How to Get Stable Upload and Download Speeds

By: John Shepler

A solid connection is a wonderful thing to have. Have you been scratching your head, wondering why your upload and download speeds vary all over the place? It’s likely the nature of the bandwidth connection you’ve chosen.

Why Can’t It Be Like a LAN?
Most of us are spoiled when it comes to local area network connections. Our computing equipment comes with Gigabit or at least Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) network interfaces right out of the box. Cat5E and Cat6 cables are common now, as are gigabit routers and switches. Even WiFi runs fast, especially on the 5 GHz band. Unless your network is overloaded, it’s transparent to you.

So why is communications so sluggish and unreliable on Internet broadband or other long distance connections?

We forget. In the early days of setting up local computer networks, they were sluggish too. Even then, it didn’t seem too bad compared to dial-up modems or X.25 links at 64 Kbps. What’s happened is that LAN networking technology has sped up by leaps and bounds and equipment prices have plunged dramatically. You have to make a real effort just to buy the slow stuff anymore.

The same technological advancements have also applied to Internet and private line connections. The cost savings haven’t been quite as dramatic and there still is a wide range of connectivity in use.

What Makes Line Speeds Vary
General sluggishness is usually due to congestion caused by low bandwidth or a shared link that is over-subscribed. Speeds that vary all over the place are usually due to shared bandwidth with periods of heavy usage that come and go. You might run a speed test and get 100 Mbps. A few minutes later you run the same test and get 10 Mbps for worse. That congestion will eventually let up, but you have no idea how soon.

Any system with multiple users that can’t support full speed simultaneous connections is going to have variations. Those cable broadband options that have such great pricing are subscribed to the point that they keep most users happy most of the time. But they are a shared resource and you can’t be sure how many of your fellow users are on at the same time or what they’ll be doing.

The same is true of 4G LTE wireless and will be true of 5G once there are enough devices deployed to sop up the bandwidth. Radio frequencies used in cellular and satellite have limited capacity, which is why they have data caps and also why too many users will drag the speed down.

In general, any bandwidth service with pricing attractive to consumers is going to be a shared service and also likely to be asymmetrical. In other words, the download speed will be much faster than the upload speed.

Dedicated Connections for Solid Bandwidth

You’ll get far more consistent performance from dedicated bandwidth. Do you remember T1 lines? Perhaps you still have one. The 1.5 Mbps speed is no longer accepted as broadband, but the performance is rock solid. That’s because you are the only user on the line. Whatever bandwidth you aren’t consuming just idles.

For point to point phone and data connections or interconnecting LAN networks at two different locations, dedicated private line bandwidth can’t be beat. Yes, it will cost a bit more than the commodity shared bandwidth services, but the performance will be rock solid. You’ll also see an improvement on the Internet with dedicated Internet access, but once you’re into the actual Internet, you can still get variability and latency issues.

This means your best connection to your cloud service provider is to bypass the Internet completely and install a dedicated private line from your location to the cloud center. Once you have that with enough bandwidth to support your peak activities, the cloud will seem like it is right next door.

Those T1 lines? Probably not going to cut it anymore, unless you are doing such simple tasks as email, casual web browsing and point of sale credit card verification. You’ll want to upgrade to at least Ethernet over Copper at 10 or 20 Mbps. A even better option is Fiber Optic Ethernet at 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps and any speed in-between. Fiber bandwidth prices have dropped significantly in the last few years and availability has dramatically increased. You can thank 4G LTE and 5G cell towers for that, as well as competitive fiber optic service providers.

Are you frustrated by slow and highly varying bandwidth? How about VoIP phone service that is good one call and garbled the next? You should really look into dedicated bandwidth solutions including private lines and dedicated Internet access to improve your metropolitan and wide area network performance.

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.

How to Feed a Hungry WISP

By: John Shepler

We’re a wired nation, except when it comes to locations that are a bit off the beaten path. That includes farms, rural households, businesses beyond the city limits, new subdivisions and some industrial parks. While they may have telephone, thanks to universal service, the availability of broadband Internet access is less of a sure thing. This is where the wireless broadband supplier or WISP fills the gap.

Why WISPs?
WISP or Wireless Internet Service Provider is similar to a cell phone provider, except specializing in high speed Internet access. While even 4G cell service has fairly low usage limits, WISP services are much more generous and try to emulate the type of service you’d get from cable, telco or even fiber optic lines. The real cost to hooking up less populated areas is trenching cable bundles or flying them on utility poles. The WISP eliminates the wires and their associated cost. The tradeoff is that you generally need a small dish antenna and receiver outside to pick up the signal from the WISP tower.

Where Do WISPs Get Their Broadband?
While the WISP distributes broadband much like WiFi, the broadband they serve must come from somewhere. When the Internet was young, T1 lines did an excellent job of feeding the WISP, just like they did feeding cell towers out in the countryside. The beauty of T1 is that it can be sent virtually any distance over standard twisted pair telephone wiring. The downside is that the bandwidth is fixed at 1.5 Mbps per T1 line. Higher speeds can be accomplished by adding or bonding additional lines to double, triple or quadruple the speed. The practical limit is around 10 to 12 Mbps. Pricing goes up linearly as you add each line.

Higher Speed Copper Lines
A newer technology that also runs over twisted pair copper is Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This service offers higher speeds, say 20 or 30 Mbps or even higher. Transmission is distance limited, but EoC is now more available beyond the city limits. Cost is much more attractive per Mbps than T1, if moderate speeds are adequate for what you need.

Business Cable Broadband can provide hundreds of Mbps these days but has suffered from very limited deployment outside of metro areas. That has changed somewhat as the cable has been extended to outlying subdivisions and business parks. If you can get this service and the Cable Company is OK with using it for a WISP, the cost will be very attractive.

