You Pay Too Much For Your Business Phone

While we’ve been busily gathering and servicing new customers, the telephone industry has been changing behind our backs. If you are still using the same phone and provider that you had a decade ago, it’s seriously time for a review. You not only could be, but probably are, paying way more than you would have to and be missing out on some newer productivity features.

What’s so different now? After all, a phone is a phone, right?

Ah, not so anymore. All phones used to be pretty much the same. That’s because they all came from the same supplier, the local telephone company. The phone was a big dumb peripheral to the large scale switching system at the central office. Most single line phones were built from passive components and got their power through the phone line. Multi line business phones were also built from passive components but supplied from a power supply and line card rack in the back room. That was necessary to create such features as flashing a line button when it was on hold.

Some of business phones you can buy today are not much more sophisticated that the one’s that Ma Bell supplied. One difference is that they may have a plug-in power supply or batteries to power the electronics inside. The one to four line key telephone systems that you can buy from office supply stores have replaced the old electromagnetic switching with smaller electronic boxes. Still, they all work on the same old telephone lines called POTS.

POTS stands for Plain Old Telephone Service. It consists of independent analog business lines that run from your office to the phone company over twisted pairs of copper wires. Power and switching signals are provided by the telco switching system. The in-house key system lets you have more than one line on a phone with LEDs to show what’s in use or on hold.

Did you know that you can get POTS service from companies other than your local phone company? The telephone industry has been deregulated so that other providers can lease the bare copper wires that run to your office and supply you with local and long distance service. There can be a cost savings in doing nothing more than switching providers. Your phone system will work exactly the same as it does now only you’ll get a lower monthly phone bill.

If your system has grown to more than a half dozen lines, especially if you have upgraded to an in-house PBX switching system, you could benefit from bringing in a digital trunk line instead of all those separate analog lines. A digital trunk called T1 CAS or ISDN PRI bundles up to 23 or 24 separate lines into a single line that still keeps the phone conversations independent. Why do this? You could realize a big cost savings from consolidating your lines. Chances are that your PBX system already has a T1 or PRI connection or you can upgrade with a adaptor card.

You may be wondering if VoIP telephony is for you. The consumer grade services that run on the Internet may not give you the call quality consistency that you need for good customer support or other business communications. What can work very well and save you considerable money is something called a SIP Trunk. This is a digital line that transports both telephone calls and broadband Internet access but keeps them completely separate so they don’t interfere. It’s a way to take advantage of VoIP technology without losing call quality or reliability.

The latest innovation is cloud based communications, also called Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. This is sort of like going back to just having phones in-house connected to the phone company’s switching center. The difference is that you aren’t stuck with the local phone company as your only choice. Using SIP Trunks, you can connect to many different providers, all competing for your business. Not only can you save money on your monthly bill, but you’ll avoid investing in expensive PBX or Key telephone systems and get advanced features like being able to include your smartphones in the system.

Does this whet your appetite to investigate what is available for your business telephone needs? Get prices and features for a variety of business phone service options so you can be fully informed before making any new commitments.

When Asymmetrical Bandwidth Works Just Fine

Asymmetrical bandwidth has been pooh-poohed for business applications in favor of symmetrical bandwidth options. In some cases, you can wind up spending too much for the service you really need. In other cases, picking the wrong option will leave you frustrated and unproductive.

How do these symmetries work? Symmetrical bandwidth means that the upload and download speeds are exactly the same. You’ll see this identified as 3 x 3 Mbps Ethernet or 100 x 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. The classic example of symmetrical bandwidth is the venerable T1 line. It offers a fixed 1.5 Mbps in the upload or transmit direction and 1.5 Mbps in the download or receive direction.

T1, DS3 and SONET are all symmetrical bandwidth services. The reason for this is historical. These are standards developed by the telephone companies to transport phone calls in bulk. The same bandwidth is needed for talk as well as listen on both ends. Ethernet over Fiber and Copper also tends to be symmetrical. It’s because these services were designed as replacements for T1, DS3 and SONET when used in business.

Asymmetrical bandwidth is characterized by differences in the upload and download speeds. This can be as much as an order of magnitude or 10x. You might order a service with 20 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload or 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload.

Asymmetrical bandwidth is dominant in consumer broadband services. These include DSL, Cable, 3G and 4G wireless, two-way satellite, WiFi hotspots and WiMAX. Why? It’s the nature of the Internet.

