The Sun is Setting on Copper Telecom Lines

By: John Shepler

It has been rumored for a long time and now it’s really underway. The end of over a century of copper wire based phone and network lines is here, with a key event on June 30. That’s the start of AT&T’s first major wave of wire center decommissioning. Over 277 of these facilities will go dark when completed, with more waves of decommissioning to follow. In the end, we’ll have completely moved on from Alexander Graham Bell’s original network.

What The Loss of Wire Centers Really Means
In simple terms, a wire center is where all the wires connect. It’s the building that connects the central office switching with all the local loops. That’s often thousands and thousands of individual twisted copper pairs that are bundled into larger cables. Your analog phone line, the “landline” or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line, is one of these loops. You can trace the wire pair directly from the phone jack on your wall all the way to the line card at the central office that provides power and signaling to run the phone handset.

Those twisted pairs can carry a lot more than individual phone calls. They can be set up with digital termination equipment to provide DSL and T1 broadband or PRI digital multi-line phone service. They may also be used in special applications such as fire alarms, elevator phones, gate entry systems, security systems, and fax machines.

Decommissioning means taking these lines out of service. No more wire center. No more copper line service.

In actuality, the phone companies that own these lines have already been discouraging their use through higher service prices and refusal to add more customers. Another group, copper wire thieves, have been doing their own decommissioning by cutting and stealing cables and then burning off the plastic insulation so they can sell the copper at recyclers. Copper prices are way up due to the expansion of data centers, electric vehicles, and solar power, to name a few.

What Replaces Copper Telecom Lines?
Like the incandescent light bulb, it’s time to move on from 19th century technologies. The new options are primarily fiber optic and wireless.

Fiber voice and broadband started with phone company Optical Carrier standards but has migrated to Carrier Ethernet standards to be compatible with the vast majority of company networks. Ethernet over Fiber service ranges from 10 Mbps up to 100 Gbps, with Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE becoming popular standards.

You need what is called an Ethernet Port at your end. That connects via fiber to your service provider, often an Independent network operator but perhaps a traditional telco. The speed of the Ethernet port limits the amount of bandwidth you can have. A Gigabit port lets you order up to 1,000 Mbps. A 10 Gigabit port supports anything up to 10,000 Mbps.

There are different flavors of fiber optic service. Your Internet access can be on a fiber line that is shared among many businesses and residential users to save cost. You may prefer to order Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) so that your connection to the Internet itself in essentially on a private line.

Direct Cloud Access is a similar service without the Internet being involved at all. You have a private fiber service from your facility to your cloud service provider. This gives you the best low latency and low congestion for higher productivity and smoother voice calls and video conferences.

You might also want to consider dedicated point to point fiber to interconnect your facilities across town or around the world. These private lines offer high performance and better security than what you could hope for on the Internet.

Wireless Options
Of course you have mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers that connect to the Internet using 5G cellular broadband. Another flavor of that services is Fixed Wireless Access. It comes in a box with higher gain antennas and Ethernet connection. It’s the 5G broadband without the phone features. There are also options to add outside antennae for better coverage and some controllers offer multiple providers for service continuity if one company goes offline temporarily. FWA can be as speedy as fiber, but without having to run the fiber line itself.

Some Wireless Internet Service Providers do not use cellular networks. Instead, they have their own towers and beam and point to point signal to a small dish antenna on your roof. These are very private lines and can have Gigabit or higher speeds.

Satellite broadband and satellite phone have been around for years. The broadband using geostationary satellites can be very reliable and speeds have been improving with newer generations of satellites. The half second or more of latency due to the distance to geosynchronous orbit is one sticking point. LEO or Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations, primarily SpaceX Starlink, reduces the latency to something similar to terrestrial broadband. Bandwidths are also competitive for many applications. Just stating now is direct to handset service that turns satellites into alternative cell towers. Soon there will be no dead spots, even in the most remote areas.

What to Do About Specialty Services?
Those fire alarms, fax machines and elevator phones that were designed for twisted pair copper and nothing else still have hope. AT&T, among others, is offering a “POTS Replacement” service that consists of 4G LTE cellular wired to support these services along with built-in battery backup. Why 4G LTE? This standard can mimic the old phone lines and is still readily available.

The One Remaining Copper Service
There is still one very popular copper broadband service, but it is not from any phone company. This is Cable Broadband that is brought in on coaxial copper wiring. In reality, the cable companies have converted to fiber optic transmission, but the latest DOCSIS standards let them keep their existing copper coax into your building and still achieve speeds of 1,000 Mbps or even 10 Gbps… competitive with fiber.

Is your company experiencing an upcoming loss of service due to copper decommissioning? No time to wait. Find out what copper replacement services are available for your business needs. You may be surprised to find you can actually get more capability at a lower cost.

Are T1 Lines Obsolete?

By: John Shepler

Have you been using a T1 line for years, perhaps decades? Yes, they’ve been around that long. At the dawn of the Internet, a T1 line offered business a solid, reliable, high bandwidth connection that made dial-up phone line modems look glacially slow. Nowadays similarly priced bandwidth options make those venerable T1 lines seem equally pokey. So, are T1 lines still a good business solution or in their twilight years?

The T1 Story
T1 lines are a product of Bell Labs, which created them to serve the telephone industry. The idea was to replace 24 analog phone lines with two pair that carried a digital multiplex of all the phone calls. There were two advantages, It saved copper wiring and reduced background noise. That was especially true for long distance calls that used analog multiplexing to send multiple calls over a single line. If you remember the switchover from analog to digital toll calls, it seemed almost eerie to no longer hear hiss and garbled conversations during your phone conversations.

T1 lines got a an additional use when they were released to business for Internet access. A protocol conversion interface on each end took care of the translation between synchronized phone channels and Ethernet packets. Businesses only knew they had a highly reliable 1.5 Mbps always-on Internet connection. In the late 1990’s and into the first decade of the 2000’s, that 1.5 Mbps was speedy bandwidth.

A variation of T1 lines, called ISDN PRI, still used T1 for multiple phone lines to corporate PBX phone systems. T1 has been a mainstay of phone and FAX communications for businesses since.

The T1 Twilight Years
Two factors are driving T1 lines into retirement. The first is the need for much higher bandwidths. You might have increased your bandwidth in 1.5 Mbps increments by bonding additional T1 lines to make one larger pipe. There is no economy of scale. Three T1s cost three times the price of one line. It's also hard to get above 10 Mbps with this approach.

Today, we think in terms of hundreds of Mbps and 1 to 100 Gbps as the right level of broadband to support cloud services. That means fiber optic rather than copper based line services. T1 is relegated to smaller business applications such as credit card verification, security alarms, multi-line phone systems and email service. Even so, with the increasing availability of fixed wireless access and fiber optic service, prices on the newer technologies are coming down and T1 isn’t becoming more affordable.

The second factor is the local telephone companies that own the twisted pair copper connections needed to bring in T1 lines. The telcos themselves are switching out copper in favor of fiber and chosing to abandon their copper assets. In some larger cities, copper lines are pulled out of conduits so that fiber cables can take their place.

Even smaller businesses are shunning older telco tech such as DSL and T1 in favor of very low cost broadband and telephone from their Cable providers. The newer DOCSIS modems can support gigabit level broadband delivered over traditional coaxial cable.

Are T1 Lines Still Used?
In some areas T1 lines are still being sold and provisioned. They can be especially valuable in rural areas where fiber, cellular and cable services haven’t yet reached. Some businesses may choose to keep their existing phone systems and FAX machines which are supported by the T1 protocol. A T1 line for these applications and fiber or cable for broadband can make a nice combined solution.

The issue is how long T1 service will still be offered. It’s really a question of time. At some point you may find that new T1 lines can’t be ordered and eventually you may get a letter saying that your T1 service will not be renewed. At that point there is no choice but to move on. Cellular 4G LTE modems designed for business can take over many T1 functions where available. Most companies will be switching to fiber optic connections and cloud based phone and FAX solutions.

What is Best For Your Company?
Business grade fiber optic services are now priced much lower on a per Mbps basis than T1, DS3 and other legacy telco services. Fixed wireless using 4G LTE or 5G can be installed quickly and offer higher bandwidths. Gigabit cable broadband is also a great option for many applications. Find out now what bandwidth services are available for your business location so you can make the best decision for your needs.