Fiber Optic Service
The new gold standard of bandwidth service is fiber optic lines. These used to be few and far between, but provider competition has made them far more common even in rural areas. You can thank 4G cellular for providing the incentive to trench fiber conduits into rural areas. Prices have come down dramatically with Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) services. These are highly reliable and easily scalable up and down in bandwidth to meet your needs. Bandwidths of 10 Gbps up to 100 Gbps are common now.

Microwave Transmission
Why not feed wireless with wireless? That’s not a crazy idea and is being used more and more as telco companies upgrade to 5G towers. Microwave is a point to point wireless service. You mount a small dish on your tower and point it toward the service provider. It’s like fiber but without the fiber.

SDN Combines Bandwidth
What if you need more bandwidth than any one supplier can provide? One option is to combine them using a technique called SDN or Software Defined Network, also known as SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Network. The SDN controller manages traffic to get the best performance for each packet. You can combine T1, EoC, cable broadband, microwave, fiber optic lines and even satellite Internet to create a higher speed robust feed for your WISP tower.

Do you operate a WISP service or have one in the planning stage? Find out what bandwidths and pricing are available for your desired locations now. A friendly consultant will help you sort through the options.

Increase Your Bandwidth Beyond T1

By: John Shepler

You’e had your faithful T1 line service for years, maybe even decades. You love the reliability, solid bandwidth, low latency and the fact that prices have even declined from contract to contract. The one limitation that’s becoming a real bottleneck is the bandwidth. While 1.5 Mbps was plenty a decade ago, it’s not keeping up anymore. Is there any way to keep the performance of T1 but goose up the speed? Most definitely!

What Makes a Good T1 line Replacement
When you first took out your T1 contract, you chose this technology for good reasons. DSL was popular for business at the time, but notoriously unreliable. T1 had the advantage of being a service that was developed by the telephone companies for the telephone companies. That meant it was professional grade from the beginning and not a “consumer” service being offered for business as a cheap option.

T1’s fixed 1.5 Mbps bandwidth was dictated by the need to multiplex or combine 24 individual analog phone lines into a single digital equivalent that maintained all the voice quality, including minimal latency. T1 also had to run on existing twisted pair telco lines no matter how far they stretched. That’s why T1 is available far out into rural areas beyond the reach of other options.

T1 is still used to provide multiple phone lines for key telephone and PBX systems. It has been expanded to support packet-based digital networks including point to point dedicated lines and dedicated Internet access. Many T1 lines come with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that provides a guarantee of availability and performance from the service provider.

Bonded T1
One way to increase the bandwidth of T1 lines is to simply add more of them. Most companies want that bandwidth combined, which is easily done by carriers using a process called bonding. All of the T1s you want bonded must be from the same provider. Two T1 lines gives you 3 Mbps, 4 lines give 6 Mbps and so on. You can go up to 10 or 12 bonded T1 lines, but the cost gets prohibitive unless this is your only option.

Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper uses the same twisted pair infrastructure as T1, but a newer modulation technology. You lose the unlimited distance advantage but gain much higher bandwidths, generally up to 10 or 20 Mbps, at more reasonable prices. If you are located in a populated area, EoC can give you the service you want at a fraction of the cost of bonded T1 lines.

DS3 Bandwidth
DS3 is part of the T-Carrier specification that also defines T1. DS3 offers 45 Mbps, enough for many businesses. Low latency, dedicated lines and reliable service are similar to T1 lines. The only wrinkle is that the higher bandwidth of DS3 isn’t supported over twisted pair copper. Instead, DS3 rides a fiber optic backbone to the curb and then a pair of small diameter coaxial copper lines to your router DS3 interface card.

Fiber Optic Service
Fiber service used to be well beyond the financial reach of most companies even if it was available… and it often wasn’t. That’s all changed. SONET technology, which transports DS3 and the higher bandwidth services like OC3, OC 12, and OC48, has become more available and less expensive. Ethernet over Fiber is the newer technology and it is much less expensive for the same high quality service. Many, many companies order 10 Mbps Ethernet over Fiber service and then easily upgrade to 50 or 100 Mbps as they need it. Bandwidths are readily available to 1 Gbps and even 10 Gbps in many areas.

What about Cable, Satellite, Wireless, Etc?
These less expensive services are shared, not dedicated bandwidth. That’s a major reason they are less expensive. Most are asymmetrical, meaning that upload speed is only a fraction of download speed. Satellite has tremendous latency effects and both satellite and wireless tend to have data caps. That said, a lot of businesses are saving a lot of money each month, especially if they combine a couple of low cost broadband services in a SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Network. It all depends on how demanding your applications are and whether you prefer to avoid the Internet to connect locations. Get some expert advice and then pick the best bandwidth option appropriate for your business needs.

Is It Time To Go Fiber Optic Internet?

By: John Shepler

You’ve outgrown the Internet service that has served you well all these years. Business has changed and yours has expanded to the point that your Internet connection is getting in the way. Everyone would be more productive and less frustrated with a connection that didn’t impose limits. So, what should you do?

More Choices, Less Cost
You might be cringing at the thought of shopping for better Internet access. The last time you did that, pickings were slim. Few providers offering few services, most of which were very expensive. You may have wound up with a T1 line or DSL from your telephone company or a business cable offering from your Cable TV company. Has anything changed?

Oh, yes. Pretty much everything has changed. Actually, the choices have expanded and gotten cheaper across the board. You can still still order T1 lines. Today you’ll find there are more providers vying for your business and the prices may be a fraction of what you paid to sign your service contract years ago. Other than cost, though, T1 is still a 1.5 Mbps service. It may be adequate for the smallest businesses, but most everyone else will find the 1.5 Mbps limit stifling.

A more expansive option may be Ethernet over Copper. This is newer technology running on the same twisted pair telco lines. Bandwidth options vary from 1 Mbps up to typically 15 or 20 Mbps. Pricing is maybe half the cost of T1 per Mbps.

