4G Wireless Broadband Options

Wireless broadband is on an upward path to take over many of the applications that have long been the domain of wireline technologies. Wireless has the convenience of portability and mobility. What’s held back deployment and more powerful applications is the limited availability and speed of wireless connections. The move to 4G wireless looks to be a potential solution.

4G or fourth generation wireless doesn’t have a strict definition, but it is roughly stated as the bandwidth typical of Cable broadband or Ethernet over Copper business connections. With this level of transmission speed and a city-wide reach, 4G wireless can take over service for desktop as well as mobile devices.

One might throw WiFi into the 4G category. The bandwidth for a, b, g, and n WiFi technologies fall into the right bandwidth category. However, WiFi is a short distance system. It works well within and nearby particular locations, such as homes, offices, restaurants, hotels, airports and even park benches. But you can’t get in your car and drive away with a WiFi connection. It will disappear as soon as you leave the parking lot. In a way, WiFi is more of a PAN or Personal Area Network like Bluetooth.

The higher power wireless technologies, including 2G & 3G are associated with cellular phone service. These are based on using networks of fixed transmitters and receivers arranged as cells with signals that fill-in the coverage between towers. The trick of turning this system into a metropolitan or wide area network is to coordinate the handoff of an existing wireless connection as the user moves from cell to cell.

The most popular wireless technology right now is 3G. It offers bandwidths similar to T1 lines and basic DSL of around 1.5 Mbps on average in metropolitan areas. You may get two or more times this speed if you happen to be near a tower with few users. This is more than adequate for many mobile uses, such as Web browsing, email and viewing video clips on smartphone screens.

Beyond limited speed, 3G also suffers from limited bandwidth availability. It shares channels with cellular telephone on the same towers. Those channels were originally sized to support expected voice traffic. They’ve been overwhelmed by the higher bandwidth requirements of Internet data traffic. That’s why carriers are so insistent on bandwidth caps.

There are a couple of different approaches to 4G wireless. The one taken by the cell phone companies is to view 4G as an upgrade to their 3G systems. There are two differing cellular system that co-exist. One is a US-centric system called CDMA that is used by Verizon, Sprint and others. The other is a more global standard called GSM that is used by AT&T and T-Mobile.

Right now, AT&T and T-Mobile have upgraded their 3G networks to a faster version of the same thing called HSPA+ that delivers up to 6 to 8 Mbps. Verizon has moved to a 4G technology called LTE that offers downloads of 5 to 12 Mbps. Sprint has gone with another 4G technology called WiMAX that delivers downloads in the 3 to 6 Mbps speed range.

As wireless continues to evolve, 4G is expected to move into two camps. LTE is the technology most discussed as a truly universal standard. WiMAX deployment actually predated LTE and has installations worldwide. Both LTE and WiMAX have technical upgrade paths that can boost download speeds to over 100 Mbps and even 1000 Mbps. This is competitive with many fiber services and ensures that 4G wireless will be with us for a long time.

One thing we’re also seeing with 4G wireless is the use of lower frequency bands that can more easily penetrate buildings. These bands came from the re-deployment of those channels from UHF TV as part of a federal auction. Clear offers 4G fixed and mobile wireless service with a telephone option over WiMAX in over 80 cities nationwide. Right now, this service offers unlimited broadband service.

Cheaper Business Broadband Abounds

With finances tight, most companies are looking for ways to save money without compromising the operations of the business. Telecom and networking costs are often eyed because they tend to be substantial monthly expenses. Well, go ahead and look closer. There’s money to be saved on your business broadband services.

What has given some managers the idea that their costs are fixed and non-negotiable is that they signed their original contract years ago with the one vendor in town who could provide the service - the local telephone company. That’s rarely the situation any more. Deregulation and technology developments have spawned a plethora of competitors who each have something to offer.

Let’s take that dedicated T1 line for instance. T1 is still an excellent choice for business broadband. You get bandwidth that you don’t share with anyone else, high availability, the option to bond lines to increase bandwidth, and the security of a private line that runs directly to your location. But, oh, the cost. Aren’t T1 lines the expensive way to go?

Not so much anymore. The price of T1 lines has come down dramatically in recent years. If you are still on an old contract or just paying month to month since your contract expired, you are probably missing out on a big cost reduction. What you want to do is get a new set of competitive T1 line quotes for your location and see what you’ll pay for the next three years, not the last ten.

For about the same price as T1, you can now get Ethernet over Copper in many business districts. EoC gives you a simpler interface since it runs the same Ethernet you have on your network, only standardized for long distances over telco copper cable. For the price of a 1.5 Mbps T1 line, you can probably get 2 Mbps or even 3 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. The one hitch is that this new technology isn’t available everywhere. It is distance limited to several miles or less from the nearest telephone company central office.

