Is Cellular the New ISP?

By: John Shepler

Internet Service Provider technology has evolved dramatically in the last few decades. It stated out as audio modems over classic landline phones. Then came broadband with DSL and Cable. Business broadband started with ADSL, T1 lines & DS3, upgraded to SONET fiber and then Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Now we may be headed back to telephone technology, as 5G cellular make a move to become an accepted Internet Service Provider.

What’s 5G Got to Offer?
5G is the latest in a long line of technology evolution for wireless mobile phone service. The earliest cellular 0 and 0.5G emerged in the 1970’s, followed by 1G and 2G technologies in the 1980’s. These were voice technologies designed to make the traditional telephone set wireless and mobile. SMS messaging appeared in 2G with e-mail and simple Web browsing added with 2.5G and 2.75G.

The first mobile service that really could be called broadband Internet access was 3G, 3.5G and 3.75G. This is what supported the rise of smartphones. The next generation (G stands for generation level of technology) 4G and 4G LTE (long term evolution) made cellular broadband a real contender as an Internet Service Provider.

The latest phones with 5G are seeing Internet speeds in the dozens to hundreds of Mbps with low latency, jitter and packet loss. The millimeter wave bands support Gigabit per second service and that may be upgraded to 10 Gbps downlink and 1 Gbps uplink with 5G-Advanced upgrades.

5G vs Cable and Fiber
More and more business is being conducted on smartphones and tablets vs desktop computers and even laptops. WiFi is useful indoors to avoid burning cell usage quotas, but while mobile and at customer locations you’ll likely be connecting via 5G from your service provider. Since that applies to all of your mobile devices, the value of an Ethernet connection is limited to desktops and wired phones, with WiFi helpful in moving about in the office or at select locations, such as restaurants.

With so much computing being done via 5G, is it possible to replace everything with a 5G account that supports all your devices?

For an increasing number of consumers and small business users, the answer is yes. Replace your cable modem or fiber termination equipment with a 5G hotspot and continue using the Internet as you always have. You may not even notice a difference in performance. Let’s face it. Once you’ve got all the bandwidth you can reasonably use at one time, doubling or tripling it doesn’t make things go any faster. The limit will likely be the server at the other end that you are connecting to.

Since 5G speeds are often a couple of hundred Mbps or more, the difference between wireless, DOCSIS 3.1 cable and Ethernet over Fiber might not even be noticeable. Where the difference does show up is in your usage limit. That’s only important if you are a heavy user or a corporate operation with dozens or hundreds of users online at the same time. It’s especially true if your business applications are being run from the cloud and accessed via the Internet.

Limitations of 5G Broadband
Yes even with “unlimited” plans, you can’t hog all the bandwidth of the cellular provider all the time. The system isn’t designed for continuous uploads or download from a single customer. Bandwidth is scarce and must be shared with a multitude of users on each tower. Your provider may not drop your connection, but you might find it slowing down severely, especially during busy times, when you are using more that your fair share of capacity.

Another issue to consider is upload vs download performance.Casual web browsing and media streaming is demanding on the download side and not so much for upload. Business applications that transfer large files to and from remote servers or the cloud may well need upload bandwidth that rivals download performance. Video conferencing and telephone call centers also need both upload and download capability about equally. This is where fiber shines. Business fiber is typically symmetrical with upload and download speeds the same. This is also usually provided with no usage restrictions, something you are unlikely to find with cable and 5G.

Selecting a Service
What service works best for your business? It depends on what you are doing and how intensely you are doing it. Some companies will find that only high speed fiber optic service will meet their needs. Others will be fine with cable or 5G wireless service at a lower cost.

Another consideration is ability to connect. While fiber may offer the best performance, there may be no fiber near your rural location or you may be in a dense metro location that hasn’t been “lit” yet. Some companies have found it best to quickly connect with a 5G hotspot and use that service while waiting for fiber to be brought in over a period of weeks or longer.

If you have a need for new or expanded broadband Internet service or are simply curious if you can make a better deal, learn what business broadband options are available and suitable for your business.

Is There Business Fiber Optic Internet Near Me?

