Two Flavors of Fast Ethernet Service

By: John Shepler

No need to let bandwidth limitations stifle your business. Here are two affordable options to acquire 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service, likely as much as a small to medium size operation will need. I’ll tell you later how to upgrade that to Gigabit Ethernet when the time is right.

Fast Ethernet over Fiber
The gold standard in business bandwidth has shifted from legacy T1 lines to fiber optic service. Not the old expensive SONET telco fiber that you know as OC-3, OC-12 or OC-48. I’m talking about the modern Carrier Ethernet standard known as Ethernet over Fiber, also called Metro Ethernet.

Entry level fiber service typically starts at 10 Mbps. That’s enough for many small businesses with limited Internet or file transfer needs. With even a few employees or heavy use of cloud applications, you’ll be craving more performance. That’s where Fast Ethernet shines. It offers 100 Mbps x 100 Mbps dedicated bandwidth 100% of the time.

Features of Fast Ethernet over Fiber
Performance is much like your old T1 line or DS3 connection, but much faster. Symmetrical bandwidth means that your upload and download speeds are both 100 Mbps. That’s important if you run cloud applications that send large files in both directions. Backup to cloud storage is almost exclusively in the upload direction until you need to recover a file.

Fiber optic bandwidth is known for low latency, packet loss and jitter. Your service will be solid since all of the line bandwidth is dedicated to your business. Whatever capacity you aren’t using at the moment sits idle, much like the way a Local Area Network behaves.

That brings up another important advantage of Fast Ethernet over Fiber. It is directly compatible with your LAN. Just plug it in to your router or switch and it’s ready to use. Many business networks run at 100 Mbps, although new installations are typically 1000 Mbps and larger networks are 10,000 Mbps or 10 GigE.

Option #2 Fast Ethernet over Cable
Business Cable Broadband has come a long way over the years. Most systems are HFC or Hybrid Fiber Cable. That architecture employs a private fiber optic network for the long haul runs. Traditional 75 ohm coaxial copper cable connects from the curb to your building. The termination equipment is a DOCSIS modem. Most are DOCSIS 3.0, which easily provides 100 Mbps Internet service up to a maximum of 1.2 Gbps in the download direction. The newer standard is DOCSIS 3.1, which easily provides Gigabit Internet service with a growth path to as high as 10 Gbps in both directions.

Characteristics of Fast Ethernet over Cable
Two advantages of Cable broadband are availability and cost. You can get service if the cable runs past your building, and that’s most buildings in metro areas. The cost for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet is likely a fraction of what you pay for Ethernet over Fiber. Construction costs are minimal, if at all. Simply plug your network into the Ethernet connector on the DOCSIS modem.

The cost difference is reflected in a difference in service level, although that may not make a difference depending on how you use the service. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated, which can mean variations in line speed that depend on how many other users are online and how heavily they are using the service.

The bandwidth is asymmetrical, meaning that download is much faster than upload. A typical bandwidth service is 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps to 25 Mbps up. Typically Internet usage is heavily in the download direction for web browsing and watching video. Email is both upload and download, but the files tend to be fairly small and not affected by the asymmetry. If you send to large mailing lists to deliver video from your own servers, the upload bandwidth could become a limitation.

Upgrading Bandwidth
One advantage that both fiber and cable service share is that they are easily scalable compared to the old T-Carrier and SONET telco standards. You simply need a port that can handle the maximum bandwidth you anticipate needing. For fiber, that’s a Gigabit Ethernet port on the Customer Premises Equipment. For cable it’s a DOCSIS 3.0 or 3.1 modem. With those in place, you can upgrade your speed with just a phone call and no equipment changes will be necessary.

Do you feel limited by your current point to point or Internet access speed? You may be surprised how affordable a major upgrade is. Check out Fast Ethernet service options for your business now.

T1, DS3, EoC or Fiber?

if you need more than a Gigabit of bandwidth, you’re down to a choice of fiber or fiber. But what about less demanding network needs? Say you need from 1 Mbps on up to 100 Mbps. Now you have a number of flavors of twisted pair copper and coaxial cable connectivity, as well as fiber optics. What’s the best way to go these days?

It’s Important and It Isn’t
What you choose for a bandwidth connection can seem like a critical decision. Relax. The fact is that as long as you choose dedicated Internet access or point to point private lines, you’ll be getting similar performance. What’s different will be the availability of each service and the price.

A Word About Dedicated vs Shared
I should point out that there is a tremendous difference between dedicated and shared bandwidth. You get a lot more bandwidth when you choose something like business cable broadband. But, that bandwidth has different upload and download speeds and you share what’s available with other users. That means your slice of the pie will vary all the time. Even so, when you get up to 10 or 100 times the download bandwidth at the same price, it’s a pretty enticing deal. If it works for your needs, that can be the smart way to go.

T1 vs EoC
T1 lines have traditionally been the entry point for business bandwidth. You get a rock solid 1.5 Mbps x 1.5 Mbps circuit with low latency, jitter and packet loss. Availability is excellent. Even prices have come down dramatically in recent years. The only weakness is that bandwidth level. While 1.5 Mbps used to be pretty decent broadband, it hardly qualifies anymore.

You can bond T1 lines together to create higher connection bandwidths. Two lines give you twice the bandwidth or 3 Mbps. Add more and you can ramp this up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That’s still plenty for many businesses, but it gets a bit pricey as you go up in bandwidth.

A competing technology is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This service uses the same multiple twisted pair copper, but bandwidths are usually higher. EoC starts about 3 Mbps and easily goes up to 10 or 15 Mbps. Maximum bandwidth capability goes down with distance from the originating office, but close-in you can get 25, 30 or 50 Mbps. Occasionally even higher.

How about the cost comparison between T1 and EoC. EoC is cheaper for the same quality of service. If available, you can often cut you bandwidth costs in half for symmetrical, dedicated private lines or Internet access. The higher the bandwidth, the better the deal.

T1 or EoC vs DS3
The traditional upgrade path from T1 used to be DS3. It’s a jump from 1.5 Mbps (or 12 Mbps bonded) up to 45 Mbps. In some cases you can get fractional DS3 that creates intermediate bandwidth options.

The thing about DS3 is that it really isn’t a completely copper solution. The connection to your equipment is a pair of coax cables. But, most of the distance to the carrier’s office is handled by SONET fiber, typically OC3. That means there needs to be some fiber in the area for DS3 to be available.

