Why Business Needs Unified Communications

By: John Shepler

Time was when there was only one method of electronic communication. It was that heavy black phone on your desk. Now look what we have. Sure, there’s still a black phone on your desk, but it’s a lot lighter thanks to modern plastics and solid state electronics. There’s also a raft of other ways we communicate electronically. How many of these do you use: email, text messages, mobile phone calls and video chats? How about the platforms: desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones and soon… a watch?

One of the biggest communications issues, especially in business, is that all these different platforms and applications don’t necessarily play together well. One solution is to just make sure you have them all with you. That used to mean a pager on the belt, a cell phone in the pocket, a laptop in the briefcase, and somebody to forward you messages from your office when you were in the field. A better solution soon became a crying need.

Let’s Combine Everything into One
The answer that you might expect is to integrate all of these communications systems into one. That won’t really do. There is no one platform that can handle everything equally well. The desk phone is tethered, as is the desktop computer with the nice big screen. The smartphone screen is way too small for a lot of serious work. The tablet makes a ridiculous telephone held up to your ear.

There are forces still pulling in that direction. Enter the “phablet.” It’s a giant cell phone that’s almost, if not really, too big for your pocket. Tablet computers now have clip on keyboards so you can touch type from the coffee house. Laptop computers are shrinking, getting lighter and some have screens that detach from the keyboard and act like tablets. If there was only a way to get a great big screen that you can actually see along with keys that fit your fingers along with a telephone that lets you take calls privately, handles email and text messaging, and all fits neatly in your shirt pocket.

Well, there isn’t. There isn’t even anything on the horizon that fits this description. Someday, the QWERTY typewriter keyboard may become as quaint as the crank telephone. Siri might actually become your best friend and be able to read your mind as well as understand everything you’re mumbling. Something akin to Google Glass may project that big screen in front of your face anywhere. That’s not today, though. Today we need a solution that let’s us communicate anyway we like anywhere we happen to be.

It’s Called Unified Communications
The development that takes what we have and makes it into the closest approximation of what we really want is UC or Unified Communications. The “unified” part means doesn’t mean trying to get one platform to do everything. It recognizes that each device has its strong points and weaknesses. The master solution is to make all of this stuff play together well. In fact, so well that you needn’t be afraid that you are missing out just because you don’t have a particular platform with you at the moment.

A simple example is the lowly telephone call. Every business is still dependent on the telephone simply because it is the only universal medium of voice communications. For a long time, this meant having a business number that you printed on your business cards and a separate home phone number that was printed in “the book.” If you were at home you didn’t get your business calls unless you had a secretary working late to give the caller your home number or forward the call. You came in the next morning and found a raft of pink “while you were out” call sheets on the your desk.

The introduction of the cell phone only made matters worse. Now you’ve got a third phone number that only certain people know. What if they call the office instead of your cell when you are out? Will you miss the sale? Could be.

Unified communications starts with voice mail to replace the secretary and the telephone message sheets. You don’t have to fear missing a call because they’ll leave a voice message you can pick up anywhere. Even better is a “find me follow me” service that routes your calls to wherever you happen to be. With this type of automation you can hand out a single phone number and have it try your office phone, your cell phone or go to voice mail. You can even have it send you an email with the audio file of the call. Toll free number? Just have it routed to your unified business number.

The Technology Behind UC
The most popular platform for implementing unified communications is the cloud. Why? Because the cloud provides a common place to collect and distribute everything with near-infinite resources. All that processing power can easily handle everything from an independent professional up to the largest corporation. You don’t need to make a big capital investment or try to keep up to date on installing the newest features. The cloud provider takes care of that.

Cloud UC is driven by computing power and that computing power understands IP or Internet Protocol. The “Internet” part of IP doesn’t necessarily mean the public Internet. It just means the technical protocol that is also used by the Internet. For security and highest voice quality, you may not want your internal communications on the Internet at all. You will, however, want access to the Internet both in the office and on the road. That can be done carefully so that you use the Internet when you want to but private channels when you don’t.

What UC Can Do For You
Unified communications can be a gateway to both productivity improvement and cost reduction. It augments or replaces your in-house PBX phone system with a more powerful VoIP system that uses a common network with your computers and other digital devices. You can get tools for ease of collaboration among employees as well as the obvious single phone number benefits. Your laptop becomes your desktop with remote desktop access. Voice and video conferences can take place anywhere with a diverse group scattered in offices and hotel rooms around the globe.