By: John Shepler

Are you still struggling with DSL or some other Internet service that is burdened by low speeds, network congestion, high latency, packet loss or all of these? It’s a frustration, isn’t it? What’s more, you are probably losing more money every month than you would spend to upgrade to high performance fiber optic broadband service. The big question: “Is there business fiber optic Internet near me?”

Times Have Changed
When you first moved up from dial-up ISDN, or X.25 connectivity to broadband, options were probably few. There was a time when DSL was state of the art. Even ADSL shared on a standard phone line offered a huge advance in line speed over what else what available.

If you could afford them, T1 lines were a lot more stable and reliable, although speed was capped at 1.5 Mbps… still plenty in the early days of e-commerce.

Many businesses opted for satellite as a way to connect retail locations to the home office. High latency and weather outages were just something to be dealt with.

But, this is ancient history. The whole nature of business operations has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. The Internet isn’t just for email or looking up information anymore. It’s IS your connection to all-things in the cloud and around the world. There’s no good reason to just get by with whatever connectivity you’ve had. That is, not when fiber optic Internet might be right next door and a fraction of the cost it was when you last took a look.

Fiber Has Been Sneaking Up on You
It’s a fact that conduits full of fiber optic cables have been quietly being trenched into both urban and rural right of ways all across the country. You don’t see headlines about this anymore, because it isn’t breaking news that somebody just put a fiber cable in the ground like it used to be. Fiber is now considered vital infrastructure and is being routinely installed, just like gas pipes and power lines. You almost have to be a little careful where you plant a shovel in the ground these days. You might just chop a fiber cable in two…. and that is one expensive situation to fix.

Who’s Burying Fiber Cables Nearby?
The telephone company is the traditional installer of telecom infrastructure including copper and fiber lines. In fact local telcos pretty much own all of the twisted pair copper in the ground and on the poles. Fiber… not so much.

While telephone companies are, indeed, in a mad dash to upgrade their physical plants to meet the nearly insatiable bandwidth demands of 4G and soon to be 5G wireless, cloud services and video distribution, there are other major players too.

You might think of cable companies as married to coax copper lines. That’s what they install in your building, after all. What you don’t see is that those coax lines terminate to fiber lines not far away. Cable fiber forms the backbone of their networks. It’s only recently that the major cable companies have offered business users fiber connections to their network. Get business cable fiber and you’ll have almost unlimited bandwidth, low latency and minimal packet loss, all at a reasonable price.

Independent network companies are the other big source of fiber optic infrastructure. These companies have built out their own regional and national fiber networks and may well completely bypass both the telephone and cable companies to hook you up directly.

So, How Do I Get Fiber?
You can get out there and do your own research, but you may miss some of the best fiber providers. They don’t necessarily have a local office or advertising. Your best shot to get the most options at the best competitive pricing is to go through a bandwidth broker. This is a company that has relationships with dozens of service providers and the service maps to know exactly what is available and how close it is to your location. You might even be surprised to learn that the building next door is already lit for fiber broadband and it is no trouble at all to get you a connection quickly.

Want to find out right now where fiber optic Internet services are relative to your business (not residential) address? Take a minute or so to enter your address and get a map and list of fiber optic Ethernet broadband near you. Then use the handy inquiry form to describe just what you are looking for and how you’ll use it to get pricing and install times for the best service options.

Hosted Exchange Email Service Advantages

POP3 is the email service we love to hate. Both businesses and individuals are so entrenched with POP3 email that switching to something else seems like a major and unnecessary upset. Here’s why you should consider just such a move and the benefits you’ll enjoy if you do.

Just what is POP3 anyway? POP stands for Post Office Protocol. It’s a longstanding Internet standard offered by nearly all Internet Service Providers (ISPs). POP3 refers to the 3rd version of this standard, which is the current version.

POP email is based on a client-server model. The email server is provided by your ISP, email service provider, employer data center or Web hosting company. The client is installed on your PC. When your PC mail is active, the client checks periodically, say every 5 minutes, with the server to see if there is new mail. If so, the client downloads it to the PC. Most people have it set up to delete downloaded email messages from the server, but you can leave them up there if you wish. The only problem with this is that messages pile up and you can run out of your assigned storage quickly.

