Are Your Pipes Fat Enough?

As the resolution of data increases, WAN bandwidth can quickly become a choke point. Think of what happens when you get a kink in your garden hose. The data is the water and the pressure is the bandwidth demand. Any kink causes flow to decrease to a trickle, while the pressure or demand remains. A data link is like a water pipe in this way. Even when the kinks are removed through diligent network engineering, you can only move so much data though the pipe. If you want to move data more quickly, you need a fatter pipe.

Fat data pipes are becoming a necessity as electronic business data increases in quantity and resolution. An example of resolution is medical imaging files. They can easily be many Megabits, even Gigabits, per image. Try transmitting those through a 64 Kbps ISDN BRI channel and you'll feel like you're trying to fill a swimming pool with a kinked garden hose. Engineering firms are also switching from sending large drawings through the mail to transmitting them electronically to branch offices or customer locations. FAX transmissions need only small pipes, like telephone lines. Detailed blueprints and 3-D models that can be printed or modified remotely need fat pipes to transmit them in any reasonable time frame.

Video post production is another field where the medium has gone from film to video tape to digital data on disk. Sure, you can load the production onto video disks, hard disks, or magnetic tape and physically transport them from location to location. But that burns precious time. If you are on a tight production schedule or need to support live programming, a courier service isn't going to cut it. You need to be able to press the send button and have the file transfer in seconds or minutes to another location.

So what is a fatter pipe in the telecommunications vernacular? Serious bandwidth starts at the T1 level with 1.5 Mbps bidirectionally. A T1 line will send files of a few Megabytes in seconds. Often this is fine for text based contracts and specifications, low to medium resolution photographs, smaller CAD files general accounting and inventory updates, and many real-time IP security cameras. If you want to transmit more files in the same time, transmit larger files without having to wait hours or longer, or speed up the transfer of what you are doing now, you'll need a fatter pipe.

You can fatten a T1 pipe by bonding in more T1 lines. Bond a second line and you double your bandwidth from 1.5 to 3 Mbps. Bonding works up to 10 or 12 Mbps in many locations before it gets more expensive than moving up to a single fatter pipe.

The next fatter pipe is the T3 line at 45 Mbps. That's a substantial jump of 28x the capacity of a T1 line (the bandwidths mentioned are rounded figures). T3 lines are often used for real time video transport, high resolution images, large engineering files, and data backups to remote data centers. You can get this same bandwidth on a fiber optic carrier, where it is called DS3 service. In fact, DS3 over SONET fiber is more commonly found now than coaxial T3 lines.

If your facilities are wired for fiber, there is practically no limit to the available bandwidth. It's primarily a matter of budget, as fiber optic services start in the thousands of dollars per month and go up from there. But, when time is of the essence or team collaboration can multiply efficiency, even massively fat pipes may well justify their cost. With fiber optic services, you can get OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps, or OC48 at 2.5 Gbps. In many metropolitan areas you can also find native Ethernet services at 10 Mbps, Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps and GigE at 1,000 Mbps or 1 Gbps. At these line speeds, the WAN bottleneck can disappear as the speed of the entire network becomes equal.

So, are your data pipes fat enough or are you feeling the "pinch" of data slowing down as it leaves your LAN network for transmission to other facilities? The good news is that WAN bandwidth prices have come down greatly in the last few years. The cost of an upgrade to meet the transmission speeds you need now may be much less than you suspect. Why now let our team of bandwidth professionals take a look at your application needs and offer you a suite of competitive options?

Over 2,000 of Your Competitors Are in This Network

Are you in the business telephone systems or computer networking business? What do you suppose your competitors are doing right now to generate more business? Unbeknownst to you, they're getting free leads from interested business users in their service areas from the VAR Network. While you're waiting for the phone to ring, they're getting email requests to call warm prospects and bid for the jobs. Perhaps that's why their trucks seem to be everywhere on the road while you're wondering how come those expensive ads you placed don't seem to result in inquiries.

Take heart. You can be part of the VAR Network too. It only takes a few minutes to join and you don't have to pony up any cash to get listed. Once your business is listed online, the leads will start rolling in.

Here's the secret of success that many people in the voice and data business don't know yet. Yellow Pages and newspaper ads have their place. So do cold calls, flyers and personal recommendations. That used to be all you need. But in this Internet age, many, many high value customers are savvy enough to be looking around the Web even for local businesses. That's especially true before and after normal business hours when owners have the time to shop for services that they can't quite get around to during the day.