How about business cable? Yes, it’s still here but better. Modems have been upgraded a couple of times and now easily offer 100 Mbps, 300 Mbps and even 1,000 Mbps on the same coaxial cable. You may even get that 1,000 Mbps for the what you are paying for the old T1 line. Just be aware that the bandwidth on the cable line is shared and may vary during the day. Upload speeds are maybe a tenth of the download speeds.

How About Fiber?
Fiber optic Internet service was beyond the reach of all but the largest companies for decades. No more. A technology improvement from the old telco SONET to competitive Ethernet over Fiber has caused prices to plummet and options to multiply. You can pretty much dictate your bandwidth from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and order what you need without over paying. Later, when your needs expand, you can scale up your line speed, usually without changing hardware.

Ethernet over Fiber has the options of speeds as high as 100 Gbps that are easily scalable, highly reliable, dedicated and symmetrical. More and more, those options include ready availability from one and often several vendors. Most providers are aggressively building out their networks and may be able to minimize or even waive construction costs. It just depends on what’s available near your location and how much competition there is.

I Want Fiber. How Do I Get It?
You’ll probably never regret taking the plunge on fiber optic Internet service. Unlike older copper-based technologies, fiber is pretty much future proof as well as minimizing limitations such as latency, packet loss and jitter. It’s the transparent connection you are longing for.

Now, how to get service. Your best option is to work with a bandwidth broker like Telarus. They have contracts with dozens of providers serving the nation with connections that can go around the world. Your cost will be no higher than if you found a particular carrier yourself and probably less, since there are often multiple providers to choose from. Want to see what’s available right now? Get a quick budgetary quote online now and followup with possible special deals that aren’t advertised.

Rural Doesn’t Mean Broadband Wasteland Anymore

By: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business Internet Service For Everyone

By: John Shepler

Unlike consumer Internet access, business Internet service has the reputation of being prohibitively expensive and sometimes hard to get, especially in rural areas. Much of that reputation goes back to a time when the incumbent telephone companies were the only provider available. Your choices were, indeed, limited and pricing could make your eyes bug out. Today’s deregulated environment has matured to the point where any business that needs and wants an Internet connection can get one… and at prices that won’t bust the budget.

Best Options for SOHO, Small Office, Home Office
The smallest businesses are the sole proprietors. Often, these are one person consultancies, remote workers, "gig" workers or web designers who work from home offices. When at the client, they’re carrying a laptop or tablet, plus a smartphone. Budgets are tight, so they want to minimize the cost of Internet access… just as long as it gets the job done.

The lowest cost option for bootstrap operations is residential cable broadband at the home office and 4G LTE cellular on the road. You can pair your tablet and laptop with your smartphone where WiFi is not available. It doesn’t get cheaper than this. Note: Contact your local Cable company for residential broadband.

If you have special requirements such as static IP addresses, any type of server or symmetrical bandwidth, you'll be needing to look at Internet services designed for commercial operations.

Professional Offices
When your business needs a commercial office, you’re probably supporting more than one person. Insurance sales agents, physicians, and any business that wants walk-in clients fits this category. You won’t be able to get residential broadband at a commercial address, but you can get basically the same service branded as “business broadband.” Cable is still an excellent option, with bandwidths up to 100 Mbps common and more than adequate to support a small team. You may even set up a guest WiFi network for clients or bundle television service for waiting rooms.

Higher Tech Offices
Businesses that are tech oriented support such niceties as in-house servers, call centers, and mission critical cloud applications. If you do as much or more uploading as downloading or run a server, cable broadband with its shared bandwidth may be too limiting. Better choices include dedicated Internet access provisioned on Ethernet over Copper at 10 to 50 Mbps or Ethernet over Fiber at 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps. Fiber gives you more options, but isn’t always available, even with construction costs added. Costs are at least several times higher than cable, but performance is more robust for sensitive applications like VoIP telephony and cloud access.

Retail
Most restaurants and bars find the business cable bundles of Internet, television and telephone compelling. It’s a package that is more than adequate and well priced. Special circumstances involve pop-up retail stores that show up just in time for holidays or are located at special events. Wireless 4G is a good fit here. This service works like a smartphone but is built into a special access point that includes a high performance antenna to ensure a strong signal. You can plug in a wired network or WiFi router depending on your needs.

Out In The Boonies
Rural businesses, including retail, agribusiness, machine shops, farms and ranches, gas stations, and so on have needs like their city counterparts, but no wires or fiber nearby. Wireless 4G may work if you can live with the usage limits, which are similar to phone services. If not, high speed satellite can be a better option. Bandwidths up to 100 Mbps are readily available with 1 Gbps coming. Location is unimportant as long as you can point the dish at the bird in the Southern sky with a clear view. The newer satellites have a lot more capacity, meaning that you can get much higher usage limits that fit the needs of many businesses. Pricing is similar to cable and lower speed fiber.

Is Anyone Still Using T1?
Because it was designed to work using the same cable as analog telephone service, you can still get T1 just about anywhere you can get a landline phone. The bandwidth is only 1.5 Mbps, but it is rock solid and reliable. T1 works for applications like credit card verification, email, and light web browsing. Performance is similar to 3G cellular. Prices on T1 lines have fallen so much in recent years that this legacy service is still a good choice in some circumstances.

More Options Than You Think
Are you a small business owner or or an IT consultant serving small clients? You may be surprised at the variety of Business Internet Service Options available now at the locations you need.

Internet and Ethernet, The Perfect Broadband Match

By John Shepler

Broadband Internet connections come in many flavors. These include DSL, 3G & 4G cellular, PTP microwave wireless, cable DOCSIS, two-way satellite, T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, SONET fiber optic, and both Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Each of these has cost and performance advantages and disadvantages. One technology, however, offers the best match for most business applications. It’s the combination of Internet and Ethernet.

Why Ethernet?
What makes Ethernet so attractive is the fact that it has almost completely taken over wired networks large and small. Do you have a LAN? What protocol are you running? Unless it’s something specialized for storage or industrial control, the answer is almost certainly Ethernet.