Today the upgrade path is from T1 to Ethernet over Copper. DS3 is a possibility, but you need to compare costs to see what is a better deal at your particular location. Any of these technologies will give you reliable high performing connections.

Ethernet over Fiber
Fiber optic service used to mean SONET, the legacy telecom standard. SONET is still available with service levels of OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48. It’s a rock solid service, but doesn’t upgrade quickly or easily and can be pricey by today’s standards.

The new gold standard is Ethernet over Fiber. Most new network services are designed around Ethernet for several reasons.

First, it’s a very easy interface to your local network. Ethernet connects to Ethernet seamlessly. It also enables additional services, such as layer 2 switched LAN to LAN connections.

Second, Carrier Ethernet has been designed to be easily scalable. Instead of a few fixed service levels, you can order just about any bandwidth increment. If you change your mind or have a greater need later, you can get a bandwidth increase with a simple phone call to you provider. In some cases, you can do it yourself via a Web browser.

Third is cost. Ethernet over Fiber is the core of many new service providers with regional, national and international footprints. Even the big legacy carriers are making the move from switched circuit to packet switching technology (Ethernet) because that’s the future. As a result, there are a lot more opportunities for Fiber Ethernet service options than traditional fiber services and greater competition. You’ll generally pay dramatically less for service at the 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps level. Even 10 Gbps is becoming readily available at affordable prices for more demanding needs.

Choosing Your Bandwidth Options
Like every other business decision, the best option is to gather as much information and quotes from as many service providers as possible. You can do this with one simple inquiry to get competitive bandwidth service quotes and expert recommendations.



Note: The humorous mousepad about needing more bandwidth, along with many other items in the same theme, is available from the Gigapacket Zazzle store.

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.

Fiber Optic Bandwidth is Closer Than You Think

By: John Shepler

If you’ve had your telecom line contracts for years, maybe decades, you may not be aware of all the connection options that have become available recently. Some have popped up only in the last few years. Don’t continue to assume that something like T1 lines are all that are available without taking another look. You may be surprised at what you find.

 

You Need More Bandwidth
Fiber optic bandwidth has been talked about for years at the wave of the future. When you look at the type of applications that are popular with both consumers and businesses, it becomes obvious quickly that nothing else will accommodate the bandwidths that are needed.

You’ve seen it coming. Static web pages have given way to embedded video clips. SD video has been supplanted by HD Video. Now that clamor is for 4K and, soon, 8K video streams.

How about software? Software used to come on tape reels, floppy disks and CD ROMs. Now software is downloaded. The old “packages” are on their way out, if not gone. They’re being replaced by apps that are acquired over the Internet. That takes a lot more than DSL or T1 bandwidth.

Downloadable apps may have a short lifespan, too. There is a mad dash for the “cloud” for both applications and storage. On-site data centers are emptying out. Massive cloud data centers are popping up as fast as they can be built. When you access everything through the cloud rather than over the LAN, your wide area network bandwidth requirements shoot up by orders of magnitude.

Why It’s Got to Be Fiber
The need for increasing levels of bandwidth have not been lost on service providers. In fact, any carrier that is still married to circuit switched architectures and copper connectivity is just marking time until it is no longer needed.

Ethernet over Copper has extended the life of the installed twisted pair copper plant by offering speeds of 10 Mbps to at least 50 Mbps and sometimes higher. DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 are doing the same for coaxial cable. Premises connectivity is likely the last bastion of copper. It only needs to stretch to the curb, where it connects to… fiber.

What about wireless? It looks like the world is now standardizing on 4G LTE and looking forward to 5G, as everything we do at the desk also needs to be done while mobile. Even so, capacity limitations dictated by the amount of room in the electromagnetic spectrum will keep wireless primarily as a mobile connection. Perhaps meshed WiFi and pico cells will again multiply the capacity of wireless… but it’s never going to be fiber.

An Avalanche of Fiber Now
The beauty of fiber is that it offers unlimited bandwidth as far as we can tell. Each strand might only support 10 Gbps with todays lasers, but DWDM creates dozens or more of those 10 Gbps channels on a single fiber strand. Why install a single hair-thin fiber when you can bundle 100 or more in a cable about the size of the familiar twisted pair bundles?

Of course multiple strand cables are the only way to go. For awhile it looked like way too much capacity had been installed during at the tech boom of the 90’s. Now those dark fiber strands are being lit up en-masse and more capacity is being installed nationwide.

Google has it right. The future… the near future… is fiber and Gigabit bandwidth is something we won’t be salivating over for long. Soon it will be 10 Gbps and then 100 Gbps. There is no end in sight.

It’s not just Google in selected cities or Verizon’s FiOS. Every incumbent telecom company and all the new competitive service providers are in a race to get to fiber as their standard connectivity for both home and business.

Goodbye SONET, Hello Ethernet
The incumbent telcos and the long line providers built their fiber networks with the SONET protocol, as it was the logical upgrade from TDM copper such as T1 and E1. All the new networks are being built around Carrier Ethernet and the older ones are converting rapidly.

Sometimes the most sensible thing to do is install Ethernet over SONET as an upgrade. When starting from scratch, native Ethernet is the protocol of choice. It’s unlikely we’ll return to a circuit switched world. It’s packet switching as far forward as we can see.

The beauty of Ethernet is that it is directly compatible with the local networks in every home and business, and all of the equipment that connects to them. Carrier Ethernet is designed to be highly scalable, with many more increments in bandwidth than were offered by SONET and fractional SONET services. You can pretty much pick the bandwidth you want, although standard LAN speeds of 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps are popular, with 10 Gbps more in demand every day.

Moreover, Ethernet services are fast and easy to scale. You can generally call your provider and get bandwidth upgrades immediately or within a few days. As long as the installed port for your WAN service can handle it, you can keep upgrading as needed with no change in premises equipment.

How to FInd the Fiber Services Quickly
You can try looking the old fashioned way, by looking in the phone directory for telecom carriers in your area. Or just run an online search. You’ll find some of them for sure, but might miss out on others that are new or not widely publicized.

It makes more sense to use a search engine that is dedicated to finding fiber optic bandwidth and nothing else. That’s the GeoQoute (™) system. How difficult is it to use? Trivially easy, in fact. You simply start by entering some basic contact information and the type of service you want. In a few minutes, the automated system will give you a list of options with budgetary pricing. If you like what you see, a complementary discussion with a product specialist can help you narrow down the choices and find out about limited time special offers that might be an even better deal.

