It's not that you need to grow a backbone... Actually it is. The frame relay or T1 connection that served you so well when most information was transmitted via paper, and the mail room served as a network router, has seen its glory days. The pace of activity and the volume of data flowing to customers, vendors and other company sites has tapped out these connections. A constant bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps might have seemed generous, even a bit wasteful, a decade or two ago. Now it's like connecting a soda straw of a WAN to a fire hose of a LAN. It will take a bigger MAN to do the job today.
The MAN for the job is the Ethernet MAN or Metropolitan Area Network. You might not be familiar with this MAN. The Ethernet MAN has come from obscurity to be the hottest ticket in town in only a few years. Ethernet MAN has taken on the incumbent SONET MAN and is winning over businesses left and right. You may not have wanted anything to do with SONET MAN. Incumbent telcos have had a lock on most SONET services and kept the pricing beyond what all the the largest organizations can afford. Ethernet MAN comes into town with two big competitive advantages from competitive carriers. One is Ethernet and the other is price.
Ethernet in point to point and multipoint metro networks makes the connection to your corporate LAN almost trivially easy. The outside line terminates in an Ethernet jack and you just plug-in your switch or router. There's no need to worry about protocol conversions or specialized terminal equipment. It really is Ethernet, just like you use internally.
Ethernet also offer dramatic cost reductions in many cases. SONET can provide dozens, hundreds, or thousands of Mbps. But can you afford it? With Ethernet, you'll most likely find that you can afford to upgrade from that 1.5 Mbps T1 to a 10 Mbps Ethernet connection. Perhaps you'll even be able to justify a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet connection. That's over twice the bandwidth of DS3 service, but not twice the price. Maybe less, considerably less, than a single DS3 connection.
Need even more bandwidth? Gigabit Ethernet MAN is for you. Of course, you'll need a building that is "lit" for fiber optic service to get 1,000 Mbps. But not necessarily at the lower speeds. Many 10 Mbps connections are provided as Ethernet over Copper, using the same twisted pair telco lines that you already have installed for lower speed services.
Now that you know the advantages of Ethernet service in metro areas, there's really only one thing left to do - MAN up now for higher bandwidth. You'll wish you had done it sooner.
