Ethernet over Copper FAQ - Part 3

Ethernet over Copper FAQ - Part 3

Ethernet over Copper bandwidth service may well be the perfect solution to your business needs. Here are some additional FAQs that might help answer some of the questions you may have about this relatively new technology.

Q: Can Ethernet over Copper be used for business telephone?

A: While EoC is not a direct replacement for traditional analog or ISDN PRI telephone lines, it can be a cost effective upgrade and offer increased call capacity. Ethernet over Copper easily supports VoIP and SIP Trunking because it is a packet rather than channel based line service. EoC offers low jitter, latency and packet loss to preserve voice quality. Many of today’s PBX systems now interface to SIP trunks as well as ISDN PRI to provide multiple outside phone lines at a cost savings. This gives you a wide choice of telephone line options.

Q: Does EoC work for video conferencing?

A: Ethernet over Copper is a good solution for video conferencing because it offers higher bandwidths needed for today’s high definition real-time video along with symmetrical bandwidth that provides the same speed in both directions. EoC also works well for downloading or streaming video.

Q: How does EoC support cloud services?

A: Cloud services over the Internet and by direct connection need higher bandwidth levels, symmetrical bandwidth and low latency. EoC is a dedicated business grade service that supports the cloud communication needs of small and medium size organizations. Larger companies will want Ethernet over FIber to provide the necessary bandwidth to support the productivity of many employees

Q: What is Fast Ethernet over Copper?

A: Fast Ethernet over Copper or FastE is a 100 Mbps dedicated symmetrical bandwidth service that supports the maximum speed of many network devices. FastE is now suitable for even smaller companies that have moved their IT infrastructure to the cloud. While some companies have Fast Ethernet MAN and WAN service brought in on multiple copper pair, Fast Ethernet over fiber optic link is a more popular way to get bandwidths of 100 Mbps or more.

Q: What is a combination copper-fiber solution?

A: Copper and fiber can combine to give you a reasonable bandwidth level quickly while you wait for the higher bandwidth fiber provides but isn’t immediately available. How it works is that you order both a copper and fiber solution from one provider who agrees to cancel the copper contract at no penalty as soon as the fiber is up and running.

Q: When does Ethernet over MPLS make sense?

A: The beauty of MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks is that they can transport nearly any protocol of traffic. In fact, they routinely transport multiple protocols without any customer being aware that other customers are also using the network. Ethernet over MPLS often has cost savings benefits, especially over nationwide and international distances. With Ethernet Virtual Private LAN service, you can connect a dozen or hundreds of business sites around the world as if they were on the same corporate LAN.

Are you ready to improve your company’s connectivity or get the same performance you have now at a lower price? If so, you should check availability and pricing for Ethernet over Copper services suitable for your commercial location.


You may also be interested in reading Ethernet over Copper FAQ (Part 1) and Ethernet over Copper FAQ (Part 2).

FastE Fiber as MetroE for Business Ethernet Service

Business bandwidth demands are not only rising, but rising fast. What’s a good solution for fast data transfer? Fast Ethernet is an excellent option. It is readily available and affordable over fiber optic connections nationwide. Let’s take a closer look at how FastE works and how it fits into your bandwidth strategy.

Chances are that you’ve been using Fast Ethernet or FastE for years on your own network. Fast Ethernet is another name for 100 Mbps Ethernet. Standard Ethernet is 10 Mbps, Fast Ethernet is 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet is 1,000 Mbps. Network Interface Cards (NICs) in every device with an Ethernet jack, also called a port, support one or more of these Ethernet speeds. For instance, a 10/100 port supports Ethernet communications at 10 Mbps and also 100 Mbps. A 10/100/1000 port includes 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Gbps.

Nearly every computer, switch, router, modem, firewall, printer, NAS (Network Attached Storage) Disk and other network device supports 10/100 Ethernet. The 10/100/1000 spec is becoming more and more prevalent. In both cases, these devices support Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps.

So, what doesn’t support Fast Ethernet communication? Many MAN and WAN connections come nowhere close. Clearly computer technology has accelerated faster than communications technology. Actually, support for 100 Mbps communication over long distances has been available for a long time. It’s just that you needed special interfacing and the cost was beyond what most businesses were willing to pay.

High priced proprietary data communications are a legacy of the telephone industry. Nearly every company has ordered a DSL or T1 line to be able to communicate between business locations and connect to the public Internet. The cost of those lines has fallen dramatically in recent years. Even so, the limited bandwidth is starting to become an uncomfortable constraint on even smaller operations.

What’s changed the game recently is the introduction of Carrier Ethernet services. Carrier means that you lease these lines from a service provider, a carrier, rather than stringing the wires yourself. Any connection that goes beyond your property is handled by carriers. At one time the only carrier available was the local telephone company. Deregulation has allowed other service providers, called competitive carriers, to enter the marketplace and compete on technology and price.

