Do You Need Bandwidth on Demand?

By: John Shepler

When you order a bandwidth service, you are expected to know the bandwidth your network requires and select the best option to deliver it. But, what if your requirements are somewhat fuzzy or subject to change? What if you are moving from an in-house IT data center to cloud computing or cloud communication services? What happens if you get it wrong?

The Limitation of Standard BW Services
Traditional line contracts are for a fixed amount of bandwidth for a set number of years. A DS3 bandwidth connection gives you 45 Mbps bi-directionally at all times. You have the security of knowing that the line speed will be there when you need it. You are also paying for the line to sit there doing nothing when you don’t.

Overprovisioning
This can lead to overprovisioning to ensure that you’ll never run out of capacity. You might only need half the capacity most of the year. Then the holiday rush hits and the network becomes congested at times. The worst situation is when you experience a sudden unexpected wealth of new business and you can’t serve the customers… because you don’t have the capacity.

Making Changes is Slow
When things start to pick up, you can order more bandwidth and keep your fingers crossed that it will be in place before your current line starts to sputter. That’s a problem with traditional telecom services because they are so specific. A T1 line is 1.5 Mbps, a DS3 connection is 45 Mbps, an OC-3 fiber service is 155 Mbps. There is a big gap between service levels and it takes equipment changes to move from one service type to another. That can translate into weeks and even months to make a change.

The Ethernet Advantage
Carrier Ethernet offers a lot more flexibility. If you have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed, you can order 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps, 400 Mbps or some other bandwidth and know that you can upgrade quickly when needed. A GigE port will run at any speed up to 1000 Mbps. You have the option to both upgrade and downgrade your service with just a phone call to your provider. How long does this take? Since there are no equipment changes needed, you may be looking at anywhere between a few hours and a few days max.

Consider Your Port
Of course, you’ll need to think ahead just a bit to know what size port to install. They are typically one of the standard Ethernet speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10 Gbps. It’s also possible to get a 100 Gbps port installed in certain locations if you really need this much capacity. Most business users need a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet port or a 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet port.

Bandwidth Bursting is Better
Additional flexibility is provided by a feature called “bandwidth bursting.” Bursting means that you have some ability to get extra capacity automatically on a short term basis. Not all line services offer this ability. It’s more typical on MPLS IP VPN networks. The capacity is already available on the network. You are simply paying for a committed information rate (CIR). It you need more, you get more and simply pay for the excess used during the month.

Bandwidth on Demand For The Most Flexibility
Bandwidth-on-Demand takes this idea a step further. This is a dynamic network design that can give you more capacity on the fly. You don’t have to plan ahead or settle for a “best effort” by the provider. Bandwidth-on-Demand gives you extra capacity on the fly at the quality of service (QoS) level you’ve pre-selected. XO Communications, a worldwide leader in WAN bandwidth solutions, is offering this service for organizations that need to accommodate unanticipated capacity needs. They are promoting it especially for cloud and multi-cloud service environments.

What Do You Need Now?
Could your operation benefit from Bandwidth-on-Demand, burstable bandwidth or easily scalable Ethernet bandwidth? Get quick quotes and recommendation on flexible bandwidth solutions now.


Note: Image of Gamma Ray burst courtesy of NASA on WIkimedia Commons.

Improve Cloud Performance With Direct Network Access

By: John Shepler

In the mad dash to the cloud, some companies are left wondering if they were better off before the upset the IT apple cart. Everything was running smoothly and business was humming along. It was the lure of cost savings or avoiding huge capital investment that made cloud hosted services look so good. Wasn’t performance supposed to improve, not decline, when you move to the cloud? Why on Earth didn’t it work out that way?

Chances are that there is nothing wrong with your cloud services. They do exactly as advertised for other companies. Costs go down, performance goes up and you can’t run out of resources. You don’t have the wrong cloud, you have the wrong connection.

How can that be? It’s the same Internet connection we’ve refined over the years. Response is snappy, files transfer smoothly and it almost never goes down. We’ll at least all those things were true BEFORE we made the move.

I believe you. The Internet is a marvelous service. I wouldn’t be without it no matter where I am. In fact, I can’t do business without the Internet and you probably can’t either. What you need to know is that the Internet is good for some things and not so good for others.

What’s it good at? Connecting you to the endless sea of consumers in their homes and out & about. You’ll need a good broadband connection to enable your traveling and home workers. Email is ubiquitous. Certainly you must have that today, right?

Indeed you must. Those needs can only be met by great Internet service. It’s everything else that doesn’t belong on the Internet that’s getting you in trouble.

What would that be? Basically, anything that is real time or response sensitive. File transfers aren’t all that time critical, a few seconds or even a few minutes delay probably won’t matter as long as there are no errors in the transfer. Email? You wouldn’t notice anything but major delays. You might even appreciate less dinging from the mailbox. How about VoIP telephone, video conferencing or software as a service? Bingo! These are the applications that can be ruined by poor network performance.

The Internet was designed to be really, really good at making sure that files get from point A to point B without corruption. That doesn’t mean that packets don’t get mangled. There is a built-in mechanism (TCP/IP) that sends another copy of any packet that doesn’t arrive intact. It doesn’t matter how congested the Internet gets or how crummy the line noise is. Your files will get where they are intended to go in perfect shape… eventually.

That’s the problem. We are used to local networks that have all the capacity required and set up so that real time processes get priority. Being relatively small and internal to the company, there’s isn’t much of a problem with noisy lines destroying bits in a packet. As far as you are concerned, the network is transparent from your workstation to the IT data center. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were still so once you move to the cloud?

It can be. What you need to do is get off the Internet “superhighway,” as it is euphemistically called, and get a direct network connection to your cloud services. This direct connection runs via a private network engineered for high performance. This can be in the form of private lines, be they SONET fiber optic or Ethernet Private Lines. You may even need to engage wavelength services if your requirements are massive.

Another approach is to connect at both ends to a MPLS IPVN network. MPLS networks are a shared resource among multiple users but with traffic management unknown on the Internet. This gives you the performance of having your own private line, but at a lower cost.

What can you expect with direct connections to the cloud? Similar responsiveness to what you have with a local data center, even though the cloud data center is somewhere on the other side of the country. This means that employees don’t have to pause what they are doing to wait for the connection to catch up. VoIP phone calls through hosted PBX services maintain their voice quality and even support HD voice for greater clarity. Video conferences maintain their HD quality and lose the jerkiness. Even backup and recovery processes run faster and more smoothly.

You don’t have to give up performance to gain the cost savings and scalability of cloud computing services. What you need is a WAN (Wide Area Network) connection that supports the performance capability of the cloud.

Could you use a better connection in your business? Check out prices and options for direct cloud service connections and private lines now.