Shopping For High Speed Options

Business broadband isn’t what it used to be. Years ago you had the choice of an expensive T1 line, a very expensive DS3 connection or a very, very expensive SONET fiber optic service. Right now those very services are a lot more affordable than they’ve ever been. What’s more, a number of other competing bandwidth options have come the market to serve business rather than residential customers. If you haven’t shopped for high speed options in a while, I’ll bet you will by the time you see what’s available. If you’d like to get right to it, check high speed bandwidth pricing and availability right now.

Let’s see what’s happened to T1 over the years. T1 for dedicated Internet access is now available just about anywhere you can get a phone line installed. The pricing has dropped from well over $1,000 to somewhere in the $300 range for most locations. Those off the beaten path will cost more, but nothing like they used to. If 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough, you can generally bond T1 lines together to get 3 Mbps or higher.

For the same price as a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps, you may also be able to get a newer service called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. The difference is that EoC will give you 2 or 3 Mbps for that price. Companies now are switching from T1 to EoC as a way to increase their Internet access bandwidth while keeping their broadband budget the same. Once the switch is made, it is much easier and less expensive to continue increasing bandwidth to 5, 10, 15, 20 and higher Mbps levels. The growth path for T1 is bonded T1 followed by DS3, which is a serious jump in both speed and cost to get to 45 Mbps.

What else can you get for your T1 line budget? Smaller retail stores that have traditionally relied on large and pricey satellite systems are turning to 3G fixed wireless at about 1 Mbps. That’s not much different than T1 bandwidth for about half the price. Like T1, 3G is available for nearly all business locations. Is works very well for Point of Sale (POS) transactions as well as general Internet access. A higher speed service, 4G fixed wireless, is starting to be deployed now and is a logical growth path from 3G.

How would you like a lot of bandwidth, say 100 Mbps, for that T1 price? That’s not impossible anymore. It’s the result of Cable business broadband that’s delivered over a standard Cable TV coaxial copper line. This is a shared bandwidth service that is very similar to home broadband but designed to meet the needs of business, including such things as static IPs if needed. A very popular service is 100 Mbps download, 10 Mbps upload. You need to have the cable passing your business to be hooked up, but if that’s the case you can get a lot of speed for your bandwidth dollar.

What happens if you need even higher speeds with dedicated access, very low latency, service level agreements and other features? The traditional approach is to move on up to SONET / SDH fiber optic service, starting with OC-3 at 155 Mbps. A less expensive competing service is now Ethernet over Fiber or EoF. The popular entry level is 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet that matches the speed of many Local Area Networks. FastE, as it is called, is an almost direct replacement for OC-3 even though the bandwidth is lower. Many times OC-3 was installed because DS3 at 45 Mbps was too little and 155 Mbps was way more than enough.

Like Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber is easily scaled up as requirements expand. You can work your way up to 250 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 750 Mbps and 1 Gbps or Gigabit Ethernet. There are often more intermediate bandwidth steps in-between these levels. With SONET, your choices are OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. Ethernet over Fiber goes up to 10 Gbps to match OC-192 that is also 10 Gbps.

How much bandwidth do you need now and what sort of budget do you need to meet? Save yourself the time and trouble of chasing all over to get pricing from multiple vendors. The GeoQuote broker pricing engine will give you instant competitive prices for bandwidth services up to 1 Gbps, with other services quoted by experienced bandwidth experts and sent to you via email or over the phone. If you haven’t gotten pricing lately, be ready for a shock... and a pleasant shock indeed.



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

What’s The Best Business Internet Service?

Does your new business need Internet service for the first time or does your established business need improved access? Perhaps you just have a nagging feeling that you could be getting more bandwidth for less money. You might be right. To answer all these questions, let’s take a look at what’s available in the way of business Internet service now.

The preferred professional-grade business Internet connection has long been the T1 line. Why? It is highly reliable and has a rock solid bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. This is called symmetrical bandwidth. You’ll see that not all Internet connections are symmetrical. The rock solid nature of the bandwidth is also not guaranteed on some of the other services. T1 is a dedicated bandwidth service. That means that you have 1.5 Mbps set aside for your exclusive use. Once again, not all Internet connections are exclusive. Service reliability is often guaranteed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that spells out how fast line problems will be fixed and what the remedies are if the provider fall short of the agreement.

In addition to these attributes, T1 is popular because it is almost universally available. Would you be surprised to learn that T1 technology, also called T-Carrier, was developed over 50 years ago? Using T1 to connect to the Internet is much newer. It was originally developed for telephone trunk lines. For both applications, T1 is provisioned over one or two pair of twisted copper telco wiring. That wiring is available in nearly every business location.

The two drawbacks of T1 is that it is relatively expensive compared to low-end data services and the 1.5 Mbps limitation. A decade or two ago, 1.5 Mbps was a lot of bandwidth for most businesses. Today it still works for smaller concerns but is too little for medium and large companies. You can work around this limitation by bonding multiple T1 lines together to achieve anywhere from 3 to 12 Mbps of total bandwidth.

