The Sun is Setting on Copper Telecom Lines

By: John Shepler

It has been rumored for a long time and now it’s really underway. The end of over a century of copper wire based phone and network lines is here, with a key event on June 30. That’s the start of AT&T’s first major wave of wire center decommissioning. Over 277 of these facilities will go dark when completed, with more waves of decommissioning to follow. In the end, we’ll have completely moved on from Alexander Graham Bell’s original network.

What The Loss of Wire Centers Really Means
In simple terms, a wire center is where all the wires connect. It’s the building that connects the central office switching with all the local loops. That’s often thousands and thousands of individual twisted copper pairs that are bundled into larger cables. Your analog phone line, the “landline” or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line, is one of these loops. You can trace the wire pair directly from the phone jack on your wall all the way to the line card at the central office that provides power and signaling to run the phone handset.

Those twisted pairs can carry a lot more than individual phone calls. They can be set up with digital termination equipment to provide DSL and T1 broadband or PRI digital multi-line phone service. They may also be used in special applications such as fire alarms, elevator phones, gate entry systems, security systems, and fax machines.

Decommissioning means taking these lines out of service. No more wire center. No more copper line service.

In actuality, the phone companies that own these lines have already been discouraging their use through higher service prices and refusal to add more customers. Another group, copper wire thieves, have been doing their own decommissioning by cutting and stealing cables and then burning off the plastic insulation so they can sell the copper at recyclers. Copper prices are way up due to the expansion of data centers, electric vehicles, and solar power, to name a few.

What Replaces Copper Telecom Lines?
Like the incandescent light bulb, it’s time to move on from 19th century technologies. The new options are primarily fiber optic and wireless.

Fiber voice and broadband started with phone company Optical Carrier standards but has migrated to Carrier Ethernet standards to be compatible with the vast majority of company networks. Ethernet over Fiber service ranges from 10 Mbps up to 100 Gbps, with Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE becoming popular standards.

You need what is called an Ethernet Port at your end. That connects via fiber to your service provider, often an Independent network operator but perhaps a traditional telco. The speed of the Ethernet port limits the amount of bandwidth you can have. A Gigabit port lets you order up to 1,000 Mbps. A 10 Gigabit port supports anything up to 10,000 Mbps.

There are different flavors of fiber optic service. Your Internet access can be on a fiber line that is shared among many businesses and residential users to save cost. You may prefer to order Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) so that your connection to the Internet itself in essentially on a private line.

Direct Cloud Access is a similar service without the Internet being involved at all. You have a private fiber service from your facility to your cloud service provider. This gives you the best low latency and low congestion for higher productivity and smoother voice calls and video conferences.

You might also want to consider dedicated point to point fiber to interconnect your facilities across town or around the world. These private lines offer high performance and better security than what you could hope for on the Internet.

Wireless Options
Of course you have mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers that connect to the Internet using 5G cellular broadband. Another flavor of that services is Fixed Wireless Access. It comes in a box with higher gain antennas and Ethernet connection. It’s the 5G broadband without the phone features. There are also options to add outside antennae for better coverage and some controllers offer multiple providers for service continuity if one company goes offline temporarily. FWA can be as speedy as fiber, but without having to run the fiber line itself.

Some Wireless Internet Service Providers do not use cellular networks. Instead, they have their own towers and beam and point to point signal to a small dish antenna on your roof. These are very private lines and can have Gigabit or higher speeds.

Satellite broadband and satellite phone have been around for years. The broadband using geostationary satellites can be very reliable and speeds have been improving with newer generations of satellites. The half second or more of latency due to the distance to geosynchronous orbit is one sticking point. LEO or Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations, primarily SpaceX Starlink, reduces the latency to something similar to terrestrial broadband. Bandwidths are also competitive for many applications. Just stating now is direct to handset service that turns satellites into alternative cell towers. Soon there will be no dead spots, even in the most remote areas.

What to Do About Specialty Services?
Those fire alarms, fax machines and elevator phones that were designed for twisted pair copper and nothing else still have hope. AT&T, among others, is offering a “POTS Replacement” service that consists of 4G LTE cellular wired to support these services along with built-in battery backup. Why 4G LTE? This standard can mimic the old phone lines and is still readily available.

