10 Mbps Ethernet T1 Line Replacement

By: John Shepler

Early in your business, you needed a robust connection as things were just ramping up on the Internet. Dial-up was too annoying. DSL was too flakey. SONET fiber was just way too expensive and had bandwidth you’d never need. T1 was the right solution at the right time. Always on. Always reliable. Low latency, low jitter and low packet loss. That 1.5 Mbps bandwidth may or may not still be getting the job done, but like all good things, T1 is coming to an end. What to do now?

It Still Works. Why Get Rid of It?
T1 lines were based on telephone lines. That is, twisted pair copper wires. That was the genius of the design. The phone companies could install T1 service using the same wiring they already had in place for multi-line business phones. Just about any business could get T1 and many, many did over the decades.

So, why not stick with a winner? Two reasons, really. First, the Internet today isn’t the nascent Internet of the ’90s. E-commerce is pretty much universal. Nearly every business has a website and most take online orders. A lot of businesses are online only. Those that aren’t still need to be connected for credit card verification, inventory control, supplies ordering and customer interaction. High definition graphics and video have supplemented email and text files that dominated early Internet use. A T1 line’s 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is getting to be a limitation for even small business operations.

The other reason is that copper telco lines are something like incandescent light bulbs. They’ve served us well for more than a century, but it’s time for new technology to take over. Phone companies own the copper lines in the ground and on poles. The costs of maintenance are getting too high considering the dwindling number of users. More and more areas of the country are seeing phone company notices that copper service is being discontinued. The replacement is generally fiber optic or, in some cases, wireless broadband.

A Sensible Replacement for T1 Internet
If you need a bandwidth upgrade or find yourself being cut-off from T1 service, you might be interested in an entry-level fiber optic bandwidth service called 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. What you get is 10 Mbps always on bandwidth versus the T1 line limit of 1.5 Mbps. It is also dedicated to your business only, so that you are not sharing this capacity with other companies. That means your speed won’t be varying depending on what others are doing. This is Carrier Ethernet service that is directly compatible with your Local Area Network. Just plug it into your router and go.

Oh, but how much more will you pay for this faster service? Thanks to extensive buildouts and more competition in fiber networks you may not pay any more for 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA than the old T1 contract you’ve kept renewing. Maybe even less.

Fiber Optic Ethernet is Easily Upgradeable
Once you have fiber installed, you should be good to go for the foreseeable future. That’s because the fiber itself has nearly unlimited bandwidth. What you are using is determined by the terminal equipment installed in your business and how much you want to pay each month. You may start off with 10 Mbps but then find you really need 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps to support your expanding business. These days Gigabit Ethernet is standard for many companies and more are bringing in 10 Gigabit service. In rare instances with unusually high Internet demand even 100 Gbps makes sense.

Typically the provider will install a GigE or 10 GigE port for your service. You can then order up to 1 Gigabit with the GigE port or 10 Gigabits with the 10 GigE port. Many providers will give you an online account that lets you change your bandwidth at will. You’ll automatically get billed for the higher rate when you upgrade. Unlike the old SONET days, upgrading bandwidth won’t generally require a truck roll and change of terminal equipment at your site. You can make the speed increase yourself almost instantly.

Private Lines Also
Ethernet over Fiber offers private lines as well as Internet access. A private line connects two locations directly and does not use the Internet. That means you are unaffected by Internet congestion or other Internet problems. Many businesses are choosing to host their business software in the cloud rather than run their own data centers on-site. A dedicated private line from your location to your cloud service provider, called a direct connection, helps to make the system run smoothly without lags and cutouts.

Are you ready for or in-need of a replacement for your aging T1 Internet line? If so, check competitive pricing on 10 Mbps and higher Ethernet over Fiber service now.

Do You Still Have Broadband?

By: John Shepler

If you’ve had the feeling that Internet broadband speeds have been accelerating lately, you’d be right. Broadband service was an amazing improvement on dial-up access when it was first introduced and then quickly took over. For a lot of years a few Mbps seemed plenty fast enough. Then 10 Mbps became the benchmark to shoot for. Now businesses are moving quickly to 100 Mbps and beyond, while the FCC is codifying 25 Mbps as the threshold where broadband begins. What does this really mean and what does it portend for the future?

