Ultra-Reliable Internet Service

The Internet is a two edged sword when it comes to business. It's a hugely success and prolific network, connecting just about everybody to everybody else on the planet. It seems like such a logical way to connect your office with your suppliers, customers, corporate headquarters, plant sites, warehouses, retail locations, etc. High speed access is usually available at decent rates and inexpensive VPN software will give you the security you need on a public network. So what's the other edge of the sword?

In the case of DSL and Cable modem Internet access, the fly in the ointment is often reliability. Just when you have an important file to download, a website to update or an order to enter, the network goes down. Often it's only a for an annoying few minutes, but at other times your broadband Internet service can be out for hours. Since DSL service comes in on a telephone line, why isn't it as reliable as dial tone?

The problem has to do with the way that Internet service is treated by carriers. It's a shared access, with you and a hundred or a thousand others connecting to the Internet through a multiplexer. It's also an "information" service, which means that there really aren't any regulations guaranteeing the performance of your connection. It's not priced like a critical resource nor is it treated like one by the service providers.

If reliability of service is absolutely critical to your business, then what you need is a carrier quality service that gives you a dedicated connection to the Internet and a service level agreement to make sure that it gets immediate attention in the rare instances when something goes wrong. There is such a service available. It is called T1 dedicated Internet service.

The truth is that the Internet itself is a very reliable network. The Internet was originally conceived by the military to provide reliable communications that couldn't be destroyed by war or natural disaster. The thousands of trunk lines and routers distributed around the world ensure that if one part of the network is lost, other pieces will detect the loss and re-route traffic via available paths.

The problem with reliable Internet service comes from the casual way that it is treated by telephone and cable companies. In order to sell the service, the cost has to be in the neighborhood of $35 to $50 or most people won't buy it. To keep the cost down, they have to share their facilities among hundreds or thousands of users and deal with problems as time permits.

T1 dedicated Internet service replaces the weak link in the system which is the connection from your location to the local telephone office and gets rid of the multiplexer that shares the connection. Instead, you get a highly reliable T1 line from your location to the phone company office and then via T1 or fiber optic carrier to the Internet service provider of your choice. All of these connections are the same high quality connections that the telephone companies use for their critical lines, so the reliability is built-in. The service level agreement is a contract between you and the carrier that guarantees a level of availability and specifies remedies if you lose your connection.

So, what does this ultra-reliable Internet service cost? Probable less than you might expect, but certainly more than the services designed for consumers. In highly populated business areas, you might get T1 service for $300 to $400 a month. There is no one set price. T1 lines are engineered for each particular location served. The farther you are from the closest telco office, the more it costs. You can almost always get T1 dedicated Internet service in U.S. locations, even out in rural areas. That's seldom true for DSL, cable, or wireless Internet services which tend to have little coverage beyond the city limits.

If you have a serious business application in need of the highest reliability in Internet service or need dedicated point to point data connections between locations, why not discuss your application with our Shop For T1 consultants and get a price quote for the high quality service you really want? You can get a quick but accurate automated T1 price quote using the form available at T1 Rex.

Retail and Restaurant Point of Sale Systems Bandwidth

Retail and restaurant point of sales systems capabilities have grown exponentially since the days of mechanical cash registers and cash boxes. Even the electronic cash register has often been a self-contained system until recently. Now systems are integrated to support inventory control and accounting. They are also networked, both within the organization and to the home office, credit card companies, suppliers and partners. Communications is critical and low cost bandwidth is the key to electronic communications.

The simplest application of an electronic data exchange is a credit card transaction using a terminal that creates a dial-up data connection over a phone line. Phone lines can also be used to download daily sales results to the home office. On the small scale level, a dedicated or shared voice line is about as cheap as you can get.

But what if you have a lot of data to transfer, many simultaneous credit card transactions, or want to stay constantly in touch with multiple sites. For that you need dedicated bandwidth. In other words, a reliable always-on digital connection. This can be a private point to point line, a secure Frame Relay connection or a VPN or Virtual Private Network running on the Internet.

The low end of dedicated lines is the business DSL line. This is a broadband Internet connection that uses a regular copper phone line. By definition, the Internet is a shared resource. To protect your data, you'll need to be running encryption software which creates a virtual private network. In other words, your data is secure even though the network is shared. The big advantage of using the Internet instead of other solutions is that you have access to a worldwide network that can connect just about anybody to anybody else. It's already in place and the cost is amortized over millions of users, so your access cost is pretty low. Sometimes under $100 a month.

