Will Elastic Bandwidth Help Your Company?

A big advantage to professional telecom services like T1 lines and SONET fiber optic connections has been the rock solid symmetrical bandwidth they provide. Order a T1 line and you can count on 1.5 Mbps in both directions all the time. Likewise, a SONET OC-3 service gives you 155 Mbps, also bidirectionally 100% of the time. What if that is no longer the type of bandwidth you need? What if you need something that can scale up and down at will? Welcome to the world of elastic bandwidth.

You might be thinking that this is similar to the kind of “best effort” services provided by DSL or Cable broadband. Those services do, indeed, provide variable bandwidth. However, the bandwidth that you get is determined by the traffic level on the network. If many users are demanding service at the same time, the total bandwidth gets divvied up and everybody gets less than the maximum capacity of the connection.

Elastic bandwidth is something different. Instead of being at the whim of network congestion, you actively control the capacity of your connection. You scale it up or down to meet your needs at the moment.

The service provider tw telecom is a pioneer in the field of elastic bandwidth with the recent introduction of their Dynamic Capacity service. Instead of a fixed amount of bandwidth that is determined when the line lease is signed, Dynamic Capacity users have the ability to scale up their bandwidth in a matter of seconds without service interruption. This is done by the customer themselves using a self-service portal. What’s more, users can schedule bandwidth increases for a particular amount of time to accommodate particular events such as overnight data backup. The programmed bandwidth changes then occur automatically without anyone having to manually intervene.

This goes far beyond previous solutions that include the ability to burst or use more bandwidth than you are allocated for short periods of time. It’s something of an extension of the rapidly scaling feature offered by many Business Ethernet providers. Carrier Ethernet is designed to be much easier to scale up and down than legacy line services. Providers will typically let you increase your bandwidth with a phone call to their office. It may take a few hours or a few days to realize the change, but this is far superior to having to wait weeks for a truck roll to change out equipment or make adjustments to the WAN network.

Dynamic Capacity is one of several phases of tw telecom’s Intelligent Network approach. The idea is to create a far more flexible network design that includes customer IT management in the loop. The first phase introduced detailed performance data reporting of Ethernet or IP VPN services. An future phase will add API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) so that applications themselves can request bandwidth changes as needed.

With the advent of cloud services, the concept of resource elasticity is gaining steam. Virtualization of servers and storage makes it easy for customers to provision more resources themselves in a matter of seconds or minutes. You simply pay for what you use and can change your mind anytime, depending on current business demands. Now, that same elasticity is being applied to WAN and metro Ethernet bandwidth services. This seems like the final piece in the puzzle to optimize the performance of cloud services.

Are you frustrated by fixed or limited networking resources? If so, then perhaps a bandwidth increase or an elastic solution like Dynamic Capacity would make a big difference in your business. Get options and pricing for copper and fiber bandwidth solutions now.

More MPLS For MPLS

XO Communications, a major provider of Multi-Protocol Label Switching network services, is expanding network services in Minneapolis (MPLS), MN.

The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area will benefit from a 190 route mile expansion of the XO metro network into the northern and eastern suburbs of Anoka, Blain, Crystal, Fridley, Maplewood, New Brighton and Shoreveiw in the Minnesota Twin Cities. In addition to more points of presence, XO is deploying its Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology more broadly to make this scalable, high speed bandwidth service available to more businesses.

XO has been aggressively building out its 19,000 mile nationwide fiber optic network and promoting some of the hottest communications services, including Ethernet over Fiber (EoF), Ethernet over Copper, MPLS IP-VPN, Ethernet VPLS, Cloud Communications, Hosted VoIP and SIP Trunking solutions. Their capability includes speeds up to 40 Gbps to support the most demanding enterprise applications.

MPLS networks and Ethernet over Copper offer an especially cost effective way for businesses to link multiple branch offices, warehouses, retail outlets and headquarters operations within metropolitan areas and even nationwide. MPLS provides point to point or mesh networking with inherent security. EoC offers fast access over already installed wiring.

MPLS IP VPN networks are built on a technology quite different from what’s used on the Internet. The Internet is all about a public network with net neutrality, ease of access for all, and robust routing to work around equipment and line failures. Security is pretty much “bring your own.” MPLS networks are designed for limited access, quality of service controls and careful engineering of parameters such as latency, packet loss and jitter. Security is a feature of limited access and proprietary switching technology that makes outside intrusions much more difficult.

