tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-97468012024-03-20T15:17:11.282-05:00TelexplainerEasy to understand information about the latest in commercial telecommunications and networking technologyT1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comBlogger1820125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-22946370462930666922024-03-20T15:16:00.000-05:002024-03-20T15:16:40.357-05:00How AI is Helping to Improve Call Centers<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
All of us have been frustrated when making calls to customer service… and it seems to be getting worse. High costs and labor shortages serve to dishearten the poor customer hanging on the phone for hours and, also, the companies who desperately need to provide a favorable experience to keep their customers and attract new ones. Tech correspondent David Pogue discusses this situation and possible solutions in this CBS News report:<br><br>
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Did you catch that the likely solution going forward is a combination of traditional call center agents and new artificial intelligence software. The example in the story is called Grace. Here’s a more detailed look at how Grace works as a stand-alone agent: <br><br>
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Of course, even the most advanced AI agents come to a screeching halt when confronted by unique or complex situations. That’s where the best solution is to transfer immediately to a trained human agent. Some of the best agents are located in countries outside the United States and English is not their first language. Many US customers are put off by interacting with an agent with a heavy foreign accent, even though this agent has excellent technical skills. A new AI tool that can help is from a company called Sanas. The software works to change the speaker’s accent without otherwise affecting the conversation. You can <a href="https://www.sanas.ai/demo">try it out online and compare how actual call center agents sound</a> with and without the AI support. <br><br>
<b>Behind the Scenes</b><br>
Not all AI tools directly interact with customers. More mundane, yet important, applications include optimizing networks to get the best performance. SD-WAN is a simple system that combines multiple Internet or direct line connections and continuously chooses what traffic to direct down what path. Highly sensitive functions like VoIP phone calls and teleconferences get highest priority on for the lowest latency paths. Less sensitive operations, like remote backups, get lower priority and lesser performing paths. <br><br>
AI software is also valuable for intelligently routing calls to ensure that they go to the next available person that can properly handle them and to track down key players regardless of whether they are at their desks or on the move. <br><br>
Do you have communications issues that might be helped with newer or better technical solutions? Things are changing rapidly. <a href="https://www.cloudbrokerageservice.com">Get support and find out what telecom solutions can really benefit your company.</a><br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-19406274428393240602024-02-21T15:02:00.000-06:002024-02-21T15:02:47.573-06:00Colocation Hosting Offers Lower Costs and More<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Traditionally, having your own data center has been the way to go for medium and larger businesses. It may still be the best answer for your needs. However, there are advantages to moving at least some of your equipment and data to a colocation hosting facility. Let’s have a look at why this might be a great idea. <br><br>
<a href="https://www.cloudnetworkingservices.com"><img src="https://www.CloudNetworkingServices.com/images/ColocationHosting300.jpg" width="300" height="284" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Colocation Hosting offers advantages for your business." /></a> <b>Just What is Colocation?</b><br>
Colocation sounds like it means having two or more operations in one location. That’s pretty much it. Colocation facilities were originally called carrier hotels. Multiple service providers would locate equipment in the same building run by one of the carriers or a third party who provided common services such as HVAC, AC power, backup generator power, and connectivity as needed. It was a way for carriers to easily exchange traffic on neutral turf and not have to each pay for their own building. <br><br>
Nowadays colocation facilities or “colos” serve businesses as well as carriers. They are still a great way to connect to the Internet with as much bandwidth as you need at the best prices and connect to various carriers who also happen to be in the facility. Compare that with trying to get 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps out in the boonies. <br><br>
In addition to bandwidth, colocation centers offer rack space, cabinets, cages and the power, cooling and connections to go with them. You generally bring your own servers and storage and take responsibility for maintaining your equipment. Many colos also now offer expanded tech services to monitor and service equipment 24/7 and may even lease you servers and other equipment you would normally buy. <br><br>
<b>Why Pay Someone Else to Host My Servers?</b><br>
It may seem logical to keep everything under one roof, but that doesn’t necessarily give you everything you need. For one thing, you have no redundancy in the event of a disaster. A tornado, hurricane, earthquake or flood can wipe out your data center and you’ll be out of business for awhile. If you keep all your backups in the same data center, that could take a long while and very expensive to recreate all the data you need.<br><br>
By having at least some of your servers and storage offsite, you gain the advantage of redundant facilities. It works even better if your sites are geographically dispersed. <br><br>
As mentioned previously, you’ll likely find much better connectivity at better prices in a colocation center. Carriers go where many potential customers are clustered so that they can quickly and easily provide service. It’s just a cable run in the colo.<br><br>
Are you able to provide tech service 24/7? Most colocation facilities have their own tech staffs available round the clock to handle their equipment and often provide a suite of services to their customers. <br><br>
Think about the cost of expansion. If you are running out of space now, you have a make or buy decision to face. Making means building or leasing a larger facility to accommodate your growing needs, including more backup power, tech support, and security. Buying means avoiding the capital investment in facilities and leasing from a colo, likely at much lower cost that doing it all yourself. <br><br>
Another area where colos shine is being physically close to your customers to reduce transmission latency. That’s more important if you have latency sensitive real-time applications and if you are selling your service nationwide or worldwide. Some of the larger colos have multiple sites so that you can disperse your equipment as needed.<br><br>
Is your business growing and creating a need for additional data center capacity or would you simply prefer to lease rather than buy the IT facilities you need? If so, <a href="https://www.cloudnetworkingservices.com/Colocation/data-center-colocation.php">consider the advantages of colocation hosting and get competitive quotes now.</a><br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-4935377675711834682024-01-10T15:40:00.000-06:002024-01-10T15:40:03.417-06:00Advantages of Dedicated Point to Point Fiber<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
If you are running a business and your broadband connections are driving you crazy, you may want to take a look at an alternate solution called dedicated point to point lines. Let’s have a look at what they are and what they can do for you.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.FiberNetworkQuotes.com"><img src="https://www.FiberNetworkQuotes.com/images/FiberOpticLines300.jpg" width="300" height="450" border="0" align="left" hspace="15" vspace="10" alt="Connect you business locations with dedicated point to point fiber." /></a><b>What Does Dedicated Mean?</b><br>
Dedicated means that the bandwidth you are paying for is dedicated to your operations only. <br><br>
But isn’t all bandwidth dedicated if you pay for it?<br><br>
This is where it gets a little tricky. If you look closely at what broadband providers offer, they say something like “bandwidth up to 300 Mbps” or a similar disclaimer. Yes, the service you bought is capable of running at 300 Mbps. When you run a speed test, you may well see it clock-in at 300 Mbps… but not necessarily every time you test.<br><br>
Why is that? It is because the bandwidth you got for such a bargain price is shared, not dedicated. You and multiple other users, including other businesses and consumers, are all connected to the same access line. When demand is low, you get screaming speeds. When everybody wants to download or upload files at the same time, that available bandwidth will be divvied up fairly so that everybody gets a share but nobody gets the line all to themselves. You might be waiting a bit.<br><br>
If you want the line all to yourself and your business, you need to order a dedicated service. With dedicated bandwidth there won’t be other users outside of your organization competing for your line bandwidth. Whatever you aren’t using at the moment simply sits there idle for the time being. <br><br>
You can greatly improve the stability of your Internet service with what is called DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. That’s a dedicated line from your company to your Internet Service Provider, where it connects to the Internet itself. <br><br>
Will that guarantee smooth performance? Not really. Remember that the Internet is a shared service by its nature. There will be congestion and failure points from time to time no matter how you connect. The next step up is dedicated point to point fiber service.<br><br>
<b>Dedicated Point to Point Fiber</b><br>
Dedicated lines have been available for decades using copper pairs and legacy telecom fiber called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. Nowadays the best value is Ethernet over Fiber or EOF. <br><br>
Fiber optic Ethernet services, sometimes called Metro Ethernet Fiber, are directly compatible with your servers using standard Ethernet interfaces. Unlike the Internet, you specify what two locations you want connected. The provider installs ports at each location and you have an always-on dedicated point to point fiber connection between them. You can order service starting at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps and go up to 10 Gbps easily. In metro areas 100 Gbps bandwidth is available if you need it. <br><br>
Advantages of dedicated point to point or P2P lines include solid bandwidth that is not affected by what other customers are doing. The link is inherently more secure than the Internet because there is no public access. Your bandwidth is usually symmetrical, meaning that it is the same for upload and download. That’s important if you are accessing remote servers to upload and download large files. Most shared bandwidth services are asymmetrical with download speeds typically 10x what you get for upload.<br><br>
What are good uses for dedicated P2P fiber? The traditional application is linking multiple business locations. You may want to connect your headquarters and branch offices on the same private network so that someone across the country seems like they are just down the hall. Remote servers in colocation facilities or your own remote data center can also benefit from “extending the LAN” using dedicated P2P. Today that’s extended to the cloud, be it public, private or hybrid cloud services.<br><br>
Do you need the stability and performance that dedicated point to point fiber line services can provide? If so, find out what fiber optic services are available for your business locations.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-7681703096399874462023-12-18T14:13:00.000-06:002023-12-18T14:13:00.353-06:00Cost Saving Shared Fiber, Wireless and Coax<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
You need connectivity but are feeling the pinch of inflation. Is there any way to get a business online and not break the bank? Sure there is. If they work for you, shared bandwidth wireless, cable coax and fiber optic connections are available at bargain prices. Let’s have a look at these. <br><br>
<a href="https://www.megatrunks.com"><img src="https://www.MegaTrunks.com/images/FWC300.jpg" width="250" height="485" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Low cost shared bandwidth options for your business." /></a><b>What is Shared Bandwidth?</b><br>
You are probably too young to remember telephone party lines, but how about roommates at school? That’s the sharing economy. It’s based on the idea that if something is expensive you can still have it as long as you join with others to foot the bill. <br><br>
Internet connections can be had the same way. A fully dedicated high speed symmetrical fiber optic link can run into the big bucks every month. If that’s what you must have, then you’ll just have to come up with the lease fee. But, if your usage isn’t all that demanding, you can probably share the line with others, not limited to users within your company, to split the cost. <br><br>
Now, this is where shared bandwidth services differ from the old party lines. Back in the day, a single analog phone line would serve multiple households in the same area. When you picked up the handset, you might hear a dial tone or you might hear someone else’s conversation already in progress. <br><br>
The polite thing to do was hang up and wait awhile before you tried again. More often that not, curious individuals would simply cover the mouthpiece and eavesdrop on the call. <br><br>
Shared bandwidth isn’t really like that… for the most part. You and another customer aren’t going to see each other’s traffic on your screen. The routing in the system keeps your data streams separate. However, all your bits are intermingled on the same line. A clever hacker can figure out how to monitor whatever traffic they can access. <br><br>
The way around that limitation is encryption. Encrypt all your traffic and you’ve created a secure tunnel through the public Internet. That’s critical for using WiFi hotspots, but important for any shared access or easily tapped-into connection. Most websites and email services have gone to secure connections that are encrypted, but all your file transfers should also have this layer of security.<br><br>
<b>Shared Bandwidth Via Coax</b><br>
Cable broadband is the originator of the coaxial copper connection. This standard was originally designed for analog cable TV and community antennas. Eventually a cable connector came standard on the back of TV sets. Later, Cable providers became Internet Service Providers by developing a modem that could connect to their coaxial line and share the bandwidth between TV and Internet. <br><br>
The modem technology that does this is called DOCSIS for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. The most common version is 3.1, which is capable of multiple Gigabits on the downline side. The newest is 4.0, which can support 10 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream. <br><br>
<b>Shared Bandwidth Via Wireless</b><br>
Smartphones have had excellent Internet service starting with 3G and 4G LTE. The small screen requirements are easily supported and were quite useful even with the old 2G standard. The standards also serve tablet computers, laptops and in some cases desktop computers, especially when other ISPs are offline. The bandwidth is often enough from a shared smartphone connection. The one limitation for desktop usage is that you might run up against monthly data limits. <br><br>
With 5G service, cellular providers have begun promoting the use of their Internet service at fixed locations. They even have a name for this: Fixed Wireless Access. Instead of sharing your phone with your desktop, you buy a 5G gateway that may offer an Ethernet port for your network or WiFi hotspot. It connects to the provider like a phone, but without the mobility or voice service. There is simply an incremental charge to your cellphone bill each month. If you have good signal strength, you may get bandwidth of a hundred or two hundred Mbps without a wired connection.<br><br>
<b>Shared Bandwidth Via Fiber</b><br>