Sound good? Do a fast search for fiber optic network services now and see what you may have been missing for years.

Easy Migration from T1 to Ethernet

By: John Shepler

A lot of companies that have depended on T1 lines for years, even decades, are getting to the point where the available bandwidth just isn’t enough anymore. What’s the logical upgrade? Right now what makes the sense for most businesses is Ethernet. Fortunately, the upgrade path is easy and cost effective.

Don’t Write Off T1 Yet
T1 isn’t done, by any means. T1 lines are so entrenched in telco infrastructure that they are almost universally available. This is one of the big draws of T1. It was designed by the telephone industry to serve the telephone industry. When computer communications came along, T1 lines were adapted to connect machine to machine. With 1.5 Mbps bi-directional capacity, T1 has ruled small and even medium business connections. Unfortunately, 1.5 Mbps is barely broadband anymore.

So, do you have to dump your trusty T1 line to get more bandwidth? Actually, no, but it might be advantageous.

Bonding for Higher Bandwidth
You may not realize it, but it is possible to at least double or triple your T1 bandwidth right now. The way you do this is to order additional T1 lines from the same vendor and have them bonded into one larger line service. Bonded T1 ranges from 3 to 12 Mbps. That’s still plenty for many applications. As long as you have additional unused copper telephone pairs coming into your facility, you can likely get more bandwidth.

So, why not just do this upgrade and leave well enough alone? In some cases, this is exactly the right move. Out in the countryside, T1 is often the only professional grade bandwidth available. However, there is a price to be paid. That is, 2x T1 lines cost twice as much as one. Eight T1 lines cost 8 times what you pay now for a single line. That can be more than many budgets can handle.

More Bandwidth For Less Money
Most business locations are within the city or suburbs and have another interesting option. It’s called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. This is the simple upgrade path from T1 because it uses the same twisted copper pair that bring in your T1 lines. Like bonded T1, EoC uses multiple wire pairs to increase bandwidth. The difference is that Ethernet over Copper may be able to give you a LOT more bandwidth.

The basis of EoC is a newer modulation scheme that is more efficient in transporting packets over copper wires. Common bandwidth levels start at 3 Mbps and go up from there. How much higher? Popular choices are 10 to 12 Mbps, 15, 20 and even 50 Mbps in some areas. The hitch is that EoC technology is dependent on distance from the telco office. Distance doesn’t matter much to T1. But, then again, you won’t be getting 20 or 50 Mbps out of bonded T1.

The cost structure is also different. Ethernet over Copper can give you at least twice the bandwidth for the same money. In other words, 3 Mbps EoC costs about the same as 1.5 Mbps T1. As you increase bandwidth, the cost differences are dramatic. You may be able to get 10 Mbps EoC for just a fraction of what bonded T1 would cost.

When 100 Mbps or More is Needed
It used to be that higher bandwidths, including DS3 at 45 Mbps and OC3 at 155 Mbps, were expensive and hard to get. Now DS3 has come down in price so that it is affordable by many smaller and medium size companies. A newer service, Ethernet over Fiber (EoF), starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to at least 10 Gbps capability.

You read that right. The same fiber line can bring you anywhere from an entry level service of 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet, and 10,000 Mbps 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Even 100 Gbps is available in some metro areas.

Where It’s All Going
Fiber is the future. Eventually, all that copper in the ground will be recycled or be left to eventually corrode away. That’s not today, as Ethernet over Copper has given all those old telco lines a new lease on life. However, many businesses are discovering that Ethernet fiber is also both available and quite reasonably priced. They can have EoF installed with a 100 Mbps port and start off paying for only 10 Mbps. A simple phone call to the provider can then speed up the line to 50 or 100 Mbps. Install a Gigabit Ethernet port to begin with and you can get any speed from to 10 Mbps to 1000 Mbps without making any equipment changes.

Are you ready to migrate from T1 to Ethernet to get more bandwidth at a better price? If so, quickly check your copper and fiber Ethernet options now.

The Office to Data Center Connection

By: John Shepler

Outsourcing IT applications to the cloud has become so popular that the connection to the cloud is sometimes given little consideration. Why should it be when all the action is in the remote data center? That center has a wealth of connectivity options both to the Internet and dedicated private lines. But, how do you connect with the cloud? Does it matter?

The Ubiquitous LAN Connection
To understand why office to data center connections are so important, let’s take a look at what you have now. You have your own data center right down the hall, in the basement or the next building over. Chances are that nobody gives a second thought to how they connect with that equipment because everything connects through the company LAN. All of the network equipment runs at the same speed, 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps most likely, so one Ethernet jack is pretty much the same as another.

Performance Taken For Granted
The beauty of the in-house network is that it is well controlled and that high bandwidth and low latency are fairly easy and inexpensive to come by. After all, it’s just a copper or fiber cable running hundreds of feet at the most. Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet switches are standard. Bandwidth, jitter and latency? You can pretty much take them for granted.

If your network is converged, with voice, data and video all running on the same network, your job is a little harder. You likely need to prioritize traffic so that the sensitive audio and video streams aren’t interrupted or delayed by less sensitive data transfers. Even so, on the local network this is under your control

The Trouble With Telecom
The challenge begins at the edge of your network. This is where you hand off control to a third party. Unless you are leasing dark fiber or have a wireless or optical laser link, you need a carrier to accept your signal and transport it across town, across the country or even around the world. Your wide area connections can be as robust as your local network connections… but they aren’t necessarily.

This is where you can get into trouble. Metro and long haul connections come in many flavors, each with its own classes of service, guaranteed bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss.

Shared vs Dedicated
Two major categories of bandwidth service are shared and dedicated. They mean what the names imply. Shared bandwidth means that you share a pool of bandwidth with dozens or hundreds of other users. Dedicated means that you have exclusive use of a line. Whatever you don’t use sits idle.

Why would anyone opt for shared bandwidth when they could have an exclusive channel? It comes down to cost. Telecom lines are less expensive than they’ve ever been. Even so, the cost is not trivial. Consumer Internet broadband is set up as shared bandwidth in order to get the monthly charge down to something most people can accept. The same is true of 3G and 4G cellular wireless and satellite. Wireless bandwidth is scarce and expensive, so there are usage limitations imposed above and beyond the shared usage.