The weaknesses of DSL have always been availability at particular locations and reliability of service. DSL is a technology that uses telephone circuits that were never designed for high speed digital use. Consequently, it is a short range service. You may find that the store across the street can get DSL but your location can't. The other issue is that DSL, even business grade DSL, doesn't generally come with a service guarantee. The carriers make their best effort to keep it operational, but outages can and do occur.

If it is absolutely vital that your broadband connection be available all the time and get top priority if there ever is an outage, then what you want is T1 line service. T1 was originally designed by the telephone industry for its own use. T1 connections can be installed most anywhere you can run phone lines and come with a service level agreement. A T1 line is highly reliable and can be configured as a private point to point line or a dedicated Internet connection. Multiple T1 lines can be bonded together to give you 2 to 6 times the capacity as your business grows.

Another option is Frame Relay. Frame Relay is a private network that connects locations to each other with a guaranteed bandwidth. Unlike the Internet, a Frame Relay network is managed to limit the number of customers to no more than the service can support. Since it is a shared network, you may wish to run your own VPN software to encrypt your data for the highest level of security.

If you have retail or restaurant point of sale systems, or other inventory control systems that need high speed digital bandwidth, let us help you find the most cost effective solution that meets your requirements. We have expert consultants available 24/7 who are happy to discuss DSL, T1 and Frame Relay options for your business. Go ahead and put in a quote request at T1 Rex anytime and a consultant will call you back at your convenience.

LG VX8100 Audio Video Cell Phone

The LG VX8100 entertainment phone is one of the new wave of cell phones that are also mobile entertainment centers. Thanks to the Verizon Wireless VCAST system, you can download full motion video clips up to 5 minutes in length, including music videos and concert performances. VCAST is the first widely available multimedia content service for cell phones and includes newscasts, sports reports, weather updates and entertainment programs. It's enough to make you forget you also have a cell phone.

The LG VX8100 looks like an ordinary clamshell style cellular phone. It also works like a cell phone with up to 180 minutes of talk time and up to 216 hours of standby time. It has a speakerphone. It also has Bluetooth communications so you can use a wireless headset. There are two color displays. The main display is 176 x 220 pixels with over 262,000 colors. The external display is 128 x 128 pixels with 65,000 colors.

Even the built-in digital camera is higher resolution than you might expect in a cell phone. This one has 1.3 megapixel resolution for print quality photos. The camera doubles as a camcorder with 15 seconds of record time. It has 2x digital zoom, an LED flash and a self-timer so you can include yourself in those group shots.

What really makes this a 3G phone is the EV-DO broadband capability. EV-DO or EVolution Data Only is a high speed digital data service that shares cellular bandwidth. It is sometimes referred to as 1xEVDO. Bandwidth is up to 2.4 Mbps download speed using a separate 1.25 MHz radio channel. In practice, you'll probably see more typical speeds of 300 to 500 Kbps. That's fast enough to download audio and video content without excruciating delays. EV-DO is also being heavily promoted by Verizon as a alternative to the Wi-Fi hotspot.

To complete its repertoire of multimedia capabilities, the LG VX8100 includes a MP3 player with stereo output. In one package, you have a cell phone, digital camera / camcorder and a video on demand player.

Wish you could get a great deal on a Blackberry, Pocket PC phone or other cell phone models? Compare cell phone plans and get both the phone and service provider you want plus a great deal at Cell Phone Plans Finder.

International Callback With a VoIP Flair

A clever approach to lowering the cost of international phone calls is the "call back" service. Like the name implies, you call this service, let it ring once and hang up. The callback service will then dial your number within half a minute or so. When you answer, you'll get a dial tone and can then place the call to the party you wish to speak with.

Why such a complicated arrangement instead of just calling directly? It's to make calls cheaper. What makes callback services viable is the disparity in rates between calls made from the United States and calls made to the U.S. or other countries from locations outside of the United States. It's just cheaper when your call originates in the U.S.

Callback is something like the old trick students use to call home but avoid the outrageous long distance rates charged by the school. You dial your folks number and let it ring once or twice. They know it's you and call you back at their long distance rates. Since the original call wasn't answered, the student doesn't get charged. The parents pay for the call they make.

Now there's a new wrinkle on international callback phone service using computers and VoIP. A company called 2speak has figured out how to let people use VoIP to make cheap phone calls without any special software, no phone adaptor and not even broadband.