Two Internet Connections For Consistent Phone Calls

There are forces at work changing the way business phone systems connect. Plain old analog telephone service and traditional PBX switching systems are giving way to mobility, computer integration and cloud services that bear little resemblance to Alexander Graham Bell’s network of the last century. The new features can greatly enhance business performance… as long as the fundamentals of high quality robust voice communications aren't lost. Can we have both advanced technologies and quality of service?

We have to. There’s really no going back. If you are still tethered to an analog twisted pair or ISDN PRI, obsolescence is coming for you… and soon. It’s time to embrace digital voice and the cloud services that it enables.

What’s The Internet Got to Do With It?
Telephone networks were purpose built for telephone sets. When the Internet started, it glommed onto the phone network with dial-up modems because that was the only universal connectivity available. Fast forward to today and the Internet has moved on to high bandwidth fiber optics as a core network and last mile connectivity. Mobile telephony has developed its own wireless cellular system. That leaves the original phone network to rust in peace.

Business telephones are connecting more and more to the company IT network rather than run a separate phone network based on legacy wiring technology. For those calls to leave the company and connect to the greater world, a decision has to be made. Do you install a PBX system that connects those internal phone sets directly to the phone company using telco lines, or stick with the digital network system and connect to a phone service supplier via a dedicated private line or the Internet?

The Internet is a compelling answer. It has already been built-out to interconnect just about everybody, everywhere. Costs to reach them are as low as you can get. You already use the Internet and probably cloud business services for computer applications and file transfers. Why not let your phone calls ride along on the same network?

The fly in the ointment is that voice calls don’t have the robustness that file transfers enjoy. If the connection slows down a bit or gets little jittery, the data will get through just fine. The voice on the other end of the phone calls will cut in and out, become garbled or just disconnect. That’s unacceptable for business and a major impediment to adopting VoIP telephone systems.

How to Fix the Internet for Phone Calls
A solution to getting high quality business phone service along with the benefits of digital telephony is called SD-WAN. A WAN or Wide Area Network is any connection, such as the Internet, that goes outside your business. The SD part is called Software Defined. That means adding intelligence into the WAN connections to manage sensitive traffic for quality and reliability.

The most basic operation of SD-WAN appliances is to combine two or more WAN connections. That can be two broadband Internet lines, such as Cable, DSL, fiber, T1, 4G LTE or 5G cellular, or fixed wireless access.

The idea is that every connection has it own performance characteristics and variations that are different from other types of connections. That’s typical of the Internet. It varies all over the place from instant to instant, but not on all connections at the same time.

The SD-WAN appliance constantly monitors the characteristics of each connection. What is the speed, packet loss and jitter? Has the line gone dead or so congested it might as well be? With two or more lines to choose from, SD-WAN can route packet by packet through the best connection at each moment. Phone calls get priority over your other traffic so they get the absolutely best connectivity at all times.

There are other intelligent features that are also running to ensure voice quality. Forward error correction duplicates each voice packet so if one is lost, the other can take its place at the far end. That gets rid of a lot of the choppiness you hear in digital phone calls. Calls are also smoothed out using dynamic jitter buffering that collects the packets and delivers them smoothly in spite of variances in transmission time.

How about security? The Internet is notorious for terrible security issues compared to private lines and the traditional PSTN phone network. By encoding the voice streams and including a firewall and other intrusion preventing measures, even the Internet can be made acceptably secure.

SD-WAN Also Improves Your Other Applications
What helps improve voice calls is also a major benefit for all your network traffic over the Internet. As companies move more and more applications to the cloud, robust connectivity is becoming essential to productivity and customer satisfaction. SD-WAN can make all of your Internet interactions faster, smoother and more reliable. It comes down to having enough high quality links for the system to always have solid connections. Those links will be used efficiently since lower demanding traffic, such as backups and low priority file transfers, can traverse even slower and more jittery connections.

Are you frustrated with the quality and performance of your current business phone system or face disconnection of legacy services? If so, find out what high quality enterprise VoIP and Universal Communications options are available for your business.

SIP vs PRI Pros and Cons for Business PBX

Business telephone lines have gone through several transformations. What started out as analog landlines evolved into digital T1 CAS trunks, then ISDN PRI, and finally SIP packet based network connections. Amazingly, all of these technologies are still available. We’ll take a closer look into the two most popular configurations used in multi-line PBX business phone systems.

The Primary Rate Interface
ISDN PRI is short for the mouthful of an expression that is Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate Interface. Often the shorthand PRI or ISDN PRI is used for obvious reasons.

ISDN PRI is a standard telecom service that is based on the earlier T1 line specification. T1 got its start as a means of consolidating 24 pairs of twisted wire phone lines into 2 pair to save the expense of long distance cabling and overloading of telephone poles. This was accomplished by digitally multiplexing the 24 separate channels so that they were all transported together on a single 1.5 Mbps digital signal. An additional advantage of going digital was the reduction of noise and crosstalk on long distance phone calls.

A major benefit of the T1 specification is that existing phone company infrastructure can be reused, including wire landlines and microwave relays. High frequency digital signals degrade over distance fairly quickly, so regenerative repeaters were added to the lines to build the signal back up. With this arrangement, T1 could be offered over long distances to serve virtually all of the customers who were using the old analog phone lines.

One issue with T1 was that if each of the 24 channels carried only the audio telephone conversations, other wiring would have to be provided for signaling. A better solution was to multiplex signal bits into the data stream by robbing a bit here and a bit there in each of the channels. This degraded the audio very slightly and allowed the T1 CAS (Channel Associated Signaling) system to be self-contained.

Additional features, such as caller ID, were introduced by the phone companies and desired for business phones and especially call centers. This is where PRI comes in. The same basic T1 line organization was kept, except that only 23 channels were assigned as individual telephone lines. One complete channel was assigned to handle all of the signaling, data and other background services.

Most PBX systems today have interface cards where you directly plug-in a ISDN PRI cable and have 23 phone lines (or as many as you have ordered) at your command. If you need more than 23 lines, you plug in additional PRIs to add more channels.

Is there a Secondary Rate Interface?
No, but there is a related standard called BRI or Basic Rate Interface. The phone companies thought this would catch on as a two phone line system or higher speed dial-up modem service. By the time it was heavily deployed, computer communications had moved on to broadband and BRI never caught on. It has been popular for radio station broadcasts and remote announcing, such as voice over artists, because it can carry high quality audio signals. Recently, this service has been replaced by broadband Internet and is very difficult to find anymore.

What is SIP and How Does It Compare to PRI?
SIP is Session Initiation Protocol. It is a technology competitor to PRI. SIP is really a standard for transmitting VoIP or Voice or Internet Protocol phone calls over networks typically shared with other computing devices.

As you probably suspect, SIP is a packet based protocol versus the channel based protocol used by ISDN and T1. In channelized systems, a complete voice channel is assigned to a phone call for as long as the call is in progress. If no one is talking, the line just sits there idle. There is no sharing of facilities. In VoIP telephony, the conversation is broken up into small packets that are routed on the network to their destination. Many conversations can be on a network at the same time along with file transfers, print jobs and everything else digital. If there is a pause in one conversation, no packets are sent to the network for that channel only.

As you can see, VoIP is more efficient at sharing the network facilities. It comes at a cost though. Sometimes everybody wants to talk or send data at the same time. Unless the network is carefully designed, it can become flooded with too many packets to handle and things back up. This network congestion causes delays in transfer that breaks up phone conversations. Any packets lost will also distort the conversation.

Network Considerations for SIP
Careful network engineering is necessary to ensure that the sensitive voice packets are transferred without delay or corruption. Usually, these data streams are given a priority using Class of Service mechanisms within the network.

A network line dedicated to SIP is called a SIP trunk. This is the equivalent of an ISDN PRI line. Any digital line capable of carrying Ethernet packets can be a dedicated SIP trunk, although T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth and Carrier Ethernet services are often used for SIP. By giving the SIP phone conversations their own line, there is no interference from other data packets. SIP trunks are most often used to connect business and call center PBX systems directly to phone service providers. Like PRI, most PBX systems have network interface cards that plug directly into a SIP trunk.

