Ethernet Replacements For SONET

By: John Shepler

High bandwidth fiber optic Wide Area Networks have their basis in a decades old telephone company standard called SONET. Highly reliable, but highly expensive, SONET is giving way to the newer technology of Ethernet WAN. As demand for business bandwidth keeps increasing, so does the attractiveness of Ethernet for long distance connections.

Why SONET Ruled For So Long
SONET or Synchronous Optical Network was born out of a burgeoning demand for higher and higher levels of traffic. In this case, the traffic was long distance telephone calls. In the early days of telephony, this demand was met with dense webs of overhead copper lines.

Multi-channel analog technology made it possible for each copper pair to carry many phone conservations on a carrier-based system, much like many radio stations in a single band.

Digital technology eliminated the noise and crosstalk of carrier telephony by converting the analog conversations to pulse coded digital streams and multiplexing many together on a single pair. The transmission medium was still copper wire.

One thing about phone company standards is that they are all backwards compatible down to a single phone line. After all, that’s the telco business. So, the digital T1 lines were actually carrying 24 separate phone calls. A T3 line was 28 T1 lines or 672 phone calls.

When the fiber optic standard was developed, it picked up where copper left off. The OC3 SONET line is 155 Mbps and is equivalent to three T3 lines. Within all those multiplexed channels is the same 64 Kbps voice channel to support one phone call.

How did we get from really big phone lines to data transmission? Basically, SONET was the only game in town if you needed large amounts of bandwidth. So, all those voice channels in the line were combined to create one large data channel to carry packets of information. That requires protocol conversion circuitry to go from Ethernet network protocol to SONET telephone line protocol.

This works beautifully, but there are a few issues. For one thing, SONET levels are very specific and not scalable. If you want to move up from, say, a 155 Mbps OC3 to a 622 Mbps OC-12, you’ll at least need to swap out the termination controller or interface card in your router. Also, since analog phone traffic is now trivial compared to packet based data traffic, wouldn’t it be more efficient to just keep everything Ethernet from end to end? Indeed, it would.

Ethernet Replacements For SONET
Most competitive carriers and even many of the traditional telecom companies have adopted Ethernet as their network standard, as that’s where the traffic is. As a result, you can find much better pricing for Ethernet circuits than for traditional SONET. Ethernet WAN is also highly scalable. If you install a Gigabit Ethernet port, you can order service at any bandwidth level up to 1 Gbps. That covers OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps and pretty much OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps.

No hardware changes are needed until you require more 1 Gbps. At that point you may install a 10 Gbps port which will cover OC-24, plus OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps. Today, 100 Gbps is becoming more and more available to take the place of OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

If you are looking to upgrade your fiber optic WAN connections or are just curious about how much you might save by switching from SONET to Ethernet WAN service, you can easily get a set of competitive quotes from multiple service providers with no obligation. That applies to private line services, including cloud communications, as well as dedicated Internet access. Now would be a good time to make that inquiry.

Ethernet Better Than a T3 Line

By: John Shepler

Not long ago, T3 voice and data lines were a mainstay of medium and larger size businesses. Today, that once impressive 45 Mbps doesn’t seem all that fast. Our business applications demand more like 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps. Medical campuses, design firms and video production houses are more interested in 10 Gbps and looking beyond even that. If you still have a T3 line contract, you may well find that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less cost right now.

What is a T3 Line?
The T3 designation is part of the T-Carrier system developed by Bell Labs in the post-war tech boom. It was originally designed to transport large numbers of simultaneous telephone conversations and still fills that role for some larger businesses and call centers. Prior to T-Carrier, telecom was based on analog technology. T1 and T3 changed that to digital and started us down the path to the Internet we have today.

T3 is specified at 45 Mbps, enough to transport 672 digitized phone calls. That makes it a lot more efficient than creating a bundle of 672 separate twisted pair copper wires as telephone lines. T3 was once transported through large coaxial cables or microwave relay stations. More recently, it has been bundled on SONET fiber optic cables and called DS3. DS3 is the data format that runs on the physical T3 line, so DS3 and T3 pretty much mean the same thing.

The channelized version of T3 is used to carry those 672 phone calls, each in a separate channel or time slot in the data stream. For data transmission, the unchannelized version of T3 carries 45 Mbps worth of data, including the familiar packet switched networks.

Ethernet Replaces T3
Most all communications these days done over digital networks and originates in the most popular protocol, Ethernet. Even telephones have switched to an Ethernet interface so they can hook to the same network as computers instead of having separate wiring. This is called VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. With computers and phones on the same network, it makes sense to transport everything over Ethernet on both the local and wide area networks.

This is exactly what is happening. Carrier Ethernet, the long haul version, is replacing other telecom protocols such as T-Carrier for copper line and SONET for fiber optic. It’s pretty much going all Fiber optic Ethernet now. This is often referred to as Ethernet WAN for Wide Area Network.

Cost and Performance Advantages of Ethernet
The first advantage of long haul Ethernet transmission is that it is directly compatible with most all company networks. You simply plug the Carrier’s Ethernet into your router. There is no need for separate protocol conversion boxes or modules as required to support T1 and T3 lines.

