Going Rogue But Not Rouge With Samsung

Are you a maverick personality who needs a high performance cell phone that won’t quit on you in the middle of its service term? Then consider the new Samsung Rogue U960 Black (sorry, no red) for Verizon Wireless. It’s one hot candidate in a field of competing smartphones.

Does your current phone have one-touch access to your favorite social network apps, like Facebook and MySpace? No? How about the ability to surf the Web, watch YouTube videos and edit high resolution photos on a screen so bright its easy to use even in sunlight? No? Can you stream stereo music to a wireless headset, get driving directions, or message with ease using a real pushbutton slide-out QWERTY keyboard?

Still no? Your phone’s just too out of date to do everything you want to do, with ease, when you want to do it. Well, don’t waste your time trying to put lipstick on that pig when you can trade up to an advanced multimedia messaging-centric phone like the Samsung Rogue. It’s available at an incredible online discount with free shipping right now.

Let’s take a look at this candidate’s qualifications. What the Rogue has that you’ll be hard pressed to find on another phone is the AMOLED touchscreen color display. That stands for Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode. Eventually your TV will have one of these displays, but right now you can enjoy the advantage of this new technology that is incredibly bright and easy to see even in direct sunlight. The Samsung Rogue display measures a generous 3.1 inches with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and the ability to display over 262,000 colors. That gives you a rich, desktop-like Internet experience on your cellphone.

The Rogue’s customizable widget bar enables you to have one-touch access to social media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and so on. You’ll be able to surf the Web with the built-in HTML Web browser and take advantage of Verizon’s cellular broadband network that’s available in most populous areas. You’ll also have access to V Cast Videos and V CAST with Rhapsody, if you choose to subscribe to these multimedia services.

The vibrant color display will also be appreciated for viewing the high resolution photos you take using the Samsung Rogue's 3 Megapixel digital camera with flash. It has advanced editing tools and zoom capability onboard, plus it runs in camcorder mode so you can make your own videos wherever you happen to be. Share them with your friends using multimedia messaging for picture and video messages. You won’t run out of storage space if you plug in a microSD memory card with up to 16 GB of capacity.

If messaging is a major part of your communications, you’ll love the slide-out full QWERTY keyboard of the Samsung Rogue. No tapping on the screen to compose messages with this phone. You get real pushbuttons with comfortable size and spacing so you can compose text quickly, easily and accurately. Slide it back in when you are done for a smaller profile phone.

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

Fiber Is The New Wireline

In telecommunications the term “wireline” means a copper wire connection. That’s contrasted with “wireless” which means no wires at all. There’s also another delivery mechanism called “fiber optic” which isn’t really a wire, but it really isn’t no physical connection at all like wireless. It may be neither fish-nor-fowl, but it is the likely successor to our copper wired infrastructure.

Fiber optic cable is destined to be the replacement for copper wire cable for a couple of reasons. In fact, they’re more alike than different.

Copper wire cabling is a bundle of twisted pairs of thin copper wires, each coated with a plastic insulating covering. Each wire is a different color or combination of colors for easy identification. They’re twisted together in pairs to reduce the effects of electrical interference. One pair is capable of supporting one telephone service or a DSL Internet service. Two pair will carry a T1 digital phone line. A binder group is a collection of individual twisted pairs bound into a single cable. A small to medium size business may have a 25 pair cable installed to provide telephone service. Larger cables have multiple binder groups, each color coded, in one fat plastic coated bundle. All this copper cabling can be buried in the ground or run overhead on poles. It’s where we get the term “land line.”

Now let’s compare our copper landline with a fiber optic cable. Look inside one of these fiber optic cables and you’ll see that the smallest unit is a single strand of glass fiber consisting of a core and cladding. That’s roughly analogous to the copper wire and its insulation. A fiber cable is like a binder group in that there are many individual fibers, each with a color coded jacket for easy identification. Also like copper cabling, fiber cable can be buried in the ground or run overhead on poles. Each fiber serves the same purpose as an individual twisted pair of wires. The difference is that wires transmit electricity while fibers transmit light.

Now, here’s why fiber is going to be the new wireline technology. The limitation with copper is that it can only transmit digital signals so fast. T1 lines have become the standard for digital telephony and business broadband because they use the same twisted pair copper wiring that's used for legacy analog telephony. It takes two pair to make one T1 line, but most businesses have at least a couple of unused pair available on their incoming telco cabling. A T1 line transmits and receives at 1.5 Mbps. If you have additional copper pairs available, you can bring in additional T1 lines. A process called “binding” couples them so they act like one larger capacity service. Eight T1 lines or 16 copper pair bonded gives you a broadband service of 12 Mbps.

Newer modulation technology can bind those multiple copper pair for a faster service called EoC or Ethernet over Copper. EoC can deliver 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps or even 45 Mbps with one limitation. You have to be within a few miles of the nearest carrier facilities, called their POP or Point of Presence. T1 lines can stretch out into the countryside to reach nearly every business, albeit at lower bandwidths than EoC can provide where available.

That’s it. You may be able to get the equivalent of 10 Mbps standard Ethernet speed and even approach 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet in special circumstances using traditional twisted pair copper wireline facilities. But if you want to get really fast service, Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, you’ve got to have fiber optic cabling installed. In fact, each of those fiber strands can provide at least 10 Gbps versus 1.5 Mbps for a copper pair over long distances. That’s several orders of magnitude difference.

The ground is full of copper telecom cabling, as are utility poles. That’s because there was a century of copper build-out by the telephone companies while they enjoyed a monopoly business position. The telcos and competing companies have been filling the ground with fiber cabling in recent decades. But nearly all of that fiber is for long haul transmissions. You are almost certain to have copper telecom connections to your business, but probably don’t have fiber unless you are in a fairly new facility or are large enough to justify the cost of bringing it in.

That’s all changing. The cost of trenching fiber optic cable isn’t that much different from copper cable. For new installations, it makes sense to install fiber as well as copper. Eventually, it will be fiber only as nothing will connect to copper anymore. It’s going back and bringing in fiber to existing buildings that requires a new investment that providers have been reluctant to make, except where demand from the users in the business park or office building has justified the one time construction costs.

Even in residential areas, fiber is becoming the choice of homeowners who can get it. Many individuals are abandoning their traditional landlines as “old fashioned” compared to being able to communicate anywhere using their cell phones. But cellular networks choke on delivering high bandwidth services, such as video on demand or computer operating system updates. Consumers are finding they actually need a wireline service, but one that has the capacity for high bandwidth content delivery. Verizon’s FiOS is the pioneer in FTTH or Fiber To The Home. Where available it is very popular, even as copper wireline service is abandoned in favor of cellular phone service.

Is your business starved for bandwidth? Perhaps a fiber optic connection can give you all the bandwidth you can use at a cost lower than you might expect. Don’t assume it’s too costly or unavailable until you check prices and availability of fiber optic service for your location.

Your Cell Phone Is A Tool For International Business

Do you conduct business internationally? If so, your cell phone can be the business machine that keeps you in touch with clients overseas.

The first tool you’ll want is a way to make cheap international phone calls from your cellphone while using U.S. mobile service. The cell phone plan that enables you to make local and long distance domestic calls may well prohibit calls outside the country. If you can make them, you’ll pay a pretty penny. So, right now you wait until you have access to your landline or VoIP calling service to make those calls. Sometimes, that’s really inconvenient. So much so that you could lose a valuable customer just because you aren’t available.

There’s a better way. Use a low cost international dial-around service when you need to call overseas. You simply dial a local or toll-free access number to reach the service. Then dial the international number you want to reach. It’s that simple. You’ll pay just a few pennies per minute to call many destinations. With the special promo plan that’s available right now, calls to China are just 1 cent per minute. Call to Canada are less than a penny a minute.

You might not even be able to call that cheaply on your landline or VoIP service. No problem, use the Tel3Advantage international calling service from any phone you happen to be at. The rates are incredibly low and the service is easy to use. In fact, you can download a special app for many cell phone models so that making international calls is as easy as calling the next state.

But what happens when you need to travel overseas and call back home. If you’d like to use your cell phone, then you’ll be accessing the towers and cellular service in the countries you’re visiting. For that you need the right cell phone and access.