SIP vs PRI
One protocol isn’t necessarily more appropriate than the other. It depends on the application. Most PBX systems can be set up to connect to SIP trunks or PRI trunks regardless of whether the phone sets themselves are analog handsets or VoIP phones. SIP trunks are particularly useful with newer Unified Communications or Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) systems that integrate computers, desk sets video conferencing and mobile phones into a single interoperable system. In these systems everything is in packet format and running on a single network.

Which is Right For You?
The best choice in telephone trunks is the one that works best with the system you have or the system you desire, and at the lowest cost for the performance you need. Prices of both PRI and SIP have fallen dramatically over the last few years, so you owe it to yourself to see what telephone trunk line options are available for your business needs.

Lit Buildings Have Near Infinite Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Among the many opportunities for locating your business, one group of buildings is special. These are the lit buildings, otherwise known as fiber lit buildings. Find one of these and your bandwidth woes will be over.

Lit Building Definition
What is a lit building? In this case, it’s not a building with all the lights turned on. The lit building meaning is that this particular facility is already “lit” for fiber optic Internet and, likely, point to point bandwidth service. The light this is referring to is the laser beam that shines down the glass fibers to transport digital signals at high speeds.

What’s So Great About Fiber Lit Buildings?
Pretty much every business today, from the smallest hamburger stand to the largest multinational corporation has a need to communicate electronically. Do you or any of your employees ever use a computer? Obviously, you have a need for connectivity. Even the smallest retail businesses have to process credit cards and likely need to place Internet orders, send and receive emails. and perhaps run a website. If you are not online, you are probably not in business.

Seems obvious, until you move into a new facility and find out there is no Internet in the place. If it’s a stand alone building or you are the first tenant in a strip center, office building or warehouse, you’ll be the one who has to order service and have it installed. It’s then that you find out that there are construction costs involved in bringing in the cabling and having the termination equipment set up and working with the provider. That’s all before you can plug-in your network.

Lit buildings take most of that grief away because the expensive and time consuming construction work has already been done. All you need to do is contract with the carrier who has lit the building to add an account for your business. Then just plug in your router to the termination point they give you and… Voila! … you are up and running.

What Services Are Available in Lit Buildings?
The advantage that fiber optic connections have over traditional landlines and even cable is that they can support nearly infinite bandwidth. Oh, there are technical limits to how many Gigabits or Terabits per second you can cram through a fiber strand, but they are pretty hard to breach. The modulation and multiplexing techniques are getting more sophisticated every day, leading to new upper limits on bandwidth through even a single fiber strand. A 10 Gbps service is no challenge. Now 100 Gbps is getting easy to come by. If that’s not enough to support an industrial park or office campus, fiber cables can bundle 100 or more individual strands that each operate independently.

The range of services available spans pretty much everything you can ask for. Most popular is Ethernet over Fiber, which is directly compatible in nearly all LANs. Bandwidth is easily scalable from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and beyond. Many carriers are now giving users portal access so they can adjust service bandwidth at will. Traditional SONET services like OC3 to OC48 may also be available. These can even be demultiplexed to provide traditional T1 line or ISDN PRI phone service. SIP trunking for VoIP and direct cloud connections are generally a standard offering.

Why NOT Go With Fiber?
Fiber is a truly transparent bandwidth transport in the literal sense of the word. It’s future proof and easily scales to meet your needs as your business grows. The only hangup may be that fiber is often not the least expensive solution for very small businesses and tight budgets. For that, the service of choice is business cable broadband. As long as the cable passes your location, you can probably get hooked up with 1000 Mbps of asymmetrical shared bandwidth at a bargain price. Many times there isn’t even a construction fee. Also, availability of cable is completely unrelated to whether the building is already lit for fiber.

Are you considering a move? Before signing a lease, make sure your bandwidth needs will be met now and for as long as you’ll stay there. Check for lit building fiber optic services and cable broadband availability now, to be sure.

Modernize Your T3 & DS3 Bandwidth Connections

By: John Shepler

Companies that grew up with T1 lines naturally graduated to T3 lines or DS3 connections as their bandwidth needs increased. These technologies are firmly established to deliver secure reliable bandwidth with low latency, packet loss and jitter. While you may be perfectly happy with the line service you have now, you might also be missing out on some advantages of new technology approaches.


T-Carrier Legacy
The story begins with the development of T1 lines starting after WWII. The impetus to create a new telephone trunking system was driven by the high cost and noisy performance of analog carrier telephony for long distance lines. T1 was the first digital replacement. It offered 24 digitized telephone lines on two pair of ordinary twisted pair telco cable. Each independent channel was time division multiplexed into a data stream running at 1.5 Mbps.

That’s still the spec for T1 lines. You can find the same channelized lines in use today for ISDN PRI telephone trunks to PBX phone systems. It’s organized as 23 phone lines and 1 control channel. Most T1 lines, though, have the channels combined to transport a 1.5 Mbps bit stream for data transmission. T1 lines can be combined or bonded to create larger “pipes”, up to about 10 or 12 Mbps.

T3 & DS3 Upgrade
T3 and DS3 use multiplexing compatible with T1 lines to create 28x the bandwidth or about 45 Mbps. T3 lines require frequencies too high to travel very far on twisted pair copper. T3 was originally provisioned on coaxial cable or via microwave towers. Later, fiber optic lines were implemented for long haul, with small diameter coax to the customer handoff in the building.

You might be wondering what the difference is between T3 and DS3. T3 is the physical circuit, coaxial cable or microwave link. DS3 is the signal that rides on the T3 line. The situation is similar for T1 lines. In that case, the signal is called DS1.

SONET Fiber Optic
Even the 45 Mbps bandwidth of a T3 line soon became a limiting factor for long distance telephony and the rise of digital computing. The next telco standard was a fiber optic definition called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. SONET was designed to be compatible with DS1 and DS3 so that it was easy to multiplex or combine multiple DS3s onto, say, an OC3 at 156 Mbps. OC12 offers even higher bandwidth and OC48 was the prevailing network core bandwidth until recently.

Carrier Ethernet is a Game Changer
T-Carrier (T1 and T3) and SONET were products of the telephone companies and more suited to channelized telephony than computer data. Through a protocol conversion process they can be made to carry the standard Ethernet signals that run on LAN networks, but why not just keep everything in the Ethernet format end to end?

Why not, indeed! This is what Carrier Ethernet does. It replaces the earlier telco standards with long distance Ethernet directly compatible with in-house network connections. Instead of T1, T3, OC3, OC12 and OC48, you have Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE and so on. A major difference is that Ethernet is easily scalable, while T-Carrier and SONET require equipment changes whenever you move to a higher standard.

Modernizing to Ethernet Connections
Carrier Ethernet networks, sometimes called IP networks because the protocol is the same as what is used on the Internet, are expanding rapidly to replace older Metro and Wide Area Networks. They offer the same dedicated, symmetrical bandwidth low in latency, packet loss and jitter. You can order point to point connections or dedicated connections to the Internet.

Ethernet comes in both copper and fiber options. Ethernet over Copper is a good upgrade for T1 from 3 Mbps up to 15Mbps, 20 Mbps or even more. Entry level Ethernet over Fiber is around 10 Mbps. Fiber is easily scaled to 50 Mbps that can replace T3 or DS3. It can also ramp up to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10,000 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Even 100 Gbps Ethernet is available in some areas.

An Even Lower Cost Alternative
Business Cable Broadband is another service that has become extremely popular with small and medium size businesses. DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 modems offer an Ethernet connection to your network with speeds that easily reach 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. An upgrade to 10 Gbps symmetrical bandwidth is being readied.

The attraction of cable is that it is readily available in most cities and often can be installed quickly with little or no construction charges. It is also the least cost per Mbps for the bandwidth you need. It is designed to work best for Internet browsing including video and file downloads. The bandwidth is generally asymmetrical, often as much as 10x as high in the download as upload direction. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated, so you may find the speed varying throughout the day. Even so, many business and well and residential users are sold on cable broadband. For secure point to point connections you can use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) over the Internet.