Being dominant has it’s advantages. From a technical standpoint, dominance means that nearly every piece of network equipment comes with Ethernet connectors built-in. In most cases, these are 10/100/1000 Mbps RJ-45 jacks. At higher speeds, 10 GigE and higher for sure, fiber optic connectors will be included.

It’s also not just that Ethernet standards permeate every network such that you have a hard time building one to some other protocol. How much do those alternative networks cost? The dominance of Ethernet has led to economics of scale. Ethernet is now the low cost solution by far. It’s also the solution that is sourced everywhere. You have no trouble picking up cable, connectors, switches, routers, and everything that plays on a network.

The One Laggard… The WAN
Local Area Networks are firmly ensconced with Ethernet technology. Outside the plant, however, it’s not so clear-cut. Wide Area Networks evolved from different standards pioneered by the telephone companies and were not originally intended for computers. Telephone networks were invented first and they were all analog, both wired and wireless. Then, starting mid-20th century, the T1 digital standard was introduced for multiplexing phone lines and long distance transmission. T1 expanded into T3/DS3 for higher speed, followed by fiber optic standards based on the same TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) protocol.

Since the phone companies pretty much owned all telecommunications networks, Ethernet packets had to learn to ride on what was available. That meant protocol conversion from Ethernet to T1, and so on. This is still the case for traditional telecom networks, although that’s changing fast.

Carrier Ethernet Moves to the Front
The old collision domains are long gone for the most part. Networks now are switched Ethernet. It turns out that the switched Ethernet protocol are quite compatible with long distance networks with a few additions to the standard for operations and maintenance. Those standards have been created and go by the name of Carrier Ethernet.

As you might suspect, Carrier Ethernet is merely an extension of LAN Ethernet. There really is no protocol-conversion speed bump traversing from one to the other. You plug your network into the carrier’s premises equipment and your packets travel seamlessly for hundreds or thousands of miles.

Ethernet and the Internet
The Internet was designed as a computer to computer network from the get-go. When we talk about IP networks, the IP means Internet Protocol. When we talk about Ethernet protocol, we are generally referring to IP and perhaps the file transfer standard, TCP/IP.

When the Internet started, there were only the telephone company networks available, so the Internet began running on legacy telco standards, particularly SONET fiber optic. That’s changing now. More and more networks are Ethernet at their core. Most newer networking providers design their networks as IP from the start and don’t go depend on handoffs to the telephone company central offices.

Either way, as long as you have Ethernet to your premises, you can ignore what’s going on at the core of the network.

Ethernet’s Big Advantages
Carrier Ethernet services come in a wide variety of speeds, but they all stick to the same Ethernet standard. You simply specify the maximum speed of the port that is installed at your location. That’s generally 1 Gbps these days, although you can also opt for 10 Gbps and, in some cases, 100 Gbps. The port sets the maximum, not the minimum, broadband speed you can order. In fact, many companies start at 10 or 100 Mbps and then upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet or beyond when they need to. That means they only pay for the bandwidth they need.

Ethernet services also tend to be less expensive than traditional telco services for the same bandwidth. It’s fairly common to get 3 Mbps for the same or less cost than a single 1.5 Mbps T1 line. You might even get 10 Mbps for the budget you originally set for T1 Internet service.

That last mile connection to the Internet via dedicate Ethernet Internet access means that your bandwidth is symmetrical, or the same in the upload and download directions. It is also dedicated to your use 100% of the time. With other services, such as cable or cellular broadband, the bandwidth is shared among customers. That makes it cheaper, but also means that your share will vary depending on how many others are using the service at the same time.

Ordering Ethernet Internet Service
The best place to get your business broadband service is from a bandwidth broker, like Telarus, who has relationships with many carriers. You’ll likely have multiple options to choose from. The two flavors you’ll most likely encounter are Ethernet over Copper for lower speed options and Ethernet over Fiber for 50 Mbps and up. Fiber is highly desirable if your building is already lit or construction costs are low. Otherwise, you can almost always get some type of copper based delivery.

Interested in finding out what options you have and what they cost? Run a quick search for fiber optic Ethernet service here and see what pops up.

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.

Are Your T1 Lines Saturated?

By: John Shepler

The ideal network connection is transparent. Regardless of whether the link is twisted pair copper, coaxial cable, fiber optic or wireless, if it does anything to affect your network traffic, it is clearly not transparent. The more you notice link limitations, the more your productivity will suffer and the more you need to do something about it.

Artificial Limitations
Best effort shared broadband services, like Cable BB, DSL, 4G Cellular or two-way satellite are limited by both technology and policy. Each type of service has its own capacity for traffic. That capacity is generally available 24/7, aside from occasional outages. Even so, you have access only to a portion of that capacity.

The first limitation is bandwidth. You are entitled to the level of service you order, as a maximum and not a guaranteed throughput. Providers manage this by rate limiting your connection to the service. The line might be capable of 1000 Mbps, but you get 10, 30 or 100 Mbps. Thats the highest bandwidth you can achieve even if there are no other users.

The second limitation is usage limits. These are particularly severe on wireless & satellite links where bandwidth is expensive. Limits of 5 or 10 GB per month severely limit what you can do with the service. Even higher limits of 20 or 50 GB may not be enough for normal business activities. If you go over your limit, you’ll either be charged more, have your connection dropped or have your bandwidth throttled for the rest of the month.

Actual Limitations
Private lines and dedicated Internet access connections usually don’t have artificial limitations. You pay more for these services because you are the only user. There is no need to create policies to ensure fair usage.

Technical limitations remain. Each technology has it’s inherent limitations. There’s no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, even on your own LAN network. What you want is enough bandwidth available that you never run out of capacity.