This increasing piece of the business pie is what the VAR Network was designed to capture. It's an automated database system that intelligently assesses the appropriateness of suppliers to the inquiry data provided by prospective buyers. Type of service required, make and model of equipment requested, and geographical location are major factors that determine which dealers are informed about any particular opportunity. The buyer knows that they'll only be contacted by dealers who are ready, willing and able to meet their needs. Sellers know that they'll only be notified of prospects who will be worth their while to pursue. This approach is orders of magnitude more efficient than typical media ads.

So how does a potential buyer find the VAR Network? Mostly through online search engine listings that are specific to what they are looking for, both technically and geographically. Also through online paid ads and offline marking efforts by network agents. The agents are telecom marketing professionals, not competing equipment dealers. Their whole job is getting the opportunity in front of high value prospects needing equipment, installation, and service.

The VAR Network also comes with another strategic advantage. It's owned and operated by Telarus, Inc., a major broker of voice and data telecom line services. If you've ever sold a PBX phone system or Internet router and then told the customer to call the phone company for line service, you've left money on the table. By partnering with agents at the VAR Network, you can offer T1, DS3, PRI, and Integrated voice and data lines to your customers along with equipment and installation for one stop shopping. The VAR Network experts will take care of closing the line sale, including all the contractual paperwork. For a few minutes effort in entering the line service lead into the system, you'll receive a generous monthly commission for the length of the contract. It's like bonus money on every job.

Heard enough to be interested? Remember, there is no up-front cost to be listed or receive leads. You contribute to the VAR network only on sales you are actually paid for. Line sales cost you nothing, you get paid for referring leads that close. Take a couple of minutes and have a look at the VAR Network now. If you like what you see, you can get more information on the business opportunity and enter your application anytime through the VAR Partner site. It's the easiest thing you'll do today to increase your earnings.

VoIP Land Lines Complement Wireless

The name often given to traditional analog phone lines is "land lines". You may also hear this term associated with digital services, such as T1 lines. Both analog and digital telephony have been provisioned on pairs of copper wires often buried in the ground since the inception of telephone service two centuries ago. But the term land line is also used to distinguish telecom services over copper wire from satellite and cellular wireless services.

You might think that land lines and wireless are completely different technologies that don't really intersect. But now there's a mix of the two that gives users important advantages. In this case, landlines and wireless complement rather than compete with each other.

What makes this work is a new form of land lines you can call VoIP land lines. A VoIP land line is a wireline service that carries packetized voice rather than analog or TDM telephone service. For consumers that's almost always DSL or Cable Internet service. Business users might also have T1 dedicated Internet service or SIP trunking for IP telephony transport.

VoIP land lines support broadband phone service. But that's often a secondary use of the land lines. Broadband lines are usually installed to get broadband Internet service as a replacement for slow dial-up. But once you have broadband Internet, you can use it for both your computers and an adapter that makes your telephone act something like a computer. What the ATA or analog telephone adapter is really doing is converting the phone signals from analog to digital and organizing them into IP or Internet Protocol packets that are indistinguishable from other traffic on the Internet. The ATA communicates with a VoIP phone service provider that lets your phone call any other phone in the world.

Seems like a long way around just to have the same phone service that's always been hooked up to that landline buried decades ago in the back yard. The reason people do this is that VoIP or broadband phone service is often much less expensive than what your local phone company charges for its legacy phone service.

For example, consider SunRocket VoIP. SunRocket is an independent broadband phone service that offers a unique annual plan giving you 12 months of unlimited calling anywhere in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Canada. Up to 100 minutes of international calling is included each month. Calling features that the local phone company usually charges extra for, like Caller ID, is also included.

The key to this savings, of course, is that you are already paying for broadband Internet service for your computers. The VoIP telephone service simply piggybacks on the DSL or Cable Internet broadband you have now. It's an especially attractive deal for Cable Internet users, since they don't need their old land line service for telephone or Internet connections anymore.

So what does this have to do with wireless? Just about everyone has a cellular phone these days so that they can communicate on the go. Where VoIP land lines complement cellular is that low cost VoIP service gives you unlimited minutes when calling or receiving calls. Heavy users of cellular know that you have to ration your anytime minutes or buy a really expensive plan with thousands of minutes. You pay a fortune and some months they go to waste. By having both a low minutes cell phone plan and home VoIP phone service, you can talk all you want and still have the advantage of mobility when you need it.