A second advantage is that Ethernet is easily scalable. You can run at any speed up to the limit of the physical port from the Carrier. T-Carrier and SONET protocols were designed for specific speeds and needed to have hardware replaced to upgrade. The bandwidth of your line is set by the Carrier based on your contract. You can easily increase or decrease that as your needs change and it will be reflected in your billing.

Perhaps the biggest incentive to switch to Ethernet WAN service is pricing. You may be shocked at how much your can save by switching from an older telecom service to Ethernet WAN. Ethernet is almost always lower in cost on a per-Mbps basis. Sometimes the difference can be a factor of two or more.

Much of the cost savings comes from a more competitive environment for fiber optic Ethernet versus the old telco services with one provider. There may be several companies offering Ethernet bandwidth for your business at competitive rates.

Fiber is also more available than ever before. The upgrade of cellphone towers to 4G LTE and 5G has demanded a rapid expansion of fiber optic networks. Copper is yesterday’s news and, more and more, it is being left to rust in the ground. Fiber and wireless are the future for networking.

Do you have legacy T3 or DS3 service and want to see if you can get a better deal? That’s easy. Just check prices and availability of Ethernet WAN service for your business address. Chances are good that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less cost than what you pay now.

Gigabit to 10 Gigabit to 100 Gigabit WAN

By: John Shepler

Business WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth needs have accelerated, as more operations are moved to the cloud and more employees are working remotely. Fortunately, there are very good provider solutions available to create high bandwidth links from point to point and to the Internet.

Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN
Fiber optic connectivity is now clearly the gold standard for business bandwidth. If you are still using legacy T1 lines, ISDN PRI, or DS3 bandwidth, you are probably running out of bandwidth and likely headed for obsolescense. Many carriers are starting to decommission their copper-based services due to high maintenance costs and declining customer interest. It’s time to upgrade.

All fiber is not created equal, however. The legacy SONET technology introduced decades ago by the telephone companies is also getting long in the tooth. What’s better? The new standard is called Carrier Ethernet or Ethernet WAN.

Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN is an extension of the switched Ethernet standard used on virtually every Local Area Network. The technical standards make it easy to connect the LAN to the WAN without going through any intermediate protocol conversions. It’s Ethernet from end to end. This is the standard that most every service provider is offering, including many of the legacy telephone companies that have adopted it for their own networks.

Advantages of Fiber Ethernet WAN include ease of scaling bandwidth without having to change interface hardware. Order 10 to 50 Mbps starter service and easily upgrade to 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps, usually by using an online portal or making a phone call. Truck rolls are seldom needed unless you are ordering service beyond what your terminal equipment can handle.

Pricing is very attractive. You can start with lower bandwidth services from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and likely pay the same or less than you pay now for your copper based services. You almost always get more bandwidth for the same cost or pay less for the replacement bandwidth at the same service level.

Cost savings are even more dramatic as you go up in bandwidth. The cost per Mbps or Gbps compared to legacy solutions gets lower and lower as you go up in speed. Costs have also been dropping over time as technology improves, carriers build-out fiber runs, and competition increases. If you have a contract that is more than a few years old, you can likely save money with a new service.

Multi-Gigabit Solutions
There was time, and it was only a few years ago, that 1 Gbps or 1,000 Mbps broadband or private line service was the holy grail of connectivity. Not anymore. Fiber isn’t rare the way it used to be. It’s very common, now, to have fiber running extensively in metro business areas. Often there are multiple competing providers that result in very attractive pricing.

Fiber build-outs are multiplying, as more and more businesses demand higher and higher bandwidths and cell towers are upgraded to support millimeter wave 5G cellular service.

1 Gigabit bandwidth is common for business, with more demanding applications upgrading to 10 Gigabit service. The next move is to 100 Gbps Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN. Although that may seem ridiculously high for smaller businesses, it is not unreasonable for large hospital campuses and medical centers with multiple imaging facilities. Other high users are universities, research laboratories, government entities, video production houses, architectural firms and manufacturers. With 5G wireless supporting bandwidths in excess of 1 Gbps and cable companies offering at least that much to consumers, 10 Gbps is quite reasonable for highly automated businesses that have made the transition to digital. 100 Gbps is simply the next logical increment.

Dark Fiber and Fixed Wireless Access
Lit fiber optic WAN is likely to remain the standard for business for the foreseeable future. However, there are special situations where related technical solutions make sense.

Dark Fiber is an option for businesses that want more control of their connections, almost as if they owned the link themselves. Many network providers have extra unlit fiber strands in their cables available for spares and future expansion. They may be willing to lease an entire fiber strand or a wavelength on one of the strands. What is available depends on the locations you wish to link. Advantages of dark fiber include being able to run any protocol you wish and the enhanced security of being the only user on a particular fiber or wavelength.

Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) uses microwave frequencies instead of fiber to carry the traffic. Many cellular companies use FWA to backhaul traffic to their remote towers instead of having long and isolated fiber runs. Bandwidths can be in the Gigabit to 10 Gigabit range and offer dedicated private line service or connections to the Internet. Think of FWA as fiber without the physical fiber. You have an antenna on your building instead. A major advantage of FWA is that installation can be done in days versus months to have fiber trenched in were none is currently available.

Are you ready for a bandwidth upgrade from older copper services or expensive SONET fiber? Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN, Dark Fiber and Fixed Wireless Access may offer exactly what you need at better prices than ever before.

Ethernet WAN is the New SONET

By: John Shepler

High speed communications lines progressed from copper analog to copper digital to fiber optic digital over most of the last century. The technology that drives fiber has also evolved from time sliced synchronous multiplexing to packet based protocols, mirroring the transition to networked computing for nearly every business. While older SONET telco lines still provide effective connections, there are real advantages to be gained by upgrading to Ethernet WAN, the newer technology for fiber optic service.

It Started With Really Fast Phone Lines
SONET, which stands for Synchronous Optical NETwork, is a phone company invention that was developed to bundle or multiplex thousands of individual phone calls onto an optical fiber for long distance transmission. To make operations easier, SONET was made backwards compatible with legacy T1 service that does exactly the same thing with 24 calls over two twisted copper pair… in other words, ordinary telephone line.

SONET allowed the phone companies to bundle T1 line into DS3 lines into OC3 fiber lines and demultiplex or unbundle them anywhere along the way. Everything was compatible down to the single telephone channel.

SONET to Link Computers
So, how did SONET come to support computer networking? The protocol had to be converted between SONET’s time division multiplexing and Ethernet’s packet switching. That was accomplished using protocol conversion on a plug-in module. To the user, It made no difference what was going on under the hood. Packets would go in one router and come out another miles or thousands of miles away.

SONET was developed for fiber and all of the early fiber optic links for computer networks were connected using one of the SONET levels. OC3 was the lowest speed at 155 Mbps. This was the first fiber service that most corporations ordered when they outgrew their T1 and T3 lines. Each increase in speed required swapping out an adaptor module for the particular SONET level.

In fact, the Internet was built on SONET. SONET rings, which offer redundant paths, formed the core of the Internet as it grew. Internet service providers would connect via SONET and then divvy up the bandwidth for multiple 64Kbps dial-up modems or, later, DSL or Cable broadband modems.

The Ethernet Revolution
Ethernet, developed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the mid to late 1970’s, grew to become the dominant networking protocol, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of the personal computer at the same time. Most small and large users adopted Ethernet, as adaptor cards, cabling, hubs and routers became more and more affordable. Every PC soon came with an RJ-45 Ethernet jack as standard equipment and peripherals, such as printers, did the same for compatibility.

Once Ethernet became the de-facto networking standard and computer data traffic greatly exceeded voice traffic, it started to make sense to just adopt Ethernet for Wide Area Networks as well as Local Area Networks. When business phones became digitized and used VoIP to connect on the same network as the computers, the need for a separate voice network faded away.

Another factor that has moved WAN services from SONET to Ethernet is the rise of competitive network service providers independent of the telephone companies. Since these companies had no legacy analog phone service to support, they could simply focus on offering Ethernet connections to their customers in competition to the telcos.

By this time the original Ethernet protocol has been expanded to provide technical specifications for Carrier Ethernet, which is the same as LAN Ethernet but extended to support the MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network).

What Ethernet WAN Has to Offer
You remember that SONET has distinct service levels, each with it’s own bandwidth and specific adaptor requirements. Ethernet doesn’t have this limitation. Instead, you have an Ethernet port with a maximum bandwidth, say 1 Gbps. It will support any bandwidth up to the max limit of 1 Gbps. You can order 100 Mbps service today and easily upgrade to 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps later. Only if you want a service level above 1 Gbps, will you need to have a higher capacity port installed. This process is so seamless that many providers will let you change service levels at will by logging into your online account.

Ethernet services tend to be less expensive than SONET. Usually, much less expensive. You pay for the service level you want, be it 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and so on. Remember you can change this easily after you have service installed and your bill will be adjusted to the new level you select.

Since there are many, many competing Ethernet MAN and WAN service providers, pricing per Mbps has dropped rapidly over the years and continues to do so. Some of the service providers are the traditional telephone companies, but with much improved pricing. Others are independent carriers serving regional, national, or international areas. They can also provide excellent customer service, high reliability, and very good deals on bandwidth.

There are usually two types of service you’ll be interested in. One is a dedicated connection to the Internet at a bandwidth you select. The other is a point to point dedicated private line that is just like having a very long Ethernet cable connecting two LANs separated by many miles. These are useful for interconnecting main offices and branch offices, warehouse, manufacturing centers and so on with maximum performance and privacy. Another popular application is a direct connection between your offices and your cloud service provider. This avoids the vagaries of Internet performance and makes the cloud seem like it is right down the hall.

Perhaps you still have legacy SONET service that was installed years ago. It’s been working fine so no one has paid much attention. This would be a good time to see if competing Ethernet WAN services can give you more bandwidth for the same budget or offer a considerable cost savings if you are happy with the bandwidth level you have now. It doesn’t cost anything to look, so why not see what’s available?