What Does The New Standard Represent?
Official broadband standards have never been a leading indicator. They are set after a technology is well proven and the need clearly demonstrated. The move from 4 Mbps to 25 Mbps is quite a jump and it tells you something important about where bandwidth requirements are going. Is 25 Mbps the end of the road for awhile? Not likely and here’s why.

Few individuals and fewer businesses are going to pay up for higher line speeds for simple bragging rights. Something is driving the need to upgrade and then upgrade some more. The big factors are the move from local to remote resources and the nature of content itself.

The Rapid Growth of Computing Requirements
Remember message boards? Digital communications used to mean ASCII text transmissions. No need to press up against the speed of light just to get a few KB of characters to a distant server. It was the text-based model of computing that prompted Bill Gates to declare that 640K of RAM was plenty for the original PC, because who could possibly need more? Well, nobody did when the migration was starting from 64KB 8-bit processors. In just a few years, 640 KB was a joke. How long before 640 GB becomes a limitation? Probably sooner that any of us think possible.

Processor speeds have bumped up against some practical manufacturing limits, but the way around that is multiple processors. Memory, both RAM and Disk (now solid state), are sill growing. Bandwidth? Why is anybody surprised that WAN bandwidth requirements are going up when processing capability and memory are steadily increasing?

What's Next?
Computers always seem on the verge of not being able to keep up with us because of the functions we ask them to do. Text? That’s kids stuff. Photos? Easy. HD and 4K video? That’s more of a challenge. Will 4K be fully deployed before 8K starts to take over? What then?

You might think that software is getting less sophisticated because of the relatively small size of downloaded apps compared with some of the huge software packages that used to come in fancy cardboard boxes. That’s an illusion. The real power of of the apps we use is in all of the back-end processing that is going on at some remote server. Now everything is being tied to locality (with GPS) and highly personalized. A lot of this personalization is subtle and automatic. The system watches your behavior instead of you having to manually input a bunch of parameters.

Big data was a big bottleneck when it had to be handled locally. Just how much of a database can you put on a PC and how much grief is it going to be to keep up to date and accurate? Enormous data bases in equally enormous data centers can present a wealth of opportunity. The way the investment in gathering and managing all this data makes sense is to keep it simple for the end user. That doesn’t mean the system is simple. It just means that you and I are only dealing with the tip of the iceberg when we access these systems.

Big Data, Big Support Required
Big Data and sophisticated business applications have driven IT to a new architecture: The Cloud. The cloud pools all the processing and memory you can possibly use in a system that allows individual tenants to scale resources up and down at will. What you don’t need right now can be used by someone else. The resources they release can be put to work on your growing applications. As long as there are sufficient resources above and beyond what everybody needs at the moment, the system appears to be infinitely expandable.

What often isn’t infinitely expandable or even seems that way is bandwidth. The WAN connection, be it a dedicated line or Internet connection, has become the new bottleneck. Think of those clouds as enormous lakes full of data and you are getting your share through an old garden hose.

The way businesses are going to continue accelerating productivity is to let the machines do more and more of the work. Paper pushing is already a thing of the past in most clerical operations. Manually filling out forms is as obsolete as standing at a drill press or using a scythe to cut grain. Make no mistake that performance will continue to increase and probably accelerate. If you don’t make it happen, competitors will. That means more and more sophisticated processing, more mobility, and more data to present in simple, usable formats, more flexibility in manufacturing (think 3D printing) and larger data communication channels.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough
In the long run, we have no idea how many Gbps or Tbps or Pbps will be needed. Right now, we can make some good estimates on what’s needed immediately and what that will grow to over the next few years.

Single digit Mbps connectivity has had its day. The only place T1 lines are still appropriate is for simple point of sale terminals and remote locations where there really isn’t any better solution. Bonding T1 lines can take you to 10 or 12 Mbps, but that’s just a stopgap. You’ll be needing more in the future.