Fiber optic service used to be only for major corporations and priced accordingly. Now fiber is so widespread that you can get Ethernet over Fiber Dedicated Internet Access in most reasonably populated areas. Bandwidths are available from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps and even 100 Gbps in major metro locations.<br><br>
Fiber Internet is highly desirable and prices have dropped dramatically over the years. Even so, you may still want a lower cost option. Did you know that you can still have fiber for a bargain price? The technology involved is called PON or Passive Optical Networking. The provider takes that high bandwidth dedicated fiber line and divvies it up among 32 users using a passive splitter. Each customer still gets a fiber line, but the bandwidth on that line is being shared among multiple users just like cable broadband. In fact, cable companies are pioneers in building out this technology. You get fiber bandwidths, but with pricing that is more similar to cable services.<br><br>
<b>Limitations of Shared Bandwidth</b><br>
While you won’t be seeing your neighbors messages popping up on your screen, you will likely still feel the effects of sharing. During periods of heavy usage, the service slows down. You might even detect congestion that brings everything to a crawl and then, just like with traffic jams, magically disappears. VoIP phone calls can break up. Video conferences can stutter or freeze. Cloud applications can become sluggish. <br><br>
Another characteristic of shared bandwidth connections is that they are usually asymmetrical. That means that the download speed is much higher than the upload speed. Typically, a factor of ten or so. For Internet browsing or email, this may make no difference. It could impact video conferences and large file transfers up to cloud storage.<br><br>
You can improve on this with a dedicated Internet access or with a software defined wide area network or SD-WAN. This is a technique for combining multiple Internet connections. The SD-WAN controller assigns traffic to the most appropriate link, with sensitive applications like phone calls getting the highest priority on the fastest paths. SD-WAN can let you combine a fast shared and low cost line with a small dedicated line. The result can be a service that gives you all the performance you need at a lower cost than a high speed dedicated fiber line. <br><br>
What bandwidth service is most appropriate for your business? Find out what <a href="https://www.megatrunks.com">shared and dedicated Internet and private line services</a> are available at better prices for your particular location.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-24833210562606062392023-11-10T15:13:00.000-06:002023-11-10T15:13:15.949-06:00When It Comes to Computer Networks, Trust No One and No Thing<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Network security is a major headache for business. It almost makes one long for the days of one computer per desk and nothing connected to anything else. <br><br>
Almost. Those air-gapped computers weren’t all that secure either. Sneaker networks, meaning running around with floppy discs, allowed malware to spread and sensitive files to be copied. It’s just that today’s networks with LANs, local data centers, multi-clouds, and the Internet make it really hard to know who’s sneaking in where and what they are up to. <br><br>
One breach in a corporate network can run up a cost in the millions. If ransomware is involved, the bill can be a lot higher… and a lot more disruptive. What can you do? Don’t be so trustful. Make sure your system is suspicious of everybody and everything all the time. The buzzword for that is “zero trust security.”<br><br>
<a href="https://www.cloudbrokerageservice.com"><img src="https://www.CloudBrokerageService.com/images/CastleWithMoatC250.jpg" width="300" height="350" align="left" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" alt="Protect your castle with better network security" /></a><b>What is Zero Trust and How is it Different?</b><br>
Traditional network security is sometimes compared to a castle with a moat. The castle is your corporate network. Everybody inside the castle is considered to be friendly and trustworthy. Everybody beyond that moat is suspected to be an enemy. The drawbridge is your firewall. It works to keep the bad actors away from the castle while allowing trustworthy visitors access. It assumes that everything bad is going to come through the Internet.<br><br>
There are a couple of weak links with this approach. First is that some bad actors can already be inside the castle. There are spies and infiltrators and even trusted employees that have turned rogue. Of course we want to trust our colleagues, and that’s how we get in trouble. Even worse when we automatically trust our vendors and customers. <br><br>
Then there is the famous tale of the Trojan Horse. Gee, it sure looks safe enough. Let’s open the firewall and bring it in. You can just imagine some well-meaning but naive individual in your company doing just that. Of course the gullible Trojans got the worst of that deal since once the Greeks were inside they had the run of the city. <br><br>
Moral of the story: It’s too easy to have your organization destroyed by one little misstep. Trust no one and no thing. Network security is not an insult to your integrity. It’s a way to make everyone more secure and prevent little slips from becoming major disasters. That means high security processes both inside and outside the network.<br><br>
<b>What Makes Zero Trust Work?</b><br>
It starts with having everybody and every thing, meaning anything attached to the network, prove that it is approved for access and what they are approved for. You can’t really say that because someone has been cleared by, say, logging-on, that they should be able to access all the files and every peripheral on the net.<br><br>
Oh, no. You must have a need to know for everything you want to access. That leads to segmenting the network into much small pieces that each have to be accessed separately. You may have access to one set of information to be able to do your job, but no way are you getting into some of the companies trade secrets or even financial data. Access to HR files? Fat chance… unless you are specifically authorized to see them. <br><br>
Each use and each device will have a profile constructed that says what they can do and where they can do it. These lists will be used by the network administration to grant or refuse access. You may find that your access times out and you have to log in again to keep using a particular resource. Multi-Factor Authentication, like password plus a code sent to a mobile phone or a hardware key that must be plugged-in, is especially valuable for access through the Internet or to highly sensitive data.<br><br>
Zero Trust Security does take some doing to implement and maintain, but it can also be the means that keeps hackers and scammers of all sorts from stealing your information or damaging your systems. Are you feeling vulnerable? <a href="https://www.cloudbrokerageservice.com">Learn more about how to secure and safeguard your network and get a complementary quote appropriate for your business.</a> <br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-4985926741615601342023-10-31T14:40:00.000-05:002023-10-31T14:40:06.609-05:00Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Metro Fiber Ethernet<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Have you ever wished that you could stretch your LAN to cover other locations around the block or around an entire city and suburbs? You can. Best of all, you don’t have to do it personally. A Metro Fiber Ethernet connection will plug into your LAN at one location and plug into your LAN at another location. <br><br>
<a href="https://www.fibernetworkquotes.com"><img src="https://www.FiberNetworkQuotes.com/images/CityFiber300.jpg" width="275" height="393" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Get quotes on Metro Fiber Ethernet" /></a><b>The Problem Connecting Multiple LANs</b><br>
Most all private networks are now Ethernet LANs or Local Area Networks. Within your realm, you have complete control. You string the cabling. You provide the switches and routers. You hook up the user equipment. You manage the entire network operations.<br><br>
It doesn’t matter what the company next door or across town is doing. They won’t be bothering your network. They have their own to serve their employees. <br><br>
This is all well and good until you get another location that is not on your campus. What are you going to do to tie them together? You could go into the business of pulling a fiber bundle across town. Just get the rights of way, bring in the trenching equipment and get to work. It keeps you in control, but it gets really expensive really fast. It also takes forever and may be blocked by city organizations that just don’t want you doing it.<br><br>
<b>The Internet Will Interconnect Your Locations… Sort of</b><br>
Hey, the Internet is available. It goes everywhere. You probably have service at each of your locations already. Why not simply exchange files and route phone calls over the Internet?<br><br>
Actually, this works after a fashion. You can connect anything to anything over the Internet. However, you need to be mindful about how you do this or you’ll find out it is nowhere near the expectation of a transparent line connection.<br><br>
The Internet is so available and so cheap because of scale. It does connect everybody to everybody else, and they are all on one big party line. No way do you have any say over priority of traffic or who is accessing that traffic. It’s a big happy family and everybody potentially has their nose in everybody’s business.<br><br>
There are ways to make this work better. First, get dedicated access. No, you won’t have a private connection through the Internet, but you can order a private line to the Internet. That helps greatly with keeping your service consistent. <br><br>
Also, make sure you encrypt the daylights out of anything you send through a public network. If not, you are just asking for eavesdroppers to lick their chops as they read through all your sensitive documents or tap into your phone calls and video conferences.<br><br>
To really make the Internet seem like your private lane, take a look into SD-WAN, or Software Defined Wide Area Networking. This is a technique of combining multiple internet connections of different types, such as wireless, fiber, copper, and cable, using software to pick the best path for each packet despite constantly changing network conditions. It sets priorities and knows that data backups take a back seat to interactive cloud services.<br><br>
<b>Better Yet, Go Private</b><br>
Now we’re getting to Metro Fiber Ethernet. It’s a service provided by a commercial carrier but not part of the Internet. You get a LAN to LAN connection between your locations. You can set it up as point to point, like a direct line. You can also set it up as multipoint to multipoint for any number of locations in the area. They’ll all be on that one big LAN. Another flavor of this service is a direct to cloud connection that connects you to your cloud service provider through a local data center.<br><br>
Sometimes the Metro designation is a bit limiting. You need to connect to cloud services or branch offices in another city, state or even country. Many fiber optic network providers have connections that go far beyond your city and may have interconnections with other networks to extend the reach across International borders.<br><br>
You can also contract with a private service provider called an MPLS or Multi Protocol Label Switching network. These are wide area service providers that are privately owned and not accessible by the general public. They will guarantee performance and connect your far flung empire with low latency and high bandwidth. Security is enchanted because this type of network has its own protocol that differs from what runs on the Internet.<br><br>
Do you have a need to interconnect business locations with speed, reliability and privacy? <a href="https://www.fibernetworkquotes.com">Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Metro Fiber Ethernet might be just what you need at a reasonable cost.</a> For even higher performance 100 Gbps bandwidth are also supported in key metro areas. <br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-74309680315513956442023-09-29T14:08:00.000-05:002023-09-29T14:08:45.023-05:00Are T1 Lines Obsolete?<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Have you been using a T1 line for years, perhaps decades? Yes, they’ve been around that long. At the dawn of the Internet, a T1 line offered business a solid, reliable, high bandwidth connection that made dial-up phone line modems look glacially slow. Nowadays similarly priced bandwidth options make those venerable T1 lines seem equally pokey. So, are T1 lines still a good business solution or in their twilight years?<br><br>
<a href="https://www.t1rex.com"><img src="https://www.T1Rex.com/images/TelephoneLines300.jpg" width="300" height="419" border="0" align="left" hspace="15" vspace="10" alt="Upgrade your telecom services from T1 lines to fiber optic, cable or fixed wireless access." /></a><b>The T1 Story</b><br>
T1 lines are a product of Bell Labs, which created them to serve the telephone industry. The idea was to replace 24 analog phone lines with two pair that carried a digital multiplex of all the phone calls. There were two advantages, It saved copper wiring and reduced background noise. That was especially true for long distance calls that used analog multiplexing to send multiple calls over a single line. If you remember the switchover from analog to digital toll calls, it seemed almost eerie to no longer hear hiss and garbled conversations during your phone conversations.<br><br>
T1 lines got a an additional use when they were released to business for Internet access. A protocol conversion interface on each end took care of the translation between synchronized phone channels and Ethernet packets. Businesses only knew they had a highly reliable 1.5 Mbps always-on Internet connection. In the late 1990’s and into the first decade of the 2000’s, that 1.5 Mbps was speedy bandwidth.<br><br>
A variation of T1 lines, called ISDN PRI, still used T1 for multiple phone lines to corporate PBX phone systems. T1 has been a mainstay of phone and FAX communications for businesses since.<br><br>
<b>The T1 Twilight Years</b><br>
Two factors are driving T1 lines into retirement. The first is the need for much higher bandwidths. You might have increased your bandwidth in 1.5 Mbps increments by bonding additional T1 lines to make one larger pipe. There is no economy of scale. Three T1s cost three times the price of one line. It's also hard to get above 10 Mbps with this approach.<br><br>
Today, we think in terms of hundreds of Mbps and 1 to 100 Gbps as the right level of broadband to support cloud services. That means fiber optic rather than copper based line services. T1 is relegated to smaller business applications such as credit card verification, security alarms, multi-line phone systems and email service. Even so, with the increasing availability of fixed wireless access and fiber optic service, prices on the newer technologies are coming down and T1 isn’t becoming more affordable. <br><br>
The second factor is the local telephone companies that own the twisted pair copper connections needed to bring in T1 lines. The telcos themselves are switching out copper in favor of fiber and chosing to abandon their copper assets. In some larger cities, copper lines are pulled out of conduits so that fiber cables can take their place. <br><br>
Even smaller businesses are shunning older telco tech such as DSL and T1 in favor of very low cost broadband and telephone from their Cable providers. The newer DOCSIS modems can support gigabit level broadband delivered over traditional coaxial cable. <br><br>
<b>Are T1 Lines Still Used?</b><br>
In some areas T1 lines are still being sold and provisioned. They can be especially valuable in rural areas where fiber, cellular and cable services haven’t yet reached. Some businesses may choose to keep their existing phone systems and FAX machines which are supported by the T1 protocol. A T1 line for these applications and fiber or cable for broadband can make a nice combined solution.<br><br>