Fiber WAN is Closer Than You Think

By: John Shepler

You know you really need fiber optic WAN service to give you the speed to make cloud-based business application responsive and keep everyone at peak productivity. The problem has been lack of availability. If fact, you may have given up after an extensive search a few years ago. It’s time to take another look.

Why Should Fiber Be More Available Now?
Fiber optic connectivity used to be exotic. It was only available to the largest companies and was very expensive. The only way to get this service was to go through the telephone company and hope they had built out to near your location. Even then, the cost of getting hooked up could be significant.

Times have changed. Fiber is becoming the default telecommunications medium. Copper bundles, such as analog landlines, T1 lines and even ISDN PRI phone service are being abandoned as they corrode in the ground and are too expensive to replace with demand steadily dwindling.

A big onus for fiber is that the speed of business communications has multiplied. The apps we run today are far more sophisticated, use much more data and often include bandwidth demanding services such as video. Text based email and small file transfers may have worked fine with lower speeds decades ago. Today our tools and data sets slow to a crawl with anything less than fiber capacity.

Another driver in making fiber the default technology for any new construction is that at the data center is moving to the cloud. In-house, you can get Gigabit and even 10 Gigabit speeds with twisted pair copper Ethernet cable. Once you leave the building, that arrangement won’t work. Twisted pair speeds fall off rapidly with distance, which is why you don’t see it being installed in trenches or on utility poles.

To maintain the congestion free speeds you need to run entire offices via cloud based applications, you need a fiber optic WAN connection from your location to your cloud service provider. Fortunately, that’s easier to come by than ever before.

Finally, the fiber tipping point has really been reached with the deployment of 5G wireless to replace 3G and 4G on cell towers. Many of these towers are located far from business districts that were initial wired for fiber. They are in residential areas and even out in the countryside. Fiber runs now stretch further than anyone envisioned a decade ago.

Who Offers Fiber Connections and Where?
Yes, the big telco companies are also leaders in fiber optic services. However, there are many, many more competitive service providers that service both the telco footprints and far beyond. If you have looked and failed to find fiber service recently, you may just not have access to know newer providers who can hook up your location at little or no construction cost.

Telarus, a major technology solutions broker, has contractual arrangements with dozens upon dozens of tech providers, many who offer business grade fiber optic service. A quick inquiry will generate a comprehensive search of fiber optic service near you. There is no charge to see what is out there and how much it costs. So, why not get a complementary fiber list now?

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.

DOCSIS 4.0 Expands 10 Gbps Cable Broadband

By: John Shepler

Fiber Optic service is expanding faster and farther than ever. It’s the gold standard in the quest for unlimited business bandwidth. Many businesses, frustrated by their inability to get fiber lit into their buildings or locked-out by the high cost of fiber construction, turn to their next best option: Cable broadband. Now the latest cable standard, DOCSIS 4.0, brings symmetrical streaming and increased upload speeds to ordinary coaxial copper cable service. Would you believe 10 Gbps download and 6 Gbps upload? Fiber has some serious competition from cable.

What is DOCSIS?
DOCSIS is the technology that enables traditional cable TV providers to also offer broadband Internet service on the same cable at the same time. The term is an acronym for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. It is the product of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc., CableLabs, a non-profit group supported by the cable system operators.

DOCSIS has evolved along with the Internet. The original spec was DOCSIS 1.0 released in 1997 and defined standards for 40 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. VoIP and QoS mechanisms were added by the early 2000’s, along with a boost in upstream data rates to 30 Mbps.

A significant improvement was introduced with DOCSIS 3.0 in 2006. Now cable companies could offer 1 Gbps downstream and 200 Mbps upstream with channel bonding. Support for IPv6 was also introduced at this time. With these improvements, it could be said that cable was a serious competitor to fiber optic services.

DOCSIS 3.1 in 2013 increased maximum downstream capacity to 10 Gbps with 1 to 2 Gbps upstream and is widely embraced by cable operators. DOCSIS 4.0, the latest version, increased the upstream rate to 6 Gbps in 2017. DOCSIS 4.0 is still in the early stages of production testing and deployment. The ultimate plan is to have full duplex symmetrical bandwidth on cable of 10 Gbps.

How Can Copper Cable Run So Fast?
Truth be told, it’s been a lot of years since cable TV networks were built with coaxial copper cable from the antennas at the head-end all the way to individual households and business locations. Virtually all systems of any size now use a technology called HFC or Hybrid Fiber Cable. The core network is fiber optic cable just like fiber network providers operate. The difference is that those companies run fiber right to the demarcation point within the building, while cable service terminates the fiber somewhere in the neighborhood and the makes the final run with the familiar coaxial cable. It was HFC that really enabled cable providers to offer serious broadband service.

Access Cable Fiber Networks Directly
Cable networks serve extensive metropolitan areas and their suburbs. Multi-system operators have fiber that interconnects their networks and connects to the Internet backbone. Major cable companies have gotten into the business of competing directly with competitive fiber optic networks by offering businesses the option to connect to their fiber networks without going through the copper interface.

