Is Cellular the New ISP?

By: John Shepler

Internet Service Provider technology has evolved dramatically in the last few decades. It stated out as audio modems over classic landline phones. Then came broadband with DSL and Cable. Business broadband started with ADSL, T1 lines & DS3, upgraded to SONET fiber and then Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Now we may be headed back to telephone technology, as 5G cellular make a move to become an accepted Internet Service Provider.

What’s 5G Got to Offer?
5G is the latest in a long line of technology evolution for wireless mobile phone service. The earliest cellular 0 and 0.5G emerged in the 1970’s, followed by 1G and 2G technologies in the 1980’s. These were voice technologies designed to make the traditional telephone set wireless and mobile. SMS messaging appeared in 2G with e-mail and simple Web browsing added with 2.5G and 2.75G.

The first mobile service that really could be called broadband Internet access was 3G, 3.5G and 3.75G. This is what supported the rise of smartphones. The next generation (G stands for generation level of technology) 4G and 4G LTE (long term evolution) made cellular broadband a real contender as an Internet Service Provider.

The latest phones with 5G are seeing Internet speeds in the dozens to hundreds of Mbps with low latency, jitter and packet loss. The millimeter wave bands support Gigabit per second service and that may be upgraded to 10 Gbps downlink and 1 Gbps uplink with 5G-Advanced upgrades.

5G vs Cable and Fiber
More and more business is being conducted on smartphones and tablets vs desktop computers and even laptops. WiFi is useful indoors to avoid burning cell usage quotas, but while mobile and at customer locations you’ll likely be connecting via 5G from your service provider. Since that applies to all of your mobile devices, the value of an Ethernet connection is limited to desktops and wired phones, with WiFi helpful in moving about in the office or at select locations, such as restaurants.

With so much computing being done via 5G, is it possible to replace everything with a 5G account that supports all your devices?

For an increasing number of consumers and small business users, the answer is yes. Replace your cable modem or fiber termination equipment with a 5G hotspot and continue using the Internet as you always have. You may not even notice a difference in performance. Let’s face it. Once you’ve got all the bandwidth you can reasonably use at one time, doubling or tripling it doesn’t make things go any faster. The limit will likely be the server at the other end that you are connecting to.

Since 5G speeds are often a couple of hundred Mbps or more, the difference between wireless, DOCSIS 3.1 cable and Ethernet over Fiber might not even be noticeable. Where the difference does show up is in your usage limit. That’s only important if you are a heavy user or a corporate operation with dozens or hundreds of users online at the same time. It’s especially true if your business applications are being run from the cloud and accessed via the Internet.

Limitations of 5G Broadband
Yes even with “unlimited” plans, you can’t hog all the bandwidth of the cellular provider all the time. The system isn’t designed for continuous uploads or download from a single customer. Bandwidth is scarce and must be shared with a multitude of users on each tower. Your provider may not drop your connection, but you might find it slowing down severely, especially during busy times, when you are using more that your fair share of capacity.

Another issue to consider is upload vs download performance.Casual web browsing and media streaming is demanding on the download side and not so much for upload. Business applications that transfer large files to and from remote servers or the cloud may well need upload bandwidth that rivals download performance. Video conferencing and telephone call centers also need both upload and download capability about equally. This is where fiber shines. Business fiber is typically symmetrical with upload and download speeds the same. This is also usually provided with no usage restrictions, something you are unlikely to find with cable and 5G.

Selecting a Service
What service works best for your business? It depends on what you are doing and how intensely you are doing it. Some companies will find that only high speed fiber optic service will meet their needs. Others will be fine with cable or 5G wireless service at a lower cost.

Another consideration is ability to connect. While fiber may offer the best performance, there may be no fiber near your rural location or you may be in a dense metro location that hasn’t been “lit” yet. Some companies have found it best to quickly connect with a 5G hotspot and use that service while waiting for fiber to be brought in over a period of weeks or longer.

If you have a need for new or expanded broadband Internet service or are simply curious if you can make a better deal, learn what business broadband options are available and suitable for your business.

5G Fixed Wireless Fills the Copper Gap

By: John Shepler

For almost a century and a half, twisted pair copper wiring has been the way telecom services were delivered. This ranges from classic plain old telephone service, to T1 digital lines for Internet access and point to point private connections. Copper, however, is on the way out. If you haven’t run up against its bandwidth limitations yet, you may still have a problem if your local telephone company (who owns all the copper lines) decides to discontinue service. Then what?

