So Long T1 and POTS, Hello AI

By: John Shepler

Have you gotten the word from your telecom service provider that your T1 lines and POTS telephone lines are scheduled for decommissioning? Perhaps you’ve seen news items to this effect. It’s true. The major landline telephone companies are determined to replace their more than a century old copper cables with the newer technologies of fiber and wireless. It’s happening faster in some parts of the country than others. Like the incandescent light bulbs of the same era, copper telco connections are being relegated to history.

Why Do They Hate Copper?
Copper has served us well from the gilded age to this millennium. Copper POTS phone lines are highly reliable and are powered by the phone company. If you lose power, the phone still works because the equipment has battery backup at the central office. If you want the same functionality with your VoIP phones on the Internet, you’ll need add that battery backup at your end.

Copper T1 lines have been the mainstay of both business Internet connections and PBX phone systems for decades. Some companies use them for direct connection from one business location to another. As private lines, they are more secure than the Internet and you avoid the congestion when everyone in the area is trying to work online at the same time.

Like all legacy technology, T1 and POTS lines are getting a little long in the tooth. A T1 bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps was once considered broadband. Now 1.5 Gbps has the same respect. Analog POTS lines and their own unique telephone network are being replaced by LAN and WAN network connected phone systems, often with switching systems in the cloud. As a result, there are fewer and fewer users of these older circuits. Most consumers are primarily dependent on their cell phones and have dropped landline phone. Businesses are heading more and more to the cloud and using fiber optic direct connections to get there.

This is creating quite a dilemma for the phone companies. The incumbent local carriers own all that copper and it is not getting any younger. Fewer customers means less revenue. Corroding wires and insulation result in more any more repair calls. The cost of maintaining that copper plant keeps going up and up.

Copper’s Replacements Are Mostly In-Place
The replacement for all that copper interconnection is fiber and wireless. Fiber has the advantage of nearly unlimited bandwidth. With wavelengths and multiple strands per cable, there is lots of unused capacity that can be pressed into service as data demands increase. The limitation to date has been too few routes installed and lit for service. That’s changing fast. Many cities have seen the future and are contracting for municipal fiber that runs past every home and business. Cellular 5G and eventually 6G require fiber to get the required bandwidths.

The other replacement technology is wireless. The same 5G towers used for phone calls also support fast broadband in the dozens or hundreds of Mbps. Mobile Internet nearly everywhere is already in place. A newer wrinkle is a 5G access point, essentially a phone without the user interface, that installs in a home or business. You have broadband Internet service that is always-on and you don’t need to worry about connecting to a fiber or cable.

There are still dead spots. Sparsely connected areas may not have fiber, cable or cellular coverage. They mostly did have landline phones, though. The replacement for these areas may be GEO or LEO satellite, as they may never get cell towers or fiber lines.

What Becomes of The Copper Facilities?
Oddly enough, the latest technology may provide a new lease on life for the oldest. One proposal is to gut those telco central offices and points of presence and install high powered servers to support the demand for Artificial Intelligence.

The facilities with utility power, battery and generator backup, HVAC, and weatherproof buildings are already in place. By upscaling them to be small data centers located near potential customers, the growing demand for AI services can be supported faster than with all new construction. Another major benefit is the lower latency that comes with having computing at the network edge rather than centralized thousands of miles away.

The copper itself may well be mined to support the need for electrical transmission, electric vehicle propulsion, power generation and more. Some copper cables are pulled out of their conduits as fiber is installed to make room for the new fiber. Copper in the ground and central office wiring may become a welcome source of recycling, much as scrap aluminum is melted down and repurposed. No point in letting it corrode to dust if it costs less to reuse than smelt new ore.

Do You Need Copper Replacement Services?
Have you been notified that your copper telecom services are going to be discontinued or are you just interested in how much more bandwidth you can get for the same or less cost each month? See what fiber and wireless services are available for your business now.

