Redundant Internet Connections Keep You Online

By: John Shepler

The Internet has become so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. It’s a utility, like gas, water and electricity. It’s always there quietly and efficiently running in the background… until it isn’t.

The Danger of Single Point Failure
Any time we’re dependent on one key element, we’re subject to what is called “single point failure.” Your entire business could be running like a well oiled machine, with orders being fulfilled and customers pouring in. It’s high efficiency and high profits. Then, the connection goes down and stays down. Computers do nothing. Point of sale terminals are frozen. Business grinds to a halt.

Somewhere, somehow the Internet has stopped cold. But it’s designed not to do that, right? Indeed it is. The technology behind the Internet was designed by the military to keep functioning during a nuclear attack when whole areas were vaporized. No one cable or router can stop the data flow. It simply re-routes to paths that are still functional. Well, except for that last connection. You, know. The one that hooks your business to your Internet service provider. How many lines is that? That’s right… ONE. What happens when that gets cut? Right again. Service to and from the Internet stops cold.

The Value of Redundancy
Redundancy is what protects you from single point failure. For things that are so critical you can can’t do business without them, you need a backup. When you have a primary connection and a backup you have redundancy

A simple example of redundant connections is found with many home based businesses. As a solopreneur, you probably can’t justify having a second fiber optic or cable service just in case one goes down. But you likely do have redundancy. Your desktop computer is connected through the router and modem to the ISP. Rarely do you lose service, but it does happen. What then? No need to call up and order another service, you already have one on your phone. Simply use the personal hotspot feature with your phone to supply cellular broadband to your computer and you’re back in business.

There are a couple of fine points here. First, you wan’t to get back to your primary service as quickly and you can or you may get overage charges on your cell phone bill. You typically get only so may GBs per month before they start tacking on extra fees. Second, is your primary Internet service a Fixed Wireless Access from the same provider as your phone service. That might be a great money saver but likely not a redundant connection. If the tower you are accessing is off the air, your phone goes dead and your FWA goes dead at the same time. What’s left to do? Pack up the laptop and head for a hotspot. Hopefully that coffee shop has a different ISP and is still Internet ready. Best to check before you settle in and order.

Robust Business Redundancy
Most businesses don’t have the option to flee the office or store and head out for a break to get reconnected at the nearest hotspot. It makes a lot more sense to have redundant service connections with enough speed to keep running no matter what. Also in most offices it isn’t practical to have everyone pair their PC with their smartphone, although that can work for a short period in some cases. It’s better to have a second redundant service available for the network you already use.

What are some things to think about when setting up this redundant connection? Ideally, you want at least automatic failover. That means when one line goes down, the other picks up the load automatically. This is similar to the way a battery backup power supply works. When the line drops, the battery powers an inverter and the computer doesn’t even blink.

Even better than automatic failover is having a dual or multi-port router that can automatically share the load or pick and choose what route to send each packet for best performance. That’s SDN (Software Defined Networking) or SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network). The beauty of this approach is that instead of one line sitting idle until it is needed, you can make use of all the available bandwidth all the time. Only when one connection goes down does the total bandwidth available get reduced for the duration of the outage.

A good SDN supplier will ensure that you have truly redundant services, but here are a few guidelines if you are going to set this up yourself. First, don’t just have a pair of lines going from your location to your iSP using the same route. Chances are they run in the same bundle. If a backhoe cuts the bundle, you lose all your connectivity at once. Instead, use diverse pathways so that no one disaster can take out all your lines.

You may also want to have different providers for each service. They can be fiber, cable, wireline, fixed wireless, or satellite. At least use two different providers and you may want to consider two different technologies that are unlikely to be affected by a particular outage… be that wire cut, storm, or power loss. It’s valuable to have battery, generator, or solar power backup for your own equipment as well as redundant Internet.

Have you experienced Internet outages or concerned that a sudden loss of service could damage your business? If so, speak with a technology expert and see what redundant Internet options are available for your situation.

Various Flavors of Business Internet Access

By: John Shepler

You might think that the Internet is the Internet, but how you connect to it makes a big difference in the performance you experience. What is your best bet? Is it Dedicated or Shared Internet Access?

What is Dedicated Internet Access?
There are actually two ways to connect to the Internet. One is Shared Internet Access, which is the basis of consumer and most wireless services. The other is Dedicated Internet Access or DIA.

