Know the Lingo to Save Money

If you want to be successful with any technology, you need to know the lingo. The world of VoIP telephony is no different. Actually it is. There is a Lingo as well as lingo.

Lingo the company and product, not lingo the vernacular, is a broadband phone service with offerings for both residential and business users. These offers are intended to save users considerable cost versus conventional wireline telephone service, especially if you have reason to call overseas from the United States.

Let's take a look at the residential plans first. You can choose from Chatter Box, Global Gabber, Lingo Link, Small Talk, South Asia, Talk 365, and LatAM SaveMore. Gotta love those names.

Chatter Box is the featured plan. It's priced at $21.95 a month. For that you get unlimited calling to numbers in the US and Canada. Sounds similar to other VoIP services on the market. But, Chatter Box also gives you unlimited calling to UK, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Austria, Luxembourg, Norway, Vatican City, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, & South Korea as well. If you have friends or relatives in any of these countries, you'll have a hard time beating this deal.

LatAM Save More is the same price, but gives you unlimited calling to US, Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Caracas, & Rio de Janeiro. LatAM being Latin America, of course.

South Asia gives you unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. But the 2.9 cent per minute long distance rates to India and Bangladesh are what make this plan truly special.

The lowest cost residential plan is appropriately called Small Talk. This one is for the person who wants home phone service but isn't a heavy user. You get 500 minutes to call anywhere in the US, Canada or Puerto Rico. You only pay $14.95 a month. Let's see the phone company beat that.

Business calling plans start at $39.5 a month for 500 minutes to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, and go up to $79.95 for unlimited calling to US, Canada, UK, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Australia, Vatican City, Portugal, New Zealand, China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong & Taiwan. If you do business internationally, I don't see how you can miss with this service.

Business plans differ from residential plans in that they include the Lingo Office Assistant. This is software in the form of a toolbar that's added to Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. With it, you can make calls directly from your desktop, access voicemail, and set up your cell phone or home phone to be your business phone.

Wired Magazine named Lingo as it's Editor's Pick for a VoIP telephone service. They describe domestic calls as sounding superb, which is not always the case with phone services that share a broadband connection with your computer.

Is Lingo right for you? Learn more about the Lingo service plans and the many, many included features. Also check prices and special offers, which are always subject to change in this competitive business. If you like what you see, go ahead and sign up quickly and easily online. You have a 30 day money back guarantee from Lingo to ensure your satisfaction with their service.

I'm Sorry, Dave. I Can't Let You Use That Channel

After the high dollar feeding frenzy of the last spectrum auction, you might have the impression that all the good frequencies are spoken for. From DC to light, there isn't a spare kHz to squeeze in one more carrier. Or is there?

If you call the FCC office and tell them you want to start a new radio-based service and then ask what band of frequencies they can give you exclusive use of, they'll probably be polite enough not to laugh in your face. Unassigned swaths of spectrum are as rare as unclaimed swaths of land. But that doesn't mean that occupied communications channels are packed cheek to jowl up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, at any given time in any given place there is plenty of room to communicate.

The problem with making more efficient use of the various RF (Radio Frequency) bands lies in the way that transmitters and receivers operate. A transmitter sends out a signal on one or more channels, which is then picked up by a receiver listening on the same channel or channels. If two transmitters try to occupy exactly the same space at the same time, interference occurs and any listening receivers hear gibberish.

You may have experienced this using walkie-talkies, or hearing two broadcast radio stations cutting in and out on the same channel. WiFi networks and wireless phones using the same 2.4 GHz spectrum can also interfere to the point where one or both won't function properly.

Some services, such as radio and TV stations, transmit continuously 24/7. Those channels truly are spoken for. But other communications and data services only transmit some of the time. When nobody is transmitting, those channels might be used by another service. Even TV and Radio station channels aren't used to the fullest. Not every channel has a listenable signal in each and every location.

The major obstacle in the way of letting more services use the currently assigned spectrum is who's going to manage the traffic? If you just let everybody do what they want on any channel they want, you'll soon have little more than a bar room brawl where the commotion is so loud that nobody can hear anything. It's channels assigned and policed by a central authority that keeps things civil.

The way cellular telephony works gives a hint at one way to let many, many users use only a few channels without interference. A central switching system tells each phone what channel to use. When that call is done or the user moves out of range of a cellular base station, the channel is reassigned to another caller.

So is the answer to establish a central switching system for all communications and have it assign channels to whomever wishes to transmit at a given time? Very Orwellian or perhaps something reminiscent of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but not very practical and unbelievably expensive.

But what about building intelligence into the equipment that will use the spectrum? The rule could be that you can use any channel allocated for a particular purpose, but you have to listen before you transmit and only transmit if the channel is clear. In deference to established licensees, if the assigned user wants the channel, you have to get off immediately.

This is the idea behind proposed "white space" systems that would squat on unused TV channels to deliver services such as rural broadband. But it can be taken further and generalized into a concept known as cognitive radio. These would be smart radios based primarily on software that would be programmed to take a number of factors into account to avoid interfering with licensed or even unlicensed users of a communications channel. As long as there is some open spectrum, cognitive radios could find it and put it to good use.

Cognitive radio is a far cry from the crystal sets that pioneered radio broadcasting. Even the latest in spread spectrum systems that use sophisticated technology fall far short of radios that could be considered deep thinkers. White space transmitters still need to prove they can work reliably before anybody is going to unleash them on even TV channels where interference is unlikely. Expanding cognitive radio technology beyond that well-defined and limited application will be done slowly and carefully.

The sophistication of low cost processing chips may well be at the point where every radio can have a brain that is so agile and polite that shared usage of scarce spectrum is now practical. What's hard is accepting the idea that nothing is going to go wrong - go wrong - go wrong.

Bricks and Mortar Apocolypse, Now?

The real world is in a pickle while the virtual world is humming along nicely. Could we be nearing a tipping point when the Internet finally does take over? Perhaps. If traditional bricks and mortar commerce does get a comeuppance, it may be for reasons we never expected.

Let's look at the evidence. Retail has been in something of a downturn for some time. But lately there has been an acceleration, almost a panic in some areas. The reason is the spiking price of gasoline. The quick run-up in gas prices this year has sent a cold chill up the spines of consumers. The more that chill gives them the shakes, the less they drive. The less they drive, the less they shop. Well, at least the less they drive to shop.

Shopping is America's real pastime. Shopping and buying are what keep the economy moving. If shopping grinds to a halt, buying will take a tumble and we might just "drive" ourselves into a economic depression - by not driving.

The problem is that we've structured our society on driving to get places. Look at any recent real estate development. It's a mile of houses followed by a mile of strip malls, a mile of offices, and tucked out of the way where you don't have to see them is a mile of factories. There aren't that many places now where you can walk to the corner pub, grocery store or even an ice cream shop. Forget hoofing it to any of the big box retailers. They carve out huge swaths of landscape so that an acre of store can have acres of parking. Movie theaters, sports fields, and even churches have all gone with the model of big buildings surrounded by huge fields of asphalt parking lots.