T1 Line Saturation
T1 lines have been the gold standard of business connectivity since they were introduced decades ago. T1 lines are dedicated connections between two locations or between your location and the Internet. You are the only user and there are no usage limits. The line is constantly running and available to transfer data. You can use as little or much of the available capacity each month. The lease price is fixed.

T1 lines have a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. Actually, the exact line speed is 1.544 Mbps. However, 8 Kbps is needed as overhead to synchronize the line, so the payload rate is 1.536 Mbps. That’s what’s available for your bits of data.

The absolute maximum amount of data you can shove through the line can be figured at 1.536 Mbps x 60 seconds/minute x 60 minutes/hour x 24 hours/day = 132,710 Mbits or 16,589 MB per day, at 8 bits per byte. That’s 16.59 GB of data each day. In a typical 30 day month, that’s just shy of 500 GB.

Line Saturation Problems
Your T1 line becomes distinctly non-transparent when you have big files to transfer and you want to transfer them fast, or you have many users wanting to transfer their files at the same time. The entire line is only capable of transporting less than 17 GB every day, not even 1 GB per hour.

What happens when you try to shove more data down the line than it can carry? Everybody’s traffic slows down… sometimes to a crawl. That’s frustrating and can lead to real productivity issues, especially when need the information to proceed with your next task.

It gets worse when your telephone system is cloud hosted VoIP. Those voice packets get jammed up with all the data packets and don’t get from phone to phone as quickly as needed. The result is garbled voices, pauses in the conversation and perhaps even dropped calls.

Solutions
If you only occasionally reach line saturation, prioritizing traffic can help. Real time services, such as telephone calls and video conferences get highest priority. Whatever they don’t need can be used for interactive business applications, and whatever is left over is available for background activities like file backups.

At some point, you just need to pony up for more bandwidth. Fortunately, this is a lot less expensive to do than ever before. If doubling bandwidth will hold you for awhile, you can go from one to two T1 lines. By bonding those lines, you can double your bandwidth while the two lines act as one larger pipe.

Ethernet over Copper technology uses the same twisted pair copper lines that transport T1, but supports higher bandwidths of 10 Mbps or more. Ethernet over Fiber starts to become cost competitive at that level and can take you from 10 to 100 to 1000 Mbps, and even up to 10 Gbps if you ever need that much. Best of all, copper and fiber Carrier Ethernet services are scalable. That means you can have the line rate limited and pay less until you need the full capacity of the fiber.

Do you find yourself running out of bandwidth on your venerable T1 lines or other WAN connections? If so, check out prices and availability of higher level bandwidth services available for your business location.

Upgrading to Fiber FAQ

By: John Shepler

The bandwidth solution you’ve had for years is running out of capacity. It’s worked well for you, but now you have no real choice but to upgrade to something faster, more reliable, lower latency, more consistent or all of the above. How about fiber? You’ve always had twisted pair copper or cable. Does fiber make more sense for the future and… can you afford it? Let’s look at some key questions and answers for making this decision.

What Can Fiber Do That Copper Can’t?
The real beauty of fiber isn’t necessarily what it will do for you today. It’s the virtually unlimited upgradability down the road that is unique to fiber. Every copper technology runs out of capacity at some level. Technology advancements have expanded copper’s capability and extended its life. However, technology advancements have also expanded fiber capacity beyond what most of us can fathom needing.

I Have a T1 Line Now and Love It. Can’t I just Add Another T1?
You bet you can. The process is called bonding. It makes 2 T1 lines act like a single line with twice the bandwidth. You can bond T1 lines up to 10 or 12 Mbps, which is about the entry level for fiber. One limitation is that you have to get all your lines from the same provider to bond them. A more serious limitation is cost. You may find that 10 Mbps fiber is a lot less expensive than 10 Mbps bonded T1.

What About Ethernet over Copper?
EoC is a competing technology to T1 and uses the same twisted pair copper. You can get higher bandwidths at lower cost than T1, but the technology is distance sensitivity. For 10 to 50 Mbps, you need to be geographically close to the office supplying your service. For higher bandwidths, say 100 Mbps and up, it’s rare to find EoC available. At 1Gbps, it’s pretty much fiber all the way.

Don’t Cable Companies Offer Fiber Bandwidth over Cable?
Yes and no. Yes, you can get hundreds of Mbps, perhaps even Gbps, bandwidth over the same coaxial cable that brings in hundreds of TV channels. This is relatively inexpensive service, but it is a “shared” bandwidth that varies with the number of users online. It’s strictly Internet access, not private line, and has no performance guarantees. For demanding business operations, the Cable companies offer competitive fiber optic service using their core transmission networks. This grade of service is similar to what you get from telecom companies.

OK, But Isn’t Fiber Hard to Get?
Not any more. The first fiber technology, called SONET, is a telephone company product and has been both expensive and limited in availability. A newer technology called Ethernet over Fiber is offered by a wide array of competitive carriers, including many traditional suppliers. Nobody is building out copper plant anymore. It’s yesterday’s news. All of the new network construction is fiber and there is a race among carriers to capture the business market

Where is Fiber Available?
Ethernet over Fiber and SONET are both readily available in major metropolitan areas. Fiber is also often available in suburban areas and smaller cities. There is a big push right now to replace T1 lines with fiber to increase the bandwidth of cell towers from 3G to 4G and, eventually, 5G. That is extending metro fiber networks out into the countryside where they haven’t been before. Eventually, fiber will be everywhere.

What About Now? Where Can I Get Fiber?
Your best bet is to be located in an already “lit” building. That means the building has fiber optic service installed and operating. Once the terminal equipment is in place, adding another customer in the same location is trivially easy for the carriers. If you can’t be in a lit building, you’ll need to be near enough that construction costs are minimal. It’s those long distance runs that need new fiber installed that get expensive.

Note: A popular option for companies that find fiber construction costs too much to consider is to locate their high bandwidth equipment, such as servers, in a colocation data center where multiple fiber options are readily available.