Most people browse the Web or download software and video while they are online. When you are doing these things, you are sending commands via your keyboard to the remotely located Web server. These commands are inherently low bandwidth and are based on text you type or links you click on. Neither of these has very many bytes of data involved. Downloads are another matter. Web pages, video clips and streams, music and other audio, software updates and large files are all bandwidth intensive because of their large file sizes. You want the maximum bandwidth available for downloads to minimize load times. You don’t need much bandwidth at all in the upload direction for the usual Web browsing.

What changes this picture? Any process that results in sending out large files as well as receiving them. Examples are remote backups, video conferencing, posting photos and movies online, and making large updates to Web servers. Most consumers do some of these things some of the time. Businesses are far more likely to be sending as much as they receive. But... not all.

If you are heavily involved in big data, cloud computing, enterprise VoIP, video production and distribution, medical image transmission or similar large file operations, you’ll want to opt for symmetrical bandwidth. Fast download speeds may not be so valuable when you wait forever to upload something or try to conduct an HD video conference.

Why pick asymmetrical bandwidth options? The primary reason is to save money. The asymmetrical services like Cable, DSL and 3G wireless are usually priced at a fraction of the cost for symmetrical services. This is generally due to more than symmetry. Asymmetrical services are most often shared rather than dedicated bandwidth. This reduces costs dramatically but means that your bandwidth will vary depending on what other users are doing. There are generally no service level agreements or performance guarantees on asymmetrical bandwidth services. That may be changing as business service providers begin offering dedicated asymmetrical bandwidth options.

What is the best bandwidth option for your business? Find out by comparing prices and features for a wide variety of asymmetrical and symmetrical bandwidth options on carriers serving your business location. Free consulting is also available to help you make the appropriate choice.

Why Telephone Wiring is a Thing of the Past

One given in voice communication is the telephone network, a web of small gauge copper wiring that runs through buildings and underground or overhead to the nearest telco central office. The telephone network, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service, is a single purpose dedicated network that supports analog business phones and low speed devices such as fax machines.

Think of networks as similar to the highway system. There are high speed freeways, that's computer networks, and lower speed county roads, the telephone network. They exist at the same time in the same areas but serve different traffic needs.

While it’s true that analog telephone networks have been used to carry data via analog modems and that computer networks carry packet voice traffic, each of these networks was built for a specific purpose and they are generally incompatible. Technology advancements have now made the gravel roads of the analog telephone network largely obsolete.

They’re being replaced by high speed, high capacity LAN, MAN and WAN networks that easily transport voice, data and video simultaneously. Some use copper, some use fiber. Some even used repurposed phone lines for high speed digital transport like bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper (EoC). It's the old low speed analog circuits that are on the way out.

Many companies still have two separate networks in-house. One for the phones and one for the computers. This is true even if the telephony connection to the outside world is handled by digital ISDN PRI trunks or packet based SIP trunks. The interface that joins these two technologies is the PBX or Private Branch Exchange, your in-house telephone switching system.

What’s wrong with this arrangement? After all, the facility telephone wiring has been in place for decades and is fully paid for. It works just fine for telephone calls and fax messages. Why go to the trouble of moving your phones onto the computer network?

There are a couple of good reasons why companies are combining or converging their networks. Having only one network to maintain is less of a staff burden. Perhaps you even have a separate staff to manage the telephones or an outside contractor who comes in and does this. Every time a phone is installed or moved, wiring has to be changed or the PBX system reprogrammed. You can’t just pick up a phone and plug it into a different phone jack and expect it to ring at the same number. The physical connections determine the address of each device in the network.

Contrast this with Ethernet networks that connect the computers. The address of the computer is contained within the machine, not a function of the network. You can pick up your computer and take it anywhere in the building. Find an Ethernet jack, plug it in and it will work just as well as it did on your desk.

The same is true of IP phones, which are telephones with a computer network interface. The IP phone or SIP phone looks like any other computer or peripheral on the network. They each have their own address assigned either manually or automatically. The network will find them wherever they happen to be plugged in.

Ease of managing moves, adds and changes is one big advantage of IP telephony. Another is that your phone can now perform more sophisticated operations than just taking and making calls. It is possible to integrate computer and telephones in a call center to work as a team once both are on the same network.

IP phones are the basis of VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In a complete enterprise VoIP system, both the phones and the PBX, called an IP PBX, are connected to the LAN. The IP PBX communicates with your telephone service provider over a WAN connection called a SIP Trunk. Since you are free of the telephone company’s analog phone wires, you can get your VoIP service from any provider you can connect to via SIP Trunk.