Will all this cost a fortune? It’s probably cheaper than you think and may even offer all the new benefits at a lower cost than you are paying now. There’s only one way to find out. Get a set of competitive quotes for unified communications solutions and review the benefits and costs specific to your situation.



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Why Telephone Wiring is a Thing of the Past

One given in voice communication is the telephone network, a web of small gauge copper wiring that runs through buildings and underground or overhead to the nearest telco central office. The telephone network, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service, is a single purpose dedicated network that supports analog business phones and low speed devices such as fax machines.

Think of networks as similar to the highway system. There are high speed freeways, that's computer networks, and lower speed county roads, the telephone network. They exist at the same time in the same areas but serve different traffic needs.

While it’s true that analog telephone networks have been used to carry data via analog modems and that computer networks carry packet voice traffic, each of these networks was built for a specific purpose and they are generally incompatible. Technology advancements have now made the gravel roads of the analog telephone network largely obsolete.

They’re being replaced by high speed, high capacity LAN, MAN and WAN networks that easily transport voice, data and video simultaneously. Some use copper, some use fiber. Some even used repurposed phone lines for high speed digital transport like bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper (EoC). It's the old low speed analog circuits that are on the way out.

Many companies still have two separate networks in-house. One for the phones and one for the computers. This is true even if the telephony connection to the outside world is handled by digital ISDN PRI trunks or packet based SIP trunks. The interface that joins these two technologies is the PBX or Private Branch Exchange, your in-house telephone switching system.

What’s wrong with this arrangement? After all, the facility telephone wiring has been in place for decades and is fully paid for. It works just fine for telephone calls and fax messages. Why go to the trouble of moving your phones onto the computer network?

There are a couple of good reasons why companies are combining or converging their networks. Having only one network to maintain is less of a staff burden. Perhaps you even have a separate staff to manage the telephones or an outside contractor who comes in and does this. Every time a phone is installed or moved, wiring has to be changed or the PBX system reprogrammed. You can’t just pick up a phone and plug it into a different phone jack and expect it to ring at the same number. The physical connections determine the address of each device in the network.

Contrast this with Ethernet networks that connect the computers. The address of the computer is contained within the machine, not a function of the network. You can pick up your computer and take it anywhere in the building. Find an Ethernet jack, plug it in and it will work just as well as it did on your desk.

The same is true of IP phones, which are telephones with a computer network interface. The IP phone or SIP phone looks like any other computer or peripheral on the network. They each have their own address assigned either manually or automatically. The network will find them wherever they happen to be plugged in.

Ease of managing moves, adds and changes is one big advantage of IP telephony. Another is that your phone can now perform more sophisticated operations than just taking and making calls. It is possible to integrate computer and telephones in a call center to work as a team once both are on the same network.

IP phones are the basis of VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In a complete enterprise VoIP system, both the phones and the PBX, called an IP PBX, are connected to the LAN. The IP PBX communicates with your telephone service provider over a WAN connection called a SIP Trunk. Since you are free of the telephone company’s analog phone wires, you can get your VoIP service from any provider you can connect to via SIP Trunk.

One further advance is called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. This arrangement eliminates the PBX or IP PBX at your location and replaces it with an IP gateway. A SIP trunk connects to a cloud-based PBX system that handles all the switching, both internal and external. You avoid the investment in expensive PBX equipment and the ongoing maintenance as well as any maintenance of old school telephone wiring. Your cost is a fixed fee per phone. Just add or remove phones from your network and pay for only those in service.

Are you ready for a modern business phone system? Get competitive options and pricing for SIP trunks and Hosted VoIP to meet your business needs.

Carrier Ethernet Providers Expand

One of the big developments in network connectivity the last couple of years has been the emergence of Carrier Ethernet services nationwide. That move is accelerating. Here’s why you should more and less costly metro, long haul and last mile connections running the Ethernet protocol.

You may be wondering what all the hoopla is about Carrier Ethernet. After all, bonded T1, DS3 and SONET fiber optic services have been around for years and steadily decreasing in price. Do we really need yet another technical standard?

