Why Symmetric Bandwidth?

By: John Shepler

Bandwidth is bandwidth and the more the better, right? Well, not so fast. There is bandwidth and then there is bandwidth. All connectivity solutions are not the same. Let’s see why.

Sharing Isn’t Always Caring
Some connections are dedicated. Some are shared. You need to know which you are ordering.

A dedicated connection means a fixed amount of bandwidth that you are contracted for and are guaranteed to have all the time. The classic T1 line, SONET fiber optic, and many Ethernet over Fiber and private wireless solutions are dedicated. They may be set up as point to point private lines , cloud connections or last mile Internet access.

The advantage of dedicated lines is that your network capacity is always there even when you are not loading it up to the max. This improves latency and congestion compared to your other choice, shared bandwidth.

Shared bandwidth connections have other company’s traffic on the same line as yours. You have no idea how many there are or what they are doing. You may well feel their presence, however, as your WAN connection speeds up and slows down for unknown reasons.

So, why on Earth would you share bandwidth? Simply to save cost. Shared lines are dedicated lines that the carrier has sliced and diced to support many users instead of just one. If there is enough bandwidth and not so many users, you may not have a problem and can save considerably on monthly rates. Typical shared bandwidth services include cable broadband, wireless 4G LTE and 5G, and some passive optical fiber optic services that are available at bargain rates.

Symmetric vs Asymmetric Bandwidth
Symmetric bandwidth is when you upload and download speeds are the same. Asymmetric bandwidth means that one direction has much more capacity than the other. The high speed link is almost always the download path. Download speeds may be 10x faster than upload speeds.

Why? Asymmetric setups were designed to mimic the way people actually use the Internet. For the most part you download videos much more often than upload them. You enter short addresses in your browser and download web pages and content far more than you upload them. Or… Do you?

Business users may use their networks much more symmetrically than typical residential users. Business users likely transfer large files back and forth. Many of their applications reside in the cloud with data flowing up and down. VoIP phone and video conferencing are inherently symmetrical. Voice and images go both ways. Remote back-up is asymmetric for the most part… but the other way. Most data is being uploaded to the remote storage.

Traditional telecom networks are designed with symmetric bandwidth in mind. Consumer solutions, which are also typically shared bandwidth, are asymmetric in nature. For casual users and small businesses this may not be an issue. However if you are a heavy bandwidth user, depend on software as a service, do extensive video conferences or back-up your data to remote storage, you will likely be better served with symmetric and dedicated solutions.

Is your business running out of bandwidth or are you just frustrated with the solution you have now? Discuss your real needs with a technology expert and get quotes for multiple options that will work for you. There’s more available and at better prices than you think.

Bandwidth to Support Your Data Center

By: John Shepler

Data centers are hot these days. Oh, not just the temperature of the air exiting the servers. Data centers are hot business. As businesses are transformed digitally and AI is implemented to improve productivity, all eyes are on the data center and what it takes to gain the benefits of this technology.

Not Yesterday’s Server Closet
You can see advances in data center technology as information tech has grown in importance. Once a company is big enough to have more than one PC, it needs networking to interconnect computers and shared resources such as storage, printers and servers. Hot and noisy racks of equipment are quickly moved out of the office and into their own room, which might be the size of a broom closet. Hence, the server closet.

Little rooms soon become big ones with lots of equipment, special floors and ceilings for wiring, uninterruptible power and heavy duty HVAC. This is the genesis of the data center. Today’s businesses are dependent more and more on information technology and require substantial data centers and staff to process and serve that data 24/7.

Some companies still choose to maintain their own data centers in-house or at remote facilities. Others outsource that function to colocation facilities or cloud service providers. Still others see the skyrocketing demand for data center services to support crypto and AI and look to get a piece of the action.

What Connections Do You Need?
Even if you keep everything in-house, you’ll need external connections. That’s at least broadband Internet and telephone connections. If you have other locations in the same area, you can’t go trenching your own cables. You’ll need carrier connections from point to point or connect everything via the Internet.

There are two flavors of Internet access. They are called dedicated and shared. Dedicated Internet Access or DIA offers the highest performance. Dedicated means that the connection is for your use only and no other company is on the same circuit… at least until you get to the core of the Internet. Since most of the congestion occurs in that first mile, DIA can avoid many slowdowns during peak usage times. Fiber optic DIA is available from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps available in some areas.