One further advance is called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. This arrangement eliminates the PBX or IP PBX at your location and replaces it with an IP gateway. A SIP trunk connects to a cloud-based PBX system that handles all the switching, both internal and external. You avoid the investment in expensive PBX equipment and the ongoing maintenance as well as any maintenance of old school telephone wiring. Your cost is a fixed fee per phone. Just add or remove phones from your network and pay for only those in service.

Are you ready for a modern business phone system? Get competitive options and pricing for SIP trunks and Hosted VoIP to meet your business needs.

Business DSL Alternatives

Business DSL has been popular with small businesses because of its ready availability and low monthly cost. It works just great for some businesses and not so good for others. Some are out of luck completely. The service is just not available to them. Here’s a bit of explanation and some alternative ideas for companies that either can’t get business DSL or don’t like the way it works.

Business DSL is similar to residential DSL. It comes in on ordinary twisted pair telephone wiring. Usually this is just a single pair like a phone line. In fact, it is a phone line. This means that DSL is delivered by your telephone company. They own the copper and are the only ones who can connect to it. Often, though, they will lease out copper pairs to competitive carriers that also offer business DSL service.

One thing that often distinguishes business DSL from residential service is that the home variety is priced at bargain basement prices because it uses the same wires as your landline telephone. Filters are installed so that the low frequency voice signal and the higher frequency digital signal don’t interfere. Business DSL lines are often used only for the digital connection. The telephones have their own separate network.

Some things that business owners don’t like about DSL are the shared rather than dedicated bandwidth, relatively low speeds, outages that don’t get quick repairs and asymmetric bandwidth (for the ADSL variety).

If you’ve been disappointed with what you can get in DSL performance or can’t get DSL at all, consider these alternatives.

For about the same or a little more money, you can get either 3G wireless broadband or Cable broadband. Cable is like DSL on steroids. The much higher bandwidth can make up for shared and asymmetric bandwidth. Like DSL, Cable is distance limited and only available if the cable happens to pass near your business location. Forget DSL or Cable if you happen to be located in the countryside.

Wireless is now an option for businesses in rural and metropolitan areas. WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers offer what amounts a giant WiFi hotspot. In order to get a far enough reach, special antennas are needed at each business location. Another flavor of wireless service is fixed microwave wireless. This is business grade service only available mostly in downtown business districts. The provider installs a small antenna on the roof of your building and an Ethernet jack in your office. Bandwidths range from 1 to 45 Mbps for standard service and 50 to 100 Mbps for high speed options. You typically need a line of sight path within 6 miles of the provider’s tower.

There is a type of wireless service that is nationally available and usually doesn’t require outside antennas. This is 3G cellular using the same towers and signals as smartphone cellular. These towers offer strong signals for most businesses, especially if high performance indoor antennas and modems are employed. The 3G service is similar to many DSL service speeds. Now 4G is becoming available, with bandwidth similar to Cable.

One more wireless service that you can get even if there is no cellular service is satellite. All you need is a dish on the roof with a clear view of the southern sky. Prices and bandwidth are competitive with DSL, Cable and 3G. It’s good for many applications, but not VoIP or video conferencing. The latency or time delay is just too long going to and from the satellite.

Consider T1 and Ethernet over Copper if you want high reliability professional wireline connections with low latency. T1 is the classic telecom service. What’s changed is that it is now available nearly everywhere you can get landline phone service and prices are a fraction of what they were a few years ago. Bandwidth is competitive with many DSL services and this is symmetrical dedicated bandwidth. It also comes with a service level agreement that ensures your line will get the highest priority if a rare outage occurs.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has emerged recently as a competitor for T1. It is also dedicated rather than shared bandwidth, symmetrical with equal upload and download speeds, and service level agreements. EoC offers higher bandwidths that T1 that often rival the best you can get from Cable. Like T1, prices may be double what you pay for Cable or DSL, but the bandwidth is rock solid and highly reliable.

Are you dissatisfied with your current bandwidth options or simply want to see if you can get a better deal? If so, get complementary competitive business bandwidth options and prices to know the opportunities available for your business location.

What Makes Low Latency Bandwidth Important

Bandwidth is bandwidth, right? What’s really important is how many bits per second you can squeeze down the line, isn’t it? Or is it?

The speed of your connection is one important specification in a bandwidth solution that will meets the needs of your company. Others include availability, packet loss, jitter and latency. Don’t understate the importance of latency in providing a satisfactory WAN service.

