100, 1000, 10000 Mbps Internet Speed

By: John Shepler

Business Internet speed requirements have increased dramatically as computer and software technology has advanced. It’s also true that our long distance WANs (Wide Area Networks) have become more like umbilical cords than transmission pipes. Today, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and even 10000 Mbps Internet connections are common and necessary. Fortunately, pricing has plunged as speed has jumped, making these bandwidth levels affordable.

100 Mbps Fast Ethernet
100 Mbps is the new benchmark bandwidth, replacing the traditional DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps. DS3 is part of the telco TDM standard as an upgrade to slower T1 lines. At one time, DS3 could be supplied on a T3 coaxial copper line or microwave signal, but is now demultiplexed or “dropped off" by a SONET OC3 legacy fiber optic service.

The lower cost option for 100 Mbps bandwidth is cable broadband running DOCSIS on small diameter coaxial lines. These are the familiar “cables” installed for cable TV and broadband. In most cases, 100 Mbps is the download speed. The upload speed may be 10 Mbps or less. The service is also multiplexed or shared among subscribers, so actual bandwidth may vary somewhat. Even so, 100 Mbps cable broadband works very well for many work from home situations, home based businesses, small offices and small retail businesses.

For larger or technically more demanding applications, 100 Mbps Ethernet over Fiber gives you 100 Mbps upload and download speeds or symmetrical service. This service is also dedicated or private. You and you alone have access to all the bandwidth and it is consistent at 100 Mbps. While this service requires a fiber drop rather than cable, pricing is quite reasonable and readily available for most business locations.

1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet or GigE provides 10x the bandwidth of Fast Ethernet. Like the 100 Mbps service, you can now get this level of service through a cable broadband provider in many areas. The step up in speed makes it easier for many users to connect in your office. It also facilitates more demanding applications like heavy video streaming or conferencing.

Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber is a premium service that is getting more affordable every day. Many medium and larger businesses opt for this service as it is highly reliable, with low latency, jitter and packet loss combined with high enough bandwidth to be transparent even with many concurrent users. The symmetrical bandwidth enhances the performance of cloud based applications and remote backup where upload speed is important.

10,000 Mbps Gigabit 10 Gig Ethernet
10 Gigabit Ethernet or 10GigE is the fastest bandwidth service available to most business users. At this level, you can connect large offices, factories, warehouses and retail stores to the Internet or as point to point private lines. Bandwidth is symmetrical and private, as you would expect. While DOCSIS cable is theoretical capable of supporting 10 gigabits, this is currently a fiber optic service almost exclusively.

When you get to these bandwidth levels, some other options become available. You can opt for the standard fiber optic connection or lease an entire wavelength or lambda on the fiber. This increases your privacy and, thus, security level. For even greater control, you can lease an entire dark fiber and light it yourself or have the carrier do that.

Advancing Bandwidth Levels
Like processing speed and number of cores on a chip, metropolitan and wide area network bandwidths are continuously increasing. In select areas, 100 Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber service is now available for business. With Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, you can easily achieve that by lighting dark fiber and, perhaps, even move up to Terabit per second bandwidth levels if the budget allows.

Are you looking for reasonable high business bandwidth levels at your current location or needing to connect a new facility? Know that high bandwidth broadband and private line services are more available and affordable than ever before. Get quotes from multiple providers and decide the best option for you.

Two Flavors of Fast Ethernet Service

By: John Shepler

No need to let bandwidth limitations stifle your business. Here are two affordable options to acquire 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service, likely as much as a small to medium size operation will need. I’ll tell you later how to upgrade that to Gigabit Ethernet when the time is right.

Fast Ethernet over Fiber
The gold standard in business bandwidth has shifted from legacy T1 lines to fiber optic service. Not the old expensive SONET telco fiber that you know as OC-3, OC-12 or OC-48. I’m talking about the modern Carrier Ethernet standard known as Ethernet over Fiber, also called Metro Ethernet.

Entry level fiber service typically starts at 10 Mbps. That’s enough for many small businesses with limited Internet or file transfer needs. With even a few employees or heavy use of cloud applications, you’ll be craving more performance. That’s where Fast Ethernet shines. It offers 100 Mbps x 100 Mbps dedicated bandwidth 100% of the time.

Features of Fast Ethernet over Fiber
Performance is much like your old T1 line or DS3 connection, but much faster. Symmetrical bandwidth means that your upload and download speeds are both 100 Mbps. That’s important if you run cloud applications that send large files in both directions. Backup to cloud storage is almost exclusively in the upload direction until you need to recover a file.

Fiber optic bandwidth is known for low latency, packet loss and jitter. Your service will be solid since all of the line bandwidth is dedicated to your business. Whatever capacity you aren’t using at the moment sits idle, much like the way a Local Area Network behaves.

That brings up another important advantage of Fast Ethernet over Fiber. It is directly compatible with your LAN. Just plug it in to your router or switch and it’s ready to use. Many business networks run at 100 Mbps, although new installations are typically 1000 Mbps and larger networks are 10,000 Mbps or 10 GigE.

Option #2 Fast Ethernet over Cable
Business Cable Broadband has come a long way over the years. Most systems are HFC or Hybrid Fiber Cable. That architecture employs a private fiber optic network for the long haul runs. Traditional 75 ohm coaxial copper cable connects from the curb to your building. The termination equipment is a DOCSIS modem. Most are DOCSIS 3.0, which easily provides 100 Mbps Internet service up to a maximum of 1.2 Gbps in the download direction. The newer standard is DOCSIS 3.1, which easily provides Gigabit Internet service with a growth path to as high as 10 Gbps in both directions.

Characteristics of Fast Ethernet over Cable
Two advantages of Cable broadband are availability and cost. You can get service if the cable runs past your building, and that’s most buildings in metro areas. The cost for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet is likely a fraction of what you pay for Ethernet over Fiber. Construction costs are minimal, if at all. Simply plug your network into the Ethernet connector on the DOCSIS modem.

The cost difference is reflected in a difference in service level, although that may not make a difference depending on how you use the service. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated, which can mean variations in line speed that depend on how many other users are online and how heavily they are using the service.

The bandwidth is asymmetrical, meaning that download is much faster than upload. A typical bandwidth service is 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps to 25 Mbps up. Typically Internet usage is heavily in the download direction for web browsing and watching video. Email is both upload and download, but the files tend to be fairly small and not affected by the asymmetry. If you send to large mailing lists to deliver video from your own servers, the upload bandwidth could become a limitation.