Carrier Ethernet is one of those competitive services, although you’ll now find it offered by incumbent as well as competitive carriers. What’s allowed Carrier Ethernet to grow by leaps and bounds is standardization by an industry group called the MEF or Metro Ethernet Forum. Any provider that meets the MEF standards will be compatible with Carrier Ethernet equipment and interconnection with other provider networks.

Fast Ethernet is one of the Carrier Ethernet services you can order in both metropolitan and long haul connections. These are known as MAN or Metropolitan Area Networks and WAN or Wide Area Networks. The difference is really one of scale. The MAN serves a local geographical area that includes a city and surrounding suburbs. The WAN joins cities and may cross state and national borders. International WANs use undersea fiber to link far-flung destinations worldwide.

Metro networks based on Ethernet rather than the older SONET technology are sometimes referred to as MEN or Metro Ethernet Networks. You’ll hear them referred to as MetroE networks. These networks are almost always based on fiber optic rather than copper lines. Increasingly, so are the connections to the network. It’s fiber all the way for FastE and above.

What kind of connection can you make to a MetroE network. One of the most popular is the Fast Ethernet or FastE connection at 100 Mbps. Another popular service level is GigE at 1000 Mbps. What’s just emerging now as a business service level is 10 GigE at 10000 Mbps or 10 Gbps.

Going Ethernet all the way through your network, across the metro or wide area networks and to another LAN at the far end, has some real benefits. The interface is trivially easy. Your handoff from the carrier is a standard fiber or copper Ethernet jack. You’ll also be able to order both point to point connections called E-Line and meshed multi-location connections called E-LAN. Don’t think that you are stuck with only the standard Ethernet speeds either. You can generally get many increments between 10, 100, 1000 and 10000 Mbps.

The biggest advantage of all is cost savings. You’ll pay far less per Mbps for Ethernet than other services. The difference is sometimes half as much for Ethernet as SONET or other telecom services. This easily allows you to afford the bandwidth you really need for today’s communication-intensive applications such as cloud services.

Is your business bandwidth constrained? No need to be stuck at low copper technology speeds when fiber connections to high bandwidth metro and wide area networks are available and affordable. Check now for bandwidth services and prices available for your business location.

Shopping For High Speed Options

Business broadband isn’t what it used to be. Years ago you had the choice of an expensive T1 line, a very expensive DS3 connection or a very, very expensive SONET fiber optic service. Right now those very services are a lot more affordable than they’ve ever been. What’s more, a number of other competing bandwidth options have come the market to serve business rather than residential customers. If you haven’t shopped for high speed options in a while, I’ll bet you will by the time you see what’s available. If you’d like to get right to it, check high speed bandwidth pricing and availability right now.

Let’s see what’s happened to T1 over the years. T1 for dedicated Internet access is now available just about anywhere you can get a phone line installed. The pricing has dropped from well over $1,000 to somewhere in the $300 range for most locations. Those off the beaten path will cost more, but nothing like they used to. If 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough, you can generally bond T1 lines together to get 3 Mbps or higher.

For the same price as a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps, you may also be able to get a newer service called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. The difference is that EoC will give you 2 or 3 Mbps for that price. Companies now are switching from T1 to EoC as a way to increase their Internet access bandwidth while keeping their broadband budget the same. Once the switch is made, it is much easier and less expensive to continue increasing bandwidth to 5, 10, 15, 20 and higher Mbps levels. The growth path for T1 is bonded T1 followed by DS3, which is a serious jump in both speed and cost to get to 45 Mbps.

What else can you get for your T1 line budget? Smaller retail stores that have traditionally relied on large and pricey satellite systems are turning to 3G fixed wireless at about 1 Mbps. That’s not much different than T1 bandwidth for about half the price. Like T1, 3G is available for nearly all business locations. Is works very well for Point of Sale (POS) transactions as well as general Internet access. A higher speed service, 4G fixed wireless, is starting to be deployed now and is a logical growth path from 3G.

How would you like a lot of bandwidth, say 100 Mbps, for that T1 price? That’s not impossible anymore. It’s the result of Cable business broadband that’s delivered over a standard Cable TV coaxial copper line. This is a shared bandwidth service that is very similar to home broadband but designed to meet the needs of business, including such things as static IPs if needed. A very popular service is 100 Mbps download, 10 Mbps upload. You need to have the cable passing your business to be hooked up, but if that’s the case you can get a lot of speed for your bandwidth dollar.