Yes, if for no other reason than Ethernet-everywhere is the future. The legacy transport technology, T1, DS3 and SONET, was developed by the telephone companies long before computer to computer communications became the dominant network traffic worldwide. As such, they are based on a design that makes it easy to carry lots and lots of small bandwidth telephone conversations. Each channel is 64 Kbps. You string together multiple channels, like cars on a freight train, to create T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps, DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps and SONET fiber optic services from 155 Mbps on up to 10 or 40 Gbps. That’s called TDM or Time Division Multiplexing.

Digitized phone calls are no longer the primary traffic carried on networks. Today it is data, VoIP voice and video. The protocols are all based on IP, a packet-switching technology that also forms the basis of Ethernet. Thus, in the modernization of networks to support packet protocols rather than switched circuit TDM, the core networks are being re-engineered to support IP directly. Carrier Ethernet has emerged as a standard carrier service to replace the earlier telco-provided options.

Solidifying this move to Carrier Ethernet is the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). This is the standards body that provides the technical specs to ensure that providers are compatible with one another. Otherwise, you’d have chaos and few networks could connect to each other to exchange traffic.

That’s one of the big secrets driving Carrier Ethernet. The MEF has defined a E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface standard. Any carrier that implements E-NNI can easily exchange traffic with other E-NNI carriers so that each expands its reach into the other’s territory. This turns many small regional or national carriers into much larger worldwide carriers without the need for every provider to have assets in every possible location.

Most carriers are in an expansion mode now. Two notable ones are tw telecom and Integra Telecom. tw telecom is now offering national Ethernet service that includes their E-Access product, a “one to many” connection. This is particularly valuable to content producers and others who need to distribute large amounts of data quickly and at reasonable cost. As a wholesale service, it is also valuable to carriers who want to connect to businesses nationwide without having to build their own fiber plants.

Integra Telecom is now offering E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. This is a standardized MEF Ethernet service that offers multipoint to multipoint Layer 2 VPN. Connecting multiple LANs at multiple locations at the OSI Layer 2 level allows corporations and others to create large bridged networks that include locations all over the country.

Other providers offer low latency fiber optic connections to Europe and Asia from the United States. Running point to point Ethernet connection or E-LAN allows multinational corporations to easily do business worldwide.

Would you be interested in the improved performance and lower cost of Carrier Ethernet services? You’ll likely find that the Carrier Ethernet Provider expansions of recent years give you more options than you might expect.

Advantage of Dedicated Cloud Connections

The capital investment and staff cost savings offered by cloud services are encouraging small, medium and large companies alike to move their telephone and IT resources to the cloud. It’s been assumed that a simple broadband Internet connection will suffice for access. That’s turning out to be a disappointment in some cases.

The notion that bandwidth is bandwidth is how we get in trouble specifying metro and wide area network connections. What makes the Internet attractive as a WAN service is that it is almost universally available and the cost is spread over millions, even billions of users. Savvy companies discovered long ago that you could get around the security issues by encrypting your data to create a VPN or Virtual Private Network. The VPN gives you a private tunnel through a public network.

VPNs work great to support remote workers and traveling employees who’s only way to connect with corporate headquarters is through a wired or wireless Internet service. They’re also good for linking multiple business locations, such as branch offices or franchises. With a VPN you can transfer sensitive financial and inventory files among dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations.

Note that we are talking about file transfers. The TCP/IP network protocol was made for this application. All you do is launch the transfer and TCP will ensure that all the packets that make up the file will get from point A to point B intact. If something goes awry and a packet is corrupted, it is automatically resent.

Remember that the Internet was designed for universal access and to be self-healing in the face of equipment failure or line breaks. While TCP/IP is making sure that files are being accurately transfered, the Internet itself is making sure that there is a path available from point A to point B no matter what. While you can expect to transfer data, voice or video files over the Internet, you can’t really expect that this is going to happen without hiccups or in any minimal amount of time. Packets may or may not be lost and require a resend. The path may change from packet to packet. The latency or time delay from source to destination can vary all over the place, or jitter.

The result of this is that real time performance of Internet connections is highly variable. This is no big deal for data file transfers. The time to transfer may vary by milliseconds or seconds for each file. Time sensitive data streams like audio and video need some extra help in the form of buffering. You compensate for unknowable transmission rate variations by filling up a buffer with packets and then clocking them out at a constant rate.