The One Remaining Copper Service
There is still one very popular copper broadband service, but it is not from any phone company. This is Cable Broadband that is brought in on coaxial copper wiring. In reality, the cable companies have converted to fiber optic transmission, but the latest DOCSIS standards let them keep their existing copper coax into your building and still achieve speeds of 1,000 Mbps or even 10 Gbps… competitive with fiber.

Is your company experiencing an upcoming loss of service due to copper decommissioning? No time to wait. Find out what copper replacement services are available for your business needs. You may be surprised to find you can actually get more capability at a lower cost.

Is 10 Gbps Internet the New Business Standard?

By: John Shepler

Internet bandwidths have been creeping up since the introduction of broadband more than two decades ago. Just when you think you have enough, you find that response from websites and cloud applications is too sluggish for you to maintain maximum productivity. It’s time for another upgrade, but that isn’t such a bad thing these days… if you do it right.

Why the Need for So Much Bandwidth?
What’s driving the need for ever increasing bandwidth is more data hungry applications. While the original Internet was most text-based, the next move was to images and then database operations. The introduction of video really started to suck up Mbps and Gbps as fast as they could be provided.

Now it is enormous file transfers, high definition video, including video conferencing, and the relocation of business critical applications from the server room to the cloud. Add e-commerce to that mix and you have a screaming demand for high speed low latency bandwidth.

The Changing Nature of WAN Bandwidth
The telecommunications world was founded on copper and wireless. Wireless persists in an evolved form, but copper is on the way out. Well, twisted pair copper telecom lines are disappearing fast. Coaxial cable copper has a new lease on life with DOCSIS 3.1 and 4.0 that are enabling it to compete with fiber. Wireless, too, can compete with fiber using 5G and, soon, 6G technology in the microwave range.

The big daddy of telecom is fiber. You can see fiber being trenched into nearly every right of way in cities and even smaller towns. Fiber goes under water to link continents. The Internet IS fiber, even if your access isn’t.

Fiber today isn’t the same fiber as yesterday. Oh, it’s still glass fibers fed by lasers. What’s different is the protocols. The telephone-centric SONET has given way to Ethernet over Fiber that is directly compatible with the Ethernet on your LAN. Packet switched networks have taken over from circuit switched networks.

The Good News About Bandwidth
The thought of ever accelerating bandwidth needs could give you pause except for one counter factor. The cost of that bandwidth is decreasing almost as fast as the speeds are increasing. You can get gigabit level fiber or cable broadband for what you used to pay for a T1 line. It is rapidly becoming possible for residential users to get gigabit level bandwidth over cable and PON (passive optical network) fiber. Wireless speeds in the hundreds of Mbps are also getting common. Any of these services may also serve smaller businesses well.

The next step up is in the multi-gig speed range, with 10 Gbps a new standard. It works well for businesses with many employees online, hospital and medical centers needing to transmit medical images, automated factories, video production and so on. If you already have Gigabit Internet or GigE service and are running into congestion, a 10 Gbps fiber line may be the perfect solution. For very high volume operations, even 100 Gbps isn’t unreasonable and is becoming more commonly available.

All Bandwidth Isn’t the Same
So far we’ve been talking about the Internet, the ultimate public commons. It’s a shared network by its very nature. Even so, most users with enough bandwidth find it works well for their purposes.

Internet access is also generally shared. Cable and cellular wireless are multi-user services without any priority or guarantee of latency. Because they are shared, these are the most affordable options.

The next step up is called Direct Internet Access or DIA. It’s a private line from your location to the Internet connection at your service provider. Being private means that you aren’t competing with dozens of other local companies or consumers for bandwidth, which can become scarce at times. The wireless equivalent of DIA is called 5G slicing.

Still need higher performance? Skip the Internet for a private lane all the way from your company to your cloud provider. Direct connection, another name for a private line, completely eliminates competition from other users to give you the best consistent performance. A 10 Gig Ethernet fiber private line is a premium service that may well fit your budget if you need to have the cloud behave like the servers down the hall.