When Sharing Works and When It Doesn’t
For things like email, web surfing, downloading short video clips, online purchasing and other activities that aren’t very resource demanding or time critical, shared bandwidth offers an excellent tradeoff between price and performance. This is why many small businesses opt for commercial grade cable broadband as their Internet connection. For home offices, shared bandwidth is almost universal.

Where sharing become a problem is when applications are sensitive to time delays. VoIP telephony can’t take much in the way of latency caused congestion, packet loss or jitter without sounding bad or dropping calls completely. The same is true for video conferencing. One often forgotten time sensitive application is the business critical cloud application.

What Makes Cloud Stormy
Cloud and other remote data center applications have unlimited resources, right? So why should they not perform even better than when you hosted them yourself? The answer is that pesky connection back to the office. You might assume a perfect connection, but it probably isn’t so. If you are using shared bandwidth, it really isn’t so.

What happens when there are even short time delays in packets to and from the cloud? You experience hesitation in the application. You send a request. You’ll get a reply… eventually. That’s likely no more than seconds at worst, but the seeming randomness of the delays is enough to drive a user crazy. The more annoying it gets, the more productivity suffers.

The Dedicated Line Solution
The answer to effective remote data center connectivity is to make your WAN as transparent as your LAN. You do this by ordering a dedicated connection with symmetrical bandwidth and guaranteed performance for bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. It’s a direct connection between you and the data center without going through the Internet and its potential bottlenecks.

Fortunately, this has become affordable for all but the smallest operations. Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE are now readily available for most business locations. Even 100 GigE is starting to be installed for the largest and most demanding users.

Are your applications suffering from lower than expected performance since you moved to a colocation facility or cloud service provider? If so, it’s time to look into what’s available in the way of high speed dedicated bandwidth connections.

100 Mbps Fast Ethernet for your Business

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling the pinch of too little bandwidth to support your more sophisticated business applications, such as cloud services, big data, VoIP telephony, video conferencing or simple video downloads? It’s a good time to take a look at making the move to 100 x 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service. Let’s have a look at a quick video on Fast Ethernet:


Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps is just one option of many offered by Carrier Ethernet providers. You can get bandwidths as low as 10 Mbps or as high as 10 Gbps to support you business needs. What’s even better is that you have the option to order the bandwidth you need today with an easy upgrade path when you need more. By installing a port that can handle your anticipated needs, you can pay for what you need now and add bandwidth incrementally with no more than a simple phone call.

Learn more about Ethernet bandwidth options for your business with free consultation and instant online pricing.

100 Mbps Business Ethernet vs OC3 SONET Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Many high tech companies and large corporations got into fiber optic bandwidth service years ago. The service they chose was the one available: OC3 SONET. Since then, many have upgraded to higher speeds, also in the SONET family of service, or simply stuck with the OC3 that has been performing reliably over the years.

The entrance of 100 Mbps and higher Ethernet MAN and WAN bandwidth is challenging the dominance of SONET fiber service. Long time users are taking a closer look at the competition. Companies upgrading or ordering bandwidth the for first time are doing their homework before choosing one technology over the other.

SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) in the SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) became the core of most metropolitan, wide area and international networks over the last decades. It was originally developed as a massive telephone trunking technology designed to bundle hundreds and thousands of simultaneous phone calls for long distance transport. With the rise of computer to computer communications and the Internet, SONET services were the logical choice to carry data packets as well as voice channels.

What does SONET have going for it? It is a very mature and well supported technology understood by all of the telephone companies and most network carriers. It is highly reliable and can survive certain fiber cuts and equipment failures. There are a number of service levels available between 155 Mbps and 100 Gbps. Costs have also come down over the years to the point where even smaller companies can consider the entry level OC3 SONET service.

Why throw over a winning service for a newer technology like Carrier Ethernet? It comes down to cost, service features and scalability.

In case you haven’t noticed, just about everything that can communicate uses Ethernet. This includes nearly every corporate LAN, all PCs, printers, scanners, routers, network switches and wireless access points. That’s expanding now to telephones, televisions and any other equipment that is joining the “Internet of Things.” Why not an all-Ethernet world?

The brand of Ethernet that leaves your property is called Carrier Ethernet. It has been standardized by and industry group, the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), so that it works over long distances, has the operations and maintenance features needed for carrier operations and is compatible from provider to provider.

Let’s compare two very common bandwidth services: 100 Mbps Ethernet vs OC3 SONET. Both are provided over fiber optic strands and delivered to your organization at a specified demarcation point. For Ethernet you use a simple Ethernet copper or fiber patch cord to connect your equipment to the carrier’s demarc. OC3 requires a special interface module that plugs into a router to convert between the Ethernet on your LAN and the SONET that runs on the carrier lines.

This is one reason why SONET is losing ground to Ethernet. If your network and everything on it is running Ethernet, why do a protocol conversion from Ethernet to SONET and back again at the far end just to send Ethernet packets from point to point over to the Internet? There are inefficiencies associated with that conversion process. Plus, you need a specific interface module for each SONET level. An OC3 module won’t work for OC12 or OC48.

SONET has specific service levels, although you can sometimes get fractional or rate limited services below the maximum line speed. Ethernet is scalable by design. The carrier provides an Ethernet port with a maximum speed, typically 100, 1,000 or 10,000 Mbps. Your actual service level can be any speed up to the capacity of the port. You pretty much pay for the bandwidth you are actually using rather than the capability of the circuit.

Scalability can also save you money. A 100 Mbps or Fast Ethernet connection on a 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet port can be scaled up or down easily. With SONET you start out at 155 Mbps for the entry level OC3. That sounds like 50% more bandwidth and it is. However, many companies really need 50 or 100 Mbps but had to buy 155 Mbps because it was that or nothing. If your 100 Mbps Ethernet connection bogs down, you can call the service provider and ask for an upgrade to 150 or 200 Mbps and have it in a matter of hours or days. If you tap out an OC3 connection, you have to wait days or weeks for an upgrade to the next generally available SONET level of OC12 at 622 Mbps.

Besides being able to order just the bandwidth you need now while knowing that you can easily upgrade when the need arises, Ethernet service tends to be less expensive than SONET on a per Mbps basis. But how about the quality of service? Both can deliver your packets with high reliability, low latency, and rock solid bandwidth. SONET tends to have fewer “flavors” available. It’s usually a protected ring arrangement with symmetrical dedicated bandwidth and five-nines (99.999%) reliability.