What’s a client? Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail and Eudora are examples of POP email clients. What they have in common is that they are installed on a particular computer, store your messages locally on that computer, and communicate with a POP3 server over the Internet.

An advantage of POP3 is that once the mail is downloaded, you don’t have to be online to read your messages. You know that if you are using Webmail and lose your Internet connection, you’ve lost your link to your email account. With POP3, you can read your stack of messages, put them in particular files for storage, and search your computer to find an old email message.

That’s the good part. The bad part is that if you lose your computer, say a laptop, or your hard drive crashes, you can lose years of valuable email messages in an instant. Unless you’ve backed them up somewhere they are gone for good. If you trade up to a new computer, you have to transfer all those messages, too, or you won’t be able to get to them. Also, any messages that came into your desktop computer and were deleted from the server won’t be accessible on your laptop computer when you are out and about. The reverse is also true.

Then there’s the really bad part. That’s the spam and viruses that we’re constantly fending off. Many of us have far more spam messages come in than legitimate ones. Email clients have the ability to detect spam to some extent and sent it to a separate spam file. You may have a separate spam and virus program to protect your PC. Today, many service providers have a first line of defense spam and virus protection on their email servers. That helps, but a lot of junk still gets through.

Companies that want control of their corporate email run their own email servers, either in their own data centers or space rented from colocation data centers. One of the most popular server programs is Microsoft Exchange. Exchange expands pure vanilla POP email to support voice mail storage, calendar, contact organizing, faxes, and public folders for sharing information among employees. All of this is protected by secure transfers and anti-virus and anti-spam filtering in the server itself.

Microsoft Exchange is great for large corporate IT departments that have the staff and data center resources to run their own Exchange servers. Small and medium size companies may find this too much to deal with and revert to consumer grade email services or Web mail accounts just to have some way to send and receive messages. There is another option available for just these companies. It’s called Hosted Exchange.

Hosted Exchange gives you all the advantages of Microsoft Exchange without the headache of running your own server. The hosting is done by a hosting or cloud services company. They provide you with your own instance of Microsoft Exchange running on their servers. You connect via the Internet or dedicated telecom line.

With Hosted Exchange service, you not only lose the server disadvantage, but you gain the advantages of having your service in the cloud. Those include routine automatic backups so you won’t lose data. You can access your messages from your desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet from wherever you happen to be. If you accidentally delete an important email, you can generally recover your messages or entire mailboxes even weeks later. Your private mail will stay private, too. All communication with the Hosted Exchange server is done using SSL encryption just like you’d use for online shopping or banking.

Is it time you made the move to a more modern and capable email system? If so, consider Hosted Exchange email service options in the cloud. It can handle as many users and as much data as you need and offers considerable cost savings over doing it yourself.

What is 4G and Why Do You Want It?

You see ads for 3G cell phones and wireless modem aircards. Now here comes 4G. What is this advance in technology all about and why should you want it now?

2G, 3G, 4G. All those G’s, what do they mean? What we’re talking about is a shorthand for the generations of wireless broadband service. It’s been advancing so fast that it’s not unusual for different generations of service to be available in the same area. That’s by design. If you are in a weak service area for 3G, then your device will automatically seek out a lower speed service such as 2.5G or 2G. You won’t get as high a bandwidth, but at least you’ll be connected.

Wireless broadband is generally a companion service to cellular telephone. It uses the same towers and base stations. Coverage areas are pretty much the same. The exception is when a particular tower site hasn’t yet been upgraded to the latest cellular broadband generation. In that case, you’ll get a lower level of service until you move into the coverage of a cell tower that is at the latest standard.

I should mention here that there are two wireless broadband services that have nothing to do with cell phones. One is the WISP or Wireless Internet Service Provider that offers home and business broadband. You need to be within line of site of their tower and install an outdoor antenna on your roof. These WISPs are pretty much locally owned an operated, and generally serve locations that aren’t wired for DSL or Cable.

The other non-cellular wireless service is the WiFi hotspot. There are so many of them, that they could almost form a cellular-like network of their own. That hasn’t happened because hotspots are also largely local services, mostly offered by restaurants and hotels. There’s no network to tie them together, so once you leave a hotspot you have to log into another one at your next stop.

