Gigabit Ethernet Replaces DS3 and T3

By: John Shepler

T3 lines and DS3 bandwidth have long been a staple of telecom service offerings. The rise of Carrier Ethernet WAN, point to point microwave for business and DOCSIS 3 cable broadband is causing these traditional telco services to fade into legacy services. Let’s have a look at what’s available for your business in the 50 to 1000 Mbps speed range.

Telco’s T1 Line Upgrade
The pioneering work on digital transmission over long distances was done by Bell Labs right after WWII. Their first product was called T-Carrier and consisted of T1 and T3 services that were compatible. T1 lines could replace 24 analog phone lines with one multiplexed T1 line.

T1 was designed to run on the same twisted pair copper wires that supplied analog POTS landlines for easy deployment. T3 is an upgrade that ran on coaxial copper lines and microwave towers at 45 Mbps. It can handle 672 voice lines. The protocol that runs on T3, called DS3, can also be carried on SONET fiber optic circuits. When the Internet arrived, both T1 and DS3 were offered in clear channel versions to carry packetized data. T1 runs at 1.5 Mbps. DS3 or T3 runs at 45 Mbps.

Carrier Ethernet over Fiber Takes Over
Computer generated data far exceeds telephone traffic these days. The near ubiquitous standard is Ethernet on the LAN running the Internet Protocol or IP. With T1 or DS3, you need to do a protocol conversion at each end to go from the computer standard to the telephone standard and back again. The introduction of Carrier Ethernet keeps everything in one standard, Ethernet, from end to end.

Carrier Ethernet has been deployed in two versions. The slower version is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. This is a direct replacement for T1 lines and fractional DS3 service and runs from about 1 Mbps to 20 Mbps or so depending on the length of the circuit. The key feature is that it uses the same twisted pair wiring as T1 line or analog phone lines.

The faster version of Carrier Ethernet is Ethernet over Fiber or EoF. This is the technology that is rapidly taking over the world. EoF gives you end to end Ethernet from about 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and even 100 Gbps in some areas. As you might expect, Ethernet over Fiber easily replaces T3 lines or DS3 bandwidth over SONET. It also offers the ability to easily upgrade to higher speeds than 45 Mbps any time you want. With a Gigabit Ethernet port, you can start off at 50 or 100 Mbps and scale up to 1,000 Mbps with just a phone call or click of a mouse online. There is no need to change out equipment. Only the speed of the line and your monthly billing will change.

The other big advantage of Carrier Ethernet, and some say the most important one, is the cost reduction compared to traditional telco services. You can get EoF service at DS3 bandwidth speeds of 50 Mbps for a fraction of what you would pay for actual DS3 over SONET. 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10,000 Mbps are suddenly affordable when you upgrade to Ethernet over Fiber.

Wireless is Fiber Without the Fiber
There are situations where fiber just doesn’t work despite all its advantages. One is is rural or remote areas that haven’t been wired, perhaps not even for telephone. The other is in dense urban areas where fiber has yet to be installed. The cost of construction is astronomical in both situations but that doesn’t mean you are out of luck. Just skip the fiber or wires completely.

Point to point microwave was a staple of telephone long haul. Microwave relay towers would retransmit the phone calls every 30 miles or so. Microwave is still applicable on a smaller scale over reasonable distances. In downtown business districts a dish on the roof pointed at the provider's antenna a few blocks away can give you Gigabit level bandwidth with very little construction cost. it’s also fast to install compared with pulling cables under the street.

In more rural areas, a WISP or Wireless internet Service Provider gives similar service usually at somewhat lower bandwidth levels, but similar to DS3 or better. Customers point their antennas at the service tower which can be miles away, but in a direct line of sight.

Another popular arrangement is to take advantage of the fact that every cell tower is also transmitting Internet traffic for smartphones. 4G LTE is commonly available and can give you the performance of fractional DS3 at least on download. Many smaller businesses can get all the performance they need from 4G without any of the wiring headaches. This is especially valuable for mobile or pop-up stores and individual entrepreneurs. Now that 5G is well into deployment, cellular can easily replace DS3 and higher speeds.

One thing to be aware of with wireless services, especially cellular, is that there are usage limits to most plans. That’s because the system can handle less traffic than fiber and the bandwidth must be shared fairly among users. Even so, if you can get 300 GB per month plans and pay much less than DS3 or even a T1 line, wireless can make a lot of sense.

Cable Broadband Can Mimic Fiber
The old Cable TV networks have been vastly upgraded and are now mostly run on fiber. It’s just that last link into your building that is run with coaxial cable. The protocols have also been upgraded along with the switch from analog to digital television. DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 offer high speed performance at bargain prices. You might be surprised to know that DOCSIS 3.0 can support bandwidth up to 1 Gbps download and 200 Mbps upload. The newer DOCSIS 3.1 standard is good to 10 Gbps download and 1 to 2 Gbps upload. When DOCSIS 4.0 is deployed, that upstream capacity will increase to 6 Gbps.

Cable broadband is extremely popular with residential users and many businesses. You just can’t beat the pricing. The only limitations are that cable isn’t available in many rural areas and the bandwidth is multiplexed or shared among many users. Thus speeds can vary. Like wireless, there is a large difference between download speeds and upload speeds. Uploading is typically a tenth or less the speed of downloads. That reflects the way Internet traffic usually flows. In many cases, this may make no difference to your operation, but it you need very high upload and download speeds and dedicated bandwidth, especially for cloud services, you may need fiber optic service through cable companies or other competitive fiber network providers.

Do you still have an old DS3 or T3 contract or simply need high performance, low cost bandwidth in the 50 Mbps or above range? If so, discover what Gigabit Ethernet services are available for your business.

Dedicated Leased Lines for Business

By: John Shepler

Leased lines have been around since the telegraph was invented. Today, they’re a bit faster. Typical leased lines for business range from 1.5 Mbps on the low end to 10 Gbps and even 100 Gbps on the high end. Let’s look at what leased lines are and how they differ from your typical broadband connection.

Leased From Whom?
You know how it works when you lease a property. You sign a lease document and typically pay monthly for the duration of the lease. For that, you have exclusive use of the office or other building space. It’s similar with leased lines.

The simplest leased line is a pair of twisted copper wires that connect to a demarcation point in your facility to your service provider or through the local incumbent telephone company. For historical reasons, the ILECs, as they are called, own all the copper telco lines. After industry deregulation, other competitive service providers were able to lease these line and then sublease them to you.

The telco may provide the entire line service or just the “last mile” connection to your place. In any case, that’s invisible to you. You’ll get one bill from your service provider that covers the entire line service regardless of how far it stretches.


Dedicated Leased Lines
Leased lines can provide telephone services, Internet access or Wide Area Network (WAN) connections. A single copper pair gives you landline phone service. A multi-pair bundle gives you multiple phone lines. Once you order more than a few lines, it is more cost effective to install a single digital line that supports up to 23 simultaneous calls. That service is called ISDN PRI.

Regardless of the number of lines you need, they are all what is called dedicated lines. That means they are for your use exclusively. Many decades ago, there weren’t enough phone lines to go around and they were shared in an arrangement called a “party line.” The real party often involved snooping on your neighbor’s phone conversations.

Party lines are pretty much relegated to history, although many Internet services have a similar connectivity. You and others in your area share the broadband bandwidth. Typically, you can’t see what your neighbor is doing, but you can feel the effects of the line speeding up and slowing down with the varying traffic. These are shared services versus dedicated.

Dedicated Leased Data Lines
More business activity is now done with computers than telephones. Every business needs some type of digital connection for credit card transactions, Web sites, online order processing, purchasing and inventory, accounting, customer service and so on. You’ll need leased lines for interconnecting your various business locations and for connecting to the Internet

The T1 leased line was popular for decades. It was the first high speed dedicated digital connection available for business and runs at a blazing 1.5 Mbps. That’s pretty slow by today's standards, but it still useful for smaller operations. An advantage of T1 is that it runs on ordinary phone lines and can be installed virtually everywhere.

The next step up traditionally has been to the DS3 or T3 line at 45 Mbps. Above that is SONET fiber optic service at 155 Mbps and above.

These legacy dedicated lines are still in service, but are rapidly being replaced by Carrier Ethernet that better matches the needs of today’s networks. Ethernet over Copper handles the low end from about 1 to 20 Mbps. Ethernet over Fiber is far more capable and is available from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps in most locations and 100 Gbps in some areas.