Are you still on an old T3 or DS3 service contract? You’ll be amazed how much bandwidth you can get today for the same cost. Find out right now how many bandwidth providers serve your business location and what they offer.

Replacements for GigaMAN and Other Discontinued Line Services

By: John Shepler

AT&T announced that it is going to discontinue some of its line services because the demand just isn’t there anymore. “Ho, Hum,” you say, “Who needs telegraph lines anymore anyway?”

Not So Old-Timey
Well, it turns out that the services in question are not corroding copper lines in the middle of nowhere. They are cutting edge technology from not so long ago. I’m talking about GigaMAN Gigabit Ethernet point to point service and DecaMAN 10 Gigabit Ethernet service that interconnects geographically separate LANs.

The affected customers include those in 11 states: Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin.

Take a second and pick your jaw up off the floor. How is it possible that high speed fiber optic Ethernet service could be on the discontinue list so soon? Even more important, what replacement options are available?

Replacement Technology
It turns out that technology really is moving this fast. GigaMAN and DecaMAN serve very useful purposes for companies that need dedicated high bandwidth, low latency connections they can count on. AT&T has come up with an even better technical solution called ADE or AT&T Dedicated Ethernet that goes beyond the GigaMAN and DecaMAN solutions. ADE offers speeds ranging from 1 Gbps up to 100 Gbps.

The new AT&T technology supports not only Ethernet formats, but other protocols as well. Their system embeds data signals within an Optical Transport Network (OTN). That network offers a standardized way to “wrap” various protocols in containers that can all be carried on the same industry standard format fiber optic wavelengths.

Where is This All Going
The two digital transport technologies that are growing rapidly are fiber and wireless. Fiber demand is being pushed by ever increasing amounts of video content being generated and exchanged. It is being pushed even more by the move from local data centers to remote cloud services. High connection speeds with low latency are essential if you want the same or better productivity from your applications when they are cloud hosted as when they are in the server room down the hall.

Ironically, perhaps, another huge demand for fiber optic transport capacity is the move to higher speed wireless services. Older generation cell towers could be served well by copper-based T1 lines that were almost universally available and provisioned over the same twisted pair cables that provide landline telephone service. LTE 4G and the coming 5G bandwidths far exceed the capacity of even multiple bonded T1 lines. Only point to point wireless and fiber optic lines have the necessary bandwidth to support 4G, 5G and beyond.

Is Copper a Goner?
Twisted pair copper connections have served the telecommunications industry well for over a century. Even T1 digital has been widely deployed for half a century. Will it still be with us half a century from now? I seriously doubt it.

Cellular phones are now so ubiquitous that the majority of consumers see no need for the old wired landline anymore. Businesses are dropping POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) for VoIP telephony and Unified Communications. Both of these newer protocols run on computer networks, not traditional telephone wiring. Smaller companies may opt to connect to their service providers via cable broadband, but medium and larger companies connect directly with fiber optic lines.

It has gotten so bad that telephone companies are petitioning the FCC to let them abandon their old copper lines in the ground rather than having to deal with ever corroding connections for fewer and fewer paying customers. It will no doubt begin as a refusal to connect new locations, but how long before even existing customers are told that they’ll no longer have dial tone? Months? A few years?

That leaves the interesting situation of businesses who still have analog POTS phone service, ISDN PRI multiple phone lines, T1 dedicated data lines and Ethernet over Copper point to point and dedicated Internet service. These connections may still be widely available while demand is high. You know, though, as more and more buildings are lit for fiber, business will quickly jump on the fiber links that offer higher bandwidth options and lower costs per Mbps. It’s likely that line of sight and 5G cellular wireless will fill the gaps where fiber construction costs are just too high for some locations.

How To Ensure Continuing Service
The best way to ensure that your business will have the voice, data and video transport services that you need is to make sure you have options. That’s easier today than ever before. A generation ago, the incumbent local telephone companies ruled the roost and you took whatever they had available and paid whatever the bill said. No more.

Deregulation has spawned a wealth of competition. Initially that meant new companies renting those same telephone company lines to deliver alternative service, often at a better price. Fiber optics has changed that landscape. Now there are many fiber optic network companies that own the fiber in the ground and will connect you directly to their networks, avoiding the phone company facilities completely. The result is price competition that is reducing the cost of bandwidth by an order of magnitude or more. Get 10 Mbps Ethernet for what you used to pay for a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Get 100 Mbps for a few times that price. Gigabit Ethernet is now affordable for many if not most businesses. Even 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps are within reason if you need that much capacity.

Are you concerned about upcoming loss of your voice, video or data connections or what might be in the planning stages? How would you like to get more bandwidth for less cost that you pay now? If that sounds interesting, see just how many competitive bandwidth options are available right now for your business locations.

When Only T1 Will Do

By: John Shepler

In the age of gigabit fiber connections, the venerable T1 line might be thought of as a relic of the past. Not at all. T1 service is alive and well. It might even be exactly what you need right now in the way of bandwidth and affordability.

Why Would Anyone Want a T1 Line?
T1 is the most mature, most deployed and most available of the telecom line services. You might think that Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) would be the leader in that category. It was. POTS is giving way in many organizations to newer premises VoIP and telephony in the cloud. That still leaves what used to be the POTS lines connected. What are they good for? Think: T1

T1 lines are amazingly versatile. They make perfect telephone trunks for channelized T1 phone, ISDN PRI and even high quality VoIP. They are almost certainly available at your location, wherever you may happen to be. Plus, T1 is readily affordable by just about any size business.

The T1 Telephone Line
Did you know that T1 actually started out as a telephone trunking technology? If the telco companies didn’t have a burning desire to consolidate the mass of wiring that interconnected their switching centers, T1 might never have come about. In the beginning, it was one telephone conversation per pair of wires. Then the phone companies found a way to send multiple conversations down the same pair simultaneously using a method called carrier telephony. It works like the radio band. Each conversation had its own assigned carrier frequency separated from the others so they wouldn’t interfere. This is the analog way to get the job done.

The breakthrough that was T1 involved the conceptual change from analog to digital. By digitizing the phone conversations, you could send 24 of them down the same pair of wires and they wouldn’t interfere. What’s more, digital technology got rid of all that noise and crosstalk that analog long distance lines were famous for in the first part of the last century.

A channelized T1 telephone line consists of 24 time division multiplexed segments or channels that are synchronized at the transmitting and receiving end. Each analog phone signal is digitized into 8 bits by 64 Kbps, which preserves the call quality. What grade of wiring do you need to transmit these calls? Ordinary twisted pair telephone cable will do just fine. With signal regenerators every mile or so, a T1 line can be stretched as far as you like.

ISDN PRI Telephone Trunks
T1 telephone lines are used by in-house PBX business phone systems. In recent decades, that technology has been upgraded to something called ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface. It’s the same T1 line, but with a slightly different format. ISDN PRI provides 23 separate phone lines plus a control and signaling channel that runs the system. This is the preferred option for call centers because of its fast connection times and high voice quality. Multiple T1 lines can be installed to most PBX systems to match the number of outside lines needed.

T1 for VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a different method of achieving the same phone service. VoIP was designed to be compatible with computer networks rather than a unique telephone standard. Even so, VoIP trunks, called SIP trunks are needed to get the phone calls to the telephone service provider in the cloud. Unchannelized T1 lines work great for this because they are highly reliable and offer enough bandwidth to carry two dozen or more simultaneous telephone conversations.

T1 Internet Lines
T1 for Internet access, with its paltry 1.5 Mbps bandwidth might be considered laughable in this age of gigabit broadband. It’s not so funny when your business is on a farm or so far out in the wilderness that you are lucky to have a landline phone. Those landline phone wires can also carry T1. That means if you can get phone service, you can get at least T1 broadband where there is no fiber or even cell towers for miles.

Is 1.5 Mbps truly a problem? It likely is if you want to transfer HD video production. Not really, though, if you have a small business and need the line for credit card verification, a connection back to a franchise office, or just email and casual web browsing. You can increase this bandwidth by combining, called bonding, multiple T1 lines together. This will give you anywhere from 3 to 12 Mbps, depending on the number of lines you bond.

