The Sun is Setting on Copper Telecom Lines

By: John Shepler

It has been rumored for a long time and now it’s really underway. The end of over a century of copper wire based phone and network lines is here, with a key event on June 30. That’s the start of AT&T’s first major wave of wire center decommissioning. Over 277 of these facilities will go dark when completed, with more waves of decommissioning to follow. In the end, we’ll have completely moved on from Alexander Graham Bell’s original network.

What The Loss of Wire Centers Really Means
In simple terms, a wire center is where all the wires connect. It’s the building that connects the central office switching with all the local loops. That’s often thousands and thousands of individual twisted copper pairs that are bundled into larger cables. Your analog phone line, the “landline” or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line, is one of these loops. You can trace the wire pair directly from the phone jack on your wall all the way to the line card at the central office that provides power and signaling to run the phone handset.

Those twisted pairs can carry a lot more than individual phone calls. They can be set up with digital termination equipment to provide DSL and T1 broadband or PRI digital multi-line phone service. They may also be used in special applications such as fire alarms, elevator phones, gate entry systems, security systems, and fax machines.

Decommissioning means taking these lines out of service. No more wire center. No more copper line service.

In actuality, the phone companies that own these lines have already been discouraging their use through higher service prices and refusal to add more customers. Another group, copper wire thieves, have been doing their own decommissioning by cutting and stealing cables and then burning off the plastic insulation so they can sell the copper at recyclers. Copper prices are way up due to the expansion of data centers, electric vehicles, and solar power, to name a few.

What Replaces Copper Telecom Lines?
Like the incandescent light bulb, it’s time to move on from 19th century technologies. The new options are primarily fiber optic and wireless.

Fiber voice and broadband started with phone company Optical Carrier standards but has migrated to Carrier Ethernet standards to be compatible with the vast majority of company networks. Ethernet over Fiber service ranges from 10 Mbps up to 100 Gbps, with Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE becoming popular standards.

You need what is called an Ethernet Port at your end. That connects via fiber to your service provider, often an Independent network operator but perhaps a traditional telco. The speed of the Ethernet port limits the amount of bandwidth you can have. A Gigabit port lets you order up to 1,000 Mbps. A 10 Gigabit port supports anything up to 10,000 Mbps.

There are different flavors of fiber optic service. Your Internet access can be on a fiber line that is shared among many businesses and residential users to save cost. You may prefer to order Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) so that your connection to the Internet itself in essentially on a private line.

Direct Cloud Access is a similar service without the Internet being involved at all. You have a private fiber service from your facility to your cloud service provider. This gives you the best low latency and low congestion for higher productivity and smoother voice calls and video conferences.

You might also want to consider dedicated point to point fiber to interconnect your facilities across town or around the world. These private lines offer high performance and better security than what you could hope for on the Internet.

Wireless Options
Of course you have mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers that connect to the Internet using 5G cellular broadband. Another flavor of that services is Fixed Wireless Access. It comes in a box with higher gain antennas and Ethernet connection. It’s the 5G broadband without the phone features. There are also options to add outside antennae for better coverage and some controllers offer multiple providers for service continuity if one company goes offline temporarily. FWA can be as speedy as fiber, but without having to run the fiber line itself.

Some Wireless Internet Service Providers do not use cellular networks. Instead, they have their own towers and beam and point to point signal to a small dish antenna on your roof. These are very private lines and can have Gigabit or higher speeds.

Satellite broadband and satellite phone have been around for years. The broadband using geostationary satellites can be very reliable and speeds have been improving with newer generations of satellites. The half second or more of latency due to the distance to geosynchronous orbit is one sticking point. LEO or Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations, primarily SpaceX Starlink, reduces the latency to something similar to terrestrial broadband. Bandwidths are also competitive for many applications. Just stating now is direct to handset service that turns satellites into alternative cell towers. Soon there will be no dead spots, even in the most remote areas.

What to Do About Specialty Services?
Those fire alarms, fax machines and elevator phones that were designed for twisted pair copper and nothing else still have hope. AT&T, among others, is offering a “POTS Replacement” service that consists of 4G LTE cellular wired to support these services along with built-in battery backup. Why 4G LTE? This standard can mimic the old phone lines and is still readily available.

The One Remaining Copper Service
There is still one very popular copper broadband service, but it is not from any phone company. This is Cable Broadband that is brought in on coaxial copper wiring. In reality, the cable companies have converted to fiber optic transmission, but the latest DOCSIS standards let them keep their existing copper coax into your building and still achieve speeds of 1,000 Mbps or even 10 Gbps… competitive with fiber.

