HTC ThunderBolt Screams On LTE

Get your hands on this Android smartphone and it will hit you like lightning. This is the future of mobile connectivity. The HTC ThunderBolt doesn’t just run on Verizon’s LTE network. It screams.

Not so long ago you could turn a colleague’s eyes green with envy by showing off your cutting edge smartphone with amazingly fast 3G broadband. Remember those days? You couldn’t possibly be that young! It was only a few years ago. That’s how fast things have been moving in the world of mobile devices.

When 3G entered the marketplace it really did seem fast. Well, fast in the way that 56K modems seemed amazingly fast when you remembered poking along at 300 baud. There are all sorts of speeds quoted for 3G and 4G transmission, but let’s say that 3G comes in at about 1 Mbps and 4G takes that up to 10 Mbps. You know that you may get more than that or a mere fraction depending on how strong your signal is and how congested the tower is that you are connected to.

When they say that 4G is an order of magnitude times the speed of 3G, they're not kidding. All that extra speed lets you download apps faster and enjoy video experiences that might not be up to it with lower bandwidth. Also like all technology advancements, there seem to be two competitors trying to claim the market.

First out of the gate was WiMAX technology deployed by Sprint and Clearwire as CLEAR. You’ll find CLEAR capability on Sprint Android smartphones. So fast is this technology and so powerful is the signal that CLEAR is selling wireless service for both desktop and mobile applications. You still have a broadband modem on your desktop. There just aren’t any phone or cable wires running to it.

T-Mobile and Verizon have shunned WiMAX in favor of a competing technology called LTE. AT&T is also planning to deploy LTE and not WiMAX. Some pundits are predicting that LTE will be the universal standard in a few years, but WiMAX is also a worldwide standard and may be more resilient than anyone expects.

Is this the end of the line as far as speed enhancements are concerned? Not hardly. Both WiMAX and LTE are upgrading their standards to offer peak rates of at least 1 Gbps for fixed operation and 100 Mbps in mobile use. Nobody’s talking 5G yet, but those speeds suggest the order of magnitude increase that justifies a new descriptor.

The ThunderBolt itself is a 4.3 inch full touch screen (800 x480 pixels) smartphone running Android 2.2 OS with HTC Sense 2.0. It uses the Snapdragon 1 GHZ processor with 8 GB of built-in memory that’s expandable up to 32 GB via plug-in microSD card. You have enough horsepower onboard to act as a WiFi hotspot for up to 8 other devices. You also have excellent photographic capability with an 8 Megapixel 2x LED flash camera that takes HD videos plus a 1.3 Megapixel front facing camera for video chatting.

Do you live in one of the 39 initial cities where Verizon LTE has been deployed or the 150 markets where it should be installed by the end of 2011? If so, you may have a hard time resisting the urge to move up 5x to 10x the download speed of your once-amazing 3G smartphone. If so, learn more and order your HTC ThunderBolt with Verizon Wireless Service and get a tremendous discount off the suggested retail price.

Environmentally Friendly Hosting is Super Green

More and more website builders and bloggers are looking for ways to embrace both technology and the environment. Here’s a way to not just go green, but super-green with Super Green hosting. Let’s take a look at what’s super about Super Green.

It starts with their "green ethics". Super Green Hosting started out with the goal to provide the greenest service available in the green web hosting market. It all comes down to the carbon. Do you realize that everything we do on the Internet has a carbon footprint? That’s because everything draws electricity and most of that electricity is being generated from sources that are decidedly un-green. Coal fired power stations - very, very un-green.

The way to counteract this is to cut back on the power you use, generate the rest using renewable resources such as solar and wind, and plant trees to absorb remaining carbon in the form of CO2 and store it away.

Super Green hosting does all three. They’re using dell servers that produce 20% less CO2 than average servers, using wind power to run them and planting trees to reverse the effects of global warming. They can boast of being 100% carbon-neutral. That’s hosting you can be proud of.

Unlike may hosting providers, Super Green Hosting keeps their plans simple but feature rich. For less than five bucks a month, you get unlimited hosting space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited email accounts. With all those resources at your disposal, you can host as many domains as you want. But don’t pay for the first one. Super Green Hosting will give you a free domain and take care of renewing if for as long as you have your account. Already have a domain elsewhere? No problem, they’ll transfer it for you so you can use it in your account.

Some other included features that you might have to pay extra for elsewhere are 1 click installation for WordPress and Joomla, as many MySQL databases as you can use, Ruby/Ruby On Rails, SSL Secure Serve, shopping cards, a free generated certificate, Paypal support, merchant account support, and free ad credits for Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Also take note of their 99.9% uptime guarantee and their money back guarantee, along with 24/7 phone and email support, live support inside cPanel, video tutorials and extensive knowledgebase.

Most bloggers and website builders will be happy with the standard Green Hosting plan. For resellers and owners of extensive domain collections that want complete and independent control of each website, there are Green Reseller Hosting plans available starting at under twenty bucks a month. These offer both cPanel and WHM admin control panels, automated billing systems, site builder software, website templates and private name servers. One unusual benefit is a domain reseller account. This is a free eNom account for cheaper rates on domains with no setup fees.

Are you in the market for green hosting solutions with the power and flexibility to handle anything from a WordPress blog right on up to online business and even being a web hosting provider yourself? If so, check out the Green Hosting and Green Reseller Hosting plans available from Super Green Hosting.

Finding Fiber Lit Buildings

If you are looking for high levels of bandwidth at reasonable prices, the place you need to be is in a “lit” building. Let’s take a look at what makes a building “lit” and why that’s important.

The lighting we’re talking about with a lit building is laser light. It’s not lighting the building itself, but only the fiber optic strands that run through it. A building is said to be lit if there is fiber optic bandwidth service installed and running.

As you may suspect by now, if there is fiber optic service to the building and you own or are renting space in that building, you can almost certainly get fiber optic bandwidth services installed for your needs. Granted, there can be construction costs if only one tenant has fiber service and there is no cabling running to other rooms. That’s usually a solvable problem at a reasonable cost.

There’s a much bigger problem if nobody in the building has contracted for fiber optic bandwidth. Chances are, fiber cabling was never pulled into the building during construction or as part of any upgrades. Who knows where the nearest fiber even exists? It could be in the building next door or it could be ten miles away. If you are in the business district of a major city you probably aren’t far from the nearest fiber connection. Out in the boonies it’s much less likely that there is anything reasonably close. Oh, there may be long haul fiber conduit right under your feet. Those don’t count. You need to be near a termination point so you can hook into the fiber optic service.