How About The Cost?
People who think T1 is expensive remember back a decade or two, when a single T1 line would set you back at least a grand a month. Today, that figure is more like $200 to $300 in most cases. It still depends on how much competing service is in your area and how far you are from the telco office. Is this expensive? Business grade cable broadband is also priced in that range, but with “up to” higher advertised bandwidth… if you happen to be next to where the cable line runs. Even then, cable is shared bandwidth while T1 is dedicated to your particular company.

If your need is for highly reliable PBX telephone lines, point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access or rural broadband applications, T1 might still be the optimum service for your company. Check out T1 and bonded T1 pricing and availability and compare with your alternative service options.



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Cyber Monday is For Business Buyers Too

By: John Shepler

Cyber Monday is the new tradition for shopping online to get deals that you couldn’t in the rough and tumble of brick and mortar Black Friday sales. You’ll see numerous offers for special deals targeted at consumers today. But what about businesses? Is there such a thing as Cyber Monday for business?

There should be. Business purchases are a huge part of the economy. What’s more, what businesses have to pay for products and services reflects in the price consumers have to pay. If your business can get a bargain on Cyber Monday, it’s a win all the way around.

Let’s have a look at some things that you might not think are ripe for savings, yet actually are. While prices for these services might not be specific to this particular day, there’s still a huge incentive for you to take a closer look. You’ll likely find savings that you didn’t know were available. Whatever you save will pay off for months and years into the future.

1. T1 Lines
Just about every company has leased a T1 line at some point in its growth. Many still do, and new T1 lines are being provisioned every day. Why has this decades old telecom service retained its popularity in the face of technological advancement?

It’s hard to beat a winner. T1 lines have a long history of reliability and versatility. You can use a T1 line as a point to point private line, dedicated Internet access, MPLS network connection, or as a T1 or ISDN PRI telephone trunk for your telephone system. They offer the same bandwidth in both directions and are inherently low in latency.

What T1 lines have that many other telecom services don’t have is near universal availability. They come in on ordinary twisted pair telephone cable that is available to just about every business building. The one gripe has been cost. Ten years ago, T1 lines were pricey. You had to swallow hard and sign the contract if you needed connectivity. Today, prices are a fraction of what they used to be and are attractive to even very small businesses.

If you are unhappy with “consumer grade” broadband or have a T1 contract that is a few years old or more, you should get an instant price quote for T1 line services now.

2. Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper, also called EoC, is the direct competitor to T1 lines. EoC is a newer technology and uses the same twisted pair copper wires that provision T1. It’s also symmetrical in bandwidth, highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss.

What Ethernet over Copper offers is higher bandwidth and… Ethernet! While your phone system may still be a traditional Key Telephone System or PBX using analog POTS lines or ISDN PRI, your computer network is almost certainly based on Ethernet. EoC lets you connect to other locations or the Internet while keeping your packets in the Ethernet protocol all the way. This opens the door to services like E-LAN that let you set up a bridged LAN that includes locations across town or nationwide.

Unlike T1 that has a fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps no matter the distance, EoC technology trades off speed for distance. If you are close to the central office you can get very high speeds, perhaps 50 Mbps or more. Farther away, available line speed drops off as the line length increases. Even so, most business locations can get 3 Mbps up to 10 or 20 Mbps using Ethernet over Copper. Even better, the cost per Mbps is usually lower than what you pay for T1… perhaps half as much.

If you are running out of bandwidth on your T1 line or want to see if you can get the same or higher bandwidth at a better price, you’ll want to check out Ethernet over Copper bandwidth speeds and prices for your locations.

3. Metro Ethernet over Fiber
If Ethernet over Copper is a good idea, Ethernet over Fiber is a even better one. Fiber optic networks have multiplied in recent years, with tentacles reaching into nearly every city around the globe. The other revolution is the rise of independent private carriers to compete with the traditional telephone companies. This competitive environment has expanded service availability and reduced prices.

If you’ve had fiber optic services for years, chances are that you have one of the legacy SONET telco fiber lines. These include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.4 Mbps. SONET is highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss. It traditionally has suffered from lack of availability, few fixed bandwidth levels, and high prices per Mbps compared to what is available now.

Yes, SONET is still a good fiber service to have. Prices have come down dramatically over the years. But Ethernet over Fiber is an even better deal. Like EoC, EoF keeps your traffic in the Ethernet protocol for easy interfacing, and the ability to get LAN-type connectivity among multiple locations.

it’s also highly scalable. You can get just about any bandwidth level you want between 10 Mbps and 10 Gbps. In some major business centers, speeds as high as 100 Gbps are available to businesses as well as carriers. What’s more, you can generally get your service upgraded quickly with just a phone call to your provider. Quickly means anything from a few hours to a week or so. Compare that with weeks or months if you need a SONET upgrade.

If you need bandwidth of 10 Mbps or higher for your business (not residential) location, it is well worth your while to take a few minutes this Cyber Monday (or any other day) and check out the fiber optic bandwidth and pricing options available right now.

4. Hosted PBX
Everybody knows what a business telephone is. It’s that box with a handset and dial pad that sits on your desk and has its own wiring to the phone company or an in-house phone system. Business phones are essential for business. The traditional phone systems aren’t so essential anymore. In fact, you are likely missing out on both features and cost savings if you aren’t looking at the new cloud hosted VoIP or cloud PBX phone services. So, let’s take a Cyber Monday shopping trip.

There are numerous companies offering “hosted” phone services. These range of single line VoIP telephone services all the way up to call centers in the cloud. They’re all based on the idea that if telephones can connect to the computer network, then the switching equipment can be located anywhere. Today, the best deals are cloud service providers who operate massive data centers dedicated to IP telephony.

Don’t confuse enterprise VoIP services with the low-end Internet VoIP services. They may use similar technology, but the trick to consistently high voice quality is a dedicated network connection between you and the provider. This is known as a SIP trunk. The bandwidth of the trunk determines how many simultaneous calls it will support. You can have a few lines or thousands. Only the speed of the connection changes.

What Hosted PBX does is change the way you pay for your phone service. Instead of making a major capital investment in equipment and ongoing maintenance expenses, you pay per phone per month to a service firm. That firm bears the cost and responsibility of running a highly reliable and easily scalable phone system for your company. All you have in-house are the IP phones plugged into your computer network and a specialized router to prioritize the voice traffic.

Is your phone system too small or getting a little “creaky”? Before you go out and drop a bundle on a shiny new in-house equipment rack, see how competitive and feature-filled a Cloud Hosted PBX service can be.

Now you see how Cyber Monday can be as asset to businesses beyond what you sell to consumers on this single day of the year. Use Cyber Monday as an incentive to shop for your business as well as yourself and get deals that will pay off handsomely for years.

Business Phone Line Options

By: John Shepler

One thing every business, large or small, needs is at least one telephone line. Phone lines may seem pretty mundane, but you may have more options than you think. Are you sure that you have the right phone line for your business?

Plain Old Telephone Service
The historical phone line that we’re all familiar with is the analog phone line, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. It’s that vanilla.

POTS lines are as simple as they come. They consist of a single twisted copper pair that runs from a standard RJ-11 phone jack on your wall all the way back to the telephone company central office. The phone conversation is carried by a varying current in the wires.

What you may not realize is that POTS is a self-contained phone system. Phones were traditionally made of passive electrical components. They got their power right off the phone line… and still can. The value of this is that even if the electrical power goes off at your location, you still have phone service.

What’s happened lately, however, is that even single line phones have gone electronic and require AC power supplies and/or batteries to power the circuitry. This is especially true of cordless phone systems with multiple handsets. You can still get dial tone during a power outage, but you need to have a backup battery supply to operate the phone, not the line.

Multiple LInes
You are not stuck with just a single POTS line. You can have as many as you want. Mind you, there is no economy of scale. There is a fixed price for each line whether you have one phone per line or share the outside lines using a Key Telephone System or PBX.