Upgrading Bandwidth
One advantage that both fiber and cable service share is that they are easily scalable compared to the old T-Carrier and SONET telco standards. You simply need a port that can handle the maximum bandwidth you anticipate needing. For fiber, that’s a Gigabit Ethernet port on the Customer Premises Equipment. For cable it’s a DOCSIS 3.0 or 3.1 modem. With those in place, you can upgrade your speed with just a phone call and no equipment changes will be necessary.

Do you feel limited by your current point to point or Internet access speed? You may be surprised how affordable a major upgrade is. Check out Fast Ethernet service options for your business now.

E-Rate Supports Gigabit Internet for Schools & Libraries

By: John Shepler

It’s clear that broadband Internet is a key infrastructure for business, education and personal use. Schools and libraries may have the greatest need of all to access information online. We’re living in a Google, Wikipedia, e-book world and information is going more electronic by the day.

Schools & Libraries are Lagging
What might surprise you is that many elementary schools and libraries area woefully behind the times when it comes to electronic access. They need modern broadband service. Not the Megabit per second standard that was thought fast when we were moving from dial-up modems to always-on high speed Internet. Today’s standards need to be based on what fiber optic connections can provide. Is Gigabit Ethernet too fast… or just about right?

The FCC is now in the just about right camp. The latest round of improvements to the government’s E-Rate program are targeting Internet speeds of at least 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and staff now, moving up to 1,000 Mbps in the longer term. Libraries that serve fewer than 50,000 people should get at least 100 Mbps. Larger libraries, those serving more than 50,000 people need 1 Gbps or higher Internet access speeds. Looking ahead, the FCC wants WAN/Last Mile connectivity to be scalable to 10 Gbps per 1,000 students. You know it won’t be long before that is what we’ll think of as typical.

More Funding for Higher Bandwidths
The amount of funding for E-Rate discounts has been running a $2.4 billion a year. That has been recently increased by $1.5 billon to $3.9 billion per year. A good part of this funding will support high speed Internet access. The rest will be used for infrastructure within the facilities, particularly Wi-Fi access. Wireless vs wired Ethernet connections are particularly important for students and library patrons. Funding will be ended for legacy services such as paging and traditional landline telephones.

How to Qualify for E-Rate Discounts
Any school, school district or library that wants to participate in the E-Rate program needs to submit an application through the program administrator, USAC or the Universal Service Administrative Company. Any carriers, or service providers, that want to offer E-Rate qualified services also need to submit an application. They are then assigned a SPIN or Service Provider Identification Number. Many of the larger carriers have already taken this step and have the ability to install fiber optic broadband Internet or WAN connections at speeds ranging from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps or more.

How Much Are the Savings?
E-Rate is a discounted service price. In other words, if you qualify for E-Rate you’ll pay less for broadband access than commercial entities for the same line speeds. The actual discount that each school or library receives is based on the poverty level of the population they serve and whether the population is considered urban or rural. The actual calculations are based on the percentage of students eligible for the national school lunch program. Discounts then range from as low as 20% to as high as 90%.

The Easy Want to Find E-Rate Broadband
You can do the research yourself by contacting local service providers or searching online for national carriers. However, it’s much easier to use a company that works with many different carriers and knows who has E-Rate capability in your area. There is no cost for this service. It’s available to any interested school or library. It’s also fast and easy to make a no-obligation inquiry. Check for carriers offering E-Rate bandwidth services now.

10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps Internet Upgrades

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling stymied by your company’s low Internet speeds? It’s to be expected. Today’s online applications are far more demanding than the static websites and text based email that were the norm when you got your first T1 line. Today, 10 Mbps can be considered entry level for most businesses. Demands for 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps are entirely reasonable. So, what’s the best way to upgrade?

Movin’ On Up
You can sometimes get away with incrementally increasing your bandwidth as needs grow slowly. Bonded T1 lines can give you 3 to 12 Mbps in 1.5 Mbps steps. You need to order all your lines from the same provider and there will be equipment changes every time you want to step up. Even so, this can be the best option in rural areas where there isn’t much service available.

A competing approach is to order Ethernet over Copper rather than T1. It’s available in most metro areas, although not so much beyond the city limits. EoC can give you higher bandwidth levels, 3 to 20 Mbps, at lower cost than bonded T1 solutions. It’s distance sensitive, so the closer you are to the office supplying your service, the higher your bandwidth.

The best option today is looking more and more like Ethernet over Fiber. Yes, fiber optic service used to be rarely found and very expensive. The legacy SONET fiber services still are pricey, although they’ve come down dramatically in recent years. Ethernet over Fiber is a newer approach that offers a number of advantages for business users.

What Ethernet over FIber Offers
Ethernet over FIber (EoF) is pretty much like it sounds. It uses the same Ethernet protocol that runs on your company LAN, but adds some features that make it suitable for telecom carrier use. You’ll also hear it called Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet. This is currently a metropolitan service. There isn’t much fiber in the boonies, although more is being installed all the time to boost the capability of cellular towers.

Because it’s Ethernet, EoF is easy to connect to your network. Your handoff from the service provider is a fiber or copper Ethernet connection. Plug it into your edge router and you’re in business

Ethernet over Fiber was designed to be highly scalable. That means upgrades are very easy and probably don’t need equipment changes. Compare that to legacy services that always required the carrier to swap out termination equipment and often took weeks and months to complete. With EoF, you make a phone call and your speed will be increased in a matter of hours or days. The latest offerings let your make changes on-demand. You can increase or decrease your bandwidth right from your computer.

How about bandwidth?
Ethernet over Fiber typically starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps or more. Popular speeds mirror the standard Ethernet LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 1000 Mbps. Actually, you can get many increments in-between these standards. If you like, start off at 10 Mbps and then upgrade to 20 or 30 Mbps and eventually move on up to 100 Mbps or more.

The one consideration that makes this easy is the port speed you install. That the speed of the connection to the provider’s equipment. You’ll want at least a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet connection to provide 10 to 100 Mbps. If you expect to go into the hundreds of Mbps, you’ll want at least a Gigabit Ethernet port. Want more than 1 Gbps? Get a 10 Gbps port installed initially so you won’t need equipment changes from running out of port speed.

The Pleasant Cost Surprise
Many traditional and new carriers are now offering Ethernet over Fiber, since it has become so popular. This makes for a highly competitive marketplace and that’s great for you as a buyer. EoF pricing is far more attractive per Mbps than bonded T1, DS3 (T3), or any of the SONET (OC-3, OC-12, OC-48) services. You can easily find yourself paying half or less than you would with other telecom services. You retain highly reliable service with low latency, jitter and packet loss.