If the consumer threshold for broadband is 25 Mbps, then that seems like a reasonable amount for businesses too. Granted, most business users aren’t creating or consuming a stream of HD movies all day. But they are accessing cloud applications, doing desktop or conference room video conferencing, sharing large files among business locations and running the phone system in the cloud. Remember that one consumer or a family is using that 25 Mbps. Your business demands per person may not be as consistently high, but you have lots of them on the same line. Productivity is also more of an issue when you are paying people. You don’t really want them sitting around waiting for the computers.

That argues for at least 10 Mbps for really small operations and 25 to 50 Mbps more commonly. Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps used to be expensive and hard to come by. Now it’s reasonably priced and readily available. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for a medium size office to have 100 Mbps broadband… especially when that 100 Mbps may not cost much more than the 1.5 Mbps T1 line you budgeted for when you first got broadband many years ago.

Larger companies or sophisticated operations creating video content or doing 3D printing on an industrial scale can easily justify Gigabit Ethernet. So can school districts and anybody else with hundreds of simultaneous users.

How about really big companies? The new threshold may well be 10 Gbps Ethernet or 10 GigE. That service is readily available in metro areas and 100 GigE is starting to deploy nationwide on some carriers. This is where the upper end will be soon. Can Tbps service be far behind? It’s in development now.

Ethernet is the Way to Go Now
Note that all of these recommended services are Carrier Ethernet based. That’s where the industry is going for ease of interfacing and rapidly scalability. Like cloud resources, connectivity changes will be on-demand as well.

How is your company doing for broadband? Feeling the squeeze as you try to get more packets through the old lines? Feeling put upon now that the FCC has declared your connection as below broadband standards? Not to worry. Faster fiber optic bandwidth connections are plentiful and now cost much less than you might think. This is a good day to make a broadband upgrade.

10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps Internet Upgrades

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling stymied by your company’s low Internet speeds? It’s to be expected. Today’s online applications are far more demanding than the static websites and text based email that were the norm when you got your first T1 line. Today, 10 Mbps can be considered entry level for most businesses. Demands for 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps are entirely reasonable. So, what’s the best way to upgrade?

Movin’ On Up
You can sometimes get away with incrementally increasing your bandwidth as needs grow slowly. Bonded T1 lines can give you 3 to 12 Mbps in 1.5 Mbps steps. You need to order all your lines from the same provider and there will be equipment changes every time you want to step up. Even so, this can be the best option in rural areas where there isn’t much service available.

A competing approach is to order Ethernet over Copper rather than T1. It’s available in most metro areas, although not so much beyond the city limits. EoC can give you higher bandwidth levels, 3 to 20 Mbps, at lower cost than bonded T1 solutions. It’s distance sensitive, so the closer you are to the office supplying your service, the higher your bandwidth.

The best option today is looking more and more like Ethernet over Fiber. Yes, fiber optic service used to be rarely found and very expensive. The legacy SONET fiber services still are pricey, although they’ve come down dramatically in recent years. Ethernet over Fiber is a newer approach that offers a number of advantages for business users.

What Ethernet over FIber Offers
Ethernet over FIber (EoF) is pretty much like it sounds. It uses the same Ethernet protocol that runs on your company LAN, but adds some features that make it suitable for telecom carrier use. You’ll also hear it called Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet. This is currently a metropolitan service. There isn’t much fiber in the boonies, although more is being installed all the time to boost the capability of cellular towers.

Because it’s Ethernet, EoF is easy to connect to your network. Your handoff from the service provider is a fiber or copper Ethernet connection. Plug it into your edge router and you’re in business

Ethernet over Fiber was designed to be highly scalable. That means upgrades are very easy and probably don’t need equipment changes. Compare that to legacy services that always required the carrier to swap out termination equipment and often took weeks and months to complete. With EoF, you make a phone call and your speed will be increased in a matter of hours or days. The latest offerings let your make changes on-demand. You can increase or decrease your bandwidth right from your computer.