So, Where Are These Lit Buildings?
Lit buildings and nearby fiber optic services can be easily located using the Telarus GeoQuote search engine. This is a tool specifically developed to quickly locate existing fiber services. You can find out in seconds what’s available in your area with no commitment.

Great, I’ve Found Fiber Service. Will It Cost a Fortune?
You may be shocked to find how affordable fiber optic service is today. This isn’t consumer grade FTTH (Fiber to the Home). It’s a business grade service that is installed at commercial locations. Bandwidth generally starts at 10 Mbps, which is the same speed as traditional Ethernet. If you’ve had your T1 line for many years and haven’t negotiated a lower priced contract, you may find that you can get 10 Mbps fiber for about the same price. Yes, you’ll pay more for Ethernet over Fiber than today’s T1 lines or low cost business cable broadband, but you can also expect higher performance.

How Much Bandwidth Makes Sense?
Many smaller businesses can get by with 10 Mbps Ethernet over Fiber. High tech or medium size operations will want 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. Nowadays, Gigabit Ethernet is well within reason for companies that need highly responsive cloud applications or make extensive use of video. Municipalities and school districts often find that Gigabit Ethernet or GigE is exactly what they need at a reasonable price point.

How Easy Are Upgrades
Legacy T-Carrier (T1, T3) and SONET (OCx) services can take a long time to provision because each bandwidth level has a unique interface. Ethernet over Fiber is designed to be easily scalable. You install a port with the maximum speed you expect to need (usually 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps). Then you pick the bandwidth you want to start out with. Often a quick call to your provider is all it takes to increase or decrease bandwidth within hours or days. Some services even let you make the changes yourself through a Web browser.

What’s the Maximum Bandwidth Available?
It’s not likely you’ll ever run out. Gigabit Ethernet service is common. So is 10 Gbps now. In some locations you can get 100 Gbps business bandwidth. That level will become more widely available in the future, as more bandwidth intensive requirements demand it. If you are a really high bandwidth user or have special protocol or security requirements, you might consider wavelength service. Each fiber can carry dozens of wavelengths. Each wavelength transports up to 10 Gbps.

Are you interested in finding out what fiber optic service options are available for your business location and how much they cost? Get fast quotes with no obligation and complementary expert consulting to help choose the best option for your needs.

T1 is Your Rural Broadband Solution

By: John Shepler

While metro areas enjoy a plethora of broadband Internet services, those outside the city limits or living on farms or ranches have little to pick from. Often all that seems available is smartphone 4G and two-way satellite. But, wait! There’s another option you may not be aware of that could be perfect for your rural business, farmstead or work from home. It’s T1 dedicated Internet access.

T1 is Everywhere
T1 line service is available just about anywhere you can get ordinary POTS analog phone service. That’s because T1 runs on standard telephone company twisted pair copper wiring. The same cable that brings in telephone service probably has a couple of unused pairs available for a T1 line.

T1 is a digital service designed by Bell Labs with regenerators to boost the signal. You can get service even if you are miles out in the countryside.

No Data Caps
The biggest limitation for wireless services, like 4G and satellite, is that the airwaves have only so much capacity to serve all their customers. This is why providers enforce data caps. Such caps used to be laughably low, but now are typically 5, 10 or 15 GB per month. That’s probably enough for a single user of email and web browsing. Your quota gets used up quickly with high def video, software downloads, cloud applications and data backups.

What happens when you hit the cap limit? It varies among providers. The cellular companies will charge you overages on a per GB basis. Satellite providers will either throttle down your bandwidth or cut you off until you buy more capacity.

T1 lines have no data caps. The line runs at a constant speed all the time. You can choose to load it up 24/7 and get as many bytes through the pipe per month as you can at 1.5 Mbps, or just use it as-needed during business hours. The full capacity is always there available for your use.

Dedicated, Not Shared
Another reason that some services have data caps is that the bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. T1 lines are also known as dedicated Internet access or DIA. The dedicated part means that the line is for your use exclusively. There are no other users.

That may sound obvious, but it’s not what you have with satellite, 3G & 4G wireless, or even cable and DSL. All of these are shared bandwidth services. They are typically priced lower than equivalent telecom wireline services because the bandwidth at any given time is divvied up among the users who are online. If you are the only one, you get the full capacity of the system. Usually, you are sharing the available capacity with dozens, hundreds or thousands of other users. This is why these services advertise their bandwidth as “up to” so many Mbps.

T1 lines are a fixed dedicated bandwidth. It’s not “up to 1.5 Mbps”. It’s 1.5 Mbps all the time.

Minimal Latency
Shared bandwidth services that get congested with too much traffic and all geosynchronous satellite channels have a particular issue called latency. Latency is a time delay between when a packet is sent and when it is received. If you are only dealing with 10 mSec or or so of line latency you’ll probably never notice it. However, when that latency rises to 100, 200, or even 500 mSec you’ll really notice it.

Satellite links have the highest latency simply because even light takes a millisecond to travel each 186 miles. That’s the familiar physics constant of 186,000 miles per second. When the signal has to travel 23,000 miles up to the satellite and another 23,000 back down you’ve lost about a quarter of a second. TCP/IP needs to be acknowledged, which doubles this latency. Add a little for ground and satellite equipment processing and you’re easily at 500 mSec or half a second best case.

Now you know why television reporters have to pause before the anchor can ask a question and vice-versa. You’ll have the same effect using VoIP telephony on a geosynchronous satellite link. Plan on treating your phone conversations like you were using a walkie-talkie or other two-way radio. Only one person at a time can talk or you’ll be talking over each other.

T1 lines have minimal latency. It’s pretty much determined by the length of the connection plus a little added for equipment processing. We’re talking tens and not hundreds of milliseconds. That works perfectly for VoIP or ISDN phone trunks, two-way video conferences, and just about anything you want to do on the Web, including working remotely or using cloud hosted applications.