What happens if you need even higher speeds with dedicated access, very low latency, service level agreements and other features? The traditional approach is to move on up to SONET / SDH fiber optic service, starting with OC-3 at 155 Mbps. A less expensive competing service is now Ethernet over Fiber or EoF. The popular entry level is 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet that matches the speed of many Local Area Networks. FastE, as it is called, is an almost direct replacement for OC-3 even though the bandwidth is lower. Many times OC-3 was installed because DS3 at 45 Mbps was too little and 155 Mbps was way more than enough.

Like Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber is easily scaled up as requirements expand. You can work your way up to 250 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 750 Mbps and 1 Gbps or Gigabit Ethernet. There are often more intermediate bandwidth steps in-between these levels. With SONET, your choices are OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. Ethernet over Fiber goes up to 10 Gbps to match OC-192 that is also 10 Gbps.

How much bandwidth do you need now and what sort of budget do you need to meet? Save yourself the time and trouble of chasing all over to get pricing from multiple vendors. The GeoQuote broker pricing engine will give you instant competitive prices for bandwidth services up to 1 Gbps, with other services quoted by experienced bandwidth experts and sent to you via email or over the phone. If you haven’t gotten pricing lately, be ready for a shock... and a pleasant shock indeed.



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

Ethernet and Colocation For Texas Business

The Lone Star State is a land of big spaces, big business, big data and the need for big bandwidth. Alpheus is a carrier with both Texas roots and a focus on the needs of Texas business. Let’s take a look at the services they offer to meet the needs of companies in banking & finance, energy, government, healthcare, information technology, legal and media sectors, among others.

With a Network Operations Center (NOC) in Houston, the Alpheus fiber optic network connects major cities in Texas. Their Texas regional network connects to Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Bryan, Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, McAllen, Harlingen, Corpus Christi, Victoria and Houston. Core network reliability exceeds 99.999% or “five nines,” the gold standard for telecommunications.

Alpheus serves both enterprises and carriers within their Texas footprint. Network services include Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Metro Ethernet, Private Line and Managed Wavelength. One of the newer services is Ethernet-Over-Local-Area-Network (E-LAN). This is a Carrier Ethernet service standardized by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) and used to bridge multiple local area networks so that they act as one much larger network.

If you’ve been trying to tie business locations together with traditional telecom services, you know that there is a transition between your network edge and the telco providers network. Usually this means a protocol conversion and specialized interface hardware. What E-LAN does is eliminate that transition by keeping everything in the Ethernet protocol from end to end. A simpler service called Ethernet Line or E-LINE provides a dedicated point to point Ethernet connection between two locations as a replacement for private line services such as T1, DS3 and OC3.

Alpheus Carrier Solutions include Metro transport with rates ranging from DS-1 (1.5 Mbps) to OC-192 (10 Gbps), Texas Long Haul for connecting from Texas Metro markets to virtually anywhere in North America at the same speeds as Metro Transport, Metrolocity Peering to cross-connect with other service providers with bandwidth speeds from DS-1 to OC-12 (622 Mbps), Ethernet services to 10 Gbps, and 2.5 Gbps managed wavelengths. Ethernet interfaces include 10/100 Mbps FastE, 1000 Mbps GigE and 10 Gbps Ethernet. Scalability is flexible from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps to match user requirements.

Alpheus Waves and Gigabit Ethernet services offer 3 levels of protection. Load sharing consists of two interfaces with two physically diverse unprotected connections. Your provide the protection switching. Network protection is configured to protect against network outages but not client issues. Unprotected services are just that. There is no network or client protection.

Alpheus operates four Data Centers with colocation services available. These are 777 Walker (2 Shell Plaza) in Houston, 1905 E. 6th Street in Austin, 2323 Bryan in Dallas and 307 & 309 West 7th St. in Fort Worth. The Austin and Houston data centers are SAS 70 Type II Audio Certified for critical operations that need to meet that requirement.

Colocation solutions include full and half cabinets, private cages, relay racks, flexible power configurations and the Alpheus Tier 1 regional fiber optic network with connections to over 75 carriers. “Remote Hands” service is a way to let Alpheus engineers perform simple troubleshooting and maintenance tasks, plus lend a hand when emergencies pop up. Remote Hands include server & equipment reboot, equipment and card testing, secure cabling connections and removal of customer equipment.

Is your business located in Texas and in need of connectivity or colocation services? There are excellent options available to you for a simple inquiry. Get competitive quotes from Alpheus and other top tier carriers for bandwidth services and equipment colocation and see what works best for your situation.



Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

Finding Fiber Lit Buildings

If you are looking for high levels of bandwidth at reasonable prices, the place you need to be is in a “lit” building. Let’s take a look at what makes a building “lit” and why that’s important.

The lighting we’re talking about with a lit building is laser light. It’s not lighting the building itself, but only the fiber optic strands that run through it. A building is said to be lit if there is fiber optic bandwidth service installed and running.