With business Ethernet, you need to be aware of what you are ordering. You can now get Carrier Ethernet with the same redundant path protection as SONET to ensure that if one circuit fails, the system will automatically switch to the other path in under 50 mSec. You can also get the same 99.999% reliability, low latency & jitter, and symmetrical dedicated bandwidth that you’ve come to expect with SONET services. However, if your applications aren’t so critical and you are more interested in saving money than in having the ultimate in performance, be aware that you can also order Ethernet services with asymmetrical bandwidth, shared bandwidth and unprotected circuits. These flavors of Ethernet work well for general Internet usage and casual PC backup to the cloud and are considerably cheaper.

Is SONET or Ethernet the best choice for your business bandwidth needs? Get free consulting help from a bandwidth expert who can also get you the best pricing from multiple carriers who offer services for your location. Also get instant online quotes for many bandwidth services up to 1 Gbps.

Ethernet over Copper FAQ - Part 3

Ethernet over Copper FAQ - Part 3

Ethernet over Copper bandwidth service may well be the perfect solution to your business needs. Here are some additional FAQs that might help answer some of the questions you may have about this relatively new technology.

Q: Can Ethernet over Copper be used for business telephone?

A: While EoC is not a direct replacement for traditional analog or ISDN PRI telephone lines, it can be a cost effective upgrade and offer increased call capacity. Ethernet over Copper easily supports VoIP and SIP Trunking because it is a packet rather than channel based line service. EoC offers low jitter, latency and packet loss to preserve voice quality. Many of today’s PBX systems now interface to SIP trunks as well as ISDN PRI to provide multiple outside phone lines at a cost savings. This gives you a wide choice of telephone line options.

Q: Does EoC work for video conferencing?

A: Ethernet over Copper is a good solution for video conferencing because it offers higher bandwidths needed for today’s high definition real-time video along with symmetrical bandwidth that provides the same speed in both directions. EoC also works well for downloading or streaming video.

Q: How does EoC support cloud services?

A: Cloud services over the Internet and by direct connection need higher bandwidth levels, symmetrical bandwidth and low latency. EoC is a dedicated business grade service that supports the cloud communication needs of small and medium size organizations. Larger companies will want Ethernet over FIber to provide the necessary bandwidth to support the productivity of many employees

Q: What is Fast Ethernet over Copper?

A: Fast Ethernet over Copper or FastE is a 100 Mbps dedicated symmetrical bandwidth service that supports the maximum speed of many network devices. FastE is now suitable for even smaller companies that have moved their IT infrastructure to the cloud. While some companies have Fast Ethernet MAN and WAN service brought in on multiple copper pair, Fast Ethernet over fiber optic link is a more popular way to get bandwidths of 100 Mbps or more.

Q: What is a combination copper-fiber solution?

A: Copper and fiber can combine to give you a reasonable bandwidth level quickly while you wait for the higher bandwidth fiber provides but isn’t immediately available. How it works is that you order both a copper and fiber solution from one provider who agrees to cancel the copper contract at no penalty as soon as the fiber is up and running.

Q: When does Ethernet over MPLS make sense?

A: The beauty of MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks is that they can transport nearly any protocol of traffic. In fact, they routinely transport multiple protocols without any customer being aware that other customers are also using the network. Ethernet over MPLS often has cost savings benefits, especially over nationwide and international distances. With Ethernet Virtual Private LAN service, you can connect a dozen or hundreds of business sites around the world as if they were on the same corporate LAN.

Are you ready to improve your company’s connectivity or get the same performance you have now at a lower price? If so, you should check availability and pricing for Ethernet over Copper services suitable for your commercial location.


You may also be interested in reading Ethernet over Copper FAQ (Part 1) and Ethernet over Copper FAQ (Part 2).

100 Gbps Wavelength Service Open for Business

At a time when many businesses are discovering the benefits of Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, the upper limit of bandwidth available to business is, if anything, accelerating. Would you believe that you can now order 100 Gbps wavelength service up and down the West Coast?

That’s not just a small increment over typical 100 Mbps Ethernet. It’s a factor of 1,000x. How on earth can you use this much bandwidth... and where can you get it?

Oddly enough, what’s driving the demand for 100 Gbps bandwidth are the same factors that are establishing 100 Mbps as almost entry level. I say almost because many smaller businesses are just now becoming totally frustrated with their old dependable T1 lines. Today’s online activities drag along at 1.5 Mbps. You really need 10x or 10 to 15 Mbps to do much of anything productively.

Once you get beyond email, general Web surfing, inventory management and customer support, that 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service starts looking pretty attractive. What pushes the capacity of the line is video downloads and streaming, big data and cloud computing. It’s really the move en masse of businesses to the cloud that is generating the stampede to 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 GigE and now 100 Gig Wavelength.

What’s the cloud got to do with it? Pulling up stakes and moving your IT services to the cloud completely changes your network requirements. Ethernet has grown for decades on the model that all of your computers, servers, switches, routers, printers, storage and other assets will connect on a wired, copper or fiber, local network (LAN). Your WAN connection only needs to be big enough to support communications outside the company.

This was no big deal for most companies prior to Internet-everything and outsourcing to the cloud. T1 lines and DS3 bandwidth were plenty to support even mid-size companies. It worked because the vast majority of traffic stayed within the company walls. Only communications to and from remote sites, franchises, some customers and vendors needed to traverse the outside network (WAN).

That was good because the cost of telecom services prior to competitive deregulation was astronomical. In fact, the availability of lower cost bandwidth has been a driver in the rise of the Internet. It’s also been an enabler of relocating data center facilities to colocation centers as a cost savings measure. Once you start moving your servers off-site, it’s an easy jump to the cloud.

That’s really all the cloud is. Each cloud is a very large data center with infrastructure and perhaps software supplied and maintained by a vendor. You no longer need to invest in IT. You rent everything. Payment is by the “seat” by usage or as a monthly fee. No more capital expenses, no more long cycles to upgrade capacity, and no more round the clock staffing to keep everything working.

The only fly in the ointment is the shift in bandwidth requirements from the LAN to the WAN. Your traffic no longer zips around in-house. Instead everything goes to and from your offices over the WAN. All the heavy computing is out there in the cloud. So is the data. If you want to send a file, get a file or perform any process you’ll be doing it over the WAN.

Companies that didn’t take this into consideration are hurting. They’re the ones frantically shopping for higher bandwidth levels at reasonable prices. A slow WAN connection means everybody waits. While your employees are killing time waiting for the system, you are flushing money down the drain.