That’s where 4G steps in. Imagine that you are connected to a 4G service and are reading a document while parked in your car. You can go into a client’s office or your own and you’ll still be on the same service. The idea of 4G is to blanket a city with a signal strong enough that you have high bandwidth connectivity without worrying about where you are located.

But doesn’t 3G do that? To some extent, yes. But 4G has the advantage of higher bandwidths. With the 4G service that is available today using the WiMAX standard, you can get 3 to 6 Mbps on a normal basis, with bursts of to 10 Mbps.

WiMAX 4G is also not limited to mobile service the way that 2G and 3G are. It’s designed for both desktop and mobile service. That puts this 4G network in a class by itself. You can get a WiMAX modem for your desktop computer and a plug-in 4G aircard for your laptop computer. You’ll have the same service at your desk as you do on the road. There are even 4G phones coming out sometime this summer that look to become a game changer in the wireless service industry.

There are two standards that will dominate 4G service. One is LTE which will be deployed later this year and through 2011. The other is WiMAX broadband that is available now in many cities and states. Find out if your location qualifies for 4G wireless broadband
now.

Biggest Cisco Router Yet

If there is any doubt that we are smack in the middle of the information age, it was put to rest today with Cisco’s announcement of their newest and largest routing platform. The CRS-3 Carrier Routing System is an evolutionary upgrade to their CRS-1, used as a core router for Internet traffic and data center operations.

The CRS-3’s throughput of 322 Terabits per second is mind-boggling enough. But just as important is Cisco’s acknowledgement that the nature of Internet traffic is changing. What started as a packet data network is now quickly becoming dominated by video transmissions, mobile services, and new architectures such as cloud computing. You might yawn at the old benchmark of how long it takes to download the Library of Congress (1 second), but I’ll bet you’ll be impressed to know that the CRS-3 can stream every motion picture ever made in less than 4 minutes. Now, that’s video-ready!

Speaking of video-ready, check out this informational video from Cisco to see the CRS-3 in action and learn more about its capabilities:



Obviously, this isn’t something you’re going to install in the basement of your house or in the office of a quick serve restaurant. Entry level pricing is $90,000 and goes up from there. But if you are an Internet service provider or operate a fiber optic content delivery network, you may be eyeing one of these with a thought to purchase sooner than you think. Perhaps you’ll simply want to upgrade your CRS-1 Carrier Routing System as gigabits of video content grow geometrically.

AT&T can see the future coming. They recently tested the Cisco CRS-3 on a 100 Gigabit link between New Orleans and Miami. It’s not just server capacity that will have to grow by leaps and bounds. Network connections will also have to scale up across the board.

How’s your network capacity doing? Are you about to use up the remaining margin in your copper or fiber optic WAN? If so, you’ll be pleased to know that bandwidth upgrades at all service levels are more available and affordable than ever before. In many cases you can get more capacity for the same price you are paying now. Want to find out if that’s possible for your situation? Check out Gigabit bandwidth prices and availability now.

Are We Finally Out of IPv4 Addresses?

It's been predicted for years and pooh-poohed for as many years. The Internet has gotten much bigger than first planned and the original technology is starting to get creaky with the strain. Someday, it's going to all come crashing down if nothing is done. That someday now looks like 2010.

ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, has sent out a letter to Internet Service Providers warning them that they are running out of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 or Internet Protocol Version 4 is that standard that defines Internet addresses. It defines 4 bytes or 32 bits to identify a particular piece of equipment on the Internet. That could be a server, a router, a web camera, or your PC. Those 32 bits are enough for 4.3 billion addresses. How many are already used up? According to ARIN, all but about 500 to 700 million. After that, nothing can connect to the Internet unless something else gets off. It will be take-a-number-and-stand-in-line.

Well, not really. There is an upgrade available called IPv6. That's version 6 of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 expands the address space from 32 to 128 bits. That's a factor of 4x as many bits, but trillions and trillions as many addresses. That's the beauty of binary numbers. An addition of only 1 bit doubles your capacity. It's going to be a long, long time before we can figure out how to use up all the addresses available with IPv6, even if everybody on Earth has as many IP addresses as they can possibly use and then some.