5 Gig Internet Business Fiber

By: John Shepler

You can see it for yourself. Bandwidth needs are climbing higher every day. That Gigabit Ethernet Dedicated Internet Access service you installed a few years ago is already hitting its limit. A GigE to the cloud isn’t enough to completely avoid congestion anymore. Clearly, it’s time to move on up.

5 Gig is the New Gigabit
What’s the next logical level for business bandwidth? Actually, you can have pretty much anything you want in 1 Gbps increments. However, some levels are more popular than others. An emerging standard is 10 Gig. You may not need or want to pay for that much right now. A good intermediate level is 5 Gigabit for Internet or private lines.

Why 5 Gig? It gives you breathing room for business applications running in the cloud, e-commerce Internet connections, remote file storage and access, and lots of video content. The more users you have accessing the same WAN connection, the more bandwidth you need to avoid congestion slowdowns, broken VoIP conversations and jerky video conferencing. Real time applications need fat pipes.

Dedicated Internet Access vs Private Lines
There are two basic types of network connections: Private and shared. The Internet is by design a shared network that connects everybody to everybody else with nobody having priority. You can improve your Internet connection performance by avoiding shared access and using Dedicated Internet Access. That gives you a private link from you business to your Internet Service Provider. The last mile is where most of the congestion and variation problems originate.

A private line is just that. Your company is the only user on the connection that runs from point to point. There is no contention with other businesses or consumers. If you have a 5 Gigabit fiber link, you have 5 Gbps available at all times. Whatever bandwidth you don’t use at the moment is there for headroom. You’ll only experience congestion and the latency it creates when you exceed 5 Gigabits per second momentarily or for an extended time.

Connecting Multiple Business Locations Privately
A private fiber optic network can be set up point to multipoint or mesh as well as a direct cloud link or dedicated line between business locations. You can also employ an MPLS network to span regional, national or international sites for a cost savings. MPLS networks are run by a private provider who guarantees bandwidth, latency and packet loss even though there are multiple users on the network. Everybody thinks they are the only user.

Other High Bandwidth Options
Fiber future-proofs your network and generally offers symmetrical bandwidth so that upload and download speeds are the same. Cable broadband speeds are often above 1 Gbps, with 5 Gbps offered in some areas. The bandwidth is asymmetrical and the last mile connection is shared, but the cost savings may well outweigh the advantages of fiber in less critical applications. Fixed wireless can also offer high bandwidths using a small antenna on your building and are a great alternative where fiber and cable are not available.

Are you running out of capacity on your Gigabit fiber connection? If so, consider an expansion to 5 Gbps with a growth path to 10 Gbps when you need it. You’ll love the extra breathing room.

Dark and Lit Private Lines

By: John Shepler

The Internet is a marvelous network. It enables all of us to connect to any of us anywhere in the world and at a very reasonable cost. Why wouldn’t you use the Internet for all your communications? Much of the time we do, both for personal and business needs. It works great… well, it works just fine a lot of the time. There are a few snags, though.

Network Priority
One is priority for highly sensitive applications like interactive voice and video. Say, telephone calls. There is no priority. Your voice packets get the same treatment as your next door neighbors video stream or someone backup up files to the cloud. Get in line and take your turn. When things get too busy, called network congestion, your real-time stream may break up or stop completely for a short time.

Cloud Critical Applications
The same is true for business critical applications running in the cloud. If you are taking orders, interacting with a customer or needing fast answers to deal with rapidly moving situations you may be drumming your fingers as you wait for the system to respond. Trying to make a quick financial trade in the market? Maybe it executes immediately. Maybe not. You may or may not get the price you had in mind.

Network Security
Another issue is security on the Internet. There is none. If you want security, you need to add it yourself. That means encryption. A popular way to encrypt your traffic when out of the office is by using a VPN or virtual private network. This is end to end encryption that makes it safer to use public access points like WiFi in coffee shops or send sensitive documents across the Internet. SSL or, now, TLS encryption has made possible online shopping and banking with confidence using web browers over the Internet with or without a VPN.

Improving Performance with Private Lines
You can get better network performance with private lines. Think private road versus crowded superhighway. The idea is to limit the competition from other people’s traffic.