Fortunately, the cost of high performance bandwidth has been plummeting with the skyrocketing demand and entry of new regional and national fiber optic networks. There’s a mad scramble on now to light every building with fiber and ensure enough capacity in the system to prevent traffic jams. This is where Zayo comes in.

Zayo is a premier international provider of bandwidth infrastructure services with massive fiber optic capacity. This is the company that is establishing 100 Gbps Wavelength services, not just for carriers, but for businesses too. Their initial buildout is in the high tech corridor of the West Coast, from Seattle to Los Angeles. The latest rollouts are the ability to originate and terminate add/drop 100 Gbps service to Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Modesto and Los Angeles. There is a similar network on the Eastern Corridor that includes New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. and a path through Chicago that connects the East and West coasts.

Do you really need 100 Gbps Wavelength service? Probably not unless you are a content distributor, Internet service provider, cloud service provider, large corporation, government agency or massive organization dealing with the biggest of big data operations. Nevertheless, you should know that higher bandwidths are in your future and that fiber is well within reach of most company budgets.

Do you feel constrained by your current modest WAN bandwidth? Now is the perfect time to get a new set of competitive quotes for high speed copper and fiber connectivity just to see what new services are available and how low the costs have plunged since you last went for quotes.


Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.





Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

100 x 100 Mbps Business Bandwidth Options

Bandwidth levels of 100 Mbps are no longer a luxury for many businesses. You need that much to backup files remotely, access cloud applications, distribute content and share large files such as high resolution medical images. Traditional bandwidth services like T1 lines or DS3 connections don’t come close to meeting this requirement. What does and can you afford it?

The traditional service that supports this capacity is OC-3 SONET fiber optic bandwidth. Larger companies have used OC-3 for decades. What’s limited the number of companies that install this service has been high costs, at least in past years.

If you haven’t checked prices in a decade or even the last few years, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. OC-3 prices have plunged from the astronomical levels of years ago to something well within reason today. Medium size businesses and medical organizations, and many smaller high tech businesses where high bandwidth is essential, can now afford OC-3 bandwidth... but should they?

Besides the cost reductions for telecom services, something else has happened recently to give businesses options for 100 Mbps bandwidth. It’s the rise of competitive technology. Decades ago, it was OC-3 or nothing at all. Today, that is just one of several services that can get the job done. Let’s take a look at what else is available.

The biggest competition to SONET fiber optic services is now Ethernet over Fiber. The fiber optic pipes are the same. The signal that they are transporting is different. For you as a business owner or IT manager this makes no difference in the end. Both SONET and Ethernet technologies can carry the same traffic from place to place or to and from the Internet. However Ethernet has some advantages you should know about.

The most important is cost. Much of this is due to competition and some to the way networks are constructed. SONET is a telephone company developed technology. There is almost always a telephone company involved in delivering SONET. It might be for the entire span. Often, the last mile is handled by the local telco and the rest is provided by a competitive carrier.

Ethernet is different. Ethernet came out of the computer industry. It had nothing to do with telephones. In fact, Ethernet really gained prominence as a LAN, not a telecom, technology. It still forms the basis of nearly every installed local network. While the traditional local and long distance telephone companies have added Ethernet to their portfolios, other carriers have started up to gain share in this marketplace. Many built their networks around delivering Ethernet services and don’t even offer SONET.

One thing that’s different about Ethernet over Fiber is that the competitive carrier may handle service throughout the entire network. That includes the connection into your building. Multi-tenant office buildings are especially attractive because there is more than one customer to make it worthwhile to construct the fiber drop and termination equipment. Competitive carriers are aggressive about finding and connecting business locations before someone beats them to it. This helps to hold down prices for everyone in the industry... to your advantage.

Another approach to bandwidth delivery is to eliminate the wires altogether. That’s the domain of the microwave wireless companies. If you are in the right location, you may be able to get 100 Mbps bandwidth over a radio beam to a small antenna on your rooftop.

What’s the right location? It’s almost always in the downtown business district of a major metropolitan area. The microwave transmissions are strictly line of sight and limited in distance to a few kilometers. This means that there needs to be nothing but air between your building and the provider’s tower. For financial services companies, corporation headquarters and other downtown locations, this may be no problem at all. If so, you may be able to get the bandwidth you need installed very rapidly with little or no construction cost.

All of these services are also known as symmetrical dedicated bandwidth. OC-3 is actually 155 Mbps. Fast Ethernet is 100 Mbps with many other service levels available. The symmetrical part means that the upload and download speeds are the same. 100 x 100 Mbps means 100 Mbps upload and 100 Mbps download. Dedicated means that the bandwidth is constructed for your use only. Whatever you don’t use sits idle until you do.

Some companies don’t need this level of performance, especially if all they want to do is access the Internet the way you would at home. These companies can save even more money by going with an asymmetrical shared bandwidth service. As example would be a coaxial cable connection that offers up to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. Your actual speed at any given time depends on what other users are doing because the bandwidth is in a pool shared by multiple subscribers.

Are you feeling pressed for increased bandwidth but concerned about price and availability? You may have more options than you suspect. Get prices and availability for high bandwidth providers that service your business location.

Fiber Optic Speed Using Ethernet over Copper

In the future, perhaps the near future, all connectivity will be by fiber optic communication lines. The largest companies already have fiber assets in place. Some smaller but bandwidth intensive companies have also moved from their traditional copper lines to fiber optic connections. Fiber offers nearly unlimited bandwidth growth once installed. The issue is what to do if there is no fiber available at your location yet.

A few years ago your options were limited. You probably started with a T1 line. This service is available everywhere and easily affordable. T1 lines offered plenty of bandwidth for most businesses when they were first made available decades ago. Today, 1.5 Mbps still works for very small companies but is very limiting for larger organizations or any business with high bandwidth demands.

The reason T1 is available to nearly every business location is that it is provided over standard twisted pair telco lines. These are the same wires that bring in multiline telephone service. Extra pairs in the bundle are available for T1 use.

This offers a growth path for many companies. There are often many unused copper pairs in the telecom cable. Those extra pairs can be pressed into service to bring in multiple T1 lines. A process called bonding combines the bandwidth of those lines into one larger pipe. Bonding 2 T1 lines gives you 3 Mbps, 4 lines are good for 6 Mbps and 8 lines boost that to 12 Mbps.