Are you ready for 10 Gbps Internet or private line service? Don’t say no until you’ve checked prices for 10 GigE and higher business bandwidth. If 10 Gig is too much right now, you may opt for a fraction of that with the option to upgrade later. If 100 Gbps makes sense, large organizations may also find that within their means.

10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access Has the Speed You Need

By John Shepler

Gigabit Internet is something of a gold standard for high speed business connections. Sometimes, though, even 1 Gbps doesn’t get the job done. At that point you need to consider a move up… to 10 Gigabit Internet.

Who Needs 10 Gbps Bandwidth?
Most small businesses and probably all residential Internet users have no real need for this performance. The bragging rights are far offset by significant monthly lease fees. This is serious bandwidth for demanding applications that make having it more than worth the cost.

Not long ago the only place you’d find 10 Gbps pipes were in the backbones of carrier networks, including the Internet itself. Time marches on and what was adequate a decade ago is marginal performance today. Those 10 Gbps lines have gone from rare and hard to get to fairly common and readily available to business.

Cloud services and colocation centers certainly need access to gigabit, 10 gigabit and even higher connection speeds. Large corporations with thousands of employees, all connected, can also justify this speed. High tech firms and those using high tech tools may also require higher speeds. Content providers? Absolutely. Hospital and medical centers with large imaging requirements certainly can’t be waiting around for file transfers.

What’s Involved In Acquiring 10 Gigabit Service?
Speeds this high are almost always going to be delivered on fiber optic cable. The interesting thing about fiber is that once you have it installed it is as easy to get high speeds as it is to get much more modest service. That’s because the fiber itself is capable of tremendous throughput. The limiting factors are the number of strands in the fiber bundle and the termination equipment on both ends.

The first standard for high speed fiber transmission was developed by the telephone companies and called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. You may have heard of OC-192, which is the 10 Gbps SONET Optical Carrier level. Nowadays, most competitive networks and even the telcos are moving to Carrier Ethernet. Ethernet is directly compatible with nearly all local area networks. It is also easily scalable from typically 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and even higher speeds. What’s even more important for most business users is that Carrier Ethernet, also called Ethernet over Fiber, is generally far more available and far less costly than the older SONET technology.

Many competitive regional, national and international carriers now offer 10 Gig Ethernet access as well as point to point private lines. That means you may have several competitive offers to consider.

Why 10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access?
Think of the Internet as the proverbial electronic superhighway with a backbone of major interstate and international roadways and millions of on-ramps. Unless you are part of the Internet itself, you will be connecting through one of these on-ramps. They vary greatly in performance.

The best performance you can expect on the Internet is to connect to the network backbone through a high tier provider using a dedicated connection. Dedicated means that you and you alone have use of the bandwidth you have leased. That sounds like the way it should be, but most Internet connections designed for consumers and smaller businesses are shared, not dedicated. By multiplexing many customers on the same line, cable, satellite and cellular wireless companies can offer low cost reasonable speed connections to their customers.

The other characteristic to look for is symmetric bandwidth. That means 10 Gbps in both the upstream and downstream connections. Those low cost options are usually asymmetrical, with download speed high and upload speed low.

Bandwidth to Grow With Your Needs
Since Carrier Ethernet is so scalable, you can often order the bandwidth you need today with the option of upgrading incrementally as your needs grow. With a 10 Gbps port, you can order 1 Gbps, 5 Gbps or some other speed and pay for the performance you are actually using. As long as you have enough port speed, you can often upgrade with just a phone call to your supplier or even through your online account.

Are you cramped for bandwidth but concerned that what you really need is not available or too expensive? You’re likely in for a pleasant surprise, so go ahead and request competitive quotes from Dedicated Internet Access providers serving your business address.

Dark Wavelength vs Dark Fiber for 10 GigE

By: John Shepler

Organizations that require extremely high MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) bandwidth or need to run a multitude of protocols have looked to dark fiber as a technical solution. Dark fiber is still a good choice for the most demanding applications, but there is a competitive service you should also be aware of. It’s called dark wavelength or dark lambda. Let’s look at what each has to offer and how they compare with the more common point to point and MPLS network connections.