The issue is how long T1 service will still be offered. It’s really a question of time. At some point you may find that new T1 lines can’t be ordered and eventually you may get a letter saying that your T1 service will not be renewed. At that point there is no choice but to move on. Cellular 4G LTE modems designed for business can take over many T1 functions where available. Most companies will be switching to fiber optic connections and cloud based phone and FAX solutions.<br><br>
<b>What is Best For Your Company?</b><br>
Business grade fiber optic services are now priced much lower on a per Mbps basis than T1, DS3 and other legacy telco services. Fixed wireless using 4G LTE or 5G can be installed quickly and offer higher bandwidths. Gigabit cable broadband is also a great option for many applications. <a href="https://www.t1rex.com">Find out now what bandwidth services are available for your business location</a> so you can make the best decision for your needs.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-39017373033566337452023-08-29T14:41:00.001-05:002023-09-28T23:24:07.813-05:00How Managed SD-WAN Can Help Your Business<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Digital transformation is a wonderful thing for business… until you run into snags trying to implement it. One of those unanticipated snags is the need for WAN bandwidth connections far beyond what you ever thought you’d need. You can slug it out trying to make everything work and not break the bank. Or, you can enlist the help of managed SD-WAN to make your connectivity something you don’t even think about anymore.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.cloudnetworkingservices.com"><img src="https://www.CloudNetworkingServices.com/images/NetworkGlobeA300.jpg" width="300" height="300" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Get a quote on Managed SD-WAN for your business needs." /></a><b>How Did Connectivity Get to Be Such a Big Deal?</b><br>
Chances are that when your business was primarily bricks and mortar, you installed a broadband connection for when you needed to access the Internet and that was plenty good enough. It works for point of sale. It works for online ordering. It’s even good enough for a brochure-style web site so that potential customers can easily find you.<br><br>
Then the transformation began. First it was VoIP phone to replace the old analog landlines. Then came online ordering for both you and your customers, followed by automatic restocking, customer relationship management, financial and tax accounting in the cloud, lead generation, online advertising management, factory planning and on, and on and on. Under the weight of too many software packages to keep track of, eventually some these processes relocated to cloud servers, with some still in your local data center.<br><br>
That good old broadband service that got you started with the Internet is no longer satisfactory. Even upping the speed as much as you can still doesn’t make it work right. Phone calls get garbled, but not all the time. Workflow slows to a crawl, but not all the time. This inconsistency is driving everybody crazy. You never know when things will zip along seamlessly or when it will all slow to a crawl for a few seconds or a few minutes or the entire afternoon. You need better and you can get it.<br><br>
<b>The Expensive Solution: Build Your Own WAN Network</b><br>
You can avoid many of the vagaries of the Internet, especially on shared broadband connections, by building a private network for your operations. This means getting everything off the Internet that you can. All connections to branch offices, warehouses, factories, and any cloud providers can be made with dedicated private lines. As you might expect, each line costs plenty and you’ll need lots of them.<br><br>
MPLS networks with guaranteed performance levels can reduce the cost when operations are spread over long distances. MPLS is a privately run Wide Area Network with a special protocol that makes it more secure than the Internet. The general public also has no access. It’s business subscribers only and they are only admitted if the network can handle the traffic. For multiple locations, MPLS is less expensive than private lines, but still pricey. <br><br>
<b>Managed SD-WAN Is More Cost Efficient</b></br>
SD-WAN stands for Software Defined Wide Area Networking. The software defined aspect is where the savings come from. The managed aspect takes the burden of running all of it off your back. If done correctly, Managed SD-WAN makes your connectivity invisible. You don’t have to worry about it. It just works.<br><br>
Here’s briefly how SD-WAN does its magic. The trick is to use the least cost connections that will get the job done, but make sure that quality doesn’t suffer. Take the Internet. The least costly connections are shared bandwidth, like cable broadband and wireless, but these are also the most likely to get congested and vary in performance. The most costly are dedicated private lines, but these may be wasted on low priority traffic that doesn’t need low latency and jitter and isn’t bothered by a bit of congestion. If you aren’t using a private line, it’s just idling and you are paying for it anyway.<br><br>
SD-WAN needs at least two connections in order to make traffic decisions. These can be a mix of cable broadband, Ethernet fiber optic WAN, fixed wireless access, satellite broadband, LTE or 5G cellular, MPLS network and even older wireline services such as T1, PRI or DS3. <br><br>
What SD-WAN does is continuously monitor each connection’s performance so that it knows the available bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss on a moment by moment basis. When you have traffic in the form of packets, it notes the quality of service you require and then picks the best connection for those packets. Phone conversations and video conferences need very stable connections to work well, so they get a higher priority and QOS requirement. Backups to off-side storage aren’t so demanding and can live with a lower quality link. Other processes are assigned to the right connections for their needs. <br><br>
<b>Better Performance, Less Cost, Fewer Headaches</b><br>
Managed SD-WAN is handled by your provider so that you don’t have to worry about day to day connectivity issues. You add locations or policies as you need to. The supplier figures out how to program the system to make everything work. It’s all transparent to you and the cost is considerably lower than trying to optimize a morass of connections yourself. <br><br>
Are you frustrated with your current connections enough to want an easier and more reliable solution? If so, <a href="https://www.cloudnetworkingservices.com">get a competitive quote for your needs by one or more SD-WAN providers</a> and see if they can save you money and improve performance at the same time.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-4314252571058071102023-07-21T14:17:00.000-05:002023-07-21T14:17:02.488-05:0010 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access Availability<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Once considered a massive bandwidth suitable only for carriers, 10 Gbps is rapidly becoming the in-demand connectivity for businesses, municipalities, medical centers, content providers, and e-commerce. But is this bandwidth level readily available at a reasonable price? Indeed, it is. <br><br>
<a href="https://www.gigapackets.com/10Gigabit/10gigabitinternet.php"><img src="https://www.GigaPackets.com/images/BinaryDatastream300.jpg" width="300" height="483" border="0" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="10" alt="Find 10 Gbps and higher bandwidth connections now." /></a><b>Where is 10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Available?</b><br>
Most municipalities have 10 Gig Ethernet readily available because of the rapid deployment of fiber optic infrastructure. Fiber is necessary to provide the bandwidth to support 4G LTE and 5G cell towers, replacing legacy T1 copper lines. Fiber is also at the heart of cable systems even though the connection to the cable modem is still coaxial copper. Cities are now installing fiber infrastructure as a utility to serve all homes and businesses. <br><br>
Once you have fiber optic cables, getting Gigabit and 10 Gigabit broadband is a piece of cake. Each strand can transport 10 Gbps with only one channel. Those same strands can be set up to use multiple wavelengths to carry numerous Gigabit and 10 Gigabit services. A fiber cable can bundle a few to over a hundred fiber strands. Rest assured, there is plenty of 10 Gbps capacity to go around. <br><br>
<b>What 10 Gbps Options Are Available?</b><br>
The universal service in demand is Dedicated Internet Access. Dedicated means that your connection to the Internet carries only your traffic. Any capacity that you aren’t using at the moment is idle and available. There is no competition with other companies sharing your line. <br><br>
Dedicated Internet Access gives you the best consistency and lowest latency way to access the core of the Internet. This is important if your company has remote servers in the cloud or colocation hosting. It’s also key if you are doing business over the Internet and want your customers to have the best online experience. <br><br>
There are also 10 Gbps private lines that connect point to point between your business locations or from your company to your cloud service provider. This is a step above using the Internet for access. Private lines give you the lowest latency and least congestion. Having a dedicated private line makes your servers seem like they are right down the hall even if they are on the other side of the country. <br><br>
Cable broadband is now offering a shared bandwidth service that enables 10 Gbps in the download direction using DOCSIS 3.1 and will offer 10 Gbps symmetrical service with DOCSIS 4.0. By sharing Internet access with other users, you can save a significant amount of money, but with the vagaries of varying bandwidth and congestion. <br><br>
How about wireless? In some metro areas, microwave wireless broadband can give you bandwidths as high as 10 Gbps with no wired connections. Service can be installed rapidly, sometimes within a matter of days or a week. <br><br>
<b>What About Pricing?</b><br>
Fiber optic service prices used to be sky high, but that has changed in recent years due to intense competition among service providers and the economies of scale that come from having so many more customers using high bandwidths. <a href="https://www.gigapackets.com/10Gigabit/10gigabitinternet.php">If you haven’t checked 10 Gbps prices lately, you owe it to yourself to get a set of current quotes from multiple providers.</a> Yes, there are likely several carriers that can meet your needs right now.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-90766431199830655262023-06-21T14:12:00.000-05:002023-06-21T14:12:54.597-05:00Fiber - Dark, Lit and Wavelength<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
You’ve made up your mind that a fiber optic connection to your business is no longer a luxury. It is essential to productivity. Now the question is which type of fiber to order. What? There is more than one type of fiber?<br><br>
<a href="https://www.fibernetworkquotes.com"><img src="https://www.FiberNetworkQuotes.com/images/FiberBundleColors300.jpg" width="300" height="424" align="left" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" alt="Find lit, wavelength and dark fiber optic service." /></a><b>One Strand, Multiple Options</b><br>
All fiber optic connections are based on the principle that modulated light waves carry information guided through a glass strand. The fiber cable coming into your building will look the same. What changes is how you terminate it. <br><br>
Basically, there are three fiber options. You can order lit fiber service, dark fiber, and wavelength service. Which you pick depends on your bandwidth, security, and control requirements. Let’s see how the three compare. <br><br>
<b>Lit Fiber Bandwidth</b><br>
Lit fiber bandwidth is what we normally think of when we’re talking about fiber optic service. You are leasing a service that provides a certain amount of bandwidth, usually with guarantees as to the latency, jitter, packet loss and availability.<br><br>
How this is done is handled by the service provider. They will terminate a fiber strand into customer premises equipment at your location. You connect your network via fiber or copper connection, depending on the bandwidth level.<br><br>
Early fiber optic implementations were based on the SONET optical carrier system and needed a specially designed interface for each service level. Today, most fiber service uses Carrier Ethernet and is good for any bandwidth up to the speed of the port that you have installed. Most companies opt for Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet, although you can often specify up to 100 Gbps in major metro areas.<br><br>
You pay based on the speed of service you request. One nice feature of Carrier Ethernet or Ethernet over Fiber, as it is also called, is that the bandwidth is easily adjusted. You can install a Gigabit port and order and pay for 100 Mbps service if that’s all you need. When activity picks up, you can easily increase the bandwidth with a phone call or even online portal. Your service bandwidth will change, as will your monthly bill.<br><br>
<b>Wavelength Fiber Service</b><br>
While in-house fiber optic networks might use a single laser beam to transmit data, outside carriers that run large networks use a combination of multiple strands of fiber within a single bundle and multiple wavelengths within each strand. This is a more efficient use of expensive fiber cabling and the only real way to accommodate all the traffic on the regional, national or international network.<br><br>
The process of using multiple lasers, each tuned to a different frequency or wavelength is called multiplexing. All the beams exist at the same time but since they are different colors, they don’t interfere. You can imagine it something like a rainbow, although the frequencies tend to be in the infrared rather than visible band. Each separate wavelength, also called a lambda, can act like an independent fiber optic strand, although virtually. The physical strand carries them all. <br><br>
There may be dozens or hundreds of different wavelengths on the same fiber strand depending on whether Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM) or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is used. Each of these wavelengths can carry lit fiber optic service or it can be leased to one customer.<br><br>
When you order a wavelength, you do so because you need high bandwidth such as 10 Gbps. You also want the ability to use whatever protocol you like or multiple protocols over the same wavelength using your own multiplexing. You’ll typically provide the termination equipment that determines all this, although you might be able to lease it from the service provider. Another advantage of wavelength service is that security is improved because only your traffic uses that particular wavelength and there is no sharing of traffic between wavelengths.<br><br>
<b>Dark Fiber Service</b><br>
The ultimate in control comes from having your own fiber optic network or the next best thing, a private fiber strand on your service provider’s network. This private strand is called dark fiber.<br><br>
Most every Wide Area Network contains unlit fiber strands that are intended for future service expansion as traffic levels increase. It is very expensive to install fiber in trenches or on poles over long distances. The incremental cost of have more strands in the fiber bundle is usually well worth the extra expense compared to having to add more fiber cable later. Some cables have 100 or more fiber strands. <br><br>
Many fiber network carriers are quite willing to lease out some of these unlit strands as long as there is plenty of capacity left for them to expand. The advantage to you is that dark fiber gives you control of the amount of bandwidth you send down the fiber, the protocols you use, and the best security you can have over long distances unless you install your own fiber cable from point to point. Once again, you provide the termination equipment at each end of the fiber run. In some cases, you can lease this from the service provider.<br><br>