What is latency and isn’t it related to bandwidth? In some cases, yes. Bandwidth increases latency when you don’t have enough for the job. If you have a huge file, say a radiology image, that you need to transfer to another location in 10 minutes and it takes 10 hours, you’ll feel the pain. If your VoIP calls are getting derailed by employee internet browsing, you’ll hear the pain. If your video conferencing breaks up so badly that it is unusable, your employee productivity can really be a source of pain.

Latency is the delay between sender and receiver. If you have all the bandwidth your equipment can possibly use, that delay is a function of how fast the packets can get through the line unimpeded. What slows them down is the speed of light in wire and fiber and any delays introduced by routers, switches and amplifiers along the way.

So, how is it possible to have plenty of bandwidth but too much latency? The perfect example is two-way satellite transmissions. You’ve no doubt noticed that on-location live TV reports seem to have a delay that prevents normal two-way conversations. The anchor and the reporter have to each pause before talking or they’ll talk over each other. That’s latency. Most of it is caused by the simple fact that the geostationary satellite relaying the signal is located about 22,000 miles overhead. Even in a vacuum it takes light and radio waves a millisecond for each 186 miles of distance or a full second for each 186,000 miles. This results in a minimum delay of a quarter-second for a one-way transmission or half a second for a round trip.

Is there a technical way to reduce this latency? Nope. As long as we use electromagnetic waves we’re stuck with Einstein’s speed limit. If you want lower latency, you need to use shorter paths.

One way that carriers are reducing latency is by establishing point to point connections that run in as straight a line as possible. This can mean new fiber installations with minimal length between cities. It also means removing as much electronics from the path as possible. Each box adds a little latency as the signals are converted from light to voltage to light again. Of course, bandwidth has to be high enough that it appears to be transparent to the application.

An extreme example of lower latency requirements is high speed financial trading. It’s computers making trade decisions and placing the orders far faster than a human broker possibly could. Half a second delay is eternity to such systems. Every millisecond counts when you are issuing hundreds or thousands of buy/sell orders every second. Even an optimized fiber optic link from out of state or across national borders may have too much latency. The optimized solution is to move your computers into the same data center as the trading floors. This gets the delay problem from milliseconds down to microseconds and nanoseconds.

You may not need such highly optimized latency reduction solutions for your business. However, you should be aware that cloud services can become latency limited. Any signal delay through your own company LAN is likely unnoticeable. Stretch that connection out a thousand miles or two over the Internet and you may experience noticeable response delays in interacting with your applications. If you can’t live with the performance of the public Internet, you need a latency optimized bandwidth solution.

Big fiber optic carriers like Zayo, MegaPath and XO communications offer high bandwidth low latency private line connections that can improve the performance of your cloud based applications. You’ll also need this for high quality VoIP telephony and video conferencing. Be sure to investigate the impact of latency on your SIP Trunks and multi-location networking through MPLS. Low latency solutions are available for just about every need.

Do you need lower latency as well as higher bandwidth? Get competitive pricing on low latency high speed bandwidth solutions for local, interstate and international connections.

Hosted PBX Adds Video Services

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP, is becoming popular with large, medium and small businesses as a way to get the latest phone features without the big investment. Now that capability is being expanded to include video services as well.

MegaPath, a major competitive network carrier and cloud service provider, is adding cloud-delivered unified communications video services to its hosted PBX portfolio.

The key to video with voice is a new generation of business phones that replaces traditional analog desk phones and even VoIP digital phones. Polycom, one of the leaders in IP telephony, calls these media phones. These are telephones with video screens. Think of them as tablets that look like telephones. Some have cameras built-in. Others use a plug-in webcam.

Unified Communications (UC) is the process of combining voice, data and video on a single network. UC in the cloud is the next step. All you need are your company LAN and the network attached equipment that meets your business needs. In many cases, this is desktop computers and telephones. Everything else can go to the cloud. Add video capability and you have desktop conferencing without buying any new servers or making big changes to your network. All the complexity involved in making this work is handled out there in the cloud.

What are the advantages of adding video to your voice communications? You instantly have video conferencing without the infrastructure and inconvenience of setting up special video conference rooms and having people convene there at a particular time. Video conferencing has long been used as a substitute for expensive and time consuming travel. Desktop video conferencing takes that to the next level. Now you can have spontaneous or scheduled video conferences without having to uproot otherwise productive employees just to waste time gathering at the other end of the office.

Where else do you see this type of personalized video communications? Smartphones, of course. Also tablets, Ultrabooks and laptop computers. All of these have one thing in common: mobility.