Dedicated Internet Connections
The Internet itself is a shared resource, which is its great advantage. You can connect with just about everyone, everywhere. It’s your connection to the Internet where you have a choice. You can use a dedicated Internet connection or a shared bandwidth connection.

How to choose? The shared bandwidth connections are what you find in cable broadband, cellular broadband, and satellite broadband services. Consumers and many small businesses opt for this arrangement as it offers the lowest costs.

In addition to sharing the bandwidth on a providers circuit, which causes variations in performance, shared services are also typically asymmetrical. That means the download speed is many times the upload speed. That’s good for watching video streaming or reading web pages, but not so good for sharing or backing up large files, or some business processes in the cloud.

Dedicated lines are usually symmetrical with upload and download speeds identical. They also have rock solid bandwidth that is strictly for your use. If the line is getting congested, then you need to increase your bandwidth because it's all your traffic. A further advantage of many dedicated lines is that they come with a Service Level Agreement that guarantees a level of availability and time to repair, should anything go wrong.

Do you need new WAN bandwidth services or help deciding the best options for your business? Check out the myriad of dedicated and shared bandwidth services available for your particular location.

Yes, You ARE Overpaying For Your Phone and Data Lines

By: John Shepler

With the economic future highly in question, every business needs to take a long, hard look at what it takes to survive. With future income uncertain and likely reduced, a good place to focus is on reducing expenses. Telecom lines, including data, telephone and Internet, can be a major monthly bill. It’s highly likely that right now you are paying more, perhaps much more, than you could be for the same quality of service.

Who’s Gouging Me?
Probably no one is cheating you or even taking advantage of your business. If you like, blame it on the gremlins. You know, those sneaky little critters that make everything break at the worst possible time. They also know how to bleed your budget without you ever knowing.

First, Get Rid of the Waste
You are paying for stuff you don’t need. I suspect you are paying for stuff that you don’t even use. How can that be? Anyone who has ever cleaned house has discovered all sorts of unopened christmas presents, products still in their original packaging, and food way past its safe date. The same is true in business. Things get bought. Some never get used. Others are used awhile, then the situation changes and they are set aside… just in case. Just in case never comes back again.

The worst offenders are subscriptions and contracts you pay for monthly but don’t get any value from. Right now, pull the bills for the last few months related to computing and telecom services. Services are especially sneaky at bleeding your budget because they are often out of sight and out of mind. You don’t trip over them like you do a big piece of equipment.

Now, grab a cup of coffee and go to a quiet space with your bills and some highlighters. You have to walk through these from top to bottom and question everything. Are there lines installed that aren’t being used anymore? Are there cell phone numbers that stopped being used when people left long ago? What about special fax machine lines, alarm connections, direct lines to buildings you got rid of? More DID numbers than you can possible use today? Toll Free numbers you don’t even advertise? Highlight them all. They’ve got to go.

Save a Bundle on What You DO Need
Now that you’ve made arrangements to delete all that extra costly clutter that adds no value, you’re left with the essentials. Of course you need phone lines and broadband service. You may need a direct connection to a cloud service provider or another office. You may well want managed security instead of having to keep someone on staff to fend off cybercriminals. Don’t cut so far to the bone that you hurt your ability to do business. Just get a better deal.

There’s a little secret about telecom services that escapes notice most of the time. Business lines, especially the dedicated ones like T1, DS3, SONET and Carrier Ethernet, are sold on contract. Usually you commit for at least a year, but probably take a 3 year contract for better pricing. Nothing wrong with that. It’s what happens at contract expiration that matters.

You might be tempted to simply renew the same contract at the same price, figuring you are lucky to avoid price inflation. Wrong. This industry is highly competitive and technology is advancing constantly. That translates into lower prices, not higher. For the same money you should get more bandwidth. Otherwise you should get a lower price for the next 3 years at the same bandwidth.

When New is Cheaper
Upgrading your technology could actually save rather than cost. Still nursing an old PBX system that needs maintenance and has pricy replacement parts? Have a look at
VoIP cloud service providers and let them manage the switching gear. All you need is phones and a SIP trunk to the cloud. You also gain new features that old analog desk phones can’t support.

Fiber optic bandwidth connections used to cost an arm and couple of legs. Not anymore. If you are in a built-up, not rural, area there is probably lots of fiber in the ground and overhead. Even the cable companies are leasing out extra fiber capacity. You might find that an upgrade in bandwidth could cost less than you pay for copper service now.

Running your own servers used to be the only way to go. Not anymore. In fact, it’s hard not to save money by pulling the plug and getting your infrastructure in the cloud. This is especially true if you need special high capacity lines to handle customer traffic. That bandwidth is likely cheaper at the remote data center and you’ll only need a lower bandwidth connection to manage the cloud services from your location.

Well, what do you think? Is there opportunity for cost saving in your business? Give these ideas at least a good look before you decide you are doing as well as you can. That includes getting a new current set of competitive quotes on all your line services, telephone, wireless and cloud services to see what might be available that you don’t know about.

T1, T3 and Ethernet Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Are you considering new or additional bandwidth for your business office, retail store, or other commercial location? Professional grade options include high performance T1 lines, T3 (DS3) lines, and Ethernet options over copper and fiber optic cables.

T1 Lines
T1 Lines have been the mainstay of many, many businesses for decades. They still are, although for more special situations. The big advantage of T1 lines is that they are provisioned over standard twisted pair copper telephone wiring. If you can get landline phone service installed, it’s likely you can also get T1 service. That includes rural areas where there isn’t much else to pick from.

T1 lines are highly reliable, get fast service if something goes wrong, and are dedicated to your use only. The bandwidth is symmetrical. That is, the upload and download speeds are identical. That’s important if you exchange large data files or back them up to the cloud.

T1 lines can be configured for dedicated Internet access or point to point connections. They support ISDN PRI telephone trunks for multi-line phone and PBX systems. Their one limitation is the bandwidth, which is fixed at 1.5 Mbps. That’s rather slow in broadband terms, but perfectly useful for small business point of sale terminals, email and casual web browsing. Additional T1 lines can be bonded to increase the bandwidth to 3, 4.5, 6 or even 10 Mbps.

Ethernet over Copper Lines
Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is a modern technical upgrade to legacy T1. It uses the same copper telephone lines, but can support higher speeds. Bandwidths of 10 or 20 Mbps are common within metro areas. Some support is also available for rural businesses, but not as ubiquitous as T1 service. Additionally, EoC is generally less expensive per Mbps than traditional T1 lines. You can often get twice or more bandwidth for the same monthly lease cost.

T3 Lines
T3 lines are in the same technology family as T1 lines. The bandwidth is much higher, 45 Mbps vs 1.5 Mbps. T3 refers to the actual lines, which are coaxial, waveguide or microwave relay. These days T3 is delivered as a service on SONET fiber optic lines and referred to as DS3. Like T1, T3 or DS3 service is highly reliable, dedicated and symmetrical.

Ethernet over Fiber Lines
Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) is the modern technical upgrade to SONET fiber optic service. As such, EoF replaces T3 and DS3 with the same bandwidth at a better price. Unlike T3 and DS3, Ethernet over Fiber offers a wide range of bandwidth choices instead of the fixed 45 Mbps service. You can typically get EoF service from 10 Mbps on the low end up to 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps. You also have the option of changing your mind at any time to upgrade or downgrade your service. Usually, no hardware changes are required. You are billed for the bandwidth level you order rather than a fixed 45 Mbps.

Until recently, fiber optic service was limited to major metropolitan areas and rather expensive. The entrance of competitive service providers and the high demand to supply cell towers to support 4G and 5G broadband has vastly increased the amount of fiber optic services available. Most offices, business parks and retail locations now have the option for competitive fiber bandwidth pricing. Some lines are even available to rural locations.

You have a wide range of possibilities for your business bandwidth that include T1, T3 (DS3) and Ethernet over Copper and Fiber. Check pricing and availability now.

Modernize Your T3 & DS3 Bandwidth Connections

By: John Shepler

Companies that grew up with T1 lines naturally graduated to T3 lines or DS3 connections as their bandwidth needs increased. These technologies are firmly established to deliver secure reliable bandwidth with low latency, packet loss and jitter. While you may be perfectly happy with the line service you have now, you might also be missing out on some advantages of new technology approaches.


T-Carrier Legacy
The story begins with the development of T1 lines starting after WWII. The impetus to create a new telephone trunking system was driven by the high cost and noisy performance of analog carrier telephony for long distance lines. T1 was the first digital replacement. It offered 24 digitized telephone lines on two pair of ordinary twisted pair telco cable. Each independent channel was time division multiplexed into a data stream running at 1.5 Mbps.