Actually, there is now a quick and easy way to find fiber lit buildings in your area. It’s a Shop for Ethernet GeoQuote tool that maps out fiber point of presence in a given area. All you do is enter the address of your building and you’ll get both a map and the distances to the nearest lit buildings and the bandwidth capability at those locations. If you like, you can then put in a request for detailed pricing to support your applications.

The biggest variable in getting high bandwidth Ethernet line service is the cost of construction to install the fiber optic connection. This may be quoted to you as a non-recurring cost or it may be waived by the carrier depending on how close you are to where their fiber service is already installed. If it’s right next door, you could luck out and not have to pay anything. If it is miles down the road, the construction cost may be more than either you or the carrier wants to pay.

You can make your building more attractive to the carriers if there are multiple tenants all willing to commit to fiber optic service. By pooling your bandwidth requirements, the carrier will view your situation as a much bigger opportunity and be willing to kick in more of the construction costs than they might for just one user.

What if you are still too far away to make fiber construction practical? You’re not out of luck by any means. You will certainly qualify for bonded T1 service that can give you up to 10 Mbps. You may also qualify for Ethernet over Copper that can easily take that up to 20 Mbps and perhaps higher. Other services that might be available are Ethernet over Hybrid Fiber Cable and Ethernet over Fixed Wireless. Cable is the same type of cable that delivers Cable TV and can also provide 50 to 100 Mbps of business bandwidth. Fixed wireless systems can beam up to 45 Mbps to a terminal box mounted on the roof of your building.

Don’t count yourself out for increased bandwidth at reasonable prices until you get a complete set of prices and availability quotes for business bandwidth options. This is a highly competitive business, with new services becoming available all the time.

Cloud Hosting With a Free Trial

You’ve been keeping an eye on the cloud computing phenomena for a long time. You’re thinking that it might be something that could benefit your business. Still, you're reluctant to put forth the cost, effort and commitment to give it a try. Now there’s an opportunity that might be just what you need. It’s a free trial of cloud hosting to get you started.

One easy way to get your toe into cloud services is to start with cloud hosting. Why cloud hosting? It’s a logical upgrade for a operation that has outgrown shared hosting solutions and is looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. The beauty of the cloud is that it offers you a flexibility and cost advantage over competing ways to host your web sites.

VPS and dedicated web servers are popular because you don’t need to make capital purchases and provide support and connectivity they way you do with running your own data center. They are one step up from the intermediate solution of colocation hosting, where you move your equipment to a public data center. The limitation of VPS and dedicated servers is that you pay a monthly fee for a bundle of resources. If you find that you have over or underestimated your requirements, you can generally upgrade or downgrade over the course of days, weeks or months.

Getting the resources right is a tricky proposition. If you order too little in the way of disk space, processing or bandwidth, you can find yourself watching hopelessly as a huge surge of viral traffic gets stopped cold by your overloaded website. The potential loss of sales can be far in excess of your monthly hosting fees. So what do you do? Take your chances or over-provision? Having all the resources you need will protect against traffic surges, but the rest of the time you are just paying to watch the disks spin.

Worse, yet, is having the type of site with wide variations in traffic and sales. You may find that your needs follow a seasonal, weekly or even daily pattern. Or perhaps no pattern at all. That’s especially true if you are a startup with the next killer app, but you don’t really know when it is going to take off or to what extent.

These are the kind of problems that cloud hosting is designed for. The cloud is a virtual environment with massive resources hidden just out of sight. If you need another server, you don’t wait for a technician to come around with a screwdriver and mount another one in your rack. You simply go to your control panel and deploy one or more in a matter of seconds. Things getting too quiet? Cancel your excess capacity and you won’t be paying for it anymore.

Atlantic.net has been providing hosting solutions since 1994 and operates a SAS 70 Type II platform that can handle large as well as modest requirements. They are making a splash in the cloud services field by setting up a system that makes it easy for just about anyone to get into cloud hosting quickly and easily.

You have your choice of Windows or Linux servers that can be deployed in less than a minute. Scale up or down in seconds, not next month. Flexible hourly billing starts at just 1.5 cents per hour and you pay only for what you use. There’s an API to control cloud servers programmability and you can add cPanel and WHM control panels to any cloud server for easy and familiar administration.

What’s your commitment level? There are no commitments, contracts or setup fees. You can cancel your servers at any time. Your data is backed-up nightly and the self-healing redundant infrastructure with automatic failover ensures availability. In fact, this cloud service comes with a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Does this sound like the kind of hosting that would work well for your company? Well, don’t go sign any contracts or make any commitments elsewhere until you give cloud hosting a try for free. You’ll wonder why you didn’t head to the cloud sooner.

What Is a PRI Line?

PRI lines are popular for providing multi-line phone service to businesses. But just what is a PRI line and what options are available?

PRI is part of a telephone technology standard called ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network). It was envisioned as a digital line service that would replace analog telephone lines for both residential and business users. At the time that ISDN was being introduced, connections to the Internet were mostly dial-up using 56 Kbps modems at best. Many of those 56K modems really connected at something around 30 to 40 Kbps due to noise and other limitations on most phone lines. All-digital lines offered basic ISDN service with 64 Kbps data plus one standard telephone service on a single line.

This basic service is called BRI for Basic Rate Interface. It consists of 3 channels. There are two “B” or Bearer channels at 64 Kbps each that can be configured as either voice or data. That can be a 64K digital Internet connection and a phone line, 2 phone lines, or 2 combined data lines for 128 Kbps Internet. The third channel is called a “D” or Delta channel. It has only 16 Kbps, but is used for signaling and control.

If you’ve never heard of ISDN BRI it’s because it never took off. By the time it was starting to be deployed in a big way, technology had moved on and broadband over DSL and Cable was taking over the role of Internet access.

The second standard introduced with ISDN is PRI for Primary Rate Interface. This much higher bandwidth service offers 24 channels configured as 23 B + D. In this case the D channel bandwidth has increased to 64 Kbps just like the B channels. Why stick with 64K channels? It’s because 64 Kbps is just the right amount of bandwidth to transport one digitized telephone conversation using the industry standard G.711 coding standard.

You can configure a PRI circuit to carry voice, data or a combination. Some ISPs used these to connect to modem banks in the dial-up days. Today, the most popular use of ISDN PRI is for PBX telephone trunking with 23 outside voice lines and one control channel that also handles Caller ID for the other 23. Most PBX switches come already configured for at least one PRI line or can be interfaced with a plug-in card.