How about bandwidth?
Ethernet over Fiber typically starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps or more. Popular speeds mirror the standard Ethernet LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 1000 Mbps. Actually, you can get many increments in-between these standards. If you like, start off at 10 Mbps and then upgrade to 20 or 30 Mbps and eventually move on up to 100 Mbps or more.

The one consideration that makes this easy is the port speed you install. That the speed of the connection to the provider’s equipment. You’ll want at least a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet connection to provide 10 to 100 Mbps. If you expect to go into the hundreds of Mbps, you’ll want at least a Gigabit Ethernet port. Want more than 1 Gbps? Get a 10 Gbps port installed initially so you won’t need equipment changes from running out of port speed.

The Pleasant Cost Surprise
Many traditional and new carriers are now offering Ethernet over Fiber, since it has become so popular. This makes for a highly competitive marketplace and that’s great for you as a buyer. EoF pricing is far more attractive per Mbps than bonded T1, DS3 (T3), or any of the SONET (OC-3, OC-12, OC-48) services. You can easily find yourself paying half or less than you would with other telecom services. You retain highly reliable service with low latency, jitter and packet loss.

Does this sound like just the business Internet access you need now? Check out prices and available of Ethernet over Fiber bandwidth options for your business location now.

Why 10 Mbps Ethernet is Replacing T1

There is a big technology shift in progress right now that involves many small to medium size businesses. It involves your broadband and private line WAN connections. The classic T1 line that has served this business market so well for so long is quietly going extinct. Let’s see how that can be and what is replacing those lines.

T1 was the first truly broadband network connection offered to business users. Before T1, you were dealing with dial-up over analog phone lines or fairly low speed digital lines running something like 64 Kbps. What T1 brought to the table was 1.5 Mbps of rock solid symmetrical bandwidth. As a synchronized line, it also supported digital telephony with up to 24 digitized phone conversations per T1 line. In fact, that’s the origin of T1. Bell Labs devised it to support efficiently transporting telephone conversations between switching offices.

The reason that T1 has become so popular is that it is a mature, reliable technology that is nearly universal available. T1 comes into your building on two pair of ordinary phone wire that is installed for multiple business lines. Even today, T1 lines are still being ordered by smaller businesses that need a dependable dedicated Internet or private line service but don’t have high bandwidth demands. Pricing has plunged over the years from well over a grand a month down to something in the range of $200 to $300. You may even find lower prices in highly competitive metropolitan areas.

So if T1 service is so wonderful, why would companies replace it with something else?

The problem is bandwidth. Over the last few decades, business processes and the applications that enable them have become much more sophisticated. Casual Web browsing and online ordering is still done, but now a lot of content is video and “big data” moving over the networks. The last straw is probably the move to cloud-based services. Before the cloud, your network traffic ran on your own LAN between users and servers. Now, all of that traffic has to traverse the WAN network. Only the smallest cloud implementations are satisfied by a mere 1.5 Mbps pipe.

T1 technology does accommodate higher bandwidths through a process known as bonding. Two bonded T1 lines double the available bandwidth to 3 Mbps. Bond four lines together for 6 Mbps. You can continue this expansion up to 10 or 12 Mbps before it becomes impractical.

The real limit to bonding T1 lines is affordability. There is no economy of scale. Each T1 line needs to be individually installed and costs the same. Therefore, you pay double for 2x bonding and quadruple the monthly lease price for 4x bonding with perhaps some small discount for multiple lines.

What’s moved in to replace T1 is a newer technology called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet over Copper uses the same telco twisted pairs that support analog telephony and T1 lines. The modulation scheme is more efficient, though, and supports higher line speeds. It’s not at all unusual to get 10, 20 or 30 Mbps over copper lines.

Ethernet over Copper is also priced much lower per Mbps than T1 lines. Typical entry level is 3 Mbps EoC for the same price as a T1 line. That’s double the bandwidth for the same money. Even more attractive is 10 Mbps EoC for 2x to 3x the cost of a T1 line, depending on location.