What Replaces Copper Lines?
When it comes to bandwidth, fiber optic cables can’t be beat. You can order any bandwidth from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps, and even 100 Gbps in many locations. Hybrid Fiber Cable, commonly known as cable broadband, can now deliver multi-gigabit speeds through the classic coaxial cable.

Sounds great, but what if you are in an area that is not served by Cable and has no fiber infrastructure nearby? Are you simply stuck with no service at all?

5G Wireless To the Rescue
Fifth generation or 5G smartphones have pretty much taken over the market from the 4G LTE standard that served us for years. With 5G comes new bands that offer expanded bandwidth and low latency for smart autonomous devices that are called the Internet of Things.

There is another application that 5G is pursuing aggressively. That is fixed wireless access or FWA. The “fixed” part of FWA means situations that are not mobile. Think of your desktop PC, point of sale terminals, or even your entire Local Area Network.

Internet service providers called WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers have been around to serve homes and businesses that can’t get wired or fiber Internet. They tend to be very local and independent and use systems that are not affiliated with cellular providers. If you have a WISP nearby, they can often step in and give you the service you need to stay online.

How 5G is different than the usual WISP is that it is true cellular broadband and serves both fixed and mobile users. The same broadband that you use on your phone can also be delivered directly to an office, store or residence wherever there is a cell tower nearby.

4G LTE service actually started the push for applications to use cellular broadband rather than depend on DSL, cable or other wired services. When 4G LTE became widely available it offered bandwidths that rivaled typical broadband services and had enough capacity to serve multitudes of customers rather than just a few at a time.

4G LTE is still a good option for many applications. What 5G does is offer bandwidths that can rival fiber at low latencies for sensitive applications. Major cellular carriers are promoting 5G wireless as a competitor to cable broadband in fixed locations. For business users, 5G can often substitute for unavailable T1 lines or even DS3 bandwidth.

How Do You Get 5G FWA?
You may have already paired your phone with your desktop PC or tablet using Bluetooth and setting up the phone as a personal Internet Hotspot. FWA expands upon this idea. Instead of a phone, you install a 5G or combination 5G / 4G LTE Gateway. This can be a simple box that sits on your desk in on a shelf near a window. It may have a wired Ethernet port to connect to your router or may even contain a router and WiFI hotspot. Some of these devices have special antennas that are more efficient in capturing the cellular tower signal for reliable operation.

A good way to research the availability of 5G and 4G LTE options for your business is to work with a bandwidth broker that represents a multitude of companies offering this type of service. You’ll want a solid connection with enough bandwidth to serve the size of your business and sufficient or no data limits. You may be surprised at the variety of offerings available, even in rural or otherwise underserved areas.

Fiber Without The Fiber

By: John Shepler

You’re stretched for bandwidth. Perhaps the telco is telling you that they won’t renew your T1 or ISDN lines, as they are dropping their support for copper telecom services. You know the solution to either of these dilemmas is an upgrade to fiber optic bandwidth. Once it is installed, you can get all the bandwidth you need now and upgrade easily in the future. One problem. There are no fiber buildouts near you.

That leaves you with two unpleasant possibilities. Either pay a small fortune in construction costs to have fiber pulled-in, or forget fiber because there is none to be had for your location. Not so fast. There is another possibility. Get fiber performance without the actual fiber.

What Acts Like Fiber But Isn’t Fiber?

It isn’t those little glass strands that are so valuable to your business. It’s the bandwidth they carry. Your network doesn’t need to know or care how the traffic is carried in the metropolitan or wide area networks. There just needs to be enough bandwidth with low enough latency, jitter and packet loss. Anything that does that is virtually fiber.

Let’s take a look at two good options for high speed business Internet connectivity that can give you fiber optic performance but without the issue of having to install fiber where there isn’t any.

No fiber, No Wires At All
The first possibility is Fixed Wireless Access or FWA. Back in the day, this was known as microwave relay. Telephone companies put up massive towers with equally massive horn antennas to beam microwave signals from point to point. The traffic was bundles of telephone calls or television transmissions.

Today there are thousands of towers dotting the landscape in town and throughout rural areas. These were erected to support cell phone service. After several generations of technical advancement, we arrive at the newest standard: 5G or fifth generation. The 5G system uses a variety of bands in the megahertz and gigahertz range. The highest frequency or shortest wavelength equipment runs well into the microwave part of the spectrum and has massive bandwidth capability.

The higher the population density, the more 5G capability you’ll find. For smaller businesses, a fixed location cellular modem that plugs into your network can give you the reliable connection you need with lots of bandwidth available at reasonable prices. In other areas 4G LTE is a reasonable alternative and a very mature technology. If you need dozens of Mbps rather than hundreds or thousands, a 4G LTE modem with specially designed antennas for better signal capture can get the job done.