What is a Dark Wavelength?
We think of wavelengths as colors of light, not something dark. A wavelength with no color would essentially be turned “off” and would be the same as a dark fiber, right?

Not really. The difference is that dark fiber is nothing but the glass fiber strand itself. There is no equipment attached. Somebody, and that somebody is likely you, has to install terminal equipment at each end and turn on one or more laser beams to “light” the fiber. Sometimes "managed" dark fiber is available, where the carrier will provide the terminal equipment but you'll still have exclusive use of the fiber strand.

With a dark wavelength, this has already been done. It’s not a fiber with a single color laser at one end and a detector at the other. Instead, the equipment that has been installed is DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing gear. What DWDM does is send multiple non-interfering laser beams down the same fiber strand to create what amount to additional channels equivalent to multiplying the number of fiber strands available.

With DWDM there is still only a single physical glass strand. The multiplexing or creating of multiple virtual fibers out of one is based on the fact that glass is transparent to more than a single color or wavelength of light. You can easily see this with a common prism. Shine white light in one side and bands of color appear on the other side. The prism shows that a number of separate colors can travel through the glass without interfering or canceling each other out.

Say you want to create a dozen different wavelengths on a single fiber. You’ll need a DWDM system that contains a dozen laser transmitters, each tuned to a slightly different wavelength or color. In practice, all the colors are in the infrared part of the spectrum and not visible colors. Nonetheless, they are referred to as colors, wavelengths or lambdas (the Greek letter used to denote wavelength).

Why go to all this trouble and expense? Simple: To multiply the capacity of a fiber cable. There are two ways to get more bandwidth from a fiber bundle. Either add more strands or use more of the inherent capacity of each strand. Adding strands means running an additional cable along the same route or replacing the cable you have with a larger diameter one that has more of the hair-thin glass fibers. Both options are incredibly expensive. Getting more from the infrastructure you already have is very attractive by comparison.

This is why DWDM is so popular. Why pull many miles of new cable at a cost of millions of dollars when you can upgrade your terminal equipment for a fraction of the cost? DWDM is a well established and standardized technology. Why not let technology save you the cost and delays involved in upgrading the physical cable?

The Dark Wavelength vs Dark Fiber Tradeoff
If you lease a dark fiber strand, you have exclusive use of that piece of glass. You have the security of knowing that only your traffic will travel over that strand. There will be other customers using other fiber strands, but there is a physical separation between you and them.

Dark fiber also gives you the flexibility of using any protocol you want and even setting up multiple protocols on the same fiber. How do you do that? By installing DWDM equipment of your own to create multiple independent wavelengths.

You can see how this can get to be expensive fast. A simple one wavelength fiber strand is one thing. You can probably get 10 Gbps bandwidth on that strand with simple equipment. DWDM is another matter. Now you need a fairly sophisticated piece of equipment at each end that you have to install, pay for and manage. For that, you can create multiple independent channels of, say, 10 Gbps each.

Instead, why not let somebody else bear that expense? That’s the basis of dark wavelength services. Someone, the carrier or service provider, has already lit the fiber with DWDM equipment that they own and operate. However, they don’t need all of the wavelength capacity themselves. If there is only enough traffic to use half the wavelengths available, the others can be leased to help pay for the system.

A dark wavelength is simply an unused wavelength on an existing fiber optic system. To be truly dark, the laser for that wavelength may be turned off or there is no card in the system for that particular channel. Either way, once someone agrees to lease the wavelength, service can be turned up fairly quickly. After all, the fiber and the DWDM chassis are already in place and operating.

Why Choose Dark Wavelength?
One reason to opt for dark wavelength service is that it may be all that is available. The owner of the fiber network may not be willing to lease an entire strand. That’s especially true if they have already lit their strands and are using some of the wavelengths.