BRI was designed to be provisioned over the same twisted pair cable that brings in analog phone service. PRI is provisioned over T1 lines because of its higher capacity. T1 was designed to use 2 twisted pair of telco cable and is almost universally available as a standard business-grade digital telecom service.

Recently, another PRI option has become available. That is business grade telephone trunking provided by Cable companies, such as Comcast. The coaxial cable used to bring in television has tremendous capacity and easily supports broadband services up to 100 Mbps. The same cable can transport individual analog telephone lines or ISDN PRI to support a business PBX phone system. With Cable PRI, you may have the option to order fractional PRI service with as few as 6 phone lines. You can then add more, even one at a time, as your business needs increase.

Are you interested in lower cost multi-line business telephone service to support your in-house phone system? If so, get prices and availability for PRI line service options. Single line service and VoIP SIP trunking are also often available.

UK Domains and Web Hosting

Network Solutions, one of the largest domain registrars and web hosting services companies in the world, now offers a complete array of services especially for users in the United Kingdom. These include not just .co.uk domain names, but web hosting, e-commerce email hosting, SSL security certificates and custom design and marketing services. It’s everything you need to be successful whether you are targeting visitors from the UK or operating a worldwide enterprise.

While .uk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to the United Kingdom, you can’t register .uk domains the way you register a .com or .net. Instead, you need to register one of the approved second-level domains. The most popular of these is .co.uk which is intended for commercial use but available for general registration. Of course, you are free to use the more general .com, .net and .org domains.

By the way, you can also register a .eu domain if you would rather be identified with the European Union. Unlike the unrestricted availability of the .co.uk domain, as a registrant you must be located within the EU to register a .eu domain name.

Once you have a domain name, you’ll want hosting to put that name to use. Most users want web hosting, but it is possible to skip the website and just have email hosting for a very low cost. You pay by the number of mailboxes you want. Then you have a choice of whether to pickup your email using the email program on your computer that downloads the messages, or to keep everything in the cloud and access your messages from anywhere using webmail. Spam and virus protection are included.

Network Solutions UK also offers a business email service to host your domain name. It works like the personal email solution, but includes more storage and the ability to sync email, contacts, calendars and tasks so you can work remotely and the ability to share calendars and collaborate on group projects.

Web hosting comes in a range of sizes to accommodate every user from those just starting out to major enterprises. The most popular packages are shared hosting, where you and a number of other clients share the same server. Of course, your files are kept separate in your own account. It’s the sharing of computing resources that keeps this service low cost.

For most hosting needs, shared hosting is the way to go. You get a lot for your money. Most plans are general hosting packages that include buckets of monthly bandwidth and disk storage. There are also specialized hosting options that include Hosting for WordPress that is designed specifically for bloggers and SharePoint hosting that is specifically designed to work with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) collaboration for small businesses.

You can generally add e-commerce capability to any general hosting package. Network Solutions UK has gone a step further by creating specialized CommerceSpace packages for online stores. You get customizable storefront templates that you can edit online or using web design software such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage. You have the ability to accept PayPal and Google Check payments and can add a merchant account to accept credit cards. The packages are priced by the maximum number of products from 25 to 100,000. A domain name is included with an annual purchase.

A step up from shared hosting is VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting. Intended for more demanding uses, these virtual servers give you root access to install whatever software you want, including different operating systems. You have a guaranteed amount of RAM and ample amounts of storage and bandwidth. VPS has become popular because it offers the flexibility of a dedicated server at a lower cost through virtualization than shared physical computing resources.

One additional type of hosting you should consider is mobile website hosting. More and more traffic and commerce is moving to smartphones. How does your website work on the small screen of a mobile phone? Not so well? You may benefit from a mobile-specific website with a .mobi extension. The advantage of a mobile site is that it is optimized for mobile screens and loads much faster than a full website. The user interface features the familiar icon appearance.

Are you interested in hosting to support your UK business, or are you conducting business internationally and want to focus on UK customers? If so, learn more about UK Domains and Web Hosting from Network Solutions.

Note: Map of the United Kingdom courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Ethernet over Fixed Wireless Broadband

Many companies have discovered the cost and performance benefits of Metro Ethernet services over copper and fiber optic cable. But did you know that there was a third option? It’s Ethernet over Fixed Wireless and it can get you the bandwidth you need both quickly and affordably.

Ethernet over Fixed Wireless (EoFW) differs from the portable or mobile wireless services we are most familiar with. While most WiFi, WiMAX or LTE services offer broadband Internet access within a given service footprint, they are intended for general use. There is generally no encryption and no directionality. You use a smartphone or laptop computer, sometimes with a USB adaptor, to get connected to the network. The bandwidth is limited and shared. You’re never quite sure how fast the connection is going to run.

Fixed wireless is a completely different service. The only thing it has in common with 3G and 4G cellular broadband is that it doesn’t use wires. It doesn’t use their microwave channels nor their towers. This is a private service sold to businesses, not consumers.

What does Ethernet over Fixed Wireless have to offer? You’ll get speeds similar to wireline services, secure data transmission, fast installation and a service level agreement. In other words, a dedicated wireline connection without the wireline.

TelePacific is now a major player in this relatively new field, after acquiring the assets of Covad Wireless. They offer two levels of service, one to compete with T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper, plus a higher speed service that competes with DS3 bandwidth.

Wireless Super-T T1-class Business Internet provides scalable bandwidth from 1 Mbps to 6 Mbps. That’s what you’d get from bonding up to 4 T1 lines or an EoC service. But what if you are outside the limited EoC footprint for your area and you don’t want to wait for T1 service to be installed? TelePacific can install service and have it working within days of an order. You’re talking weeks for a T1 line and who knows how long if you want to bring in fiber.

Speaking of fiber, are you in need of higher bandwidth but beyond the capability of bonded T1 or EoC and blanching at the cost of fiber construction? TelePacific can have you up and running in typically 30 to 45 days using their professionally engineered and installed licensed microwave equipment. Bandwidth levels of 10, 15, 20, 30 or 45 Mbps are available in California and Nevada. Higher bandwidths from 50 to 100 Mbps are available in California. No need for expensive DS3 cards and routers. You connection is a Fast Ethernet interface.

Even if you already have high capacity lines to support your business, are you sure that you’re ready if disaster strikes. What if those cables get cut? How long will you be out of business before they get spliced back together? This is where TelePacific’s HiCap wireless service can save the day. The path to your ISP is wireless and they offer a network-diverse route to the internet.