Not all fixed wireless is dedicated to the cellular phone industry. Some use licensed and unlicensed bands to deliver wireless Internet access over a limited area. You may have a small dish or other antenna installed on your building and aimed at the provider’s antenna. That gives you a strong signal regardless of weather conditions. Some private FWA providers can offer gigabit and higher bandwidths that feature low latency, jitter and packet loss just like fiber. Very high usage or even unlimited usage plans are available. Unlike new fiber installations, you can get service up and running in days rather than months or longer. Installation fees range from nothing to a reasonable one time fee.

It’s a Cable, But No Fiber Inside
The second good option to fiber optic service is cable broadband. Yes, this is the most recent incarnation of the Cable TV revolution. What’s new is that cable has gone far beyond its community antenna roots. Most of cable's infrastructure is now fiber. Surprised? Fiber is the only way these companies can transport all those TV channels and all the data.

So, if the cable companies use fiber why not just get them to connect you to their fiber network. They will, if you are close enough to a fiber access point and the construction issues aren’t too great. Otherwise, they’ll simply run the last few hundred feet or so with the familiar coaxial copper cable.

Can cable service on that coax really replace fiber? In a lot of cases, yes. The reason is that the cable modem standards have been massively upgraded over the years. Today’s DOCSIS 3.0, 3.1 and 4.0 modems deliver hundreds of Mbps up to 10 Gbps. That’s right. You can get some of the highest fiber optic speeds delivered via a DOCSIS 4.0 modem connected to a coax cable.

Will Non-Fiber Work For You?
In many, many cases, Fixed Wireless Access and cable broadband can make good substitutes for Ethernet over Fiber optic bandwidth. There are a couple of caveats, however. Wireless bandwidth isn’t as unlimited as what you can put through one or more fiber strands. As such, you may find that there are limits to your speed or usage, depending on what services are available for your location. Cable broadband is an inherently shared service, meaning that bandwidth may vary somewhat depending on how many users are on the cable and how much bandwidth they are using at any given time.

Even so, many businesses don’t need or need to pay for dedicated bandwidth of 1 to 100 Gbps. You may find that wireless and cable offer tremendous cost savings and can deliver all the performance you really need. Why not check out the range of bandwidth options available for your business now?

Gigabit Internet Near Your Business

By: John Shepler

No doubt about it, you need more broadband speed to conduct business than you ever have. Most businesses have an online presence now. The few that don’t still need the Internet for business processes and to offer WiFi hotspots for their customers. If yesterday’s connection solutions seem to have slowed to a crawl, you clearly need an upgrade. Gigabit Internet broadband could be exactly what you need now and for the foreseeable future.

Is Gigabit Internet Really Right for Me?
What you really need is invisible connectivity. No matter what you are doing, the speed of the line shouldn’t be getting in your way. In fact, you should completely forget about how you get to the Internet. It should just be there.

You probably need more speed than you think. Over the last 20 years, the “Internet” has evolved from email and some very simple HTML brochure-type websites to fully functional online operations. Many of your customers never set foot in your place of business anymore. They do everything online. It’s second nature. Their phone is really a web browser that is always in their pocket. Their desktop computer has relatively little boxed software anymore. Most everything is done online and in real time. Your phone system? Probably VoIP technology these days and more likely, integrated with a video conferencing system for unified communications.

How about your business processes? Do you keep manual books? How about customer or patient records? Your customer relationship management systems are all software based and most likely cloud based. In fact, fewer and fewer companies host their own data centers anymore. It’s all about the cloud and what isn’t cloud related is all about connecting to the outside world, especially customers and suppliers.

Making your connection invisible to you and your employees involves certain technical characteristics. The line must run fast enough. That’s speed or bandwidth. It also must respond quickly. That’s latency as much as speed. Long latency in the system means sluggish response. It must also be accurate and efficient in the sense that it doesn’t lose bits. That integrity is essential in the case of voice and video streams. Dropped bits garble conversations and make video distorted and even jerky. A high quality Gigabit Internet connection can go a long way to making all of this fairly easy to accomplish.

Your Gigabit Internet Connection
Is Gigabit Internet near you? Most likely, yes. Perhaps you checked around a few years ago and found nothing available. It’s highly likely that situation has changed. The demand for higher and higher speeds, especially 4G and 5G wireless broadband speeds, has resulted in a building boom for fiber optic and microwave circuits. In addition, new technology modems have enabled cable broadband systems to be able to deliver Gigabit speeds over their existing fiber and coaxial copper infrastructure.