That’s still the spec for T1 lines. You can find the same channelized lines in use today for ISDN PRI telephone trunks to PBX phone systems. It’s organized as 23 phone lines and 1 control channel. Most T1 lines, though, have the channels combined to transport a 1.5 Mbps bit stream for data transmission. T1 lines can be combined or bonded to create larger “pipes”, up to about 10 or 12 Mbps.

T3 & DS3 Upgrade
T3 and DS3 use multiplexing compatible with T1 lines to create 28x the bandwidth or about 45 Mbps. T3 lines require frequencies too high to travel very far on twisted pair copper. T3 was originally provisioned on coaxial cable or via microwave towers. Later, fiber optic lines were implemented for long haul, with small diameter coax to the customer handoff in the building.

You might be wondering what the difference is between T3 and DS3. T3 is the physical circuit, coaxial cable or microwave link. DS3 is the signal that rides on the T3 line. The situation is similar for T1 lines. In that case, the signal is called DS1.

SONET Fiber Optic
Even the 45 Mbps bandwidth of a T3 line soon became a limiting factor for long distance telephony and the rise of digital computing. The next telco standard was a fiber optic definition called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. SONET was designed to be compatible with DS1 and DS3 so that it was easy to multiplex or combine multiple DS3s onto, say, an OC3 at 156 Mbps. OC12 offers even higher bandwidth and OC48 was the prevailing network core bandwidth until recently.

Carrier Ethernet is a Game Changer
T-Carrier (T1 and T3) and SONET were products of the telephone companies and more suited to channelized telephony than computer data. Through a protocol conversion process they can be made to carry the standard Ethernet signals that run on LAN networks, but why not just keep everything in the Ethernet format end to end?

Why not, indeed! This is what Carrier Ethernet does. It replaces the earlier telco standards with long distance Ethernet directly compatible with in-house network connections. Instead of T1, T3, OC3, OC12 and OC48, you have Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE and so on. A major difference is that Ethernet is easily scalable, while T-Carrier and SONET require equipment changes whenever you move to a higher standard.

Modernizing to Ethernet Connections
Carrier Ethernet networks, sometimes called IP networks because the protocol is the same as what is used on the Internet, are expanding rapidly to replace older Metro and Wide Area Networks. They offer the same dedicated, symmetrical bandwidth low in latency, packet loss and jitter. You can order point to point connections or dedicated connections to the Internet.

Ethernet comes in both copper and fiber options. Ethernet over Copper is a good upgrade for T1 from 3 Mbps up to 15Mbps, 20 Mbps or even more. Entry level Ethernet over Fiber is around 10 Mbps. Fiber is easily scaled to 50 Mbps that can replace T3 or DS3. It can also ramp up to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10,000 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Even 100 Gbps Ethernet is available in some areas.

An Even Lower Cost Alternative
Business Cable Broadband is another service that has become extremely popular with small and medium size businesses. DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 modems offer an Ethernet connection to your network with speeds that easily reach 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. An upgrade to 10 Gbps symmetrical bandwidth is being readied.

The attraction of cable is that it is readily available in most cities and often can be installed quickly with little or no construction charges. It is also the least cost per Mbps for the bandwidth you need. It is designed to work best for Internet browsing including video and file downloads. The bandwidth is generally asymmetrical, often as much as 10x as high in the download as upload direction. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated, so you may find the speed varying throughout the day. Even so, many business and well and residential users are sold on cable broadband. For secure point to point connections you can use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) over the Internet.

Are you still on an old T3 or DS3 service contract? You’ll be amazed how much bandwidth you can get today for the same cost. Find out right now how many bandwidth providers serve your business location and what they offer.

Ethernet Everywhere? We’re Almost There!

By John Shepler

It’s been brewing for a long time, now. The prediction is that all of those networking standards will finally settle on just one. No more T1, DS3, OCx and whatever. It’s all going to be just Ethernet one day. How close are we to that day? Why, we’re almost there!

Network Standards Have Already Embraced Ethernet
Telcos are doing something once thought heresy. They’re abandoning their proprietary standards in favor of Ethernet services.

Why? Because that’s what the market wants. Once upon a time, there were all sorts of Local Area Network standards. Can you remember when Token Ring was the coming thing? How about AppleTalk?

Today, virtually all network equipment has one connector and it is for Ethernet. There are really only two flavors: copper and fiber. Virtually all office equipment is either 10/100 or Gigabit Ethernet over twisted pair copper. Networking equipment may have fiber connections for GigE, 10 GigE or 100 GigE.

This standardization has make connectivity extremely easy. The standardization on switched Ethernet versus the original collision domains makes networking a fairly easy plug-and-play.

The same thing has happened to networking software. The Internet standard, TCP/IP has become the THE standard, further enhancing the ease of setting up and running networks.

Getting LANs to Talk Telco
When you own the network, you get to decide how it works. There’s nobody to tell you otherwise when you come up with a design that’s based on off-the-shelf massed produced switches, routers and cabling. The big problem comes when you try to connect to the outside world.

The Internet may have been based on TCP/IP, but the wide area networks that carried it were not. Telephone company standards evolved from the world of voice only channels for telephone calls. What T1, T3 (DS3) and OCx did was simply bundle the smallest channels, 64 Kbps PCM coded telephone calls.

Digital being digital, the solution was to perform a protocol conversion at each end so that Ethernet LAN would be converted to, say, T1 for transmission over some distance and then back to Ethernet at the other end. That process still works great and many T1 lines remain in use because they are sometimes all that is available in rural areas.

What’s Going Bye-Bye?
The major telecom companies have been quietly converting their networks to Ethernet for years. In many cases, this can be simply running Ethernet over some underlying fiber protocol like SONET. Competitive carriers have built out their facilities using Ethernet in the network core and never going through the TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) evolution.

What’s going on now is that telcos are asking the FCC for permission to sunset some of their older services, especially those that run on copper and don’t have many customers anymore. The standard POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is an endangered species. Fewer and fewer residential users have the traditional “home phone.” They either get their phone service bundled with TV and Internet or simply depend on cellular for voice communications.

Businesses are following suit. Smaller companies may get voice and data bundles from cable companies or incumbent telcos that are acting like cable companies. Larger companies are moving rapidly to enterprise VoIP and Unified Communications. These don’t need traditional telephone wiring inside or outside the facility. Everything runs on the network. Outside connectivity is by SIP trunking, dedicated private line, MPLS networks or Dedicated Internet Access.

Is Copper a Goner?
Copper is still going, but who knows for how long. The telcos want to rid their plants of those thick copper bundles, especially the individual POTS lines.

T1 lines are still popular, but the 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is becoming more and more of a limitation. A newer standard, Ethernet over Copper, is highly competitive and offers an order of magnitude or more higher bandwidth at lower cost per Mbps.

Even so, fiber optic connections are reaching more and more business buildings as well as cellular towers. 4G and 5G wireless needs bandwidth beyond what is practical with twisted pair copper. It’s likely that all twisted pair copper may be abandoned to corrode in the ground or pulled out of conduits and sold for scrap. That’s not today in most areas, but it’s not that far away.

So, Where Can I Get Ethernet?
You can order Ethernet over Copper or Ethernet over Fiber in most populous areas right now. In rural locations, Ethernet over DS1 uses a T1 line to deliver Ethernet.

Don’t forget that Cable broadband is delivered to you as an Ethernet connection and FTTP (Fiber to the Premises) is also Ethernet at typically 1 Gbps.

Satellite and wireless Internet services are also delivered as Ethernet. That includes 3G and 4G cellular services designed for business use.

If you’ve been living with a legacy Internet or telecom connection and wondering if there is something better to choose from, there probably is now. Find out with a quick check of Ethernet services in your area and complementary consultation to help you choose the best solution for your business.

Private Point to Point Connections

By: John Shepler

Sometimes you need to get your traffic from Point A to Point B with as much security and transparency as possible. Let’s look at popular options to do just that.

What Are Dedicated Private Lines?
You can think of a dedicated private line as a connection between two locations that goes through a carrier. This is what you need if you can't just string the wires between buildings on your own campus. The private line acts like your own wiring, except that it is provided by another company. Private lines can go across town, between cities, or even around the world.