Is your company experiencing an upcoming loss of service due to copper decommissioning? No time to wait. Find out what copper replacement services are available for your business needs. You may be surprised to find you can actually get more capability at a lower cost.

Can You Use 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps Circuits?

By: John Shepler

The move to business software in the cloud increased the demand for high speed, low latency bandwidth. The introduction of AI ups the ante even more. What used to be considered high bandwidth may now be an impediment to getting work done. Fortunately, higher bandwidth circuits in the range of 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps are now readily available and at reasonable prices.

What Higher Bandwidth Offers
Why increase your bandwidth to 10 Gbps or above? Because you need it. Or, if you don’t absolutely need it, the improvement in performance and productivity justify the additional cost.

The amount of bandwidth you need is driven by the traffic on your WAN or point to point networks. As long as there is enough and the quality is high enough, the lines are essentially invisible. As soon as there are more packets ready to transfer than there is capacity to transfer them, trouble begins. Your circuit becomes congested. It shows up as increased latency, as packets must be buffered to wait their turn.

Response from the Internet and cloud slows down. Telephone calls have delays even to the point of sounding like you are on a two-way radio. Some packets might get lost creating garbled audio. Same for video. Two way conferencing gets jerky or frozen and may have missing pieces. Anything in real time suffers. Frustration by users increases. Workflow slows.

What Drives the Need for Higher Bandwidth?
Text messaging and email are now the least of the bandwidth drivers. Telephone audio might be if you have a large operation or a call center. Video for conferencing and watching online streaming is definitely a bandwidth driver. Don’t forget that more and more business processes are now being conducted in the cloud or at colocation data centers. The days of everything running on a server and some disk drives in the same building are gone for most everyone. At least some of what you do is processed remotely. That could be ordering, inventory, accounting, simulation and so on.

Replacing a sea of stand-alone PCs with a LAN was the first step. Now the LAN connects to a WAN and Dedicated Internet Access. The amount of traffic leaving the building is often more than what is handled strictly inside.

Don’t Forget About Big Data and AI
Data sets are becoming huge as more and more business and customer data is electronic. You don’t need more file cabinets, but you do need more disk space, including remote backup for safety.

AI is something new that consumes data and bandwidth like never before. As staffs are being encouraged to up their inference level and use as many tokens as they can to gain skill with AI models, the load on the connection circuits increases. Training can be even more of a overwhelming load as data bases have to be uploaded to the model. All of this is a demand on your network you probably didn’t see coming. But it’s here and it is only going to increase.

What Bandwidth is Available?
Most everyone needs Internet access and the best type for most business is DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. That is essentially a private line between your office and your service provider. Most of the congestion comes in the first mile when circuits are shared among many companies and residential users to save cost. Casual and undemanding users may not even notice the difference, but highly demanding businesses can easily see variations in performance throughout the day that are largely unpredictable.

Another form of private connection is direct cloud access, which connects you to your data center or cloud provider without going through the Internet. No sharing means faster and more consistent performance.

Dedicated private lines may also be leased to interconnect your facilities directly. This is like extending your LAN to cover multiple locations. Once again, no traffic sharing with other businesses and definitely no traffic sharing with the general public. Better performance and better security.

Is your network not keeping up with today’s needs? Increase productivity and future proof your connections with Dedicated Internet Access, direct cloud access, dedicated private lines, wavelengths and even dark fiber with bandwidth from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps and above.

Data Center Opportunities For Your Business

By: John Shepler

Data centers are certainly in the news these days. Most of it focused on the near-viral expansion of AI hyperscale facilities that are overwhelming local power and water utilities, resulting in a contentious standoff between concerned citizens and massive tech innovators. But that’s just a small part of the data center industry. Your business is unlikely to go hyperscale, but you can still benefit from data center services. In fact, it’s likely you need them.

What is a Data Center?
A data center is where you find data, right? That’s correct. But it’s also where you find the computing, storage, networking and facilities to store and make use of that data. If all you have and use is a single computer, the data center is right inside. But, if you need to support a website, sell online, interconnect multiple computers or process files too big for a single machine, you’ll be using a data center. Even that single computer might want online backup.

Types of Company Data Centers
Data centers come in various sizes, depending on your needs. The simplest is an in-house data center, once called the server closet. It may be as simple as a single rack with a few servers, network disk storage, backup power supply and ventilation or cooling. Security is a lock on the door.

Larger companies create whole rooms or special buildings dedicated to their computing resources. These are enterprise data centers. They are under the control of a single company and dedicated to its needs. Often this facility will be in the same building or on the same campus as other company buildings. However, it may make sense to locate the enterprise data center a distance away for protection from disasters such as fires, floods and earthquakes.