How about business class Cable broadband? If the local cable operator (MSO) has lines running by your location, you may be able to get 25, 50 or even 100 Mbps cable broadband for the same price as that T1 line. Cable offers a lot of bandwidth for the money, but it is a shared service so bandwidth fluctuates. That may or may not matter to you. Also, upload bandwidth is only a fraction of download bandwidth. That doesn’t matter for Web browsing, watching video, downloading software updates or email. It could be a limiting factor if you are use to constantly uploading large files to remote data centers or other business locations.

Want to pay even less and still get reliable broadband capability? Consider fixed wireless broadband running on 3G. This is similar to what you use for a laptop computer or smartphone, but designed as a box to install in your retail store, construction site or other business location. Bandwidth is typical for 3G, up to 1 Mbps or so for downloads and much less for uploads. But if all you need is point of sale connectivity and perhaps email and other occasional Web use, you could pay a third the cost of a T1 line and have installation within the week.

Are you concerned that you are paying too much for your business broadband and other network or telephone services? Chances are, your concerns are justified. Why wonder when you can find out quickly where you stand? Get current prices and availability for business broadband and telephone services suitable for your company location and requirements and see how much savings can be gained.

Why Ethernet Broadband For Business?

When we think of broadband, what generally comes to mind is DSL, Cable Internet or cellular wireless services. But these are light duty or consumer-grade bandwidth services. Why might you become frustrated with such broadband services in business and is there an attractive alternative?

First, let’s take cellular wireless. It goes by the name 3G and, increasingly, 4G. The problem with both 3G and 4G coming from cell towers is that there is a very limited amount of bandwidth available and it has to be fairly apportioned to all the users who want it.

Smartphones gobble up bandwidth at an eye-popping rate. Get enough smartphones or netbook aircards in a particular area and the whole network can be brought to its knees. That’s why most carriers now have monthly bandwidth limits with steep overage penalties. Satellite and some 4G carriers take a different approach. Instead of charging for overage, they throttle down bandwidth for heavy users. If you use too much in a given period, they slow down your access to give others a chance.

While out and about, cellular broadband may be your best bet simply because service is so readily available compared to everything else. If the cells are too congested, you can find a WiFi hotspot and likely get better throughput there.

If you want or need wireless broadband service for an office with multiple users, consider a fixed wireless option designed for business. They’re mostly available in large metropolitan areas. If you can get this service, you’ll be hooked up quickly and have generous amounts of bandwidth at your disposal. An outdoor antenna is installed on your building to a strong signal for reliable service.

DSL and Cable broadband were designed for consumers. The carriers bend over backwards to keep the price low so that most consumers can afford the service. But they achieve that by having everyone share the available bandwidth. Your service might offer “up to 10 Mbps” of download bandwidth. Whether or not you get anywhere near that depends on what your neighbors are doing online. When everybody starts heavily accessing the Internet, the line speed for each user slows and sometimes slows to a crawl.

Businesses that need reliable, dependable and fast Internet service often find themselves frustrated at keeping up productivity on services that cater to people downloading music and videos at home. The classic solution is the T1 line. T1 lines are dedicated, in the sense that you have full use of the available 1.5 Mbps bandwidth. T1 is highly reliable, gets fast repair service if anything ever does go wrong and is “unlimited” in that you can run it full speed 24/7 all month. If you need more bandwidth, you can “bond” more T1 lines up to about 10 Mbps both upload and download.

The one thing that makes businesses sometimes hesitate at installing one or more T1 lines is that the cost is several times what you pay for those consumer services. Even though the cost is well worth it when you consider the lost business or productivity that results from flaky Internet service, there is now an even better option for business use. That service is Ethernet broadband.

Ethernet broadband is a high speed dedicated wireline service that can be provided to your business location on either copper wiring or fiber optic cable, depending on bandwidth. Popular speed options are 3 and 10 Mbps for smaller businesses, 100 to 1000 Mbps for medium size operations, and 1 Gbps and up for large corporations. Your line speed is scalable, so you can generally have it increased up to the full capacity of the installed port with only a phone call to your provider.

Best of all, Ethernet is often the best value for your broadband dollar. A 3 Mbps Ethernet connection is often about the same price as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. A 10 Mbps Ethernet service is easily affordable by most businesses.

Would you be interested in switching to highly reliable, high speed Ethernet services if the price were attractive? Why not check out Ethernet broadband service prices right now? See how much bandwidth you can get for your budget.