Does this sound like just the business Internet access you need now? Check out prices and available of Ethernet over Fiber bandwidth options for your business location now.

100 Mbps Fast Ethernet for your Business

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling the pinch of too little bandwidth to support your more sophisticated business applications, such as cloud services, big data, VoIP telephony, video conferencing or simple video downloads? It’s a good time to take a look at making the move to 100 x 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service. Let’s have a look at a quick video on Fast Ethernet:


Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps is just one option of many offered by Carrier Ethernet providers. You can get bandwidths as low as 10 Mbps or as high as 10 Gbps to support you business needs. What’s even better is that you have the option to order the bandwidth you need today with an easy upgrade path when you need more. By installing a port that can handle your anticipated needs, you can pay for what you need now and add bandwidth incrementally with no more than a simple phone call.

Learn more about Ethernet bandwidth options for your business with free consultation and instant online pricing.

100 Gbps Wavelength Service Open for Business

At a time when many businesses are discovering the benefits of Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, the upper limit of bandwidth available to business is, if anything, accelerating. Would you believe that you can now order 100 Gbps wavelength service up and down the West Coast?

That’s not just a small increment over typical 100 Mbps Ethernet. It’s a factor of 1,000x. How on earth can you use this much bandwidth... and where can you get it?

Oddly enough, what’s driving the demand for 100 Gbps bandwidth are the same factors that are establishing 100 Mbps as almost entry level. I say almost because many smaller businesses are just now becoming totally frustrated with their old dependable T1 lines. Today’s online activities drag along at 1.5 Mbps. You really need 10x or 10 to 15 Mbps to do much of anything productively.

Once you get beyond email, general Web surfing, inventory management and customer support, that 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service starts looking pretty attractive. What pushes the capacity of the line is video downloads and streaming, big data and cloud computing. It’s really the move en masse of businesses to the cloud that is generating the stampede to 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 GigE and now 100 Gig Wavelength.

What’s the cloud got to do with it? Pulling up stakes and moving your IT services to the cloud completely changes your network requirements. Ethernet has grown for decades on the model that all of your computers, servers, switches, routers, printers, storage and other assets will connect on a wired, copper or fiber, local network (LAN). Your WAN connection only needs to be big enough to support communications outside the company.

This was no big deal for most companies prior to Internet-everything and outsourcing to the cloud. T1 lines and DS3 bandwidth were plenty to support even mid-size companies. It worked because the vast majority of traffic stayed within the company walls. Only communications to and from remote sites, franchises, some customers and vendors needed to traverse the outside network (WAN).

That was good because the cost of telecom services prior to competitive deregulation was astronomical. In fact, the availability of lower cost bandwidth has been a driver in the rise of the Internet. It’s also been an enabler of relocating data center facilities to colocation centers as a cost savings measure. Once you start moving your servers off-site, it’s an easy jump to the cloud.

That’s really all the cloud is. Each cloud is a very large data center with infrastructure and perhaps software supplied and maintained by a vendor. You no longer need to invest in IT. You rent everything. Payment is by the “seat” by usage or as a monthly fee. No more capital expenses, no more long cycles to upgrade capacity, and no more round the clock staffing to keep everything working.

The only fly in the ointment is the shift in bandwidth requirements from the LAN to the WAN. Your traffic no longer zips around in-house. Instead everything goes to and from your offices over the WAN. All the heavy computing is out there in the cloud. So is the data. If you want to send a file, get a file or perform any process you’ll be doing it over the WAN.

Companies that didn’t take this into consideration are hurting. They’re the ones frantically shopping for higher bandwidth levels at reasonable prices. A slow WAN connection means everybody waits. While your employees are killing time waiting for the system, you are flushing money down the drain.

Fortunately, the cost of high performance bandwidth has been plummeting with the skyrocketing demand and entry of new regional and national fiber optic networks. There’s a mad scramble on now to light every building with fiber and ensure enough capacity in the system to prevent traffic jams. This is where Zayo comes in.

Zayo is a premier international provider of bandwidth infrastructure services with massive fiber optic capacity. This is the company that is establishing 100 Gbps Wavelength services, not just for carriers, but for businesses too. Their initial buildout is in the high tech corridor of the West Coast, from Seattle to Los Angeles. The latest rollouts are the ability to originate and terminate add/drop 100 Gbps service to Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Modesto and Los Angeles. There is a similar network on the Eastern Corridor that includes New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. and a path through Chicago that connects the East and West coasts.

Do you really need 100 Gbps Wavelength service? Probably not unless you are a content distributor, Internet service provider, cloud service provider, large corporation, government agency or massive organization dealing with the biggest of big data operations. Nevertheless, you should know that higher bandwidths are in your future and that fiber is well within reach of most company budgets.

Do you feel constrained by your current modest WAN bandwidth? Now is the perfect time to get a new set of competitive quotes for high speed copper and fiber connectivity just to see what new services are available and how low the costs have plunged since you last went for quotes.


Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.





Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

100 x 100 Mbps Business Bandwidth Options

Bandwidth levels of 100 Mbps are no longer a luxury for many businesses. You need that much to backup files remotely, access cloud applications, distribute content and share large files such as high resolution medical images. Traditional bandwidth services like T1 lines or DS3 connections don’t come close to meeting this requirement. What does and can you afford it?

The traditional service that supports this capacity is OC-3 SONET fiber optic bandwidth. Larger companies have used OC-3 for decades. What’s limited the number of companies that install this service has been high costs, at least in past years.

If you haven’t checked prices in a decade or even the last few years, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. OC-3 prices have plunged from the astronomical levels of years ago to something well within reason today. Medium size businesses and medical organizations, and many smaller high tech businesses where high bandwidth is essential, can now afford OC-3 bandwidth... but should they?

Besides the cost reductions for telecom services, something else has happened recently to give businesses options for 100 Mbps bandwidth. It’s the rise of competitive technology. Decades ago, it was OC-3 or nothing at all. Today, that is just one of several services that can get the job done. Let’s take a look at what else is available.

The biggest competition to SONET fiber optic services is now Ethernet over Fiber. The fiber optic pipes are the same. The signal that they are transporting is different. For you as a business owner or IT manager this makes no difference in the end. Both SONET and Ethernet technologies can carry the same traffic from place to place or to and from the Internet. However Ethernet has some advantages you should know about.