So, which type of fiber optic service is right for your business? Most of the time regular lit fiber bandwidth will get the job done. In special cases, wavelength service or dark fiber may be the solution. <a href="https://www.fibernetworkquotes.com">Compare options and see how much bandwidth is readily available at affordable prices for your business location</a>.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-53088837913406191952023-05-25T15:58:00.000-05:002023-05-25T15:58:03.615-05:00Bandwidth Without Usage Metering<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Perhaps the most unpleasant experience of broadband is hitting your data cap. You may have forgotten it was even there. But, like the cop hiding behind the highway billboard, it pops out at the most inconvenient times and, boy, are you in trouble. Let’s have a look at what data limits are all about and what you can do to avoid hitting them.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.megatrunks.com"><img src="https://www.MegaTrunks.com/images/UsageMeter300.jpg" width="300" height="294" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" align="left" alt="Avoid data usage limits with dedicated Internet access and private lines." /></a><b>Where Did Usage Metering Come From?</b><br>
The big problem is scarcity. Bandwidth is like electricity. If we had unlimited amounts at minimal costs, there would be no need to meter it or even limit your line speed. Such is not the case. <br><br>
Take 5G cellular for instance. The demand for Internet broadband has always been way ahead of capacity buildout for the cellular networks. 2G was pitiful. 3G was still bandwidth starved. 4G LTE greatly improved on cellular capacity to the point that most people didn’t run out before the end of the month. <br><br>
5G offers the promise of billions of “things” all communicating autonomously and people using fixed wireless from their cellular provider to replace services like DSL, cable and T1 lines. <br><br>
Have you been watching what is happing with 5G? There is a mad scramble to build towers, feed them with fiber optic cables or microwave backhaul, and lobby the government to assign more and more of the limited radio spectrum to high speed Internet. It’s cellular vs satellite vs independent WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) vs television vs government vs everybody else to grab as much bandwidth as possible. <br><br>
Why? The amount of spectrum you can press into service determines the speed of your connection and the amount of data to divvy up among users. Thus the feeding frenzy among service providers.<br><br>
Even wireline and fiber optic services have their limits. Twisted pair landlines are pretty pokey by today’s standards and fiber optic requires a huge capital investment. A fiber bundle has enormous capacity, but only where the fiber has been run. It doesn’t blanket an area like wireless does. Each location needs its own fiber connection.<br><br>
<b>How Carriers Allot Their Capacity</b><br>
All bandwidth services have limited capacity. Wireless has the most constraints because the electromagnetic spectrum has only so much available in the popular frequencies that travel reasonable distances and penetrate walls. Fiber and HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) is less constrained but has high costs to build out.<br><br>
Carriers divvy up their capacity and sell it to users by slicing and dicing what they have. The two limitations that they put on users are speed in Mbps or Gbps and usage in total Gigabytes. Speed determines how much of the total bandwidth you can use at any given moment. Total capacity limits keep a few high data users from uploading and downloading continuously so that other’s can’t get online. <br><br>
You see, the price you pay for Internet access is much less if the carrier can assume that you aren’t sending or receiving all the time. Much of the time you may not even be accessing remote servers. When you do, you’ll send or receive a certain bundle of data and then pause before doing more. By allowing many customers to share one big line, providers can give everyone reliable access at greatly reduced cost. That’s the principle behind cable broadband, satellite services, and cellular broadband. <br><br>
In practice, this works well for consumers and many smaller businesses. They just don’t need to be sending enormous files one right after the other. On cable, you may never hit your allotted limit or even know what it is. With cellular and satellite, you may have and “unlimited” plan, but just try continuously streaming video or doing massive data transfers and you’ll run into what the carriers call “fair use” provisions. Yes, there are limits to unlimited plans. <br><br>
What happens if you consume more that your “fair share”? Your service provider may choose to simply issue a warning, or may slow your speed so you can’t hog so much of their capacity. Or they may charge you for extra GBs of usage. Worst case, they’ll simply cut off your service until the next month’s billing cycle begins.<br><br>
<b>How to Avoid Usage Metering</b><br>
Medium and larger businesses and heavy Internet using companies with cloud services and remote backup storage may well exceed even the most generous fair use quotas. The best option then is to order services that aren’t metered at all. Those tend to be private lines and dedicated Internet access.<br><br>
Dedicated lines without usage metering give you two advantages. First, you are not sharing with other companies or residential users. The capacity of the channel is yours and yours alone. If you order a Gigabit Dedicated Internet Access fiber service, you can feed it traffic continuously and nobody is going to complain. Plus the speed of your service won’t vary with competing traffic, because you have sole usage. This is particularly valuable with business critical applications and real-time services like video conferencing that run in the cloud.<br><br>
A private line is like dedicated access except that the Internet is never involved. You connect point to point or in a private mesh network where others cannot interfere. Even the core Internet gets congested from time to time. Your private lines are like private superhighways. Your traffic, and yours alone, is what is carried. If you are using cloud services extensively, consider a direct line from your business to your cloud provider for the highest performance.<br><br>
Have you been hitting the limits of your Internet service or being warned by your provider that they may heavily up-charge you or cut off access? Consider the advantages of ordering <a href="https://www.megatrunks.com">dedicated private lines and dedicated Internet access without usage limits</a> to keep your business running smoothly. <br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-14136233382314943102023-04-18T14:08:00.000-05:002023-04-18T14:08:32.597-05:005G Fixed Wireless Fills the Copper Gap<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
For almost a century and a half, twisted pair copper wiring has been the way telecom services were delivered. This ranges from classic plain old telephone service, to T1 digital lines for Internet access and point to point private connections. Copper, however, is on the way out. If you haven’t run up against its bandwidth limitations yet, you may still have a problem if your local telephone company (who owns all the copper lines) decides to discontinue service. Then what?<br><br>
<a href="https://www.t1rex.com"><img src="https://www.T1Rex.com/images/5GTower.png" width="300" height="489" border="0" align="left" hspace="15" vspace="10" alt="Find 5G Fixed Wireless Access for your business broadband." /></a><b>What Replaces Copper Lines?</b><br>
When it comes to bandwidth, fiber optic cables can’t be beat. You can order any bandwidth from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps, and even 100 Gbps in many locations. Hybrid Fiber Cable, commonly known as cable broadband, can now deliver multi-gigabit speeds through the classic coaxial cable.<br><br>
Sounds great, but what if you are in an area that is not served by Cable and has no fiber infrastructure nearby? Are you simply stuck with no service at all?<br><br>
<b>5G Wireless To the Rescue</b><br>
Fifth generation or 5G smartphones have pretty much taken over the market from the 4G LTE standard that served us for years. With 5G comes new bands that offer expanded bandwidth and low latency for smart autonomous devices that are called the Internet of Things.<br><br>
There is another application that 5G is pursuing aggressively. That is fixed wireless access or FWA. The “fixed” part of FWA means situations that are not mobile. Think of your desktop PC, point of sale terminals, or even your entire Local Area Network.<br><br>
Internet service providers called WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers have been around to serve homes and businesses that can’t get wired or fiber Internet. They tend to be very local and independent and use systems that are not affiliated with cellular providers. If you have a WISP nearby, they can often step in and give you the service you need to stay online. <br><br>
How 5G is different than the usual WISP is that it is true cellular broadband and serves both fixed and mobile users. The same broadband that you use on your phone can also be delivered directly to an office, store or residence wherever there is a cell tower nearby.<br><br>
4G LTE service actually started the push for applications to use cellular broadband rather than depend on DSL, cable or other wired services. When 4G LTE became widely available it offered bandwidths that rivaled typical broadband services and had enough capacity to serve multitudes of customers rather than just a few at a time. <br><br>
4G LTE is still a good option for many applications. What 5G does is offer bandwidths that can rival fiber at low latencies for sensitive applications. Major cellular carriers are promoting 5G wireless as a competitor to cable broadband in fixed locations. For business users, 5G can often substitute for unavailable T1 lines or even DS3 bandwidth. <br><br>
<b> How Do You Get 5G FWA?</b><br>
You may have already paired your phone with your desktop PC or tablet using Bluetooth and setting up the phone as a personal Internet Hotspot. FWA expands upon this idea. Instead of a phone, you install a 5G or combination 5G / 4G LTE Gateway. This can be a simple box that sits on your desk in on a shelf near a window. It may have a wired Ethernet port to connect to your router or may even contain a router and WiFI hotspot. Some of these devices have special antennas that are more efficient in capturing the cellular tower signal for reliable operation.<br><br>
A good way to <a href="https://www.t1rex.com">research the availability of 5G and 4G LTE options for your business</a> is to work with a bandwidth broker that represents a multitude of companies offering this type of service. You’ll want a solid connection with enough bandwidth to serve the size of your business and sufficient or no data limits. You may be surprised at the variety of offerings available, even in rural or otherwise underserved areas.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-17795136206501981312023-03-16T14:47:00.000-05:002023-03-16T14:47:31.654-05:00On Ramps That Improve Cloud Performance<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
IT infrastructure is now key to your business. It’s a lot more than a few servers in a closet down the hall these days. Chances are that you are using Software as a Service (SaaS) running on popular public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure plus your own private data center. What once was an easy interconnect to everything on a company LAN is now a worrying mix of local and remote connections. Are you stuck with performance that varies constantly and nightmares of security breaches, or is there a much better solution?<br><br>
<a href="https://www.cloudnetworkingservices.com"><img src="https://www.CloudNetworkingServices.com/images/CloudGearsRampM300.jpg" width="300" height="397" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Cloud On-Ramps boost performance" /></a><b>Weak Links In The Chain</b><br>
When equipment or services are remotely located, the first thing everybody thinks of is connecting through the Internet. Broadband is readily available nearly everywhere and very reasonably priced. This is especially true if you just connect through a Cable broadband service. Reliability of HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) networks has gotten very good and prices are as low as you’ll find. <br><br>
The massive adoption of consumer broadband is what has kept prices low even for business broadband. The tradeoff is that you are sharing that connection with dozens or even hundreds of other users. You can’t see them, but you can feel the effect as the Internet speeds up and slows down. <br><br>
<b>Dedicated Access Improves Performance</b><br>
The Internet is an amazing data superhighway, but the on and off ramps are where a lot of the congestion is. A good solution is get a private ramp, called Dedicated Internet Access or DIA, between you and your Internet service provider. This is most likely a fiber Ethernet connection but could be Fixed Wireless as long as the path you are using is dedicated for your use only. <br><br>
<b>Why Not All Private Access?</b><br>
The next step up is a completely private line from your local network to your cloud service provider. Once again, this would be a fiber optic Ethernet running 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps with guaranteed performance. This is like having your own highway with no traffic other than your company data. It’s the closest thing to a LAN that stretches across the country to include your cloud services.<br><br>
The drawback to dedicated private lines is the cost, as you might suspect. There is no one else sharing the pipe, so there is no one else helping to pay for it. You have all the bandwidth and the security of a walled-off connection, but you have all the costs too.<br><br>
An intermediate solution that maintains connection performance and offers high security over long distances is the MPLS network with dedicated access lines. The MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network is a private Wide Area Network with costs that are shared among many subscribers, but with performance guarantees instead of the “best effort” you get on the Internet. Security is better than the Internet because the network uses a proprietary label switching protocol and not the easier to hack TCP/IP.<br><br>
<b>Move Next Door To Really Improve Performance</b><br>
Remember how easily it was to get all the network performance you needed when everything was in the same building and all you needed was runs of Ethernet cabling? You can replicate that by choosing to move your equipment to a colocation center that also houses your software service providers or has dedicated cloud on-ramps. <br><br>
This is an example of a hybrid cloud. Your servers and storage are in racks in the colo building that supplies power and cooling. It also has direct cable or fiber connections to service providers housed in the same building. Other direct connections go to points of presence for large public cloud services that are located in multiple data centers around the world. By accessing one of these cloud on-ramps you avoid the vagaries of the Internet and connect your private cloud to their public cloud to create the hybrid cloud arrangement.<br><br>
Of course, this can be expanded to include multiple services providers as long as they have a physical presence or on-ramps available in the data center. Connect to as many as make sense to create a multi-cloud that give you all the services you need. The connection to your business is then through a dedicated private line or Dedicated Internet Access from your colocated equipment back to your offices. This is considerably more cost effective than having many dedicated private lines to widely scattered service providers.<br><br>
Do you need higher performance than your current connections can provide or have a requirement to interconnect multiple service providers? If so, find out what mix of <a href="https://www.cloudnetworkingservices.com">dedicated, dedicated access and cloud on-ramps</a> would work best for your company.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-86690135219784305952023-02-21T11:24:00.001-06:002023-02-21T11:24:48.356-06:00Colocation Hosting vs Cloud Data Centers<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
You’ve run your own in-house data center for years, but business is growing and you’ve hit the limit on what your server room can support. Now you’ve got a choice to make. Lease new space for the additional servers, storage and other appliances you need or consider moving everything to the cloud. It’s a big decision and one that needs careful consideration before funds are committed.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.cloudnetworkingservices.com/Colocation/data-center-colocation.php"><img src="https://www.CloudNetworkingServices.com/images/ColocationHosting300.jpg" width="300" height="284" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Choose colocation instead of cloud hosting." /></a><b>Isn’t Everyone in the Cloud?</b><br>