There are advantages in going the fully fiber route. You may be able to get faster speeds and fully symmetric and dedicated connections by avoiding the cable modem. Remember that cable broadband is an inherently shared service. You are on the same last-mile Internet connection as dozens or hundreds of your neighbors. As such, you may find the the congestion level and speed of service vary throughout the day. It all depends on what everybody else is doing.

This is the reason that businesses, especially those with significant business processes running in the cloud, opt for dedicated Internet access and point to point private lines. You can get those at low speeds with traditional telco services such as T1 lines and higher speeds with DS3 bandwidth, SONET fiber optic services, Ethernet over Fiber and MPLS networks.

What service will meet your needs depends on how sensitive your operations are to line speed and latency, along with jitter and congestion. Cable broadband, especially at the DOCSIS 3.0 and above levels, provides many, many businesses with highly usable and reliable service at excellent pricing levels. Other companies with more sensitive needs may need to access fiber itself and set up more dedicated and private connections to achieve the performance they require for maximum productivity.

Find out now what cable, fiber and twisted pair copper broadband options are available for your business and what each has to offer.

Bandwidth for Cloud and On-Premises

By: John Shepler

Whether you choose to have your data center on-premises or in the cloud, you’ll need high performance WAN bandwidth for connectivity. Let’s look at the various options.

Everything’s On Premises
One big advantage of maintaining your own in-house servers and other data center equipment is that you control the premises network. Your local area network (LAN) likely runs at least 100 to 1000 Mbps. The connections in the data center may be much higher for the short runs needed to interconnect storage, processing security appliances and the rest.

It’s important to note that this is a dedicated network for your exclusive use. If congestion is a problem, you need to upgrade the weak links because it is your operation that is causing the problem. There are no outsiders to cause interference. We’ll come back to that later.

Since all of your company connections are local, why do you need a a wide area network (WAN) at all? For one thing, you’ll have remote employees or employees that occasionally connect from home. For another, your operation may not be contained in one closed campus. You may have multiple offices, retail sites, franchises, warehouses or factories. Even if they are just across town, you have to lease network bandwidth to connect.

Ideally, you’d like these operations to look like they are also on your local network. You can do that with WAN network connections that look like your LAN connections. Metro Ethernet and long haul Ethernet connections are available from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and look just like very long LAN cables. Transparent LAN service (TLS) is a managed carrier service that links locations no matter how far apart they as switched nodes.

Connecting to the Outside World
How is it that you connect to your customers and suppliers? These days it is probably via the Internet. You’ll want a high speed dedicated Internet connection to reach out to customers and suppliers and access Internet resources. You may well have a security appliance in the line between the Internet link and your network to keep malicious actors out of your company.

Remote employees will also use the Internet but may connect using a VPN or Virtual Private Network. This adds encryption to your Internet sessions so that they can’t be accessed by anyone not authorized.

Another consideration is the connection that customers use to access your E-commerce servers. Sometimes that bandwidth for this activity is much larger than what you are actually using in-house. You’ll want a fiber optic dedicated Internet access connection to your customer facing servers.

Facilities in the Cloud
The joke going around is that there really is no cloud, it’s just somebody else’s computer. Strictly speaking, that’s true. The advantage of the cloud is that one massive data center can host and maintain thousands of servers with backup power and massive connectivity at reasonable prices. Some companies may want to keep their in-house processes under local control and have their e-commerce servers in the cloud where they can have those massive scalable resources.

The cloud provider will take care of Internet bandwidth out to your customers. You’ll also need an Internet connection with enough bandwidth to efficiently upload and download files from your cloud servers. If you choose to have business process software running on cloud servers, you connectivity will be crucial to the in-house user experience. Latency can be a big issue in responsiveness. Variations in latency due to congestion or line issues can kill productivity and become a major morale problem.

For the best performance, you’ll want a high speed dedicated connection directly to your cloud service provider, avoiding the Internet completely. If that is not available or beyond the budget, a dedicated Internet connection with enough capacity for everyone is a reasonable substitute.

Why Dedicated Bandwidth?
As you may have surmised, there are two types of line services: Dedicated and shared. Dedicated lines are assigned to your traffic only. Whatever you don’t use at the moment sits idle, but you never have to contend with someone else hogging the bandwidth. Point to point E-Line, E-Line and E-Tree connections are all dedicated, as are T1 lines and DS3 bandwidth.

MPLS networks are actually a shared resource, but are a private network carefully managed to ensure that the committed resources in the contract are available at all times. They behave like dedicated resources, but with a cost savings if you need to link many sites.

The public Internet is inherently a shared resource. The core network has reasonably high performance, although equipment failures can occasionally grind performance to a halt. The Internet is designed to work around faults, but may not be able to maintain full speed if some nodes are overloaded.

The real issues with the Internet revolve around the last mile connection performance and no ability to set priority for highly sensitive packets like VoIP telephone calls and video conferences. Shared Internet connections include DSL, cable and cellular broadband. They work well for many uses and offer bargain rates, but you have to accept variations in performance that can range from unnoticeable to highly annoying.