In the United States there are two competing cellular technology standards. One is CDMA used by Verizon and Sprint. The other is GSM used by AT&T and T-Mobile. GSM is the global standard, so you need a GSM phone if you expect to use it outside U.S. borders. The best phones for this are called quad-band GSM phones. They can access all 4 international mobile bands, so they work virtually anywhere.

You also need a phone where you can access the SIM card. That’s a tiny circuit card, often located behind the battery, that is removable in many GSM phones. When you travel outside the U.S., you replace your domestic SIM card with an international SIM card. A great value is the OneSimCard prepaid international SIM card. With it in your GSM phone, you’ll save up to 85% on your calls and even receive calls for free in more than 60 countries. If you don’t have a GSM phone or are only traveling for a short time, you can also rent a mobile phone for a small fee from OneSimCard.

With business becoming increasingly more global in nature, these simple tools can give you the capability of being an international player wherever you happen to be. Why, it’s enough to start shopping for a more capable cell phone.

Dedicated Internet Access Via Ethernet

Broadband Internet access is now almost universal at business locations large and small. But what type of Internet connection are you using? Did you know that your best option might now be Ethernet?

It’s true. Metro Ethernet Networks are not only growing by leaps and bounds, but they offer some valuable advantages for business users that choose this option. Perhaps the least known but most valuable advantage is the cost savings. With an Ethernet access solution, you may wind up paying half or less what it costs you for Internet bandwidth today. That’s a major cost savings without having to give up reliability or dedicated bandwidth levels.

How is dedicated Internet access different from any other kind of broadband service? Dedicated means that you have a certain bandwidth dedicated to your connection. For instance, if you lease a 5 Mbps connection then you can depend on having 5 Mbps available to you at all times. Shared access solutions, typical with consumer grade broadband services, have a pool of bandwidth that is shared among users. Can you afford to have your throughput stifled because someone down the street is downloading HD movies? Perhaps that’s acceptable at home, but in business where time is money? I don’t think so.

Another advantage of Ethernet connections is the wide range of bandwidth options available. Many provider offer everything from T1-level 1.5 Mbps through Gigabit Ethernet. The standard network speeds that run on your LAN are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps. If you want transparency from the LAN through the WAN, you can match your connection speed to your local network speed. But if you want to save money and don’t need massive bandwidth right now, then pick a service level that gives you the throughput needed to support your applications. You can upgrade later. Ethernet services tend to be more scalable than traditional telecom services, so a simple upgrade request may be all it takes to double your bandwidth when you need to.

Dedicated Internet access via Ethernet also gives you a simple connection to your internal network. The handoff from your service provider is a standard Ethernet jack. The provider usually installs a managed router at your location so that they can monitor the link to their network operations center and catch problems before they impact your business.

Are you required to have fiber optic service to your building to take advantage of Ethernet Internet? Only if you need or want the higher service levels of Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps) or 10 GigE (10,000 Mbps). For bandwidths up to the DS3 level of 45 Mbps and maybe even higher, you may qualify for delivery over already installed twisted pair copper bundles. Ethernet over Copper, or EoC, is a popular way to increase your business bandwidth while perhaps also enjoying a cost savings. You do need to be reasonably close to a carrier office to take advantage of this option, but it is generally available in high density business locations downtown and in suburbia.

Would switching to Metro Ethernet Network service be advantageous to your business? Check availability and pricing for Ethernet Internet access now.

Toll Free Number Includes Conference Calling

Are you on the lookout for cheap and easy toll free conference calling? Why not just use your toll free number to host a conference call anytime you want?

Can you really do that? You can if you happen to have a Kall8 toll free number . They start at $2 each with a $2 service fee per month plus the cost of incoming calls. For most calls that will be 6.9 center per minute.

What? Even the cheap conference calling services want more than that. Plus the old-line providers want you go through some rigamarole to schedule your conferences in advance. Does Kall8 really offer this type of conferencing service at such low rates?

Yes, they do. There’s no big fanfare about it. Toll free conference calling is just one of the many features already included in your toll free service. You may not have even known it was there. But it is, and it’s available for your use anytime.

What can you do with Kall8 toll free conferencing? You can call a conference anytime you want. It’s almost as simple as making a telephone call and using a speakerphone at each end. Only with this feature, you can have up to 25 participants located anywhere in the country. They simply dial your toll free number and enter a password that you have sent them. With that, they join the conference.

How much does all this cost again? For each participant calling your toll free number in the continental 48 states, you’ll pay 6.9 cents per minute. Calls coming in from Alaska and Hawaii pay an extra surcharge. If you want people to call for your special training, sales program or other event, you’ll find the total cost is way cheaper than specialized conferencing services that charge 10 to 25 cents per minute for the same service.

Oh, do you want a recorded copy of your conference call? No problem. Just select that feature on your control panel and a link to your recorded conference will be sent to you. The cost is just 5 cents per minute for this additional feature.

Let’s face it. If you’re in business and want to encourage prospects or customers to call you, one of the best ways to do that is by offering a toll free number. Kall8 toll free numbers start at $2 each with instant availability. Then you pay only $2 a month to maintain your service. If nobody calls, that’s all you pay. For each caller, the charge is the same 6.9 cents per minute quoted for conference calls.

Your Kall8 toll free number also has some nice features beyond conferencing. You can change the ring-to number (which phone rings) for your toll free calls anytime you wish. Voice mail is included and can be picked up by calling in, listening online in your account, or having the message sent to you as an email attachment. Inbound FAX messages can also be read online or sent as an email attachment.

What are the extra charges for these deluxe features? There are no extra charges. Those features are included, as are others such as call blocking, custom call forwarding, maximum call length selection, Caller ID display, and calling out on your toll free number as a virtual calling card. All this for a couple of bucks per month plus the cost of the calls.

Is this the best deal in toll free service you’ve ever heard of? Then why not have it for yourself right now? Learn more and order your Kall8 toll free number w/ conference calling feature now.

Greening The Product Life Cycle

Time was when the life cycle of a product consisted of completely disconnected phases. It was designed, manufactured, shipped, sold, used, and discarded with little or no connection between these activities. That era is coming to an end. We’re entering a new era where every life cycle activity will be coordinated and, in many cases, optimized for least impact on the environment.

Remember the mantra of agricultural America? It went “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” That philosophy stands in stark contrast to industrial America where planned obsolescence and disposable everything was in vogue. But as we enter what might be called the age of environmental concern, we may well return to those rural values of century ago.

The beating we’ve given Mother Earth is starting to come back on us. There are real safety issues associated with our food and water. We’re running out of acceptable places to throw our trash. Oh, and have you noticed that sea ice is melting, oceans are rising, and even local climates are going a little weird?

Even if global warming wasn’t coming to cook us or that the price of oil is going to make our eyes bug out as soon as the economy picks up again, it would still make sense to address the way we make, use and dispose of products before we wind up poisoning ourselves.

First and foremost, we’ve got to stop making stuff that tries to kill us. That includes anything that runs on hydrocarbon fuels. As it turns out, most of what we make will try to kill us if we make large enough quantities. For instance, consider the humble cell phone. They may seem benign, but when you throw them in the trash bad things start to happen. There are all sorts of toxic chemicals, such as cadmium and arsenic, that leach out as they decompose in the landfill.

There are a couple of ways to avoid this problem. In the short term we can send cell phones and other electronic gadgets to a recycler instead of tossing them in the trash. That way the materials will be kept out of the waste stream and used in future manufacturing. A longer term solution is to identify troublesome materials and substitute others that aren’t toxic or much less so. One example is the solder that fastens components to circuit boards. It used to be full of lead. Now more and more circuit boards are being made with lead-free solder alloys. CRTs are also full of lead. But flat screen displays aren’t.

Material selection is critical to making environmentally safe products, but the manufacturing process is also important. A key element is the amount of energy used to create a device and where that energy comes from. The degree of future climate change that is caused by manufacturing one more item today can be cut dramatically by using green energy in the manufacturing process and using materials that have been recycled, especially metals such as copper, gold and steel. Getting new metals from ore costs much more in energy terms that simply re-melting and purifying already refined metal.

Product design itself is a major influence on how much damage a product will do over its lifetime. Circuits designed to minimize power draw mean less demand for power stations. Products designed for easy disassembly and recycling save energy downstream when they’re useful life is over. The fact is that most things we use are not heirlooms. We’re likely going to buy and replace a dozen or more personal computers in our lifetimes. The old ones have to go somewhere. Apple Computer is particularly sensitive to this issue and offers to pay for the return and recycling of your old computer when you buy a new one. Perhaps the day will come when all products are treated this way.