If you read the tech headlines and articles, it looks like everyone is clearing out the old server room and simply leasing cloud services. That does have a lot of attraction. With your data and applications deep within the cloud, you no longer have any capital investment, no power bills, no physical security worries, no HVAC worries, and perhaps less IT support staffing. If you need more bandwidth, server processing or storage, you simply ask the cloud to increase your allowance, perhaps even automaticlly. <br><br>
<b>Why Wouldn’t You Join the Stampede to the Cloud? </b></br>
Perhaps you’re feeling a little uncomfortable. You’ve heard that joke: “There is no cloud. It’s just somebody else’s computer.” What it really amounts to is somebody else’s thousands of computers, all nicely divvied-up to share among thousands or millions of clients. The promise of the cloud is that it looks to you like you have your own computing resources all by themselves.<br><br>
Does that sound exciting or does it give you a bit of a twinge? After all, you’re really happy with how responsive your IT staff is and the control you have over all the equipment and software. There are no other companies sharing your facilities. Security involves keeping bad actors out of the building and on the far side of the firewall. So, is your only choice to bite the bullet and lease a new building for expansion?<br><br>
<b>Consider the Colo Option</b><br>
Perhaps a third option is best. Lease space in someone else’s specialized building but keep your computing resources to yourself. This is the idea behind Colo or colocation hosting. These facilities were once called carrier hotels when their tenants were primarily telecom carriers. Now colo is popular with businesses of all sizes.<br><br>
A colocation facility provides the physical building with controlled access and security personnel. It is staffed 24/7, which may even be more than you are able to provide now. Massive redundant power lines feed the facility so there is never a question of having enough amps to power new equipment. Moreover, that power is backed up by emergency generators and often batteries to keep things running no matter what. <br><br>
With all that power, you are also going to need to get rid of the heat generated by the electronics. That is handled by redundant HVAC equipment to provide cooling air to the servers and other equipment. Air filters keep the facility dust-free.<br><br>
What about connectivity? That’s one reason why companies move out of their own facilities and to a colocation center. With so many clients wanting so much bandwidth, major carriers have a presence in the colo. Often you have multiple carriers to choose from and they each have multiple fiber links for dedicated access and Internet service. Not every business is served with high bandwidth fiber yet, but the colocation centers are. They’ll get you as many Gbps as you need along with IP addresses. <br><br>
<b>Moving to a Colo Facility</b></br>
When you move to a colo, you lease racks with power and cooling plus connections for bandwidth. Want more security? You can have those racks installed within a locked cage that keeps everybody but your staff out. Your people can come and install their own equipment, do maintenance, and make upgrades as needed. <br><br>
Many colo facilities also offer additional services if you want them. You can have the colo tech staff monitor, troubleshoot and repair your equipment. You can even lease servers and storage from the colo instead of buying them yourself. <br><br>
Are you outgrowing your tech facilities but want to explore options other than simply relocating to a cloud? Consider <a href="https://www.cloudnetworkingservices.com/Colocation/data-center-colocation.php">colocation data center facilities
</a> as an option that gives you more control but saves money compared to leasing your own dedicated buildings.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-4232833546334292842023-01-23T13:42:00.000-06:002023-01-23T13:42:09.961-06:00What Replaces DSL, T1, ISDN PRI, EoC?<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Have you seen recent cost increases for your copper-based telecom services? Did you even get a letter saying that service will be discontinued? This situation will only get worse, as telcos sunset their aging copper wire assets in favor of more modern technologies such as fiber and wireless. It’s time to make a change. <br><br>
<a href="https://www.megatrunks.com"><img src="https://www.MegaTrunks.com/images/NetworkPointing300.jpg" width="275" height="398" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Find copper line network replacements now. " /></a><b>The Copper That Isn’t Going Anywhere</b><br>
The copper that’s in trouble is twisted-pair analog copper telephone lines. They started the electronic communication revolution over a century ago and have run their course from innovation to obsolescence. There is another copper network line, however, that is still going strong. That is cable broadband using coaxial copper cable as a curb to premises connection.<br><br>
The copper nature of cable services is something of a fooler. The vast majority of the network is fiber optic based. Only the last few hundred feet is the well known RG-6 terminated with an F-type connector. You might think of this wiring as old-school, but with the latest DOCSIS modems, it can easily deliver Gigabit broadband up to 10 Gbps. <br><br>
Cable companies offer television, broadband and telephone service over the same cable line at a very reasonable cost that is attractive for small businesses, especially those that can use the TV feature for their customer waiting rooms. <br><br>
<b>Fiber Optic: The New and Improved Copper </b><br>
The telephone and network industry standard that is replacing twisted pair copper is Ethernet based fiber optic service. The original standard, SONET, is still the backbone of many networks, but has actually transitioned from carrying channelized telephone calls to packet based Ethernet network traffic. Newer networks are all Ethernet, to reflect the standard Ethernet protocol used in the majority of digital networks worldwide.<br><br>
Ethernet over Fiber has the advantage that it plugs directly into company routers and is vastly scalable, from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps just about everywhere, and up to 100 Gbps in many metro locations. Fiber takes over from copper data services, include DSL, T1, DS3 and even the newer Ethernet over Copper. EoC was meant to provide higher bandwidth using the same twisted-pair infrastructure, but is falling victim to the decommissioning of the copper bundles themselves.<br><br>
Business telephone, which standardized its own analog and digital networks, is largely switching to a computer networking standard of Voice over IP or VoIP. This offers the benefit of supporting many newer technology features and allows computers and phones to share the same company Local Area Network. <br><br>
To make VoIP work, your phones need to connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network to make and receive outside calls. This is done using a standard called SIP or Session Initiated Protocol that runs on the network and connects to your phone service provider over an Ethernet WAN connection, using fiber. Both the Internet and direct connections can be employed. SIP trunks replace analog phone lines and ISDN PRI trunks to carry telephone traffic to the PSTN. <br><br>
<b>The Special Case of POTS Replacement</b><br>
In many cases, the move to fiber optic private line and Dedicated Internet Access will handle business needs for voice, video and data traffic. There are special cases of FAX, fire alarms, burglar alarms, elevator phones, analog point of sale systems and some others that are specifically designed to phone company standards and don’t work well on packet based networks, such as the Internet. <br><br>
For these uses, you may want to look into specialized POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) replacement options. These usually work wirelessly through private connections to the LTE cellular phone network and don’t traverse the Internet at all. An advantage of POTS replacement equipment is that it connects directly to the systems you already have.<br><br>
<b>Fixed Wireless Where There Is No Fiber</b><br>
The day may come where fiber is everywhere, but today were are still in the build-out phase. Fiber is going into the ground at a rapid pace, but in more rural locations are still waiting for access. Even metro areas that don’t have lit fiber installed may be faced with huge construction costs to connect to the fiber access points. <br><br>
The alternative is to skip the fiber but get high speed Ethernet bandwidth using Fixed Wireless Access. FWA is similar to cellular broadband but is intended to connect to in-house networks rather than cell phones. In fact, the major cellular companies are in competition to offer 5G Fixed Wireless broadband service to both residential and commercial users. <br><br>
Other wireless companies, often called WISPs for Wireless Internet Service Providers, don’t handle cell traffic but have towers that serve a limited area with wireless Internet access.<br><br>
Other microwave-based FWA providers focus on business customers with high bandwidths that can reach 10 Gbps. This can be private line as well and Internet service. An advantage to business FWA is that a small dish or other antenna can be installed on your building for reliable operation and service can get started in days rather than weeks or months for fiber construction.<br><br>
Are you facing a loss of your traditional DSL, T1, ISDN PRI, EoC or analog telephone service and need replacement soon? If so, you may have an opportunity to upgrade your service and save money at the same time. Check out <a href="https://www.megatrunks.com">telephone and network replacement options</a>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-73108821695697842782022-12-21T12:27:00.002-06:002022-12-26T14:17:29.528-06:00Fiber Without The Fiber<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
You’re stretched for bandwidth. Perhaps the telco is telling you that they won’t renew your T1 or ISDN lines, as they are dropping their support for copper telecom services. You know the solution to either of these dilemmas is an upgrade to fiber optic bandwidth. Once it is installed, you can get all the bandwidth you need now and upgrade easily in the future. One problem. There are no fiber buildouts near you. <br><br>
That leaves you with two unpleasant possibilities. Either pay a small fortune in construction costs to have fiber pulled-in, or forget fiber because there is none to be had for your location. Not so fast. There is another possibility. Get fiber performance without the actual fiber.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.megatrunks.com"><img src="https://www.MegaTrunks.com/images/FWC300.jpg" width="300" height="553" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Choose Fiber, Cable broadband, or Fixed Wireless Access" /></a><b>What Acts Like Fiber But Isn’t Fiber?</b><br><br>
It isn’t those little glass strands that are so valuable to your business. It’s the bandwidth they carry. Your network doesn’t need to know or care how the traffic is carried in the metropolitan or wide area networks. There just needs to be enough bandwidth with low enough latency, jitter and packet loss. Anything that does that is virtually fiber.<br><br>
Let’s take a look at two good options for high speed business Internet connectivity that can give you fiber optic performance but without the issue of having to install fiber where there isn’t any.<br><br>
<b>No fiber, No Wires At All</b><br>
The first possibility is Fixed Wireless Access or FWA. Back in the day, this was known as microwave relay. Telephone companies put up massive towers with equally massive horn antennas to beam microwave signals from point to point. The traffic was bundles of telephone calls or television transmissions.<br><br>
Today there are thousands of towers dotting the landscape in town and throughout rural areas. These were erected to support cell phone service. After several generations of technical advancement, we arrive at the newest standard: 5G or fifth generation. The 5G system uses a variety of bands in the megahertz and gigahertz range. The highest frequency or shortest wavelength equipment runs well into the microwave part of the spectrum and has massive bandwidth capability. <br><br>
The higher the population density, the more 5G capability you’ll find. For smaller businesses, a fixed location cellular modem that plugs into your network can give you the reliable connection you need with lots of bandwidth available at reasonable prices. In other areas 4G LTE is a reasonable alternative and a very mature technology. If you need dozens of Mbps rather than hundreds or thousands, a 4G LTE modem with specially designed antennas for better signal capture can get the job done.<br><br>
Not all fixed wireless is dedicated to the cellular phone industry. Some use licensed and unlicensed bands to deliver wireless Internet access over a limited area. You may have a small dish or other antenna installed on your building and aimed at the provider’s antenna. That gives you a strong signal regardless of weather conditions. Some private FWA providers can offer gigabit and higher bandwidths that feature low latency, jitter and packet loss just like fiber. Very high usage or even unlimited usage plans are available. Unlike new fiber installations, you can get service up and running in days rather than months or longer. Installation fees range from nothing to a reasonable one time fee.<br><br>
<b>It’s a Cable, But No Fiber Inside</b><br>
The second good option to fiber optic service is cable broadband. Yes, this is the most recent incarnation of the Cable TV revolution. What’s new is that cable has gone far beyond its community antenna roots. Most of cable's infrastructure is now fiber. Surprised? Fiber is the only way these companies can transport all those TV channels and all the data.<br><br>
So, if the cable companies use fiber why not just get them to connect you to their fiber network. They will, if you are close enough to a fiber access point and the construction issues aren’t too great. Otherwise, they’ll simply run the last few hundred feet or so with the familiar coaxial copper cable. <br><br>
Can cable service on that coax really replace fiber? In a lot of cases, yes. The reason is that the cable modem standards have been massively upgraded over the years. Today’s DOCSIS 3.0, 3.1 and 4.0 modems deliver hundreds of Mbps up to 10 Gbps. That’s right. You can get some of the highest fiber optic speeds delivered via a DOCSIS 4.0 modem connected to a coax cable. <br><br>
<b>Will Non-Fiber Work For You?</b><br>
In many, many cases, Fixed Wireless Access and cable broadband can make good substitutes for Ethernet over Fiber optic bandwidth. There are a couple of caveats, however. Wireless bandwidth isn’t as unlimited as what you can put through one or more fiber strands. As such, you may find that there are limits to your speed or usage, depending on what services are available for your location. Cable broadband is an inherently shared service, meaning that bandwidth may vary somewhat depending on how many users are on the cable and how much bandwidth they are using at any given time. <br><br>
Even so, many businesses don’t need or need to pay for dedicated bandwidth of 1 to 100 Gbps. You may find that wireless and cable offer tremendous cost savings and can deliver all the performance you really need. Why not check out the <a href="https://www.megatrunks.com">range of bandwidth options available for your business</a> now?<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-8228686333869655682022-11-17T14:12:00.000-06:002022-11-17T14:12:36.849-06:00Ethernet Replacements For SONET<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
High bandwidth fiber optic Wide Area Networks have their basis in a decades old telephone company standard called SONET. Highly reliable, but highly expensive, SONET is giving way to the newer technology of Ethernet WAN. As demand for business bandwidth keeps increasing, so does the attractiveness of Ethernet for long distance connections.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.fibernetworkquotes.com"><img src="https://www.FiberNetworkQuotes.com/images/FiberOpticLines300.jpg" width="300" height="450" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Get competitive quotes on Ethernet fiber optic WAN service." /></a><b>Why SONET Ruled For So Long</b><br>