Shared Internet Access is what is available with Cable broadband and Fixed Wireless Access. Your cost is lower because you are not the only one using the line. How well this works depends on how sensitive you are to interruptions and how many high volume users are sharing the same link.

Your data center servers will also likely need Internet access. Most colocation and cloud facilities have multiple carriers serving their facilities. This give you the option to have redundant connections so that if one goes down, another service provider is unlikely to be out at the same time. You can set up an arrangement like this for your own in-house data center. Just be sure that the two or more Internet Service Providers are not sharing the same fiber or other facilities or you may lose all service with a single point failure.

You can also get dedicated Ethernet point to point fiber optic service between two or more of your own locations. This gives you high performance networking without the security issues and variable performance seen on the Internet.

Connecting to the Data Center
If you choose to place your equipment in a colocation facility or contract for cloud services, you’ll need a way to connect from your company building to the remote data center. Some companies choose to do this through the Internet, but you can get much higher performance and better security with a dedicated point to point line also called direct cloud access. This is a private fiber optic circuit that runs from your facilities to the cloud service provider no matter how far away. You’ll generally have lower latency and more consistent performance than connectivity via the Internet.

Do you need a high performance connection to a data center or cloud service or Internet service to the Internet? If so, get highly competitive prices and availability of connection services for your business locations now.

Goodbye Employees, Hello Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Office employment has been undergoing a major shift since the rise of the Covid Pandemic in 2020 and it’s likely to accelerate rather than return to “normal.” Office buildings nationwide have been emptying out, some being converted to residential units or commercial malls. Even with employees being ordered to return to the office or be replaced, things aren’t really going to go back to mass commutes five days a week, as we’ll soon see. This also has major ramifications for the bandwidth you’ll need and where you’ll need it.

Reluctant Office Workers Offer Opportunities
How do you get ‘em back in the office after they’ve seen work from home?

That might be the title of a song for the 2020’s. The abrupt culture shock from everyone being sent home, with most expected to keep on working, did indeed break the expected paradigm of where you are supposed to be all day. Once appropriate computers and Internet connections got settled, quite a few customer service reps, programmers, and other information workers found they could work just as well from a spare bedroom or dining room table as in the corporate cubicle. Their productivity even improved without the distractions of office chatter or pro-forma meetings.

Employees might have picked up an hour or two of extra personal time not spent commuting and some could drop the expense of outside daycare for children. Meanwhile, companies that continued this arrangement after the pandemic threat had passed found they could reduce office space expense, including real estate and utilities.

One demand that might have increased is the need for fast highly reliable bandwidth to connect now far-flung individuals. Residential Internet connections have improved greatly during this millennium. High speed cable broadband, fiber to the home and 5G fixed wireless access have made most connections nearly transparent. For more demanding applications, SD-WAN and dedicated point to point private lines can reduce latency and congestion.

Not All of Us Are Coming Back to the Office
Remote work may be a boon for some employees and their employers, but many other companies, including some of the largest ones, want the old culture of co-located teams back for camaraderie and supervision. In fact the managers are insisting on it. To some extent this coalescence will occur, but there is another force at work that is going to disrupt it again.

Artificial Intelligence is heralded to be the next dramatic productivity improvement. There is a mad scramble on to build data centers and secure baseload power to support the coming tsunami of AI applications. These promise to be far more sophisticated than the inane chatbots on many sites that can’t seem to answer the simplest questions. Expect these to get a lot smarter. A lot of the coming AI will not be customer facing. It will handle back office paperwork, data entry, report writing, proposal generation, language translation, code generation, graphic arts, network monitoring & troubleshooting, quality control, financial analysis, legal research and medical image diagnosis just to name a few.

In other words, the century long migration from farm to factory to office is about to hit a brick wall of automation. There is already concern that new hires in white collar professions will be facing an increasingly tough job market, followed by job eliminations right up the ladder.

What Network Technology Will You Need?
If office automation is soon taking over, what do you need to plan for to support this transition? In addition to remote worker systems and bandwidth, you’ll need robust connectivity to the AI data centers where many of these applications will reside. Any apps that deal with the customer directly will require substantial Internet connections, likely right from the data center. Your office team will also need solid connections to those same data centers. The Internet may not be adequate for high bandwidth, low latency, jitter, packet loss and general congestion. A dedicated fiber optic private line, also called a cloud on-ramp, can make this connection transparent and help maximize productivity.