The 10 Mbps bandwidth service level is becoming the most desirable price point. While you pay more for a10 Mbps EoC connection than a T1 line if both are ordered today, most companies ordered their T1 service years ago. They may have paid more than necessary because they only investigated one or two vendors. The result is that you may well be able to get 10 Mbps Ethernet over Copper for the same lease price as you have been paying for longstanding T1 service. Making the move to EoC can give you the higher bandwidth you need today without having to increase your monthly telecom budget.

Does your company really need more bandwidth to operate efficiently in today’s marketplace? If so, consider trading in your T1 lines for Ethernet over Copper or the higher speed Ethernet over Fiber service. The cost is probably much lower than you expect.

10 Mbps Is The New T1

T1 service has long been the gold standard for business connectivity. They’re deployed as point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access, and PBX telephone trunks. T1’s are readily available, reasonably priced and highly reliable. Their one limitation was once their prime selling point. It’s the fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps.

Now it’s true that 1.5 Mbps still meets the needs of many small retailers and companies that aren’t technology driven, although even that is starting to change fast. Everyone from insurance professionals, physicians, video producers and engineers is now highly connected. Some of those connections are private lines or virtual private lines. Others are dedicated access to the Internet. What they have in common is a need for far more than yesterday’s bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps.

What’s more appropriate for today’s needs? It’s looking like 10 Mbps is becoming the new gold standard. Why is that? First, let’s look at what’s happened to bandwidth requirements. Nearly everyone connected to the Internet now has broadband rather than dial-up access. The wireless industry is under tremendous pressure to move from 3G speeds of around 1 Mbps, not that much different from T1, to 4G speeds of 3, 6, 10 and higher Mbps downloads and at least 1 Mbps upload.

Broadband speeds are under the gun because they are now the limiting factor to the success of computing. The PCs themselves, including Macs, have gone to multi-gigabyte memories, terabyte storage and multi-core processors. They’ve got the horsepower to create whatever user experience is required. Even tablets are now multi-core and connected to WiFi, 3G or 4G broadband. The WAN is the limiting factor in getting information into and out of the computing platform.

This wasn’t the big deal a few years ago because most all computing was done locally. You either had a software package on your PC or accessed a corporate server over a Local Area Network. Web pages were small, static and mostly text and low resolution graphics. Email is an undemanding text-based service. Ecommerce solutions may have sophisticated processing on the back-end, but don’t necessarily need to transmit that much data back and forth during a transaction.

What’s happened now is that graphics are going high resolution to match higher resolution screens and the natural output of higher resolution still cameras and HD video cameras. Video content is a greater portion of the traffic on any WAN connection. Even more importantly, everything is moving off to the cloud. The cloud is your data center, somewhere, out there, and everything flows to and from the cloud over your WAN connection. This might be a private line or an Internet access service. Either way, it better be a fairly large pipe or you will be feeling constrained in everything you try to do on your computer.

TelePacific is one carrier that is embracing the demand for higher business bandwidth levels and deploying what they call EoX or Ethernet over Anything. That’s Ethernet over copper, TDM, fixed wireless or fiber optic cabling. Why Ethernet? It has the cost advantage over traditional telecom services, an easy interface to corporate LANs, and rapid bandwidth scalability. Most popular is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. What EoC offers is provisioning over the same type of twisted pair copper telco wiring that transports T1 lines, but with higher bandwidths and lower prices per Mbps than T1.

For instance, to get 10 Mbps over T1 lines you need to bond 7 T1 lines together at a cost of 7 times the price of a single T1 line. For half that cost or less, you can get 10 x 10 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. If need be, you can easily ramp that up to 15, 20 or 25 Mbps or more when the need arises. As a reference point, the price you were paying for a single T1 line a few years ago will get you 10 Mbps EoC service today.

Are you feeling constrained by your WAN bandwidth, especially that aging T1 line? If so, it’s time for an upgrade that is likely less expensive than you think. You can probably afford 10 Mbps or more right now. Find out by getting prices and availability for Ethernet bandwidth services suitable for your business location.



Note: Ethernet patch cords photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.