When you get this much equipment, you’ll likely need larger scale HVAC environmental control, fire suppression, security monitoring, and building maintenance. Now the question is whether to provide all this yourself or outsource it. A managed data center is an enterprise data center that is run by a third party. This operator may own the facility and provide the staff. They may also handle IT tasks such as software updates and server maintenance.

Moving Out to a Colo Data Center
A colo or colocation data center is a multi-tenant version of the single company enterprise data center. The colo operator provides the facility, security, environmental control, backup batteries and generators, rack and cage space, and wiring. They also generally have multiple carriers with a presence in the building. You get easy access to massive amounts of bandwidth that might be harder to come by where you are located. That includes fiber, wavelength, and dark fiber services depending on your needs.

The advantage of colocation is that you are saving money vs running and/or owning the facility yourself. That’s the upside of sharing costs. It likely won’t affect a small to medium scale business because you’ll have your own racks and perhaps a cage to house them in for security. When you need to make updates, you just visit the facility.

Some colo companies offer extended services. They will maintain the servers, patch the software, add disks and so on using their in-house tech staff. They may also offer to lease you servers, disks, switches and the like so you don’t have to bear the capital expense. Pick and choose the level of support you want. That’s especially great for smaller companies that don’t have large tech staffs.

Cloud Data Centers
They say there is no cloud. It’s only somebody else’s server. That’s about right. The thing we call the cloud looks a lot like a colocation data center. The difference is that the cloud operator owns and runs everything. Resources are shared among tenants but not segregated like in a colo. Instead, most everything is virtualized. You don’t necessarily know what server is running your process or what disk your data is stored on. It’s likely that many companies are sharing all the facilities.

The cloud might offer even greater cost savings than colo. The massive facilities also have reserve capacity so that you can easily scale up or down as your needs change. It is possible to make this automatic or “elastic” so that you pay for what you use on a moment by moment basis.

This is what is known as the public cloud. There are also special versions of cloud data centers. A private cloud uses the same virtualization as the public cloud, but all resources are dedicated to one company. That can be located within your own facilities or in a third party location that might have many other private clouds physically separate in the same building. A hybrid cloud is a mixture of public and private clouds that share data and applications. You may want privacy for sensitive data but a public cloud for web traffic.

What type of data center is the best match for your business? Compare capabilities and costs for general hosting, managed, colocation and cloud data centers to see what works for you.

Rural Business Broadband is Getting Better

By: John Shepler

Businesses located in cities and suburbs have a wealth of choices in connectivity, including Internet access and private lines. Out in rural areas, not so much. In fact, until recently it might be what former FCC Chairman Newton Minnow referred to as a “vast wasteland”, although he was talking about television content. Rural broadband has really been a scarce resource… but it is getting better; A lot better.

What is Driving Rural Broadband Expansion
The biggest factor driving broadband expansion is broadband itself. The technology is mature and the defacto standard for Internet access. The Internet has also matured and expanded to include nearly every business and consumer in the United States and most worldwide.

Speeds have multiplied and multiplied again. Dial-up is long gone. T1 lines available for rural business are woefully inadequate for most purposes as they are capped at 1.5 Mbps. Even if still available, they won’t be for long. Telcos are abandoning their copper wireline assets as quickly as they can.

Part of the problem in getting high bandwidths into rural areas is the cost per user. Cities with dense populations can easily support hookups to metropolitan area fiber networks. In the countryside, there may be miles and miles between paying customers. The infrastructure costs have been just too high for the revenue generated to support… until recently.

What’s changed? One big change is the advancement of cell phone standards to 4G LTE and 5G. The Internet connectivity supported by these standards just can be satisfied by even multiple copper T1 lines. So, the phone companies have been pulling fiber optic cables and adding microwave relays to remote tower sites.

Another change is a national initiative to get everyone connected, much the same way as rural electrification and universal telephone service interconnected the entire country. This initiative is called BEAD for Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment. It will be underway for maybe another five years before Internet Service Providers can hookup everyone, everywhere. The preferred solution is fiber optics for expandability far into the future.

Multiple Technologies Fill the Broadband Gaps
Fiber is slowly but surely making its way past every business, home, farmstead and cell tower. Those cell towers can do double-duty as Internet Service Providers. With 5G blanketing the country, an easy solution to remote access is to use a Fixed Wireless Access modem plugged into your broadband router. This device is a smartphone without the keys, display and apps. As long as you can get cell service, you can get full time broadband.