There's no getting from point A to point B without a car. It's too far to walk and, in most places, public transportation is spotty at best. Gasoline gets put in those cars every week or so. The cost of that gas gets put in your face. I'm not so sure that $3, $4 or even $5 pump prices are all that traumatic in themselves. It's the $50, $75, and $100 fill-ups that stop the hearts of motorists and start them thinking about changing their ways.

Driving is down over the last year by a couple of percent in the U.S. That's pretty significant considering that the population is increasing. What's happening is that people are less casual about cruising around, burning gasoline, and then hearing the gas station pump click up, up, up. They're thinking about their route and mentally planning paths that include the necessary stops without a lot of randomly going here and there.

That's smart, efficient and good for the environment. But it's not so good for retail establishments that benefit from impulse shopping. A shopper might not think "Oh, I should stop in and pick up a book," when their more efficient travel plan doesn't give them a chance to see your store and plant the thought.

But people love to shop, right? You bet. That hasn't changed. But now they're doing more shopping in front of their computers instead of behind the wheel. You don't get the touchy-feely experience with e-tailing, which might be overrated for a lot of products. That's especially true if you are just buying replacements. How much hands-on do you need to buy more office supplies? Furnace filters? Specialty toothpaste? I regularly order all of these online.

For major purchases, such as cars, appliances and computers, people are shopping online even when they buy locally. What might be thought of as product research is the process people used to go through visiting every retailer in town and talking to all the salespeople. Now they may make their decision online and then make a bee-line to the store with the best advertised price. Or they may decide to buy that new flat screen TV or cell phone online and have it delivered.

Many traditional businesses have seen this coming and opened parallel stores online with the same stock as you'll find in the retail establishments. Some, like Circuit City, give you the option of having your purchase delivered or picking it up at the store even though you've ordered online. Major chain stores have hedged their bets with the dual online/offline approach. If local shopping takes a dive, online shopping can take up the slack. Chances are that the products are stored in the same warehouse anyway.

That doesn't work so well for strictly local establishments that aren't part of a national distribution chain with a massive e-commerce support system. Many, if not most, local merchants have put up business Web sites without online ordering. These give locations, hours, phone numbers and perhaps current specials. They're the electronic equivalent of phone book and newspaper ads.

If the downward trend in miles driven continues, it could mean a come back for local delivery service. Instead of calling the local butcher or haberdasher like in the old days, customers may browse and order online. The merchant would then make delivery rounds, but in a updated version of the old horse cart. Think plug-in hybrid or natural gas fueled delivery trucks. This may sound like a zero-sum game, but it's actually more efficient for one delivery vehicle to run a circuit around town than have every customer drive to the store and back to pick up their one little order. If said deliveries are made in electric vehicles that are recharged from the grid overnight, fuel costs could be measured in pennies per mile.

This model is already working for some restaurants, sans the fuel efficient vehicles. The fancier ones often use SUVs that burn a ton of fuel. The little pizza shops still use beater cars that drip oil in your driveway. But both high and low end restaurants have made the jump to online ordering as a replacement for phone-in orders. Online, you have the opportunity to present a complete and up to date menu. No additional clerk is needed to handle the extra business because customers themselves take care of order entry.

If the idea of online ordering coupled with local delivery sounds like an idea that popped with the tech bubble of the 90's, it may have been that those pioneers were just too early. What's different now is that gasoline prices have gotten to the point where people no longer go running out on a whim for this, that and everything else. Couple that with highly efficient delivery vehicles to keep delivery costs low and the window of opportunity opens for more merchants to integrate online shopping with their bricks and mortar operations.

The other thing that's changed in the last 10 years or so is that consumers have become very comfortable with the Internet, including online retailing. Its not unusual anymore to be noodling around on a laptop computer while watching TV in the living room. You may well be placing an order at Amazon.com, while missing an ad for a similar product running on your local TV station.

There's no doubt that bricks and mortar retailing will continue to garner a major share of consumer spending. By supplementing traditional walk-in business with online shopping and perhaps free or low cost delivery, retailers can benefit from the Internet rather than see their business base erode to online e-tailers.

It's 10:00. Do You Know Where Your Website is?

Don't you just hate it when some smart aleck geek friend rings your phone, and when you pick up all they do is play half a minute's worth of Janis Joplin's song "Down on Me"? Your friends wouldn't do that, would they? No, they'd play Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Down on the Corner."

Instead of being annoyed, you should be thanking your friends for providing a valuable if embarrassing service. In their own not so subtle ways they're trying to tell you that your website is down, dead, missing in action. They've got your number and it's 404.

Let's face it. Every once in awhile servers stop serving. Disk heads crash. Power supplies smell putrid and start emitting smoke. Lightning strikes and knocks out everything. Chances are that you won't be around because Murphy's Law dictates that these things happen when you're far away and least expect it. So, can you depend on your comedic friends catching the problem right away or would you like a more professional solution?

There are two nice things about a professional site monitoring service. One: It's always on duty and ready to alert you to server problems. Two: It's professional. it doesn't point and laugh, or even play songs through the telephone.

An automated site monitoring service can provide you with information no friends or even employees would have the patience to collect. You can get running graphs showing uptime, downtime, average response time, server status, time of last error event, notifications, and so on. View them online at your leisure and look for trends.

A monitoring and alert service called Just Uptime will do that and more. Like your friends, Just Uptime will call your phone to let you know when your servers have a problem. But unlike your friends, you'll get a text message not a snarky song clip. You can set the system to check and report in whatever increment you wish, from a paranoid every minute to a lackadaisical every hour.

Just Uptime. Catchy name, huh? Well, their name is their fame. They offer quite a range of checks, including HTTP/HTTPS, Ping, TCP/UDP, DNS, POP/IMAP/SMTP, and website keyword. You can get error notifications by email or SMS to unlimited contacts. All of this is controllable from a handy online control panel where you can also set parameters and view reports. The system will check locations worldwide and you can include all of your servers on the same account.

Pricey? Not really. Basic service is under ten bucks a month and you can upgrade for more checks and more notifications as you see fit. There's no setup fee or long term contract. Just to make sure you like the service, you can try it free with no credit card needed. Chances are you will like it and continue service, to the chagrin of your jovial compadres. Learn more and try Server Monitoring & Alerts from Just Uptime.

Got a Bandwidth Jones

How much bandwidth is enough? Silly question. How much money is enough? How much good health? How much chocolate? When it comes to bandwidth the more that's available, the more that we find use for. What's more, the most desirable bandwidth of all is wireless and fiber optic. Wireless is for freedom of movement. Fiber optic is for massive throughput. Property owners and managers that offer their business clients both may well find themselves more in demand than even health, wealth and fine quality chocolate.

A new report on business and consumer bandwidth usage says that IP traffic will grow by three times more in the next four years than what it has reached after the first 30 years. Even more interesting, the majority of that traffic will be located on private networks.

Popular media has convinced us that YouTube video is sucking up all available bandwidth and bringing the Internet to its knees. Indeed, some service providers and particularly Cable broadband companies are struggling to cope with the surge in Internet activity. But a lot of that is because they oversubscribed their networks based on assumptions of limited infrequent traffic from Web surfers, not lengthy high bandwdith downloads of video clips, movies and television shows. Less well known is the dramatic growth in business traffic both on the Internet and off.