T1 Dedicated Lines
T1 lines are the digital equivalent of the old “dry loops” or “equalized loops” that phone companies leased to radio stations and burglar alarm companies. A dedicated T1 point to point line goes between two locations using telco twisted pair wiring. You need routers or other equipment with the T1 interface at each end.

T1 dedicated lines offer 1.5 Mbps in both directions with no usage limits. A popular application is audio transport such as studio to transmitter links (STL) for radio stations.

T1 dedicated lines are still used for cellular traffic backhaul. They were extremely popular prior to 4G LTE, which really needs more bandwidth than you get with T1. In some cases, multiple T1 lines can be bonded together to create a larger bandwidth solution. Where fiber is unavailable, it is possible to get 10 or 12 Mbps from bonded T1 lines.

DS3 Dedicated
The next step up in traditional TDM telecom circuits is the T3 or DS3 dedicated line. These offer 45 Mbps upload / download private links. DS3/T3 is considered a copper-based service. In actuality, most of the transmission distance is handled over OC3 or other SONET fiber optic circuits, with only the curb connection carried by dual coaxial copper cables.

Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is a technical improvement on T1, while using the same twisted pair infrastructure. EoC easily offers bandwidths in the 1 to 10 Mbps range, with some systems delivering up to 50 or even 100 Mbps over relatively short distances. If available, you may find that you can replace a bonded T1 solution or DS3 circuit with EoC for a considerable cost savings.

Fiber Optic Dedicated Lines
Higher bandwidths are more and more in demand. Fortunately, fiber optic private lines are more affordable than in years past. There are two technologies of interest, although it may not make much difference in performance which you choose. SONET is the legacy telco standard, with services such as OC3, OC12 and OC48 providing different bandwidth options. Ethernet over Fiber is the technical upgrade to SONET. It offers advantages of being easily scalable from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps or higher, and is usually the lower cost solution.

Virtual Private Lines
The Internet offers lower cost solutions to interconnect multiple locations, but it is far from dedicated or private. The attractive pricing comes from being a shared resource with universal connectivity available nearly everywhere in the world. You can’t do much about the fact that the bandwidth is shared and not dedicated to your own use, which might affect the performance of your applications. The lack of privacy can be addressed by encrypting your traffic which effectively creates a private “tunnel” or VPN through the Internet.

A more robust solution is provided by MPLS networks. These can be thought of as privately run versions of the Internet that connect only businesses and not the general public. Proprietary protocols are used for routing traffic on the network, which adds security to the transmissions. MPLS networks are often described as MPLS VPN. Network capacity and performance are actively managed by the network operator so that a shared core network can perform like a private line, Over long distances, MPLS offers considerable cost savings over a dedicated copper or fiber connection.

Do you need a high performance dedicated private line connection to support your critical application? If so, get pricing and tradeoffs available for a variety of private line solutions available to your business locations.

High Speed Business Internet

By: John Shepler

Broadband for business has many more options available than residential broadband. Conventional wisdom is that businesses pay dearly for their high speed Internet. It’s true that some telecom options are more costly, even much more costly than consumer services… for good reasons. But other options are priced in the same ballpark as residential broadband and perfect for certain applications. Let’s take a look at the range of high speed business Internet services available for your location and how to choose.

Business Cable Broadband
At the low end of the price spectrum is cable based broadband Internet. Technically, this is known as DOCSIS 3.0 or D3. Yes, it is delivered on the same coaxial cable that brings in Cable TV. That’s an advantage for certain businesses, like bars and doctor’s waiting rooms. You can get a bundle of broadband and TV, or a “triple play” of broadband, TV and telephone on one line.

Pricing is very attractive because of the huge number of subscribers on the cable. That is also a limitation. You and dozens or hundreds of other users are sharing a pool of bandwidth. When the provider says you get “up to” a certain bandwidth, that is the maximum you’ll see. When lots of other subscribers are online and downloading video or other large files, the line speed for everyone slows down accordingly.

Another reason prices are so low is that cable broadband is not regulated the same way as legacy telecom services. It is considered an “information service” with delivery on a “best effort” basis. Telecom services have SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that spell out performance characteristics and time to response and repair outages.

How do you know if business cable broadband is right for you? For small businesses, especially those who can take advantage of the bundled options, cable is budget friendly. If you have experience with cable broadband at home and are satisfied with the performance and reliability, you’ll likely be happy with the business version as well.

Wireless Broadband
Sometimes you don’t want or need wires at all. 3G and even 4G cellular broadband is available for most business locations. Without the wires, you can be mobile with your smartphone, tablet or laptop computer. A high performance fixed transceiver works great for “pop up” stores or construction sites that only need temporary service.

The limitations of wireless broadband tends to be the limited bandwidth available. Even if you have all the speed you need for your applications, you have a monthly download quota of 5 GB, 10 GB or some number. For things like credit card verification, email and occasional Web access, this may not be a problem. It isn’t a good match for many employees, considerable video downloads or software updates.

Satellite is a fixed wireless service separate from cell towers. It works anywhere you can mount a small dish and have a clear view of the southern sky. Like cellular broadband, satellite is bandwidth limited and not suitable for heavy use. It also suffers from high latency, or time delay, that make it difficult to use for real time applications like VoIP and video conferencing.

T1 lines
T1 is the classic broadband line for businesses. It offers rock solid bandwidth that is equal in both the upload and download directions. Shared bandwidth services, like cable and wireless, offer much higher download that upload speeds. T1 is dedicated to your use and not shared with other companies. It offers low latency and high reliability.

The main limitation of T1 is the bandwidth. It’s 1.5 Mbps. That used to be plenty and still is for smaller applications. You can increase this from 3 to 12 Mbps by adding more T1 lines. This is called “bonded T1.” Each line has a certain cost, so it can get pricey fast.

T1 and bonded T1 offer the professional grade performance you need for nearly everything you want to do, including cloud services and secure point to point connections. It’s also available just about anywhere you can get a conventional telephone line.

DS3 or T3
The legacy upgrade path from T1 is called T3, also known as DS3 (not to be confused with cable D3). Bandwidth increases from 1.5 Mbps to 45 Mbps. That is generally enough for most small to medium size businesses. Like T1, DS3 is highly reliable with low latency, jitter and packet loss. It can be set up as a direct point to point line service as well as Internet access.

The two limitations of DS3 are the relatively high cost compared with other options and availability. The DS3 connection is a pair of coaxial copper cables, but fiber optic lines carry the signal most of the way. That means that fiber needs to be nearby for DS3 to be an option.

Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper or EoC is a direct competitor to T1. EoC uses the same twisted pair copper wires employed by T1. Multiple pairs are bonded to increase bandwidth. What EoC offers is a direct Ethernet connection to your network plus bandwidth options from 3 to 20 Mbps, even up to 50 or 100 Mbps in some locations.

Ethernet over Copper is widely available and the cost per Mbps tends to be much lower than T1 or DS3. The limitation is that you need to be located near the telco office to get the higher bandwidths. Unlike T1, EoC bandwidth rapidly decreases with distance. However, when available, Ethernet over Copper is an excellent choice for business broadband.

Ethernet over Fiber
Like EoC, EoF or Ethernet over Fiber gives you a high performance broadband service at an excellent price. As you might guess, moving from copper to fiber makes higher bandwidths available. Ethernet over Fiber bandwidth options start at 10 Mbps and go up to 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10 Gbps. In some locations you can now get 100 Gbps bandwidth if you need this service level.

Fiber has the advantage of being “future proof.” Once installed, chances are that you’ll never need further line construction. Ethernet (as opposed to legacy SONET fiber) is highly scalable. That means you can start off paying for the bandwidth you need today and then upgrade to higher levels with a simple phone call to your provider. Usually no equipment changes will be needed and you can get the increase immediately or within a short time frame compared to upgrading other services.

What broadband option is best for your business? It comes down to cost vs performance along with availability. Get the complete picture on the options for your location with competitive quotes for high speed business Internet services.

Benefits of Migrating From T1 to Fiber

By: John Shepler

If you’ve been using T1 lines for years, maybe decades, you know how solid and reliable they are. Your natural inclination is to stick with what’s working. After all, why mess with success? You should know that there are really good reasons to do just that.

What’s So Great About T1 Lines?
The appeal of T1 lies in its design and technical maturity. T-Carrier technology, which includes T1, E1 and T3 (DS3) line services, was developed in the mid-twentieth century for long distance telephone trunking to replace noisy analog carriers. Being digital, it was easy to expand the role of T1 lines to carrying packets as well as PCM audio telephone calls.