A lot of your communications may be in the form of video conferences, including a mobile workforce and well as the office staff. Don’t forget to include enough mobile bandwidth so that the people in the field are as well connected as those in the office.

Finally, you may be looking at whole new systems of computers, phones, pads and other devices that integrate your staff, management, suppliers and customers along with the AI applications that make it all work seamlessly.

Are your business needs in a state of change? Yesterday’s solutions might not support your future. Let an experienced technology advisor help you acquire the networking services you need to stay at the top of your markets.

10000 Mbps Business Internet is Available

By: John Shepler

Growing businesses seem to always be running out of bandwidth. No matter how much you have, it doesn’t take long and you’re starting to push against that upper limit. That’s where the conversation gets a bit difficult. Is there more bandwidth to be had? If so, will it be even remotely affordable?

Good news! Behind the scenes, the infrastructure of Internet access has been moving fast. You are no longer stuck with what copper pair wiring will carry or the jaw dropping cost of telecom oriented fiber optic protocols. There are reasonably priced options available right now for your business that stretch to 10000 Mbps or even higher.

Why Such a Need For Speed?
Today’s bandwidth isn’t yesterday’s bandwidth. Everything has changed and it has happened seemingly overnight. What’s driving changes to the networking industry is the way businesses and consumers have evolved in their use of the Internet. What started out as a simple way to send electronic messages between computer centers has morphed into a life support system for an all-digital environment.

Take your business, for instance. In fact, take any business. Nobody logs onto the Internet anymore. It’s just there, running all the time. It is probably running processes for you in the background even when your screens are dark and everybody goes home. Turn off your PC. It doesn’t matter. The programs aren’t running on your PC. They’re on the network somewhere. That used to mean a server in the back room. Now it’s a server in a colocation facility or a server cluster in a cloud service provider.

Today’s business processes are large and often customized packages from a provider who offers everything you need from sales to inventory to customer service. Your office telephones are probably integrated with the computers and also any mobile devices including smartphones. Communications run the gamut from text messages to traditional email to in-app messaging to video conferences. All of these have a bandwidth demand, with video needing the most and being the most sensitive to interference from other applications.

Oh, and then there are your customers. Do they all just walk in? Sure, some do. Especially in businesses where face to face service is necessary or customary. Other business may derive most of their sales online and not even have a showroom or client conference room. Those online customers need to connect to your business instantly and without glitches. If they have trouble, they’ll go somewhere else. After all, your competitors are just as easy to get to as you are.

Add it all up and you can see that a digitally oriented business environment demands a support structure that is far more robust and seamless than they days when the Internet was just an accessory tool to a legacy bricks and mortar operation.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough
Every business type has its unique set of demands. Similar size companies in similar industries will likely have more or less similar demands. Large and small companies will have large and small demands. Some applications, like content delivery or medical imaging may have enormous needs. Most all of these can be accommodated with a combination of fiber and wireless bandwidth, and perhaps cable broadband.

Ethernet over Fiber has become the de-facto connectivity for demanding business applications. Copper-based services like T1 and DS3 are on the wane. They probably won’t be with us too much longer as the telecoms are decommissioning the facilities. In most cases it doesn’t matter. The limited bandwidth of these services has been eclipsed by newer technologies.

The older SONET fiber services developed by the telephone industry and adapted to business metropolitan and wide area networks is also going by the waysides. It may still be at the core of many networks, but is less and less offered to businesses directly. Ethernet over Fiber directly connects to business Local Area Networks without the need for any proprietary protocol conversion.

A major advantage of standardized Ethernet over Fiber infrastructure is that it accommodates a wide range of bandwidths using the same protocol. 10 to 100 Mbps is entry level, with 1000 Mbps a typical standard offering. Gigabit Ethernet, also known as GigE, seemed the most anyone would need not so long ago. Nowadays, the need for increased speed goes beyond a gigabit per second.

Bandwidth You Can Afford
If you are nearing the end of a three year contract or have just been paying month to month for years, you owe it to yourself and your company to get fresh quotes for the bandwidth you need right now and into the foreseeable future. As long as you have a port installed that will handle your anticipated growing needs, you don’t need to pay for the maximum bandwidth right now. Most providers will lease you the capacity you need today with the understanding that you can easily upgrade at any time on just a phone call or even through a Web portal.