The fact is that people don’t work in one particular location anymore. You may have your first conversations before you leave home in the morning or on the way to work. Then you spend some time at your desk along with moving around in the office. Many employees will leave the office building at some point to meet with clients or other business and personal related activities. In the old days that means having an operator take your incoming messages or letting callers record voicemail. You’d find out who was calling and why when you got back to your desk.

At the speed of business now, you can’t afford to be incommunicado for hours or even minutes. A missing employee can put an entire team project on hold. A sales prospect may well move on to the next vendor if they don’t get through to a person immediately. You need all of your communications integrated into one unified system.

This is where cloud-based PBX services shine. They support integrating desk phones and mobile phones in a process called Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). With the addition of video and single number calling, you are now connected at all times with the same feature set no matter where you happen to be.

Another feature of many hosted VoIP systems is HD audio. We’re used to the sound of standard “toll grade” voice quality. This has somewhat degraded with the introduction of mobile phones and some inadequate VoIP systems. HD audio reverses the trend to make VoIP a higher voice quality service than traditional analog and digital TDM arrangements.

Are you feeling that your current business phone system is hurting rather than enhancing your productivity. Are you having maintenance headaches or face a major capital investment in new equipment? Don’t commit yourself to any particular solution until you’ve had the chance to evaluate Hosted PBX Cloud Services for audio and video communications.

California and Nevada Get 200 Mbps Bandwidth over Copper

It’s no secret that business bandwidth demands have been skyrocketing in the last decade or so. Companies that used to be successfully connected with T1 lines (1.5 to 12 Mbps) or DS3 (45 Mbps) are now finding that line speeds over 100 Mbps are needed to support HD video, big data and cloud computing.

Companies in California and Nevada now find it much easier to get up to 200 Mbps over multiple copper pair. Notice that I said copper, not fiber. It’s no trick to get bandwidths this high or higher over SONET or Ethernet over Fiber. The big stumbling block is getting the fiber installed.

The beauty of fiber optics is that the bandwidth is nearly unlimited. Once the fiber is in place you can swap out terminal equipment at each end to increase single wavelength fiber speed or install wavelength division multiplexing equipment to multiply the bandwidth capacity of each fiber strand. Now, if there was only a way to get fiber installed without breaking the bank.

You may not have to. Modulation technology developments have given a new lease on life to the same twisted copper pairs that carry your analog business phones or T1 data lines. Standard Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology uses up to 8 twisted pair to deliver roughly 3 to 45 Mbps. In special cases that has been increased to 100 Mbps. There is no need to install new copper pair to the building, so construction costs are minimized and you don’t have to worry about fiber runs being available in the area.

Technology continues to advance rapidly. Now TelePacific is doubling the current offer of 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper to 200 Mbps. They call the upgrade EEoC for Enhanced Ethernet over Copper. It’s already available in 247 of their LSOs (Local Service Offices) in California and Nevada. That number is increasing to 284 LSOs this year. That makes EEoC service available to a potential quarter million SMB (Small to Medium size Businesses).

Compare EEoC to services like OC-3 at 155 Mbps or Fast Ethernet over Fiber at 100 Mbps. The speed is higher and you don’t need fiber. For many if not most SMBs a bandwidth of 200 Mbps will meet their needs far into the future. By the time 200 Mbps is no longer adequate, technology will likely increase this speed again or fiber will be pulled into your building by TelePacific or another competitive service provider.

What if you don’t happen to be located in California or Nevada? Are you out of luck for any reasonable amount of bandwidth for your business?

Far from it. There are multiple options available just about anywhere to increase your line speed. The ubiquitous T1 line has been available to business users for decades and is still selling briskly. The only thing that’s changed over the years is the price. Competition from multiple providers and other services has dropped T1 prices significantly. Plus, lines can now to bonded to increase bandwidth from 1.5 Mbps on up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That’s plenty for many smaller companies.

Need more speed? Ethernet over Copper is available nationwide from multiple providers. It’s very easy to get EoC in speeds that range from 3 to 30 or even 50 Mbps in most business areas. Companies that are in smaller towers or out in the countryside are the exception. They’ve always been able to get T1, but now a variation on EoC called EoDS1 gives you Ethernet over Copper using beyond city limits. Fiber optic carriers are also aggressively building out their networks and wiring up multi-tenant buildings as fast as it makes sense. You may not have been able to get fiber last year, but this year could be a different story.

Are you looking for a bandwidth upgrade for your business? Would you be delighted to find out that you can get the same bandwidth you have now or even more for no additional cost? It’s time to check out your options. Get a complete list of options and prices, plus free consulting services to help you choose the best approach. You might be surprised by what’s available today.