It also should be noted that shared Internet connections tend to offer much higher download than upload speeds, often in the range of 10 to 1. That’s because most users, especially those watching video, are receiving far more data from the Internet than they are sending. Dedicated connections usually offer the same speeds on download and upload, which might be important for business processes, file transfers, telephone, video conferencing and data backups.

Are you in need of a bandwidth upgrade or new service? Get a suite of quotes from competitive providers to see what’s available for your location and how prices compare.

How You Can Benefit From Wavelength Services

By: John Shepler

What do you do when you have a need for high bandwidth, security and flexibility in your WAN connections? This may be the time to take a closer look at wavelength services.


What tradeoffs should you do to ensure that you’re getting the right bandwidth for your operation? Certainly, there is the protocol competition between the dedicated point to point line services provided by SONET/SDH and Ethernet over Fiber. Both will get your packets from point A to point B, but you may find that locations lit for EoF have access to much higher bandwidths for the same lease price or a cost savings if you don’t need a BW upgrade.

One important consideration is the protocol that you wish to transport. Ethernet is easiest to connect and most efficient over Ethernet WAN services. SONET/SDH is designed for TDM, but can also support packet switched networks. The waters have been muddied lately by the addition of Ethernet over SONET that gives you Ethernet services running on mature SONET fiber optic networks.

Another tradeoff worth doing is lit fiber vs dark fiber. Wavelengths are a lit fiber service. They are fully managed in the sense that the carrier provides the fiber path plus the terminal equipment that accepts and delivers your traffic. You don’t need to be concerned about the inner workings of the network because the carrier takes care of that for you.

The big advantages of dark fiber are improved security, since you are providing the terminal equipment at each end of the fiber, and the ability to create your own wavelengths. You’ll need to invest in the CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing) or DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) equipment. By doing that, you can have as many wavelengths as you wish, each running a different protocol. You can even multiplex wavelengths to create higher bandwidth pipes.

What is the right connectivity solution for your needs? Get expert recommendations on fiber optic wavelength services now.

How MPLS Network Bursting Provides Flexibility

The usual way to order bandwidth for last mile connections or MPLS networks is to commit to a given rate or line speed. You may order a T1 line and you’ll get 1.5 Mbps continuously. Order a 10 Mbps Ethernet service and you get 10 Mbps. On multi-tenant networks, like MPLS VPN, you pay for a committed information rate that sets the highest speed that your connection will run. But what happens if business conditions change or you simply guess wrong? Are you stuck paying for the wrong bandwidth for the life of the contract?

Not necessarily. In these volatile times service providers recognize that many companies need some flexibility in their bandwidth commitments. This is where the idea of bursting becomes attractive. Bursting basically allows you to exceed your committed bandwidth rate for short periods of time. This can happen during seasonal peaks like additional shoppers you didn’t plan on or a sudden increase in traffic due to having your company mentioned in the media. Bursting is also useful when you are adding additional locations for your business and haven’t factored the additional traffic into your bandwidth budget.

Who lets you burst? Some providers offer this feature on their line or network services, some don’t. A traditional T1 line, for instance, runs at a constant 1.5 Mbps. You have exclusive use of all 1.5 Mbps whether you have traffic on the line or not. Whatever isn’t being used at a particular time sits idle. The same is true for DS3 at 45 Mbps or private line Ethernet services at, say, 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps. You can’t make a bandwidth service run any faster than its technical limitation, but you may be able to buy fractional bandwidth service with bursting capability up to the full limit.

Why would you do this? Perhaps you need about 20 Mbps on a rather steady basis, but occasionally that jumps up to 30 or 40 Mbps. You could simply order a 45 Mbps DS3 service and be covered for any contingency. Or, you could order a fractional DS3 at 25 Mbps with the ability to burst up to the entire 45 Mbps capability. The advantage of this approach is that you may pay less per month for the fractional service plus the excess bandwidth used when bursting that if you leased the entire 45 Mbps line.

This works especially well with Ethernet connections. The maximum Ethernet bandwidth is set by the port that is installed in your facility. If a Fast Ethernet port is installed, you can get any bandwidth increment up to 100 Mbps. If a Gigabit Ethernet port is installed, you can order any bandwidth increment offered up to 1 Gbps. Most carriers give you a wide range of bandwidths to pick from. Some even offer bursting options that present significant cost savings. If you find that your needs have increased so that you are always bursting, you can change your line service to a higher bandwidth. That may be much less expensive since the committed rate is cheaper than the bursting charges. Think of overage charges on smartphone data use. That’s very similar to how bursting works.

XO Communications has taken the concept of bursting to their MPLS IP VPN networks. As you know, MPLS is now the preferred way to connect multiple business sites together. There are big cost advantages over simply installing dedicated lines to each location. By using the multi-tenant MPLS network for most of the distance and only installing short last mile connects to each location, you have the advantages of high bandwidth connections at a considerable cost savings. You also have the option to tie all of your locations together in a many-to-many mesh network so that any location can easily communicate with any other. The network takes care of setting this up, you don’t need to make those connections at headquarters.