What's behind all this organizational activity? It's a combination of new types of information based businesses and productivity improvement initiatives by old-line businesses.

The new businesses offer digitally based services, such as video production and distribution, computer generated imaging, software outsourcing, and digital modeling and simulation.

How about traditional businesses? Office buildings full of clerks processing paper-based forms have been replaced by online systems for order entry, processing and shipment, inventory tracking, and e-commerce Web sites. More sophisticated tools help fewer people handle a larger volume of work without becoming swamped. Electronic communications have reduced cycle times of virtually every business process. Even mom and pop franchise operations have point of sale systems tied back to the franchisor for sales tracking and automatic inventory management. Plus every business, no matter how large or small, has its own Web site.

This transformation in business practice means that owners and managers of business properties have to consider electronic communications as a necessary utility, the same as electricity, heat and water. Today, it's very reasonable to make sure your building is "lit" for fiber optic service and even including high bandwidth connectivity as part of the lease. No longer are fiber optic bandwidth prices unreasonable. New Metro Ethernet services offer 100 Mbps and even Gigabit Ethernet at reasonable prices when shared among multiple tenants. Include some wireless access points to cover the floor space and you have an up to date facility that will appeal to even the most high-tech tenants.

Don't Layoff Employees, Evict Them

The life of an employee today is one of feast and famine at best. In good times you have way too much work to do and fear for your job if you complain. In lean times you have way too much work to do and fear for your job regardless of what you say. Layoffs are always looming like a dark shadow over the organization. But what if you could be evicted rather than laid off? Wouldn't that be better?

I know what you're thinking: "This is nuts." Getting kicked out of your home is certainly no better than getting kicked out of your job. But that's not what I'm talking about. The idea gaining popularity among managers is to evict employees not from their homes, but from their offices. You stay on the payroll. You just don't set foot on the premises. Oh, and you have to get your job done too.

The popular term for this is telecommuting. The idea is that many, if not most, employees of today's information intensive companies can work just as well from home. In some cases their productivity soars because the opportunities to socialize with other employees disappears and they aren't trying to remotely manage a myriad of personal concerns, such as child care.

Think about it. How much of your workday do you spend sequestered in a cubicle staring at a video display and pecking away at a keyboard? Or, how much of your time is spent on the telephone while perhaps also using a computer? Is there really something sacred about the hallowed ground of the corporate center that makes it imperative that you sit there and only there to do the job? Probably not.

But what about meetings? You have to have meetings or you're not a team. Yeah, right. How much of those meetings are a complete waste of time, as you wait for all the members to saunter in and quiet down. The rest is also a waste of time or could be handled via email, Webcast, teleconference or video conference.

But what about supervision? Everybody knows employees work harder when the boss is breathing down their neck. Yeah, right. If a job can be measured and status objectively tracked and reported, there is no longer a need for the long arm of intimidating management. There is still a need for training, coaching and evaluation. Some of that is still best done face to face and can be scheduled for office visits.

By having employees visit the office when needed instead of squatting there in dedicated personal space, the need for expensive real estate is dramatically reduced. With less floor space required, there is a proportional reduction in heating, cooling, plumbing and lighting expenses. What replaces those is a telecommunication expense that's just a fraction of the expense eliminated.

Telecommuting has been used as a "perk" for trusted employees to give them more flexibility in their schedule and hopefully keep their critical skills on staff. But now it's becoming a cost saving strategy for the many rather than only the chosen few.

The company sets up telephone communications and broadband Internet, often with VPN software to maintain security. An MPLS network can provide many to many connections with a higher degree of performance and reliability than your typical residential broadband services. Some employers also provide computing and telephone equipment just like they would if you were on premises.

Other businesses are organized as "virtual companies" from the get-go. There is no corporate center. Instead, all of the team members are on a virtual PBX telephone system that works just like a business phone system with users scattered around the country. Customers and suppliers have no idea the operation is distributed because they still dial a central number and even have "virtual" operator service.

Cut Telecom Line Expenses, Not Lines

In this recessionary business climate, keeping the enterprise afloat may mean throwing every non-critical expense overboard. Soon the obvious fat disappears from the budget and managers start questioning line items once thought sacrosanct. Do you really need 10 phone lines or could everybody get by with 5? Take turns calling if you have to. What about that Internet connection? Do we really need that T1 line when those 56K modems are still boxed up in the back room?

Good grief. Cost cutting can easily go from savvy business practice to organizational nightmare when desperation sets in. It's best to start coming up with reasonable reductions before upper management gets a whiff of blood in the water and goes nuts. Think through the justification for each budgetary line item yourself and make changes you can take credit for, or at least have proposals in your back pocket.

Now here's the good news. If you can keep a cool head at least for a little while, you may be able to get the savings your business needs while maintaining the services you need to be at your most productive. The trick isn't just to slash and burn every telecom expense you come across. It's getting the same functionality for less money. You don't necessarily want to cut your lines, and with them your livelihood. You want to cut the expenses associated with those lines.

Most companies have two types of telecom line services: voice and data. Video, such as video conferencing, can fall into either the voice or data category depending on how it's implemented.

Lets start with voice services. Most businesses of any size have a PBX telephone system that manages their telco connections. There may be some room for cost savings here because of the way the system has grown. It usually starts with a few lines, adding another and another as the company need grows. Pretty soon you've got a dozen or two individual lines. Usage reports say you need them all or customers will start getting poor service and some of your employees will be cooling their heels while waiting to place a call. But you aren't necessarily married to the configuration you have today. By consolidating all those individual phone lines into one or two T1 PRI digital trunks, you'll have the same level of service but at a discount.

If you already made the move to T1 lines years ago, you might still be able to save. Competitive prices for T1 voice lines, including long distance rates, have plummeted in the last few years. By running a competitive service check you can find out if a simple change of provider could result in significant cost savings for the very same usage.

The same logic applies to your business Internet service. A T1 dedicated Internet line might now be priced at half what you paid when you signed a multi-year lease years ago.T1 prices are very favorable right now and you can make a good deal getting into a better contract. Once again, you keep the same functionality you have now but simply pay less.

You might also want to consider some newer technologies, such as MPLS networks or Metro Ethernet to interconnect multiple business locations. SIP trunking offers a way to get high quality voice and data service delivered on a single line service. All of these services have become readily available only in the last few years. If they work for your situation, you could find very substantial cost savings available for the asking.

Steppin' Out With My Ethernet

Ethernet connects all of our computing equipment within the enterprise. It's the standard protocol for LAN or Local Area Network connections. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just string that Ethernet backbone out the door and across town or across the country? Well, now we can.

You're no doubt familiar with DSL, T1, DS3, and perhaps SONET fiber optic connections. All of these are used for metropolitan or long haul voice and data services. There's also a recently introduced service called Carrier Ethernet. In town it's referred to as Metropolitan or Metro Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet is the technology that moves your network out of the office to just about anywhere you want to go. Other technologies will do that too, but Ethernet has a couple of notable advantages.