T1 Service Characteristics
T1 lines come into your building on one or two twisted copper pair using the same wires that carry multi-line telephone. This means that you can get T1 just about anywhere you can get regular POTS phone service. The service is symmetrical, meaning that upload and download speed are the same. There are no usage limits. Whatever you can load on the line during the month, you can transport. This is a dedicated private line, meaning you are the only user and security is high. So, with all that going for T1, why would you want to make a change?

Time Marches On
The 1.5 Mbps bandwidth of T1 was more than enough for business users… once upon a time. Today, 1.5 Mbps is still enough for credit card verification, email, casual Web browsing, and backup for small computer systems. It’s not a bad choice for small retail operations and offices, especially in rural ares where other bandwidth services are hard to come by.

Most users are used to higher bandwidths now, even on their smartphones. They expect faster response and really need it to efficiently do their jobs. That’s OK. You can get higher bandwidth from T1 lines. It’s done by bonding two or more together to make one large pipe. The size of that bandwidth pipe ranges from 3 Mbps on up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. If you need more than that, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

How About T3/DS3?
A faster version of T1 is T3, also known as DS3. The terms T3 and DS3 generally mean the same thing, although, strictly speaking, T3 refers to the physical line and DS3 is the organization of the data.

T3/DS3 isn’t just a little faster than T1, it’s a lot faster at 45 Mbps. This is more than enough for most small operations and many medium size companies. That makes T3/DS3 the logical upgrade from T1, right?

Yes and no. T3/DS3 is, indeed, a popular line service. It’s available in many business locations, but not nearly as many as T1. That’s because T3 doesn’t use twisted copper pair wiring. It’s provisioned on a pair of coaxial cables. That’s only for the last few hundred feet at most. T3/DS3 is transported primarily by fiber optics. If the fiber passes near your location, you may be able to get T3/DS3. If not, you’ll need to stick with copper.

The Ethernet over Copper Option
A newer technology than T1 is called EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This never was a a telephone company product. It’s an extension of the LAN Ethernet protocol for metro connections. Whatever goes on your LAN can be carried by EoC.

The big advantage of Ethernet over Copper is that it uses the same twisted copper pair as T1 lines. A more advanced modulation scheme allows EoC to offer speeds ranging from 3 Mbps on up to 50 Mbps, sometimes higher. The tradeoff is that the farther you are from the provider office, the less bandwidth is available. EoC is quite popular in the 10 and 20 Mbps bandwidths.

Moving Up to Fiber
Carrier Ethernet is available over fiber as well as copper. This is called EoF or Ethernet over Fiber. Once you move up to fiber, the bandwidth limitations disappear. Fiber optic service typically starts at 10 Mbps, with 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps as popular service levels. Some companies and now requiring 10 Gbps EoC, which is more and more available.

You may already know that fiber optic service comes in two protocols: SONET and Ethernet over Fiber. SONET is an older service that is the fiber optic extension of T-Carrier. DS/T3 is generally transported to the curb over a SONET service.

Choosing Ethernet vs SONET
SONET fiber services typically range from OC3 at 155 Mbps on up to OC-192 at 10 Gbps, although higher bandwidths are available. The increments are 155 Mbps, 622 Mbps, 1.2 Gbps, 2.4 Gbps and 10 Gbps.

Carrier Ethernet works differently. There aren’t large increments in bandwidth. You can pretty much specify the bandwidth you want in the 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps range. Popular service levels are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. You’ll recognize these as standard Ethernet LAN speeds.

Ethernet over Fiber is not only much more scalable than SONET, it is generally less expensive. The cost difference can be dramatic in some locations. You may pay half or less for EoF as you would for SONET. You’ll still get highly reliable professional grade service with low latency, jitter and packet loss.

Are you feeling stymied by the limitations of your old T1 lines? Now may be the perfect time to migrate your connectivity to Ethernet over Fiber at a lower cost than you might expect. You’ll also be laying the groundwork for future expansion, with higher bandwidth levels quickly available as you need them.

Why Your Telecom Lines Should Be Switched Ethernet

By: John Shepler

A major trend in telecom services is the massive migration from traditional circuit switched to packet switched networks. Right along with this has come the availability of Ethernet connections door to door and to the Internet. Even so, many organizations still embrace traditional technology and are loath to give up their trusty T1 lines and SONET fiber optic services. Why should they consider making change…. and to what?

Aren’t All Networks Ethernet?
Pretty much all Local Area Networks (LANs), including wireless networks, are based on the Ethernet protocol. There are exceptions, such as Fibre Channel that connects computers to Storage Area Networks (SANs), but the vast majority of networking equipment and software is based on supporting Ethernet.

So, What are T1, DS3 and SONET?
Traditional telecom standards were developed long before anyone thought of using packet technology to communicate. Their intended application was for bundling or trunking telephone lines between phone company offices. Their architecture is based on circuit switching instead of packet switching plus segmenting the line into many individual channels. Each channel carries a single phone conversation. The process for doing this is called TDM or Time Division Multiplexing.

Connecting TDM to Ethernet Networks
You can see there is a technology gap between TDM and Ethernet or IP networks. Fortunately, technology comes to the rescue to make this largely invisible to you, the user. All those little (64 Kbps) telephone channels can be combined on a given line to create one large bandwidth pipe. Plug in modules allow routers to connect to TDM lines going outside and LANs within the company. While this approach has allowed modern computer to computer communications to flourish, there are some good reasons to move on from this protocol conversion approach.

Ethernet vs Ethernet
The Ethernet protocol envisioned by Bob Metcalfe in the 70’s is a different animal than what we use today. The original Ethernet was based on a single wire channel with all packets from all systems vying for access in a giant “collision domain.” This technology is described by the mouthful, “Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection” or CSMA/CD for short. It’s a self-policing system where each connection to the network is responsible for making sure that the line is clear before launching a packet and recovering if the packet gets in a collision with another.

This system works, but network gets crowded fast as devices are added and lines interconnected with simple hubs. Communication is limited to half-duplex because only one connection can talk at a time. The big improvement to the technology, and one we still use today, is called switched Ethernet.

The Switched Advantage
The Ethernet switch directs traffic from source to destination rather than having a single party line for everybody. Transmission and reception paths are physically separate on different wire pairs. This alone doubles the network rate from half-duplex to full duplex because devices and talk and listen at the same time. There is no collision domain anymore. Each device has its own network port and the switch takes care of getting the packets to the right place.

Beyond the LAN
It seems logical that the way to connect networks across town should be the same as connecting multiple small networks into one LAN in-house. It hasn’t been because you lose control of the net when you leave your property. Two business locations across town have to be connected through a no-man’s land in-between by a common carrier. This was originally the role of the local phone company but competition has opened the carrier business to many other players.

Scaling Up Ethernet
For decades, the transportation of voice, data and video between locations has been done using legacy switched circuit telecom technologies. Ethernet, by design, was limited to the LAN because of fairly short distance limitations for each network line. To get around this, Carrier Ethernet was developed. It’s pretty much the same switched Ethernet, but with additional provisions for long distance transmission and the operation and maintenance features needed by the carriers to maintain the lines. Carrier Ethernet scales up switched Ethernet so that packets can be carried across town or even around the world.

Ethernet All the Way
Now it is possible to plug your edge router into a familiar Ethernet connection (copper or fiber) at each of your business locations. In-between, the common carrier reliably transports your packets from location to location. It’s Ethernet all the way with no protocol conversions required.

Switched Ethernet Service Advantages
Think of the world as your network. Well, at least your parts of the world. With switched Ethernet, you can bridge two or more locations to put their LANs on one larger network… just like you would in-house. Ethernet Line Service (E-Line) replaces T1, DS3, and SONET OCx lines one a one to one basis. Carrier Ethernet also adds a couple of new options. Ethernet LAN Service (E-LAN) creates a fully meshed network for you. All you need is an Ethernet line connection at each location. Ethernet Tree Service (E-Tree) is a one to many connection that is popular with content providers. One location generates the traffic to be used by many, many other locations.

The Ethernet Cost Advantage
Carrier Ethernet networks are designed to be both easily scalable and lower in cost than what you are used to with traditional telecom services. It is not uncommon to get Ethernet over Copper connections at 3 Mbps for the same price or less than T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps. At higher speeds, the difference in cost is even more dramatic. The scalability technology lets you upgrade the speed of your service quickly and easily, often without needing new equipment installed.