The core MPLS network has tremendous capacity. It is designed to support many simultaneous users at various classes of service without one user impacting another. You have the feeling that you are the only one on the network, even though there may be thousands of others. The network operator has to provide enough bandwidth to meet the committed rates offered to all it’s clients, even if they all decide to communicate at the same time. Excess capacity can be used to offer bursting to those clients who need it. With XO, you can commit to 100 Mbps but burst up to 1 Gbps. They discard the top 5% of traffic samples as anomalies and only charge you for the committed rate plus the excess rate that you have used during the month.

How about your business requirements? Are they rock solid or do you need the ability to rapidly and automatically respond to spikes in demand? There are great solutions available for both cases. Get competitive MPLS network and line prices now to compare with your current telecom costs.


Note: Image of Gamma Ray burst courtesy of NASA on Wikimedia Commons.

Lock In Telecom Cost Savings For Next Year

As we approach the end of the year and run the numbers to see how well we’ve done, it’s not unusual to get that nagging feeling that maybe we’re cutting into profits by spending a lot more than necessary to conduct business. Nowhere is that more likely than in your networking and telecom expenses. It is almost always certain that a thorough competitive search will provide opportunities to pay less for the same level of service you have right now. Do this before the end of the year and you’ll lock in those savings for all of next year.

Why is this possible? There are two major elements to the cost savings. First is competition. Time was that you could have any provider you wanted as long as it was the local telephone company. The last few decades have seen that landscape change as deregulation opened the door to other competitors. First to go was the telcos lock on long distance service. Then local service became competitive. Finally, new vendors built out regional and nationwide networks of their own to provide metro and wide area networking connections. Today, you can get competitive bids on even international circuits.

The second major driver of cost savings is new technology. Nearly all telecom networking standards were designed by the telephone companies for their own use. It was decades later that these services were released for use by general business. As communications has moved from telephone calls to computer networks, these solutions still work but require a protocol conversion from LAN to WAN to LAN. It’s no longer the most efficient way to transport data and rarely the least expensive.

What’s better? IP centric networks closely match the packet based networks that are almost universally used for company LANs. Ethernet, the most popular networking protocol, has been extended from the LAN to the WAN. An Ethernet WAN connection can directly connect your LANs at two locations and bridge them into one large network.

Consider lower speed telecom connections. T1 has been the standard for decades. It is now being challenged by Ethernet over Copper (EoC) in many areas. Both T1 and EoC use the same twisted pair telco wiring that runs from your building to the nearest central office. They use different modulation schemes to achieve data transport and have different characteristics. T1 is limited to 1.5 Mbps per T1 line, although multiple lines can be bonded to create higher bandwidths up to 10 or 12 Mbps. There is no distance limit for this service and it works even for rural businesses. Ethernet over Copper can achieve much higher bandwidths of 10, 20, 50 or even 100 Mbps. However, the farther you are from the central office, the slower the line speed.

Equally or even more important, EoC is much less expensive than T1. You can get 3 Mbps EoC service for about the price of a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Upgrade to 10 Mbps EoC for just 2 or 3 times the cost. Need lots of bandwidth? Move up to Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). The most popular connections are 10 to 100 Mbps, although many companies now order Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps) and even 10 GigE.

Is this affordable? The combination of competition from hungry new carriers and technology advancements have caused prices to plunge from where they were a few years ago. Don’t be surprised if you can save 50% on your telephone and WAN connection or dedicated Internet service bills. If you are paying month to month on a old expired T1, PRI, DS3 or SONET contract, the savings may be even more dramatic.

How do you cash in? Simple. Get competitive quotes on voice, data and cloud services and compare with what you are spending now. You can do this any time, but if you lock in the savings by the end of the year, you’ll get the full benefit for all of the new year. Can you think of a better New Year’s resolution than to pocket all of that savings?

VPLS over MPLS Connects Locations Worldwide

MPLS networks are replacing older technologies such as frame relay and TDM point to point connections. It’s all part of the switchover from switched circuit to packet switched networks as a realization that legacy telephone traffic plays a minor role in worldwide voice, data and video communications.

MPLS is becoming the WAN of choice because of its versatility. The MP of MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol. MPLS networks aren’t fussy about the type of traffic they transport. Each packet gets a wrapper label and the LS or Label Switching makes sure it gets from source to destination intact.

There’s another networking technology that is also coming on strong. That is VPLS or Virtual Private LAN Service. VPLS is an Ethernet WAN service that connects multiple company LANs as if they were one much larger LAN that includes sites all over the world.

“That’s it,” you say. “I want VPLS not MPLS.”

Ah, not so fast. VPLS isn’t a network by itself. It needs MPLS networks to transport it. VPLS is a service running on MPLS. It’s one of those multi-protocols that MPLS networks carry so well.