As you may suspect by now, if there is fiber optic service to the building and you own or are renting space in that building, you can almost certainly get fiber optic bandwidth services installed for your needs. Granted, there can be construction costs if only one tenant has fiber service and there is no cabling running to other rooms. That’s usually a solvable problem at a reasonable cost.

There’s a much bigger problem if nobody in the building has contracted for fiber optic bandwidth. Chances are, fiber cabling was never pulled into the building during construction or as part of any upgrades. Who knows where the nearest fiber even exists? It could be in the building next door or it could be ten miles away. If you are in the business district of a major city you probably aren’t far from the nearest fiber connection. Out in the boonies it’s much less likely that there is anything reasonably close. Oh, there may be long haul fiber conduit right under your feet. Those don’t count. You need to be near a termination point so you can hook into the fiber optic service.

Actually, there is now a quick and easy way to find fiber lit buildings in your area. It’s a Shop for Ethernet GeoQuote tool that maps out fiber point of presence in a given area. All you do is enter the address of your building and you’ll get both a map and the distances to the nearest lit buildings and the bandwidth capability at those locations. If you like, you can then put in a request for detailed pricing to support your applications.

The biggest variable in getting high bandwidth Ethernet line service is the cost of construction to install the fiber optic connection. This may be quoted to you as a non-recurring cost or it may be waived by the carrier depending on how close you are to where their fiber service is already installed. If it’s right next door, you could luck out and not have to pay anything. If it is miles down the road, the construction cost may be more than either you or the carrier wants to pay.

You can make your building more attractive to the carriers if there are multiple tenants all willing to commit to fiber optic service. By pooling your bandwidth requirements, the carrier will view your situation as a much bigger opportunity and be willing to kick in more of the construction costs than they might for just one user.

What if you are still too far away to make fiber construction practical? You’re not out of luck by any means. You will certainly qualify for bonded T1 service that can give you up to 10 Mbps. You may also qualify for Ethernet over Copper that can easily take that up to 20 Mbps and perhaps higher. Other services that might be available are Ethernet over Hybrid Fiber Cable and Ethernet over Fixed Wireless. Cable is the same type of cable that delivers Cable TV and can also provide 50 to 100 Mbps of business bandwidth. Fixed wireless systems can beam up to 45 Mbps to a terminal box mounted on the roof of your building.

Don’t count yourself out for increased bandwidth at reasonable prices until you get a complete set of prices and availability quotes for business bandwidth options. This is a highly competitive business, with new services becoming available all the time.

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.

FastE and GigE WAN Connections

The need for business bandwidth is growing, but corporate budgets are not. So, does that mean that businesses will be stifled for throughput and perhaps lose customers to slow performing ecommerce websites?

No. There’s a telecom bandwidth solution available that can give you the extra network performance you need to keep up with productivity and customer satisfaction demands. That solution is Ethernet.

Standard Ethernet connections at 10 Mbps are readily available over both copper and fiber optic cable. But higher speeds are also available. These are Fast Ethernet or FastE at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE at 1000 Mbps. You’ll notice that these line speeds exactly match the common LAN speeds of 10/100/1000 Mbps. Yes, you can get WAN connections to match your LAN speed so that your network performance is consistent regardless of whether packets are traveling in-house or across the country.

In rare cases, it may be possible to provision FastE service over bonded copper pair. But that only works if you happen to be very close to the carrier POP or Point of Presence. The usual way that FastE and GigE service are brought into the building is by fiber cable. If you already have a fiber connection, you may find that you’ll save considerable cost by switching your WAN service over to Ethernet.

If your building isn’t yet “lit” for fiber, it may still be possible to have fiber brought in at little or no construction cost. It all depends on the bandwidth demand. For instance, if you happen to be in a large office building with many business offices that could benefit from higher bandwidth options than the T1 lines that they typically have now, a carrier might be interested in lighting that building to get the ongoing bandwidth business. The same is true of industrial parks where modern manufacturing and warehousing businesses need high speed connectivity. Don’t automatically write off high bandwidth services just because you don’t have them now. Telecom carriers have gotten very competitive and may well want to enable you to get their higher performance services.

What can Ethernet connections do better than conventional telecom services? First, there is improved network performance because the protocol is Ethernet from end to end. There’s no need to convert between Ethernet and other protocols and suffer the inefficiencies that come from that process. The interface is trivially easy. It’s the same RJ-45 connector that you use for all your network connections now. You can get Ethernet for point to point connections or multi-point to multi-point to connection your far flung business sites. Dedicated Internet is also available.

By far, the most popular reason to switch to Carrier Ethernet services is the cost savings. You may find that you’ll spend half the cost or less per Mbps when you switch over to Ethernet. Sound interesting? Explore the FastE and GigE WAN connection options available for your location.