It’s easy to see now that the energy that a product draws from the grid while operating is just a fraction of the energy involved in its life cycle. So, too, the materials used to create one product can come from the remains of a previous item and live on as they are recycled to build the next model. The incremental cost of transforming products to incorporate technology innovations is far less than the cost of starting from scratch with raw materials each time.

Better life cycle planning for all the products we use has the potential to dramatically reduce our need for new energy sources as it simultaneously saves us from chemically polluting our environment. All of this without having to sacrifice the progress we’ve come to enjoy.

The Stunning Truth About Metro Ethernet Prices

Over the last couple of years, a new type of network connection has become available. It’s the Metro Ethernet Network also called MetroE. Metro Ethernet services have defied conventional telecom pricing models by offering more bandwidth for less money. That’s right, MORE bandwidth for LESS cost.

Really? Is this true? If so, how can it be that way?

The answer breaks down into two primary drivers. The first is technology. The second is aggressive service providers. This double-barreled business advantage gives you something that you may desperately want in this depressed business climate. It’s an opportunity to get more for less. Alternatively, keep the bandwidth that works for you now and really pay less. By shaving your monthly telecom service expense without requiring any counterbalancing expense or capital investment, this savings is pure profit. It's just what the beaten-up bottom line has been waiting for.

Let’s take a closer look at the forces that result in lower Metro Ethernet prices. If you have a outside data connection, such as a dedicated broadband Internet service or a point to point data line that connects two business locations, you are most likely using a traditional telecom service such as a T1 line, DS3 bandwidth, or fiber optic SONET service. These are telephone company inventions that have been gradually offered to businesses as well as telco offices.

There’s nothing wrong with digital telco services. They’ve matured over the decades into reasonably priced and highly reliable connectivity. They’ve also been deployed far and wide so that today you can get a T1 line just about anywhere you can get phone service.

But there are two limiting factors related to telco services. The first is that they are deployed using local telephone company owned copper and fiber cables. Part of the cost of every T1 line, and the other mentioned services, is the last mile connection known as the local loop. The cost of this connection will only be as inexpensive as it is available from the incumbent local telephone company.

The other limitation lies with the technology. Telco services are based on a standard called TDM or Time Division Multiplexing. It partitions the bandwidth of a digital line into small channels capable of supporting one phone conversation each. For instance, a T1 line consists of 24 of these channels. This is an ideal arrangement when you are transporting telephone calls, but it introduces some inefficiencies when you want to bundle a lot of these channels together to make a big data pipe.

Computer networks are not TDM. They have standardized on a packet switching technology, which is Ethernet. Every LAN runs Ethernet. So does every switch and router. If you need to interconnect far-flung equipment using TDM communication lines, then all this equipment needs to covert between TDM and Ethernet at every node.

Metro Ethernet may use fiber optic or copper based connections, but the network is running an Ethernet protocol known as Carrier Ethernet. This is a standardized protocol that is rapidly expanding in metropolitan areas. One reason that it is called “Metro” Ethernet is that you’ll only find it areas where there are lots of business users.

Connecting everything with Ethernet offers a number of advantages for network managers. You have the choice of using either switches or routers connect separate site networks. Ethernet services also tend to be scalable. That means you can order bandwidth incrementally, sometimes in 1 Mbps steps. Traditional telecom services require a major provisioning effort to change bandwidth. With Ethernet, a simple call to your provider may be all you need to add bandwidth to your service.

The other piece in the puzzle of plummeting bandwidth prices for Metro Ethernet is the emergence of new competitive carriers with their own networks using the latest technology equipment. With no tie to traditional telephone company operations, these providers aren’t burdened with legacy costs or equipment that is too entrenched and expensive to update at this time. They can focus their efforts on offering a suite of high bandwidth Ethernet services for businesses that need just this type of connectivity.

Is Metro Ethernet the right network service for your business operation? Find out by checking availability and pricing of Metro Ethernet services in your area.

Comprehensive Network Services From Telarus

Building and managing a network for your business can be problematic. For smaller businesses, it’s a distraction from the main focus of the company. For medium and larger operations, it can be a money pit and either a boost or a hinderance to productivity. What can really get painful is integrating your LAN and WAN networks to create one smooth running entity. Is there anything that can help?

You bet there is. There’s a service that can help regardless of whether you are a small office with no tech support to a major corporation with international operations. Imagine getting the hardware, software, installation, maintenance, operation, upgrades, plus connectivity from switched circuit analog telephone right on up to gigabit Ethernet, all from one source. Now, THAT’s comprehensive service!

The service I’m referring to is actually a family of services under one umbrella called Telarus. I first became associated with this company when they launched their groundbreaking “Shop for T1” service over 6 years ago. The revolutionary idea was that you could get T1 line pricing for your business location in under a minute on your Web browser. You still can. Just use the Shop for T1 real-time quote engine on our T1 Rex site.

Competitive T1 line pricing soon expanded to a wide variety of telecom bandwidth services that now encompass DS3, SONET fiber optic connections, Metro Ethernet, MPLS networks, wireless point to point and Dedicated Internet service, colocation servers, ISDN PRI, SIP trunking, and managed routers for everything.

When it comes to WAN services, Telarus offers one-stop shopping for nearly every business bandwidth service you can get. What’s more, being a telecom brokerage service means they can often offer you multiple competitive quotes for the service you need. The Telarus bandwidth consultants can help you weigh the tradeoffs among an often staggering amount of options so you can get the service that meets your business needs at the best price. The cost of all this to you? Zip. It’s free to any organization with serious professional requirements.

But you know that bandwidth is only one piece of the puzzle. How about all that internal infrastructure that keep the packets flowing?

This is where the complementary Telarus VAR Network service comes into play. What’s a VAR? That means Value Added Reseller. It’s an industry term for independent business telephone and computer network companies that specialize in sales and service. VARs will take your business requirements and offer you a package deal for PBX phone systems, routers, network switches, fiber optic cabling, copper wiring, connections and whatever else it takes to build your telephone, data or converged network.

VARs often offer turnkey solutions that include both the equipment and installation. Since the VAR Network is part of the Telarus family, participating VARs also have access to the complete range of bandwidth solutions that Telarus offers. This gives you the advantage of one-stop shopping and a single point of contact for any issues that arise. Accessing the VAR Network is as simple as entering a quick summary of your business needs using the VAR Network online request. That triggers the automated database to alert qualified VARs in your area to contact you for complete details.

Can you do any better than this? I doubt it. If you are not familiar with these Telarus services, go ahead and give them a try. The cost to you is zero, the time required is minimal, and the cost savings can be way more than you might think.

Residential and Small Business VoIP Rates Crushed

VoIP telephony, sometimes called broadband phone service, has gone from a geeky computer app to full-fledged competition for mainstream telephone service in the course of a few years. The enablers for this have been the widespread replacement of dial-up Internet access with broadband services and the installation of Internet connections in small businesses. But just as ample rain leads to bumper crops, ample broadband has led to a bumper crop in VoIP providers. One of the most aggressive in this space, Phone Power, is now tweaking the industry by causing rates to plunge to less than $15 a month on unlimited residential and small home-based business service plans. That cost plummets even lower to just over $8 a month when you prepay for a year.

Granted, you can still pay even less for specialized services such as MagicJack and Skype. But both of these require you to use your computer as part of the phone system. When the computer is off, so is your phone. Plus you’ve got to deal with potential contention for processor resources when you try to use the phone while you are actually using the computer.

Phone Power and many other VoIP services that vie for your telephony dollar don’t work that way. They share your broadband connection in lieu of a traditional telephone line but don’t have any connection to the innards of your computer. Instead, they use a hardware device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor to turn a phone jack into an Ethernet jack that connects into your router or broadband modem. Phone Power gives you the adaptor free while you are using their service. Some other vendors also do that or you can buy an adaptor at your local electronics outlet.

The cost of VoIP phone services seems to have settled into the $20 to $30 range for aggressive services that you see heavily advertised and somewhat more for some of the familiar name bundles. That’s not unreasonable, considering that VoIP has typically offered both unlimited local and long distance calling. A traditional landline plan is local service only with an additional per-minute charge for long distance calls. Additional features, such as Caller ID, are usually offered as ala-carte add-ons to your basic service.