Buffering works great for one-way downloads, but creates havoc for real-time video or audio streams. That includes telephone calls and video conferencing. You can’t have much of a buffer or the latency increases to the point where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. There is a noticeable delay, fractions of a second or longer, that make two-way communication painful at best. Lost packets from iffy Internet connections add distortion that blurs your video and garbles your audio.

The same Internet that seems fast and responsive when searching for information on Google can be maddening when trying to calm down an angry customer on a VoIP phone call that is breaking up. Automated business processes that worked fine over the LAN when the data center was in-house all of a sudden become sluggish in the cloud. It’s not that the cloud isn’t just as good or better than local resources, it’s that you need a better connection.

What you want is a dedicated connection between you and your cloud provider. Level 3 Communications is now offering dedicated connections to Amazon Web Services (AWS) running in Equinix data centers to meet the demand from larger corporations. Dedicated connections include Ethernet Private Line, Ethernet MPLS and Wavelength services. T1 lines are also suitable for smaller companies, although Ethernet over Copper may be a lower cost option and offer more bandwidth for the money.

A dedicated connection ensures that you have steady guaranteed bandwidth plus low latency, jitter and packet loss. Security is also improved because access is limited, not publicly available. A well engineered dedicated connection is just like a very long LAN that includes your locations and your service provider.

Are you disappointed with the performance of your cloud services or concerned that quality will suffer if you move from a local data center to the cloud? All you may need to get things working to your satisfaction is a high quality dedicated cloud connection. Why put up with all that aggravation when dedicated connection prices are lower than they’ve ever been? Check prices and availability of dedicated cloud connection bandwidth you need to support your critical applications.

Multi Protocols Network Services

MPLS, Multi Protocol Label Switching, is a fairly new type of network service that is growing in importance. It is often touted as the future of telecommunications. Let's have a look at why that might be so and how it can benefit your business applications.

The idea behind MPLS is in the name. The "multi protocol" part means that this is a network designed to transport many types of network protocols. The Internet is not multi-protocol. It's based on IP or Internet Protocol. If you want to send something through the internet it has to meet the IP specs.

The PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network is also not "multi-protocol" It's based on TDM or Time Division Multiplexing. TDM creates small 64Kbps channels originally designed for digitized telephone calls. Anything else sent through the PSTN has to fit in one or more of those channels. That's true for even the highest speed SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) fiber optic services.

Certainly, we use both the Internet and the PSTN to transport everything from telephone conversations to high definition video. This is done by converting between protocols. Just about anything digital can be sent through any digital network. But there is a price to be paid in equipment cost, time delay or latency, and inefficiency for each of those conversions.

MPLS networks are based on something called label switching. That's the LS in MPLS. Data packets entering a MPLS network are assigned labels that where they are to be routed and the QoS or Quality of Service required. Voice or interactive video packets are time sensitive and sensitive to QoS. General data transfers are not so sensitive to latency and jitter.

The traffic engineering aspect of MPLS networks make them superior to using the Internet for time sensitive applications. An MPLS network is good for transporting telephone calls, video, data transfers, encrypted information and interactive data. Everything enteres through an ingress router that assigns it one or more tags. Everything leaves through an egress router that removes the tags. While traversing the network, only the tags are examined by the tag routers. The original packets themselves do not need to be inspected because everything the network needs to function is defined in the tags themselves.

MPLS networks are especially good for companies and other organizations with multiple locations. The network cloud can provide a mesh network where any location can talk to any other location. Or you can define who gets to connect to who. It's almost like having your own private network, but a lot cheaper. The service provider ensures that you get the bandwidth and connections you need to ensure that other users will not impact the performance of your service.

There are many competitive telecom service providers offering MPLS network services in competition to the traditional telcos. How do you find them? The easy way is to use a telecom brokerage service that represents a dozen or more carriers, so you can get the best price for the network services that meet your needs. Shop For MPLS is such a service and offers complementary consulting as well as fast and accurate price quotes. Request an MPLS quote in under 2 minutes, right now.