A specialized service you may find valuable is TelePacific Wireless Event Service. They can provide you with standard service from 2 to 6 Mbps or higher bandwidth from 10 to 40 Mbps to support your trade show, sporting event, company or customer event, film festival, concert on on-location film shoot. They even provided Internet access on the beach for a surfing competition. It’s all engineered and handled by TelePacific. You just show up, plug in and access the Internet.

Does this whet your appetite for the benefits of getting your business bandwidth without the usual wired connections? If so, get pricing and availability for Fixed Wireless Broadband Service to support your business needs.

WordPress Hosting Made Cheap and Easy

Many serious bloggers and website builders choose WordPress as their software platform. It has the advantages of being versatile and supported by an extensive community of developers for themes and plugins. As a beginner, you can simply use the online version of WordPress to get your feet wet. Eventually, though, you’ll want the flexibility and expansion that comes form hosting WordPress yourself.

Now comes an important decision. Do you want to host WordPress the easy way or the hard way? The hard way is to download the software files and do an installation on your own server or a hosting service you are using now. This is the route IT professionals will go. But what if you are more of a content creator than an IT type? You may be better off just ordering web hosting designed specifically for WordPress.

One good option for those who don’t otherwise have or need a web hosting account is HostGator WordPress Hosting. It starts at under $4 a month and is 100% WordPress compatible. In addition to the low cost, what’s really valuable is the 1-Click WordPress QuickInstall feature. HostGator has built-in an installer specifically for WordPress. You click the button and in less than a minute, you have WordPress installed on your account.

Want to see how quick and easy this is? Watch the WordPress QuickInstall Demo video and see for yourself. From start to finish an actual installation and configuration ready to use takes place in about 3 minutes right before your eyes.

The nice thing about HostGator is that even the least expensive plans give you full blown web hosting and not some hobbled set of resources that you’ll soon outgrow. You get your choice of installing WordPress at the root of your account so that all it does is support your blog, or you can install WordPress in a folder so that it is just part of what you are hosting on the account.

Will you run out of space or get so popular that a flood of fans will crash the site? Not with HostGator. Their WordPress hosting offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Go ahead, become and social media phenomenon and enjoy the rewards of your success. Your site comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7/365 tech support just in case you need help.

HostGator offers 100% WordPress compatible hosting. It easily exceeds WordPress minimum requirements and sports the latest versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP. You’ll be installing the newest stable WordPress version when you click that QuickInstall button. You’ll also have peace of mind knowing that PHP runs as suPHP for increased WordPress security.

Oh, you already have WordPress installed somewhere else or you want to move from the WordPress.com free hosting site? Signup for HostGator and they’ll transfer your current WordPress site for free.

If you are serious about getting into WordPress or are already a user and want to move for better quality hosting or a better price, then you should take a few minutes and watch the video to see how easy it is. Then check out the hosting plans and see how much you can get at such a low cost with HostGator WordPress Hosting. You may also be interested in registering a domain name or in the many other hosting services that are such a great deal from HostGator.

FastE Is The New DS3

Companies that have outgrown their T1 line capacity have traditionally moved up to DS3 bandwidth. Now there’s a faster and cheaper alternative available. It’s Fast Ethernet or FastE.

Even if you are unaware of Fast Ethernet as a Metro or Carrier bandwidth service, you are no doubt familiar with the term. Fast Ethernet is the name given to 100 Mbps Ethernet. It is one of the standard LAN speeds, along with 10 Mbps Ethernet and 1,000 Mbps Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet. The abbreviation for Gigabit Ethernet is GigE. The next step up is 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 10 GigE.

Nearly all network devices, including PCs, printers, Ethernet switches, routers and servers have NICs (Network Interface Cards) that support Fast Ethernet. In fact, many smaller business LANs run at the Fast Ethernet speed of 100 Mbps. So, why do our WAN (Wide Area Network) connections run at some lower speed?

One reason is cost. WAN network services have tended to be seen as expensive. Part of that is because these are leased line services that are billed by the month, every month. LAN networks have a capital cost of purchase and installation. After that, most smaller networks need relatively little maintenance.

Another reason why we use lower bandwidths on the WAN than the LAN is usage. Most traffic within a company network stays on the LAN. A lot of it is between PCs & servers and for interoffice file transfers. Traffic that leaves the building is mostly Internet access for both websites and email. Companies with multiple business locations often have dedicated lines between them or use an MPLS network to interconnect 3 or more locations. These links get higher traffic, because they are functioning as in-house LAN connections.

A couple of forces are at work to change this situation. First of all, WAN bandwidth is going up simply because files are larger and video is becoming used more in business. A much larger effect is the move from in-house IT services to hosted services, including cloud services. This effectively moves the bulk of the traffic from LAN to WAN. Line speeds have to increase to accommodate this traffic increase, or access will slow to a crawl. Slow access spells lowered productivity in any business process.

Medium and larger companies outgrew their T1 lines long ago. Their upgrade path has been to T3 service, more popularly known as DS3. With DS3, you get 45 Mbps of bandwidth versus 1.5 Mbps over a T1 line. Your lease costs also goes up from hundreds to thousands of dollars a month.

DS3 has been essential for video streaming, ecommerce, large office Internet access, medical image transmissions and other bandwidth intensive operations. As a digital telecom service it has been readily available with costs that have come down over the years. So why not stick with DS3?

The reason, as usual, involves cost and bandwidth. The competing service is now Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps vs DS3’s 45 Mbps. That’s over twice the bandwidth, but not twice the cost. In fact, you may well be able to get FastE for the same or less than you are paying for a DS3 connection. Consider that Fast Ethernet more closely mirrors the protocol run on the LAN and that both DS3 and FastE are delivered over fiber optic lines, and it’s hard to see why sticking with DS3 makes good business sense.

The one reason that DS3 may still be the right service for your company is that Carrier Ethernet services have not been deployed everywhere just yet. However, competitive carriers are aggressively building out their metro fiber networks and vying for business customers with lowered bandwidth prices.

Are you a DS3 user interested in getting more money for your bandwidth dollar? Or, do you need new installation of high speed line services and want to make sure you are getting the best deal? If so, check out Fast Ethernet vs DS3 pricing and availability now. Once you have the competitive options, you can choose what type and level of service makes the most sense for your operation.