Technically, VPLS uses a concept called pseudo-wires. Pseudo what? The name suggests what this is. It’s the emulation of a wired connection through a network. A real wire would be used for point to point private line service. You would lease the line and it would be “nailed up” or dedicated to your exclusive use for the duration of the lease. Pseudo wires are a way to establish private lines within packet switched networks. The idea is to create a transparent wire that can be used to carry a service from point A to point B.

Think of a pseudo-wire just like a length of Ethernet cable on your LAN. The wire doesn’t interfere with your protocol. The pseudo-wire doesn’t interfere with your protocol on the WAN. By establishing pseudo-wires through the MPLS network, it is possible to string virtual LAN wires hundreds or thousands of miles long. This is one of the tricks behind extending your LAN beyond the boundary lines of your property.

The other trick is for the network to emulate a switch or bridge to create a meshed network so that all locations can communicate as if they were on a bridged LAN. VPLS is a multi-point service. If all you wanted to do is connect two locations, you’d probably just get Ethernet Line Service using a pseudowire through the MPLS network.

The MPLS network can be thought of as a cloud that transports data and creates a multipoint switched network for interconnecting two or more business LANs. That can be anywhere from a few locations in the same state up to hundreds or thousands of locations across the globe. Because it is a cloud, you don’t have to worry about how the packets get from anywhere to anywhere. That’s the network provider’s job. All you need to do is get to that cloud from wherever you need a connection.

Those “last mile” connections can be a variety of protocols and a variety of bandwidths. If you want VPLS service, you’ll need to have Ethernet connections in the last mile. Those can be Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber, Even Ethernet over DS1 or DS3 in situations where EoC isn’t available.

This brings up another option. If you don’t need layer 2 connectivity between LANs and simply want a WAN connection to transfer files between locations, you can set up a MPLS VPN service. This can use layer 3 routing just like you might create with a collection of private lines or over the Internet. One advantage is that you can use any protocol connectivity, such as T1 lines, DSL, SONET fiber optic and so on. Each location can have a different type of connection. The network will accept your packets, wrap them in MPLS labels and get them where they are supposed to go.

How about your WAN connectivity? Could you do better regarding bandwidth, quality of service or cost? Get competitive quotes for VPLS over MPLS and MPLS VPN network services to check available options for your business locations.




Note: World map graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Level 3 Will Light Your Building

The technology tide has turned, making Ethernet the WAN (Wide Area Networking) transport protocol of choice. It's the defacto standard for LAN networks. What makes more sense than extending your LAN to remote locations or the Internet using the same networking standards you use in-house?

Even more compelling is the cost advantage as your bandwidth needs increase. At the low end of the spectrum, T1 lines rule the roost with an average lease price around $450, dropping into the 300's in major metro areas. As a point of reference, you're paying $292.20 per Mbps for that 1.54 Mbps T1 connection, also referred to as a DS1. Moving up to DS3 service at 45 Mbps and you pay an average price of $5,000 per month. Yes, the cost has gone up more than 10 times, but the bandwidth has increased about 30 times. You're paying about 1/3 as much per Mbps, or $111.11/Mbps. Those are the going rates for conventional TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) telecom digital line services. But what about Ethernet?

Hold on to your hat. Instead of selecting a DS3 at 45 Mbps, what if you instead chose Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps. How much more would that cost. Here's where the tide turns. Instead of costing more, Ethernet costs less. That Fast Ethernet connection will run you around $2,000 a month or just $20 per Mbps. That's over 2x the bandwidth for 5x less money.

What's going on here? Is there a trick involved? Yeah, that trick is being able to connect directly to a competitive carrier's network without having to gain access through local telephone company facilities. That "local loop" is pretty much locked in for TDM services, especially copper that is almost universally owned by the Incumbent local phone companies. Fiber optic networks are a different matter. The incumbents also own a lot of fiber. Most of it is set up for traditional TDM services such as SONET that's backward compatible down to the individual DS0 voice channel.

Ethernet is a different game. Competitive carriers set up their own POPs or Points of Presence, analogous to the phone companies' COs or Central Offices. Level 3 is one such carrier. They own over 50,000 miles of their own national network plus 24,000 miles of metropolitan fiber network. They're so big, they even sell bandwidth to telephone companies and other carriers. But they'll also sell to you at very attractive lease prices. What's more, if you're building isn't already lit for Ethernet carrier access, they may very well make the connection.

Being "lit" or wired for fiber optic WAN services is the new utility in demand. Many buildings in metropolitan areas are already lit for fiber, meaning that fiber optic cable has been brought in, terminated, and communicating via laser light wavelengths. Is your building ready? Use this fiber optic service search engine to find out.

Not lit? Don't despair just yet. Level 3 will light your building if it's worth their while. If you are within 200 feet of their network and will contract to use 10 Mbps or more of service, they'll likely hook you up. For buildings between 200 and 500 feet away, they need 100 Mbps of service committed. Out to a mile, it is still possible to get connected, but you have to pony up for something over 100 Mbps. It's likely that other tenants in your building also want high speed bandwidth they can afford, so perhaps you can pool your requirements to come up with a sufficient bandwidth commitment to get the building lit for Ethernet services. See how close Ethernet service is to you.