4G WiMAX Wireless Broadband Available Now

Have you been frustrated by your choices in home and mobile broadband service? How would you like to find a wireless broadband Internet service that you can use at your desk and take with you on your laptop? Would you like it even more if this service was cheaper than DSL, Cable and 3G wireless? Would you go for it right now if this service was screaming fast? You should really check and see if you can get 4G WiMAX broadband.



What’s WiMAX and why is it better than other broadband service options? WiMAX is a new worldwide standard for high speed wireless data service. If you think the name sounds a lot like WiFi, you are right. In fact, you can think of WiMAX as the coming replacement for public WiFi hotspots. The MAX in WiMAX hints at why. This service gives you a hotspot that covers an entire city. It can extend for 20 or 30 miles. Compare that with WiFi that disappears in a couple of hundred feet.

If you want to go mobile and not have to constantly look for WiFi hotspots to connect, you are probably considering or have a 3G modem aircard. This is a USB device that looks like a flash memory dongle. But the modem aircard has a two-way digital radio inside that connects to a cellular broadband signal. That gives you broadband at speeds similar to entry level DSL but without the wires. The upgrade is 4G or fourth generation wireless broadband. WiMAX is the implementation of 4G that is deployed and working right now.

What does 4G WiMAX have to offer? How about typical download speeds in the range of 3 to 6 Mbps with occasional bursts to 10 Mbps? How about a service that needs no telephone or cable TV wiring even at a desktop location? How about a service that you can run at your desktop and then take with you on your laptop? That pretty much rules out the wireline services doesn’t it? Combine that with a service plan price that starts at $30 a month, and even 3G wireless is left in the dust. You can order home service, mobile service, a combination plan and a plan that even includes 4G VoIP phone service in the bundle.

Now the question is can you get 4G WiMAX broadband at your location? CLEAR offers this service in parts of Texas, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Idaho, Nevada, Hawaii, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. More locations are under construction right now. The only way to know for sure is to check for CLEAR 4G WiMAX broadband service availability. Give it a try and see if you’ve been missing out on faster, cheaper wireless broadband service.

Can Wireless Broadband Displace DSL and Cable?

What's allowed broadband to displace dial-up Internet access has been wireline technologies. For consumers, they are DSL and Cable broadband. For businesses, add T1 lines. But now there's a new contender that might just do to wireline broadband what wireline broadband did to dial-up. That contender is wireless.

Sure, WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers have been around for years without mounting too much of a threat to either the telephone or cable companies. That's because they tend to be scattered few and far between, with very small service footprints. Business wireless Internet access is mostly centered in the dense downtown areas of major cities. Consumer wireless has mostly targeted rural subdivisions where housing is dense enough to offer serious revenue potential but beyond where DSL and cable service exists.

One wireless service that has been somewhat prolific has been two-way satellite Internet service. You find dishes atop many gas stations, restaurants, car dealerships, and chain stores. These are there to support Point of Sale operations and communications back to the head office. Consumers also use two-way satellite Internet, but have been slower to adopt it than satellite television.

The newer competition that actually may have the muscle to carve out a significant chunk of the broadband market is based on cellular technologies. All of the major cell phone carriers also offer data service. But it's only within the last year or two that broadband speeds have been available to a majority of the service area. Right now there are two competing systems. They are EDGE offered by AT&T and EV-DO offered by Verizon, Alltel and Sprint. Both offer similar speeds of approximately 700 Kbps. That's similar to many DSL services and not that much below the actual speed you get with Cable during periods of heavy usage.

Cellular broadband is popular for road warriors and business users who tend to be out of the office and around town with their laptop and notebook computers. It costs about double what the consumer broadband services do and runs on cellular frequencies which have limited ability to penetrate buildings. The advent of smartphones such as the Apple iPhone and BlackBerry Storm is making cellular broadband more of a must-have option. The other new trend is toward netbooks, much smaller and lighter notebook computers that may have cellular broadband connectivity built-in.

WiFi is the true wireless service for the masses. It is now built-into nearly every laptop and notebook PC and some cell phones and even gaming consoles. Free WiFi is available in most hotels and many restaurants. It's also the home networking solution of choice. But WiFi still needs a wireline service to feed it and has a service radius of only a few hundred feet.

WiFi on steroids is how WiMAX is sometimes described, although it is a completely different technology and requires its own aircard. WiMAX has a service radius measured in kilometers and speeds measured in Mbps. In the 700 MHz band, it can easily penetrate buildings and provide home or office broadband service without the need for an outside antenna.