Email Hosting Without A Website

One of the advantages of having your own website is that you can also have your own email at the domain name of your website. For businesses, organizations and many individuals that personalized email is so valuable that they may go ahead and have someone build and maintain a site just to get the email advantages. Did you know that there is such a thing as email hosting without a website? There is, and it’s a lot less expensive.

Personalized email has important advantages. It’s hard for businesses to get taken seriously with a Hotmail or other free webmail address. Gmail has a more professional cache than most, but it does nothing to identify your business or other organization. All of these are online services. If you want what’s called POP email that you open and save on your computer, you need a different type of email service. Your Internet Service Provider will generally give you POP email, but it’s at their domain name. Once again, no personal identification and not a business image.

For a personalized email address, the thing to do is buy yourself a domain name. This will cost you somewhere around a dollar a month. This is all you really have to spend as a minimum. What you do is use the email forwarding feature of your domain name to send incoming mail to the email account you have now. In other words, mail that comes in to YourName@YourDomain.com will be forwarded automatically to YourName@Gmail.com or YourName@YourISPsDomain.com, as examples.

The next step up is actual email hosting. What email hosting does is provide the email servers but not the web servers for your domain name. Why do that? Not everyone wants or needs a website. If everything you do is offline and nobody is going to look for you or your business through a search engine, then a website is just money down the drain. Perhaps you are well established with lots of visitors on a Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account. Website? Why get into building your own website? But you may well want a personalized email account.

There are two types of email servers you’ll be using. POP or POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) servers are the ones that deliver the email to your computer. These are for incoming messages. When people talk about a having a POP account, this is what they are referring to. You set the preference on your email program to the address of the POP3 server. You’ll also need to set up a username and password so that you and only you can get your mail. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) mail servers are for outgoing mail. You tell your email program what SMTP server to use so you can send, reply or redirect email messages. Another type of server is called IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). This is a competitor to POP3. If you need it, make sure your hosting provider offers this service. Most do.

The most basic email hosting will run you another dollar a month. That’s two bucks a month to have both a domain name and email hosting. For that, you get 1 GB of disk storage on the server, up to 10 separate email accounts, virus protection and Webmail access. Yes, you can have web mail at your domain name so you can access your mail online from a different computer than the one that has your email program.

Want more email accounts or more disk space? A deluxe email hosting service runs $1.99 a month for 5 GB of storage and 25 user-defined email accounts.

A business email hosting account is more sophisticated. The one offered by Domain.com offers cloud collaboration and secure sharing, similar to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint. Employees can share inboxes, contacts, calendars, tasks, and files to improve teamwork and productivity. You get push email, push contacts and push calendar with immediate sync that is Exchange ActiveSync compatible. You can access your account anywhere, including web, desktop or smartphone. Anti-virus and anti-spam is built-in. Document storage is centralized and document sharing is encrypted for security. This service is both Microsoft Windows and Outlook friendly. All this runs you $4.99 per user per month.

If you don’t need the collaboration features, you may be interested in mobile email hosting for $1.99 per user / mo. That gives you the ability to keep your mobile phone in sync with your email, calendar and contacts. You email is secured with encryption, plus anti-virus and anti-spam to keep trouble out of your inbox.

Do you like the low cost and personalization benefits that you can get from email hosting? If so, check out domain names and email hosting plans from Domain.com. You get a lot of benefit for a small amount of money.

Broadband Business Internet Service Options

Nearly every business today is connected to the Internet or soon will be. Even those mom and pop operations that still use the mechanical credit card machines will soon use electronic card verification, email and at least a brochure website. Businesses that are already seasoned users of the Web are looking to upgrade their bandwidth to support a move to cloud services. Let’s compare and contrast the various options you have for a broadband Internet connection.

Business Internet broadband services generally fall into two categories. They are shared and dedicated connections. Shared connections are similar in design to residential broadband services. The fact that the bandwidth is divvied up among many users lowers the cost for all. Dedicated services allocate a certain bandwidth to your connection and it does not vary regardless of what other users are doing. These services also tend to come with SLAs or Service Level Agreements that spell out technical parameters and availability commitments.

Shared bandwidth services include Cable Broadband, DSL, 3G and 4G Wireless, and two-way Satellite Internet. What they all have in common is that the actual bandwidth you’ll see varies with the number of other users and what they are doing. These services are sold as speeds “up to” a certain number of Mbps. That means what it says. You may get the full speed the connection is capable of or you may get a tenth of that at any given time.

These variations may or may not bother you. If you are running enterprise VoIP or bandwidth sensitive business processes, your variable connection may not support the performance you have in mind. On the other hand, if you use the Internet at work the same way you use it at home for email, Web browsing, or accessing pre-recorded audio and video, you may be quite satisfied with the service and delighted with the cost savings. Some services, like 3G wireless and Satellite are often used to support electronic credit card machines in lieu of using a phone line.

Dedicated Internet access connections, such as T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper, have rock solid bandwidth and generally excellent latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics. These are the same lines that you would use to interconnect business connections on a private line service. As Internet connections, they have one termination at your location and the other at your Internet service providers location.

Dedicated Internet access supports Web and email servers. The also support multiple users accessing the Internet and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). If you are going to stream content to Internet users, you’ll want a DIA (Dedicated Internet Access) connection from the server to the Internet.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has become very popular as both a private line and DIA connection. You can often get twice the bandwidth you could with a T1 line costing the same price. Like T1, EoC is provisioned over twisted pair copper telco wiring to keep construction costs down.

Larger companies and those with demanding applications such as video transport move up to fiber optic services, such as OC3 to OC768 SONET and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps GigE and 10 Gbps 10GigE bandwidth services. All of these are dedicated services with service level agreements.

How do you decide which broadband service is right for your business? Perhaps the best way is to compare prices, availability and features for the range of Broadband Business Internet Service options available for your location. Most business grade broadband services are available only for business locations and not residences, despite similarities with consumer Internet services.

Namecheap Is That And More

Namecheap promotes themselves as cheap domain names registration, but they also offer a complete suite of services for anyone who wants to build and host their own website. All of their services are low cost, keeping with the “cheap” moniker.

Namecheap made quite a splash when they stepped up to the plate after the GoDaddy elephant fail. Bob Parsons’ loss was Namecheap’s gain. He made a buffoon of himself and alienated thousands of (former) customers. Namecheap raised over $20,000 to Save the Elephants in Africa, while they helped disgusted domain name owners transfer their names at a discount.