Wireless as an Option
Can you get rid of the telephone line completely? That’s what cellular phone service is all about. No more “landline”. Everything is done with cell towers instead of wires. Wireless can work just fine for independent professionals who are always out of the office anyway. With a data plan you can have both Internet and voice telephony on the same device. You can enhance your mobile setup with an incoming toll free number, fax transmission and reception, and international dial-around calling. Shared plans can support a small office as well as a single user. Operations larger than that will still need wired landlines.

Moving up to Trunks
A telephone trunk is multiple phone lines coming in on a single cable. There used to be analog trunks, but that technology has all gone digital. The most popular trunks are T1, ISDN PRI and SIP.

T1 lines were devised as replacements for multiple analog POTS lines. Instead of separate wires, T1 lines are multiplexed to divvy up the available bandwidth into 24 independent channels. Each channel can be thought of as a separate phone line.

What if you already have a dozen phones and want to replace all those separate phone lines with a single T1 line? Chances are that you’ll get the same or better service at a lower monthly cost. A box called a “channel bank” handles the conversion between T1 channels and analog lines. Just plug your phones in like you always have.

T1 vs ISDN PRI
ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface is a variation on the T1 line. It uses the same channelization scheme, but dedicates one channel to dialing and switching for all the others. That means you have a maximum of 23 outside lines available on a PRI trunk. The tradeoff is that your phone calls will switch faster on ISDN PRI. That’s important for call centers and others who need highly efficient telephone operations.

Most PBX systems now have the interface circuitry for T1 and ISDN PRI already built-in. You simply plug in the trunk line and the system handles all of the necessary conversions.

SIP Trunks
Many, many companies are considering switching to VoIP technology or have already made the move. SIP trunks are the natural complement to VoIP phone systems. Their advantage is that they use the same protocol, SIP, as the phone themselves. Remember that VoIP or SIP phones connect directly to an Ethernet LAN, usually shared with computers, printers and other network devices. The SIP trunk extends the network so that it also connects to the VoIP service provider.

Like T1 and ISDN PRI, SIP trunks support multiple simultaneous telephone conversations. The difference is that these conversations consist of packet streams all combined on one line instead of breaking the line into separate channels.

Another advantage of SIP trunks is that they can carry Internet traffic as well as phone calls. After all, everything is in packet format. What’s important is that the trunk be setup to prioritize telephone traffic over data traffic to ensure voice quality. This is called Class of Service or Quality of Service.

What phone line is best for your business? One way to find out quickly is to get multiple competitive quotes for everything from POTS through SIP Trunking as business phone line options.

The 3 Types of VoIP Lines for Business

By: John Shepler

Businesses large and small have been migrating to VoIP telephone technology for years now. Some are delighted with the move and have never look back. Others feel like they’ve lost something in the way of performance. The calls are often muddled and it’s hard to carry on a two way conversation. Would you believe that its the exact same technology involved? Why is it that VoIP telephony can range from excellent to unacceptable? Let’s take a look.

What’s VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a means to convert telephones into computer peripherals. The reason to do that is both to save money and enable applications that just won’t work on the old style telephone network. Network voice is a powerful tool, but can more easily be degraded that simpler analog phones.

Old School Phone Systems
Business phone lines are sometimes called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. They consist of twisted copper pair wires that run directly from the phone set all the way to the telephone company. Each phone has its own set of wires. Once you get more than a few phones, however, you face a mounting phone bill since the telco charges you to make internal as well as external calls.

Companies get around this by installing their own phone switches. Small systems use Key Telephone Systems where multiple outside lines are available on each phone but you can also call within the building on your own wiring. Larger companies install PBX (Private Branch Exchange) switches that manage a pool of outside lines that can be assigned to any phone as needed.

If you only have a couple of phones, each with their own line, the phone company takes care of all the switching for you. With many phones, you become your own little phone company for inside calls. That means you have to take care of all the special phone wiring and the Key or PBX switching equipment. Plus, you have to pay for multiple outside analog lines or a digital PRI trunk to get to the public telephone system.

How VoIP is Different
With VoIP, each phone plugs into your company LAN. That gets rid of the second special phone network. You still need something to switch the calls between phones. This can be a VoIP PBX or IP PBX that you have in-house. It can also be a much larger hosted PBX system from a hosted VoIP service provider. Hosted means that a specialized company “hosts” or run the system. You are one of many clients that they host. It’s pretty much like buying web hosting. You simply pay by the month for service instead of having to install and maintain your own equipment.

VoIP Phone Line Needs
All VoIP phones connect to a local network. This can be a small home office network that has only a computer, WiFi router, VoIP phone adaptor (for a regular phone) and broadband modem. Or, it can be an extensive corporate LAN that is bridged into multiple business locations nationwide and even overseas. The principles and the requirements for high quality performance are the same.

Since the network is shared with many phones and other computing devices, it take some doing to make sure that you get high performance. With dedicated analog lines, that’s the phone company’s problem. With VoIP, it’s now your IT problem.

What’s needed is plenty of bandwidth to accommodate all the phones and other devices. But that’s not enough. You need to give the voice packets priority over data because phone calls will start sounding muddled and choppy long before you notice that the file is loading slower. The network also needs low latency, packet loss and jitter to be transparent to the packets carrying the VoIP digitized phone conversations.

3 Types of VoIP Phone Lines
All analog phone lines are alike. All ISDN PRI trunks are alike. VoIP phone lines can be quite different. They range from Internet VoIP to SIP Trunks to MPLS private networks.

Using the Internet as Your Phone LIne
The low end of the market, which keeps costs low for home offices and small businesses, uses a broadband Internet service to connect to the VoIP service provider. You can share your broadband connection with a couple of computers, a WiFi router, and a few VoIP phones. You’ll need a router that creates CoS (Class of Service) to prioritize the phones or the computers will interfere with your calls. Sometimes the service provider will give you an adaptor that does this.

The advantage of using the Internet as a phone line is that it’s cheap. You probably already have broadband for your computer. The lure is to save money by “eliminating the separate phone line.” The downside is that the Internet was never designed for telephony. It was intended to reliably transport data files. There is no prioritization of voice on the Internet and most access lines, like DSL, Cable, Satellite and Cellular, are shared broadband. It’s a cost vs performance tradeoff. You may find that some calls sound perfect but others break up or sound muddled. It all depends on what else is happening on the Internet while you are making your call.

One way to improve Internet VoIP is to use a dedicated Internet access (DIA) like T1 or Ethernet over Copper. This keeps your neighbors from disrupting your calls while they download large video and software programs, but you are still subject to network congestion on the Internet itself.

Private Line VoIP Service
Companies that depend on high quality phone service for customer support and employee productivity usually sidestep the Internet in favor of something more predictable. The outside line that compares most closely to the legacy analog and PRI lines is the SIP Trunk. This is a digital broadband line, but it is a private line that is not shared with others. It’s called a SIP trunk because it supports SIP or Session Initiation Protocol, the switching system for VoIP calls.

A simple SIP trunk is a T1 line that runs from your network to your service provider. It supports up to a couple dozen simultaneous phone conversations or a combination of phone calls and Internet. The Internet service has a lower priority than the phone calls and uses whatever bandwidth isn’t needed for the phones at any given time. Smaller companies that don’t have dozens of phones find this is a great cost saver compared to maintaining separate phone and broadband lines.

Larger SIP trunks are also available for bigger companies or call centers. Both copper and fiber optic bandwidth is available to support as many calls as you need.

Voice over MPLS Networks
Major corporations generally have many business sites located around the country and even in other countries. They still want any employee to easily call any other employee without paying long distance toll charges. They also need to make outside calls to anyone with a phone.

A sophisticated solution is called VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS networks. MPLS is a private network arrangement with a regional, national or international service footprint. The network operator ensures that each paying customer has the necessary Class of Service, bandwidth and low latency, packet loss and jitter that they need for high performance.

VoMPLS works a lot like VoIP using SIP Trunks. The difference is that instead of having to run dedicated private lines among all your locations, you simply need an access line from each location to the MPLS network. This can give you a major cost savings, especially on those long international connections, while maintaining high network performance.

Are you in search of a better telephone solution, to reduce costs, increase available features or both? If so, there are VoIP telephone solutions you should take a close look at.