While the Internet is a wonderful resource for low cost connectivity from anywhere to just about anywhere else, it can fall short of the performance required for latency sensitive applications such as enterprise VoIP, video conferencing, financial trading, and mission critical business processes. XO’s MPLS network is fully managed to provide the required bandwidth and class of service needed to transport voice, data, video and converged network services.

Where Ethernet over Copper shines is in local point to point data links or last mile access to MPLS networks. Carrier Ethernet services like EoC and EoF provide a simple standardized Ethernet interface to company networks. Ethernet services tend to be more scalable than T-Carrier or SONET telecom connections, giving you more bandwidth options and faster provisioning on upgrades. Ethernet over Copper has the advantage of being able to be brought in on existing copper pair telco wiring at speeds from 2 to 20 Mbps. Finally, Ethernet connections are more often than not considerably less expensive that equivalent traditional bandwidth services.

Are you a Minneapolis-St. Paul area company, or a business located anywhere else, looking for a bandwidth upgrade or better pricing on the service levels you have now? If so, have a look at competitive pricing and availability of Ethernet and MPLS IP VPN network services. There are major savings to be had right now.



Note: Photo of downtown Minneapolis courtesy of Susan Lesch on Wikimedia Commons

Cloud Networking Services Extend Business Footprint

If you have a single office in a single city, you may have need for cloud computing or hosted PBX, aka telephony in the cloud. But chances are your communications needs are more about connecting to a service provider’s cloud than requiring a cloud of your own. It’s quite different for companies with multiple business locations. Cloud networking services are just what you need to interconnect two or more locations so they can act as one.

What is cloud networking? It is the use of public or private networks that connect geographically diverse sites on a one to one, one to many or many to many basis. The Internet is a cloud. So are privately run MPLS networks and their Frame Relay predecessors. You can even create your own cloud, if you like. You do this by leasing dedicated lines between locations and setting up your own routing scheme to determine how locations may communicate.

In fact, the ad-hoc private network is how many growing businesses get started with multi-location connections. They start off with a T1 point to point data line that connects their main office to a branch site. As more offices or retail locations are added, more lines are connected. At some point, you are dealing with a spider’s web of private lines that need constant management and are costing a small fortune.

This is where cloud networks shine. The idea behind the cloud is that costs are amortized by users sharing the resources of the cloud. Each user is required to provide a connection from each of their desired locations to the cloud network. The connections between locations and the transport of voice, data or video through the shared portion of the network is the responsibility of the cloud. The name “cloud” comes from the convention of drawing this shared network in the shape of a cumulus cloud. It signifies that you don’t manage what goes on in there. That’s someone else’s job.

Actually, you do need to be concerned about what’s going on in that cloud even though you don’t directly operate or control it. You don’t want your valuable information damaged or intercepted during the transport process. Take the biggest cloud in the world, the Internet. It has the advantages of being near universally available and relatively cheap to use. But the Internet also has the disadvantages of being a “best effort” service with no guaranteed performance parameters and enough security concerns to give you pause. How can anyone use the Internet for serious business applications?

In some cases you can’t. Two-way real-time applications have a tough time with the unpredictable performance that is inherent in the design of the Internet cloud. But it still works just fine for Web access, email, small scale data backup to remote servers, and one-way video that is properly buffered. In fact, your business probably needs access to the Internet just to communicate with customers, place orders or do research. If you are going to send sensitive business data between locations using the Internet cloud, however, you’ll need to protect yourself by encrypting those packets so they can’t be read by unintended parties. That process is called tunneling. The overall connection is called IP VPN. VPN, meaning Virtual Private Network.

If the internet is too flakey or scary to support your business, the cloud you’ll be most interested in is called MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching. This is a privately run network with a regional or nationwide footprint. The combination of private ownership and proprietary technology means that performance can be guaranteed and security is inherently better than the public Internet. That’s why MPLS networks are also called MPLS VPN networks, even without packet encryption. Of course you can still encrypt your data to add even more security... something of a belt and suspenders approach.