You can still use the Internet but make it run better with a private line called DIA or dedicated Internet access. This gives you a private, not shared, connection between your location and your Internet service provider. Of course the Internet core itself is still a shared resource, but most of the congestion is in the last mile where you and hundreds or thousands of other users share the same connection to the service provider.

Direct to the Cloud
A direct cloud connection is a private line between you and your cloud service provider. Since you are the only user on that line, your cloud services should run much more like they would if the servers were right down the hall in your building. This type of connection avoids the Internet and its vagaries completely.

Why not expand that concept to your own private WAN or wide area network? This means private lines to connect your offices, factories, data centers and branch locations or retail outlets. Think of it like having your LAN expand to include all of your other business locations. You have control of the traffic and no interference from other outside users. Both privacy and performance are improved.

Dark and Lit Fiber
So far we are talking about fiber optic services, likely Ethernet over Fiber, which is the most popular connection method today. These are “lit” fiber connections where the laser equipment that maintains the signal is owned and operated by a service provider. The ultimate in performance and privacy over metropolitan and wider areas is using “dark” fiber. Dark means the fiber strands that you lease have no termination equipment at either end. You are responsible for providing the equipment that “lights” the fiber and sets the protocol. Since the glass fiber strands have nearly unlimited bandwidth, you have tremendous ability to send traffic from point to point dependent only on your budget and technical staff.

Wireless Private Lines
Finally, there is a new type of wireless service called 5G private networking or 5G network slice that lets you have the advantage of private lines while portable or mobile. It’s something like your own private corporate WiFi, but over much wider distances. Coupled with fiber optic private lines for most of your traffic, private wireless can give you a comprehensive business network wherever you are.

Is private networking right for your business? Find out what private network and security options are available now.

10 Mbps Ethernet T1 Line Replacement

By: John Shepler

Early in your business, you needed a robust connection as things were just ramping up on the Internet. Dial-up was too annoying. DSL was too flakey. SONET fiber was just way too expensive and had bandwidth you’d never need. T1 was the right solution at the right time. Always on. Always reliable. Low latency, low jitter and low packet loss. That 1.5 Mbps bandwidth may or may not still be getting the job done, but like all good things, T1 is coming to an end. What to do now?

It Still Works. Why Get Rid of It?
T1 lines were based on telephone lines. That is, twisted pair copper wires. That was the genius of the design. The phone companies could install T1 service using the same wiring they already had in place for multi-line business phones. Just about any business could get T1 and many, many did over the decades.

So, why not stick with a winner? Two reasons, really. First, the Internet today isn’t the nascent Internet of the ’90s. E-commerce is pretty much universal. Nearly every business has a website and most take online orders. A lot of businesses are online only. Those that aren’t still need to be connected for credit card verification, inventory control, supplies ordering and customer interaction. High definition graphics and video have supplemented email and text files that dominated early Internet use. A T1 line’s 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is getting to be a limitation for even small business operations.

The other reason is that copper telco lines are something like incandescent light bulbs. They’ve served us well for more than a century, but it’s time for new technology to take over. Phone companies own the copper lines in the ground and on poles. The costs of maintenance are getting too high considering the dwindling number of users. More and more areas of the country are seeing phone company notices that copper service is being discontinued. The replacement is generally fiber optic or, in some cases, wireless broadband.

A Sensible Replacement for T1 Internet
If you need a bandwidth upgrade or find yourself being cut-off from T1 service, you might be interested in an entry-level fiber optic bandwidth service called 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. What you get is 10 Mbps always on bandwidth versus the T1 line limit of 1.5 Mbps. It is also dedicated to your business only, so that you are not sharing this capacity with other companies. That means your speed won’t be varying depending on what others are doing. This is Carrier Ethernet service that is directly compatible with your Local Area Network. Just plug it into your router and go.

Oh, but how much more will you pay for this faster service? Thanks to extensive buildouts and more competition in fiber networks you may not pay any more for 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA than the old T1 contract you’ve kept renewing. Maybe even less.