Dedicated Access is similar to how you run your own in-house network. You have ownership and control of the bandwidth. No other company can come in and hog your bandwidth. If you allow vendors or customers to connect to the network, you control that access so you decide who can use what resources.

You don’t own the Internet. Nobody does. The core of the Internet is an extremely high bandwidth infrastructure provided and operated by Tier 1 telecom carriers. Smaller carriers and local Internet service providers pay to have their traffic carried through the core. What you want is performance closest to what is experienced in the core. That’s dedicated access.

How Does Dedicated Internet Access Work?
You contract with an incumbent or competitive telecom carrier for a line that connects through their network core to the core of the internet. All the traffic on that line is under your control. Once it enters a carrier’s network you depend on their expertise and abundance of resources to ensure that you’ll have adequate bandwidth without congestion, latency, jitter or packet loss.

Isn’t Shared Internet Access a Better Deal?
Shared Internet Access is a much lower cost option for one simple reason: It’s shared. Here’s how that works. An Internet Service Provider who sells directly to consumers and small businesses leases a Dedicated Internet Access line, usually a fairly high bandwidth fiber optic line. That provider then multiplexes or divides that bandwidth among many customers. The maximum bandwidth you can use is rate limited to the plan you purchase.

Of course, the actual bandwidth you experience depends on how many other customers are online at the same time and what they are doing. There can be lots of users browsing the Web and not slow each other down. If many users are downloading video or large files from their cloud providers, the total bandwidth will exceed the capacity of the provider’s line and each customer will only get a fair share of that line. Providers can’t provision enough capacity for worst-case traffic conditions and keep the price reasonable, so you can expect your bandwidth to vary.

So, you have a decision to make. If you don’t use cloud services or have a requirement for constant high performance to ensure employee productivity, you might well benefit from the cost savings of cable broadband, satellite, or cellular broadband.

When Even Higher Performance is Required
The Internet is the Internet and it was designed to be robust in maintaining connections and not focused on bandwidth, latency or security. Congestion can happen even in the core and performance can vary on a minute by minute basis. Even a dedicated access line can’t change the inherent nature of this public resource.

The way to improve long distance network performance is to stay off the Internet for everything that doesn’t need it. Have a direct connection to your cloud service provider for business processes and certainly for VoIP telephony or Unified Communications. Use private point to point lines to connect business sites outside your headquarters. A usually acceptable option is the MPLS network, which is a form of privately run Internet. There are multiple users on this network, but the net is run to ensure every customer has all the resources they need. MPLS networks do not connect to the general public, so you will still need the Internet to interact with most customers.

A newer technology that improves Internet performance is the SDN or Software Defined Network, also called a SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Network. This is a system that integrates multiple Internet access lines and manages them to assign the highest performance paths to the most critical functions. You can plug-in a dedicated T1 or Ethernet line, a cable broadband line, a 4G or 5G wireless modem or a two-way satellite transceiver and let the SD-WAN box decide which packets go where. It gives you redundancy so that you almost always have Internet access and can cost less than a dedicated high speed line that might not be used to capacity all the time.

How do you need to connect to the Internet? Will Dedicated or Shared Internet Access work best? Find out what bandwidth options and pricing are available for your business locations.

Dedicated Symmetric Internet Connections

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with the performance of the Internet for business use? Are you inclined to think that the entire thing is really more intended for entertainment and casual browsing that actually getting work done in a timely fashion? Yet, there’s really no alternative. Your customers and suppliers and all the information you need is online. Even your software packages and communications may be on the cloud now. Perhaps all you really need is a higher performance broadband connection that is more suited to the workplace.

What’s Wrong With My Internet Service?
Chances are that your Internet Service Provider is delivering the service you ordered exactly as advertised.There is nothing really wrong with it. It’s just that the particular connection you are using is not up to the job. That’s especially true if you are making demands beyond what the typical Internet user expects. Some of the key parameters you need to be aware of include bandwidth, symmetry, dedication, latency, jitter, and packet loss. Let’s take those one at a time and see why they make a difference.