The most important is cost. Much of this is due to competition and some to the way networks are constructed. SONET is a telephone company developed technology. There is almost always a telephone company involved in delivering SONET. It might be for the entire span. Often, the last mile is handled by the local telco and the rest is provided by a competitive carrier.

Ethernet is different. Ethernet came out of the computer industry. It had nothing to do with telephones. In fact, Ethernet really gained prominence as a LAN, not a telecom, technology. It still forms the basis of nearly every installed local network. While the traditional local and long distance telephone companies have added Ethernet to their portfolios, other carriers have started up to gain share in this marketplace. Many built their networks around delivering Ethernet services and don’t even offer SONET.

One thing that’s different about Ethernet over Fiber is that the competitive carrier may handle service throughout the entire network. That includes the connection into your building. Multi-tenant office buildings are especially attractive because there is more than one customer to make it worthwhile to construct the fiber drop and termination equipment. Competitive carriers are aggressive about finding and connecting business locations before someone beats them to it. This helps to hold down prices for everyone in the industry... to your advantage.

Another approach to bandwidth delivery is to eliminate the wires altogether. That’s the domain of the microwave wireless companies. If you are in the right location, you may be able to get 100 Mbps bandwidth over a radio beam to a small antenna on your rooftop.

What’s the right location? It’s almost always in the downtown business district of a major metropolitan area. The microwave transmissions are strictly line of sight and limited in distance to a few kilometers. This means that there needs to be nothing but air between your building and the provider’s tower. For financial services companies, corporation headquarters and other downtown locations, this may be no problem at all. If so, you may be able to get the bandwidth you need installed very rapidly with little or no construction cost.

All of these services are also known as symmetrical dedicated bandwidth. OC-3 is actually 155 Mbps. Fast Ethernet is 100 Mbps with many other service levels available. The symmetrical part means that the upload and download speeds are the same. 100 x 100 Mbps means 100 Mbps upload and 100 Mbps download. Dedicated means that the bandwidth is constructed for your use only. Whatever you don’t use sits idle until you do.

Some companies don’t need this level of performance, especially if all they want to do is access the Internet the way you would at home. These companies can save even more money by going with an asymmetrical shared bandwidth service. As example would be a coaxial cable connection that offers up to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. Your actual speed at any given time depends on what other users are doing because the bandwidth is in a pool shared by multiple subscribers.

Are you feeling pressed for increased bandwidth but concerned about price and availability? You may have more options than you suspect. Get prices and availability for high bandwidth providers that service your business location.

Fiber Optic Service FAQ

Fiber optic service is rapidly taking over connections that used to be handled by twisted copper pair. Before you renew your bandwidth contract or order new service of any type, see if these FAQs help you choose the most appropriate option for your business.

Q: Why choose fiber over copper service?

A: Bandwidth requirements have escalated in recent years. At the same time fiber pricing has been dropping dramatically. You may well find higher bandwidth available over fiber than you can get with copper lines and for a comparable price.

Q: What bandwidth levels are typically available.

A. Fiber optic service for business locations ranges from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Copper options are readily available from 1.5 Mbps to 10 Mbps and sometimes available up to 50 or 100 Mbps. It all depends on how far you are located from the telco office where your copper cable terminates.

Q: Isn’t fiber service hard to get and expensive to install?

A: Not so much anymore. Competitive carriers are rapidly expanding their service footprints and looking to add customers, especially in multi-tenant office buildings. There may well be fiber located nearby that would cost little or nothing to install. In rural areas, that’s not as likely other than for cellular towers where fiber bandwidth is becoming a requirement to support 4G LTE.

Q: What’s the difference between SONET and Ethernet over Fiber?

A: They are two technologies that both use optical fibers for transport. SONET is an older standard developed by the telephone companies. You connect to a provider’s edge router or a specialized interface module for your own router. Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) uses the standard Ethernet protocol extended for long haul transport and carrier operations. EoF is a fairly recent development that is expanding rapidly worldwide. Ethernet pricing is generally much less than equivalent SONET service if it is available.

Q: What SONET service levels are available?

A: There are discrete OC or Optical Carrier service levels that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps, OC-192 at 10 Gbps and, rarely, OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

Q: What Ethernet over Fiber service levels are available?

A: Ethernet was designed to be scalable, so you can get nearly any bandwidth you want in small increments. Popular service levels are 10 Mbps equivalent to standard 10 Mbps LAN Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps 10 GigE.

Q: How do SONET and Ethernet interfaces differ?

A: SONET uses a specific interface card for each service level. Ethernet installations provide a port with a maximum speed and standard copper or fiber Ethernet jack. For instance, a Gigabit Ethernet port that is typically installed can support any bandwidth from 10 Mbps to 1000 Mbps.

Q: If Ethernet is more scalable and less expensive, why choose SONET?

A: Usually the answer is availability. SONET has been around a lot longer than Ethernet and may already be installed in your building or on lines that run nearby. If you have a specialized application, like high volume channelized telephone trunking, SONET is the logical choice. For dedicated Internet access or point to point private lines, either will do.

Would you like to see what fiber optic service options are available for your business location? If so, get instant online pricing up to 1 Gbps and complementary consultation with a bandwidth expert if you wish.


You may also be interested in reading Fiber Optic Service FAQs, Part 2 and Part 3.

When Asymmetrical Bandwidth Works Just Fine

Asymmetrical bandwidth has been pooh-poohed for business applications in favor of symmetrical bandwidth options. In some cases, you can wind up spending too much for the service you really need. In other cases, picking the wrong option will leave you frustrated and unproductive.

How do these symmetries work? Symmetrical bandwidth means that the upload and download speeds are exactly the same. You’ll see this identified as 3 x 3 Mbps Ethernet or 100 x 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. The classic example of symmetrical bandwidth is the venerable T1 line. It offers a fixed 1.5 Mbps in the upload or transmit direction and 1.5 Mbps in the download or receive direction.

T1, DS3 and SONET are all symmetrical bandwidth services. The reason for this is historical. These are standards developed by the telephone companies to transport phone calls in bulk. The same bandwidth is needed for talk as well as listen on both ends. Ethernet over Fiber and Copper also tends to be symmetrical. It’s because these services were designed as replacements for T1, DS3 and SONET when used in business.

Asymmetrical bandwidth is characterized by differences in the upload and download speeds. This can be as much as an order of magnitude or 10x. You might order a service with 20 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload or 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload.