Here's how it works. You create an account on the 2speak website. You can then log-in and create a phone book with the numbers you want to call and the numbers of the phones you'll be using. When you want to place a call, you just select which number you are at and which number you want to call. You can use any computer with Internet access, even dial-up, or your wireless PDA. Within seconds, both phones will ring and you'll be able to talk to your party. As another wrinkle, you can opt to send them a voice mail instead. They'll get an email with a link they can click to hear your message on their computer.

The system is based on VoIP transmission, but the calls terminate to landlines or cell phones at both ends. The VoIP technology is hidden in the network. Its purpose is to transmit voice over IP instead of the public switched telephone network. That makes for cheap calling rates. For instance, make a call from the U.S. to China and you'll pay 10 cents a minute at today's rates. A call from China to the USA is also 10 cents a minute. A call to or from India to the U.S. is 32 cents a minute. Or you can call the United Kingdom from India for 32 cents a minute. Call the U.S. from your business trip in France and you'll pay 8 cents a minute with 2speak. The rate is also 8 cents a minute from the United Kingdom.

You should try this yourself. The 2speak website has an international rate calculator that lets you see what it costs per minute to call between any two countries. The prices are not much more than you'd expect using VoIP, except that nobody needs broadband access or special phone adaptors. You can even use this service to call mobile to mobile between countries. The only catch is that you do need Internet access to trigger the call.

By the way, there is no signup fee or regular monthly fee for this service. You pay for the calls you make plus a 95 cent billing fee in months that you use the service. There is no charge to receive calls and no charges for calls that aren't completed.

2speak has definitely come up with a creative blend of technologies to optimize the cost of phone calls while limiting the interface to equipment that users already have. Learn more and sign up for service at 2speak now.

Hurricane Katrina, The American Tsunami

The television images from helicopter flyovers show a brutally crushed and ground-up landscape. We've seen these shots before. The surf splashes on a sandy shoreline strewn with toppled trees, boats piled on top of each other, and splinters of wood forming a carpet of debris, interspersed by square patches that mark property boundaries. What's missing is structures. This is a flat landscape, or at least as flat as it can be with all the ruined buildings, vehicles and vegetation littering the ground. It's what's left of Southeast Asia following last December's killer Tsunami. Or is it?

The images are as recent as this week. The third-world landscape is the gulf coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Take an aerial view of the Asian Tsunami and set it next to an aerial view of Gulfport, Mississippi. Which is which? You can't tell.

The reason is that we're looking at essentially the same process. One was caused by an earthquake. The other was caused by a hurricane. In both cases, a wall of water 20 or more feet high came off the ocean and crashed into the shoreline over a wide swath. That solid wall of water crushes everything standing, utterly and completely. When refugees from these stricken areas say they have nothing left, it is because there really is nothing but splinters remaining when the wall of water dissipates.

That's what we in America are coming to grips with right now. The total devastation that crushed the shorelines on the other side of the Earth have crushed our shores less than a year later. We have the devastation, the deaths, and tens to hundreds of thousands of refugees headed to homeland refugee camps for the next 3 months to 3 years. Years? Yes, it may well be that long for many. Unlike the Tsunamis that crush the landscape and then dissipate almost immediately, this hurricane breached the levees protecting the city of New Orleans. The city is not only damaged, but under water for the indefinite future.

Make no mistake about it, the disaster in the gulf area is beyond anything we've known or prepared for. Government aid will be critically necessary, but it is just one piece in putting the puzzle back together. Just as in the Asian Tsunami, disaster relief and humanitarian aid organizations will step in to feed, clothe, shelter and provide medical attention to the multitude of victims. The best of these are already trained and experienced in this type of situation. They've been involved is similar disasters around the world. The American Red Cross comes first to mind whenever people are struck down anytime, anywhere. The Salvation Army has been ministering the needs of the disadvantaged in nearly every city for as long as anyone can remember. Both organizations are worthy of our support and are planned to take lead roles in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

We also like some of the smaller, lesser publicized organizations that are moving in to lend their special expertise. Mercy Corps has international experience, most recently in the Indian Ocean Tsunami, at helping communities to rebuild following disasters. Their approach is to engage the local population in reclaiming their lives and the infrastructure they need to again become self-sufficient. This gives people jobs with a sense of purpose as well as the food, water and clothing they need to get them through the tough times. An impressive 92% of your donation to Mercy Corps goes directly to programs that help people.

There are many more excellent charitable organizations worthy of your support in this crisis and beyond. You'll find them reviewed and rated at Charity Navigator, which provides information on over 4,000 charities. Whether you support one or many charities, be sure that your contribution goes to do the most good in these tough times. It's vitally needed.