Switched Ethernet For You
Are you thinking that you may be missing out on service improvements and more bandwidth for your money that can be offered by switched Ethernet service? No need to wait. Copper and fiber optic Carrier Ethernet services are available coast to coast and worldwide right now. Discover your options now.

DS3 Bandwidth Alternatives

DS3 WAN connections are popular with companies needing more bandwidth than they can get from T1 lines but less than moving up to a full OC-3 fiber optic SONET service. So, why would you bee looking for other options? It generally comes down to either cost or performance. Most often, cost.

Yes, there are other bandwidth options available that can do the job that your current DS3 is doing. Let’s take a look at options available today that maybe didn’t exist when you signed your DS3 lease.

DS3 straddles the telecom border between copper wireline and fiber optic bandwidth services. It was originally part of the T-Carrier specifications developed by the Bell System for telephone trunking between switching centers. T-Carrier options include T1 and T3. DS3 is the service that rides on the T3 physical circuit.

Today the terms DS3 and T3 are used interchangeably. In practice, you’ll be hard pressed to find a T3 physical circuit. At one time they were available over microwave relay or waveguide pipes. The actual interface to your router is two coaxial cables with BNC connectors that plug into a DS3 interface module. Those cables have a distance limitation of 450 feet. So, how does DS3 service get from the Central Office (CO) to your location?

Most of the distance is covered by fiber optic cabling that doesn’t have this distance restriction. The DS3 signal is often multiplexed onto a higher bandwidth OC-3 SONET circuit. There may be other DS3 services sharing the same OC-3. Yours is dropped off at your building where it is converted to the industry standard coaxial connections.

This suggests a couple of alternatives to DS3. Before you jump into anything new, though, consider that you may not be getting the best price on your current DS3 service. Prices on telecom services in general have plunged in recent years owing to deregulation and considerable new competition. Perhaps the local telephone company was your only provider choice when you had the service installed. Now there may be several competing providers that are ready, willing and able to do the same job. Get multiple price quotes, preferable from a major bandwidth broker like Telarus, Inc., before you conclude that you need to dump your DS3 only for cost reasons.

Something else to consider is how much bandwidth you really need. Did you contract for DS3 because your T1 line was out of capacity? There’s a big gap between T1 at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. Do you really need the full 45 Mbps or is that simply all that was available at the time?

If you really need, say, 10 Mbps, you can achieve it by scaling up from T1 or down from DS3. T1 lines are now readily bonded together to increase bandwidth. The practical limit is 10 or 12 Mbps without distance limitations. DS3 service can be rate limited to create what’s known as fractional DS3. In other words, you still have a DS3 interface installed but the actual line speed you pay for is 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 30 Mbps or some other option.

Both these approaches may save you money compared to what you pay now. An even more attractive option is Ethernet. With Ethernet over Copper you can get bandwidths ranging from 3 Mbps on the low end up to 45 Mbps and sometimes higher on the high end. Prices per Mbps are generally lower, sometimes even half the cost, than the older T1 and T3 technologies. The hitch with Ethernet over Copper is that it is distance sensitive. The farther you are from the CO, the lower the line speed you can achieve.

Ethernet over Fiber picks up where Ethernet over Copper leaves off. Fiber optic Ethernet service is often available from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Popular options are 10 Mbps standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. The speed of the port installed at your facility sets the maximum, not minimum, speed you can achieve. Common practice is to install a 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet port.

Fiber connections aren’t available for every building, but carriers have been so competitive in building out their networks that more locations that ever before are “lit” for fiber and others can be easily connected. Ethernet over FIber is easily scaled so that you can increase your bandwidth quickly by making a simple call to your provider. This means that you only need to order the bandwidth you need today along with a port speed capable of handling whatever speed you expect to need in the foreseeable future.

Ethernet over Fiber is a bargain compared to other telecom arrangements, if you can get it. If not, you might be able to get SONET fiber optic service to your premises. The lowest speed service is OC-3 at 155 Mbps, but in some cases this can be rate limited to provide fractional OC-3 service.

One final option is fixed wireless. This is unlike the lower speed 3G or 4G cellular wireless that is now available to business. Fixed wireless at 50 Mbps or more is a line of sight microwave service only available in major metro areas in the business districts. If your location qualifies, you can get fast and inexpensive installation compared to constructing a new fiber optic run.

So, how do you decide on the optimum solution for your company? Doing the research yourself can be time consuming and you may miss out on some opportunities that aren’t well advertised. Instead, run a quick online business bandwidth availability check for the options you want to consider and compare competitive pricing. You may be surprised by what has become available recently.


Note: Photo of BNC connector courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Point to Point Dedicated T1

A classic telecom service that is still going strong is point to point dedicated T1 service. Let’s have a look at how it works and what you can use it for.

T1 lines were originally developed by the telephone companies for their own use. The idea was to consolidate 24 separate analog phone lines into a single digital trunk. The key features were serial digital transmission over no more than two twisted pair, regeneration to extend transmission distance indefinitely, nailed-up private line connections between two locations, a multiplexing scheme to keep the 24 simultaneous conversations separate and distinct, and a line speed of 1.5 Mbps.

This legacy service is still widely available and is called T1 telephone or T1 CAS for Channel Associated Signaling. It is used to connect business PBX telephone systems to telephone service providers for outside lines. Most businesses can get easily get by with 24 outside lines, so only a single T1 line is needed. There is a newer version of this service called ISDN PRI or T1 PRI for Primary Rate Interface. The underlying T1 line works the same. What’s different is that one channel is reserved for switching, dialing and data such as ANI or Caller ID. That leaves 23 outside telephone lines on one T1 PRI, still right for most small and medium businesses. Larger companies and telephone intensive businesses such as call centers can order multiple T1 PRI lines to gain more outside phone lines.

The designated T1 line speed of 1.5 Mbps, chosen to support existing telephone infrastructure, made it very attractive as a way to connect businesses to the Internet and for connecting company networks across long distances. Companies became more and more computerized with terminals and later PCs on every desktop. Internal networks eventually standardized on Ethernet as a network protocol and speeds increased to 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps. In the early days, even larger companies used dial-up modems for file transfers. Dedicated lines ran at 64 Kbps and 128 Kbps. That was fine when data files were small, few and far between. It wouldn’t work anymore when data moved from paper to disk files.

The trick to using a telephone-inteneded technology as a digital private line is to treat the entire line bandwidth as a single entity and ignore the 8 bit increments that define individual telephone channels. This is a clear channel pipe arrangement. You’ll need a router to connect to your network and a T1 interface card for the router. Plug this into the T1 “smart jack” installed by the service provider at each end of the line and you’ve got a 1.5 Mbps data connection.

A valuable characteristic of point to point T1 data lines is that they are permanently connected or “nailed up.” The actual wires, one or two twisted pair of telco wiring, are assigned to your T1 line and nothing else. No one else can gain access like they might on the Internet. This is what makes the dedicated line both dedicated to your use and private. The line goes from point A to point B and nowhere else.

What if you want to connect to another location? You can either cancel the T1 line you have now and get a new one going to that other location, or add another T1 line so you can connect to both the current and new location. You can add as many T1 lines as you like, but they all only go between two locations. What some companies do is create their own private network by running point to point dedicated T1 lines from each branch office back to headquarters. Then they set up a star network with HQ managing all traffic between the branches and headquarters and from one branch to another.

What if you like the idea of dedicated point to point service but really need more than 1.5 Mbps? That can be achieved by bonding T1 lines to double, triple or gain up to 12 Mbps of line speed. You can also use T3 lines (DS3 bandwidth) instead of T1 for 45 Mbps of bandwidth or SONET fiber optic lines starting at 155 Mbps. An alternative is Carrier Ethernet E-Line which gives you point to point Ethernet connections from 2 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps.

Can your business make good use of point to point dedicated T1 lines or higher bandwidth services? If so, get prices and availability on the line services right for your company.




Note: Picture of twisted pair cable courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

3 Mbps to 6 Mbps Bonded Internet Access

Business Internet access is critical to communicating with customers and perhaps taking and fulfilling orders. You want rock solid stability and decent bandwidth, but at a price that won’t break the bank. Here’s a look at how you can incrementally increase your Internet connection speed to match your business activity.

Not that long ago, you had a couple of choices for dedicated Internet access. You could get a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps or move up to a T3 line (DS3 bandwidth) at 45 Mbps. There really wasn’t anything in-between. Shared bandwidth services offer a larger range of choices, but shared bandwidth means variable performance and assurance of availability. You also have to contend with asymmetrical speed, where download line speed is 10x the upload line speed.