Wireless complements VoIP both for the mobility and the emergency backup. VoIP land lines are dependent on your DSL or Cable modem, Analog Telephone Adapter, and perhaps a router. When you lose power, you lose your VoIP connectivity unless you have battery backup on everything. When your broadband service goes down, so does your VoIP. Most people don't have that much trouble with outages, but it's reassuring to know that you can always use your cell phone to call 911 if you need to.

If this sound like a good arrangement to you, consider SunRocket VoIP for residential broadband phone service. If you don't already have broadband, you can find DSL and Cable Internet providers with a quick search. Need a great deal on a cell phone and service? Check out the current special offers at Cell Phone Plans Finder.

Note that these services are intended for home users. If you have a business location in need of excellent pricing on telecommunication services, try Enterprise VoIP for equipment, digital lines, installations and service.

LMDS Fills the Fiber Gap

While nationwide long distance fiber optic bandwidth is readily available, last mile connectivity to places of business is another matter. Can you believe that less than 20% of commercial buildings are set up for fiber optic telecom service?

Hard to believe, but true. The reason is cost. Trenching fiber is expensive and hard to justify. Especially when every location already has telephone service and data service over copper is readily available. Both business DSL and T1 lines use conventional copper pairs originally provisioned as analog telephone lines. T1 service is good for 1.5 Mbps bidirectionally, but what if you need higher bandwidths?

Large enterprise telephony, medical image transmission and video post production are just a few applications that demand bandwidths higher than 1.5 Mbps. An incremental solution that is also very cost effective is to bond T1 lines to create total bandwidths of 3, 4.5 6, 7.5, 9, 10.5, and even 12 Mbps.

In some locations it is also possible to bring in coaxial cable based T3 lines that run at 45 Mbps. Bandwidths of 45 Mbps are typically carried as DS3 service on higher capacity fiber optic cables. OC3 SONET over fiber is actually one of the lower bandwidth services at 155 Mbps. Are there any other options when you need this much capacity but blanch at the price tag of establishing fiber loops to the nearest carrier point of presence?

XO is one of the carriers addressing this need in major metropolitan areas. They've just announced a wireless Internet service for Seattle businesses that offers speeds of 10 to 155 Mbps. Similar service was announced last month for Phoenix. Eventually, the XO subsidiary Nextlink will be serving all of its wireless holdings in 75 major metropolitan areas.

If 155 Mbps sounds high for what you expect from wireless Internet service, it is. Bandwidths of a few Mbps are more common for WISPs and satellite Internet providers. Nextlink's service isn't based on cellular Internet, such as EVDO, or WiFi service on the 2.4 or 5 GHz channels. It uses a much higher band of frequencies licensed for LMDS or Local Multipoint Distribution Service.

As its name implies, LMDS is a point to multipoint fixed wireless technology. Transmissions frequencies are in the 26 to 29 GHz band and 31 to 31.3 GHz band. These high frequencies are an order of magnitude or more about the cellular, WiFi and WiMAX frequencies. Such high frequencies have radio waves with very short wavelengths that don't penetrate buildings well. In fact, things like tree leaves and even heavy rains can disrupt the signals. In general, the shorter the transmission path the more reliable the data link.

These factors limit transmission ranges to 11 or 12 miles from the wireless hub. User buildings must have an unobstructed view of the XO hub. That works within dense metropolitan areas and perhaps even out into the suburbs a bit. The goal is an alternative to last mile fiber optic links at a cost savings for customers.

Other even shorter range technologies include laser beams good for building to building links within corporate campuses. Light beam services are good for only a few thousand feet, but that can make a big difference when the buildings are separated by a freeway or river.

Whatever your bandwidth requirements are, including digital telephone, dedicated Internet, point to point private lines and long haul transmission, you'll find excellent pricing and multiple options from our suite of carriers at MegaTrunks.com. Just let us know what your needs are and our friendly consultants will be happy to recommend the most cost effective services that get the job done.

T-1 Digital Phone Lines For PBX Systems

Most business telephone systems that have more than a few outside lines now use T-1 trunk lines to connect from your building to the local telephone office. Why? Because the value in consolidating many individual phone lines into a single or a couple of T-1 lines makes digital lines more cost effective than a collection of analog phone lines. This is true regardless of whether your in-house phone system uses analog or digital phones. Even most VoIP based phone systems terminate calls in T-1 telephone lines.

