloud model. In this case, the service provider has their own private cloud and has virtualized the software packages to support as many or few users as you have available. A very popular SaaS application is Salesforce.com for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Other SaaS business applications include accounting, collaboration, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resource management (HRM) services in the cloud.

Another function that has been virtualized and moved to the cloud is the PBX telephone system. Instead of investing in an in-house telephone switching system and the trunk lines that connect it to the telephone company, you can pay by the seat for a hosted PBX. This is also known as hosted VoIP, since VoIP technology easily lends itself to a cloud solution. All you keep in-house are SIP telephones that connect to your converged voice and data network. Some hosted VoIP providers can integrate your smartphones into the same virtual PBX as your desk phones to create a completely converged solution.

Are you considering a move to the cloud as a potentially more flexible and less costly approach to your IT and business telephony needs? Get competitive quotes for enterprise cloud solutions to compare with your current business model in order to make an informed decision. Quotations and expert consultation are available without charge for serious business users.