Asymmetrical bandwidth is dominant in consumer broadband services. These include DSL, Cable, 3G and 4G wireless, two-way satellite, WiFi hotspots and WiMAX. Why? It’s the nature of the Internet.

Most people browse the Web or download software and video while they are online. When you are doing these things, you are sending commands via your keyboard to the remotely located Web server. These commands are inherently low bandwidth and are based on text you type or links you click on. Neither of these has very many bytes of data involved. Downloads are another matter. Web pages, video clips and streams, music and other audio, software updates and large files are all bandwidth intensive because of their large file sizes. You want the maximum bandwidth available for downloads to minimize load times. You don’t need much bandwidth at all in the upload direction for the usual Web browsing.

What changes this picture? Any process that results in sending out large files as well as receiving them. Examples are remote backups, video conferencing, posting photos and movies online, and making large updates to Web servers. Most consumers do some of these things some of the time. Businesses are far more likely to be sending as much as they receive. But... not all.

If you are heavily involved in big data, cloud computing, enterprise VoIP, video production and distribution, medical image transmission or similar large file operations, you’ll want to opt for symmetrical bandwidth. Fast download speeds may not be so valuable when you wait forever to upload something or try to conduct an HD video conference.

Why pick asymmetrical bandwidth options? The primary reason is to save money. The asymmetrical services like Cable, DSL and 3G wireless are usually priced at a fraction of the cost for symmetrical services. This is generally due to more than symmetry. Asymmetrical services are most often shared rather than dedicated bandwidth. This reduces costs dramatically but means that your bandwidth will vary depending on what other users are doing. There are generally no service level agreements or performance guarantees on asymmetrical bandwidth services. That may be changing as business service providers begin offering dedicated asymmetrical bandwidth options.

What is the best bandwidth option for your business? Find out by comparing prices and features for a wide variety of asymmetrical and symmetrical bandwidth options on carriers serving your business location. Free consulting is also available to help you make the appropriate choice.

Finding The 100 Megabit Connection

Fractional Gigabit connections are becoming more and more common, as demands for video content delivery, electronic medical image transmission and cloud connections increase. A popular service level now is 100 Mbps, the 100 Megabit connection. Let’s have a look at what’s available to deliver this bandwidth level to you.

The legacy high performance telecom service at the 100 Mbps level is OC-3. This is a fiber optic bandwidth service delivered over SONET, the Synchronous Optical NETwork. OC-3 bandwidth is actually 155 Mbps. The next step higher is OC-12 at 622 Mbps and the previous step is DS3 at 45 Mbps. DS3 is often delivered over an OC-3 connection, multiplexed with other services.

SONET fiber optic services are popular because they were first to be deployed by the telecommunications carriers. The TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) technology is directly compatible with T-Carrier services such as T1 and T3. Many Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) and nationwide fiber optic backbones run on SONET rings that offer a redundant path with automatic failover. This protection scheme gives SONET a high reliability as well as very high bandwidth capability.

A newer competing fiber optic service is Carrier Ethernet. Unlike SONET which needs an interface card to do the protocol conversion between the telecom standard and network standard, Carrier Ethernet is directly compatible with the switched Ethernet running on your LAN. You know that 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet is a standard LAN speed. It is also a standard for Carrier Ethernet. With Fast Ethernet on both your LAN and WAN, there is no “speed” bump when files are transfered to other locations over the WAN connection.

Ethernet has its standard speed levels of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10,000 Mbps, but it is also highly scalable. If you want to move up or down the SONET digital hierarchy, the jumps between bandwidth levels are large. Ethernet can be set up to deliver just about any bandwidth level up to the maximum speed of the installed port. For instance, if you have a 100 Mbps Ethernet port installed, you can easily get 20, 50, 75 or 100 Mbps as well as other levels in-between. Increasing bandwidth is often no more difficult than placing a phone call to your service provider. The change can be made in as little as a few hours. That doesn’t work with SONET. The provider will need to roll a truck to replace the interface card in their edge router before you can use the higher speed.

If you expect to need higher bandwidths, it probably makes sense to have a 1 Gbps Ethernet port installed. You can start off at 100 or 200 Mbps and then scale-up as your bandwidth needs increase. The advantage of this is that you only have to pay for the bandwidth level that you are actually using. You retain the option to quickly increase bandwidth when justified by increased business activity or additional needs.

What if there are no fiber networks nearby? In rare instances, it is possible to get 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. Eight pairs of twisted copper telco wire are used to deliver Fast Ethernet to business locations very near the central offices that have EoC equipment installed. This is most often the case in business districts of large metropolitan areas.

Another high bandwidth service available downtown in major metro areas is 100 Mbps fixed wireless service. This is a licensed line-of-site point to point microwave system with a small antenna installed on your building. Like Ethernet over Copper, high bandwidth fixed wireless has limited transmission range. It can be very useful if it is too expensive to provision fiber optic service across a major highway or a river.

There’s another 100 Mbps service that is suitable for businesses that can use a shared bandwidth asymmetrical Internet service. You typically get 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload and your bandwidth varies constantly. Even so, for undemanding tasks like email, web browsing, downloading video clips or providing a free WiFi hotspot for your customers, Cable business broadband may be just the answer. The cost is similar to a T1 line, making this option very affordable for businesses of all sizes.

Are you in need of new 100 Mbps bandwidth service or just wanting to check prices for your business location? Please take a minute and get free instant online price quotes for 100 Mbps business bandwidth services.



Note: Photo of night traffic courtesy of Pekka Tamminen on Wikimedia Commons.

Pricing Slashed For Michigan 100 Mbps Business Internet

Businesses in Michigan, like businesses everywhere, are hurting for bandwidth. Between the increased use of video, business automation, and everything moving to the cloud, those aging T1 lines are starting to grind to a halt under the load. Bonded T1 will only take you so far. After that, it’s time to face an order of magnitude price jump to get into fiber optic services. Well, that’s how it was. Now there’s another option that offers fiber bandwidth at T1 prices. Is this for real?

Comcast Business Class 100 Mbps / 10 Mbps service is definitely for real and the answer to a profit squeezed company’s prayers. All of a sudden, that big constriction at the LAN/WAN interface is gone. Files move fast. Web pages pop before your eyes. Email? You could drown in all the email that can flood in at 100 Mbps.

So, how do you get OC-3 or Fast Ethernet bandwidth levels without the high cost of fiber? What you tap into is HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax. That’s the technical name for the finely tuned network that Comcast has deployed in their vast service area. There are two types of transport technologies that are welded together in HFC. Hence, the hybrid designation. The core of the network is a robust fiber optic backbone that is worthy of any major carrier. The access connections are coaxial copper cable. You know it as TV cable. What you may not realize is just how much bandwidth that coax connection supports.