Telephone Trunks for Call Centers

By: John Shepler

All businesses need telephone lines of some sort. Independent professionals may rely on a smartphone for wireless communication, but businesses with offices or stores open to the public or with two or more employees almost always have some sort of landline installed. Let’s take a look at the analog and digital options available and the advantage of installing telephone trunk lines to increase capacity and reduce cost.


Plain Old Analog
Analog phone lines are the legacy technology of the phone companies going back over a century. You’ll hear them described as POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. POTS lines are well established, highly reliable and engineered for high voice quality on both local and toll calls. Standard phones, including desk sets and cordless phones with multiple handsets, are analog phones and plug directly into analog business phone lines.

Broadband Phone
The digital solution for a single phone line is a broadband Internet connection shared with the computers. This option is usually chosen for its low cost, but voice quality can degrade and certain applications, like FAX machines and alarm systems, may not function correctly.

Adding More Lines
What about the vast majority of businesses with more than one phone line, especially those with an in-house contact center or specializing as a call center? Small operations sill rely on analog phone lines. You can add analog lines one at a time and plug them into your key telephone system or PBX switching system. Each outside line has its own phone number.

How Costs Add Up
Adding analog phone lines incrementally as you need them works well until you get more than half a dozen to a dozen separate lines. There are no technical issues, but costs mount up. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. Six lines cost six times as much. There is no economy of scale as these are independent lines.

How Trunking Saves
The strategy for reducing costs while maintaining voice quality and reliability is called trunking. Trunking simply means combining multiple lines to create a single trunk line with the same capacity. Trunking was invented by the telephone industry to transport dozens or even thousands of phone conversations efficiently from switching office to switching office. Originally, this was done with analog technology called carrier telephony. In recent decades, it’s all gone digital from office to office, leaving analog POTS lines only for that last mile connection between the telco office and the customer’s premises.

T1 Telephone Trunks
The first digital trunk line that was introduced by the phone industry for business users was the T1 telephone line. Yes, this is the same T1 technology that you may be using for point to point or dedicated Internet access. The difference is that the T1 line is divided or “channelized” into 24 separate segments or time slots. Each channel can transport one two-way telephone conversation and is the equivalent of an analog POTS line. You can use an appliance called a channel bank to convert between analog phone and the T1 line. Most in-house PBX phone systems have the necessary interface to do this or it can be added easily with a plug-in card.

Cost Advantage of T1
The big advantage of T1 trunks is that they become cost competitive with multiple POTS lines when you get over 6 to 10 outside lines. If you need more than a dozen phone lines for your desks or a call center operation, T1 is the lower cost option. Multiple T1 lines can be added to provide blocks of 24 outside lines incrementally.

ISDN PRI Improves on T1
A newer version of the T1 line is called ISDN PRI or Primary Rate interface. It uses the same T1 line but reserves one channel for signaling and switching. The other 23 channels are available as separate phone lines. ISDN PRI is popular with call centers because it provides faster call setup and teardown than the older T1 telephone lines. It also offers digital data ,such as Caller ID, that is not generally available on just T1 trunks. Like T1, though, multiple ISDN PRI trunks can be installed to provide as many outside lines as needed. Cost is competitive with T1 and most PBX systems come with the PRI interface already installed.

SIP Trunking, The Emerging Standard
While ISDN PRI is now the standard in commercial telephone trunking technology, an even newer technology is available to better support enterprise VoIP telephone systems. This is called SIP trunking. SIP is the switching protocol used by IP telephones and VoIP phone systems.

SIP vs T1
SIP trunks are also digital, but differ from T1 lines in that they are based on packet switching rather than time division channelization. Packet switching is the heart of all Ethernet networks that support computing. What companies are doing is replacing their old analog telephones with IP phones that connect to the same network as the computers. SIP trunks extend this connection out to the service provider for multiple telephone lines or a combination of voice and data.

Private Lines vs The Internet
Note that high performance SIP trunks are private lines between the user and the carrier and do not suffer from the vagaries of Internet broadband phone. SIP trunks often have the ability to also supply Internet service, but the telephone packets have priority to maintain high voice quality. SIP trunking is becoming popular for call center operations as companies replace their old PBX systems with newer IP PBX systems or choose to outsource the switching function to the cloud.

How to Choose
Which type of telephone trunking arrangement is optimum for your organization? Get some expert advice on the tradeoffs and competitive pricing from multiple carriers serving your location. Call now toll free (888) 848-8749 or enter your inquiry at Telexplainer.net

Achieving Call Quality Momentum With Cloud Communications

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with your decades old in-house phone system that is getting more obsolete by the minute? Or, do you have a horror story that revolves around moving to VoIP only to find the reliability bad and the call quality worse? It’s time you gained some momentum with a superior cloud communications solution… like one from Momentum. Have a look….


If you are new to IP based voice communication, you may not be aware of the pitfalls that can ruin a good network voice system or the solutions that are just bad to begin with. This is where you need a “best of breed” vendor to ensure your success.

There are a couple of competing approaches to enterprise level VoIP. The first is to have the system located and operated in-house. You treat it as part of the IT infrastructure. That’s different from traditional approaches that have kept the telephone network and IT network forever separate.

Some companies only go so far as to replace their T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI trunks with SIP trunks in order to get a better deal from a competitive service provider. Nothing changes in-house other than a new way to connecting to the phone company.

While this is the least amount of upset to the status quo, it does nothing to modernize your phone system. You gain none of the advanced calling features that VoIP systems have to offer. For that, you need to combine voice and data.

Enterprise VoIP, as opposed to a home office or small office with one or two phones, involves making the IT network also your phone network. You can add adaptors to your current analog phones so they connect to Ethernet, but you’re probably better off upgrading to IP telephones that have the network interface built-in plus all sorts of other capabilities.

Once you get all the phones on your LAN and off the phone wiring, you reach another fork in the road. Do you buy an in-house IP PBX system and continue to run everything yourself, or do you offload the switching system and connections to the public phone system to a cloud vendor?

Cloud communication is becoming a very attractive option. You avoid the capital investment of upgrading your in-house system and the ongoing maintenance costs. You also gain the ability to include remote workers in the system so you can communicate the same way no matter where you happen to be. Being tied to a desk, especially by a phone cord, can damage both your flexibility and productivity.

Momentum, the service provider, has some very attractive pluses in cloud communications. For one thing, they offer measurable call quality. Getting network voice right can be a tricky prospect and your customers will know if your phone system degrades. You also gain mobility, cloud disaster recovery and call center features. Best of all, you may find that your next phone system upgrade can save rather than cost you money.

Is your business ready to tap the advantages of cloud hosted communications? If so, find out what Momentum and other top tier providers have to offer. You may be surprised at what you can get for the same or less than you spend now.

Choose Your Trunk, Choose Your Handoff

By: John Shepler

The telephone system isn’t what it used to be. Mostly that’s good. Technology has given us wireless mobile smartphones, enterprise VoIP, cloud hosted services and sophisticated call center operations. Many companies, though, can’t afford to shuck their considerable infrastructure investment in order to gain the advantages of the latest advancements. Is there any way to mash up the old and the new and have it work?

Indeed, there is. The magic is in something called a “handoff”. This is the interface between your telecom lines and your equipment. Let’s take a look at what type of handoffs are available to keep your phone system up to date.

In the beginning, “Ma Bell” offered one type of handoff. It’s the venerable analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line that is still popular today. Every phone was an analog phone and every line was an analog line. The handoff was in the form of a single twisted pair of copper wires. All the switching was handled by the public telephone system.

This type of connection still works well for businesses that need only a single telephone line. The phone plugs into a jack on the wall that connects to the telco POTS line. It’s the ultimate in simplicity. This arrangement supports both single wired handsets and the newer cordless phones. You can have multiple cordless handsets connected to a single POTS line.

A slightly more sophisticated business phone system allows multiple desk phones along with multiple outside lines. Each line is still an analog POTS line with its own phone number. It’s called a key telephone system because each phone has a button or “key” for each line. You can see the status of each line, typically 4 or 8, on the light for that line. You select the line you want by pushing the button for that line. You have to provide the switching intelligence for the system by answering the line that is ringing or selecting an unused line for calling out.