The big telephone carriers also offer competitive bundles of local and long distance minutes or unlimited calling plans with popular features included. But at $14.95 a month? Try twice that. When you look at Phone Power’s 12 Month Prepay option, the difference is even more pronounced. This is a new customer promotional rate for $199.95 prepaid for a year’s service. But as part of this special promotion, Phone Power will include a 2nd year’s service for free. That brings your equivalent monthly rate down to about $8.33 for unlimited calling to US and Canada numbers and free lease of the telephone adaptor.

This offer is intended for residential addresses, including home office users and home-based businesses. If your business is large enough to have its own physical address, there are also business packages available for single and multi-line users, with a wealth of add-ons and upgrades to give you the power of a on-site PBX phone system without the capital expense.

If you are considering switching your residential or business phone service or are just feel you are paying too much for the service that you have now, you should take a look at Phone Power Residential and Business VoIP before you commit to buying any other service.

Celairo Offers Gigabit Wireless MWAN Services

Is your organization bandwidth frustrated? You need telecom network throughput and lots of it. Gigabit Ethernet would be nice, but it’s just not available for your location. Bonded copper solutions can’t deliver anything near the speed you require. Fiber optic line service would surely work, but that costs a fortune to build-out and will take forever even if you have the capital funding, which you don’t. What to do? How about carrier-grade gigabit wireless?

Wow! Gigabit wireless connections for businesses and other large organizations? Is there really such a thing?

Oh, yes, there is. Celairo Wireless Solutions specializes in just such high bandwidth point-to-point and Dedicated Internet Access services. They are experts in MWAN or Metropolitan Wide-Area Networks. They can give you the bandwidth you need from 1 Mbps to 3 Gbps without having to worry about how the wires are going to get to you. That’s because there are no wires. No wires means quick turn up times and often cost savings as well.

Celairo employs a combination of licensed and unlicensed WiMAX technology to deliver their high capacity services that include wireless Ethernet, high speed Internet, metropolitan point-to-point and multi-point services, and temporary high speed Internet for city events, emergency services and conventions. Bandwidth is symmetrical, scalable, reliable and secure. All connections are fully managed from Celairo network operating centers.

You may be familiar with the consumer oriented WiMAX services that are being built-out around the nation by Clearwire. But did you know that WiMAX technology isn’t just limited to wireless consumer broadband? WiMAX, meaning Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a set of technical standards for wireless transmission that’s ideal for feeding WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers), campus WiFi networks, hospitality or hotel and motel broadband Internet, healthcare and general business. With high reliability and security, WiMAX connections are every bit as capable as wireline and fiber optic connections.

Another Celairo service is called the HotZone Mesh Network. This is a wireless system that can scale up to 1000 nodes that automatically form the mesh network and overcome line-of-sight obstacles. This system is perfect for temporary or portable networks, like you might need for fairs and festivals, sporting events, concerts or even emergency situations.

Are you stymied by a lack of wide area connectivity, or limited by wireline services that simply can’t provide the bandwidth you need or be provisioned fast enough to support your special project? If so, Celairo may have wireless solution that is just what you need. For pricing and availability on high capacity voice and data service from Celairo and other high reliability carriers, speak with a bandwidth consultant toll free or enter a quick request for quote at our GigaPackets service.

The Coming Low Power Revolution

Change is in the air and it’s going to permeate everything we do. This change has to do with power. Unlike many important changes in society, this revolution is all about having less power, not more.

We’re in the midst of an interesting dilemma. Our information society is driven by leveraging technology to improve productivity. We’re expected to do more will fewer resources. Well, at least with resources of the human variety. What substitutes for head count is processor count. Even in our personal lives, we expect to be in constant communication via cell phone conversations, email and text messaging. Electronics is giving us more and more opportunities, but at a price. The price isn’t so much in device cost as it is in additional power consumption.

A generation ago we used reference books. It takes a certain amount of energy to write a book, print and distribute it. But after that it uses no power to sit on the shelf or when someone is flipping through the pages. Now when we need to know something, we access the Web. The PC takes a certain amount of energy to build and ship it. But it also takes an ongoing amount of energy to keep it active. It’s using power when you type and read the screen. But it also uses power while it sits there on your desk waiting for input. Not only that, but the servers that actually hold the information you are seeking are also using electricity while they wait for inquiries.

The tradeoff is the constant energy supply required for instant access to dynamic databases with up to date information versus the low energy approach of slower access to resources that may not have been updated in years. As we transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture to industry and then information technology, humanity has always opted to expend more energy to gain more productivity and a higher quality of life.

That’s about to change. Not that the universe is running out of energy. There’s plenty available. But cheap energy, particularly that energy made cheap by hidden subsidies and ignoring environmental and social consequences, is going away. Last year’s gasoline price shocks won’t be the last. Climate change abatement worldwide is going to drive hydrocarbon fuel sources out of business. We’re going to enter an era where Watts are precious and not to be frittered away haphazardly.

Does this mean that we’re all going back to the sod house and the plow? Not much chance of that, even if we could stand it. There’s too many of us to homestead the prairie now. We won’t have to give up our urban technology lifestyle, but we will have to provide it differently. We’re going to need to reduce our energy draw while we push for even greater business and personal productivity and convenience.

You see this starting now, with a push for LED and compact fluorescent lighting to replace incandescent bulbs. LEDs as backlights offer a major energy savings for computer monitors and television sets. Why? A fluorescent backlight is on all the time even when a largely dark image is being displayed. LEDs can turn on and off so fast that they only need to be energized where brightness is needed. This technology is just emerging, but it’s the sort of thinking we’ll have to get used to when designing new products. How about those OLED screens and electronic paper? They started out as ways to save battery power. They may be pressed into service on desktops to save AC power.

Most of us heavily involved in information technology or the Internet aren’t about to give up our computing resources until they pry them from our cold dead server racks. But the amount of power needed to expand the Web is no laughing matter. Google is locating at least some of its new server farms near hydroelectric plants to guarantee power availability. Have you been in a room full of server racks or even banks of PCs lately? Toasty isn’t it. That heat is a byproduct of the way we do processing. More GHz and Gbps means more kilowatts.

But this paradigm of computing is changing. IC vendors have stopped cranking up processor clocks in favor of multiplying the number of lower power cores on the processor chip. My new iMac runs cooler than my old PC even though it has several times the processing power. If the additional throughput had been obtained using the older design processes, I’d be cooked right out of this office if not deafened by the cooling fan.

One of the coolest new products, literally, is the “server in a wall-wart” as presented by the Marvell ShevaPlug. It has a GigE LAN connection, a 1.2 GHz CPU with a half-gig each of RAM and ROM, and USB I/O. All this for a 2 Watt power draw. This is the type of design thinking that we’re headed for. Hardware may well become even more sophisticated as it manages power consumption the way it optimizes memory and processing resources today. When power is the limiting resource, that’s where the focus will be.

Reducing power consumption offers a double benefit. First, you lessen the direct energy draw of the device. But you also reduce the cooling requirements, as all electronics generates heat as an unwanted byproduct of operation. This may be trivial in a digital watch, but it’s huge in a colocation center where roof mounted air conditioners run year round to deal with the heat generated by rack after rack of servers. Less heat means less electricity to cool the equipment. It is, indeed, a double savings.

Combine lower power designs with smarter equipment that knows when it isn’t being used and shuts down to a barely-alive sleep mode and the power savings can easily multiply. That includes an environment that detects the presence of the user and shuts off room lights as well as powering down workstations and peripherals. The result not only benefits the environment, but it greens the bottom line as well. And in Wall Street terms, “green is good!”

I hope you've enjoyed our series of articles on technology and the environment, posted in support of Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change. This issue is so important that we will regularly report and comment on what is happening with green energy developments, a more efficient use of energy, and how you can save money for yourself and your business by being more energy savvy. In case you missed some of this week's offerings and are curious to read them, here is a list of what we presented:

Monday: Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow.

Tuesday: The Green Energy Fairy Tale Is Real.

Wednesday: Every Home And Business Is A Battery.

Thursday: Banish Vampires To Reduce Global Warming.

Banish Vampires To Reduce Global Warming

There’s something with tiny little teeth sucking on your electrical wires. The blood it draws isn’t just electrical current. It’s your money, a few cents at a time. It’s also your future, because while it’s trying to drain your bank account, it’s also heating the atmosphere and indirectly belching greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. What kind of a hideous creature could do this? One that’s a parasite on the equipment that you want and need for your business and home. It’s the dreaded electronic vampire!