Dedicated Internet access, like T1 and T3, offers symmetrical bandwidth that is the same for both upload and download, a fixed line speed that doesn’t vary, and high availability with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The one issue is cost, especially when you need more than what a T1 line can provide but not the full capacity of a T3 line.

Sometimes you can get what’s called a fractional line service. The service provider installs a full capacity line, but rate limits your bandwidth. The result is referred to a fractional T3 or fractional DS3 service. It saves some money over the full service level but isn’t that great of a deal on a per Mbps cost basis.

A better option today is to order bonded line service to increase your bandwidth. Bonding is an industry standard for connecting multiple lines of the same type to combine their bandwidths. For instance, you can bond two T1 lines together and get 3 Mbps instead of 1.5 Mbps. The view from your router is one larger bandwidth service rather than juggling two separate lines. That bonding process takes place within the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that is installed by the service provider.

Bonding is a great way to increase your bandwidth incrementally, but there are a couple of things to consider. First, you can’t just go out and buy a second T1 line from just anybody. You have to get your bonded lines from the same carrier. Remember that it is the service provider who does the bonding through equipment at both ends of the line.

Also, the cost goes up by the same increment as the bandwidth. In other words, two T1 lines cost twice as much as one T1 line. There is no economy of scale. That’s no big deal if you are happy with doubling your line speed and your cost versus have to pay 10x the price to move up to the next standard line speed increment of T3. However, this technique does get less attractive with the more lines that you bond in.

Yes, you can go beyond double bonded T1. Bond three T1 lines for 4.5 Mbps, four lines for 6 Mbps, 5 lines for 7.5 Mbps, 6 lines for 8 Mbps, 7 lines for 9.5 Mbps or 8 T1 lines to get 11 Mbps. By the time you get 8 T1 lines bonded, the cost may be approaching what you’d pay for 45 Mbps T3 and you’d have a lot higher line speed.

There is an alternate bonded line service that may give you more bandwidth for less money. This is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Like bonded T1, EoC uses multiple wire pairs to transport the signal. Providers will bond 2, 4, 6 or 8 pair to increase the speed of Ethernet over Copper service. Unlike T1, EoC offers a much wider range of available bandwidth options. For the price of a T1 line, you can get 2 or 3 Mbps EoC. Other speed options include 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 and 45 Mbps. Cost per Mbps actually decreases as you order higher bandwidth levels.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper is availability. It is a newer service and not all central offices are equipped to provide this line service. Also, EoC is highly distance sensitive. You need to be close to your CO to get the highest speeds. Otherwise you may top out at 10 or 15 Mbps. That’s still about the best you can do with bonded T1 and for considerably less cost.

Are you looking for a rock solid connection to the Internet to support your business activities. If so, check availability and pricing for bonded T1 and EoC dedicated Internet access options.

What Ethernet over Copper Is All About

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is perhaps the most exciting new business bandwidth service available. Any company currently using T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth or other connection services needs to compare what they have with Ethernet over Copper options. Why? Because the cost and bandwidth benefits are too great to ignore.

Let’s take a look at what’s behind EoC and how it compares with competing telecom services. First, let’s define Ethernet over Copper. You’re certainly familiar with Ethernet, the near universal standard protocol of local area networks. This is also Ethernet, but extended for metropolitan and wide area network transmission.

What’s special about Ethernet as a connection service? Other services, like the venerable T1 line, are products of telephone technology. They use transmission standards and technologies that aren’t directly compatible with computer networks. They can be interfaced, of course, with the appropriate protocol and signal conversions. This is why you can’t just plug a T1 line into any LAN switch or router. You need an interface card to make the two networks, LAN and telecom, compatible.

Ethernet over Copper is already in the right protocol. Your connection to the outside world is a common RJ-45 jack. It’s like extending your network over miles or even hundreds to thousands of miles. In practice, the service provider will often install a managed router as Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) to connect their network to yours. This way, they can monitor the MAN or WAN network automatically to ensure that everything is working the way it should and take corrective action if problems arise.

The term Ethernet over Copper may seem obvious, but there is an important distinction to be made. In this case copper doesn’t refer to Cat 5e or Cat 6 cabling. It is referring to the twisted copper pair telecom cable that connects your facility to the local telco office.

Telephone wire? Yes, indeed. This is one of the secrets to the general availability and low cost of Ethernet over Copper services. Nearly every company has multiple copper pair cabling already installed and hooked-up for telephone service. The pairs that aren’t used for telephone lines are available to supply T1, ISDN PRI or Ethernet over Copper.

For Ethernet over Copper service to be available, the central office that connects at the far end of the telco cable for your building needs to have EoC equipment installed. MegaPath, a major provider of Ethernet over Copper as well as other telecom services, has over 400 central offices (COs) nationwide already set to connect Ethernet over Copper. This includes major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC. This year they are expanding to include Austin, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Newark New Jersey, Portland Oregon, Sacramento and Tamp. Other providers are equally aggressive and deploying EoC technology as fast as they can.

So, what’s all the excitement about Ethernet over Copper? It’s primarily more bandwidth at lower prices for businesses. This is a business service, not targeted for consumers. The primary competition is T1 lines and DS3 bandwidth connections. For instance, MegaPath’s basic 2 x 2 Mbps EoC directly replaces a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. You might think that you’d have to pay more for the extra bandwidth, but actually it’s less. Prices are about the same for T1 lines and 3 x 3 Mbps EoC. That’s twice the bandwidth for the same money.

What’s more, Ethernet technology is more easily scaled than T1. You can bond T1 lines together to get 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9, 10.5 or 12 Mbps. The cost of the service is the cost of one T1 line times the number of lines bonded. Ethernet over Copper also uses multiple copper pair, but the bandwidth goes up much faster than the pricing. MegaPath is offering up to 45 Mbps EoC service in some areas. That’s equivalent to a DS3 connection supplied over fiber optic link at a higher cost.

Do you have proactive monitoring of your current telecom circuit? Are you guaranteed 99.99% reliability backed up by a Service Level Agreement (SLA)? Can you easily scale bandwidth to grow your business quickly? Are you paying more than you would have to by sticking with older technology?

If these questions have you wondering, you should see what you are missing. Why not get an instant online Ethernet over Copper price quote to see what bandwidths are available for your location and what they cost. If you like what you see, rapid ordering and provisioning service is readily available.

DS3 and Fractional DS3 Broadband

In the quest to upgrade bandwidth, companies have generally turned to DS3 bandwidth service. Here is what DS3 is all about and the different technologies used to provide DS3 and similar mid-level bandwidth services.

DS3 stands for Digital Signal 3, a standardized switched circuit TDM telecom service. As a refresher, DS0 is the basic building block at 64 Kbps. That’s one channel of digitized telephone call. DS1 is a bundle of 24 DS0 channels at 1.5 Mbps. You are probably more familiar with its implementation as a line service called T1. DS3 is the next step up at 45 Mbps. It’s a bundle of 672 DS0 channels as a large telephone trunk or 28 T1 lines multiplexed together for transport. When you order a T3 line, you are getting the line service implementation of DS3.

Even though DS1 and DS3 were originally conceived as telephone company technologies, they are more often used to transport data packets today. That includes private point to point lines and dedicated Internet connections. In these applications, the entire payload is used to transport data packets.

A full DS3 circuit will give you 45 Mbps bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. This is the most common service ordered and is readily available nationwide. You’ll need an interface card for your router to connect to a DS3 termination. There are two interconnect cables, one for transmit (upload) and one for receive (download). They are 75 ohm coax, similar to what you’ll find for Cable TV connections, although the specified cable type is Bellcore 734 or 735 for this application. The connectors are type BNC. You’ll find these on the router interface card. There may be more than one pair if the router can handle multiple DS3 connections.

At this point, you might be imagining coaxial cables stretched from your building back to the telephone central office, like the twisted pairs used for T1 and multi-line telephone service. In practice, the coaxial connection is only used for short distances. The DS3 bandwidth itself is most often delivered over a SONET fiber optic cable, where it is demultiplexed and dropped off at your premises.

DS3 bandwidth may be higher than you require. There’s a big gap between T1 line bandwidth at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. Companies often begin scaling up their bandwidth by bonding multiple T1 lines to double or triple the individual line bandwidth. This works up to about 10 or 12 Mbps in most cases. Let’s say you only need 20 or 30 Mbps right now. What do you do?