That’s about the best you can do with T1 service. If you need more bandwidth, your next best bet is DS3, another longstanding telecom service. It offers 45 Mbps. DS3 is fairly common in most business areas, but it no longer strictly a copper wireline service. Most of the distance between the central office and your location is covered by fiber optic lines. The DS3 rides on this fiber until it is terminated at your building. If suitable fiber is available, great. Otherwise you are out of luck.

A new technology has been developed to bridge the gap between T1 lines and dedicated fiber optic connections. It’s called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. This technology uses the same twisted pair copper telco wiring as T1, but supercharges the bandwidth. The way it does this is by using a more advanced digital modulation technique with special terminal equipment at both ends of the connection.

Ethernet over Copper has caught on so fast that it is now the preferred bandwidth solution for low to mid level line speeds. Entry level is typically 3 Mbps, twice the bandwidth of a T1 line for about the same monthly cost. Many companies are now moving to 10 Mbps EoC to support higher business bandwidth demands. The cost of 10 Mbps EoC is only a fraction of what you’d pay for 10 Mbps bonded T1.

An even bigger advantage of Ethernet over Copper is that it can support higher speeds than 10 Mbps. If 10 Mbps isn’t enough, you can often move up to 15 or 20 Mbps. Another desirable speed level is 45 Mbps. This is the same bandwidth as a DS3 connection but without any fiber needed to deliver the signal.

Two competitive carriers are now announcing even higher speed service levels using EoC technology. Integra Telecom has debuted 60 Mbps symmetrical Ethernet over Copper service. That’s 60 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. This service can be provided up to 2,500 feet from the central office that terminates the copper bundle. This is enough to reach over 400,000 businesses.

The technical tradeoff for speed is distance when you employ EoC technology. The higher the line speed, the closer you have to be to the CO and the termination equipment. T1 doesn’t have this distance limitation but is limited to 1.5 Mbps per T1 line.

XO Communications has upped the capability of Ethernet over Copper connections even further. Their newest level is 100 Mbps. This compares favorably with the 155 Mbps bandwidth of the lowest available SONET fiber optic speed, a commonly used fiber service.

Ethernet over Copper is now an established and widely available connectivity service with speeds ranging from 3 to 100 Mbps. It’s certainly a viable replacement for T1 or bonded T1 lines. It also makes sense for companies that need higher bandwidths but can’t wait for their buildings to be lit for fiber. In some cases, the 50 or 100 Mbps line speeds are all they really need and the upgrade to fiber can be delayed until sometime in the future.

Is your business bandwidth limited or do you have an interest in cutting costs on your monthly telecom expense? If so, you should get the latest competitive prices on Ethernet over Copper bandwidth services.

Fast Ethernet over Copper

Fast Ethernet has been a networking standard for many years. You may know it as 100 Mbps Ethernet speed. Nearly every computer, router and switch now has a Network Interface Card (NIC) rated at 10/100 Mbps or 10/100/1000 Mbps. Many smaller networks find 100 Mbps more than adequate. Larger networks use 1000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). The largest corporate and other high performance networks have at least part of their infrastructure running at 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE). Its when you leave the LAN and connect to metro or long distance networks that things slow to a crawl.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same network speed regardless of distance? That way it wouldn’t matter where you were transferring files to or from. The time to transfer would be independent of distance. This is especially important to companies with multiple business locations. The illusion of everyone being on the same network is shattered when it takes ten or a hundred times as long to get information from the remote site as it does within your own building.

What has stood in the way of upgrading network connections to a common speed is cost and availability. Fast Ethernet for MAN and WAN connections have been cost prohibitive for smaller companies. If your location isn’t on a fiber path, getting bandwidth above 10 Mbps or so has been out of the question. Well, not any more.

PAETEC, a major network services provider, is blazing new ground by deploying Fast Ethernet connections over copper as well as fiber. If your buildings are within the service footprint of this new technology you can avoid the budget breaking costs of fiber construction completely. PAETEC uses multiple bonded copper pairs within the same telco conduit to provide bandwidths as high as 200 Mbps.

Chances are that the multi-pair copper conduit is already installed in your building for multi-line telephone and lower speed services like T1. The beauty of T1 lines are that they use standard twisted pair copper telco wire. The major limitation is that the bandwidth is fixed at 1.5 Mbps. You can bond T1s together to get higher bandwidths, up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Technically this works just fine, but it gets pricey because the cost is the price of a T1 line times the number of lines needed.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is much more cost effective. First, the advanced modulation techniques support higher bandwidths per pair of wire used. Second, the cost does not multiply as fast at bonding T1 lines. Third, you can now get Fast Ethernet bandwidth using EoC.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper technology is distance. The higher bandwidths require you to be near the central office that connects to your copper bundle. That’s perfect for businesses with metropolitan locations, especially in major business districts. If you are located out in the boonies, you’ll have fewer options.

Do you need cost effective Fast Ethernet connections to support your business processes? Check Fast Ethernet over Copper availability and pricing now. Fiber and wireless may also be available at lower prices than you imagine. Sorry, no residential service available.

100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper Rivals Fiber

Ethernet over Copper is rapidly taking over from T1 lines as the bandwidth service of choice for low to medium speed applications. Multiple copper pair can support bandwidths of 20 Mbps up to 50 Mbps in some locations. Beyond that, it’s assumed that fiber optic service has to be brought in. Not any more. Now there’s 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper available from Paetec.

Twisted pair copper has a legacy of connecting central offices to telephone sets for over a century. The enormous installed base of copper connections makes this an extremely valuable resource even in the era of digital communications and fiber optic cabling. The problem is that unshielded small gauge copper wire loops were engineered to carry low frequency audio signals up to several miles. It’s a tribute to clever engineering that these same pairs can be repurposed to carry high frequency digital signals.

Paetec is applying Ethernet over bonded Copper Products from Overture Networks as the technology behind this amazing bandwidth fete. Overture acquired the technology when it purchased Hatteras Networks earlier this year. Their HN product series can deliver up to 15 Mbps per copper pair depending on distance. By bonding up to 32 pairs, bandwidths approaching 500 Mbps can be achieved. Typically, the equipment is used to support user bandwidths from 10 to 100 Mbps.

Speeds in the hundreds of Mbps, even up to 1 Gbps, over copper have been announced in experimental setups. Now, you can order 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper as a standard bandwidth service. This is particularly significant in that 100 Mbps “Fast” Ethernet is a standard LAN speed. By extending this into the MAN and WAN, the bandwidth speed bump experienced when exiting the office is eliminated. Two locations can share files as if they were side by side in the same building.