In essence, FWA is expanding on the idea of WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers. Those operate in limited service areas and deliver broadband from a tower to antennas mounted on your home or business in a direct line of site.

Another source of broadband is straight up to the sky. LEO (low Earth orbit) satellite constellations like Starlink and the upcoming Amazon Project Kuiper and Blue Origin TeraWave are designed to deliver high bandwidths at low latencies to mimic fiber optic broadband but pretty much anywhere no matter how remote.

The next step is direct to phone service that will act as cell towers in space and orbiting data centers powered by solar arrays. It’s likely that some mix of satellites, cell towers and fiber will give us all the connectivity we need for the foreseeable future.

Are you having difficulty getting broadband in a rural or remote area? Opportunities are more available than ever before. Find out what rural broadband solutions are available for your business right now.

Can You Afford a Slow Internet Connection?

By: John Shepler

Time is money. In business, that’s almost always true. Your expenses for labor, facilities and services keep draining the cash register. You need to refill it faster than it is draining or you’ll be out of the game at some point. Things need to keep moving at a steady clip just to make your nut each month. On top of that, customer satisfaction often depends on how fast you can service them. What’s the last thing you need? A process that slows you down!

Where are the Bottlenecks?
Most businesses have at least some online presence and many have their business processes inextricably connected with software running on remote or cloud servers. That means that no matter how much you scurry about in the office or shop, you may be inherently limited by computer processing a thousand miles away and the connections to them.

Let’s assume for the moment that your data center has all the resources needed to process any requests instantly. With elastic computing you don’t even have to worry about peaks and dips in traffic. The system automatically assigns whatever computing hardware and software are required to keep up with the necessary tasks. Let’s also assume that the data center has as much Internet bandwidth as needed to handle all the incoming and outgoing traffic. That's more than likely as major carriers tend to have points of presence with massive bandwidth located within key data centers.

So, where might things slow down? The Internet itself is vulnerable. It is designed to work around traffic jams to keep things moving. Even so, there are times when too many things go wrong and the entire network drags. Far more often, the problem is not within the backbone of the Internet but with your connection to it. This is referred to as the last-mile connection.

Unclogging the Last Mile
Last mile problems tend to be caused by limited bandwidth, congestion from too many users needing that bandwidth at the same time, latency from long paths and repeated transmissions to get the packets through intermittent connections.

Bandwidth is the easiest to address. If you are still stuck with aging T1 lines or DSL you likely don’t have near enough bandwidth to handle modern Web traffic. In the dial-up days, a Megabit per second was considered broadband. Today that’s more like a Gigabit per second. Smaller users may get by with fractional Gbps, but large operations may be needing 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps to keep traffic streams from interfering with each other.

Fortunately, fiber optic bandwidth is more the norm than the exception now. If you have a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps port installed, you should have the bandwidth you need unless your requirements are extraordinary.

Fiber bandwidth also tends to be low in latency. That’s important to responsiveness because when you have enough bandwidth latency will make communication sluggish and adding more bandwidth won’t help. Low latency is especially important in real-time processes including phone calls and video conferencing. You want those communications channels to be full duplex or instantly two-way all the time.

A fiber connection is the gold standard in the office, but you may also need high performance while portable or mobile. That’s where 5G rises to meet the challenge. You likely have this on your smartphone. Other devices can also have built-in 5G or connect through a portable hotspot that is essentially a 5G phone without the user interfaces or apps. It simply converts 5G bandwidth to WiFi. Any WiFi compatible device can then access the Internet.

Private Lines offer Superior Performance
One limitation to the most readily available Internet connections, such as cable and 5G broadband, is that they are a shared resource. The price is kept low by sharing the cable or radio channels with many users at the same time. When things are going well, you don’t even know there is anybody else on the line. But when everybody wants to send huge files are download video simultaneously, you’ll definitely feel the speed bumps.

If the loss in productivity due to varying congestion is a problem, consider a direct private line from your location to your cloud service provider. This bypasses the Internet completely and is available only to your organization. This service is sometimes called “direct access.” You may also want private lines among your facilities and even key suppliers and customers. In essence, you create your own private Internet.

An alternative that can enhance performance and improve reliability of your connection is called SD-WAN. This involves having two or more Internet connections with a special router that prioritizes traffic and selects which path offers the best performance at the time. The SD means software defined, which is the intelligence in the router that monitors your connections and makes instant decisions on how to best route traffic.

Is your business struggling to keep up because your Internet connection isn’t responsive enough? Look into better alternatives for faster, more reliable connectivity to boost productivity and ensure customer satisfaction.