Well, it should be dreaded. Sadly, it generally isn’t. If this was the type of vampire that lurched from behind a curtain and bit you in the neck, you’d quake in fear at its mere mention. But this vampire is more insidious. It hides inside perfectly acceptable electrical devices and does its biting behind your back. The damage isn’t a couple of bloody punctures from an attack that’s over in minutes. It’s a steady sip, sip, sipping of your precious resources. But the result is eventually the same as if you were attacked. You wake up and your whole world has changed.

So where do these electronic vampires live and how do you spot them?

That’s the tough part. These vampires are something like body snatchers, only for things that use electricity. They’re buried inside. You’ll know they’re around, though, because they leave indications. The first indication is a glowing light. Does anything you plug-in have a small red or green light that never goes off? Suspect a vampire inside. Is there any other visual indication of activity when you turn the equipment off? This might be an LCD display that still shows information, particularly a digital clock. It could be the sound of a fan running or the click-click-click of a hard drive being accessed. It could be a case that’s slightly warm to the touch. All of these are sure-fire indicators of a vampire inside.

One certain tip-off to vampire circuitry is a remote control. The remote runs on batteries and is likely not drawing any power until you push a button. But the device that it controls has to be awake to see the invisible beam of the remote. Even if the front panel is completely dark, there’s something hooked to an infrared detector or UHF receiver that continuously draws power on the odd chance that someone is going to push a remote button soon.

The new wireless network devices are power vampires. WiFi b/g/n is a power-intensive technology. That’s why smartphone and laptop computer manuals suggest you turn off WiFi access when you aren’t using it so your battery will last longer.

The truth is that the power switch is rarely a power switch anymore. It’s a stand-by switch. All you are doing when you turn off a computer, a television set, a printer, or even a coffee pot is switching the device from the high power to the low power consumption mode. A true power switch physically breaks the electrical circuit so that no electrons can flow.

The whole vampire power problem got started because people got antsy waiting for their vacuum tube television sets to warm up. They wanted instant-on. The only way to do that is to keep the picture tube filament on and up to temperature. It’s just like leaving a light bulb on all the time in a closet where you don’t see it. It’s still on, drawing power and producing heat.

Back in the vacuum tube days, there was no concern over continuous power draw in TVs nor any mention of global warming. But now we know better and more things than ever are drawing vampire power. Just how significant is it? Studies suggest that standby power draw can range from around 5% to over 25% of total energy consumption. Think about it. If we banished the vampires completely, homes and businesses would cut their monthly expenses by a significant amount and numerous coal-fueled power stations could be switched off with no adverse affect.

The effect of eliminating vampire standby power is even more significant. Every device that uses power generates heat. There may be no measurable effect on warming the entire atmosphere directly, but all that heat has to be dealt with indoors. That means extra air conditioning load in the summer that leads to more electrical draw and more demand on coal-fired electric generators.

If you are wondering just how much you are losing to the vampires, a good way to find out is to use a device like the Kill A Watt energy usage monitor. Plug it into the wall, plug your computer or other device into the monitor and read the meter when you have your device in both the ON and STANDBY modes. Add up the standby draw from all the devices you are powering and be prepared for a shocking total. Sometimes you can just look at the power specifications for the equipment in question. The manufacture will often unabashedly quote standby power even when it is 30 or 60 watts for a device that only draws a few hundred watts at full power.

How can you take action? Since the problem is distributed, you need to actually turn off anything that plugs into the wall that isn’t currently being used. That means a wall switch that controls the outlet or a power strip with a switch. You need surge protector power strips anyway to protect your valuable equipment. Keep the switch readily accessible and turn it off overnight or when you know you won’t need the equipment for awhile. It will come alive from a complete power shutdown soon enough when you return. Be sure to unplug those modular “wall wart” power supplies that are used to power smaller equipment and charge mobile devices like cell phones and MP3 players. That little black transformer is a tiny vampire in itself.

Some manufacturers are becoming more sensitive to the standby power problem. My laser printer has a sleep mode, but it also has a mechanical power off rocker switch. I’ve taken to turning the power off when I’m done for the day and only back on when it is next needed. During the day it goes into sleep mode, which is at least some power savings. Other companies are offering ultra low power modes of 1 watt or less when on standby. It’s not perfect, but it is a good compromise when you have something that really needs to be instantly available or if you’re not good at remembering to flick the power switch.

Just remember that every vampire banished is one more that won’t be biting your wallet or infecting us all with more global warming. If you find the prospect of global warming disturbing, there are many more great posts to read as part of Today’s (October 15, 2009) Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change.

You may also be interested in reading our other posts this week related to climate change and technology. They are:

Monday: Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow.

Tuesday: The Green Energy Fairy Tale Is Real.

Wednesday: Every Home And Business Is A Battery.

Every Home And Business Is A Battery

As part of Blog Action Day 2009, we’re dedicating this week’s posts to the topics of global warming, climate change and alternative energy. Yesterday’s installment presented the case that alternative energy is a fairy tale no more. It’s mature technology that only needs a little national fervor to make it the power of choice. It’s pretty hard to argue with the “shovel ready” nature of solar and wind when there is already so much installed base and even smaller scale units showing up for sale in hardware stores. But skeptics still cast a suspicious eye. Often that suspicion is voiced by the question, “So what do you do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?”

That’s a fair concern. After all, the sun still sets every evening and winds blow sporadically in most locations. If you don’t want your lights getting brighter and dimmer, you need something to smooth out the fluctuations. That something is energy storage.

Coal, nuclear and natural gas fired generating plants don’t need storage. The energy storage is built into the fuel. There is also a short-term energy reserve in the steam boilers that only heat up and cool down so fast. Not so with windmills and solar panels. They have no fuel. They extract energy that is directed at them and only while they have access to that energy source.

At first glance, this appears to be a show-stopper for alternative energy. But it’s really not that bad. The sun doesn’t shine at night, but most of us don’t either. When it gets dark, we go home and shut down offices, factories, schools and stores. The biggest energy demand is during the day. That’s also the biggest demand for air conditioning, because the same sun that makes it bright outside and lets solar panels tap it for electricity also heats everything up. The wind doesn’t blow all the time either, but it’s usually blowing somewhere. That’s the value of an energy grid. Sources that contribute energy feed the grid and users that need energy tap it.

Some of the difference between supply and demand can be handled by base load generators. These are things like nuclear power, geothermal, and natural gas generators that can produce at a steady rate regardless of what’s going on with the weather.

But really making good use of clean energy sources that may generate too much power some times and not enough at other times requires storage. Users that are so far “off the grid” that it’s too expensive to string wires to their cabins often use lead acid storage batteries. Wind and solar generators charge up the batteries when they can. The user draws power from the batteries as needed.

Batteries are a good idea, but the automobile style lead acid batteries have some limitations. You need a lot of them to store much energy, so they take up a lot of room. They emit nasty gasses that need to be vented. Battery life is also more limited than we would like.

Nickel-metal hydride batteries are more energy dense and are the battery of choice for today’s hybrid cars. Lithium ion batteries can store even more energy per cubic foot and are the batteries chosen for plug-in hybrids and electric cars. They’re a bit pricey when you get to the capacities needed to run a home or business, but that’s soon to change. As Li-ion batteries get into mass production in vehicle sizes, the prices will plummet. How soon before they’re reasonably priced for fixed location battery backup?

What I’m talking about is a unit about the size of a furnace that will have a battery, inverter and control circuitry suitable to run the entire electrical load of a residence or small business. Power outages will be a thing of the past. Feed one of these from solar panels on the roof or a wind generator out back and you can go off the grid any time you want and avoid paying the electric company for power. Or, better yet, let them pay you for power.

Rather than round up all the batteries and put them at the generating station, why not distribute both generation and storage of electrical power? The grid still makes sense for sharing power among users. Those who are power rich can sell their excess capacity. Those who have demanding needs, like steel mills, street lights, and buildings without generation or storage will just pay the electric bill like today. The difference is that most of the generating sources can be green. The system will be more robust because a million small resources aren’t as likely to go out of service at the same time as one or two large generators.