Bandwidth
Do fire fighters try to put out a blazing building with a garden hose? Of course not. A small pipe can’t deliver the huge volume of water needed. Same with bandwidth. A small or low bandwidth connection might keep up with emails, credit card verification, casual browsing and some video streaming. it can’t keep a dozen, a hundred or a thousand employees working efficiently. Once the “pipe” (yes, it’s actually called that) is at capacity you experience congestion. Too many packets per unit of time. Somebody has to wait their turn… and wait, and wait and wait.

You need bandwidth appropriate to the job. That means you’ll have to kiss DSL goodbye. T1 lines are reliable but way too slow these days. Same for budget cable broadband, 3G or even 4G wireless. Move up to fiber optic service if you can possibly get it without too much construction cost. Otherwise, Ethernet over Copper may work. Depending on the application, you might get by with 100 Mbps to 1000 Gbps DOCSIS cable.

Symmetry
Not all broadband is the same by a long shot. One big difference is symmetry of upload and download bandwidth. Symmetry means how much alike they are. Cable, satellite, DSL and similar connections that primarily serve the consumer market are not symmetrical. They are called asymmetrical. You may get 100 Mbps in the download direction but only 10 Mbps in the upload direction.

What difference does it make? Consumers don’t care. They mostly download. Businesses transfer large files between locations and upload them to remote web servers. Enterprise software packages transfer data in both directions. Offsite backups are primarily in the upload direction. If you can watch videos easily but can’t backup your files, you’ve got a symmetry problem.

Dedication
We’re all dedicated to the job, right? That’s not what this is about. The two choices in bandwidth are dedicated and shared. Once again, those low cost broadband services are actually shared bandwidth. You and a dozen or a hundred other customers are all drinking from the same pipe. When everybody wants service at the same time, there isn’t enough to go around and things slow down. It’s really bad when they slow down during business hours and worse when you are working to a deadline.

Dedicated bandwidth services are yours and yours alone. Don’t get me wrong. The Internet backbones themselves are always shared. That’s not where the problem usually is. The real pinch point is that last mile between you and your service provider. You want that to be a dedicated connection if you expect consistency high performance.

Latency
Latency is a time delay. It’s a pause. Every circuit has latency. Even your local area network has some. The trick is to keep the latency so low you don’t notice it. What adds latency? Long distance connections with lots of equipment on the line. The worst is geostationary satellites. No matter what you do, there’s a half-second or more of time delay between action and response. Ten milliseconds of latency likely won’t hurt anybody. A hundred milliseconds will probably be noticeable. Half a second to a second? Maddening. Real time services such as VoIP telephone and video conferencing will be the most affected. If you need to use a satellite, be prepared to pause to let the other person speak or you’ll talk all over each other.

Jitter and Packet Loss
Jitter is a variation in arrival between packets. It’s another congestion problem. Jitter distorts conversations. Worse is packet loss. That means some packets get sent and never received. Data transfer protocols will simply request a resend. Voice and video will have holes in the stream that add more distortion. If packet loss is too bad due to a nearly unusable connection, even website performance and data backups will slow to a crawl.

Dedicated Symmetric Internet Connections
The gold standard in professional grade business Internet service is dedicated symmetric lines. Even better are dedicated symmetric lines that go directly from location to location, like branch offices or to a cloud service, and avoid the Internet altogether. If you are going to use the Internet, though, give yourself the best performance possible. Insist on a dedicated symmetric Internet access, preferably with a service level agreement. Plan on paying considerably more than you will for a budget connection, but consider it worth the price in productivity and better customer relations.

Two Flavors of Fast Ethernet Service

By: John Shepler

No need to let bandwidth limitations stifle your business. Here are two affordable options to acquire 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service, likely as much as a small to medium size operation will need. I’ll tell you later how to upgrade that to Gigabit Ethernet when the time is right.

Fast Ethernet over Fiber
The gold standard in business bandwidth has shifted from legacy T1 lines to fiber optic service. Not the old expensive SONET telco fiber that you know as OC-3, OC-12 or OC-48. I’m talking about the modern Carrier Ethernet standard known as Ethernet over Fiber, also called Metro Ethernet.

Entry level fiber service typically starts at 10 Mbps. That’s enough for many small businesses with limited Internet or file transfer needs. With even a few employees or heavy use of cloud applications, you’ll be craving more performance. That’s where Fast Ethernet shines. It offers 100 Mbps x 100 Mbps dedicated bandwidth 100% of the time.