Another attraction of dark wavelengths is equipment cost and maintenance. In theory, a provider could require you to purchase the channel cards that are compatible with their DWDM system and light the wavelength yourself. More likely, they will handle that themselves. You may or may not be asked to pay a one-time installation fee that includes the cost of the wavelength cards.

If the common carrier turns up the wavelength and maintains the system, you will have exclusive use of that particular wavelength at a bandwidth of 1, 5 or 10 Gbps. Sometimes wavelengths can be aggregated to create higher bandwidths up to 100 Gbps. Either way, only your traffic will be carried on that wavelength as whatever protocol you choose. Other customers will have their traffic on other wavelengths, but the different color beams will not interact.

Other Options
Not everyone needs or wants dark fiber or wavelength service. Many businesses only need 100 Mbps or Gigabit service. Both traditional SONET or the newer Carrier Ethernet protocols are generally available as point to point connections, ports to much larger MPLS optical networks, or Dedicated Internet Access.

What bandwidth option is best for your applications? Why not discuss your needs and get competitive quotes from multiple carriers for a range of services that can meet your needs. Then you can compare costs and benefits and pick the high bandwidth fiber optic service that best meeds your requirements.


Note: Spectrum of light wavelengths though a prism animation courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

The How and Why of 10 Gbps WAN Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Big data keeps getting bigger. HD video will soon be supplanted by 4K and then 8K video. IT data centers are going dark, one by one, as applications move to the cloud. Where is the bandwidth coming from to handle the demand of ever higher bit rates in the MAN and WAN?

That bandwidth is coming from fiber optic carriers who realize that every organization is going to be upsizing its data pipes or falling behind competitively. A gigabit per second was considered massive bandwidth not that many years ago. Now it’s considered entry level for many medium size and larger companies. Even consumers are anxiously awaiting universal FTTH to satisfy their ever growing media demands. Is 10 Gbps unreasonable for high performance business applications? Not at all.

The next question is how do you go about acquiring 10 Gig bandwidth once you’ve made the determination that nothing less will get the job done. Here’s an overview of the 10 Gigabit Bandwidth Options available for businesses and other organizations.


Note that SONET at the OC-192 level is still a viable option for businesses seeking 10 Gbps bandwidth. It will continue to be a good choice for some time to come because the amount of installed base of SONET/SDH fiber.

However, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is coming on strong and should be looked at carefully as the service of the future. Carrier Ethernet-native networks and those running Ethernet over SONET have big advantages in scalability and ease of deployment compared to the rather rigidly defined SONET OC levels.

The trick is to get a service port installed that is capable of providing the maximum bandwidth you’ll need. If you are considering more than 1 Gbps service, then a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port makes a lot of sense. It will allow you to incrementally scale your service bandwidth from 1 to 10 Gbps without having new terminal equipment installed. The terminal equipment is most likely to be a managed router installed by the carrier as CPE (Customer Premises Equipment).

What if you are going for the whole 10 GigE right from the start? That would merit a discussion on the cost tradeoff (if any) to have a 40 Gbps or 100 Gbps port installed right away. As outrageous as it may seem from the traditional perspective, 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet are real service options available today for many business locations. These are likely to become common bandwidth levels as more sophisticated applications move to the cloud.

Does it make sense to opt for wavelengths or dark fiber? It depends on what you’ll be using it for. If you need to be running multiple protocols through a point to point connection, managed wavelength service can be the right move. If you are sophisticated enough to install and maintain your own DWDM equipment, then you might get the best deal by simply leasing dark fiber to the locations you want to connect. For most businesses, though, dark fiber is beyond what they really need.

How can you tell what the best option is when there are multiple choices available? Make sure you are getting competitive quotes for as many different options and carriers as possible. It’s likely that there may at least several serving your location that you may be completely unaware of. You best choice is to work with a bandwidth broker, like Telarus, Inc., to get the best deal on 10 Gigabit or other bandwidth service.

10 Gigabit Ethernet For Business

Is it possible that Gigabit bandwidth services aren’t enough to support your business? These days that’s entirely possible. The proliferation of video content and a migration to the cloud that’s picking up steam make old assumptions about WAN bandwidth obsolete. Today, 10 GigE connections are perfectly reasonable.