A specialized type of cloud networking is telephone service. Instead of hooking all your phones with individual lines to the local phone company or managing an in-house PBX system, you connect your phones to the cloud using SIP trunks. This is also called hosted PBX. Users that all connect to the same cloud may communicate over this private network. When you need to make or receive calls with the general public, those calls are connected to the public telephone network by the service provider.

Can your company benefit from cloud networking or better cloud services? It’s fast and easy to find out. Just take a second and put in an inquiry for availability and pricing of competitive cloud networking services.

IP VPN vs MPLS VPN

Security is an issue anytime you send data into a cloud network. One way to ensure that your data cannot be observed or tampered with is to build your own WAN network from point to point private lines. Another approach is to use a virtual private network that runs on resources that you don’t have exclusive use of. That’s what is meant by a VPN.

The beauty of using dedicated private line connections is that you are in control of both access and resource utilization. You need to manage bandwidth demand and packet priority. What you don’t have to worry about is someone else crowding you for resources. There is no one else. If you are really concerned about malicious parties tapping into your line surreptitiously, you can chose to encrypt the data while it traverses the WAN connection. That’s the ultimate in network security. It’s also the highest cost approach.

What’s attractive about VPN solutions is that they are much less expensive to lease and require fewer resources on your part. Both the cost and resource savings come from sharing the facilities with other parties. The Internet is a prime example of how massive utilization can drive down costs. If you want to really minimize costs, a shared access connection, such as DSL or Cable broadband, is the cheapest approach by far.

The same things that make the Internet cheap also make it insecure. Anybody and everybody worldwide can connect to the Internet for what you are paying or less. Perhaps they’re using a public library or WiFi hotspot network without paying a cent. Many of these networks make no effort to even verify user identity. It’s the perfect breeding ground for mischief makers and criminal activities.

Fortunately, there is a way to secure your data as it traverses the Internet. The trick is encryption. You encrypt your data packets using a key that only you know. Anyone else who has access to your data stream sees only gibberish. A popular standard for doing this is called IPsec for IP security. It requires hardware and/or software that you manage at each location for the encryption/decryption process.

IPsec lets you create a virtually private network out of the Internet, a completely public network. This is generally what is meant by the term IP VPN. One big advantage of this IP VPN approach is that laptop computers can be configured with this system to give corporate access to remote or home workers. All that’s needed is the VPN enabled computer and a broadband Internet connection.

While the Internet is cheap, it offers no guaranteed performance. You take your chances on network congestion, packet corruption, latency and jitter. File transfers generally work fine, but voice and video can degrade without warning. Many businesses want a more reliable network to connect their branch offices, warehouses, retail locations, and so on.

MPLS networks come to the rescue as an improved form of virtual private network. The MPLS network doesn’t have public access, but it is a shared resource. Your costs are reduced compared to dedicated private lines because the cost of regional, national or international connections are amortized across the total user base. What makes MPLS networks a VPN solution is that your data connections are essentially tunneled through the cloud wrapped in proprietary routing labels. You define your connections and the network operator instructs the MPLS network on how to route your packets.

MPLS networks are often referred to as MPLS VPN because they are inherently virtually private. Connections to the network tend to be through dedicated private lines, such as T1 or Ethernet. If you want an even higher level of privacy, you can choose to encrypt your data while it traverses the MPLS network. In addition to improved security compared to the Internet, MPLS networks offer performance guarantees for bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss. That makes MPLS VPN a popular choice for mission-critical business applications.

Do you have a need to connect multiple business locations? Which type of VPN makes the most sense for your needs? Is it IP VPN or MPLS VPN? One easy way to sort out the options is to get complimentary network consultation and price quotes through our Affordable VPN site. You may well be spending far more than you need to for the performance and security you desire.

TelePacific Takes Business Continuity Seriously

TelePacific Communications, a competitive telecommunications carrier serving customers in California and Nevada, is taking a comprehensive approach to disaster planning and the need for business continuity that follows disasters natural and man-made.

Their Business Continuity Services are focused on maintaining your ability to use voice and data services in the event you lose a trunk line or even your entire facility. But how just how can you do that?