Symmetrical Bandwidth
Shared bandwidth services are typically asymmetric. That means they have much higher download than upload speeds. Usually a factor of x10. That works fine for accessing websites or downloading files or video. It’s not so great for uploading files or backing up data to remote sites.

T1 lines are symmetric. They have 1.5 Mbps download and an equal 1.5 Mbps upload speed.

VPN Compatible
Some services, especially satellite broadband, don’t work well with the VPN or virtual private networks used by remote workers to connect to their employers. Satellite companies may even warn you that their service doesn’t play well with VPN because of the signal processing in their system. T1 has no such limitations. It’s a good match for VPN applications.

Highly Reliable
T1 lines were developed by the telephone companies for their own use in transporting bundles of phone calls. The technology is robust and well-proven. Outages are rare. If someone cuts the cable or a piece of network equipment fails, T1 lines get fast attention and quick repair. Often you can get a SLA or Service Level Agreement that spells out the mean time to repair as well as other characteristics such as latency, jitter and packet loss.

Broadband Options
While 1.5 Mbps may be as much as many users need for small business operations or working remotely, its not high bandwidth compared to many other services. One option is to bond two or more T1 lines together to get double, triple or even higher speed. Another option is to use a related technology called Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This service has similar characteristic to T1 but much higher bandwidth available. Unlike T1, EoC isn’t available everywhere and speed decreases with distance from the originating office.

Reasonable Costs
The final factor is cost. You can expect to pay more for dedicated T1 line service than you will for the consumer and other shared bandwidth services. There used to be a huge difference is price, but T1 costs have come down dramatically in recent years while other services have chosen to increase bandwidth and raise prices accordingly. If you have a serious need for connectivity and are frustrated by the lack of options or lack of performance in the options you do have, then you should give T1 a serious look. It might be a very good match with your needs.

Cyber Monday is For Business Buyers Too

By: John Shepler

Cyber Monday is the new tradition for shopping online to get deals that you couldn’t in the rough and tumble of brick and mortar Black Friday sales. You’ll see numerous offers for special deals targeted at consumers today. But what about businesses? Is there such a thing as Cyber Monday for business?

There should be. Business purchases are a huge part of the economy. What’s more, what businesses have to pay for products and services reflects in the price consumers have to pay. If your business can get a bargain on Cyber Monday, it’s a win all the way around.

Let’s have a look at some things that you might not think are ripe for savings, yet actually are. While prices for these services might not be specific to this particular day, there’s still a huge incentive for you to take a closer look. You’ll likely find savings that you didn’t know were available. Whatever you save will pay off for months and years into the future.

1. T1 Lines
Just about every company has leased a T1 line at some point in its growth. Many still do, and new T1 lines are being provisioned every day. Why has this decades old telecom service retained its popularity in the face of technological advancement?

It’s hard to beat a winner. T1 lines have a long history of reliability and versatility. You can use a T1 line as a point to point private line, dedicated Internet access, MPLS network connection, or as a T1 or ISDN PRI telephone trunk for your telephone system. They offer the same bandwidth in both directions and are inherently low in latency.

What T1 lines have that many other telecom services don’t have is near universal availability. They come in on ordinary twisted pair telephone cable that is available to just about every business building. The one gripe has been cost. Ten years ago, T1 lines were pricey. You had to swallow hard and sign the contract if you needed connectivity. Today, prices are a fraction of what they used to be and are attractive to even very small businesses.

If you are unhappy with “consumer grade” broadband or have a T1 contract that is a few years old or more, you should get an instant price quote for T1 line services now.

2. Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper, also called EoC, is the direct competitor to T1 lines. EoC is a newer technology and uses the same twisted pair copper wires that provision T1. It’s also symmetrical in bandwidth, highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss.

What Ethernet over Copper offers is higher bandwidth and… Ethernet! While your phone system may still be a traditional Key Telephone System or PBX using analog POTS lines or ISDN PRI, your computer network is almost certainly based on Ethernet. EoC lets you connect to other locations or the Internet while keeping your packets in the Ethernet protocol all the way. This opens the door to services like E-LAN that let you set up a bridged LAN that includes locations across town or nationwide.

Unlike T1 that has a fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps no matter the distance, EoC technology trades off speed for distance. If you are close to the central office you can get very high speeds, perhaps 50 Mbps or more. Farther away, available line speed drops off as the line length increases. Even so, most business locations can get 3 Mbps up to 10 or 20 Mbps using Ethernet over Copper. Even better, the cost per Mbps is usually lower than what you pay for T1… perhaps half as much.

If you are running out of bandwidth on your T1 line or want to see if you can get the same or higher bandwidth at a better price, you’ll want to check out Ethernet over Copper bandwidth speeds and prices for your locations.

3. Metro Ethernet over Fiber
If Ethernet over Copper is a good idea, Ethernet over Fiber is a even better one. Fiber optic networks have multiplied in recent years, with tentacles reaching into nearly every city around the globe. The other revolution is the rise of independent private carriers to compete with the traditional telephone companies. This competitive environment has expanded service availability and reduced prices.

If you’ve had fiber optic services for years, chances are that you have one of the legacy SONET telco fiber lines. These include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.4 Mbps. SONET is highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss. It traditionally has suffered from lack of availability, few fixed bandwidth levels, and high prices per Mbps compared to what is available now.

Yes, SONET is still a good fiber service to have. Prices have come down dramatically over the years. But Ethernet over Fiber is an even better deal. Like EoC, EoF keeps your traffic in the Ethernet protocol for easy interfacing, and the ability to get LAN-type connectivity among multiple locations.

it’s also highly scalable. You can get just about any bandwidth level you want between 10 Mbps and 10 Gbps. In some major business centers, speeds as high as 100 Gbps are available to businesses as well as carriers. What’s more, you can generally get your service upgraded quickly with just a phone call to your provider. Quickly means anything from a few hours to a week or so. Compare that with weeks or months if you need a SONET upgrade.