Just a few years ago, 10 Gigabit bandwidth was a basis for core transport networks. Now that speed is 100 Gbps. Even 40 Gbps is being left in the dust. Bandwidth levels at 10 Gbps are now available for both metro and long haul connections.

Don’t need a full 10 GigE right now? How about fractional 10 GigE? These are bandwidths between 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps. Fractional bandwidth services are much more available with Carrier Ethernet than SONET. Ethernet is designed to be more scalable. Rather than specific standardized WAN speeds like OC-48 or OC-192, you can specify many granular bandwidths up to and including the full speed of the installed Ethernet port.

What’s available in 10 GigE connectivity? The point to point private line is typical. This is an optical bandwidth connection from your premises to somewhere else in the country or around the world. 10 Gigabit connections are useful for connecting data centers for data mirroring and high speed backup. Geographically diverse data centers are desirable to protect against natural and manmade disasters that can take out an entire area. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and toxic spills fall into that category.

The newest application for a 10 GigE connection is likely to be the most popular one soon. This is the connection between your facility and the cloud. Cloud computing services offer extremely high performance. It’s so easy to scale resources in the cloud that before long you can find yourself with Terabit processing and Megabit connections. Somehow all that data has to go back and forth between your offices and your cloud service provider.

Amazon Web Services has defined a service called AWS Direct Connect as an alternative to using the Internet for accessing their cloud services. This is a private line connection using a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps port. The sheer size of Amazon’s cloud makes it logical that they would pioneer speeds of this magnitude. Other cloud providers are hot on Amazon’s heels, though, and it won’t be long before 1 Gbps is considered entry level and 10 Gbps is the standard way to connect to your cloud provider.

What about the Internet? The Internet has limitations as your path to the cloud. Latency and jitter are unspecified and uncontrolled. Bandwidth can vary when paths become congested. Companies are finding that for high performance applications the Internet is a bit too unpredictable. The more employees you have accessing the cloud, the more you risk productivity by using an indeterminate connection.

High speed Internet connections are a must for Internet service providers, content distributors and large e-commerce sites. The Internet is the only viable way to connect to the public at large. It will be a long time before individual users expect 10 Gig downloads, but large Cable MSOs and wireless service providers need that bandwidth level to divvy up among hundreds or thousands of users.

The same limitations that make the Internet unsuitable for cloud connections also make it unsuitable for massive content transport. Video content distributors have found that the only suitable way to electronically get their content to market is to bypass the Internet and connect directly to their customers, such as Cable and satellite networks. This has spawned the CDN or Content Delivery Network. The CDN is a private network that is designed to transport content at high speed to specific destinations. There is no public traffic on the CDN even though the content is meant for public consumption at the far end.

What does this mean to businesses? If you are involved in e-commerce, video production or distribution or Internet access services, you need a high speed connection to a CDN or the Internet backbone. This is where a dedicated 10 Gigabit Ethernet line can be critical to your operation. That’s true even if it is only a last mile connection.

Are you feeling constrained by the bandwidth limitations of your current service provider? It’s time to get prices and availability for 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to your business location.

Low Latency Fiber Network For Orange County

Businesses are demanding more bandwidth at lower latencies to support demanding applications such as financial trading, business process automation, cloud computing & storage and medical image transmission. This is creating an opportunity for new fiber buildout, like the one underway in the Los Angeles Metro area.

AboveNet, a major provider of fiber optic networking services in the US and Europe, is launching what they call a large “feeder ring” to connect office buildings, data centers, and carrier hotels to an existing fiber optic backbone that now serves the business districts of Irvine and Costa Mesa in Orange County, California.

Fiber optic connectivity has become the new battleground for competitive service providers as well as incumbent telcos. A major push has been the transition from legacy SONET/SDH to Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE and 40 GigE, MPLS networks, dark fiber and wavelength services. Networks are becoming more IP oriented, at the expense of traditional switched circuit TDM technologies. This plays well with the dominance of Ethernet networks in business and the move to converged voice, data and video networks.