SONET or Synchronous Optical Network was born out of a burgeoning demand for higher and higher levels of traffic. In this case, the traffic was long distance telephone calls. In the early days of telephony, this demand was met with dense webs of overhead copper lines.<br><br>
Multi-channel analog technology made it possible for each copper pair to carry many phone conservations on a carrier-based system, much like many radio stations in a single band. <br><br>
Digital technology eliminated the noise and crosstalk of carrier telephony by converting the analog conversations to pulse coded digital streams and multiplexing many together on a single pair. The transmission medium was still copper wire.<br><br>
One thing about phone company standards is that they are all backwards compatible down to a single phone line. After all, that’s the telco business. So, the digital T1 lines were actually carrying 24 separate phone calls. A T3 line was 28 T1 lines or 672 phone calls. <br><br>
When the fiber optic standard was developed, it picked up where copper left off. The OC3 SONET line is 155 Mbps and is equivalent to three T3 lines. Within all those multiplexed channels is the same 64 Kbps voice channel to support one phone call. <br><br>
How did we get from really big phone lines to data transmission? Basically, SONET was the only game in town if you needed large amounts of bandwidth. So, all those voice channels in the line were combined to create one large data channel to carry packets of information. That requires protocol conversion circuitry to go from Ethernet network protocol to SONET telephone line protocol. <br><br>
This works beautifully, but there are a few issues. For one thing, SONET levels are very specific and not scalable. If you want to move up from, say, a 155 Mbps OC3 to a 622 Mbps OC-12, you’ll at least need to swap out the termination controller or interface card in your router. Also, since analog phone traffic is now trivial compared to packet based data traffic, wouldn’t it be more efficient to just keep everything Ethernet from end to end? Indeed, it would.<br><br>
<b>Ethernet Replacements For SONET</b></br>
Most competitive carriers and even many of the traditional telecom companies have adopted Ethernet as their network standard, as that’s where the traffic is. As a result, you can find much better pricing for Ethernet circuits than for traditional SONET. Ethernet WAN is also highly scalable. If you install a Gigabit Ethernet port, you can order service at any bandwidth level up to 1 Gbps. That covers OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps and pretty much OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps.<br><br>
No hardware changes are needed until you require more 1 Gbps. At that point you may install a 10 Gbps port which will cover OC-24, plus OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps. Today, 100 Gbps is becoming more and more available to take the place of OC-768 at 40 Gbps. <br><br>
If you are looking to upgrade your fiber optic WAN connections or are just curious about how much you might save by switching from SONET to Ethernet WAN service, you can easily <a href="https://www.fibernetworkquotes.com">get a set of competitive quotes from multiple service providers</a> with no obligation. That applies to private line services, including cloud communications, as well as dedicated Internet access. Now would be a good time to make that inquiry.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-8739129923482582922022-10-25T16:28:00.000-05:002022-10-25T16:28:13.974-05:00The Connectivity You Need For Digital Transformation<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Most every business is now in some phase of digital transformation. It’s the process of moving from analog mechanical and paper based operations to digital and online processes. The promise of this transformation is faster and more efficient business methods that save cost and expand your customer base. But, what do you need to put in place to support this digital transformation?<br><br>
<a href="https://www.GigaPackets.com/"><img src="https://www.GigaPackets.com/images/DigTranDevices300.gif" width="300" height="271" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Get the connectivity you need for digital transformation." /></a><b>Plan on Doing Most Everything Online</b> <br>
While most products and services are not digital, the tools to support them now are. Everything from finding prospects to converting prospects to customers, servicing those customers and keeping the products flowing has a digital element to it. The Internet is now the hub of operation for many businesses. Others may be local and walk-in for the most part, but may have an online presence and accounting or other processes in the cloud. <br><br>
What makes the Internet so compelling is that after a decades of development, it is largely in-place, paid for, and ubiquitous. People who don’t even have bank accounts do have smartphones with Internet apps that allow them to buy, sell and get paid. While there are challenges, especially in the area of security, the Internet is a must for most companies. <br><br>
<b>Start With High Speed Reliable Internet Access</b><br>
You’ll need a solid connection to the online world. It will have to be fast enough to be transparent to you and your customers, always available, and have a minimum of latency, jitter and packet loss. The best connections are the ones you never have to think about. That customer on the other side of town or the other side of the world will seem as close as someone in the next office.<br><br>
There are basically two types of broadband connections. One is called Dedicated Internet Access. The other is Shared Internet access.<br><br>
Dedicated Internet Access, particularly with symmetrical bandwidth that gives you the same speed uploading as downloading is the gold standard. While the Internet is certainly a shared resource, most of the congestion and outages occur in that “last mile” between you and your service provider. Dedicated connections give you a private road to the Internet. You always have the bandwidth you are paying for, whether you are using it every second or not.<br><br>
Shared Internet Access is just that. A service provider leases a dedicated access line and then divides it up among many users. If the speed is high enough and there aren’t so many users demanding the same bandwidth simultaneously, you may not even know you are sharing. Sometimes, though, everybody wants to download videos or large files and things slow down. Then, like every traffic jam, they just as mysteriously dissipate and everything is back to normal. <br><br>
The advantage of dedicated access is performance. The advantage of shared access is cost. Shared services such as cellular and cable broadband can cost a fraction of what a similar speed dedicated fiber or fixed wireless access service costs. <br><br>
<b>A Hybrid Approach to Increase Reliability and Lower Cost</b><br>
There is also a third option that has been recently developed. That is the Software Defined Network (SDN) or Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN). What these systems do is take multiple Internet connections and bond them together so that you get one higher capacity, lower latency and more reliable connection. A SD-WAN box can combine a cable broadband line, a cellular broadband modem, and a small fiber optic service. Even satellite and landlines can be included. The software in the controller monitors each line constantly and selects the most appropriate for every packet. <br><br>
With SD-WAN, your most sensitive applications, such as telephone and conference calling, get the highest priority for speed, latency and jitter. Business process are next in line. Less sensitive needs, like remote backups, get the lowest priority because a few seconds here and there probably won’t make any difference. SD-WAN can save you money compared to one very large fiber line that you can’t keep busy or perhaps can’t even get installed. It is also a lifesaver when one line is accidentally cut or has an equipment failure. SD-WAN will simply use the other connections to keep things running seamlessly. <br><br>
<b>Don’t Forget Your Cloud Connections</b><br>
Your main office, store or factory connection to the Internet is critical, but so are the connections for your cloud based operations. Once those servers and applications leave the premises to be co-located elsewhere or run in a public or hybrid cloud, they need the same reliable and transparent connectivity you had in-house.<br><br>
There are two connections to be concerned with. The first is the connection between you and the cloud. This may be the same Internet access you use for everything else, but for business critical operations you may want to consider a dedicated private line between your office and the colocation center or cloud service provider. This bypasses the Internet completely and gives you much greater control of your traffic since nothing is shared outside of your business.<br><br>
The other connection of importance is the connection between the remote servers in the colo center or cloud and the outside world. For this you want the same high performance Internet access with enough bandwidth, low latency and minimal jitter and packet loss. Fortunately, this quality of service is easy to find for colo and cloud, as they deal in massive amounts of bandwidth on a regular basis. <br><br>
Are you properly connected for digital transformation? That old DSL line or bandwidth limited T1 probably won’t get the job done anymore. Consider an <a href="https://www.GigaPackets.com/">upgrade to highly reliable fiber or wireless broadband</a> for your business. Recent buildouts have made this much more affordable than you might expect. <br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-6785662412338643492022-09-20T14:43:00.000-05:002022-09-20T14:43:21.366-05:00Two Internet Connections For Consistent Phone CallsThere are forces at work changing the way business phone systems connect. Plain old analog telephone service and traditional PBX switching systems are giving way to mobility, computer integration and cloud services that bear little resemblance to Alexander Graham Bell’s network of the last century. The new features can greatly enhance business performance… as long as the fundamentals of high quality robust voice communications aren't lost. Can we have both advanced technologies and quality of service?<br><br>
<a href="https://www.enterprisevoip.com"><img src="https://EnterpriseVoIP.com/images/BusinessPhone300.jpg" border="0" hspace="5" vspace="5" align="left" width="300" height="239" alt="Get higher quality phone calls with SD-WAN" /></a>We have to. There’s really no going back. If you are still tethered to an analog twisted pair or ISDN PRI, obsolescence is coming for you… and soon. It’s time to embrace digital voice and the cloud services that it enables. <br><br>
<b>What’s The Internet Got to Do With It?</b><br>
Telephone networks were purpose built for telephone sets. When the Internet started, it glommed onto the phone network with dial-up modems because that was the only universal connectivity available. Fast forward to today and the Internet has moved on to high bandwidth fiber optics as a core network and last mile connectivity. Mobile telephony has developed its own wireless cellular system. That leaves the original phone network to rust in peace.<br><br>
Business telephones are connecting more and more to the company IT network rather than run a separate phone network based on legacy wiring technology. For those calls to leave the company and connect to the greater world, a decision has to be made. Do you install a PBX system that connects those internal phone sets directly to the phone company using telco lines, or stick with the digital network system and connect to a phone service supplier via a dedicated private line or the Internet?<br><br>
The Internet is a compelling answer. It has already been built-out to interconnect just about everybody, everywhere. Costs to reach them are as low as you can get. You already use the Internet and probably cloud business services for computer applications and file transfers. Why not let your phone calls ride along on the same network?<br><br>
The fly in the ointment is that voice calls don’t have the robustness that file transfers enjoy. If the connection slows down a bit or gets little jittery, the data will get through just fine. The voice on the other end of the phone calls will cut in and out, become garbled or just disconnect. That’s unacceptable for business and a major impediment to adopting VoIP telephone systems.<br><br>
<b>How to Fix the Internet for Phone Calls</b><br>
A solution to getting high quality business phone service along with the benefits of digital telephony is called SD-WAN. A WAN or Wide Area Network is any connection, such as the Internet, that goes outside your business. The SD part is called Software Defined. That means adding intelligence into the WAN connections to manage sensitive traffic for quality and reliability. <br><br>
The most basic operation of SD-WAN appliances is to combine two or more WAN connections. That can be two broadband Internet lines, such as Cable, DSL, fiber, T1, 4G LTE or 5G cellular, or fixed wireless access.<br><br>
The idea is that every connection has it own performance characteristics and variations that are different from other types of connections. That’s typical of the Internet. It varies all over the place from instant to instant, but not on all connections at the same time.<br><br>
The SD-WAN appliance constantly monitors the characteristics of each connection. What is the speed, packet loss and jitter? Has the line gone dead or so congested it might as well be? With two or more lines to choose from, SD-WAN can route packet by packet through the best connection at each moment. Phone calls get priority over your other traffic so they get the absolutely best connectivity at all times. <br><br>
There are other intelligent features that are also running to ensure voice quality. Forward error correction duplicates each voice packet so if one is lost, the other can take its place at the far end. That gets rid of a lot of the choppiness you hear in digital phone calls. Calls are also smoothed out using dynamic jitter buffering that collects the packets and delivers them smoothly in spite of variances in transmission time. <br><br>
How about security? The Internet is notorious for terrible security issues compared to private lines and the traditional PSTN phone network. By encoding the voice streams and including a firewall and other intrusion preventing measures, even the Internet can be made acceptably secure. <br><br>
<b>SD-WAN Also Improves Your Other Applications</b><br>
What helps improve voice calls is also a major benefit for all your network traffic over the Internet. As companies move more and more applications to the cloud, robust connectivity is becoming essential to productivity and customer satisfaction. SD-WAN can make all of your Internet interactions faster, smoother and more reliable. It comes down to having enough high quality links for the system to always have solid connections. Those links will be used efficiently since lower demanding traffic, such as backups and low priority file transfers, can traverse even slower and more jittery connections.<br><br>
Are you frustrated with the quality and performance of your current business phone system or face disconnection of legacy services? If so, find out what high quality <a href="https://www.enterprisevoip.com">enterprise VoIP and Universal Communications options</a> are available for your business.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-49847582006652298382022-08-24T13:11:00.000-05:002022-08-24T13:11:10.398-05:00Metro and Long Haul Dark Fiber<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
High performance companies with diverse locations and significant staffing may get to the point where the usual Internet access and private line offerings just won’t get the job done anymore. At that point, you may wish to take total control of your network so that you can set the standard for performance and make upgrades as quickly as they are needed. <br><br>