First of all is the ease of connecting and managing your extended LAN. With Carrier Ethernet, you can connect all of your scattered offices, factories and warehouses as if they were on the same network. You just have very, very long wires inbetween.

The other big and perhaps more important advantage is lower costs. Competitive Ethernet Service providers have newer regional and national networks based on IP technology that works very well with Ethernet. They are also aggressively expanding their points of presence (POPs) to bring connectivity to business users. Residential users will continue to get their broadband Internet connections through Cable, telco and wireless service providers.

What type of Ethernet services are available? The most popular speeds are 10/100/1000 Mbps, the same speeds that are standard for NIC or Network Interface Cards. There are also two delivery methods. For Gigabit Ethernet, also known as GigE, fiber optic connections are essential. That's no problem if your building is already lit for fiber optic service. If not, a competitive carrier might choose to "light" your building if there are a sufficient number of clients willing to sign up for substantial amounts of bandwidth. If that isn't cost effective, Ethernet over Copper may be the answer.

EoC or Ethernet over Copper is a mechanism for transporting standard Ethernet at 10 Mbps or Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps over distances a few miles or less. The copper is standard twisted pair copper telco wiring that would otherwise be used for analog telephone or T1 voice and data lines. Newer modulation techniques make it practical to carry Ethernet bandwidths on lines once thought to be limited to 1.5 Mbps or less.

Are your ready to step out of the office with your Ethernet? If so, check fiber optic or EoC Carrier Ethernet service pricing and availability for your business.

T1 Voice Options for Call Quality

Any business who's telephone communications are the lifeblood of its operation can settle for no less than excellent call quality at all times. That includes natural sounding voices with minimal noise and distortion. Calls that break up or are dropped are unacceptable. So are echo chambers and that annoying speech clipping that makes it sound like you're using walkie-talkies. If you don't want that, what you do want is T1 voice service.

T1 lines are a natural for business telephone systems because they were designed for telephony from the ground up. T-Carrier, the technology that includes T1 (1.5 Mbps) and T3 (45 Mbps), was invented for use by the phone companies themselves. It replaced the web of wires and poles that carried phone calls from telco office to office with a highly efficient digital system.

Quality of Service (QoS) is inherent in the nature of T1 technology. The line is divided into 24 separate channels, each assigned its own time sequence in the bitstream. This is what's known as TDM or Time Division Multiplexing. TDM requires precise synchronization at both ends of the transmission. Atomic clocks and the stability of today's solid state equipment makes this a well established and robust process. Because the channels are unique and completely separate, one call cannot interfere with another.

Latency is also not a problem with T1 telephone lines. The precise timing required for channel synchronization keeps the bits moving along at a steady rate. In IP networks, packets can be inspected and delayed along the way and still retain their integrity. T1 voice channels must maintain their place in line. Unlike most packet networks, T1 voice channels don't share the network bandwidth with other types of data that can cause congestion problems. When there is no phone call in progress on a particular channel, it idles while maintaining synchronization with the other channels.

Voice tonal quality is set by the CODEC or Coder/Decoder that converts between the analog signals in the telephone handset and the digital format used for transmission. Each T1 channel is 64 Kbps, organized as 8 bits at 8 Kbps using the industry standard G.711 CODEC. This standard is called "toll quality" and was chosen to mimic the analog phone spectrum that existed prior to digital transmission.

If you are happy with the sound of your telephone system in-house and want to maintain that quality between company locations or between your contact center and your customers, T1 phone lines offer a proven and robust solution. A popular option to the standard T1 voice line is T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface, and ISDN term. PRI uses the same standards as T1 but reserves one channel exclusively for signaling, control and information. You have 23 vs 24 telephone channels per T1 PRI line but call connection times are faster and you can get Caller ID or ANI information delivered to your PBX system.

T1 telephone lines have the built-in mechanisms to maintain voice quality for consistently excellent telephone calls. They are also readily available at lower lease costs than ever before, including historically low per-minute rates. Check prices and availability of T1 and T1 PRI telephone lines for your business application now and have the call quality you really need.

MPLS Just Got Easier

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is fast becoming the core transport technology of choice for point to point and point to multipoint networks. If MPLS is gaining acceptance, what is on the wane? It's Frame Relay networks for sure, and perhaps legacy TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) networking in general. If you're still on one of those legacy networking technologies but wondering if a move to MPLS would be advantageous, you're in luck. A new service is here to make your life easy.

The newest service of Telarus, Inc., the creator of the GeoQuote (tm) instant online pricing service for T1 and DS3 line services, is called Shop For MPLS. It's exactly what it sounds like and then some. This is an online tool that lets you enter information about your business locations and how you are going to use the network. That gives the automated search system and the Telarus consultants the data needed to calculate the best options for your situation.

You'll notice that the Shop For MPLS query form is more detailed than the simple GeoQuote quote request form found on Shop For T1. The reason for this lies in the inherent nature of MPLS networking.

If MPLS were a wireless technology, it might be called 4G. The impetus for a new core network technology comes from the need to transport a variety of protocols from point to point or as a mesh network. Plus today's need to provide a QoS or quality of service control to ensure that real time services, such as VoIP or live video, are protected from degradation by network congestion.

Without MPLS, you have a potpourri of network technologies and pick the one that most closely matches your application requirements. Frame Relay has been a popular service for connecting multiple locations. It uses a private network with virtual circuits that are set-up between locations. Multiple users share the network and the cost, but your data has a committed information rate that is protected.

MPLS does something similar by employing an extensive private network to connect among multiple locations. Instead of virtual circuits, MPLS routers employ labels or tags that define source, destination, and quality of service. The quality of service part of the tag is what makes MPLS able to reliably transport voice and video and well as data.

MPLS networks are based on IP rather than legacy TDM protocol, although they can transport TDM services such as T-carrier or SONET. Many large scale carriers are building new MPLS networks or converting their TDM networks to MPLS. This make the MPLS marketplace very competitive and offers considerable cost savings for network service users.

The new Shop For MPLS online service recognizes that many ideal candidates for MPLS networking are companies with many locations. These can be branch offices, retail outlets, franchises, warehouses and factories. You have the ability to upload a site list rather than having to individually enter a dozen, a hundred or a thousand locations, or mail-in a list or electronic file. That alone can shave days off the quote process and improve accuracy.

The automated analytical tools available to Telarus consultants further improves the opportunity to find the lowest cost solutions from among a large suite of competitive carriers, making it easy to get a good deal on MPLS services.

Is The World Going on a High Fiber Diet?

A recent research report shows that around the world, more people are now signing up for fiber optic Internet access than cable broadband. Yours is being installed next week, right?

Don't feel bad. The United States isn't exactly leading the charge in shunning copper in favor of fiber optic delivery. Certainly not in FTTH or fiber to the home service. Verizon's FiOS is about the only game going here. But in China, there are almost 17 million fiber optic service subscribers. We have about 2.6 million to put us in a solid fourth place behind Japan and Korea.

But wasn't satellite communications supposed to be the answer to unlimited worldwide communications? It was back when the space age began and twisted pair & coaxial copper cables were the only game in town. Or under the sea for that matter. Yes, there are low earth orbit (LEO) and geosynchronous satellite communications in place now and you can order satellite broadband any time you want. But it's still a specialized service almost 50 years after AT&T put the first Telstar satellite into orbit.