The competitor to WiMAX will soon be LTE, a cellular broadband standard that also offers cable Internet speeds of a few Mbps or more. It is also expected to be built-out using the 700 MHz frequencies auctioned off from the shutdown of analog television.

WiMAX and LTE will likely displace EV-DO and EDGE somewhere down the road. Both are just starting deployment, with only a few cities expected to be up and running this year. But will they obsolete DSL and cable broadband? Not for a long time. These technologies are well entrenched with sunk costs and the ability to offer lower pricing and higher speeds as competition develops. Wireless will probably grow on its own for users who are increasingly mobile. The real threat to wireline services is coming from fiber optic service that can offer speeds an order of magnitude or two above wireline bandwidths. But, then again, isn't fiber just a glass version of traditional wireline?

Broadband For The Home Office

With bandwidth choices multiplying, home office users are wondering what's the best deal for them. Should they go with garden variety residential DSL or Cable Internet service, the new FIOS service from Verizon, or something professional grade like Business DSL, T1, or Carrier Ethernet? Here's a quick guide to what's available and what makes sense for the home office user.

Most often, the best option for home office connections to the Internet are the "residential" broadband services. That's true for a couple of reasons. First of all, residential broadband is as low cost as you can get. It's generally only available in residential neighborhoods. The local cable company may well be selling broadband connections to restaurants and small offices in areas zoned for business, but they'll also be charging around double what you'll pay at home. It's likely to be the same or very similar connection quality, perhaps with special customer service attention for the higher paying business customers.

Beyond cost, the other reason residential broadband is a good match for home offices is that most home users are willing to live with occasional short outages and varying bandwidths in exchange for cost savings. If the line drops for 20 minutes, can you take a break and come back or do something offline? If so, you'll save a bundle. If you are using VoIP telephony, is the bandwidth high enough so that your phone calls sound decent and rarely drop? With one or two phones and a decent router that lets you set priority for voice packets, you may very well be able to use a single broadband connection for your broadband telephone and PC Internet.

So how do you find your best deal on residential broadband? The easiest is to use an online broadband search engine such as "Can I Get DSL?" You enter your name, email, and phone number and in a matter of a minute or two you get back a display of which broadband services are available for your location and their prices.

Notice that you need to enter you landline phone number for this to work. Search engines like this one use the phone number to establish your exact location based on phone company records. That's important because all broadband services are location sensitive. The house across the street may be wired for cable or fiber optic service, but yours isn't. Or vice versa. For DSL, it's even more critical. DSL uses high frequency signals that ride on the telephone line along with standard voice service. These signals have a very limited geographical reach from the phone company office. If you are more that a few thousand feet, it gets dicey. By the way, that applies to both residential and business DSL offerings. It's the technology that limits the distance.

OK, but what if you don't have a landline? Perhaps you use a cell phone exclusively or VoIP sharing your broadband connection. Or you are moving to a new location and want to find out what broadband services are available there. For DSL, forget it. It's rare to be able to get DSL without landline phone service. Both services use the same phone lines. Plus you need that phone number to even run a search. If you are using VoIP for phone calls, chances are that you are looking for Cable Internet anyway. To get an idea on service availability and prices, use a next door neighbor's landline number to run a search (with their permission of course). This won't guarantee availability, but is likely to give you an accurate picture of what services are available. You'll need to call your cable company or the cable company at your new location to actually establish service.

An exciting new service rolling out in selected parts of the country, mostly in the New York metroplex area, is Verizon FIOS. This is the long awaited FTTH or Fiber To The Home service. You can get download speeds up to 30 Mbps, plus telephone and television service, all delivered over fiber optic cable.

I should mention that the broadband search at Can I Get DSL? returns DSL, Cable, and Satellite Internet. Satellite is a viable alternative if you live in a rural area or part of town not served by DSL or Cable. It's more expensive than the other residential options and you have to pay a equipment fee, but it may well met your Internet needs when the other option is dial-up. Because of the time delay, called latency, involved in sending a signal up to a geosynchronous satellite and back down, this service isn't very usable for VoIP phone service. You might be able to make it function, but the conversations will be more like using walkie-talkie or CB radio than traditional telephone service.

Another option that may be available locally is wireless broadband. These are locally owned and have very limited coverage, so there's no search engine. Try the newspaper ads or Yellow Pages to see if there is a provider in your area. If so, you can often get service quality similar to Cable broadband at about the same cost. Sometimes there are wireless providers in smaller or more rural counties that aren't hooked up to Cable.