Cloud services have opened up a further need for increased bandwidth. When companies had on-site data centers for their servers and storage, most traffic was contained within the building or campus LAN. Special links served overnight tape backup at offsite storage centers. Once computing and disk resources move to a colocation facility or a cloud services provider, there is a corresponding increase in WAN bandwidth requirements. With everything “out there,” a much higher portion of traffic leaves the company LAN.

AboveNet and other carriers are in a major push right now to expand their fiber optic network footprints in the US and abroad. Especially important are low latency networks to Europe and Asia to interconnect financial markets and major international businesses. Private networks require an enormous capital investment and the Internet is unsuitable for high performance, secure connections. That’s creating an opportunity for companies that specialize in metro and long haul fiber optic networks to jump in and fill the need.

Some services that are seeing more demand are IP transit to connect with the Internet backbone for companies that don’t have networks large enough to do their own peering, Ethernet Private Line and LAN services, global MPLS networking, and wavelength services that offer both very high bandwidth capacity along with flexibility of protocols.

Competitive pressures have also reduced the cost per Mbps for nearly all leased line services. This is true for even the ubiquitous T1 lines, but even more so for Ethernet connections of all types. Ethernet availability has expanded to such an extent that it is often far less expensive than T-Carrier or SONET in most metro areas. Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE WAN connections are now routinely ordered by larger business and organizations.

Is your company bandwidth starved or simply looking for better prices on existing network services? See if you can do better by checking prices and availability for fiber optic bandwidth.



Note: Orange County, CA photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Metro Ethernet for Faster Access Connections

Businesses and organizations are bandwidth hungry these days. With an increase in interactive Web applications, cloud computing services, and electronic medical records, the speed of doing business is starting to be limited by the availability of WAN bandwidth. There's plenty of carrier bandwidth available at decent prices. The real speed bump is in the last mile connection from your location to the carrier's POP (Point of Presence). In metropolitan and suburban areas, the cost effective answer might be a move to Metro Ethernet.

What is Metro Ethernet? It's Ethernet transport that's compatible with the Ethernet you run on your company computer network. But this type of Ethernet is designed for the WAN (Wide Area Network) rather than the LAN (Local Area Network). The generic term is Carrier Ethernet. When provisioned for metropolitan area access and connectivity, it's often called Metro Ethernet.

So what's the advantage of Metro Ethernet over, say, a T1 line? Speed for one thing. A T1 line runs at a fixed rate of 1.5 Mbps. You can order less speed with fractional T1 service or you can bond T1 lines together to get higher speeds of 3 to 12 Mbps. But that's about where T1 tops out. While it is technically possible to bond even more lines together, it's seldom cost effective. By the time you exceed 10 Mbps, it's usually cheaper to bring in DS3 service at 45 Mbps over fiber optic cable.

Metro Ethernet can also be provisioned over fiber optic cable to give you standard Ethernet at 10 Mbps, Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps or even Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbps and 10 GigE at 10,000 Mbps. It's often significantly cheaper than traditional SONET fiber optic services because Metro Ethernet is offered by competitive carriers who have their own nationwide fiber backbones and fiber within the metro areas. Since they completely control their network assets and don't need to subcontract to local phone companies, these carriers can often offer large cost reductions. That's especially true when they are trying to establish a major presence in an area.

Another service that you'll find with Metro Ethernet that makes lower bandwidth services even more cost effective is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This is what it sounds like. It's Metro Ethernet provisioned over multiple copper pair, similar to T1 lines. But a different modulation technology is used for EoC that is more efficient for packet transmission, but at a tradeoff of being distance limited. In other words, you need to be within a few miles of the nearest carrier POP to take advantage of this service. If you qualify, you can get Ethernet over Copper in bandwidths from 1 to nearly 50 Mbps at costs per Mbps often well below other line services.

But what if you are located in a smaller town or rural area? Remember those bonded T1 lines? You can probably get bonded T1 service at 3, 6, 9 Mbps or more anywhere you can get business telephone service. Chances are that this service will be far cheaper than bringing in new fiber optic lines.