Ethernet over Copper technology has been gaining in popularity as the need for higher speed network connections increases. Business automation, medical file transfers, video transport and the move to cloud based services is rendering low bandwidth connections obsolete. T1 line used to be considered a broadband service at 1.5 Mbps. Now many companies need at least 10 Mbps to get their jobs done. So, too, wireless backhaul was fine using T1 lines as long as the traffic was voice and low speed data. Since 3G and 4G have become so popular, slow backhaul is no longer acceptable.

Why not just switch to fiber optic service with it’s unlimited bandwidth? Someday that will be the case. Right now, ready fiber access is available in core business districts and colocation centers. Many metropolitan buildings remain unlit for fiber. Small and medium size towns are relatively fiber-poor. Yes, there is a lot of fiber construction underway. But why pay a king’s ransom and wait six months to a year when there are multi-pair copper cables already run into your building? By employing Ethernet over Copper technology to take full advantage of that existing wiring, you can have higher bandwidths now without enormous construction costs.

Can high speed copper-based bandwidth be the solution that works best for your company? Find out by getting availability and pricing for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet over Copper service for your business locations.

100 Mbps Colocation Center Bandwidth

Companies often look to colocation as a way to avoid the capital and operating expense of running their own data centers. There is also another important incentive to go the colocation route. It’s high bandwidth availability at lower costs.

A colocation center, or colo, is a facility that serves the data center needs of many businesses. Each server farm requires the servers themselves, networking switches, routers and appliances, equipment racks, rack wiring, electrical power, cooling air, and connectivity. Plus you’ll need physical security, fire suppression and a staff to monitor operations and take corrective action 24/7. You can provide all of this in-house or get it at a colocation center.

What makes a colo center cost effective is economy of scale. Instead of each customer having to maintain their own backup generators and fire suppression systems that are rarely used, the colocation facility has much larger units that serve all customers. The costs don’t scale linearly. The incremental cost of adding another user to the facility is pretty low and the facility cost spread over all users is less than what you can do on your own.

The somewhat hidden secret of colocation centers is that they have bandwidth available that you may not be able to afford on your own. A common connection is 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. You know that it’s no great shakes to connect a 100 Mbps Ethernet node to your own LAN. Getting a 100 Mbps connection beyond your property line may be anywhere from expensive to impossible. At 100 Mbps, you are beyond the capability of twisted pair services such as EoC or T1/E1 lines. You’ll need fiber optic cabling brought into your building and lit for SONET/SDH or Metro Ethernet service.

Why is there such a difference in price between 100 Mbps bandwidth provided in a colocation center and the same level of service delivered to your facility? One big reason is construction costs. Downtown in a major metropolitan area there may be many fiber facilities in your office building or nearby. If you order a significant amount of bandwidth you might not even be charged construction costs. But move a bit off the beaten fiber path and those charges go up dramatically. If you are located in a smaller town, industrial park or rural area you can be looking at tens of thousands of dollars or more to trench fiber optic cable from the nearest carrier point of presence.

The other reason for bargain prices at colocation facilities is competition. Once again, depending on population density and popularity of high bandwidth network services, you might find yourself with only one carrier serving your location. Your negotiating ability is pretty limited without competition. Colocation centers, however, are carrier magnets. Service providers know that there are dozens or hundreds of customers in a single building who all need their services. It’s no wonder they all set up points of presence within the colo. Often, there is a “meet me room” where carriers and customers are connected.

The combination of having several or more eager carriers vying for your business combined with the trivial construction costs of running a drop to your equipment racks is what makes it easy and relatively inexpensive to get all the bandwidth you want in a colocation center. Can you say the same for where you are now? There’s an easy way to find out. Simply request bandwidth availability and pricing for both your location and a nearby colocation facility.



Note: Photo of server rack wiring courtesy of Guillaume Paumier on Wikipedia Commons

100 Mbps Corporate Ethernet

A new standard connection speed for medium to larger organizations is getting to be 100 Mbps. It may sound like an expensive and unnecessarily large network capacity, but it is actually neither. Fast Ethernet is the new DS3.

For those who remember only a few years ago when a T1 line offering 1.5 Mbps was considered a high bandwidth connection, the notion that 100 Mbps is now the benchmark may be a bit unnerving. A lot has changed over the last decade. Application requirements have increased dramatically. We might have settled for fuzzy slow motion video conferencing when even that was a novelty. Now it’s full motion HD two-way video and telepresence. E-commerce has gone from an add-on service for a bricks and mortar facility to the dominant way that many companies do business. Dynamic interactive web pages with video have replaced low resolution static HTML brochure pages.

There are also many businesses that can’t operate electronically without high bandwidth connections. These include video production, content delivery and medical imaging. It’s 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps... or forget it.

There’s no reason to forget it anymore. High bandwidth services are readily available and lower in cost than you may imagine. That’s the other big change between the start of this decade and the end. Line prices have plummeted as new competitive carriers with the latest network technology have come on the scene. While T-Carrier and SONET may be the entrenched legacy carrier services, Ethernet has become the bandwidth solution of choice. On a Mbps and Gbps basis, Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet solutions are often a fraction of the price demanded for T-Carrier or SONET and a small fraction of standard pricing ten years ago.

Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps makes a lot of sense as a bandwidth requirement for dedicated Internet access or point to point and multipoint connectivity. The standard Ethernet LAN speeds are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. In some cases, that’s been increased to 10 Gbps. Many, Many networks have most of their nodes running at 100 Mbps simply because so much equipment has network interface cards standardized at 10/100 Mbps. The big speed bump has been at the edge of the LAN where it connects to the outside world. Fast Ethernet may be more than adequate for internal file transfers. But going from 100 Mbps inside to a 1.5 Mbps T1 line outside can slow traffic to a crawl.

Medium and larger companies have reduced the speed bump by upgrading from T1 to DS3 connections. DS3 offers 45 Mbps, a bandwidth increase of 28x when line overhead is factored in. The new replacement for DS3 is Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps. That’s more than double the bandwidth, a protocol that is directly compatible with corporate LANs, and a cost savings to boot. What’s not to like?

Is your company missing out because you thought that 100 Mbps was beyond your reach? Take a few minutes right now to get 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet prices and availability. You may well be able to get more bandwidth for less than you spend now.



Note: Photo of network switches courtesy of Wikipedia Commons