But what about the profesional grade telecom services? T1 is the defacto standard for many small business locations because it provides rock-solid bandwidth at 1.5 Mbps both upload and download, often with a service level agreement or availability guarantee. The reliability is at least an order of magnitude better than residential services, repair times are faster, and the provider may offer you a managed router so they can monitor your service quality at all times. For this, you pay about 10x the cost of residential broadband. In major cities, that's around $400 a month with a 1, 2, or 3 year lease require. In less built-up areas the cost is higher. There's also a rather stringent credit check.

For some people, T1 service to the home is worth the expense. These tend to be people with expensive residences and demanding professions that require top grade service, whatever the price. If you fall into that category, please let one of our professional consultants help you decide on the best professional grade services available for your location.

There is also Business DSL service, but this is also typically available only for business-zoned areas near telephone company central offices. It typically costs 2 to 3 times residential DSL and is characterized by symmetrical bandwidth. That means similar upload and download speeds. Once again, this service is distance limited by the technology involved. If you can't get residential DSL, you won't be able to get business DSL.

The other available business bandwidth solutions are more intended for medium to large companies. These include T3 or DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps and fiber optic Ethernet at 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps. Those services start around $2,000 a month, so it would be the rare home office user who can justify this expense.

VoIP Land Lines Complement Wireless

The name often given to traditional analog phone lines is "land lines". You may also hear this term associated with digital services, such as T1 lines. Both analog and digital telephony have been provisioned on pairs of copper wires often buried in the ground since the inception of telephone service two centuries ago. But the term land line is also used to distinguish telecom services over copper wire from satellite and cellular wireless services.

You might think that land lines and wireless are completely different technologies that don't really intersect. But now there's a mix of the two that gives users important advantages. In this case, landlines and wireless complement rather than compete with each other.

What makes this work is a new form of land lines you can call VoIP land lines. A VoIP land line is a wireline service that carries packetized voice rather than analog or TDM telephone service. For consumers that's almost always DSL or Cable Internet service. Business users might also have T1 dedicated Internet service or SIP trunking for IP telephony transport.

VoIP land lines support broadband phone service. But that's often a secondary use of the land lines. Broadband lines are usually installed to get broadband Internet service as a replacement for slow dial-up. But once you have broadband Internet, you can use it for both your computers and an adapter that makes your telephone act something like a computer. What the ATA or analog telephone adapter is really doing is converting the phone signals from analog to digital and organizing them into IP or Internet Protocol packets that are indistinguishable from other traffic on the Internet. The ATA communicates with a VoIP phone service provider that lets your phone call any other phone in the world.

Seems like a long way around just to have the same phone service that's always been hooked up to that landline buried decades ago in the back yard. The reason people do this is that VoIP or broadband phone service is often much less expensive than what your local phone company charges for its legacy phone service.

For example, consider SunRocket VoIP. SunRocket is an independent broadband phone service that offers a unique annual plan giving you 12 months of unlimited calling anywhere in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Canada. Up to 100 minutes of international calling is included each month. Calling features that the local phone company usually charges extra for, like Caller ID, is also included.

The key to this savings, of course, is that you are already paying for broadband Internet service for your computers. The VoIP telephone service simply piggybacks on the DSL or Cable Internet broadband you have now. It's an especially attractive deal for Cable Internet users, since they don't need their old land line service for telephone or Internet connections anymore.

So what does this have to do with wireless? Just about everyone has a cellular phone these days so that they can communicate on the go. Where VoIP land lines complement cellular is that low cost VoIP service gives you unlimited minutes when calling or receiving calls. Heavy users of cellular know that you have to ration your anytime minutes or buy a really expensive plan with thousands of minutes. You pay a fortune and some months they go to waste. By having both a low minutes cell phone plan and home VoIP phone service, you can talk all you want and still have the advantage of mobility when you need it.

Wireless complements VoIP both for the mobility and the emergency backup. VoIP land lines are dependent on your DSL or Cable modem, Analog Telephone Adapter, and perhaps a router. When you lose power, you lose your VoIP connectivity unless you have battery backup on everything. When your broadband service goes down, so does your VoIP. Most people don't have that much trouble with outages, but it's reassuring to know that you can always use your cell phone to call 911 if you need to.

If this sound like a good arrangement to you, consider SunRocket VoIP for residential broadband phone service. If you don't already have broadband, you can find DSL and Cable Internet providers with a quick search. Need a great deal on a cell phone and service? Check out the current special offers at Cell Phone Plans Finder.

Note that these services are intended for home users. If you have a business location in need of excellent pricing on telecommunication services, try Enterprise VoIP for equipment, digital lines, installations and service.