There are a couple of good reasons for this. Telstar service was only good for about 20 minutes at a time. Then you had to wait a couple of hours for it to come around again. To provide full-time communications, you need a constellation of LEO satellites like the ones used for GPS or Iridium service. With lots of satellites you could have the Internet overhead, but it's costly. Too costly for all those birds to get enough capacity for today's Internet usage.

The same thing is true for geosynchronous satellites, plus one other nagging problem. They're so far out in space that you lose a second or so between transmission, reception and confirmation among locations. That's latency and it's a killer for voice or other real-time two-way services. Latency is unimportant for one way communications such as satellite TV, where geosynchronous satellites have flourished.

Down here on Terra Firma and under the briny depths, it's copper, fiber or wireless. Nothing beats fiber for huge bandwidths at low latency. The fiber itself isn't all that costly, either. It's the installation. That drives most of the telcos nuts, since they spent the last 100 years burying copper. Now they have to go and do the job all over again.

Even so, fiber optic communications is not just the coming thing. It's the going thing right now. Nearly all nationwide and undersea communications is now on fiber. Competitive carriers are getting aggressive about building out points of presence (POPs) to serve business users who need and can afford fiber optic bandwidth levels.

Meanwhile copper is getting a second lease on life as an access technology for both residential and business users. Fiber is brought into the neighborhood and then delivered the last mile or two over conventional twisted pair copper wires. Cable broadband is headed for an upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 to squeeze more bandwidth from coax as a delivery medium.

Meanwhile, the drumbeat of fiber optic Internet service grows louder and louder. It's just a matter of time now.

Holy Guacamole, It's Green Hosting

The unlimited power sucking days of the Internet may be nearing an end. It's not just SUVs and old incandescent light bulbs that are sending polar bears to a watery grave. Every one of us who publishes a Web site or operates an online business contributes a little to the rising fever of Mother Earth. But what can we do about it short of pulling the plug on the very technology that puts food on our tables? What we need is a lean, green hosting machine.

Eco-hosting is a new idea that comes from the recognition that non-polluting electric power sources are in short supply, while our appetite for electricity is insatiable. Throwing another shovel full of coal on the fire isn't the answer it used to be. That's especially true now that we know that even scrubbing fossil fuel emissions of the uglier smog and acid rain pollutants still leaves the CO2 dilemma. While we might feel a little squeamish about plugging in another toasty server farm, lots of people are feeling so squeamish about global warming that bringing new power plants online is getting contentious. Hydro is pretty much all dammed up. Nukes are scary. What's left? I know. Alternative energy!

Wind and solar energy used to be laughable. But while everybody was yucking it up over the decades, the cost of both energy conversion technologies has been getting more and more competitive. Joke's over. You've got Google powering its Googleplex with solar panels and oilman T. Boone Pickens singing the praises of windmills in Texas. The alternative energy bandwagon is electrically powered and picking up steam... so to speak.

A company that's positioned itself out in front of the eco-parade is one with a really green name. I mean REALLY green. It's Good Avocado.

You read right. Good Avocado is the name of an eco-hosting company. No avocados come lately are they, either. This company has been offering eco-friendly hosting solutions for almost ten years. Now you might be wondering what makes a hosting company eco-friendly. In this case it's based on 100% carbon neutral operations "generated" by buying wind and solar offsets. Plus they plant a tree for every account they establish.

Green? Yes. But what makes them a good Web host avocado? This group is as smart as they are responsible. Their hosting technology is based on a cluster of servers called the AvocadoFarm that can ramp up with more traffic capacity to maintain consistent page load times and a 100% uptime guarantee. You know that the vast majority of web hosting companies wouldn't dare make such an offer, much less meet it.

You don't pay a premium for this hosting performance or the satisfaction of doing your part to support a better environment. Hosting packages and reseller accounts are competitively priced and come with lots of professional grade goodies like a brandable interface, Ruby on Rails, ability to host unlimited websites, and as many email accounts and MySQL databases as you can use. With 300 GB disk storage and 1,000 GB bandwidth you should be pretty well set no matter how big your business grows. Sound good, perhaps even great? Have a closer look and perhaps take a bite of Good Avocado Professional Hosting.

I Know Where You Took Your Pictures Last Summer

Eye-Fi, the WiFi Memory Card, has a new trick up its electronic sleeve. Now it knows where you've been taking pictures and it's telling!

The latest version of the innovative camera memory that uploads electronic photos to your computer or photo Website is called the Eye-Fi Explore. What the Explore version adds to the basic Eye-Fi card is location tagging. Geotags or geographic location labels are automatically added to your pictures as you take them. Eerie, eh?

You might wonder how they managed to cram a GPS receiver as well as a WiFi transceiver and 2 Gigabyte memory into that little SD card. Well, don't strain your brain. They didn't actually do that. Instead, they're using a poor-man's GPS that calculates positions based on known WiFi hotspot locations nationwide. It's impressive. Over 70% of the U.S. population locations are mapped. In Europe it's limited to the top 50 metro areas, with up to 70% in the U.K, Germany, and France.

Speaking of WiFi hotspots, the purchase price of the Eye-Fi Explorer comes with access to 10,000 Wayport Wi-Fi hotspots across the US for a year. After that you're on your own to renew. And you need these hotspots, why? Remember the basic premise of the Eye-Fi is that you don't have to make your way home and wrestle with USB cables to get the pictures out of your camera. They literally fly out of the Eye-Fi card and through the ether to the Internet or your home network.

The deal that Eye-Fi has with WiFi provider Wayport is that the Explore card comes already set up to use the hotspots. No setting up an account, logging-in or toting around a laptop computer required. You walk into a Wayport location, such as an airport, hotel or restaurant, and while you're going about your business the pictures you just took get uploaded. If you forget to put a quarter in the parking meter out front and go dashing out the door, Eye-Fi will simply remember where it was and finish the upload at the next Wayport.

It's like having a little valet inside your camera, taking care of the tedious chore of getting your prized snapshots to someplace they'll be useful. As a devout USB cable wrestler, I can see where you could get addicted to a service like that. Oh, and no need to scratch your head trying to remember where you saw that awesome sculpture or met that special someone. The geolocating feature tags each photo with the spot, or reasonably close.

Think that this technology might make your life easier? Then have a look at the Eye-Fi Explore Wireless 2 GB Secure Digital Card (EYE-FI-2EX)

Drowning in a Sea of Cell Phones

The latest estimates I've seen put mobile subscribers at about 3 billion around the word, with 1 billion new cell phones sold each year. With a 2 to 3 year churn factor, that means that roughly a 1,000,000,000 mobile phones go obsolete each year. That's a billion with a "b". Where do they all go?

Right in a drawer at home, that's where. Actually a new survey says that only 44% actually wind up just sitting around the house like a boomerang college graduate. (Ouch, I was one of those). Another 25% get passed on to family and friends. A full 16% get sold. But only 3% are recycled.