Pretty classy move for a company that bills itself as “cheap.” It’s actually a good title for the organization, as so many people looking to put up and run websites want to minimize their costs. If it’s a personal blog or website, you really can’t afford to be running private dedicated servers or paying outlandish fees for hosting or domains. Those hosting bills come due every month and even domain names renew yearly. The initial expense is just the start of it.

There are also the ups and extras to beware of. Some companies lure you in with a low price and then nickel and dime you to death with services you really need to operate. Namecheap is better than most at give you a feature-rich service for the stated price. For instance, with each domain name you register at the nominal $9.98 per year (.com) fee, you get the expected URL and email forwarding, DNS service and registrar lock. You also get Dynamic DNS support. But Namecheap also includes WhoisGuard Privacy Protect, a feature that many other domain registrars feel justified in charging extra for.

Privacy Protect keeps your personal information from showing up in the public Whois registry. Instead, anyone who tries to check you out in this service will see the address and phone number for Namecheap instead of you. If they want to write you, they must use a coded email that forwards to your real email. They’ll never see your actual email address so they can’t scrape it to send you spam. This services is free for a year with all new domain name purchases and transfers.

If you bought a domain name, then you probably want to do something with it. You could just forward it to refer through to your blog or Twitter account. You don’t need a hosting account to do that or to forward email from your domain name to your current email account. You can do that with the domain name settings. What if you’d like to actually have POP email for your computer using your domain name? Namecheap offers an email only hosting package for just $1.25 a month. You get 10 spam protected email addresses, 2,000 MB of storage, unlimited email aliases and autoresponders, Webmail and both POP3 and IMAP support.

The next step up is to have some actual web page hosting space. For starters you can get a basic $2.55 a month package that includes 5 GB of disk space, 250 GB of bandwidth, the ability to host 2 domains and 30 subdomains, 5 FTP users, 50 POP3 email accounts, 15 MySQL databases and support for PHP and CGI. I remember when that used to be fairly impressive specs for a business account at at least 10x the price. This is quite a bargain for the individual or smaller business.

Namecheap has a variety of basic shared hosting services with progressively more disk space and bandwidth. Their business hosting starts at $24.17 a month and is limited to 50 users per server to improve performance for e-commerce and other demanding applications. This account includes support for unlimited domains, subdomains and email accounts. It’s whatever you can load into 100 GB of disk. The Elite package at $40 per month includes more bandwidth and a free dedicated IP address.

I’m a fan of reseller accounts and Namecheap has an impressive set of packages starting at $16.95 a month. The beauty of reseller hosting is that you can resell hosting accounts to make money or use them all yourself if you have many domains and websites. You get a Web Host Manager to control everything plus each account has its own control panel. That keeps one site from affecting another, just like you’d have with separate hosting services.

For larger companies, Namecheap has both Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. VPS is based on virtualization. There are actually many virtual servers running on the actual hardware, but you deal only with one that can be independently rebooted. You get root access, a dedicated IP, DNS hosting, SSH access and free setup. You certainly don’t get that from every hosting company. Namecheap VPS is priced starting at $17.58 a month with choice of operating systems and 24/7 server monitoring.

The ultimate is dedicated hosting, of course. Unless you have a uniquely demanding application or are running a large enterprise operation, you probably won’t be looking in this league. Even so, having a dual core Intel-based server all to yourself starts at just $109 per month with 6 dedicated IP addresses. No long term commitments, either. You can go month to month with a rolling contract.

Are you looking for new domains and hosting or just steamed that you’re paying way more than you need to? You should take a look at all you get from Namecheap domain names and web hosting services.

The Coming Level 3 Global Crossing Juggernaut

If you believe that the future of business is high bandwidth connections to clouds, customers and suppliers worldwide, then the next step toward this future is the melding of Level 3 Communications and Global Crossing. Combine their assets and you have a network map that spans the world.

Level 3 Communications is actually purchasing Global Crossing for $2 billion. When this merger is complete, their combined fiber optic assets will reach 70 countries on 3 continents.

Level 3 has an extensive long haul network with metro fiber in many US cities. Their transatlantic undersea fiber connects to a European network to link the USA and major European cities with low latency fiber connections. Level 3 is a major player in the high speed financial trading space, as well as providing other high bandwidth fiber services for global business needs.

Another strength of Level 3 is video transport. Their Vyvx service carries both high definition and standard video programming for studios and networks. For the highest in transmission feed quality, Level 3 Vyvx offers uncompressed high definition video transport services between Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and New York City at 1.5 and 3.0 Gbps. The Level 3 Content Delivery Network (CDN) has 35 strategically placed cashing locations to keep the content as near the customer as possible.

What Global Crossing does is complement rather than compete with Level 3’s US/Europe network. Global Crossing has over 100,000 route miles of fiber optic cable installed around the world. This includes US and Europe network fiber that overlaps Level 3 to some extent. But it also brings trans-pacific undersea fiber and connections to Japan, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Connected to its North America network is an extensive fiber optic networking serving the major cities in South America.

Global Crossing is true to its name. Their fiber really does span the world. Add Global Crossing’s network to the Level 3 network and you have extensive connectivity throughout North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Asia, with some facilities extending to the Middle East and Africa.

What does this mean for you, the business user? It certainly means more availability of converged IP network services worldwide and specialty services, such as low latency routes and video transport. Both Level 3 and Global Crossing have been serving major enterprise customers and carriers. They’ve got the expertise and facilities to accomplish whatever you will ever need in the way of connectivity.

Level 3, especially, also caters to smaller and medium businesses in the US. Their T1, bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper solutions offer dedicated bandwidth at very reasonable prices. For companies that need to link multiple locations, Level 3 MPLS can create a company network that spans the country and extends to include offices, factories and warehouses worldwide.

Fiber optic networks are enjoying a new renaissance, as businesses move to cloud processes and automation that increases employee productivity. You see more fiber going into the ground in both major cities and rural areas. If you’ve been affiliated with Level 3 or Global Crossing, your connection capabilities are about to be increased significantly.

If you are looking to increase your connection speeds, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised by the wide range of services available and the cost reductions that have come about in recent years from these and other competitive carriers. Don’t assume that you can’t get or afford higher bandwidth, even fiber, until you get prices and availability for business bandwidth services appropriate to your facility locations.



Note: Image of Earth from over the Atlantic Ocean courtesy of the U.S. Government on Wikimedia Commons

The Green Way To Get Documents Signed

We’re drowning in a sea of business paper. All that talk about computers creating the paperless office was 180 degrees out of phase with what really happened. As soon as there were high speed printers, business users started printing at high speed. This went on for decades, culminating in the rise of the professional business document shredder. They come by your office with a van full of high power slicing and dicing equipment and shovel the paper in like tree branches going into a chipper shredder. Is there any way to break this costly cycle of buying more paper so you can print more documents and then shred them to make more paper? There is, and you can thank your lucky cloud for it.