You can have as many analog phone lines as your key system will support. Since the lines are independent, there is no economy of scale with this arrangement. Two lines cost twice as much as one line, and so on. To gain a cost advantage, you need to move up to a trunk ing arrangement.

A trunk is a telecom line that supports multiple independent phone conversations. Originally, these were also analog using frequency division multiplexing. In the last 50 years, the old analog trunks have been replaced by digital trunks. T1 phone lines are a popular trunking system. Each T1 line supports up to 24 simultaneous phone calls carried on separate time multiplexed channels. The physical connection is two copper twisted pair. One is for transmit and the other is for receive.

Lets say you have a good size key telephone system with a dozen outside lines. You can provide those lines as individual POTS lines or with a single T1 line that carries all 12 phone lines with room to spare. The T1 line will likely cost less for a dozen lines. If you used all 24 channels, the cost savings would be even more dramatic. The issue you have, though, is how to connect a digital T1 line to your analog telephone system.

The answer is in a piece of interface equipment called a “channel bank.” This device converts between analog and digital signals so that both the phone system and the trunk line have the signal format and electrical characteristics they expect. As far as your phone system is concerned, the connection is exactly the same as if you had separate analog lines all the way to the phone company. This is called an analog handoff.

Another application for analog handoff is older in-house PBX (Private Branch Exchange) phone systems. A PBX is a key system with a brain. The PBX takes care of routing incoming calls and the bank of outside lines. When you dial “9” for an outside line, the PBX gives you the next available one. You don’t know or care which line it has selected. They all work the same.

Many PBX systems will accept one or more T1 lines directly. There is no need to go through the intermediate analog conversion using a channel bank. This is called a digital handoff. It may also be called a T1 CAS (Channel Associated Signaling) digital handoff or an ISDN PRI digital handoff.

ISDN PRI is a special type of T1 line that supports 23 simultaneous calls. What happened to the other channel? It’s used for signaling and switching to make the system faster and capable of slightly higher voice quality. Many PBX systems now have a connector for one or more PRI (Primary Rate Interface) trunks, as this is the most popular service for medium and larger phone systems.

Enterprise VoIP is the current technology being adopted en-masse by medium and larger companies. This replaces the analog or proprietary digital telephone wiring with network connections to the company LAN. The PBX is updated to an IP PBX that supports IP telephones. It also supports a packet switched phone line technology called SIP Trunking.

A SIP Trunk is digital, like T1 or PRI, but not separated into individual channels. Instead, the transmission protocol is Ethernet packets and a VoIP-centric switching format called SIP or Session Initiation Protocol.

An all-VoIP business telephone system would have IP phones and an IP PBX sharing the company LAN. A SIP Trunk connects the PBX to the telephone service provider. This is called a SIP handoff.

Another use of SIP Trunks is for cloud hosted VoIP services that provide the switching as well as connectivity to the public telephone network. With a cloud solution, you no longer have a PBX or IP PBX in-house.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. You can often select your preferred phone trunk technology and specify the handoff you require. Just like T1 and PRI can be set up to provide analog handoff, SIP trunks can provide SIP, T1 digital, PRI digital, or analog handoffs. This means that your old phone system, with whatever interface it supports, can connect to modern networks and telephone trunking options. It often makes economic sense to continue using your current phone system until you can migrate to the latest technology.

Do you want to connect your current phones or phone system to the telephone service of your choice but aren’t sure how to make that connection? Find out what business telephone trunking options and pricing are available for your business location.

Contact Center On Demand in the Cloud

Cloud communications services are becoming more sophisticated by the day. It’s a natural extension of the cloud computing revolution. Having successfully moved the data servers to the cloud, many companies have eyed the telecom room and wondered why they still need to support that large, expensive and soon to run out of capacity PBX telephone system.

More and more, it makes sense to move business phone operations to the cloud. It all started with Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX and has expanded from there. The idea behind hosted PBX is that the telephone switching function can be accomplished just as easily from a cloud data center as it can from a back room in your office. The “big iron” hardware goes away, as do the analog, T1 and ISDN PRI telephone trunks. What you keep are handsets now connected to your corporate network and a high bandwidth WAN connection to your service provider.

What do you gain? No more capital investments for one thing. You move to a pricing model of so much per user per month. You also gain a myriad of additional features such as unified communications that include your smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs into the communications system. Do you have HD voice? Probably not. HD voice is a VoIP technology that expands the transmitted audio band to increase the clarity of your “phone” calls.

Now that Hosted VoIP is a standard practice, the next step is to move the entire contact center to the cloud. XO Communications, a major player in cloud networking services, calls their system “Contact Center On Demand.” Have a look at this short video to see what it’s all about…


What XO will do for you is provide a single integrated solution that includes Hosted PBX and Contact Center on Demand. This is a comprehensive approach to your enterprise communications that gives you the quality and performance you need to support employees and customers with advanced features and a more attractive cost model. The system easily expands to include all of your business locations, along with mobile and remote workers.

What don’t you worry about any more? Equipment obsolescence, planning for large capital investments, limited feature sets, lack of mobile integration, on-going maintenance, inability to ramp up and down to accommodate seasonal spikes in call activity, and managing disaster backup and recovery.

Is your business ready to for more efficient and featured voice communications? Do the comparison between premises based business phone systems and Hosted PBX / Contact Center on Demand services. See what makes the most sense for your operations.

Ethernet over Copper FAQ

Business bandwidth options have increased dramatically over the last few years. One new technology that is rapidly gaining popularity is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Before you sign a contract or renew an existing one for the connectivity you have now, see if these FAQs pique your interest in this newer bandwidth service.

Q: What is Ethernet over Copper service?

A: Ethernet over Copper is a digital line service that transmits Ethernet network signals over twisted pair telecom cabling. It essentially transports your LAN traffic over metropolitan and wide area networks.

Q: How does EoC relate to T1 line service?

A: Both EoC and T1 use the same twisted pair telephone cable installed by the incumbent local telephone company. The modulation technology for EoC is different from what is used for T1, so the performance of the line services each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Q: Why would you order Ethernet over Copper instead of T1?

A: The advantages of EoC include higher available bandwidth at lower cost that equivalent T1 line services and easy scalability. There are also Ethernet services available that T1 doesn’t support.

Q: Does T1 still make sense in light of EoC?

A: T1 has the advantages of nearly unlimited availability and a locked-in line speed that isn’t related to how far you are from the telco office. You can get T1 line service in rural areas where Ethernet over Copper does not yet reach. A special type of T1 line called ISDN PRI is popular for PBX telephone trunking. EoC is has no direct equivalent.

Q: What bandwidth levels are available with Ethernet over Copper?

A: Entry level service is typically 2 or 3 Mbps, compared with 1.5 Mbps for T1 lines. Just about any increment in service level is available. Popular bandwidths are 3, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25 and 30 Mbps. In some cases, you can get as much as 50 or 100 Mbps over copper.

Q: Does this mean that EoC can replace fiber?

A: EoC and be a viable alternative to fiber optic service in the lower speeds that fiber operates. Some companies don’t need the full fiber bandwidth of OC3 at 155 Mbps or even DS3 (a fiber/copper hybrid) at 45 Mbps. For these applications, 10 or 20 Mbps may be fast enough and offer a considerable cost savings.

Q: How do you connect to EoC service?

A: The service provider will install a piece of CPE or Customer Premises Equipment at your location. This device will have an Ethernet port that is similar to what you find on any other piece of network equipment. You just plug it in to your edge router or switch and you’ll have connectivity.

Q: What is meant by easy scalability?

A: Traditional telecom services are designed for very specific bandwidths that aren’t easily changed. If you upgrade service, that means a “truck roll” to install a new interface and possibly a long wait while the carrier make the network changes necessary to support a higher bandwidth to your location. The Ethernet over Copper CPE has an Ethernet port with a maximum speed, typically 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. As long as you don’t need more than the maximum bandwidth supported, you can change to a higher or lower speed service in a matter of hours or days, rather than weeks or months.

Does EoC sound like a service that might work for your business connectivity needs? If so, find out what Ethernet over Copper bandwidths and costs are available for your location.


You may also be interested in reading Ethernet over Copper FAQ (Part 2) and Ethernet over Copper FAQ (Part 3).