Let’s take a look at telephone first. Most medium and large size businesses, and some smaller businesses that are heavy users of telephone communications, are using digital trunk lines. T1 PRI and SIP Trunks provide one to two dozen outside lines for management by an in-house PBX system. That trunk line offers a considerable cost savings over multiple individual phone lines, but does represent a single point failure risk. With that in mind, you can backup your primary trunk line with a few individual analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines. The key is to have the phone system programmed to automatically switch over to the backup lines when the trunk goes down. Another approach offered by TelePacific is to have your incoming calls automatically forwarded to the backup lines.

Even smaller businesses using IP PBX systems or Analog Telephone Adaptors may keep one analog telephone line in service as an emergency backup. The idea is that a fault that takes out your digital data line may not affect the analog lines. In many cases, that’s true. But what happens if a construction accident cuts all the underground lines in an area or the ground opens up in an earthquake and breaks every wire in the area?

If all your telecom connections are out, you may have also lost power. In that case, TelePacific has the ability to forward your incoming calls to a number at another business location. You could also choose to have your most important numbers, such as your main phone line and FAX number, forward to a mobile phone or even a residence. If there are too many incoming calls for you to answer immediately, the overflow can be answered by voicemail at the carrier’s facility. You then have the option to listen to and return those calls from another location when time permits.

Data lines, such as Dedicated Internet Access, are subject to the same disasters that befall telephone lines. T1 lines are the most popular connections for business users. If all you have is a single T1 line and it goes down, your connection is broken until it is fixed. But bonded T1 lines can be set up so that if you lose one, the secondary or other T1 lines will keep running. Your bandwidth will be temporarily reduced, but you’ll still have broadband connectivity.

Of course, if all lines are cut you will lose data service coming in and going out of your business location. If you have a second business location you can set up a private IP VPN arrangement so that all traffic can be routed to the secondary location. If you have only a single facility or all of your offices are located so closely together that they might all lose power or communications in the same event, you probably want to think about using a colocation service. A carrier colocation facility is probably more robust than your onside data center. The facilities are built with extensive physical security, fire and flood control, and both battery and generator backup. They also have multiple incoming and outgoing trunk lines going in different geographical directions.

TelePacific offers colocation facilities as do other providers around the country. You can house your application servers there and have an email backup server in case your primary email server fails. Remote data storage is a necessity these days since the most important business documents are now electronic documents.

Do you feel a bit uncomfortable with your ability to conduct business in the event of a fire, flood, tornado, earthquake or other unforeseen disaster? If not, it’s worth your time and peace of mind to talk with an expert consultant who can recommend the most cost effective ways to ensure your business continuity. Find out now what TelePacific and other competitive carriers can do to ensure your voice and data reliability with a toll free call or online inquiry about business continuity options.

MPLS Networks for Global Enterprises

MPLS has quickly become the network service of choice for companies that need to tie multiple locations together. But now XO Communications has upped the ante by expanding its MPLS network reach to all 50 states plus 22 countries on 5 continents.

For companies that do business internationally, this is excellent news. International connectivity has traditionally been costly with only a few major carriers serving this marketplace. Now that a highly competitive player is available, rates are likely to get a lot more attractive.

XO Communications is known for its nationwide high speed fiber optic network and wide variety of access connections. They offer both fiber and copper last mile connections, and even wireless access in some metro areas. This makes it possible for most businesses to connect to the XO network and, from there, to the world.

XO calls its MPLS or Multi-Protocol Switching Network service “MPLS IP-VPN service”. This is an IP network service running as a virtual private network to ensure the privacy of business communications across the network. In addition to being a global VPN, CoS or Class of Service controls are in place to ensure that voice, video and data all get the proper priority on the network.

If you do business internationally and need to connect your far-flung operations, an international MPLS network offers the opportunity to create a full mesh network so that any location can communicate to any other location. In addition to the 50 USA states, the XO network footprint now covers Australia, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand and the United Kingdom.

The XO network is fully managed, with 24x7 monitoring of facilities and equipment to ensure that you’ll be able to stay connected with a minimum of attention needed on your part. Bandwidth options are scalable from DS1 (1.5 Mbps) to OC48 (2.5 Gbps) for traditional TDM connections. Ethernet connections are also available with options from 3 to 1,000 Mbps.

Does your business need to connect multiple sites together in the US or internationally? If so, you may be surprised by how affordable MPLS network services are. Go ahead and get prices and bandwidths for MPLS network connections now. It’s a free service for business locations, with complementary expert consulting included.