100 Business Locations and 1 Bandwidth Bill

By: John Shepler

If your business has grown from a single small operation to a nationwide or international enterprise, chances are that your network connections have grown in a piecemeal fashion over the years. Now you’ve got a major management problem handling dozens, hundreds or even thousands of individual contracts. Moreover, there’s that nagging feeling that you may be paying a lot more that you could be with an optimized solution. You’re probably right.

So, what can you do to get your arms around all this complexity? First of all, don’t try doing it all yourself. You are ill equipped to search out that optimum solution of providers and service levels. Chances are that you’ll sill wind up with too many bills from too many providers and not the best bandwidth connections. Instead, get support from a company that specializes in consolidating all your business bandwidth services.

UNSi (United Network Services, Inc.), formerly American Broadband, Inc. , is just such a company. Their specialty is managing broadband connectivity for companies with 100 or more locations. They can give you multiple types of connectivity matched to your location needs and consolidated in a single broadband bill. They specialize in optimizing bandwidth solutions, taking that monkey off YOUR back. You’ll wind up with more and better connectivity at a lower cost that what you’re paying now… and without the management headaches.

How does UNSI do this? It starts with their nationwide MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) network. MPLS provides the reliable high bandwidth core that can cost effectively carry network traffic of nearly any protocol with high security. Beyond their own network, UNSi and unique NNI (Network to Network Interface) capabilities that allow them to mesh with more than 150 other carrier networks to create a single expansive network. No matter where your business locations are, you’ll find a suitable connection via DSL, Cable Broadband, Ethernet over Copper, Carrier TDM or Metro Ethernet. A recent merger with Airband adds fixed wireless connectivity to the mix of options.

Other network assets include 18 strategic regionally located points of presence (POPs) serving over 155,000 lit buildings. Network operation centers (NOCs) are geographically dispersed to survive any foreseeable disaster.

What type of services are available? In addition to the core MPLS network that ties everything together and connections for each of your location, UNSi offers dedicated Internet access (DIA), cloud connectivity, managed services that include routers, firewalls, colocation, hosted monitoring and even managed LAN. A special service is called SIF or Same IP Failover. This is a disaster recovery and business continuity solution that provides automated failover between the primary MPLS/DIA circuits and a broadband backup circuit. The automated system ensures that the same customer IP range will operate over both the on-net primary circuit and the backup circuit. If the primary goes down, the system will switch seamlessly to the backup to ensure continuous operation.

Are you managing a single business location or hundreds to thousands located domestically or internationally? See if you can reduce your telecom management workload and save money in the process with network and bandwidth service consolidation.

Wireless SIP Trunking

One thing we know about business telephone and dedicated broadband access is that they are wireline services. Well, that’s what we used to know. There’s a new player in the marketplace and it is wireless SIP trunking.

A pioneer in this field is Airband Communications. They offer enterprise-class IP-based voice services bundled with wireless Internet access. In wireline parlance, this could be called a SIP trunk or Integrated voice and data service. But Airband VoIP trunking service has some unique advantages.

Like other integrated services, there is only one WAN connection providing both telephone and broadband Internet access. This one just happens to be wireless. Also like the better integrated services, bandwidth is dynamically allocated between voice and data to make efficient use of the connection. Voice packets get priority to maintain quality of service. The bandwidth sharing of voice and data also only exists between your facility and Airband. Your telephone calls never travel on the Internet and aren’t subject to the disruptive effects of congestion, jitter and latency on the public network. In fact, you get a unified service level agreement from Airband that covers availability, packet loss, latency and jitter for your peace of mind.

Standard telephone trunking using ISDN PRI generally comes in blocks of 23 channel with a maximum carrying capacity of 23 separate phone lines. Airband’s VoIP trunks can be added in single increments. Buy these outside phone line connections as business picks up and you need them rather than paying for excess resources up front.

A standard package starts at 5 VoIP trunks minimum bundled with 2 Mbps of Internet access. This is perfect for smaller businesses, with unlimited local calling and 200 minutes of domestic long distance per trunk. 911 support is included. So is local number portability so you can keep the phone numbers you have now. You’ll also get both inbound and outbound caller name and ID. If you want, you can add-on DIDs (Direct Inward Dialing), toll free numbers and directory listing, and analog/Fax/security lines. The interface of this system will support either PRI or SIP to your in-house telephone system.

Don’t confuse this fixed wireless service with either cellular or WiFi services. This is professional grade private fixed wireless network with 128 bit data encryption and quality of service (QoS) controls. The radios at each end automatically adjust 8 levels of signal modulation to ensure reliable transmission in all types of weather. In fact Airband offers Dual Path Service Delivery (DPSD) that automatically fails over to the backup service should the main path ever fail. With wireline services, you have to do this yourself by ordering separate diverse line services from different carriers or take your chances on line breaks.

Could your business or organization benefit from a high quality fixed wireless solution with bandwidth up to Gigabit Ethernet? If so, get service availability and pricing on fixed wireless for voice and data now.