Sounds good, but how are you going to exercise the same control over a network that leaves your premises as you do within your facilities? Get into the network provider business yourself and install fiber to each of your facilities? Hardly. That would be cost prohibitive and way too time consuming. There’s a more reasonable approach, and that is to lease dark fiber.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.gigapackets.com/DarkFiber/dark-fiber-network.php"><img src="https://www.GigaPackets.com/images/BWnetwork300.jpg" width="300" height="502" border="0" align="left" hspace="15" vspace="10" alt="Find dark fiber for your high bandwidth needs now." /></a><b>What is Dark Fiber?</b><br>
We’re all familiar with fiber optic cables and the reliable high speed connectivity they provide. Most incumbent and competitive telecom companies now offer a wide range of bandwidth options within their service areas. Even traditional Cable companies are offering connections to their core network as an alternative to the coaxial copper drops. What is less known is that nearly all of these companies have extra fibers available within their bundles for spares, expansion and leasing. These fibers sit unlit, not installed to any network equipment. <br><br>
Think about it. If you can lease a strand of dark fiber that runs very near to your business locations, it’s almost like you installed the fiber cable yourself. You pay a provider who has already gone to the trouble of installing this fiber and it is already in place. It was likely much less costly for them to do this than it would be for you, because they install many other fiber strands in the same conduit at the same time. Those strands won’t have any effect on your usage. <br><br>
With dark fiber, you get access to the unlit fiber strand. You’ll need the expertise to select and install the termination equipment, but that is much easier than having to hire or contract with crews to trench the fiber conduits and negotiate the right of ways. <br><br>
<b>There Are Two Types of Dark Fiber</b><br>
Dark fiber comes in two varieties, although they are closely related. The first is Metro dark fiber that is installed in cities and their related suburbs. It may be installed on poles above ground or in underground conduit. Metro fiber tends to be installed in large bundles, as there is a lot of demand for fiber optic connectivity within metropolitan areas. <br><br>
The other variety of dark fiber is called long haul dark fiber. This is the fiber that runs between cities to designated points of presence. With long haul fiber, you can span the country to connect your regional offices and factories. Long haul fiber tends to use smaller glass core single mode fiber which can limit the transmission rate. It’s a tradeoff of capacity for distance. <br><br>
If all of your connection requirements are within a single city, Metro dark fiber will likely get the job done. If you need to connect between cities you’ll probably need a combination of Metro and long haul dark fiber. <br><br>
<b>Dark Fiber Alternative</b><br>
Dark fiber requires a budget and level of expertise that not every company can commit to, even though the control, scalability, and security are very attractive features. A related service is called dark wavelength. It is commonplace to “light” a fiber strand with a spectrum of discrete frequency lasers to create independent wavelengths or lambdas. In effect, the fiber strand becomes a set of non-interfering sub-fibers all multiplexed on the same physical strand. It is possible to lease a wavelength instead of a whole fiber at a lower cost. You still have control of the protocols used on that wavelength and it is solely dedicated to your use. If this will work for you, a dark wavelength can both save money and give you the connectivity you desire in areas when an entire strand might not be available. <br><br>
Do you have a need that exceeds the typical ISP or dedicated fiber optic bandwidth service offerings? If so, explore the possibility of <a href="https://www.gigapackets.com/DarkFiber/dark-fiber-network.php">leasing a dark fiber or dark wavelength</a> now. <br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-52746472489092003272022-07-27T15:06:00.000-05:002022-07-27T15:06:20.691-05:00Copper Decommissioning Expands Demand for Metro Ethernet<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
If you are still getting by with last mile Internet over DSL, T1 lines, or Ethernet over Copper, you should take a serious look at Metro Ethernet over Fiber. You’ll get more bandwidth, better pricing and… it will continue to be available. <br><br>
<a href="https://www.ethernettoday.com/MetroEthernet/metro_ethernet.php"><img src="https://www.EthernetToday.com/images/CityFiber300B.jpg" width="300" height="337" border="0" align="left" hspace="15" vspace="10" alt="Metro Ethernet gives you the bandwidth you need at an affordable price." /></a><b>Copper Decommissioning is Now</b><br>
Copper based telecom services have been the go-to technology for the last century, but not this century. The ubiquitous twisted pair telephone line has supported our needs from the introduction of the telephone through the fevered growth of the commercial Internet. But, like cellphones the size of a brick, the technology has run its course. Copper just can’t keep up with today’s and tomorrow’s needs.<br><br>
The phone companies know this. The network operators know this. They are well aware that we are way past “peak copper”. As you read this, copper lines nationwide are being retired or “decommissioned”. In some cases the copper is physically ripped out of conduits so that fiber optic cables can be pulled right back in. In other cases the copper bundles in the ground are simply disconnected and left to rust away on their own. In the coming years there will be fewer and fewer copper options available to order, until a copper wireline is as rare as a cranked telephone set.<br><br>
<b>Fiber is the Future AND the Present</b><br>
The replacements for copper telco right now are Cable in the form of hybrid fiber/copper systems, Fixed Wireless Access, and Fiber Optic bandwidth. Fiber in cities is also called Metro Fiber or Metro Ethernet. Most urban, suburban and even small town businesses now have access to Metro Ethernet and its flexible options. <br><br>
Fiber is your most flexible option for several reasons. First, fiber optic strands offer extremely high bandwidths, to 10 Gbps or more. With wavelength division multiplexing, you might get a dozen or more 10 Gbps lambdas, each a virtual fiber in itself. Now, consider that nearly all fiber cables have multiple strands, even dozens, and you can see how fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited. Once installed, that fiber will likely last as long as you need.<br><br>
Second, fiber, unlike cable or most wireless, can provide exclusive dedicated line services. You can order private point to point connections and have all of the bandwidth available for your traffic. Compare that to the consumer-oriented broadband services that share bandwidth among many users to keep the cost down. With dedicated Internet access or private point to point lines, you won’t be competing with everybody else for limited resources at high traffic times. This can be especially valuable in connecting your network to a distant cloud provider that hosts business critical applications. <br><br>
In addition to massive available bandwidth, fiber service is also very scalable. You can typically start off as low as 10 Mbps at pricing comparable with a current T1 line, but with over 6x the bandwidth. Many smaller businesses find that 100 Mbps is plenty, but Gigabit bandwidth is easy to come by and very affordable. If your applications demand it or your workforce is substantial, 10 Gbps is easily available on fiber. Even 100 Gbps is now being offered to larger companies and hospital complexes, content developers, etc. <br><br>
<b>Why Ethernet over Fiber</b><br>
The earlier implementations of fiber optic service were based on a telephone company standard called SONET that offered fixed bandwidth levels and was designed for voice calls, not data. While protocol conversion circuitry made SONET the backbone of the Internet, Carrier Ethernet is now the standard to be embraced. This is the same switched Ethernet that runs on your local network, but extended to transport packets over hundreds or thousands of miles. <br><br>
Metro Ethernet uses the Carrier Ethernet standard running over fiber optic cabling. This makes it virtually plug-and-play with your network. You can even set it up so that your business locations all over the state or country act like they are on one big network. Metro Fiber Ethernet is the new standard for business connections. Network connections within the metro area are often referred to as MAN or Metropolitan Area Network, while those more distant are referred to as WAN or Wide Area Network. <br><br>
Are you ready to replace aging T1, DS3, DSL or other network services with something more modern that is future-proof and likely less expensive? Check your <a href="https://www.ethernettoday.com/MetroEthernet/metro_ethernet.php">Metro Fiber Ethernet </a> options for one or more business locations now.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-23857839617813733852022-06-27T14:59:00.000-05:002022-06-27T14:59:07.849-05:00Ethernet Better Than a T3 Line<I>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Not long ago, T3 voice and data lines were a mainstay of medium and larger size businesses. Today, that once impressive 45 Mbps doesn’t seem all that fast. Our business applications demand more like 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps. Medical campuses, design firms and video production houses are more interested in 10 Gbps and looking beyond even that. If you still have a T3 line contract, you may well find that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less cost right now.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.t3rex.com"><img src="https://www.T3Rex.com/images/T3toEthernet300.jpg" width="300" height="333" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Switch from T3 to Ethernet and save!" /></a><b>What is a T3 Line?</b><br>
The T3 designation is part of the T-Carrier system developed by Bell Labs in the post-war tech boom. It was originally designed to transport large numbers of simultaneous telephone conversations and still fills that role for some larger businesses and call centers. Prior to T-Carrier, telecom was based on analog technology. T1 and T3 changed that to digital and started us down the path to the Internet we have today. <br><br>
T3 is specified at 45 Mbps, enough to transport 672 digitized phone calls. That makes it a lot more efficient than creating a bundle of 672 separate twisted pair copper wires as telephone lines. T3 was once transported through large coaxial cables or microwave relay stations. More recently, it has been bundled on SONET fiber optic cables and called DS3. DS3 is the data format that runs on the physical T3 line, so DS3 and T3 pretty much mean the same thing. <br><br>
The channelized version of T3 is used to carry those 672 phone calls, each in a separate channel or time slot in the data stream. For data transmission, the unchannelized version of T3 carries 45 Mbps worth of data, including the familiar packet switched networks. <br><br>
<b>Ethernet Replaces T3</b><br>
Most all communications these days done over digital networks and originates in the most popular protocol, Ethernet. Even telephones have switched to an Ethernet interface so they can hook to the same network as computers instead of having separate wiring. This is called VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. With computers and phones on the same network, it makes sense to transport everything over Ethernet on both the local and wide area networks. <br><br>
This is exactly what is happening. Carrier Ethernet, the long haul version, is replacing other telecom protocols such as T-Carrier for copper line and SONET for fiber optic. It’s pretty much going all Fiber optic Ethernet now. This is often referred to as Ethernet WAN for Wide Area Network. <br><br>
<b>Cost and Performance Advantages of Ethernet</b><br>
The first advantage of long haul Ethernet transmission is that it is directly compatible with most all company networks. You simply plug the Carrier’s Ethernet into your router. There is no need for separate protocol conversion boxes or modules as required to support T1 and T3 lines. <br><br>
A second advantage is that Ethernet is easily scalable. You can run at any speed up to the limit of the physical port from the Carrier. T-Carrier and SONET protocols were designed for specific speeds and needed to have hardware replaced to upgrade. The bandwidth of your line is set by the Carrier based on your contract. You can easily increase or decrease that as your needs change and it will be reflected in your billing. <br><br>
Perhaps the biggest incentive to switch to Ethernet WAN service is pricing. You may be shocked at how much your can save by switching from an older telecom service to Ethernet WAN. Ethernet is almost always lower in cost on a per-Mbps basis. Sometimes the difference can be a factor of two or more. <br><br>
Much of the cost savings comes from a more competitive environment for fiber optic Ethernet versus the old telco services with one provider. There may be several companies offering Ethernet bandwidth for your business at competitive rates. <br><br>
Fiber is also more available than ever before. The upgrade of cellphone towers to 4G LTE and 5G has demanded a rapid expansion of fiber optic networks. Copper is yesterday’s news and, more and more, it is being left to rust in the ground. Fiber and wireless are the future for networking. <br><br>
Do you have legacy T3 or DS3 service and want to see if you can get a better deal? That’s easy. Just <a href="https://www.t3rex.com">check prices and availability of Ethernet WAN service</a> for your business address. Chances are good that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less cost than what you pay now. <br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-67797272185217978072022-05-23T14:45:00.001-05:002022-05-23T22:01:33.135-05:00Gigabit to 10 Gigabit to 100 Gigabit WAN<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Business WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth needs have accelerated, as more operations are moved to the cloud and more employees are working remotely. Fortunately, there are very good provider solutions available to create high bandwidth links from point to point and to the Internet.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.gigapackets.com"><img src="https://www.GigaPackets.com/images/PrismBW.jpg" width="300" height="404" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="High bandwidth fiber optic services that are right for your business." /></a><b>Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN</b><br>
Fiber optic connectivity is now clearly the gold standard for business bandwidth. If you are still using legacy T1 lines, ISDN PRI, or DS3 bandwidth, you are probably running out of bandwidth and likely headed for obsolescense. Many carriers are starting to decommission their copper-based services due to high maintenance costs and declining customer interest. It’s time to upgrade.<br><br>
All fiber is not created equal, however. The legacy SONET technology introduced decades ago by the telephone companies is also getting long in the tooth. What’s better? The new standard is called Carrier Ethernet or Ethernet WAN.<br><br>
Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN is an extension of the switched Ethernet standard used on virtually every Local Area Network. The technical standards make it easy to connect the LAN to the WAN without going through any intermediate protocol conversions. It’s Ethernet from end to end. This is the standard that most every service provider is offering, including many of the legacy telephone companies that have adopted it for their own networks. <br><br>
Advantages of Fiber Ethernet WAN include ease of scaling bandwidth without having to change interface hardware. Order 10 to 50 Mbps starter service and easily upgrade to 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps, usually by using an online portal or making a phone call. Truck rolls are seldom needed unless you are ordering service beyond what your terminal equipment can handle. <br><br>
Pricing is very attractive. You can start with lower bandwidth services from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and likely pay the same or less than you pay now for your copper based services. You almost always get more bandwidth for the same cost or pay less for the replacement bandwidth at the same service level. <br><br>