So why all the foot dragging? Companies and ISPs are complacent. They have their networks set up for IPv4 and are reluctant to upgrade the equipment and switch everything over to IPv6. All the scare stories to date have been just that. Every time it looks like the IPv4 addresses are nearly exhausted, someone invents a clever workaround like NAT (Network Address Translation) or DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) to make more efficient use of addresses so that fewer are needed.

The day of reckoning is surely coming. Even if all the unused addresses could be rounded up and redeployed and each address was treated like a precious resource, the demand for Internet access by individual users and equipment of all types is steadily increasing. IPv6 is just a matter of time. Like the digital TV transition and the need to split cities into multiple area codes, somebody is going to be inconvenienced and there are likely costs involved to get equipment up to the latest standards.

In the meantime, ARIN will soon start insisting on formal justification as to the need for all IPv4 address space requests. They are also asking that all organization's publicly accessible resources be at least available via IPv6 addresses. It's a modest but serious start to what may well be a mad scramble in a year or two when everyone realizes that the cupboard is really bare.

Apartment Manager's Little Money Maker

While real estate prices may be in free fall, there is an opportunity to generate extra income from the apartment tenants you already have and even attract new lessees. It's something they buy now or would like to. They would buy it from you if they could get a better deal. It's a perfect value added service for your business. What is it? Why, broadband Internet of course.

Apartment managers becoming Internet service providers? How does that make sense?

The fact is that whether you have a few dozen or a few hundred tenants, there is a substantial amount of money being spent in your building right under your nose. In some cases your renters would not only consider alternative broadband service, they'd welcome it. DSL and Cable Internet are sold to individuals, one at a time. Every apartment dweller is paying the same price for the same service as the person in the apartment next door or down the hall. There is no quantity discount when 5 people separately order service at different times. Consequently, you may have an entire building full of people who think they are paying way too much for broadband service or refuse to pay the price and stick with dial-up.

This is where you as the owner or property manager step in. What if you ordered a reliable, professional grade dedicated broadband service for your building? You use some of the bandwidth yourself for your own office or apartment. The rest you divvy up among renters who are interested. Or just make it part of the services you include with the rent. You'll get a T1 line or Metro Ethernet connection to the Internet. That's connected to a router that distributes it to network jacks in the apartments. Or you can distribute the service via wireless access points, similar to WiFi hotspots you find in airports and hotels.

Technically, this is very similar to what hotel operators are doing. They buy a large bandwidth service and divide it up among many rooms. Users are happy because they have broadband available that may well rival what they can get at home. Since not everyone uses the service at the same time, a single T1 line or 10 Mbps Ethernet connection can serve up to a couple dozen subscribers without excessive network congestion.

But what about the economics? OK, say you can get a 1.5 Mbps T1 line for $450 a month. That's not uncommon in metropolitan areas now, but the cost at your location may be more or less. If you have 15 users sharing that service, you can cover the cost at just $30 a month. So charge $35 a month and you'll make $5 x 15 users or $75 a month. Add yourself to the user list as #16 and your broadband is essentially free.

In a larger building, let's say you can bring in a 10 Mbps Ethernet service for $950 a month. If there are 50 subscribers for this higher speed service, the costs are covered at just $19 a month. You might even get 100 users to share that much bandwidth for a cost of $9.50 per user. Charge them $20 a month for 10 Mbps broadband and they'll consider it a favor. But you'll be making over $1,000 a month profit on this arrangement.

Something else to consider is offering lower speed broadband, say 100 Kbps, for occasional users and those who mostly send email and do casual browsing. They'll get always-on service that's several times faster than dial-up for maybe $5 or $10 a month. You could distribute this service via wireless access point, perhaps even running a lower cost fractional T1 line to save money.

Of course, you need to run the numbers for your particular situation and see if this idea will turn a profit for the number of people you can sign up and the costs involved. Find out what T1 and Ethernet line service costs for your location. Then factor in the cost of routers, access points, wiring and installation. A telecom network VAR can quote this and get everything installed and running. If it makes financial sense, you may well find that broadband Internet service can be the apartment manager's little money maker.