Cable TV companies started using coaxial cable back when they were little more than enormous master antennas. The same coax that connects from your outdoor TV antenna to the back of your TV set can also bring in a much larger set of channels from your Cable company. Decades ago, it was all analog on Cable and over the air. Now it’s all digital. The RF spectrum on the cable is still channelized, with one digital TV station per slot. There are a lot of TV channels to choose from, but they don’t use all the possible channels that the cable can support. Some of those channels have been set aside for broadband or telephone services.

Besides the analog to digital transition, the other thing that’s changed with Cable operations is deployment of a fiber optic backbone to interconnect the multiple systems that the Cable operator owns and bring all the programming content into the neighborhood. This fiber network has far greater capacity than the old style large diameter coaxial distribution cable.

If fiber is so great, then why not run it directly to homes and businesses? Someday, that’s what will probably happen. Right now, the economics say no. Fiber termination equipment is expensive. Trenching a roll of plastic coated copper coax and connecting it to a wall outlet is cheap. With the ability to deliver television, broadband Internet access and telephone on that inexpensive little line, who wants to pony up for fiber?

You don’t or you’d already have installed SONET OC-3, OC-12, OC-48 or Ethernet over Fiber service for your business. Either the construction cost is a show stopper or the monthly lease fees are more than your budget can handle. Now you have another choice with Comcast’s 100 Mbps business broadband. It’s inexpensive and it can be installed quickly for any business that the Cable infrastructure passes.

What makes this service so affordable? For one thing, the cost of the network is spread over thousands of television and broadband customers. For another, this is not a true telecom service like SONET or Ethernet. Those services are symmetrical in that they have the same upload and download speeds. If you need 100 Mbps in both directions, Comcast’s offering won’t work for you. It’s specified at up to 100 Mbps download and up to 10 Mbps upload. That configuration is exactly what you need for general Internet access, where uploads are few and small but downloads are frequent and massive.

Also note that Cable is shared and not dedicated bandwidth. An OC-3 fiber connection gives you 155 Mbps all to yourself. Whatever you don’t use sits idle until you need it. You are sharing the Cable bandwidth availability with other users so that the network is always in use. This sharing also means that your bandwidth will vary throughout the day depending on what everyone is doing online. Does it matter? It may or may not, depending on how important it is to you to have that 100 Mbps at your disposal at all times.

Finally, there are no service level agreements like you have with T1 lines and the like. This is a “best effort” information service that is offered as-is. Even so, Comcast takes its network seriously and works to keep it as reliable as possible. If you’ve used home Cable broadband and been happy with the way it performed, then you’ll probably be happy with the bigger, faster Business Class service that gives all your employees a similar level of service while accessing the Internet on their desktop computers.

Are you a Michigan business owner or IT manager who’s anxious for high speed Internet access at a very affordable price? Check into prices and availability for 100 Mbps Internet options at your location. Note that Comcast and other fast Internet services are also available for locations other than Michigan.



Note: Photo of Detroit skyline courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

100 Mbps Internet for Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Your Building Fiber Lit For Free

There are some tremendous deals on fiber optic bandwidth these days. Many companies would dearly love to move up to Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps or even 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The one problem is that their building isn’t lit for fiber optic service yet. When they see the construction cost quote to bring in the fiber, the up-front cost is just too high in this economic environment. But, what if you could get your building fiber lit for free? Would that change your bandwidth plans?

It’s absolutely possible that you can upgrade to high speed fiber services without having to pay construction costs. The little known secret is that some competitive carriers see such an opportunity in the demand for higher bandwidth services that they are willing to put up money for construction costs themselves. One carrier is willing to build up to 1,500 feet of fiber if that’s what it takes to get you on their network.

Oh, but do you have to pay extra in monthly lease fees to get the free hookup? No way. In fact, you may be surprised at how much fiber lease costs have come down lately. If you haven’t gone out for quotes in a few years, you are dealing with pricing so obsolete that it’s a joke. You need to get a new set of competitive quotes right now.

Everything is pulling in the same direction now for fiber optic bandwidth. First, demand is increasing by leaps and bounds due to the increased use of video in business, including video conferencing. Business automation is making employees more productive than ever, but it comes with an increased need for bandwidth to connect to providers. Cloud services are adding additional pressure on WAN connections to provide response times similar to what you experience with a local data center.

We normally think that when something is in high demand, the price goes up not down. Just the opposite is happening in the network bandwidth market. Why? Increased demand has encouraged competitive carriers to build-out their regional, national and international fiber networks. Many have embraced new service options, such as MPLS networks and Carrier Ethernet. What every competitive carrier wants is more customers to connect to their massive core networks. That means getting more buildings on-net.

What on-net means is that your particular building is on the network of a particular fiber optic carrier. If you are on-net, that carrier has fiber strands coming into your building and terminating in equipment that the carrier provides. From there, they can connect you and other tenants in the building, if there are any, to whatever speed and format service you require.

Many carriers don’t want the aggravation of butting heads with competitors in the same building. Instead, they’ll try to find nearby buildings that aren’t already lit and get in there first. Once established, it’s easy for them to sell and keep customers. Fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited, so scaling services up and down is no trouble at all. Do you need to move up from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps? You might be able to make that happen in a matter of hours if you already have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed. Just call the carrier and tell them you want a speed increase. They can likely do that without having to change out any equipment at all.

It’s a real land-rush situation for competitive carriers, since something like 12% of business locations are already lit for fiber service. You are in the majority if you don’t already have fiber optic bandwidth. But if you are close enough to a carrier point of presence, you may be able to get those fiber services cheaper than you ever thought possible. Why not see what opportunities are available and then decide how much you can upgrade and still stay within your budget? Get instant online fiber optic prices for Carrier Ethernet from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps now. Other services will be quoted promptly, including construction costs if any. You may be in a better spot to get affordable fiber service than you ever thought possible.

100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper Rivals Fiber

Ethernet over Copper is rapidly taking over from T1 lines as the bandwidth service of choice for low to medium speed applications. Multiple copper pair can support bandwidths of 20 Mbps up to 50 Mbps in some locations. Beyond that, it’s assumed that fiber optic service has to be brought in. Not any more. Now there’s 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper available from Paetec.