Steppin' Out With My Ethernet

Ethernet connects all of our computing equipment within the enterprise. It's the standard protocol for LAN or Local Area Network connections. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just string that Ethernet backbone out the door and across town or across the country? Well, now we can.

You're no doubt familiar with DSL, T1, DS3, and perhaps SONET fiber optic connections. All of these are used for metropolitan or long haul voice and data services. There's also a recently introduced service called Carrier Ethernet. In town it's referred to as Metropolitan or Metro Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet is the technology that moves your network out of the office to just about anywhere you want to go. Other technologies will do that too, but Ethernet has a couple of notable advantages.

First of all is the ease of connecting and managing your extended LAN. With Carrier Ethernet, you can connect all of your scattered offices, factories and warehouses as if they were on the same network. You just have very, very long wires inbetween.

The other big and perhaps more important advantage is lower costs. Competitive Ethernet Service providers have newer regional and national networks based on IP technology that works very well with Ethernet. They are also aggressively expanding their points of presence (POPs) to bring connectivity to business users. Residential users will continue to get their broadband Internet connections through Cable, telco and wireless service providers.

What type of Ethernet services are available? The most popular speeds are 10/100/1000 Mbps, the same speeds that are standard for NIC or Network Interface Cards. There are also two delivery methods. For Gigabit Ethernet, also known as GigE, fiber optic connections are essential. That's no problem if your building is already lit for fiber optic service. If not, a competitive carrier might choose to "light" your building if there are a sufficient number of clients willing to sign up for substantial amounts of bandwidth. If that isn't cost effective, Ethernet over Copper may be the answer.

EoC or Ethernet over Copper is a mechanism for transporting standard Ethernet at 10 Mbps or Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps over distances a few miles or less. The copper is standard twisted pair copper telco wiring that would otherwise be used for analog telephone or T1 voice and data lines. Newer modulation techniques make it practical to carry Ethernet bandwidths on lines once thought to be limited to 1.5 Mbps or less.

Are your ready to step out of the office with your Ethernet? If so, check fiber optic or EoC Carrier Ethernet service pricing and availability for your business.

From T1 to Ethernet

Your LAN is running smoothly, but now you need to connect to the outside world for dedicated Internet service, point to point data transfer, or VoIP call termination. A T1 line seems like a cost effective solution, but your network protocol is Ethernet, not T1 data. How do you make the conversion?

Relax. Pick the right T1 line carrier and they'll take care of it for you. Yes, there was a time when you had to deal with Channel Service Units, Data Service Units, router setups and interfacing everything together. The new way is to let the service provider handle all these issues with a managed router.

A T1 router is a level 3 device specifically designed to work with T1 lines. The T1 standard is very specific with regards to line coding, framing, signal levels, impedances and synchronization. Ethernet is equally specific with regard to packet organization. The CSU / DSU portion of the T1 router accepts the T1 line signal from the Smart Jack at the demarcation point and performs all the necessary functions to transmit and receive data. The Ethernet interface gives you an RJ45 jack that connects to your LAN. The magic in-between makes sure that packets and frames get properly matched.

Another advantage of managed routers is that they allow the T1 service provider to monitor the complete WAN or Wide Area Network from their facilities through your router. That makes maintenance and troubleshooting easier and faster. It's likely your carrier will also set up automatic monitoring of your link so they can swing into action if something goes wrong even after business hours.

The latest option in WAN options is end to end Ethernet. The entire circuit between facilities runs IP protocol, not TDM the protocol of T1 lines. Your connection can be a level 3 router or level 2 switch, depending on how the network is setup. In practice, your field offices and main offices can be on the same LAN even though they are hundreds or thousands of miles apart rather than a few feet.

This service is also called Carrier Ethernet. It is provisioned directly onto an IP-based fiber optic carrier, so there are no awkward protocol conversions involved. It's also the most cost-effective WAN bandwidth you can get, especially for 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet connections. You'll need to be in or near a building that is lit for fiber optic Carrier Ethernet. Such a facility might be closer than you think. Check to see if your building is lit for Ethernet.

Not very near an Ethernet carrier point of presence? One common solution is to relocate your servers to a colocation facility, where lower cost bandwidth is readily available. Another is to use T1 lines, alone or in multiples, to create the bandwidth connections you need. Call the toll free number or enter a quick online search now to see what service is available for your location.