The availability of reasonably priced generation and storage may give rise to a new era of energy entrepreneurs. Savvy producers will want to sell as much as possible during the heavy-demand daylight hours to get the best price possible. At night, they could even draw off the grid at lower prices to run their own lights and recharge their batteries. How about the family energy farm? A field of windmills and solar roof panels augmented by fields of corn for ethanol between the wind generator towers may offer the kind of income that makes independent rural life really attractive again. Factories and warehouses with large flat roofs offer ready real estate to load up with angled solar panels to eliminate power bills and become a revenue source. Ever shrinking payback periods are making this type of investment more and more practical.

Alternative energy is a key piece in putting the brakes on climate change before our environment degenerates into something that we’ll really hate dealing with. If you share our interest in this important topic, you’ll be interested in the huge collection of articles being posted on blogs worldwide as part of Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. The official event is October 15, but we’re participating all week with articles on this subject. Come back tomorrow for our feature on banishing power vampires that suck your “juice.” Say, isn’t Halloween just around the corner?

The Green Energy Fairy Tale is Real

How many decades have we been treated to a magical fairy tale of the future, where fantastic power sources like solar, wind, tidal, wave motion and maybe fusion will create a second Eden for us? It would be a world where unlimited energy provides a picture-perfect environment. Oh, but that’s not for now. Today we need wallow in the dirty world of coal and oil because those technologies are all that are practical with the technology we have at hand.

Every time I hear that, I have to look around to see if we are all dressed like characters in a Dickens novel. Are you kidding, Scrooge? We could rid ourselves of dirty energy right now... if we wanted to.

The problem is that we are living in a fog of our own making. I’m not talking about the haze that settles over Los Angeles and other major cities around the world due to air pollution. I’m talking about a mental fog that we can’t see our way clear of. Like many myths, it’s so ingrained and potent that we believe it with all our hearts and souls. The problem is that it’s just plain wrong.

Remember the Apollo Moon program? I do. As a kid, I liked to watch the rockets blow up every time they tried to launch one in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Then President Kennedy said we were going to the Moon and come back safely within the decade. So, we did.

Clean energy is a far more mature technology today than rocketry was in my youth. Everything you need to power your home or business from solar or wind energy is an off-the-shelf item with a manufacturer’s warranty. Hybrid cars with double the MPG ratings of their non-hybird equivalents are sitting in show rooms, shined up and ready to drive off the lot.

Oh, but those are just toys for people who are willing to pay through the nose to be early adopters. Aren’t they? No, Scrooge, this stuff is mainstream now. In nearly all locations there is enough sunlight that you can make your electric meter run backwards with just the spread of solar panels that will cover the roof of your house. I just saw a wind generator on sale at one of the big box hardware stores. My Camry Hybrid routinely gets twice the milage of my previous Olds Cutlass Supreme and offers the same power and even more cabin room.

What’s wrong here is that there is no national fervor yet for energy independence nor slowing climate change. If there was, what would it look like? Let’s try to see an alternative dream.

This is a dream where every home has a roof made of solar panels and an inverter connected to the power grid. You don’t buy electricity any more, you sell it. Your electric bill is zero. Every flat roof of a commercial, government, school, or hospital building is also beset with solar panels. They’re often hard to see from the ground, but from the air it’s one great sea of power panels. Out in the country, every farm has at least one windmill that provides a secure income for the farm families regardless of what crop prices are doing. A barn roof full of solar panels adds to that residual income and powers the farm.

This mass adoption on on-site power generation means those dirty coal plants can just be shut down or converted to natural gas peaker plants that run only as needed to supplement the green energy sources. Nuclear plants provide a reliable base load capability with no realistic threat of poisoning the public. Our one domestic close call was the Three Mile Island accident 30 years ago where nobody was hurt. But it spooked us so badly that we’ve shunned nukes ever since. About 40,000 people are killed in traffic accidents per year or about 1,200,000 dead in the 30 years since Three Mile Island and yet there’s no outcry to shun cars. See how powerful these mental fogs are?

The President and other world leaders are seriously considering another round of nuclear weapons reductions. So do we just chop those warheads up and hide the radioactive parts inside a mountain in Nevada? No way. There’s our bridge fuel to make the switch from dirty to clean energy. When we’ve transitioned, we can reprocess the rods until they are nearly non-radioactive and stow what’s left for future generations to learn how to harness.

We use about 9 million barrels per day of oil for gasoline. If we simply doubled the mileage of our vehicles by switching to those hybrids that are ready to go, we could cut that to 4.5 million, which is less than the 5 million barrels per day that we produce in the U.S. That’s energy security, plus we’d cut the greenhouse gas contribution from cars in half. The next generation of plug-in hybrids and electric cars will use even less in the way of liquid hydrocarbon fuels and will create only a pittance of greenhouse gasses if we are smart enough to generate the electricity from sunlight, wind, and nuclear.

That’s not all of the oil we use, but by what insanity are we still burning oil other than for transportation? A crash program to convert all oil fueled generating stations to natural gas and switch the Northeastern U.S. from heating oil to natural gas and/or electric would get rid of the need to scratch around for new oil wells and dramatically cut greenhouse emissions. This conversion project would be a good use for current and future national infrastructure investments. We’re talking a jobs program at a time of record unemployment, an efficiency improvement that will save business and residential users money on their heating bills, and a major reduction in pollution and global warming emissions.

So, do we put on our Victorian attire and pretend we’re still living in the 19th century or do we cut through the fog that’s holding us back and demand to make alternative energy our next national passion? If we pursued green energy with the fervor that got us to the moon, we could simultaneously solve our job creation, global warming, economic security, and energy production problems. The whole new can-do 21st century attitude we’d acquire would be a bonus.

Do you think that as a nation we could be doing a much better job of converting to new energy resources to stem the accelerating rate of climate change that is upon us? If so, you’ll find many more inspiring posts to read on Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change on Thursday, October 15. Visit www.blogactionday.org for suggestions on how you, too, can participate.

At T1 Rex's Business Telecom Explainer, we’re blogging on the subject of climate change the entire week. You may also enjoy reading our kick-off post, “Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow.”

Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow

Hey, you in the server room. Is it hot enough for you? No? Well, just wait until tomorrow.

Global warming is upon us. All the dire warnings from Al Gore, the reports you hear on TV and read in magazines and newspapers, and everything on the blogosphere isn’t really about heading off some future climate change. It’s a hope and a plea that we can keep it from becoming catastrophic.

Make no mistake about it, things are heating up. Not just the discussion, mind you. It’s actually getting warmer outside. As a resident of that rustbelt tundra known as the Midwest, I know that’s a hard concept to buy when your toes get frostbit just running for the mail in mid-January. This last winter in Northern Illinois was a cruel and bitter joke after a couple decades of frequent El Nino moderation. The summer has also been more temperate than any in recent memory. But look at what’s happening in the Arctic Ocean. Shipping companies are downright giddy about that pesky sea ice disappearing to reveal a shortcut for hauling containers of “stuff” between trading nations. The Russians made a big production out of planting their flag from a submarine below the North Pole. Nobody wanted that forsaken wasteland before the lucky confluence of massive oil reserve discoveries and rising sea temperatures. They are now anxiously awaiting the day when Santa’s workshop sinks like the Titanic, clearing the area so that drilling projects can proceed unimpeded.

Like flying in a cloud bank, your senses are inferior to instruments in knowing which way is up, or whether global warming is real when your eyeglasses are frosting over. Perhaps this is why the term climate change is easier to swallow. One’s intuition tells you that something strange is going on when California is burning to the ground and polar bears are taking over the sport of synchronized swimming. What’s it going to feel like when Bedouins relocate to Iowa because that’s where the sand is?

If we really are going to hell in a CO2 handbasket, though, where is the panic? You don’t see middle-age men stapling thermometers to fishing hats and screaming their lungs out at town hall meetings. There are no organized “ice baggers” with their Isn’t Cool Enough movement demanding that the government lower temperatures. How come there’s no Hot News Channel with multimillionaire cheerleaders riling up public emotions?

That day is coming. Right now climate-everything is on the back burner as we’re preoccupied with punching each other in the face over government versus insurance company death panels and which failed bankers deserve the biggest of the billion dollar bonuses. Eventually, all this will pass and someone will pipe up, “Hey, how ‘bout that climate change?”