Very simple one and two line phones or key telephone systems with 4 to 6 outside lines are set up for analog phone lines. The simple VoIP services use an analog phone adapter to connect to DSL broadband service to provide 1 or 2 lines. That's pretty much the extent of what you can do with these simple systems. Once you get more than a half-dozen outside phone lines, you should be looking at T-1 service as a cost saver.

There are several flavors of T-1 line services to be aware of. A standard T-1 telephone trunk offers up to 24 individual phone lines all digitized and multiplexed into two pair of copper wires that connect back to the telco central office. Your PBX system needs a T-1 interface card to connect to a T-1 line. These are pretty much a standard option for any new PBX phone system and you can likely order a plug-in T-1 card for older systems.

A variation on the T-1 line is called an ISDN PRI or T-1 PRI phone line. PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface and it's part of the ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network specifications. A regular channelized T-1 line and a T-1 PRI line are pretty much the same animal, with one important difference. PRI lines offer 23 rather than 24 phone lines and use the remaining channel to provide signaling and data. You need a PRI line if you want Caller ID for your phones.

Another variation is called T-1 Integrated service. Integrated means that the line carries both telephone calls and Internet data. That's right, you can split a T-1 line so that you can have a dozen outside phone lines plus broadband Internet service coming in on the same line. This is quite a cost saver for most small businesses that need both phone and reliable Internet service. Some of these Integrated services are called dynamic T-1 lines because they automatically assign all the bandwidth not needed for active phone calls to the Internet service.

What about VoIP phone systems? Most Enterprise VoIP phone systems use IP telephony within the company so that the phones can connect to the IP PBX system using standard Ethernet cabling. Many use the same LAN as the company's computers to save on wiring costs. All the in-house calls go from phone to phone over the network. But outside calls still have to connect or terminate to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Most often that interface is within the IP PBX system or voice gateway. The most common phone line interface is the T-1 or T-1 PRI digital phone line, just like conventional PBX systems.

Another option that's not quite as widely deployed is to connect your phones to a VoIP service provider in IP format directly from your network. The service provider takes care of terminating calls to the PSTN. The network connection from your company to the service provider is called a SIP Trunk and is most often a type of T-1 line set up to be unchannelized to transport voice packets.

You should know that T-1 line prices are lower now than they've ever been. If you're still using analog phone lines connected to your PBX telephone system, it may well be worth your while to convert to one or more T-1 or T-1 PRI lines. If you already have T-1 service, then you should get a competitive quote to see how much you might save on your next contract. Simply enter a quick online quote request at T1 Rex.

Palm Treo 680 Crimson Smartphone

You love the Palm Treo line. Now get ready for the new Treo 680 Crimson smartphone. It runs the Palm OS 5.4.9 on an Intel 312 MHz PAXA270 processor. You get a 320 x 320 pixel TFT touch screen display with stylus and a backlit QWERTY keyboard. Why settle for a non-PDA smartphone when you can have a real Palm?

This Treo is designed for productivity. It will sync to your computer tethered by cable, by infrared or Bluetooth. Microsoft ActiveSync syncs your corporate email. You'll be able to both read and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. You can also read PDFs.

In addition to VersaMail Email software that supports conventional Email and VPNs, you can browse the Web using the Blazer Web browser that supports full HTML, SSL, JavaScript, cookies, bookmarks and frames. It's like a desktop browser, only a bit smaller. Of course both text and instant messaging are also supported.

The Palm Treo 680 Crimson includes a VGA quality digital camera with 2x digital zoom. Just what you need to grab those impromptu photo opportunities. The camera will also work in video capture mode with movie length limited only by the available memory. The Treo 680 comes with 64 MB built-in but expandable via MMC SD and SDI card formats.

Don't forget that this Palm is more than a PDA. It's also a full capability cell phone running on the AT&T Cingular network with quad GSM network compatibility. Data download supports EDGE cellular broadband for up to 144 Kbps download speed. You get speakerphone, voice memo, picture Caller ID and Bluetooth wireless headset support.

As a final sweetener, this Palm includes an MP3 player. The included PocketTunes software lets you listen to Mp3 music and podcasts in rich stereo.

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