One option is to order fractional DS3 service. A full DS3 interface is installed, but the line bandwidth is limited to the fractional amount you order. That could be 15, 20 or 30 Mbps. You can possibly save money this way, but not necessarily. The reason is that full DS3 is more of a standard service that is readily available. The fractional services are a special order that may or may not be available in a particular location, depending on the service provider. In the end, it might make the most economic sense to get a full DS3 connection.

There are other technical options in this bandwidth range that compete with fractional and even full DS3. The most popular is Ethernet over Copper. This is a highly scalable service that competes with T1 at the 1.5, 2, and 3 Mbps levels. You can also get 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 50, and sometimes even 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. This lets you match your budget more closely to the bandwidth you require. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is often less expensive than either T1 or DS3 for similar bandwidths, although not as readily available as yet.

Downtown in major business districts you may also find fixed wireless bandwidth services. These often deliver DS3 bandwidths, but perhaps in an Ethernet protocol. Most of the time that’s what you want anyway, since you’ll be connecting to a LAN running Ethernet.

A final option isn’t DS3, but might give you a similar benefit for a lot less money. That’s business class Cable broadband. It is shared, not dedicated, and the bandwidth varies with the amount of user activity. Still, you can get up to 50 or 100 Mbps download with 5 or 10 Mbps upload service for about the price of a T1 line. You’ll need to have the cable passing by your business location for this service to be available. Otherwise the construction costs are prohibitive.

Are you in need of higher bandwidth to support your growing business, additional computerization or a move to cloud services? If so, get pricing and availability for DS3 and fractional DS3 services, plus related bandwidth services that may also meet your needs.

100 Mbps Internet for Business

DS3 Internet bandwidth at 45 Mbps has been the mainstay of many mid-size businesses. It is readily available and a substantial bandwidth increase over T1 or even bonded T1 lines. Now even DS3 bandwidth isn’t enough to keep up with many simultaneous video users or cloud service applications. It’s time to move on up to 100 Mbps Internet access.

The 100 Mbps service level is particularly significant because it precisely matches one of the standard Ethernet LAN speeds called “Fast” Ethernet. Most all NICs (Network Interface Cards) built into nearly everything from PCs to routers, switches and printers support 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. That’s the 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps network speeds. Newer NICs expand that to include Gigabit Ethernet or GigE with 10/100/1000 Mbps ports.

The point is that if your LAN is running at 100 Mbps and you connect to the Internet at some lower speed, you are going to experience a slowdown on anything to or from the Internet. At low network activity levels, you may not notice the difference. It’s when there are lots users doing lots of things simultaneously that the congestion occurs. The big choke point, more often than not, is the WAN or wide area network connection to the Internet.

Fortunately, 100 Mbps Internet service for businesses is more available and less expensive than ever before. Let’s take a look at the different technical approaches and their advantages or disadvantages.

The traditional 100 Mbps telecom service is OC-3, which actually runs at about 155 Mbps. This is a SONET fiber optic service offered by switched circuit telecom companies nationwide. OC-3 is a transport service that can carry anything from thousands of telephone calls to private point to point connections to dedicated Internet access. It’s also often used to deliver lower speed services, such as DS3. You probably don’t think of DS3 as a fiber optic service because your connection is through BNC connectors on small diameter coaxial cables. Still, it’s likely dropped off at your location using an add/drop multiplexer connected to a SONET fiber cable.

OC-3 has the advantage of being a well established and highly popular digital line service. It comes with an SLA or Service Level Agreement, standard in the telecom industry. Your bandwidth is both dedicated and symmetrical. Dedicated means that you don’t share that 155 Mbps with any other company or individual users. Whatever bandwidth you aren’t using at the moment sits there idling so that you always have the full 155 Mbps at your disposal. Symmetrical means that you have 155 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. Sometimes this is expressed as 155 x 155 Mbps Internet access.

Competing directly with OC-3 bandwidth is Carrier Ethernet. Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps is an easy interface to your LAN. All you need to do is plug in a standard RJ-45 patch cable and your router has Internet access. There’s no need for fiber optic cabling and special interface cards like you have with OC-3 or a managed OC-3 router installed by the service provider. Like OC-3, 100 Mbps FAST Ethernet is both symmetrical and dedicated. It also comes with an SLA from the provider.

Fast Ethernet service is available over both fiber optic and twisted pair connections. In fairness, the Ethernet over Copper service at this speed is fairly distance limited so you’ll likely find it only in major metropolitan business districts. Slower speeds, say 10 or 20 Mbps, have a much greater range and are more readily available.

Ethernet over Fiber is similar to OC-3 with two important advantages. First, the cost per Mbps is often lower, even much lower than OC-3 where available. Another advantage is that Carrier Ethernet services are highly scalable. The next increment up from OC-3 is OC-12 at 622 Mbps. With Carrier Ethernet, you could go from 100 Mbps on up to 200, 500 or even 1,000 Mbps without an equipment change. The trick is to have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed initially. Then order the bandwidth you need today with the understanding that you can easily upgrade in the future when you need to.

A final option that is becoming more available is 100 Mbps Cable business broadband. This is a shared asymmetrical bandwidth service sold without service level agreements. It’s very similar to the Cable broadband you get at home, but with extra features such as static IP addresses and special customer support. Your 100 Mbps is in the download direction only. Upload speeds are on the order of 10 Mbps. This bandwidth is shared by many other users, so it varies all over the place even during business hours. Even so, you can’t beat the pricing which is similar to a T1 line. If all you need is casual Internet access for many employees and have a very limited budget, this could be the answer for you.

Are you ready to establish Business Internet service at a new location or upgrade from bonded T1 or DS3 to 100 Mbps or higher Internet access? If so, check 100 Mbps Internet pricing and availability for your business location. Complementary consulting is also available to help you sort through the options.

Broadband Access Wireless Internet Providers

When we think of wireless Internet, the first thing that comes to mind is WiFi hotspots or 3G & 4G cellular broadband. It’s a mobile Internet technology, right? It is, but did you know that there are also wireless Internet services that are appropriate for fixed business locations like offices and retail stores?

One of the lowest cost wireless broadband services uses the same towers and resources that deliver broadband to your cell phone. Only this wireless service offered by Accel Networks is designed for fixed locations. What Accel has done is contract with major wireless carriers to use their bandwidth. By combining the coverage maps of several carriers, Accel can deliver 3G data rates to most locations that need it. You get similar bandwidth to a T1 line for about half the price. Installation is a matter of days, not weeks or months. Service reliability is 99.9% per the service level agreement.

Who is this service right for? It’s perfect for convenience stores, gas stations and other retail locations that need PCI compliant connection to process credit cards. Traditionally, these stores have ordered DSL, Cable broadband or satellite. When you are not on the path for wireline connections this wireless service can give you the bandwidth you need. You can even order it for temporary holiday locations, conventions and conferences, and construction sites.

Cellular broadband isn’t appropriate for applications where you need large amounts of continuous uploading and downloading. But there are fixed wireless services that are designed for just that. These are dedicated connections using directional antennas on special licensed frequencies for this service. The provider installs a small equipment and antenna box on the outside of your building and runs an Ethernet connection inside for your router. Dedicated fixed wireless can give you DS3 levels of bandwidth (45 Mbps) and replace bonded T1 lines and even lower speed fiber optic connections. The one kicker is that you need to be located near the carriers transmitting location, which is almost always downtown in a major metropolitan area.

Satellite is a two-way wireless service that has been popular with businesses that don’t need high bandwidth levels but do need connectivity in locations that have little to no wireline service and perhaps even no cellular service. These satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, just like the ones that deliver satellite TV service. The difference is that they are providing business broadband service. Satellite has the advantage that you can get service just about anywhere in the US where you have clear view of the southern sky and some way to provide electrical power. It doesn’t even have to be from the grid. Solar and batteries will work just fine.

Satellite and 3G cellular services are bandwidth limited and tend to have caps on the amount of data you can upload or download in a given period of time. They tend to have higher latency than wireline services. Geosynchronous satellites, especially, are unsuitable for such applications as VoIP telephony. But many businesses don’t need a broadband telephone service or video conferencing. What they do need is access to the Internet for email, credit card verification, viewing Web sites, using search engines, reporting inventory and ordering supplies, etc. These activities don’t require massive amounts of capacity or very high speeds.

If you have a business application that needs broadband access to the Internet but haven’t been able to find reasonably priced wireline services that meet your need, get prices and availability on broadband access wireless Internet providers that serve your business location.