But why wait for the deck to clear before we start dealing with the inevitable? Not everyone is prepared to hold indefinitely for the Gosselins to reconcile and clear some column inches and television news segments so that there’s room for a serious discussion on how we can ameliorate a thermal meltdown. Blog Action Day 2009 on October 15 is perhaps the kickoff event that nudges the focus of public discussion toward the universal challenge that is climate change.

What is Blog Action Day? It’s a coordinated effort to engage the power of new media to “change the global conversation.” The idea is that bloggers worldwide join forces on one day of the year to all write on a particular topic of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 is dedicated to the subject of climate change. Thousands of blogs, including at least 11 of the world’s top 100 blogs, will all be presenting thoughtful posts related to emerging technology, health issues, poverty and conflict, eco-friendly consumerism, financing, government policy and sustainable design, among other topics. The focus of each participating blog will related to the subject of climate change on that particular day, which happens to be this coming Thursday, the 15th.

As you might have guessed by now, T1 Rex’s Business Telecom Explainer is participating in Blog Action Day and will be presenting a special article on banishing power vampires as the October 15 post. But I’ve decided that this initiative really deserves more than a single day’s effort. So every post this week will be in some way related to climate change and our focus of technology. I hope that you enjoy these articles and will participate in the discussion with your considered comments.

If you also write a blog, will you join us in this special project? Your voice is both welcome and needed. You can participate by registering your blog for free at the web site for Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. While you are there, pick up a badge for your blog, like the one shown on this post. Leave a comment here with a link to your Thursday post, as I’d love to read what fellow bloggers have to say on this important and timely issue.

Wrapsol is Like a Force Field Around Your Gadgets

Oh, the beauty of a brand new piece of electronic equipment. So, sleek, so perfect. But anywhere from a few minutes to a few days later, it’s spoiled. There’s a nasty scratch right on the face of your beautiful gadget. No way will you ever not be able to notice it. Call it “paradise spoiled.” Shame there isn’t a way to keep your new gear looking new indefinitely. Oh, wait, there is!

The solution is something called Wrapsol. It’s an optically clear screen film that coats your device like a second skin. Scratches can’t get anywhere near that precious mirror-like finish you paid so much for. Think of it as a force field that envelopes and protects. Someday technology may actually make such a force field practical. Today, the solution is Wrapsol body film.

So, how is this different from buying some of that peel-and-stick laminating film at the office supply store and slathering it all over your cell phone or laptop computer?

Oh, please. Do you want trashy or do you want classy? Wrapsol is made of a 14-mil optically clear screen film and a proprietary matte finish body film that shuns smudges and fingerprints, while still giving you a solid grip on your device. It goes on nice and smooth, not with that “orange peel” texture you might get if you used just any old film.

What sort of devices need Wrapsol? Pretty much anything electronic, portable and shiny that costs more than a few dollars. This is a high-tech system, custom sized for popular devices and not trivially inexpensive. You’ll spend a few bucks, but how much is it worth to keep that brand new look? How much did you spend on that iPhone anyway? Are you just going to shove it in your pocket and live with all the scratches that you’ll get... this afternoon?

Wrapsol has custom die-cut systems available for that Apple iPhone 3G and 3G S. There are also products for various BlackBerry models, other cell phones, Apple iPods and Microsoft Zune music players, popular notebook and netbook computers, game consoles, digital readers, including the Amazon Kindle, even cameras and GPS units. Each is specially cut and ready for application so you’ll get an exact fit.

No, you don’t just take a scissors to a big piece of plastic film. In fact, put that scissors away before you hurt yourself. You won’t need it. You’ll get a complete kit that includes the custom cut film, a soft reusable lint-free microfiber towelette, a mister with the application solution and a non-marking flexible squeegee. Plus instructions, of course.

Are you ready for a scratch protection system that’s as upscale as your brand new expensive electronic device? Then have a look at Wrapsol before you even take your new purchase out of the box.

TelePacific’s SmartVoice Trunking Offers Telephone Smarts

TelePacific Communications has a clever and sophisticated solution for small and medium size businesses that need telephone and Internet service. It’s a SIP trunking solution that offers both voice and data on a single telecom line. What distinguishes their SmartVoice service is that it can accommodate different kinds of business telephone systems and offers a lot more traffic capacity than Integrated T1 lines.

SIP trunking is an IP-based transmission line designed to support enterprise VoIP telephone systems. SIP is Session Initiation Protocol, the signaling technology used by many IP phone systems. Since IP networks transport voice and data packets equally well, many SIP trunking providers offer a combination of telephone and Internet service on the trunk line.

TelePacific’s SmartVoice Trunking also offers a combination of telephone and Internet service. The system is set up so that any bandwidth not being used for telephone calls is dynamically allocated to Internet bandwidth. If another phone call takes place, that call gets a priority on the bandwidth it needs to ensure voice quality.

Now here’s something different. An Integrated T1 line will do this, but only up to its capacity of 1.5 Mbps. That’s typically no more than a dozen simultaneous phone calls with 750 Kbps of broadband Internet. SmartVoice Trunking bonds multiple T1 lines together to create a single SIP trunk line. Up to 4 T1 lines can be bonded to create a path bandwidth of 6 Mbps.

The significance of all this bandwidth is that larger businesses or telephone-intensive operations, such as customer contact centers, can have up to 48 simultaneous phone conversations through their IP PBX and SIP Network connection. Perhaps you don’t need that many phones, but do need the bandwidth for broadband Internet access to support many users. The Dedicated Internet Access on the SmartVoice trunk gives you the bandwidth you need without the necessity of paying for completely separate telephone and Internet lines.

SmartVoice also supports a wide variety of business telephone systems. The latest IP PBX phone systems are supported, of course, but so are standard PRI and CAS trunks for traditional digital PBX systems. You can even connect analog handsets or your key telephone system with capacity for anywhere from 4 to 24 outside lines.

What sort of advanced features does SmartVoice support? Caller ID is standard. You can also get up to 100 DID or Direct Inward Dial numbers so that each employee has their own phone number and there is no need to go through a receptionist. A feature set just added is hunt groups. With hunting, if one person doesn’t answer the call it will go on to the next person in line on a linear or circular pattern. Circular hunting allocates incoming sales calls to the sales staff on a round-robin basis so that every sales person gets a fair share of the prospects. There are other patterns you can set also.

Does this sound like the kind of telecommunications service that would benefit your company? If so, talk to an expert consultant and get a quick quote on SmartVoice and other cost effective voice and data solutions.

Two T1 Lines For The Price of One

T1 lines are bursting at the RJ-45 connector. Businesses are pushing more data than ever before through their constrained WAN connections. But how do you go ask to buy more bandwidth in these economic times? It’s easy when you can get 2 T1 lines for the price of 1.

Whoa! Who is offering a two-for-one deal on business bandwidth?

Actually, lots of competitive carriers can do this for you. Think I’m kidding? Check T1 line prices now.

I will introduce a slight caveat. The pricing I’m referring to compares what you’ll pay for a dual-bonded T1 line today versus what you paid for a T1 line on a contract signed several years ago in many metropolitan areas. That’s not unreasonable, since professional bandwidth solutions such as T1 lines, DS3 connections, and Metro Ethernet are sold on a lease basis with 1 to 5 year contracts in locations where there are competing carriers.

Many, many companies have 3 year T1 line contracts expiring right now. What do you suppose they are going to do? Some may just ignore the fact that the contract is expired and keep paying the same invoice on a month to month basis. A lot of carriers will let you do that just like with cell phone contracts. Other companies will probably just renew their existing contracts for the same amount as before or with a slight discount. If you do either of these, you are leaving money on the table.

The fact is that the telecommunications market has gotten very competitive recently. There are more carriers interested in your business and there are more technology options than ever. But it’s likely that you are aware of only a single option through your local telephone company or perhaps one other bid from a service provider with a local office. The larger the population center where you are located, the more service options there are. But these carriers don’t have infinitely large sales staffs or advertising budgets, so you may not have been contacted by them.

Well, if they’re not calling you to vie for your business, how do you get their attention? Actually, it's much easier today than ever before because of telecommunications service brokers. Arguably the best of these is Telarus, Inc., developer of the GeoQuote (tm) online telecom service search engine. You can use GeoQuote (tm) to get T1 line quotes in under a minute and confirm what I’ve been saying. You’ll discover even more options if you let a Telarus ShopForT1 consultant call you because they have knowledge of short term special deals that don’t show up in the automated search process.