Features of Fast Ethernet over Fiber
Performance is much like your old T1 line or DS3 connection, but much faster. Symmetrical bandwidth means that your upload and download speeds are both 100 Mbps. That’s important if you run cloud applications that send large files in both directions. Backup to cloud storage is almost exclusively in the upload direction until you need to recover a file.

Fiber optic bandwidth is known for low latency, packet loss and jitter. Your service will be solid since all of the line bandwidth is dedicated to your business. Whatever capacity you aren’t using at the moment sits idle, much like the way a Local Area Network behaves.

That brings up another important advantage of Fast Ethernet over Fiber. It is directly compatible with your LAN. Just plug it in to your router or switch and it’s ready to use. Many business networks run at 100 Mbps, although new installations are typically 1000 Mbps and larger networks are 10,000 Mbps or 10 GigE.

Option #2 Fast Ethernet over Cable
Business Cable Broadband has come a long way over the years. Most systems are HFC or Hybrid Fiber Cable. That architecture employs a private fiber optic network for the long haul runs. Traditional 75 ohm coaxial copper cable connects from the curb to your building. The termination equipment is a DOCSIS modem. Most are DOCSIS 3.0, which easily provides 100 Mbps Internet service up to a maximum of 1.2 Gbps in the download direction. The newer standard is DOCSIS 3.1, which easily provides Gigabit Internet service with a growth path to as high as 10 Gbps in both directions.

Characteristics of Fast Ethernet over Cable
Two advantages of Cable broadband are availability and cost. You can get service if the cable runs past your building, and that’s most buildings in metro areas. The cost for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet is likely a fraction of what you pay for Ethernet over Fiber. Construction costs are minimal, if at all. Simply plug your network into the Ethernet connector on the DOCSIS modem.

The cost difference is reflected in a difference in service level, although that may not make a difference depending on how you use the service. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated, which can mean variations in line speed that depend on how many other users are online and how heavily they are using the service.

The bandwidth is asymmetrical, meaning that download is much faster than upload. A typical bandwidth service is 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps to 25 Mbps up. Typically Internet usage is heavily in the download direction for web browsing and watching video. Email is both upload and download, but the files tend to be fairly small and not affected by the asymmetry. If you send to large mailing lists to deliver video from your own servers, the upload bandwidth could become a limitation.

Upgrading Bandwidth
One advantage that both fiber and cable service share is that they are easily scalable compared to the old T-Carrier and SONET telco standards. You simply need a port that can handle the maximum bandwidth you anticipate needing. For fiber, that’s a Gigabit Ethernet port on the Customer Premises Equipment. For cable it’s a DOCSIS 3.0 or 3.1 modem. With those in place, you can upgrade your speed with just a phone call and no equipment changes will be necessary.

Do you feel limited by your current point to point or Internet access speed? You may be surprised how affordable a major upgrade is. Check out Fast Ethernet service options for your business now.

T1 or Better Internet Service

Have you been running “business” grade DSL or Cable broadband and find yourself dissatisfied with the results? Let’s take a look at why that may be and what the options are for higher performance business broadband connections.

First of all, there’s nothing inherently bad about DSL and Cable Internet services. Millions of people are quite happy with the performance of their services, especially for the price they pay. Therein lies the dilemma. Companies salivate at the low cost of these broadband options but are disappointed when the telecom-grade performance isn’t there. The more you think that broadband-is-broadband, the more likely you are to think that it’s all a vast conspiracy to deny you the performance that the technology is capable of.

The truth is that bandwidth is a scarce resource. Like electricity, water, gasoline and other commodities, pricing is set by the cost of acquisition and the forces of supply and demand. Where does broadband come from? The Internet isn’t one big pipe somewhere. It’s a collection of thousands upon thousands of networks. These days, most of those networks have fiber optic cores. If you’ve ever watched a utility crew slowly trenching conduit and big rolls of fiber cable underground, you can understand why there is considerable investment in metropolitan and national fiber networks.

We get lots of inquiries from residential users and home office businesses who think that business broadband services like T1, DS3 or Ethernet over Copper are going to be priced incrementally higher than the consumer broadband they have now. It always comes as a shock for them to see the quotes at 10x or more what they expect to pay. There is no gouging involved. Business telecom services are priced lower today than they’ve been in recent memory and an order of magnitude below what they were when most Internet access service was through dial-up modems. You just aren’t going to get dedicated access connections with consumer grade pricing.

