How Fiber Future-Proofs Your Business

By: John Shepler

Chances are that connectivity is not just another expense item in your business. It is critical to your being in business and for your employee productivity. What you need is solid, reliable, fast, low latency and uncongested network connections to the Internet, cloud services, and your other business locations. This is the time to ensure you have it now and in the future.

What You Are Looking For Is Fiber
Telecommunications, the genesis of computer to computer connections, was historically built on twisted pair copper wiring. That era is essentially over. The remaining T1 lines and DS3 coax are relics of an earlier day and will soon be moved to the recycling bin. Not only have they been eclipsed in bandwidth, but the infrastructure buildouts now are based on multi-strand fiber optic cables.

Fiber historically has been expensive and rare. That changed with the introduction of Ethernet over Fiber or EOF services directly compatible with today’s most popular computer networks. Fiber optic Ethernet has the widest availability of bandwidths and the lowest cost per Mbps or Gbps. In many areas, fiber is available to just about every business location and in others it soon will be. As you drive down the road you can see crews installing underground fiber conduits in both business and residential areas.

Where Do You Want to Connect?
The most popular connections are to the public Internet. This is a must if you are going to communicate with customers and suppliers. You can also use the Internet to connect to cloud services and link multiple business locations. The beauty of the Internet is that it is already built-out to connect just about everyone, everywhere. This makes worldwide connections fast and inexpensive.

While the Internet itself is a shared network that doesn’t favor one user over another, you can improve your company’s connection by using dedicated instead of shared access. A DIA or Dedicated Internet Access line is a private connection between your business and your Internet Service Provider. It lets you avoid the congestion that can occur when you are sharing access locally with many other business and consumer users.

Dedicated Cloud On-Ramps
Productivity is key to any business. If a key element to your productivity is provided by cloud services, you may be plagued with varying slowdowns and even dropouts caused by a congested Internet not able to keep up with the massive flow of data between you and your cloud provider. The solution is a direct line between your network and your cloud service provider. This is called a cloud connection or cloud on-ramp. It shields you from competition for bandwidth from other users. Such a dedicated leased line can make the cloud server perform like it is right down the hall.

Multiple Locations on the Same Network
Within your building, you have complete control of your LAN that connects terminals, PCs, printers, storage and so on. With multiple locations, you need some way to connect their networks, since they can’t all be on the same LAN… or can they? Dedicated fiber optic bandwidth can go a long way to creating the perception that all of your users, and perhaps some customers and suppliers, are on the same network with the same performance. This is usually done with a central hub and separate links to each location. For vastly separated locations, you can also achieve similar performance with a dedicated link to a MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network that provides regional, national or international coverage.

How Fast is Fast?
While single Megabits per second was once considered speedy, It doesn’t cut it for most uses today. Even consumers are demanding 300 Mbps, 600 Mbps or even 1 Gbps or more for their Web access and video streaming. Businesses, especially those with cloud services, must have at least this much. Entry level connections of 1 Gbps are now common. As demands increase or business size expands, 10 Gbps is a readily available and affordable service level. Once core network speeds of 100 Gbps are now being offered to businesses in metro areas and will soon be universally available.

How is this possible? Fiber optic strands have nearly unlimited bandwidth capacity. The limitation is often defined by the equipment powering, switching and terminating the strands. Wavelength division multiplexing divides one strand into a dozen or a hundred separate high bandwidth connections. Each cable may have a dozen to a hundred separate fiber strands.

How much low latency high performance bandwidth do you need? You may be surprised to find how much costs have come down the last few years. See now the availability and pricing for fiber optic connections that can grow with your business.

Connectivity for Telemedicine and Remote Work

By: John Shepler

The sudden onset of the Coronavirus pandemic is accelerating a couple of trends that were already in progress. One is telemedicine. The other is remote work. Both have a common critical path, which is broadband Internet bandwidth. Let’s look at what’s available to get connected.

Connecting the User
Most remote workers and patients accessing telemedicine will be connecting at home, perhaps using a desktop PC or Mac, or on the move through their smartphones, laptops and tablets. The most popular option at home is cable broadband, with bandwidths of 30 to 100 Mbps. Remotely, the most popular options are public WiFi and 4G & 5G cellular broadband.

The individual user who is an employee or patient seldom has the budget for business grade connections such as private lines, fiber optic bandwidth or point to point microwave. Their connection is to the Internet through whatever last mile connection they can afford. That’s almost always a cable or cellular connection which is shared bandwidth and asymmetric, with download speed perhaps 10x upload speed.

These connections generally work fine for remote log-in, video chat and website access. They’re pretty reliable and budget friendly.

Special Cases
Certain medical equipment doesn’t work well over home Internet. The patient may need a classic analog landline (yes, even today) or built-in proprietary wireless access.

A business needing higher performance than consumer broadband offers may have to pay the cost of a dedicated leased line. This might be a T1 line, Ethernet over Copper, or Fiber to the Premises, if available. Dedicated Internet Access generally offers a performance improvement over shared consumer broadband first-mile connections. You also have the option of setting up a dedicated private line, although higher bandwidths are often not available to consumers.

If broadcast quality live video is required, you may need to set up a small remote studio near your talent. A Metro Ethernet private line will support the quality you need to avoid the distorted audio and video glitches common with consumer Internet video chat services.

Business Bandwidth Options

If you are the provider rather than the user, your connectivity needs are likely more demanding. As the company or medical organization you will probably be supporting more than one simultaneous employee or patient. That could be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of users connecting into your central system, which might be cloud-based.

There are two types of connectivity you’ll want to consider. First is connection to those outside users, mostly likely through Internet broadband. Second is connections within your own organization. Your internal connectivity will be by Local Area Network and either Metropolitan or Wide Area Networking to include more than one business location. You may also want a dedicated high bandwidth cloud connection to make your cloud applications perform as if they were hosted in a local data center.

You’ll need enough Internet bandwidth to support the maximum number of simultaneous users that will commonly be connected, plus some surge ability to support additional users when things get busy. A dedicated broadband Internet connection using scalable Ethernet over Fiber bandwidth can handle heavy demands. Gigabit and 10 Gig E services are readily available.

Within the organization, you may wish to stay off the Internet both for higher performance and better security. Point to Point dedicated private lines can be nearly transparent to your network. If multiple locations are involved scattered over a wide geographical area, an MPLS network can save cost while still preserving high performance and excellent security.

The performance of the last-mile Internet connection can also be improved by using an SD-WAN connection. SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Network combines several types of Internet connections, including wired, fiber optic and wireless. The SD-WAN software constantly monitors the various connections and chooses the most appropriate for each packet. This helps ensure that more demanding applications have priority over activities that can be run in the background.

Is your company planning or already engaged in remote work or telemedicine? If so, we can help you find the right type of connectivity at the best price.

How to Get Stable Upload and Download Speeds

By: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedicated Connections for Solid Bandwidth

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

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

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

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

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