Cost savings are even more dramatic as you go up in bandwidth. The cost per Mbps or Gbps compared to legacy solutions gets lower and lower as you go up in speed. Costs have also been dropping over time as technology improves, carriers build-out fiber runs, and competition increases. If you have a contract that is more than a few years old, you can likely save money with a new service. <br><br>
<b>Multi-Gigabit Solutions</b><br>
There was time, and it was only a few years ago, that 1 Gbps or 1,000 Mbps broadband or private line service was the holy grail of connectivity. Not anymore. Fiber isn’t rare the way it used to be. It’s very common, now, to have fiber running extensively in metro business areas. Often there are multiple competing providers that result in very attractive pricing. <br><br>
Fiber build-outs are multiplying, as more and more businesses demand higher and higher bandwidths and cell towers are upgraded to support millimeter wave 5G cellular service.<br><br>
1 Gigabit bandwidth is common for business, with more demanding applications upgrading to 10 Gigabit service. The next move is to 100 Gbps Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN. Although that may seem ridiculously high for smaller businesses, it is not unreasonable for large hospital campuses and medical centers with multiple imaging facilities. Other high users are universities, research laboratories, government entities, video production houses, architectural firms and manufacturers. With 5G wireless supporting bandwidths in excess of 1 Gbps and cable companies offering at least that much to consumers, 10 Gbps is quite reasonable for highly automated businesses that have made the transition to digital. 100 Gbps is simply the next logical increment. <br><br>
<b>Dark Fiber and Fixed Wireless Access</b><br>
Lit fiber optic WAN is likely to remain the standard for business for the foreseeable future. However, there are special situations where related technical solutions make sense. <br><br>
Dark Fiber is an option for businesses that want more control of their connections, almost as if they owned the link themselves. Many network providers have extra unlit fiber strands in their cables available for spares and future expansion. They may be willing to lease an entire fiber strand or a wavelength on one of the strands. What is available depends on the locations you wish to link. Advantages of dark fiber include being able to run any protocol you wish and the enhanced security of being the only user on a particular fiber or wavelength. <br><br>
Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) uses microwave frequencies instead of fiber to carry the traffic. Many cellular companies use FWA to backhaul traffic to their remote towers instead of having long and isolated fiber runs. Bandwidths can be in the Gigabit to 10 Gigabit range and offer dedicated private line service or connections to the Internet. Think of FWA as fiber without the physical fiber. You have an antenna on your building instead. A major advantage of FWA is that installation can be done in days versus months to have fiber trenched in were none is currently available. <br><br>
Are you ready for a bandwidth upgrade from older copper services or expensive SONET fiber? <a href="https://www.gigapackets.com">Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN, Dark Fiber and Fixed Wireless Access</a> may offer exactly what you need at better prices than ever before.<br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-59254357539857770482022-04-14T13:30:00.000-05:002022-04-14T13:30:12.599-05:00Ethernet WAN is the New SONET<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
High speed communications lines progressed from copper analog to copper digital to fiber optic digital over most of the last century. The technology that drives fiber has also evolved from time sliced synchronous multiplexing to packet based protocols, mirroring the transition to networked computing for nearly every business. While older SONET telco lines still provide effective connections, there are real advantages to be gained by upgrading to Ethernet WAN, the newer technology for fiber optic service.<br> <br>
<a href="https://www.fibernetworkquotes.com"><img src="https://www.FiberNetworkQuotes.com/images/EthernetEyeWAN300.jpg" width="300" height="388" border="0" hspace="15" vspace="10" align="left" alt="Find Ehternet WAN services now." /></a><b>It Started With Really Fast Phone Lines</b><br>
SONET, which stands for Synchronous Optical NETwork, is a phone company invention that was developed to bundle or multiplex thousands of individual phone calls onto an optical fiber for long distance transmission. To make operations easier, SONET was made backwards compatible with legacy T1 service that does exactly the same thing with 24 calls over two twisted copper pair… in other words, ordinary telephone line. <br> <br>
SONET allowed the phone companies to bundle T1 line into DS3 lines into OC3 fiber lines and demultiplex or unbundle them anywhere along the way. Everything was compatible down to the single telephone channel. <br> <br>
<b>SONET to Link Computers</b><br>
So, how did SONET come to support computer networking? The protocol had to be converted between SONET’s time division multiplexing and Ethernet’s packet switching. That was accomplished using protocol conversion on a plug-in module. To the user, It made no difference what was going on under the hood. Packets would go in one router and come out another miles or thousands of miles away. <br> <br>
SONET was developed for fiber and all of the early fiber optic links for computer networks were connected using one of the SONET levels. OC3 was the lowest speed at 155 Mbps. This was the first fiber service that most corporations ordered when they outgrew their T1 and T3 lines. Each increase in speed required swapping out an adaptor module for the particular SONET level. <br> <br>
In fact, the Internet was built on SONET. SONET rings, which offer redundant paths, formed the core of the Internet as it grew. Internet service providers would connect via SONET and then divvy up the bandwidth for multiple 64Kbps dial-up modems or, later, DSL or Cable broadband modems. <br> <br>
<b>The Ethernet Revolution</b><br>
Ethernet, developed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the mid to late 1970’s, grew to become the dominant networking protocol, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of the personal computer at the same time. Most small and large users adopted Ethernet, as adaptor cards, cabling, hubs and routers became more and more affordable. Every PC soon came with an RJ-45 Ethernet jack as standard equipment and peripherals, such as printers, did the same for compatibility. <br> <br>
Once Ethernet became the de-facto networking standard and computer data traffic greatly exceeded voice traffic, it started to make sense to just adopt Ethernet for Wide Area Networks as well as Local Area Networks. When business phones became digitized and used VoIP to connect on the same network as the computers, the need for a separate voice network faded away. <br> <br>
Another factor that has moved WAN services from SONET to Ethernet is the rise of competitive network service providers independent of the telephone companies. Since these companies had no legacy analog phone service to support, they could simply focus on offering Ethernet connections to their customers in competition to the telcos.<br> <br>
By this time the original Ethernet protocol has been expanded to provide technical specifications for Carrier Ethernet, which is the same as LAN Ethernet but extended to support the MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network).<br> <br>
<b>What Ethernet WAN Has to Offer</b><br>
You remember that SONET has distinct service levels, each with it’s own bandwidth and specific adaptor requirements. Ethernet doesn’t have this limitation. Instead, you have an Ethernet port with a maximum bandwidth, say 1 Gbps. It will support any bandwidth up to the max limit of 1 Gbps. You can order 100 Mbps service today and easily upgrade to 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps later. Only if you want a service level above 1 Gbps, will you need to have a higher capacity port installed. This process is so seamless that many providers will let you change service levels at will by logging into your online account. <br> <br>
Ethernet services tend to be less expensive than SONET. Usually, much less expensive. You pay for the service level you want, be it 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and so on. Remember you can change this easily after you have service installed and your bill will be adjusted to the new level you select. <br> <br>
Since there are many, many competing Ethernet MAN and WAN service providers, pricing per Mbps has dropped rapidly over the years and continues to do so. Some of the service providers are the traditional telephone companies, but with much improved pricing. Others are independent carriers serving regional, national, or international areas. They can also provide excellent customer service, high reliability, and very good deals on bandwidth. <br> <br>
There are usually two types of service you’ll be interested in. One is a dedicated connection to the Internet at a bandwidth you select. The other is a point to point dedicated private line that is just like having a very long Ethernet cable connecting two LANs separated by many miles. These are useful for interconnecting main offices and branch offices, warehouse, manufacturing centers and so on with maximum performance and privacy. Another popular application is a direct connection between your offices and your cloud service provider. This avoids the vagaries of Internet performance and makes the cloud seem like it is right down the hall. <br> <br>
Perhaps you still have legacy SONET service that was installed years ago. It’s been working fine so no one has paid much attention. This would be a good time to see if competing <a href="https://www.fibernetworkquotes.com">Ethernet WAN services</a> can give you more bandwidth for the same budget or offer a considerable cost savings if you are happy with the bandwidth level you have now. It doesn’t cost anything to look, so why not see what’s available?<br> <br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9746801.post-73319407419998108952022-03-16T14:07:00.001-05:002022-03-16T14:09:47.495-05:00Upgrade your ISP to GigE and 10GigE<i>By: John Shepler</i><br><br>
Regardless of whether your business is strictly e-commerce or a traditional bricks and mortar operation, Internet access is essential to conducting business these days. One thing we never seem to have enough of is bandwidth. This is the right time to upgrade your broadband connection to handle the throughput you really need to efficiently get the job done. Surprisingly, it may be more affordable than you think.<br><br>
<a href="https://www.EthernetToday.com/"><img src="https://www.EthernetToday.com/images/SpeedometerVert300.jpg" width="300" height="394" border="0" hspace="5" vspace="5" align="left" alt="Dramatically increase your broadband speed to 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps" /></a><b>How Much Do You Need?</b><br>
Small businesses, including home offices, single person professional offices, small retail stores and the like, may find that 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service is plenty. You might even get by with less than that… for now. For every other situation, you’ll want to look at bandwidth fast enough to be transparent. Transparent means you don’t even know it is there. There’s always enough that you won’t get slowed down no matter what you are doing. That’s the gigabit range. Consider Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE).<br><br>
Why speeds so much higher than you’ve expected over the years? Today’s business is different. Much of what we call content is high consumption video versus email messaging. Images are much larger, if not in physical size then in Mbps. Databases are huge. They don’t call it “big data” for no reason. On top of all this, most processing has moved or is moving to the cloud. Those high speed Ethernet cables that connected you in-house have to be replicated between you and your cloud provider.<br><br>
<b>Really Fast Connections Readily Available</b><br>
Fortunately, the networking industry is keeping pace. The incentives of greater business demand, 4G and 5G wireless, and consumer cord cutting has pushed providers to expand their networks and lower the cost per Mbps and Gbps. You likely have multiple options to get the bandwidth you need at a price you can afford.<br><br>
You should know that Internet Server Provider (ISP) bandwidth comes in multiple flavors, each with its own characteristics and pricing. There’s a reason why they don’t all cost the same. The first reason is provider competition. The more options that are available in a particular area, the more competitive pricing will be, especially on the higher end business connections. <br><br>
Another reason is whether you can live with shared bandwidth or need to have exclusive use. Your lower cost options, of which cable is the biggest provider by far, have the bandwidth multiplexed or shared among many users. You’ll notice that your bandwidth is “up to 1 Gbps” rather than guaranteed to be that speed at all times. The idea is that not everyone is using the line to full capacity at all times. In fact, that’s highly unlikely. So, while you are reading something online, somebody else is downloading a file… and vice versa. <br><br>
If you are running a server or running business critical software in the cloud that needs to hesitate as little as possible, you’ll want Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) at a minimum. In fact, you may even need to upgrade to a direct connection between you and your cloud provider to get the performance you desire. That gets you off the Internet and its vagaries completely. Dedicated Internet Access keeps you on the Internet, but you don’t share your “last mile” bandwidth. That’s where most of the congestion occurs anyway. <br><br>
Another consideration is whether you need symmetrical bandwidth or not. Most Internet services that offer shared bandwidth are also asymmetrical. That means the download speed is much higher, sometimes 10x higher, than the upload speed. It makes sense if you are mostly accessing web sites or downloading videos, like most consumers. However, if you run cloud processes where you upload as much as you download or do large backups to remote storage, you’ll want symmetrical bandwidth options. <br><br>
<b>Your ISP Bandwidth Options</b><br>
So, what’s available? Cable broadband using DOCSIS 3.0 or 3.1 standards will get you 100 to 1000 Mbps shared bandwidth Internet access, usually asymmetrical. It’s quite reliable these days and you can’t beat the price. <br><br>
If you are out in the boonies where there is no cable, you might get by with 4G or 5G wireless broadband. Yes, it’s the same broadband that runs your smartphone, but with a special modem that connects an office network. Another option is satellite business broadband. This will work just about anywhere and offers decent bandwidth. Latency can be an issue, especially for VoIP telephony and video conferencing, but otherwise may be just the ticket. Note that both of these wireless options have limited resources so that you may run into usage limits. <br><br>
Fiber optic bandwidth is the gold standard these days. It’s more available than ever before and you can generally get as much bandwidth as you care to. This is where you find DIA and symmetrical options. You'll also find the services to directly connect you to your cloud provider or other business locations.<br><br>
Fixed Wireless Access used to be very limited and only in major downtown metro areas. It’s expanded quite a bit recently and can often function as fiber optic without the fiber. That works to your advantage when fiber construction costs are high or you can’t wait long for service installation. <br><br>
Should you upgrade your ISP to GigE or 10 GigE? Perhaps even 100 GigE? If your current Internet service is stifling your business you really can’t afford not to. Check <a href="https://www.EthernetToday.com/">high speed business Internet and direct connection prices and availability</a> now to see what is available for your business locations. <br><br>
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T1 Rexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16092519196727893911noreply@blogger.com