A similar but newer technology service that is catching on fast is Ethernet over Copper (EoC). It also uses multiple telco pairs to transport the signal, but works a bit differently. T1 bandwidth is always 1.5 Mbps no matter how far the line runs, even into rural areas. EoC offers higher bandwidths near the central office and less farther out. Several miles is the distance limitation of Ethernet over Copper. However, if you are within the service footprint, you can easily get 10, 20, 30 or even 45 Mbps. Sometimes even 100 Mbps on EoC. The other big advantage of EoC is cost. You can get twice the bandwidth for the same price as a T1 line or the same bandwidth for half the cost of bonded T1 lines.

Small retailers, especially chain stores or franchises, have used two way satellite Internet for years. Satellite will work anywhere you have a clear view of the Southern sky, even in the back woods if power is available. Satellite is often less expensive than T1, although the difference is shrinking. It has limited bandwidth available and latency, or time delay, makes it unsuitable for telephone or two-way video. It does work well for point of sale terminals and general Internet access.

Like T1, satellite has a newer competitor. This is 3G fixed wireless. It is a business grade Internet service similar in bandwidth to T1 lines or satellite but using the broadband capability of the cellular phone network. Unlike simple wireless aircards, 3G fixed wireless service uses a special antenna and modem system that makes the system more reliable and usable in most all business locations nationwide and in Canada. The cost is about half that of T1 service. It is perfect for POS terminals and is offered with PCI level security for credit card transactions.

If your application needs more bandwidth, Ethernet over Fiber or SONET fiber optical services will provide all you can use up to 10 Gbps. This level of bandwidth costs more, of course, and isn’t available for all locations. Construction costs to connect a particular building are often the deal breaker.

Two asymmetrical, shared bandwidth services of note are DSL and Cable broadband. These were designed for the consumer market and cost considerably less per Mbps than dedicated telecom services. However, you do get what you pay for and shared bandwidth services achieve their cost savings by creating a “party line” arrangement where you and many other users share the same bandwidth pool. That means your bandwidth will vary up and down all the time. There are also no SLAs because these are “information services” not telecom services. Even so, with Cable business broadband you can get 100 Mbps download & 10 Mbps upload for about the price of a T1 line. If the cable passes your business and cost is paramount, this service might well meet your needs better than any other connection.

Scratching your head as to which way to go? A more business-like approach is to get availability, features, and prices for several business Internet service options suitable for your location and needs. You may be surprised by how much has become available recently and at reduced costs compared to years past.

3G Fixed Wireless For Business

We all know how 3G cellular wireless service has transformed the mobile phone into the smartphone. Did you also know there is a fixed wireless service available that uses the same technology? It’s a unique solution to getting business grade Internet access where everything else is too expensive or not available at all.

What the cellular industry has done is to build out a vast infrastructure of wireless base stations all over the country. You can think of these as a blanket of mobile phone coverage and you’d be right. You can also think of this infrastructure as a blanket of broadband coverage. You’d be equally right. The familiar cell towers are transmitting both voice and data signals on different channels through their microwave radio equipment.

On the data side, the 3G (3rd generation) wireless broadband service acts like a collection of Wi-Fi hotspots with much greater coverage and all linked together. You need a wireless modem aircard and a subscription to pick up this service. It doesn’t use the same channels as WiFi. It’s also not free, but for businesses the cost can be lower than other alternatives.

Many small and even medium size businesses use T1 lines that are available almost everywhere. Cost varies with location, but is typically several hundred dollars per month. Fixed wireless broadband can be had for half of that for a primary connection and even less if you only want backup service.

Unlike DSL and Cable, other SMB bandwidth choices, T1 and 3G wireless are available just about anywhere you want service. That includes locations that are off the beaten path if they can still get solid cell phone service. Fixed wireless is unique in that installation can be in a matter of days and you can have it installed at temporary business locations, such as fairs, conventions, and short term holiday stores.

Accel Networks is a leader in 3G fixed wireless for business. Their equipment and system are optimized for consistent bandwidth and high reliability. That includes proprietary RF optimization and RF level management and a proprietary antenna design that maximizes signal strength. This goes far beyond the simplistic design of the USB aircard modems you buy for mobile computing.

The other advantage of Accel Networks is that they have agreements with all three major providers (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon) to ensure extensive signal coverage. You know that no matter which carrier you pick, there are places where you’d be better off with one of the other carriers. It’s a matter of who has the most towers and channel licenses in a particular area. Accel picks the carrier that has the best signal at your particular business location. Since this is fixed service, it doesn’t matter that they’d make a different choice if you were located in another town.

What is 3G fixed wireless best for? Credit card verification is extremely popular. Accel Networks specializes in this technology and offers a layer 2 PCI compliant network meeting credit card industry requirements.

Most small businesses need credit card verification, but many also need general access to the Internet for Web browsers, email, and perhaps automated ordering, inventory, bookkeeping or data transfers between locations. Accel Networks managed broadband wireless solutions offer a minimum of 750 Kbps download and 250 Kbps upload broadband speeds. They also provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that includes 99.9% availability, minimum acceptable data rates, maximum acceptable latency, and mean time to restore.

Is fixed wireless a good fit with your business? Get a complete set of options and prices so you can compare 3G Fixed Wireless For Business with competing services, and then choose what’s right for your situation.