Frankly, I can't see why you'd recycle a device that could be sold. But only 16% of those billion sales opportunities are turned into cash. That's hundreds and hundreds of millions of phones and dollars wasting away.

Well, perhaps there's not enough money to make it worth bundling up the old cell and driving it to the post office. I took a look through the listings of a company that re-purposes used cell phones for application in third world countries and as emergency phones in the U.S. They give you a mailer and send you a check for each cell they receive in good working order.

How much can you get? Most models seem to be in the $4 to $20 range, although there are a lot of newer models and smartphones that garner $25, $50 and more. Got an old iPhone you want to unload? You might get $150 for it.

What about phones that have collected a layer of dust because you sat them aside - a few years ago. Blow it off. Then send that junker in for recycling using a free mailing label. It will be out of your way and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing it isn't adding to the mounting tonnage of old electronics that will have to be dealt with someday.

Whatever you do, resist the urge to drop it in the weekly waste along with all the old pizza that's gone dried and wrinkly. Nature will reclaim pizza. The nasty arsenic, cadmium, plastics and other environmental degraders will live on to poison future generations. Some cities have electronic recycling days where you can drop off your circuit board laden trash for proper handling. If not, get that free mailing label and send it to a recycler specializing in cellular phones. They'll reclaim any valuable chemicals and metals and make sure whatever is left gets dealt with appropriately.

So now that you've unloaded your prized vintage mobile collection for cash and recycling, there's only one thing left to do. Go shopping for the latest and greatest mobile wireless devices.

Dude, Where's My Site?

Is the Internet open for business today or is it taking a little time off? Sometimes you gotta wonder. You enter a domain in your browser or click on a link and... nothing. To paraphrase the famous Dr. McCoy, "It's dead, Jim."

Or is it?

Can you really be sure that a website is down and that the problem isn't just your connection? Well, now you can. There's a new free online tool to do just that. It's called, appropriately enough, DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com.

It's the brainchild of Twitter engineer Alex Payne, who heard the phrase "is it down for everyone or just me" so often that he decided to give people a way to find out. You just enter the URL of the site you're concerned about and click the "or just me" link or hit return. You'll find out immediately if it's you or them. Alex has pre-filled the entry box with Google.com in case you just want to bash your enter key and see if anything is running.

This all presupposes that you can get to the Internet at all. Seems like if you could get to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com that you could go to just about any website, anywhere. After all, it is the WORLD Wide Web.

Logical, yes. But wrong. The Internet Superhighway may be wide open and ready to take you anywhere you want to go. But it's to no avail if half the road signs are blank.

The culprit is DNS or the Domain Name System. This is the core service on the Web that equates domain names with IP addresses. Without DNS, you'd have to type a series of numbers into your browser to access a Web site. DNS service is normally invisible. But when it goes down, your browser has no idea where to go for the site you want. So it sits and spins until you get an error message.

Who runs this DNS service? Each Internet Service Provider or ISP has a DNS nameserver that works like a phone book to look up the IP addresses for domain names, as browsers request them. These nameservers are connected in a hierarchy of other nameservers that eventually lead back to a root name server that holds the master database of domains and addresses.

If your ISP's nameserver goes down for maintenance or just an electrical glitch reboot, you've got no access until it comes back. That's even if your broadband connection is working fine. A weird situation is when you try to access the DNS while the nameserver is coming back online. Some sites will work fine. Others are unreachable. That makes you think the entire Internet is down when it really is only you. That's you and your neighbors on the same ISP.

Another common situation is when you register a new domain name or switch hosting services. Your entry or change in the DNS doesn't happen instantly. It takes time for all those nameservers around the world to get the updates. This process, called propagation, can take up to 48 hours. Usually it's a lot faster. But if you happen to have an ISP with a slowpoke DNS nameserver, you'll just have to wait to see your new Web site or work on it.

I found a workaround to the situation by using a third-party service to check my new domain names and hosting to see if they were ready yet. AnyBrowser.com is a free online tool intended to let you see how your site looks in various browsers. But AnyBrowser.com has a different and generally much faster updating DNS than my ISP. Like DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com, it will give you another means of verifying if your site is up or down. But AnyBrowser.com tools will also show you what your site looks like and whether you've entered your Meta tags correctly.

Another approach is to get yourself set up with two different broadband services, DSL and Satellite or Cable and T1. If they are completely unrelated, at least one should be running no matter what. If you can afford this arrangement, then you can say with confidence: ThatSiteIsDownBecauseItCouldNotPossiblyBeMe.

T1 Phone Lines Offer More For Less

Once your business gets big enough that the telephone bill is a significant part of your monthly expenses, you may be ready for a higher volume, lower cost service. That's especially true if you have started a dedicated contact center for your customers or have grown to a dozen or more outside lines.

The service you'll be interested in is called a T1 telephone line. A T1 "line" is a digital telephone trunk as opposed to a single telephone line. What trunk means is a group of phone lines all bundled electronically into a single line. If you order your phone lines one at a time, as most growing companies do, you'll get individual analog lines with local dial tone and perhaps long distance service. Each line is independent of the others. You select the line you want with a multi-line phone or key telephone system. Or, your PBX system will automatically pick one for you.

T1 telephone lines come bundled up to 23 or 24 to a T1 line. Each line is still independent and can be configured for local and/or long distance service, incoming or outgoing or both, depending on your needs. What T1 telephone service does is offer a volume discount compared to just adding more and more analog phone lines.

Do T1 lines connect to your phones the same as conventional analog phone lines? Not exactly. You need something to perform the conversion between analog and digital formats. If all you want to do is consolidate a bunch of analog phone lines that feed a bunch of analog handsets, a device called a "channel bank" will do the job for you. The T1 line feeds into one side of the channel bank and up to 24 individual phone lines come out the other side.

Most of the time, if you have a dozen or more phone lines you probably have a PBX telephone system in-house. The PBX or the newer IP PBX systems have gotten small and inexpensive compared to the closet full of equipment they used to be. Many newer systems come with a T1 line interface or can be ordered with that configuration. If your existing PBX system doesn't have T1 line capability, you can usually order a plug-in card that will make the connection.

There's something else you need to know about T1 phone lines. There are two types. The original configuration is a channelized T1 line with 24 individual channels, one to transport each telephone line. A newer arrangement is the T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. This is the most popular version of T1 phone service because it offers up to 23 telephone lines plus Caller ID information and faster call switching. Most PBX and IP PBX phone systems can handle T1 PRI as well as conventional channelized T1 lines.

Because of their economy of scale in combining multiple phone lines into a single digital trunk, T1 phone lines can offer you more capability for less money. How much more for how much less? That depends on how you want your service configured. There are often limited time special offers from competitive carriers that can make the line lease cost even more attractive. Find out how much you can benefit from the most competitive offers on T1 phone lines now.

Drobo Mr. Storage Roboto

What gets sucked up faster than excess bandwidth? Disk drive space, that's what. If all you did was word processing and spreadsheets, one of those 150 GB drives would last forever. But with digital cameras saving multi-Megabits per picture and videos making still photos look puny, there's no such thing as too much disk.