It’s cloud services that are finally starting to break the paper cycle. Clouds are nebulous things, so to speak. There is no hardware for you to deal with. You just access those clouds from your iPad, smartphone, desktop or notebook computer and accomplish what you had in mind. While on the go, you probably aren’t anywhere near a printer anyway. That means the business processes you use to get your job done have to be designed to work without paper.

This puts us in the interesting dilemma of half the people being fully interconnected online with the rest in a limbo state of half-online and half-offline. Many businesses and organizations still need those offline products like signed paper documents to copy, mail and file. Are you really going to trust email messages for your non-disclosure agreements, W9 tax forms, purchase orders or employment agreements? If it needs to pass a legal sniff test, a tweet, text message or an email just won’t do.

Fortunately, all is not lost. You may not be able to use casual online communication methods to support legally binding documents, but there is an electronic technology that does just that. Just in time, too, because business, government, health care and other serious endeavors are about to go paperless in a big way. The process is called electronic signature.

Electronic signature isn’t brand new. It’s just coming into the limelight with a recent stampede toward mobile computing and productivity oriented cost reductions. It supersedes makeshift solutions such as faxing (still paper intensive) and scanning paper documents so you can email them and have them printed off again at the far end. Electronic signature is a purely electronic system that doesn’t assume there is any actual paperwork to begin with.

RightSignature is a company in the forefront of this technology. What they’ve created is a way for e-signatures to replicate pen-and-paper signing when using a mouse and browser. The electronic documents then include handwritten biometric signatures that are legally binding. They are compliant with the E-Sign Act, UETA Act and European Directive that all establish the validity and legality of electronic signatures worldwide.

Getting a document signed is as simple as uploading a PDF or Word File to the RightSignature system, entering the required signers’ names and emails, and clicking send. RightSignature then contacts the signers by email to tell them how to access the online documents and sign them. When complete, all parties are notified and get electronic copies of the signed documents, plus a copy is archived.

It’s very similar to what you accomplish now, but without the flurry of copying, the cost of overnight mail, nor the interminable wait for physical documents to be delivered, signed and sent back. It’s estimated that the cost of processing a signed document can drop by more than an order of magnitude using the electronic signature process.

Would you like to give it a try? If you are a business or organization that needs to send out documents for signature, you can have a 5 document free trial right now. No credit card is required. Only buy the service if you like the way it works. Get your RightSignature Electronic Signature Free Trial started and see if you really want to go back to drowning in all that paper.

Website Reseller Hosting For One

Most people think of a website reseller hosting account as an easy way to get into the hosting business with a private branded turnkey operation. The other obvious use for reseller hosting is for the web designer who builds many small sites for local businesses and maintains them for a fee. But there is yet another important application for a reseller account. It’s highly flexible hosting that you use all yourself.

What sense does this make? The more domains you have, the more sense it makes. Back in the early days of the Internet, domain names were expensive and most businesses were happy just to have one domain for their online endeavors. But over the last decade or so, domains have gotten cheap enough to build a collection. You may want a separate domain name for each of your product lines, each division of a business, or each outreach program of a charity.

The next step is how to put all those names to work. In some cases, it is appropriate to build one site and point each domain at a different page or section of the website. In other cases, you really want different sites with different designs. Each domain supports a single site. Unfortunately, each site needs its own hosting.

Some companies buy their own servers and set them up to host their domains. Fewer small, medium and even large companies do that anymore. Like domains, hosting has become inexpensive enough that it makes more sense to buy the service rather than trying to run it yourself.

Here’s where economics comes in. You can give each domain its own hosting account at anywhere from $4 to $10 per month typically. If you only buy a few domains over the years and just buy them when you want to start up a new business, this is probably the low cost way to go. If most of your activity is online rather that bricks and mortar, you may have a collection of domains that numbers from a half-dozen to hundreds. Many online entrepreneurs and large organizations easily have 50 or 100 domains.

You can see how the cost of hosting dozens of domains can run into the hundreds of dollars per month with individual hosting plans. What many companies do that this point is move up to business hosting plans that let you host multiple domains on one service. The way this works is that each site you build has its own folder in your account. The hosting company sets up its servers to know which folder to grab files from for a particular domain name.

Does this approach work? Yes and no. You still have only one account, so you have a single .htaccess file that works across all sites. It’s possible that you can do something to tweak one site that will affect another. If your sites are all pretty similar and simple in design, loading a few domains on one hosting plan may work fine. I’ve done this over the years with good results. Even so, there is something even better that gives you the flexibility of having multiple hosting services but at a price more like one.

That something is website reseller hosting. The beauty of a reseller account is that it is already configured to keep your individual sites separate. You wouldn’t want a hosting customer or retail client of yours to be able to do anything that would affect another customer’s site, would you? Of course not. With reseller hosting, what you do with one of your sites will have no effect on the others.

The way this works is that you have two control panels. Many companies selling reseller accounts running on Linux servers are using WHM (Web Host Manager) and cPanel. The WHM panel is designed for you as the administrator of the site. It allows you to create and modify the hosting for each domain. You can allocate each site the amount of storage and bandwidth it needs. WHM is the master control panel to monitor and control all sites.

cPanel, the control panel, is intended for the webmaster of the individual site. Each site gets it own separate cPanel. You can log-into the cPanel with its unique username and password so that you can work on a particular site. If you are hosting for clients who want to maintain their own site, you give them the username and password for their control panel. You can always get to any site at any time through either the cPanel or the Web Host Manager.

What does the cPanel do for you? It lets you set up forwarding email addresses or POP mail accounts for a site, FTP files to the server instead of using a separate FTP client, access the server logs for that site, password protect directories, deny access from particular IP addresses who are bothering you or trying to hack your site, set up and administer MySQL databases, install server hosted software, and set specific server handlers for that particular domain.

I’ve been using HostGator Website Reseller Hosting for a couple of years now with excellent results. I’m running a couple of dozen domains, each for a separate site, on their smallest reseller account with plenty of capacity to spare. What’s considered small today compared to a half dozen years ago is really quite impressive. For $24.95 a month, you get 50 GB of disk space and 500 GB of monthly bandwidth to share among your sites. I’d suggest setting up a variety of hosting “packages” of various size storage and bandwidth in your WHM. Then you can assign the little sites small packages and save the big packages for your larger or more popular sites. You’ll be able to monitor and adjust bandwidth and disk usage for all sites from your WHM.