What’s the difference if the Internet is the Internet at its core? There’s no difference between the price that businesses pay for a high performance Internet connection and what your Internet Service Provider (ISP) pays. It’s exactly the same line service. The problem is that nobody but businesses who generate revenue through their Internet connection can afford the cost of this service.

So, here’s what happens. The ISP buys their bandwidth at wholesale rates at the going price for 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or more. Then they divvy up that bandwidth among hundreds or thousands of their customers. Each customer pays a small amount, say $20 to $60 a month, for their slice of the bandwidth pie. All together, the revenue collected from all those subscribers more than pays for the cost of the ISP’s Internet connection.

That’s right. As a consumer you don’t have an assigned direct pipe to the Internet. What you are doing is sharing a pool of bandwidth provided by your ISP. How fast your service runs depends on how many of your neighbors are in the pool at the same time. If every teenager in the neighborhood is streaming vampire flicks in high def, your line will slow to a crawl. In the wee hours of the night, you may be zipping along at high speed. There will be a maximum you can’t exceed even if nobody else is on. The ISP limits your speed to the service tier you are paying for. But... there’s no lower limit. You could be getting dial-up speeds if everyone absolutely, positively has to be online at once. The reason most customers remain satisfied is that only some customers are actually sitting at their computers at any given time. Anyone not home or doing something offline is effectively donating their share of bandwidth to their neighbors.

Businesses struggle with this kind of service. They all tend to work the same business hours, so every business is a heavy user for 8 hours or so a day and very little after hours. You can’t have your activities come to a halt because the company across the street is hogging all the bandwidth. This is why businesses who don’t like the performance of shared bandwidth services go with dedicated bandwidth. Dedicated bandwidth means that you are assigned a certain guaranteed line speed that doesn’t vary. If you buy 10 Mbps, you’ve got 10 Mbps all day every day whether you use it or not. It doesn’t go into any pool at night. It just sits there waiting for someone to come to work and download files.

You pay higher rates for dedicated line services but you gain important benefits. First, that bandwidth is always available. Second, it is the same bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. Consumer services and business services based on the consumer model have much higher download than upload speeds. That matches the way most personal users access the Internet. However, if you are running a server or upload large files a lot of the time, you’ll run out of bandwidth more often than not.

The third difference involves Service Level Agreements or SLAs. These are guarantees by the ISP as to how quickly they’ll hop to it and repair an outage and what parameters like bandwidth, latency and jitter you can depend on. Don’t know about these? They’re unheard of in consumer circles. Unless you have an SLA, you are dependent on the good intentions of your ISP. They all mean well, but as their ads say, “you get up to so many Mbps of bandwidth.” That means you can’t get more but you can surely get less.

What dedicated Internet services are available for business? These include T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps, bonded T1 from 3 to 12 Mbps, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) from 2 to 45 Mbps, DS3 at 45 Mbps and fiber optic services up to 10 Gbps. The higher your bandwidth, the lower your cost per Mbps but the higher your payments each month. In case you are thinking that you might pony up for one of these in your home office, forget it. It’s rare that any telecom providers will install dedicated services to a residence. You need your own business address.

Do you have such a business address and a burning desire for more dependable and higher performing Internet access? If so, then check prices and availability for dedicated business Internet solutions in your area.

Fiber Optic ISP

Not so long ago, Internet service came through the telephone as a collection of audible beeps and squeaks. That evolved into dedicated landline and wireless broadband. The next step has already been taken by the largest companies. Now, medium size businesses are also looking for a fiber optic Internet service provider.

Fiber optic Internet service for residential users is the domain of Verizon’s FiOS. Google will soon enter the market on a test basis with a new benchmark of performance: 1 Gbps. But business broadband connections have moved past the Gbps upper limit, with 10 Gbps service becoming more common for major organizations. The technology is proven. The question is how much bandwidth do you need and where do you need it?

The key to fiber optic levels of telecom service is the “lit” building. That’s a location where fiber optic cable has been pulled into the facility and connected to terminal equipment. Once the fiber is lit by a service provider, the building is considered to be “on net” and able to select from a wide variety of service options. This facility can also be a jumping off point to provide fiber optic service to other nearby buildings. The most expensive and time consuming aspect of fiber optic service is the initial fiber construction.