Replacing a disk drive with a bigger one or even adding more drives has its own challenges. The more Gigabytes you have, the more you have to backup or risk losing it all to a fatal head crash. If graphic design or video production is your occupation, you can spend substantial amounts of time protecting your work from untimely loss. What you need is an assistant to take of that. if fact, what you could really use is a personal robot.

Well, here's your robot. It's called Drobo, the "world's first storage robot." Drobo is a self-contained black cube of electronics with 4 open slots for SATA drives. You plug 'em in and Drobo takes care of disk management.

It almost looks like a hard drive juke box. But Drobo is a lot more sophisticated than that. It not only combines storage capacity from multiple drives, it secures your data from hardware failure. How does it do that?

At this point, I can imagine a legion of terrified insects all screaming "RAID". Funny, but not it. RAID or Redundant Array of Inexpensive or Independent Disks, is a technique of spreading data across several disk drives instead of concentrating it on a single drive. Files are not only spread over several disks, but redundant information is also written so that the file can be recovered if one of the drives crashes.

Drobo does something similar called SAFE for Secure, Automated, Flexible, Expandable. An advantage over RAID systems is that you can mix drives of various capacities and Drobo doesn't care. It works with whatever capacities you plug in. Like RAID, if a drive "goes south" you don't lose your data. A red light comes on and you pull out the bad drive and plug in a new one. You don't even have to fill the four slots. Start out with one or two drives and add more as you need them. Blue lights on the box tell you how much capacity you've used up.

Like any redundant storage system, Drobo uses substantial amounts of your disk drives for redundant data protection. A combination of drives that add up to 1.5 TB give you 929 GB of actual storage. That could easily be worth it as the robot does all the work.

Data Robotics put a lot of effort into making Drobo behave as much like an independent robot as possible. You don't have to worry about configuring anything or managing the processes. You plug it in, connect to a USB port, add some drives and away you go. When the drives are ready, Drobo lights green indicators next to them. Somewhere in its robotic brain, Drobo is keeping track of drive health and making sure that you don't lose anything. If you notice a flashing red light, replace that drive. It's a goner.

Drobo works with PCs and MACs through a USB port, or you can buy the optional Droboshare accessory that turns it into networked storage over a 10/100/1000 Ethernet connection. Find out more about the Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0 and read the user reviews to see if this product is right for you.

Is Broadband the Next Oil?

Consumers are nearly livid at the accelerating price of gasoline and heating oil. The price of a barrel of oil seems to have no limit, as traders race to outbid each other on futures contracts. It's a feeding frenzy with no end in sight. Now brace yourself. The next crisis you see could be broadband.

How can broadband, particularly Internet broadband, possibly be anything like oil? Oil is a commodity with over a century of exploitation. It's a product of nature. Broadband is something new. It's a product of technology.

What both have in common right now is that demand is outstripping supply. In the case of oil, we aren't finding new cheap supplies as fast as we are using up proven reserves. Even as developed countries scramble to cope by increasing energy efficiency and pressing alternative resources into service, emerging economies will sop up as much available production as exits.

Broadband capacity isn't limited by a natural resource, such as ancient biomass converted to oil over millions of years. But there is a limit. The installed capacity is a function of the time and money it takes to build-out fiber optic networks and the fiber, copper and wireless delivery systems. The Internet wasn't built in a day and you don't double, triple or increase its capacity by an order of magnitude overnight.

What's precipitating a crisis in broadband is a sudden shift in demand technology. The infrastructure of the Internet was designed around lots of people sending email or browsing Websites, and not all at the same time. What's happened lately is that those uses are overshadowed by an increasing number of people uploading and downloading video content, such as video clips, full length movies and television shows. A dedicated individual couldn't write enough emails or visit enough Web sites to begin to match the bandwidth used by casual video streaming and downloading.

The strain is being felt by Internet service providers, including cable broadband operators, telco DSL providers and wireless and satellite broadband services. Satellite has always had bandwidth limitations due to a limited number of "birds" and frequencies available. Satellite broadband dealt with this through fair use policies that slowed down the connections of bandwidth hogs so that everyone would have fair access.

Recently, the cable companies have been scrambling to do something to throttle the minority of heavy users who are pushing their systems to capacity. In this case, they are not limiting bandwidth but rather planning to charge more for above average usage. That should, in theory, provide the funding to increase network capacity so that more bandwidth is available even as average usage steadily increases.

As with any scarce resource in high demand, something's gotta give. That could be rationing, which could limit bandwidth for everyone and stifle any advance of technology. Or in the case of oil, long lines at service stations and severe economic impact. Another approach is to let prices rise until demand is checked. That also flies in the face of technical progress which as always been better, faster, cheaper. But perhaps in the case of bandwidth, it will manifest itself as tiered service with the well-healed and demanding users charged premium prices for premium speeds.

Both oil and broadband have the possibility of increased production. Oil producers can drill more wells, improve the efficiency of the wells they have, and bring online more of the higher cost resources like oil shales. Broadband companies can light more dark fiber already in the ground, improve efficiency by using denser wavelength multiplexing, and spend a bundle to bring fiber and higher speed copper connections to homes and businesses.

With any luck, the supply crises in both oil and broadband will work themselves out under marketplace forces. But of the two, I think broadband is the one with the brightest future. Now if only they could build a broadband car.

Bandwidth Windfall

Money's tight and getting tighter. That's bad news, since breaking into new markets and the new revenues the company needs is dependent on a big step-up in WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth. More bandwidth, more expense. No more bandwidth, declining revenues. It seems like an impossible situation. You don't need another big expense. You need a bandwidth windfall.

Conventional wisdom says that anytime you increase bandwidth you pay more. You pay so much for 1 Mbps. You expect to pay more for 10 Mbps. Perhaps not 10 times as much, but a substantial multiple. The best you can hope for is that the cost per Mbps will decline somewhat as you use higher levels of bandwidth. A volume discount, if you will.

But is it possible to get more bandwidth but pay less? Not just less per Mbps, but a lower monthly line lease price? That seems counterintuitive. But it it were possible, that would be the kind of bandwidth windfall that opens new business opportunities.

Traditional telecom line pricing says that such windfalls are impossible. But there are actually two ways you can get more bandwidth and pay less. This is especially true of dedicated Internet connections, but also applies to point-to-point private lines as well.

The first approach has been available for awhile. It involves going where the bandwidth is. That means a colocation facility, also called a carrier hotel. The hotel designation indicates that many carriers are housed inside the facility. That's true. But it's also true that some carriers run their own "hotels" with only their bandwidth services available for business tenants.

Both private carrier and public colocation facilities have similar setups. You move to the colo facility by physically locating your servers and other network appliances in the colo data center. You equipment is secured by locked cages and a full time security staff, but it's outside of your own server room. You upload, download and otherwise control your remote equipment via a secure broadband connection, such as a T1 line.

The reason that colocation bandwidth is such a bargain is that each carrier establishes a POP (Point of Presence) at the facility with major fiber optic bandwidth they need to sell. Construction costs to connect to that bandwidth are virtually nil. After all, you are in the same building. Often the colocation operator will run or supervise the drops from your desired carrier to your equipment.

