Ethernet Fiber Replaces Bonded T1

By: John Shepler

It’s not surprising T1 lines have been the most popular connectivity solution for businesses for decades. This is an exceptionally mature and versatile technology that you can use for private lines, dedicated Internet access and telephone trunking. The one weakness of T1 is bandwidth. It’s a rock solid 1.5 Mbps. No more, no less. In these days of cloud applications and real time HD video, what can we do about the T1 bandwidth limitation?


Solution #1: Bonded T1 Lines
Seems like the way to double the bandwidth of a T1 line from 1.5 to 3 Mbps is to add a second T1 line. You can do this yourself with a WAN aggregation appliance like the “Truffle” from Mushroom Networks. Or, you can simply order a second T1 line from the same provider and have them “bonded.” Carriers do this with terminal equipment at both ends of the circuit.

Bonding is simply a process of melding the bandwidth of the two lines so they act as one larger pipe. The nitty gritty details of how this is accomplished is invisible to you, the user.

A nice feature of bonding is that it can be extended beyond two T1 lines. You can bond 3 lines to get 4.5 Mbps, 4 lines to get 6 Mbps, and so on. All you need are enough extra twisted pairs in your telco line bundle to provide the additional T1s. The practical limit is 10 to 15 Mbps. Then, we’re back to the bandwidth issue… and one more thing.

The Ugly Side of Line Bonding
T1 line bonding works just great. It is a well established technology that is highly reliable. It’s just that it is a bit… expensive.

The downside of bonding is not technical. It’s financial. There’s no real economy of scale when you bond T1 lines. Each line has a certain cost that is made up of loop and port charges. Nowadays this is typically a few hundred dollars per line, but varies with location. That’s a lot lower cost than in years past, but it still adds up when you need a bunch of lines to get enough bandwidth. In short, two lines cost twice as much as one. Three make that 3X, and so on.

Why Fiber Makes Sense
T1 used to be the affordable bandwidth solution, while fiber was priced too high for all the but the largest businesses. That’s all changed thanks to technology and competition.

The first big recent advance in fiber optic bandwidth service has been a transition from circuit switching to packet switching technology. The original protocol was called SONET. It’s still available and popular for some applications, such as service provider backbone networks. SONET is a circuit switched protocol designed to be directly compatible with traditional T1 and T3 telephone lines. Bandwidth starts at 155 Mbps and goes on up to 40 or 100 Gbps.

The newer technology is called Carrier Ethernet and it is a packet switched technology directly compatible with Ethernet based Local Area Networks. Carrier Ethernet can easily extend your network across town or even internationally. It also supports enterprise VoIP telephone systems when configured as SIP Trunks.

Carrier Ethernet can be available in both copper and fiber optic connections. Fiber is fast becoming the connection of choice because it is easily affordable at lower bandwidth levels and scalable up to 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps if needed.

Why Fiber is the New Bonded T1
The obvious advantage of fiber optic transmission is getting rid of the bandwidth ceiling on copper technology solutions. While 10 Mbps is considered high bandwidth for bonded T1, it is low bandwidth for fiber. Once you have fiber installed, you’re set for the future.

This is especially true for Ethernet over Fiber technology. It is designed to be easily scalable up to the limit of the installed port. Say you have a 1000 Mbps port installed, a typical service option. You can then order any bandwidth you like up to 1000 Mbps without any equipment changes. A simple phone call is all it takes to change your bandwidth, often the same day. Some carriers even allow you to manage your own service through a Web browser.

Nearly unlimited bandwidth is one advantage of Carrier Ethernet. The other is cost. While bonded T1 costs scale linearly with the number of lines, Ethernet over Fiber costs go up much less between bandwidth levels. A 10X bandwidth increase with T1 can cost 10X as much as a single line. The same 10X bandwidth upgrade might raise the price only 3X. Even at the low end of the bandwidth scale you can often get at least twice as much bandwidth choosing Ethernet over T1 for the same money.

But Is Fiber Really Available?
The competition from many new carriers offering Ethernet over Fiber means both lower costs and more availability. The upgrade from 3G to 4G wireless alone has spurred a massive build-out of fiber infrastructure to support all those cellular towers. Business demands for cloud applications and higher bandwidth that can handle video and large file transfers is also encouraging more fiber construction and lower prices.

The bottom line is that fiber optic bandwidth is far more available than it was just a few years ago. If you have a new application or just haven’t checked your options in awhile, it is well worth your while to see if Ethernet Fiber can replace those legacy T1 lines to give you more bandwidth and a more attractive lease price.



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10 Mbps Fiber Offers Future Growth

By: John Shepler

There’s nothing that stifles productivity and raises your blood pressure like too little bandwidth. You wait and wait and wait for websites to load, for the cloud to give you the requested documents, for any sort of collaborative effort. Video breaks up or buffers. VoIP phone calls distort or hang up completely. It’s a miserable existence. What’s more, no amount of processor power or RAM memory will make the problem any better. You simply have to increase your network bandwidth to match the need.