Even if you don’t think you really need Gigabit speeds right now, you should seriously consider having that capability. You’ll need them sooner than you think. What you want is a DOCSIS 3.1 modem or a Gigabit Ethernet port to deliver your Internet connection. That way you can start out with, say 100 Mbps business broadband, and upgrade to as much as 1,000 Mbps, a Gigabit, later.

Know Your Broadband Types
You should know that there are two basic types of Internet broadband services. They are called dedicated and shared. Dedicated Internet Access has the highest prices, but is the most solid, reliable connection you can get. The "dedicated" name means the bandwidth is 100% dedicated to your use only. Whatever you don't use remains available when you need it. A dedicated connection also tends to be symmetrical, with upload and download speeds identical.

Shared connections, like what you get with cable broadband and 4G and 5G wireless, are far less costly, but are shared among multiple users. You many notice this as fluctuating line speed throughout the day. Shared connections also tend to be asymmetrical with download speeds about ten times upload speeds. Whether either of these characteristics matter depend on how you are using the service.

What Internet connection is best for your business? Find out now what Gigabit Internet broadband services are available near you.

Rural Doesn’t Mean Broadband Wasteland Anymore

By: John Shepler

Running a business in a rural area or even locating in a business park outside the city limits presents a challenge that urban companies seldom have to face. That is, how to get adequate broadband service at an affordable price.

Is What I Need Even Available?”
Years ago, you could run a decent size business with a few phone lines and electric power service. Now you can hardly serve even local customers without broadband in addition to or combined with your telephone service. The performance you must have varies with the size and nature of your operation.

Small retail and service businesses have it easiest. A traditional T1 line at 1.5 Mbps can get you by. Prices have dropped dramatically, so you may only be looking at a few hundred dollars a month even in the unwired boonies. That’s because T1 uses the same twisted pair wiring that delivers analog and ISDN PRI PBX telephone service.
T1’s 1.5 Mbps may seem pretty pokey these days, but it’s enough to handle email, credit card verification, online ordering and operation of simple web sites on remote servers. You can often double or triple this bandwidth, at double or triple the price, by bonding multiple T1 lines together.

A competing service called Ethernet over Copper uses the same infrastructure but a more advanced technology to deliver 10 or 20 Mbps on the same telco lines. It’s less expensive than T1, but doesn’t deliver the higher bandwidths over long distances. If you are on the edge of a metro area, this can be a good solution.

The gold standard of broadband is now fiber optic service. Fiber has long been available in metro areas, but rarely out in the countryside. That’s changing fast. The killer app is 5G cellular wireless. High bandwidths are needed for 5G and even 4G LTE. That means every tower must get served by fiber or point to point wireless. With all that fiber being trenched and lit, the chances of a fiber optic connection at a reasonable price has gone up dramatically.

How About Cable?
DOCSIS Cable Broadband has traditionally stopped at the city limits. However, these lines are being strung farther and farther from town to serve new subdivisions and industrial parks. If the cable runs by your property, chances are excellent that the cable company can provide you with a drop at little or no construction cost.

Cable has also gotten a new lease on life with DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 modems. It’s fairly easy and inexpensive to get 100 Mbps downloads and 1 Gbps service is becoming more and more common.

When There Are No Copper or Fiber Lines
Some areas still aren’t being served. That’s especially true of small farming communities, farmsteads and ranches and any business located on historically rural property. Your option in this case is to go wireless. If you have a small home-based business you might even get by with cellular broadband. You can buy a wireless access point with this service installed or use your phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot to feed your computer and tablets. The main hitch with this approach is strict data limits of 20 GB or so per month. You have to buy more capacity or have your service slowed or cut off if you exceed your carrier’s limits.

Point to Point wireless broadband provided by WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) offer higher data limits and higher bandwidths than cellular. There are no national providers. You have to be in the footprint of a local or regional provider to get service.

Business satellite can now give you the higher bandwidths you desire, even up to 100 Mbps with decent data packages. All you need is power and an open view of the Southern sky. Prices are similar to T1, cable and wireless. The remaining limitation is the half-second or more of latency as the signal goes up to the bird and back down. If what you are doing is OK with that delay, it is an option that works in the remotest of locations.

Don’t assume that just because your area wasn’t built out for broadband years ago that it still isn’t. Progress is happening rapidly in this field, often helped by federal programs to expand rural broadband. Check your rural broadband options now and see what may have become available recently.