BlackBerry 7100g PDA Phones on Sale

RIM BlackBerry wireless devices are PDA personal digital assistant style cellular phones with an emphasis on messaging capability. The RIM BlackBerry 7100g features updated styling and advanced technology that makes the BlackBerry even more productive than ever before. Best of all, you can get the 7100g at a special low price with new wireless service. I'll tell you how in a second.

This BlackBerry device is a beauty. It has a large color main display which is backlit for easier viewing. The size is 240 x 260 pixels. It displays 65,000 colors. That big display comes in handy for full HTML Web browsing on the Internet and viewing email attachments in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint plus WordPerfect and Adobe PDF formats. You'll be sending messages using the almost effortless SureType QWERTY keyboard. Messaging capabilities include SMS, multimedia messaging, AOL Instant Messenger, and POP or IMAP email access.

The BlackBerry 7100g communicates on the GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) high speed data network on the Cingular GSM cellular network. This 3G broadband network downloads at up to 170 Kbps, or more typically 75 to 135 Kbps.

Don't forget that this BlackBerry is also a cellular phone with quad band GSM. It is capable of operating on cellular networks in over 100 countries. Its slim 4.7 x 2.3 x 0.8 inch package is easy to use for making and receiving calls. Bluetooth communications is also built-in so you can use a wireless headset if you wish. Or use the speakerphone for hands-free or group discussions. Talk time is up to 240 minutes or 4 hours. Standby time is up to 192 hours or 8 days.

What are the hottest cell phone deals available right now, including free cell phones? Use the Cell Phone Plan Finder to check out the top phones and associated wireless service plans.

Verizon Wireless VCAST is Video For Cell Phones

How would you like to be able to get video weather reports, sports reports, news clips and music videos delivered right to your cell phone whenever you want? That's the idea behind VCAST, the consumer 3G multimedia service from Verizon Wireless.

VCAST is the leading edge in a move toward video and well as audio capabilities on cellular phones. After all, those big TFT color screens are just begging for full motion video. They even look like small flat screen TVs. Why not give them TV content?

What makes VCAST work where other attempts to send video to cell phones have fallen short is the broadband link called EV-DO or EVolution - Data Only. That cryptic description translates to mobile broadband using the CDMA cellular phone network. While CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is a digital transmission system, it is limited to the narrow bandwidths needed for voice transmission. What Verizon has done is piggyback a high speed data only network on it's CDMA network. Speed peaks at 2.4 Mbps but is more typically 200 to 400 Kbps. That' s fast enough to provide broadband Internet service for laptop computers using an EV-DO adaptor card and Verizon Wireless EV-DO service.

With broadband speeds now available in 60 metropolitan areas, EV-DO makes third generation or 3G cellular applications like video on demand possible. Current content includes news, weather, sports and music videos. All are delivered in the form of downloadable video clips up to 5 minutes in length.

Much of the content is produced by big name media companies. Just browsing what is available today, I see programs by Comedy Central, Sesame Street, E!, VH1, and Nickelodeon. There is breaking weather news from AccuWeather.com. News updates are provided by CNN, NBC News, and MarketWatch. You'll get sports reports from FOX Sports, ESPN, and NASCAR.COM TO GO, among others.

VCAST also offers 3D downloadable games. You may recognize such titles as "Need for Speed Underground 2," "Independence Day," "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater," or EA Sports Madden '06 3D." Each game has certain phones that it works on.

So What do you need to enjoy VCAST yourself? First, you need a 3G video phone. Verizon Wireless is recommending several models that are available at a discount with your Verizon Wireless service at our online cellular store. The best bargain is the Motorola E815 Video Phone which is currently free after rebate. The e815 is also a 1.3 Mega Pixel camera phone with flash with 4x digital zoom. It has Bluetooth communications built-in to support a wireless headset.

Order your Motorola E815 Video Phone with a Verizon Wireless service plan, such as America's Choice 450. This plan gives you 450 anytime minutes per month plus free nationwide digital roaming and unlimited IN calling for $39.99 a month. VCAST service is an option for $15 a month and right now your first month is free.

Other VCAST recommended cell phones include the Audiovox CDM8940 for $50 after rebate and the LG VX8100 for $100 after rebate. To get these special offers, you'll need to order from our online cellular store. You'll also want to include the VCAST option for an additional $15 a month.

If you would like a different model of cell phone, we have many great offers currently available at Cell Phone Plans Finder. Note that other video phones may or may not have VCAST as an available option with Verizon Wireless service.