What’s available? Fiber serves the lion’s share of today’s business locations. It’s been quietly installed without much fanfare. You can likely get any bandwidth you need from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps (that’s 10000 Mbps) quickly and easily… and for less cost than you might think. If your demands are really stringent, 100 gbps or 100000 Mbps is not available in many metropolitan and suburban business districts. Cable and wireless broadband up to 1000 Mbps is also often a reasonable option.

Go ahead. It doesn’t cost anything to simply ask for current pricing. You may be surprised at the business Internet that is available to you.

Today’s Best Business Broadband Options

By: John Shepler

If you are still using a copper wireline service, such as DSL or T1, for your business Internet connection, it’s time to upgrade your service… before you are forced to.

Forced to? Why would that be? Fact is, the major telecom companies are all in the process of decommissioning their copper wire assets. Basically anything that uses century-old twisted pair wiring is on the way out.

Technology marches on. T1 lines were once considered broadband. They don’t even qualify with today’s standard. DSL? Pretty much an obsolete system that was once a good way to re-purpose standard telephone lines for fast Internet access.

AT&T and others have made it clear that they are either pulling up old copper lines or abandoning them to rust in place. The wire centers or central offices that connect to these lines are being repurposed as data centers for the insatiable needs of AI.

So what are better options? Surprisingly, one of the best is also an older technology that has continuously upgraded to keep it competitive with the times.

Cable Broadband Is a Great Deal for Small Business
That coaxial cable that plugs into the back of a set-top box or cable modem has been a familiar tech standard for many decades. Physically, it’s the same. What’s changed is the signal that comes out that center wire.

Cable was originally analog, just like TV signals back in the day. When the Internet came along, some of the unused TV channels were set aside for digital transmission using a standard called DOCSIS or Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an invention of the industry’s R&D organization CableLabs. The current standard is DOCSIS 3.1 with a migration underway to DOCSIS 4.0.

Today’s cable modems are cable of gigabit speeds, with common service levels of 300 Mbps downstream, 30 Mbps upstream. That’s fast enough for pretty much all web browsing, video streaming and data transfer. What’s hard to beat at those speeds is the price. Cable is easily affordable by both consumers and smaller businesses, often with telephone service included.

Wireless Broadband is Now Both Mobile and Fixed
Like cable, cellular wireless had humble beginnings as a mobile telephone service, but has kept up with the times through multiple technology advancements. The first standard that really supported broadband as well as telephone was called 3G. That’s evolved to the current standards of 4G LTE and 5G. With 300 Mbps or so, an iPhone has all the bandwidth it can really make use of.

That high bandwidth, which can reach a Gigabit per second near some of the 5G towers, is easily competitive with fixed broadband services. The capacity limits have been largely eliminated with 5G buildouts and the extra spectrum acquired from government auctions of unused television bandwidth. Now the wireless companies are in a competitive battle to roll out cellular modems that work like cable modems but without the wires. You can put one at a construction site or a pop-up store in minutes. If you move soon, take it with you and have connectivity at your next location.

Cable broadband is being built into laptop computers and tablets and other devices, called the Internet of Things. Remote data acquisition and control are now possible in remote areas that have cell towers but no other connectivity.

Fiber, The Gold Standard and Secret Backbone
The magic that makes cable and cellular broadband so fast is the fiber optic lines that feed these services. It’s all behind the scenes, of course. Even so, you may want to connect directly to fiber yourself.

What’s the fiber advantage? Nearly unlimited bandwidth for one thing. Today’s service levels run from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps just about everywhere, with 100 Gbps service available in some metro locations. That’s important for medium and larger enterprises with many employees who need simultaneous Internet access.

Another big advantage is symmetrical bandwidth That means if you have 1 Gbps downstream, you also have 1 Gbps upstream. Contrast that with most cable and wireless services that offer much higher download than upload speeds. If you need to transfer files up and down regularly or have demanding video conferencing requirements, this can be important.

A third advantage is very low latency and jitter with minimal congestion. This is because fiber is usually a dedicated service, not shared like cable and cellular. For even higher performance, consider a dedicated line between your company and your cloud service that bypasses the Internet completely.

Need the ultimate in performance? Dark Fiber that you “light” with your own equipment gives you complete control of protocols and bandwidth allocation. It’s like having your own network extended across town or across the country.

Do you need a replacement Internet connection or are ready for a bandwidth upgrade or perhaps even a cost saving? Check out the Business Broadband Options available right now.