If you need bandwidth of 10 Mbps or higher for your business (not residential) location, it is well worth your while to take a few minutes this Cyber Monday (or any other day) and check out the fiber optic bandwidth and pricing options available right now.

4. Hosted PBX
Everybody knows what a business telephone is. It’s that box with a handset and dial pad that sits on your desk and has its own wiring to the phone company or an in-house phone system. Business phones are essential for business. The traditional phone systems aren’t so essential anymore. In fact, you are likely missing out on both features and cost savings if you aren’t looking at the new cloud hosted VoIP or cloud PBX phone services. So, let’s take a Cyber Monday shopping trip.

There are numerous companies offering “hosted” phone services. These range of single line VoIP telephone services all the way up to call centers in the cloud. They’re all based on the idea that if telephones can connect to the computer network, then the switching equipment can be located anywhere. Today, the best deals are cloud service providers who operate massive data centers dedicated to IP telephony.

Don’t confuse enterprise VoIP services with the low-end Internet VoIP services. They may use similar technology, but the trick to consistently high voice quality is a dedicated network connection between you and the provider. This is known as a SIP trunk. The bandwidth of the trunk determines how many simultaneous calls it will support. You can have a few lines or thousands. Only the speed of the connection changes.

What Hosted PBX does is change the way you pay for your phone service. Instead of making a major capital investment in equipment and ongoing maintenance expenses, you pay per phone per month to a service firm. That firm bears the cost and responsibility of running a highly reliable and easily scalable phone system for your company. All you have in-house are the IP phones plugged into your computer network and a specialized router to prioritize the voice traffic.

Is your phone system too small or getting a little “creaky”? Before you go out and drop a bundle on a shiny new in-house equipment rack, see how competitive and feature-filled a Cloud Hosted PBX service can be.

Now you see how Cyber Monday can be as asset to businesses beyond what you sell to consumers on this single day of the year. Use Cyber Monday as an incentive to shop for your business as well as yourself and get deals that will pay off handsomely for years.

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.

Easy Migration from T1 to Ethernet

By: John Shepler

A lot of companies that have depended on T1 lines for years, even decades, are getting to the point where the available bandwidth just isn’t enough anymore. What’s the logical upgrade? Right now what makes the sense for most businesses is Ethernet. Fortunately, the upgrade path is easy and cost effective.

Don’t Write Off T1 Yet
T1 isn’t done, by any means. T1 lines are so entrenched in telco infrastructure that they are almost universally available. This is one of the big draws of T1. It was designed by the telephone industry to serve the telephone industry. When computer communications came along, T1 lines were adapted to connect machine to machine. With 1.5 Mbps bi-directional capacity, T1 has ruled small and even medium business connections. Unfortunately, 1.5 Mbps is barely broadband anymore.

So, do you have to dump your trusty T1 line to get more bandwidth? Actually, no, but it might be advantageous.

Bonding for Higher Bandwidth
You may not realize it, but it is possible to at least double or triple your T1 bandwidth right now. The way you do this is to order additional T1 lines from the same vendor and have them bonded into one larger line service. Bonded T1 ranges from 3 to 12 Mbps. That’s still plenty for many applications. As long as you have additional unused copper telephone pairs coming into your facility, you can likely get more bandwidth.

So, why not just do this upgrade and leave well enough alone? In some cases, this is exactly the right move. Out in the countryside, T1 is often the only professional grade bandwidth available. However, there is a price to be paid. That is, 2x T1 lines cost twice as much as one. Eight T1 lines cost 8 times what you pay now for a single line. That can be more than many budgets can handle.

More Bandwidth For Less Money
Most business locations are within the city or suburbs and have another interesting option. It’s called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. This is the simple upgrade path from T1 because it uses the same twisted copper pair that bring in your T1 lines. Like bonded T1, EoC uses multiple wire pairs to increase bandwidth. The difference is that Ethernet over Copper may be able to give you a LOT more bandwidth.

The basis of EoC is a newer modulation scheme that is more efficient in transporting packets over copper wires. Common bandwidth levels start at 3 Mbps and go up from there. How much higher? Popular choices are 10 to 12 Mbps, 15, 20 and even 50 Mbps in some areas. The hitch is that EoC technology is dependent on distance from the telco office. Distance doesn’t matter much to T1. But, then again, you won’t be getting 20 or 50 Mbps out of bonded T1.

The cost structure is also different. Ethernet over Copper can give you at least twice the bandwidth for the same money. In other words, 3 Mbps EoC costs about the same as 1.5 Mbps T1. As you increase bandwidth, the cost differences are dramatic. You may be able to get 10 Mbps EoC for just a fraction of what bonded T1 would cost.

When 100 Mbps or More is Needed
It used to be that higher bandwidths, including DS3 at 45 Mbps and OC3 at 155 Mbps, were expensive and hard to get. Now DS3 has come down in price so that it is affordable by many smaller and medium size companies. A newer service, Ethernet over Fiber (EoF), starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to at least 10 Gbps capability.

You read that right. The same fiber line can bring you anywhere from an entry level service of 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet, and 10,000 Mbps 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Even 100 Gbps is available in some metro areas.

Where It’s All Going
Fiber is the future. Eventually, all that copper in the ground will be recycled or be left to eventually corrode away. That’s not today, as Ethernet over Copper has given all those old telco lines a new lease on life. However, many businesses are discovering that Ethernet fiber is also both available and quite reasonably priced. They can have EoF installed with a 100 Mbps port and start off paying for only 10 Mbps. A simple phone call to the provider can then speed up the line to 50 or 100 Mbps. Install a Gigabit Ethernet port to begin with and you can get any speed from to 10 Mbps to 1000 Mbps without making any equipment changes.

Are you ready to migrate from T1 to Ethernet to get more bandwidth at a better price? If so, quickly check your copper and fiber Ethernet options now.

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.