Twisted pair copper has a legacy of connecting central offices to telephone sets for over a century. The enormous installed base of copper connections makes this an extremely valuable resource even in the era of digital communications and fiber optic cabling. The problem is that unshielded small gauge copper wire loops were engineered to carry low frequency audio signals up to several miles. It’s a tribute to clever engineering that these same pairs can be repurposed to carry high frequency digital signals.

Paetec is applying Ethernet over bonded Copper Products from Overture Networks as the technology behind this amazing bandwidth fete. Overture acquired the technology when it purchased Hatteras Networks earlier this year. Their HN product series can deliver up to 15 Mbps per copper pair depending on distance. By bonding up to 32 pairs, bandwidths approaching 500 Mbps can be achieved. Typically, the equipment is used to support user bandwidths from 10 to 100 Mbps.

Speeds in the hundreds of Mbps, even up to 1 Gbps, over copper have been announced in experimental setups. Now, you can order 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper as a standard bandwidth service. This is particularly significant in that 100 Mbps “Fast” Ethernet is a standard LAN speed. By extending this into the MAN and WAN, the bandwidth speed bump experienced when exiting the office is eliminated. Two locations can share files as if they were side by side in the same building.

Ethernet over Copper technology has been gaining in popularity as the need for higher speed network connections increases. Business automation, medical file transfers, video transport and the move to cloud based services is rendering low bandwidth connections obsolete. T1 line used to be considered a broadband service at 1.5 Mbps. Now many companies need at least 10 Mbps to get their jobs done. So, too, wireless backhaul was fine using T1 lines as long as the traffic was voice and low speed data. Since 3G and 4G have become so popular, slow backhaul is no longer acceptable.

Why not just switch to fiber optic service with it’s unlimited bandwidth? Someday that will be the case. Right now, ready fiber access is available in core business districts and colocation centers. Many metropolitan buildings remain unlit for fiber. Small and medium size towns are relatively fiber-poor. Yes, there is a lot of fiber construction underway. But why pay a king’s ransom and wait six months to a year when there are multi-pair copper cables already run into your building? By employing Ethernet over Copper technology to take full advantage of that existing wiring, you can have higher bandwidths now without enormous construction costs.

Can high speed copper-based bandwidth be the solution that works best for your company? Find out by getting availability and pricing for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet over Copper service for your business locations.

FastE Is The New DS3

Companies that have outgrown their T1 line capacity have traditionally moved up to DS3 bandwidth. Now there’s a faster and cheaper alternative available. It’s Fast Ethernet or FastE.

Even if you are unaware of Fast Ethernet as a Metro or Carrier bandwidth service, you are no doubt familiar with the term. Fast Ethernet is the name given to 100 Mbps Ethernet. It is one of the standard LAN speeds, along with 10 Mbps Ethernet and 1,000 Mbps Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet. The abbreviation for Gigabit Ethernet is GigE. The next step up is 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 10 GigE.

Nearly all network devices, including PCs, printers, Ethernet switches, routers and servers have NICs (Network Interface Cards) that support Fast Ethernet. In fact, many smaller business LANs run at the Fast Ethernet speed of 100 Mbps. So, why do our WAN (Wide Area Network) connections run at some lower speed?

One reason is cost. WAN network services have tended to be seen as expensive. Part of that is because these are leased line services that are billed by the month, every month. LAN networks have a capital cost of purchase and installation. After that, most smaller networks need relatively little maintenance.

Another reason why we use lower bandwidths on the WAN than the LAN is usage. Most traffic within a company network stays on the LAN. A lot of it is between PCs & servers and for interoffice file transfers. Traffic that leaves the building is mostly Internet access for both websites and email. Companies with multiple business locations often have dedicated lines between them or use an MPLS network to interconnect 3 or more locations. These links get higher traffic, because they are functioning as in-house LAN connections.

A couple of forces are at work to change this situation. First of all, WAN bandwidth is going up simply because files are larger and video is becoming used more in business. A much larger effect is the move from in-house IT services to hosted services, including cloud services. This effectively moves the bulk of the traffic from LAN to WAN. Line speeds have to increase to accommodate this traffic increase, or access will slow to a crawl. Slow access spells lowered productivity in any business process.

Medium and larger companies outgrew their T1 lines long ago. Their upgrade path has been to T3 service, more popularly known as DS3. With DS3, you get 45 Mbps of bandwidth versus 1.5 Mbps over a T1 line. Your lease costs also goes up from hundreds to thousands of dollars a month.

DS3 has been essential for video streaming, ecommerce, large office Internet access, medical image transmissions and other bandwidth intensive operations. As a digital telecom service it has been readily available with costs that have come down over the years. So why not stick with DS3?

The reason, as usual, involves cost and bandwidth. The competing service is now Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps vs DS3’s 45 Mbps. That’s over twice the bandwidth, but not twice the cost. In fact, you may well be able to get FastE for the same or less than you are paying for a DS3 connection. Consider that Fast Ethernet more closely mirrors the protocol run on the LAN and that both DS3 and FastE are delivered over fiber optic lines, and it’s hard to see why sticking with DS3 makes good business sense.

The one reason that DS3 may still be the right service for your company is that Carrier Ethernet services have not been deployed everywhere just yet. However, competitive carriers are aggressively building out their metro fiber networks and vying for business customers with lowered bandwidth prices.

Are you a DS3 user interested in getting more money for your bandwidth dollar? Or, do you need new installation of high speed line services and want to make sure you are getting the best deal? If so, check out Fast Ethernet vs DS3 pricing and availability now. Once you have the competitive options, you can choose what type and level of service makes the most sense for your operation.

100 Mbps Colocation Center Bandwidth

Companies often look to colocation as a way to avoid the capital and operating expense of running their own data centers. There is also another important incentive to go the colocation route. It’s high bandwidth availability at lower costs.

A colocation center, or colo, is a facility that serves the data center needs of many businesses. Each server farm requires the servers themselves, networking switches, routers and appliances, equipment racks, rack wiring, electrical power, cooling air, and connectivity. Plus you’ll need physical security, fire suppression and a staff to monitor operations and take corrective action 24/7. You can provide all of this in-house or get it at a colocation center.

What makes a colo center cost effective is economy of scale. Instead of each customer having to maintain their own backup generators and fire suppression systems that are rarely used, the colocation facility has much larger units that serve all customers. The costs don’t scale linearly. The incremental cost of adding another user to the facility is pretty low and the facility cost spread over all users is less than what you can do on your own.