Did you run a search for your business address? Am I right about the cost of 2x T1 line service at 3 Mbps? Here’s something else to think about. Metro Ethernet is a hot new competitive technology that can give you even more bandwidth at lower prices than bonding a bunch of T1 lines. If your location qualifies, you may be able to get all the bandwidth you need and still meet your telecom service budget this year. It’s well worth your while to check it out.

Why The WAN Lags The LAN

Networks are often thought of as nearly transparent to the flow of data between nodes. Corporate LANs are managed to ensure there is enough bandwidth to prevent productivity killing network congestion within the organization. But it doesn’t take long to find the real choke point in most networks. It’s the connection with the outside world, called the WAN.

The WAN or Wide Area Network differs from the LAN or Local Area Network in more than name. They traditionally use completely different technologies.

LANs are based on the Ethernet standard. Devices that connect to the LAN have standardized NICs or Network Interface Cards. That includes PCs, servers, printers and other peripherals. The most popular interface is 10/100 Mbps. That means the device will operate on Ethernet LANs running at the standard 10 or 100 Mbps speeds. The 10/100/1000 Mbps interface is becoming more popular and increasingly seen in new devices. It maintains compatibility with 10 Mbps Ethernet and 100 Mbps, also called Fast Ethernet, and adds a new speed of 1000 Mbps, also called Gigabit Ethernet or GigE.

Now, compare these network speeds with typical WAN connections. The most popular WAN service is the T1 line running at 1.5 Mbps. Larger businesses often have DS3 connections that run at 45 Mbps. Only the largest or most bandwidth-dependent organizations have higher speed fiber optic WAN connections. These range from OC3 at 155 Mbps to OC48 at 2.5 Gbps. The largest ISPs and telecom carriers may have backbones at OC-192 or 10 Gbps. Nationwide fiber optic network backbones run at OC-768 or 40 Gbps.

Chances are your business is likely running a LAN network at 100 Mbps. When you access the Internet or connect to another of your company’s facilities via dedicated point to point data line, you may be connecting over a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps. That’s almost two orders of magnitude difference. You’ll notice the difference in file transfer times. Within the walls of your building file transfers might be measured in seconds. Go outside and the same size files will require minutes.

A larger corporation might have a LAN backbone running 1000 Mbps between switches and perhaps even to the desktop. If your WAN connection is DS3 at 45 Mbps, you still have a substantial choke point for data entering and leaving the organization. It can be a significant bottleneck when running overnight file backups to a remote data center or transferring important files to a client. If your desktop computer is connected at 100 Mbps, the slowdown might be a little more than double. But if you are transferring between two servers that have 1000 Mbps connections, the slowdown to 45 Mbps is more like 20x.

So, why don’t companies just increase their WAN bandwidth to match their LAN bandwidth? The reason is cost. WAN connections have traditionally been very expensive. Management can rationalize that the company generates far more traffic across its LAN than goes out on the WAN, so that a slower WAN isn’t that much of an impediment. Well, that depends on what is entering and leaving the building. If customers can’t access your servers in a reasonable time, they’ll think your website is broken and go elsewhere. If your medical organization can’t transfer medical images in a reasonable time, staff might be tempted to shy away from electronic medical records.

Is there anything that can help this situation? Probably the most promising technology is Carrier Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet. Prices for Ethernet WAN connections are significantly lower in general than traditional telecom service pricing. Bandwidths that match LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10 Gbps are readily available at quite reasonable pricing.

With a better WAN to LAN bandwidth parity, network performance will be much more consistent, regardless of file source and destination. That can really help productivity and encourage staff to make better use of electronic file transfers and paperless office techniques.

What will it cost to improve your network’s WAN connection performance? Probably less than you might think. Even if you don’t match your LAN speed completely, you can likely get more bandwidth for your current budget. To find out how much, check Ethernet WAN bandwidth service pricing now.

Speed of Metro Ethernet Zooming

What’s faster than a speeding bullet? Superman.

What’s faster than conventional business bandwidth solutions, such as T1 and DS3, and also cheaper? Metro Ethernet.

What’s new and in demand at an incredible rate of adoption? Sorry Superman, it’s Metro Ethernet.

Metro Ethernet is the WAN connection service that’s a real triple threat. Its speed may be one or two orders of magnitude above what you have now. It’s spreading like wildfire among business users. It’s generally cheaper per Mbps than your other bandwidth options, even the venerable T1 lines.

But can it leap tall buildings in a single bound? Your data certainly will. It will zoom in and out of your building at megabit to gigabit rates. That’s another advantage of Metro Ethernet - it’s scalable. You can start with enough bandwidth to meet your current needs and perhaps a little extra margin. When business picks up and your WAN connection becomes a bottleneck, you call up your service provider and ask them to increase your bandwidth.

Scalable bandwidth isn’t a characteristic of all network connections. Often if you want a higher service bandwidth, you need to go through a lengthly order and provisioning process. Metro Ethernet is designed with scalability built-in. The only real limitation is whether you have a fiber optic connection or use bonded copper pair.

Copper pair bonding is desirable for a lot of businesses because it frees them from the limitation of the single T1 line at 1.5 Mbps and allows them to move up to 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps standard Ethernet speed and even the equivalent of DS3 at 45 Mbps. All of these service levels are available over twisted pair copper, as long as you are reasonably close to the carrier’s facilities. In metro areas where you’ll find Metro Ethernet, that’s often the case.

Of course, fiber optic service to your building gives you a much larger range of service options. You can easily get 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet, and often even 10 Gbps Ethernet.

Even more impressive than the line speeds are the lease rates for Metro Ethernet services. Don’t drop your coffee cup if you are quoted a rate that’s just a fraction of what you are paying now for traditional telecom services. It’s for real. Competitive carriers are looking to capture their share of the business bandwidth market and you can get some excellent deals on 1 to 5 year contracts. Recently I’ve seen Metro Ethernet services that offer more bandwidth for less cost than even T1 lines.

Would your company benefit from switching to Metro Ethernet or other Carrier Ethernet services? Find out by checking availability and pricing for Metro Ethernet service now.

The Wall Wart Is A Computer

It’s been half a century since computers were behemoths that filled entire buildings and sucked as much power as a good size town. Now they sit in a rack or on your desk top and suck as much power as a good size TV. Laptop computers and notebooks are less power hungry and have AC supplies with prongs attached to plug right into a wall outlet. The power supply or transformer in a palm-size plug is so common that it has its own designation: wall wart. But what if instead of the wall wart powering the computer, the wall wart was the computer?

Amazing, but true. Computers have shrunk to the size that they fit right into the size of a container that used to be just for the power supply. Oh, we’re done marveling at the pocket calculator, the digital watch, or the light switch timer and dimmer. Arguably, these devices all have small computers inside. But they’re special purpose circuits. You won’t be downloading software to your digital watch any time soon. You will be doing just that with what’s called a “plug computer.”

The plug computer is a general purpose computer, like a PC, housed in a small plastic case with two power prongs that plug into a standard wall socket. The Marvell ShevaPlug is a good example. It boasts a 1.2 GHz CPU with 512 MB of flash memory and 512 MB of DDR2 SDRAM memory. I/O is a Gigabit Ethernet jack and a USB connector. The operating system? Why, open-source Linux of course.

By the way, the ShevaPlug draws about 2 watts. When your PC is completely off it probably draws more than that unless you pull the plug. Lots of peripherals, especially printers, are power vampires. They draw as much as 20 or 30 watts just to sit there on standby doing absolutely nothing but waiting around. The plug computer draws power too, but it just sips even when fully active.

So what’s a computer in a wall wart good for? With USB and Ethernet connectivity, it makes a really nice server. Plug in a hard drive and you’ve got network attached storage. Plug in a printer and you have a network print server. Plug in a video camera and you’ve got a webcam. How about serving up video content to an HDTV set over a network connection? Why not just use one as a low end desktop computer?

The era of the plug computer is just starting. Your home and office may be full of these some day. Right now they’re available in development kits for $99, but you’ll have to create your own applications software. Next year or the year after? You may well be able to go to an apps store and download all sorts of useful functions, similar to what’s happened with the iPhone.

I can hardly wait for the plug supercomputer. That would be a dozen wall wart servers plugged into one long power strip. Don’t laugh too loud. It might not be pretty, but it would be green - very green.