The other bandwidth windfall has only recently become available. It is known as Metro Ethernet or Carrier Ethernet. These terms often refer to the same service, although Carrier Ethernet can be a long haul as well as a metropolitan area service.

Ethernet WAN connections usually start at Ethernet speeds of 10 Mbps and go up to 100 or 1000 Mbps at very affordable rates. The higher bandwidth levels require fiber optic connections, although you can often get 10 Mbps and even 100 Mbps over standard copper telco wiring if you are located close to a carrier POP.

Here's a bandwidth windfall for you. Average pricing for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service is significantly LESS per month than traditional DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps. Over twice the speed for less expense. Is that the type of windfall you were hoping for?

Workaholic and Proud of IT

Are you a workaholic? OK, is technology your profession? Enough said.

Well, did you know that workaholics have their own day of recognition? It's not exactly a holiday. That wouldn't be in keeping with the workaholic tradition. Workaholics Day is July 5. You know, the day when everyone else is recovering from the 4th celebrations.

They're all in a semi-stupor with their ears still ringing from standing too close to the fireworks show. Or nursing burns from foolishly lighting off their own backyard shows. Meanwhile, you're roasting in the server room while installing some much needed hardware upgrades. Holiday weekends are traditionally the best times for hardware and software upgrades. There's little activity in the office and most customers aren't hitting the servers.

Sadly, holiday weekends are just a small slice of the work schedule. All the other days and nights, weekdays and weekends are also work days in this 24/7/365 economy. If you're one of the driven who embrace the "always on" lifestyle, then you are certainly qualified to celebrate your day - Workaholics Day.

So, just how does a workaholic celebrate? More work? That seems redundant. Time off? That seems wasteful. How about proclaiming to the world that you are a workaholic and proud of it. That's it! Put it in their face!

You can do just that with workaholic themed items, such as mugs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, magnets, hats and the like. Cafe Press has a pretty complete selection of stuff for the true workaholic.

Treat yourself, or treat someone you know who really doesn't have time to be shopping for themselves. You can also send a Workaholics Day e-card to share a few smiles with somebody you care about who is slaving away instead of slacking this July 5. Just don't send it from some exotic beach vacation area. Unless, of course, you are actually sitting on the beach with your laptop computer and BlackBerry online and hard at work.

Bandwidth Multiplication to the Rescue

If you think that you feel constrained by your WAN or Internet connection bandwidth, imagine the dilemma the service providers are in. Just when they thought that they'd invested enough in trenching fiber, expanding network capability and upgrading router speeds, along comes a killer app like video. In this case "killer" means bandwidth killer. When you've found that your bandwidth margin is much less than you expected, what can you do besides start over? How about speeding up what you've got?

Comcast and Cisco are testing a way to do just that. They've managed to multiply Comcast's fiber infrastructure by a factor of x10 using the latest in DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) transmission equipment. That's 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 100 GigE.

What's important about this is that the setup used Comcast's existing fiber optic backbone that runs between Philadelphia, PA and McLean, VA. No new fiber was trenched. Instead, fibers already in the ground simply carried more data per wavelength.

Simply might be an understatement. The terminal equipment is Cisco's CRS-1 Carrier Routing System. It's part of Cisco's IP Next Generation Network architecture that scales to... are you ready for this ...92 Tbps of switching capacity. Yes, 92 Terabits per second of traffic. All of a sudden 100 Gigabits per second seems like the slow lane. But for long haul network operators 100 GigE will do just fine for now, thank you. It should be awhile before users start demanding Terabit connections. At least that's what everyone hopes.

Video streaming and downloads are now the majority of packets on the Internet. The Internet may have started as an information service envisioned as primarily text or text plus graphics. But the definition of information content has expanded to include voice, data acquisition, and high definition video. Video over IP is no longer the coming thing. It's here. From YouTube to TV program segments, to full length television programs and movies, video is sopping up as much bandwidth as it can get. In that context 100 GigE delivery networks are no longer an extravagance. They're the next benchmark.

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) advancements offer a means to increase network capacity by upgrading terminal equipment and using the same fiber strands. It comes down to more densely packing individual wavelengths using more accurate and stable lasers. Beyond that, network operators will have to press more dark fiber strands into service to multiply their available bandwidth.

Transmission efficiency improvements haven't been limited to fiber optic networks. The buried asset of twisted pair copper is also being asked to transport higher bitrates by upgrading terminal equipment to improved modulation techniques and active interference cancellation. It's common now to be able to get 10 Mbps and even 100 Mbps Ethernet services delivered over copper from nearby carrier POPs (Points of Presence) using lines once thought to be limited to T1 levels of 1.5 Mbps.

Bandwidth multiplication on both fiber and copper transmission lines has lead to the availability of higher bandwidths at lower prices for business users, and residential customers as well.

First in Windmills, First in WiMAX

When it comes to the important technologies for the 21st century, where in the world do you look? Is it the United States where the Internet was born? Perhaps China or Japan where just about everything is manufactured? How about India where design expertise is concentrating? No, none of these. Would you believe Holland?

The Dutch have been leaders in business and technology for hundreds of years. Now they're the first in Europe to implement mobile WiMAX as a wireless broadband standard.

Mobile WiMAX, defined by the IEEE 802.16e standard, is an extension of the original fixed wireless 802.16d being promoted as a humongous Wi-Fi hotspot or the answer to 3G cellular backhaul woes. What mobile WiMAX brings to table is the ability to move around with automatic hand-offs between base stations. If this sounds like the way cellular networks work, it is. But instead of CDMA or GSM transmission technology, WiMAX is designed to support IP networking rather than traditional telephone voice channels.

Not that WiMAX can't be used for telephony. In fact, it may be WiMAX that gives mobile VoIP the platform it needs to take off. But voice is seen as the small piece of the pie. What mobile broadband with significant user bandwidth can really do is transport live video feeds and all those video downloads that are clogging-up the Internet delivery networks. WiMAX providers may find themselves as dazed and confused as the cable and telco operators if video goes mobile in a big way.

Who better to solve this dilemma than the Dutch? They were the first to come up with solutions to the rising tide of global warming before anybody paid attention to carbon dioxide. Dutch windmills reclaimed land from the sea for habitation and agriculture using a nationwide system of windmills to pump the lowlands dry.

We used to think that windmills were quaint in the United States. Now we can't put them up fast enough to generate clean power. We're not at the point of having to hold back the ocean yet. But as sea levels rise and beaches start to disappear, we may very well take a serious look at the Zuiderzee and Delta works in the Netherlands.

WiMAX is also coming here in the fall, courtesy of Sprint and Clearwire. As WiMAX builds-out, it will face stiff competition from LTE, a competing technology being deployed by AT&T and Verizon. Whether the competition for users will slow down 4G wireless or only serve to speed up availability of desperately needed bandwidth remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Worldmax will be expanding on its Amsterdam mobile WiMAX network that has already started operation. They eventually expect to deploy about 3,000 sites to cover all of the Netherlands, financial resources permitting. Watching how the service plays out will be a good leading indicator of how mobile WiMAX networks will actually be used once they are universally available.