What’s a Good Target Bandwidth?
That’s hard to say. Not to be coy, but how much you need is really determined by what you are doing. There’s also a matter of what quality of bandwidth you are using, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Classic T1 lines are about pooped out. They still have merit for point of sale terminals, small office telephone & casual Internet use, and rural areas where choices are few. You can stave off obsolescence by bonding T1 lines together to get up to 10 Mbps, but that gets expensive. Once you need more than 10 Mbps, what will you do?

The Fiber Option
We’re headed for an all-fiber world. Seems like it would be a good idea to get on-board sooner rather than later. The beauty of fiber is that it isn’t technically limited… at least not much. With multiple fiber strands and wavelength division multiplexing, you’ll be hard pressed to run a fiber cable out of capacity.

Fiber has other benefits, too. In addition to eliminating the bandwidth ceiling (you can get up to 10 Gbps in most areas and 100 Gbps in some major markets), the new Carrier Ethernet services are highly scalable. Legacy SONET fiber optic services require a unique interface for every service level. The same equipment won’t work for OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, etc.

Ethernet over Fiber is designed differently. It works more like the Ethernet on your LAN. It’s the port capability that sets the upper limit. Everything below that is available and easily changed. For instance, you can start off at 10 Mbps, move up to 100 Mbps and then to 1000 Gbps if you have a Gigabit Ethernet port for your WAN (Wide Area Network) service.

How difficult is it to change bandwidths? Almost trivially easy. Most service providers will do it within hours or days of your phone call. Some are providing browser based control panels so you can adjust your bandwidth up or down as desired. The future may be something like this or an intelligent system that monitors your traffic levels and automatically decides what bandwidth to order up.

Why 10 Mbps is a Good Entry Point
To gain the benefits of fiber, you have to at least get the fiber installed. This is called “lighting” your building. What’s actually being lit are the fiber strands themselves with laser light. If you are in a multi-tenant building, the fact that the building itself is lit almost guarantees that you can get fiber bandwidth service even if you aren’t the one who had the fiber installed.

So, if you’ve run out of juice with your T1 lines, either can’t get or don’t like the way cable broadband performs, and wouldn’t consider satellite because of the limited capacity and huge latency issues, entry level fiber may be a good way to go. Remember, you want to get a foot in the door so you have that ease of upgrade later.

What’s a good number to start with? Unless you are used to high bandwidth WAN connections, a 10 Mbps ethernet over fiber connection is pretty attractive. For one thing, it’s a huge jump from a 1.5 Mbps T1 line to 10 Mbps. Yes, you can keep bonding T1 lines to get the same 10 Mbps, but you’ll pay a lot more than for the same bandwidth over fiber. That’s because copper lines are priced per line. Each line has a limited bandwidth. The bonding process simply combines their capability, but you pay for each and every T1 line.

Isn’t Fiber Really Expensive?
That used to be true when the only fiber in town was the SONET fiber optic service run by the local telephone company. The newer Ethernet over Fiber services are highly competitive and don’t necessarily use telephone company lines. Many carriers are now in a frenzy to be the first to light buildings with their own fiber networks so they can garner all the businesses that are ready to move up to fiber bandwidth.

Here’s an example. T1 lines have come down in cost, but you’ve long been able to get twice the bandwidth or 3 Mbps for the same price using Ethernet over Copper. Now, Ethernet over Fiber can give you 10 Mbps for not a whole lot more money. In fact, if you’ve had the same T1 contract for many years, you may be shocked to find out that you can have fiber for the same monthly cost.

It only gets better as you go up in bandwidth. The lease price per Mbps of Ethernet bandwidth over fiber gets cheaper as you go from 10 to 100 to 1000 Mbps. The price doesn’t jump nearly as much as the bandwidth does. It’s a bit like the kind of volume discounts you are used to getting when you buy just about any product in quantity.

Quality of Bandwidth
There’s bandwidth and there’s bandwidth. T1, SONET and other traditional telecom services are called dedicated, symmetrical bandwidth services. That means you have the line all to yourself and the speed is the same in both the upload and download directions. That’s true for private point to point lines and Dedicated Internet Access.

Ethernet over Copper and Fiber are the same way. It’s your connection to do with as you please and there are no usage limits. You can shove as much traffic down those lines as they’ll take and the price is the same each month.

The beauty of this arrangement is that your bandwidth is rock solid dependable, never varies, and you’ll get the same consistent performance to or from the cloud or whatever you are connected to. Dedicated connections give you low latency, jitter and packet loss for high application performance.

Contrast that with lower cost shared bandwidth arrangements like DSL, Cable broadband, Satellite and Cellular wireless. These almost always have much higher download speeds than upload and your available bandwidth will vary depending on who is sharing the line with you at any given time. Yes, you can get more Mbps for your bandwidth dollar, but it isn’t the same quality of bandwidth. If you are a very heavy user, you may also have to contend with "fair use" limits. Go over and you'll face additional charges, reduced bandwidth or even service cancellation.
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Do You Need to Start at 10 Mbps?
Certainly not. The reason that 10 Mbps is so popular is that it is replacing lower bandwidth services like T1, and is plenty for smaller operations. Most medium size or larger offices and anybody involved with video production or distribution will want to start at a much higher level.

Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps is very popular with businesses who are moving to cloud services or have multiple employees working intensively on the Internet. Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbps is really more affordable than you might think and pretty much makes bandwidth issues disappear for many companies. Larger companies are starting to move to 10 Gbps as their bandwidth standard and 100 Gbps is the new “top of the line” WAN bandwidth service.

Remember, what’s really important is that you get an Ethernet port installed that has the growth capacity you’ll be needing. Even if you start at 10 Mbps, you’ll want a 100 Mbps minimum size port for future growth. Some carriers are installing Gigabit Ethernet ports as a matter of course. They know that it won’t be long before you’ll call up wanting it.

Are you ready to ditch the old telecom standard copper bandwidth services for the advantages that Ethernet over Fiber offers? Are you just curious about what’s available and what it costs? It is well worth your while to take a few minutes and do a quick check for fiber optic service in your area. An expert consultant is available to help match the right solution to your particular situation.


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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.

1000 Mbps SONET or Gigabit Ethernet Options

As bandwidth needs have increased for business, many companies are moving to WAN network speeds once considered impractical. The competitive bandwidth marketplace is making 1,000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) much more affordable than you might think. The cost per Mbps has plummeted over the last few years while availability has multiplied.

This is good news for any business moving to cloud computing or inherently large bandwidth users, such as medical centers, content creators and providers, and Internet service providers. The option to use T-carrier or other wireline services isn’t really an option anymore. What you need is a fiber optic connection.

Fiber connections come in several flavors. Your options include traditional SONET service, Ethernet over Fiber, and shared bandwidth service.

SONET is the original fiber optic standard. It was developed by the telephone companies for their own use in transporting massive numbers of telephone calls. As computers became the big users of bandwidth, SONET was made available to businesses as a point to point connection or high speed Internet access.

SONET is actually an acronym for Synchronous Optical NETwork. It’s a synchronous protocol organized as time slots rather than packets. Today’s packet oriented networks need a SONET interface to perform the protocol conversion necessary to load and unload packets into the SONET time slots.

That interface is generally in the form of a card or module that plugs in the back of your router. You need to choose the proper interface to match the speed of the service. SONET comes in discrete bandwidth levels that include 155 Mbps (OC-3), 622 Mbps (OC-12), 1.2 Gbps (OC-24), 2.4 Gbps (OC-48), 10 Gbps (OC-192) and 40 Gbps (OC-768). Each speed level requires a specifically designed interface module, although you can sometimes get fractional speed levels. For instance, you may be able to order OC-12 service that is capable of running at 622 Mbps but have the bandwidth rate limited to 300 Mbps. That saves you money on your telecom expenses until you need the full 622 Mbps.

SONET has been in service the longest of the high speed fiber technologies and forms the backbone of many regional and nationwide fiber optic networks. It is also readily available, especially in major metropolitan areas.

What competes head to head with SONET is Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). This is the Ethernet protocol, directly compatible with your LAN. The handoff from the bandwidth provider is a standard Ethernet connection that plugs right into your router.

Why choose Ethernet? In addition to avoiding protocol conversions between the LAN and WAN, Ethernet services are highly scalable. The speed of the port installed at your business location determines the maximum bandwidth. If you have a Gigabit Ethernet port, a very common installation, you can choose just about any bandwidth up to 1000 Mbps and make changes without having to replace any equipment. Start with what you need today and then upgrade as needed with a simple call to your provider.

Another reason to pick Ethernet over Fiber is that it supports standardized Carrier Ethernet services such as E-Line and E-LAN. E-Line is a point to point connection. E-LAN is a meshed multi-location network. Both E-Line and E-LAN can be set up to run at the layer 2 switching level so that you can interconnect multiple LANs as one large bridged network. These LAN locations can be anywhere in the country and even include international destinations.

Finally EoF tends to be a lower cost service than SONET on a per-Mbps basis. SONET prices have dropped dramatically over the last few years, but Ethernet still tends to be considerably cheaper. The only limitation is that SONET may be more readily available at your location.

The final choice is shared bandwidth. This is the cheapest WAN connection of all, priced at just a fraction of similar SONET or Carrier Ethernet solutions. The tradeoff is that you are sharing a pool of bandwidth with many other users. The bandwidth you have available at any given moment can vary all over the place. Also, shared bandwidth services tend to be asymmetrical. The download speed is much higher than the upload speed. This works fine if all you need is access to the Internet for your employees. It may fall short if you upload many files, need a highly responsive connection to cloud services or use your high bandwidth service for remote backup and recovery.

Are you in need of higher business bandwidth connection but concerned about the expense? Get competitive quotes on SONET and Carrier Ethernet options and see how many different options are available for your business locations.