The somewhat hidden secret of colocation centers is that they have bandwidth available that you may not be able to afford on your own. A common connection is 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. You know that it’s no great shakes to connect a 100 Mbps Ethernet node to your own LAN. Getting a 100 Mbps connection beyond your property line may be anywhere from expensive to impossible. At 100 Mbps, you are beyond the capability of twisted pair services such as EoC or T1/E1 lines. You’ll need fiber optic cabling brought into your building and lit for SONET/SDH or Metro Ethernet service.

Why is there such a difference in price between 100 Mbps bandwidth provided in a colocation center and the same level of service delivered to your facility? One big reason is construction costs. Downtown in a major metropolitan area there may be many fiber facilities in your office building or nearby. If you order a significant amount of bandwidth you might not even be charged construction costs. But move a bit off the beaten fiber path and those charges go up dramatically. If you are located in a smaller town, industrial park or rural area you can be looking at tens of thousands of dollars or more to trench fiber optic cable from the nearest carrier point of presence.

The other reason for bargain prices at colocation facilities is competition. Once again, depending on population density and popularity of high bandwidth network services, you might find yourself with only one carrier serving your location. Your negotiating ability is pretty limited without competition. Colocation centers, however, are carrier magnets. Service providers know that there are dozens or hundreds of customers in a single building who all need their services. It’s no wonder they all set up points of presence within the colo. Often, there is a “meet me room” where carriers and customers are connected.

The combination of having several or more eager carriers vying for your business combined with the trivial construction costs of running a drop to your equipment racks is what makes it easy and relatively inexpensive to get all the bandwidth you want in a colocation center. Can you say the same for where you are now? There’s an easy way to find out. Simply request bandwidth availability and pricing for both your location and a nearby colocation facility.



Note: Photo of server rack wiring courtesy of Guillaume Paumier on Wikipedia Commons

Diverse Connections For Data Centers

When you are running a data center or collocating your servers in a colo data center, the reliability of the data connection is critical to the availability of your services. Any one single piece of equipment and any one data line can fail. To ensure that no link failure will take you down, you need more than just several separate network connections. You need multiple diverse data connections.

The difference between multiple connections and multiple diverse connections is in where those connections go to. If you simply have 3 Fast Ethernet or OC3 links to a single service provider, you’ve only gained a small amount of protection. Especially within the colo facility, it’s relatively unlikely that only the network cable for a particular feed or the interface circuits on both ends will fail. It’s more likely that something more catastrophic will take down the entire connection with that provider.

If you are in your own facility, you’ve got the same concern only multiplied. A service provider within a colocation facility probably has multiple incoming connections. The line that comes to your building is likely a single connection that runs for miles underground or overhead. There’s lots of opportunity for a natural disaster or someone doing construction to break that line or multi-pair bundle.

So how do you protect your interests for services that absolutely can’t afford to go down even for a few hours? In addition to the usual server redundancies, you need to get multiple data line services from different providers coming in on different routes. It does you no good to contract with three separate vendors only to find that they are all bundled in the same copper or fiber optic cable. In fact, you don’t even want them sharing the same trench or poles, if at all possible. The ideal situation is to be fed by unrelated suppliers coming from different geographical directions. The only place they’ll be in proximity is within your facility.

This requirement is common for large colocation data centers that host hundreds or thousands of companies. Within the colo center, you can typically order service from several carriers who will individually provide lines to your racks. For your own facilities, you’ll need to do your homework to ensure that your are, indeed, getting diverse data connections.

Sounds like a lot of work to find and evaluate multiple providers who will serve your business location, doesn’t it? Fortunately, there’s help available from a telecommunications service broker who routinely works with dozens of service providers offering everything from point of sale wireless data connections, through the popular T1 lines and DS3 connections, on up to OC3 and above SONET fiber optic services and Ethernet at the GigE and 10GigE levels. You can save yourself a lot of grief and a lot of time by letting the broker work with the available carriers to meet your requirements. What’s that extra service going to cost you? Nothing. Nothing, at all.

Seems to only make sense to get some complementary expert consulting help with your critical infrastructure projects. Call the toll free number or put in an online inquiry now and you’ll be getting the support you need almost immediately.

Fast Ethernet as a DS3 Upgrade

Companies that have outgrown their T1 lines have traditionally migrated to DS3 service at 45 Mbps. This high bandwidth digital connection is generally provided over a SONET fiber optic circuit, with last mile connectivity installed and maintained by the incumbent telco. DS3 is fast, highly reliable, and less expensive than ever. But now it has a competitor - Fast Ethernet.

Fast Ethernet is one of the standard Ethernet LAN speeds at 100 Mbps. But Ethernet LAN has now been extended to Ethernet WAN thanks to Carrier Ethernet technology. Carrier Ethernet, known at Metro Ethernet within metropolitan areas, takes your local network and transports it across town or across the country. This service can be configured for point to point data connections, multipoint networks to link multiple sites, or as a high speed connection to the Internet.

Carrier Ethernet comes in a variety of line speeds, but the one's usually mentioned are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps to mirror standard LAN speeds. The 1000 Mbps level is also referred to as Gigabit Ethernet or GigE.

So, why trade in your DS3 connection for an Ethernet connection? Speed might be a consideration, since 100 Mbps FAST Ethernet is more than twice as fast as DS3. But once you have fiber optic service you can probably also upgrade to OC3 at 155 Mbps. Both SONET and Ethernet can also likely transport your traffic with the proper router interfaces. The real difference, and the reason you may be hearing a lot about Carrier Ethernet, is the cost of the service.

Let's take a look at the two competing technologies and their current market prices per the information provided by Shop For Ethernet, a service of Telarus, Inc. This major telecom broker sells both services and will gladly hook you up to whichever connection you prefer. But what they're saying is that, as of this writing, you'll generally enjoy a major cost savings if you choose Ethernet. A typical DS3 connection costs an average of $5,000 a month. A Fast Ethernet connection now runs $3,000 a month.

To make the comparison even more realistic, you need to factor in the bandwidth difference as well as the monthly lease price. Doing so results in a figure of $111.11 per Mbps for DS3 and $30 per Mbps for Fast Ethernet. That's over a 3x cost advantage, pushing 4x. If either service will meet your needs, which would you rather order?

Note that these numbers are representative averages taken at a snapshot in time. Your cost may be higher or lower for either service depending on how much infrastructure is built up where you are located. How can you get a current quote for your location? That's easy. Just use this handy GeoQuote (tm) Ethernet search tool. Go ahead, you may be astonished by how much your business could be saving.