One peace of mind I really like about a reseller account is that you can set up a new site on a whim whenever you want. Just buy a domain name from HostGator or other favorite registrar and by the time you’ve got your account set up and your first pages created, you’ll be ready to go live online. It can be 3 AM when the muse strikes. With your reseller hosting you can add new accounts yourself in a matter of minutes any hour of the day or night. The best part is that the incremental cost of adding another site is only the cost of the domain. There’s no extra cost for adding another site to your reseller hosting.

Does this sound like the kind of flexibility you need in running your online operations? If so, check out the various low cost hosting packages, especially Website Reseller Hosting, that you’ll find at HostGator.

Dotster Eco-Friendly Hosting Commitment

Anyone doing business on the Internet in the last 10 years has heard of Dotster, and the Dotster family of companies including Domain.com. When you think of Dotster, you probably think of domain name registration services. Dotster is also a hosting company offering everything from basic email hosing service for under a dollar a month all the way up to enterprise level website hosting. What I’ll bet you didn’t know is that Dotster is a major player in the realm of eco-friendly hosting.


Eco-Friendly or “green” hosting is growing in popularity among individuals and organizations that want to contribute to a better environment. The conventional wisdom is that green means more expensive when the term is applied to just about anything. That’s not true anymore. You can have Dotster eco-friendly hosting for just $5.75 a month with no long term commitment. Sign up for longer term plans and it gets even cheaper.

Dotster has a multifaceted approach to their eco-friendly hosting initiative. It starts with buying wind energy to power their web hosting servers. What they do is purchase enough renewable energy credits to offset all the power used for their hosting and even more. The commitment is 150% renewable energy offset for all Dotster web hosting servers.

Dotster buys its renewable energy credits from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit organization. The revenues they receive from selling their BEF carbon offsets or renewable energy credits is used to support building new renewable energy projects that include solar, wind and biomass power sources. Socially responsible companies and individuals can both buy these energy credits from various organizations nationwide who fund sustainable energy projects.

Substituting wind energy for coal, natural gas or even nuclear power is a good idea. An even better idea is to find ways to use less energy to get the same job done. Dotster does this by constantly upgrading their hosting infrastructure to improve both reliability and energy efficiency. They buy less power, which reduces the amount they have to charge their customers. Less power means less demand from the grid, so that those new wind generators can handle other loads and further reduce the need for carbon-based energy sources.

This attitude of ecologically responsible behavior is infused throughout the Dotster corporate culture. They donate their used computer equipment to programs for recycling and technology education for the disadvantaged rather than dumping it in a landfill to slowly leach out toxic substances. The office staff is encouraged to reduce printing, use paperless billing, recycle batteries and ditch paper cups in favor of Dotster reusable bottles.

As the icing on the cake, Dotster will plant a tree for you when you become a new Dotster web hosting company. The trees come from Trees for the Future, an organization dedicated to sustainable agroforestry that has already planted 50 million trees worldwide.

If you are on the lookout for web hosting that is more in tune with your personal philosophy as well as reliable, feature rich and an excellent deal, take a closer look at Dotster.com Web Hosting and Domain Name Registration services.

Broadband Ethernet Internet Services

Ethernet point to point line service and LAN service have become popular with businesses, especially as replacements for T1 lines and now-obsolete Frame Relay networks. But did you also know that Ethernet makes an excellent access connection to MPLS VPN networks and the Internet?

Carrier Ethernet got its start for business as a MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) service called Metro Ethernet. Many companies have a need to interconnect multiple facilities located in the same general geographical area. The E-Line point to point services EPL and EVPL give you the same or better connectivity that you’ll get with T1 lines and even multiple T1 lines. E-LAN service links multiple LANs in a mesh network to interconnect your entire organization.

In many cases, what you want is a broadband connection to the Internet rather than a direct link to another private facility. These are traditionally provided using T1 lines and higher bandwidth services, such as DS3, OC3, OC12 and OC48. Now, EFM or Ethernet in the First Mile can provide that same connectivity and likely save you money in the process. Let’s see why.

The reason that T1 lines are so popular is that they are provisioned on ordinary twisted pair telco wiring. That wiring is already in place in most businesses, being used for multi-line telephone service. T1 has been around for more than 50 years and is well established and available most everywhere. The one fly in the ointment is that T1 is bandwidth limited to 1.5 Mbps. Until Ethernet over Copper became available, the workaround to this bandwidth limitation was to bond multiple T1 lines together to make one large data pipe. This proven practice works well, but gets expensive since you have to pay the full price of each T1 line no matter how many you order.

The competition to T1 now is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. As the name implies, this service also uses ordinary twisted pair copper telco wiring that is currently in place. Like bonded T1, EoC uses multiple copper pair to increase bandwidth. What’s different, though, is the cost structure. A popular Ethernet over Copper service is 3x3 Mbps EoC. That’s 3 Mbps upload and 3 Mbps download, a symmetrical bandwidth, delivered over copper wiring. The cost of 3 Mbps Ethernet is pretty much equal to the cost for a 1.5 Mbps T1 line in areas where both are available.

That’s a nice cost savings for any company, but it doesn’t stop there. Ethernet over Copper can be installed at speeds from 1 to 20 Mbps. Bonding T1 lines gets you maybe half that maximum bandwidth and gets real expensive as you add more lines. Ethernet is designed to be far more scalable. You have the provider install an Ethernet port for the highest speed you expect to need. Then order the bandwidth you require today. In the future, you can simply call your service provider and tell them to crank it up to the next level. They can give you a bandwidth increase in as little as an hour because the bandwidth capacity is already installed. No additional construction effort is needed.

What happens if you need more than 20 Mbps Internet service? At that point you need to move up to fiber optic service. The good news is that Ethernet over Fiber is more available than ever before and competitive service providers are willing to make deals on the installation cost, especially if your needs are substantial. Once you have fiber to the premises, you’ll be able to go form 50 or 100 Mbps on up to GigE Gigabit Ethernet and even 10 Gbps Ethernet broadband service if you need it.

Does your business location suffer from inadequate dedicated Internet service or are you just curious if you can save money over your present solution? If so, get prices and availability of Broadband Ethernet Internet Service over copper or fiber as appropriate. Sorry, this service is not available for home offices or other residential use.