Fiber Optic Ethernet is Easily Upgradeable
Once you have fiber installed, you should be good to go for the foreseeable future. That’s because the fiber itself has nearly unlimited bandwidth. What you are using is determined by the terminal equipment installed in your business and how much you want to pay each month. You may start off with 10 Mbps but then find you really need 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps to support your expanding business. These days Gigabit Ethernet is standard for many companies and more are bringing in 10 Gigabit service. In rare instances with unusually high Internet demand even 100 Gbps makes sense.

Typically the provider will install a GigE or 10 GigE port for your service. You can then order up to 1 Gigabit with the GigE port or 10 Gigabits with the 10 GigE port. Many providers will give you an online account that lets you change your bandwidth at will. You’ll automatically get billed for the higher rate when you upgrade. Unlike the old SONET days, upgrading bandwidth won’t generally require a truck roll and change of terminal equipment at your site. You can make the speed increase yourself almost instantly.

Private Lines Also
Ethernet over Fiber offers private lines as well as Internet access. A private line connects two locations directly and does not use the Internet. That means you are unaffected by Internet congestion or other Internet problems. Many businesses are choosing to host their business software in the cloud rather than run their own data centers on-site. A dedicated private line from your location to your cloud service provider, called a direct connection, helps to make the system run smoothly without lags and cutouts.

Are you ready for or in-need of a replacement for your aging T1 Internet line? If so, check competitive pricing on 10 Mbps and higher Ethernet over Fiber service now.

Hotspots for Fixed and Mobile Business

By: John Shepler

You need connectivity and you need it wherever you are. In the office, no problem. But what if you need to pick up your office and take it to another location at a moment's notice? What if you need to conduct business on the road or on the waves. Yes, that’s right. What if you need to connect from your boat? Are you set for that? OK, how about overseas?

Your Smartphone as a Hotspot
There’s a lot of business we can do right from our cellphones. Certainly, voice conversations. Text and short email messaging work great. You can access sites on the Internet using a browser or apps. Maps are great for find your way around.

When it gets a little more complicated you want to use your tablet or laptop. Then you have a decent size screen and you can upload or down load files or easily work on documents and images. Oh, no. The other devices you want to use don’t have any connectivity except WiFi. There’s no WiFi nearby.

Actually, there is. You just need to turn on the hotspot feature in your phone. You log-in using the passcode your phone provides and your other device now shares the broadband on your phone.

Business Grade Portable and Mobile Hotspots
A smartphone hotspot can be a lifesaver in a pinch. But it has limitations. A dedicated portable or mobile hotspot designed for business has a lot more capability. A good example is the Surf & Turf Router from Infinite Wireless. This device is equipped with two external antenna rods and can pull in 4G LTE from over 20 miles away. That’s important when you’re on the boat well away from shore. It supports up to 16 simultaneous devices on WiFi. Instead of a SIM card this one uses vSIM to support multiple carriers and will select the carrier with the strongest signal. It also works in 135 countries.

Other business oriented hotspots are may support one or more carriers and are designed to let you get connected quickly for pop-up stores or on-site business, such as construction work. When your work is only scheduled for the short term, there is no reason to pay for and wait for a fixed line installation. You can choose to access via WiFi or set up a wired Ethernet network on-site.

Wireless is the New Wired Internet
It may not be long before you access the Internet in one of two ways: Fiber optic broadband or wireless broadband. Cable is still a hybrid fiber/copper system, but will likely move more and more to fiber, especially as other fiber network competitors build-out in cable areas. The cellular wireless companies, such as T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T are now pushing hard for fixed location broadband service using hotspot boxes that are easily installed and moved by customers, as needed. Service gaps are being filled-in by geosynchronous or LEO satellite constellations.

What are your business needs? Do you require extreme bandwidth for a fixed location network? Do you need quick connectivity for mobile or temporary locations? How about Internet of Things applications that may be installed anywhere but need to attach to the Internet? There are great solutions to all of these situations, and more. Find out what bandwidth solutions are available for your size business and budget.