What types of fiber optic bandwidth services are available? They typically fall into two categories. The first is traditional SONET / SDH telecom services. These are the original telco standards for voice and data over fiber optic strands. The most basic service is OC-3 or Optical Carrier, level 3. This is a 155 Mbps bandwidth service based on the same TDM or Time Division Multiplexing technology as copper based T1 and T3 lines. In fact, DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps is most often delivered as part of an OC-3 signal that can transport 3 of these DS3 services.

The SONET standard fiber optic services include OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps, OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps. This highest levels are most often used by carriers, themselves, as their backbone networks.

The other category of fiber optic service is Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet. Ethernet services are standardized at the same levels seen in LAN networks. These are 10 Mbps standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps GigE, and 10 Gbps or 10 GigE service. Intermediate service levels are generally available, as Ethernet is readily scalable.

How do you decide between SONET and Ethernet Internet connections? Both are reliable, proven technologies that can deliver the bandwidth you desire. What often differs is availability and price. The best approach is to get a complete selection of fiber optic service quotes from a telecom broker and compare pricing on the services available for your business location. You may be surprised at how affordable the higher bandwidths have become.

Oh, My Aching Internet Backbone

Bandwidth expansion is a sign of good business. As an Internet service provider or content provider, you see that once generous T1 pipe getting full to the limit. Now what? You wince a bit because revenues may not be accelerating at the same rate as bandwidth demand. Is there a way to ensure a solid dedicated connection to the Internet without going broke?

Today you have more cost competitive options than ever before. The standard upgrade path for ISPs and others with Internet backbone connections has been from T1 line to T3 line or DS3 over fiber, then OC3 SONET optical fiber, OC12, and on upward to OC48 bandwidth. You can still get all of these services at prices lower than ever before. But you now also have the options of Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet for your dedicated Internet connection. Let's take a look at what's currently available.

The most basic professional grade Internet connection is the T1 line at 1.5 Mbps. Some providers of free WiFi hotspots, such as restaurants, may get by with business DSL or a Cable Modem connection since the service is being offered on an "as available" basis at no charge to the patron. For everybody else, a T1 data line configured for dedicated Internet service is the opening ante.

If you fill up your T1 bandwidth, an incremental upgrade is to bond-in a second T1 to double the bandwidth. This process can be continued for 3x, 4x, 5x, and even 6x the original bandwidth. If you have a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) tower in a rural area, T1 service over copper lines might be your only reasonable option. In metropolitan areas, you have a choice of staying with copper or moving up to fiber optic service.

T3 Internet runs at 45 Mbps and was originally designed for a coaxial cable physical layer. Today the same service is DS3 running on SONET metro fiber. T1, bonded T1, T3, and SONET fiber optic services are all based on TDM or Time Division Multiplexing. A protocol conversion is used to transport IP packets on TDM trunk lines. The last mile connection, or local loop, is almost always provided by the Incumbent Local Phone Company regardless of who supplies your Internet service port.

The native Ethernet connection is something fairly new. It is has come about primarily from competitive carriers with their own nationwide networks based on IP and not TDM, direct peering connections to the Internet, and local points of presence in metropolitan areas. XO communications is an example of a carrier that "lights" buildings for Ethernet fiber optic service in metro areas, bypassing the local phone companies completely. Check for Ethernet Lit Buildings in your area.

If you can get Ethernet, the cost savings can be substantial. A Fast Ethernet connection at 100 Mbps an easily be half the cost of a DS3 connection at 45 Mbps. The savings gets even better when you compare OC3, OC12, or OC48 to Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet.

What if you really need or want the cost savings of Ethernet but are nowhere near a carrier Point of Presence? Consider moving your equipment to "carrier hotel" or colocation facility. There you'll find multiple carriers offering a wide variety of standard and non-standard bandwidths at highly competitive prices. The construction costs are nil or minimal since you are in the same facility as the carrier's POP.

How much bandwidth can you get for the money? The answer depends on where you are located, where you might be willing to collocate, and how much of a bandwidth level and contract length you are willing to commit to. Don't spend a lot of time trying to run down these deals yourself. Let our team of expert bandwidth consultants review your needs and provide you with a suite of competitive options.