How Fiber Future-Proofs Your Business

By: John Shepler

Chances are that connectivity is not just another expense item in your business. It is critical to your being in business and for your employee productivity. What you need is solid, reliable, fast, low latency and uncongested network connections to the Internet, cloud services, and your other business locations. This is the time to ensure you have it now and in the future.

What You Are Looking For Is Fiber
Telecommunications, the genesis of computer to computer connections, was historically built on twisted pair copper wiring. That era is essentially over. The remaining T1 lines and DS3 coax are relics of an earlier day and will soon be moved to the recycling bin. Not only have they been eclipsed in bandwidth, but the infrastructure buildouts now are based on multi-strand fiber optic cables.

Fiber historically has been expensive and rare. That changed with the introduction of Ethernet over Fiber or EOF services directly compatible with today’s most popular computer networks. Fiber optic Ethernet has the widest availability of bandwidths and the lowest cost per Mbps or Gbps. In many areas, fiber is available to just about every business location and in others it soon will be. As you drive down the road you can see crews installing underground fiber conduits in both business and residential areas.

Where Do You Want to Connect?
The most popular connections are to the public Internet. This is a must if you are going to communicate with customers and suppliers. You can also use the Internet to connect to cloud services and link multiple business locations. The beauty of the Internet is that it is already built-out to connect just about everyone, everywhere. This makes worldwide connections fast and inexpensive.

While the Internet itself is a shared network that doesn’t favor one user over another, you can improve your company’s connection by using dedicated instead of shared access. A DIA or Dedicated Internet Access line is a private connection between your business and your Internet Service Provider. It lets you avoid the congestion that can occur when you are sharing access locally with many other business and consumer users.

Dedicated Cloud On-Ramps
Productivity is key to any business. If a key element to your productivity is provided by cloud services, you may be plagued with varying slowdowns and even dropouts caused by a congested Internet not able to keep up with the massive flow of data between you and your cloud provider. The solution is a direct line between your network and your cloud service provider. This is called a cloud connection or cloud on-ramp. It shields you from competition for bandwidth from other users. Such a dedicated leased line can make the cloud server perform like it is right down the hall.

Multiple Locations on the Same Network
Within your building, you have complete control of your LAN that connects terminals, PCs, printers, storage and so on. With multiple locations, you need some way to connect their networks, since they can’t all be on the same LAN… or can they? Dedicated fiber optic bandwidth can go a long way to creating the perception that all of your users, and perhaps some customers and suppliers, are on the same network with the same performance. This is usually done with a central hub and separate links to each location. For vastly separated locations, you can also achieve similar performance with a dedicated link to a MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network that provides regional, national or international coverage.

How Fast is Fast?
While single Megabits per second was once considered speedy, It doesn’t cut it for most uses today. Even consumers are demanding 300 Mbps, 600 Mbps or even 1 Gbps or more for their Web access and video streaming. Businesses, especially those with cloud services, must have at least this much. Entry level connections of 1 Gbps are now common. As demands increase or business size expands, 10 Gbps is a readily available and affordable service level. Once core network speeds of 100 Gbps are now being offered to businesses in metro areas and will soon be universally available.

How is this possible? Fiber optic strands have nearly unlimited bandwidth capacity. The limitation is often defined by the equipment powering, switching and terminating the strands. Wavelength division multiplexing divides one strand into a dozen or a hundred separate high bandwidth connections. Each cable may have a dozen to a hundred separate fiber strands.

How much low latency high performance bandwidth do you need? You may be surprised to find how much costs have come down the last few years. See now the availability and pricing for fiber optic connections that can grow with your business.

Bandwidth Without Usage Metering

By: John Shepler

Perhaps the most unpleasant experience of broadband is hitting your data cap. You may have forgotten it was even there. But, like the cop hiding behind the highway billboard, it pops out at the most inconvenient times and, boy, are you in trouble. Let’s have a look at what data limits are all about and what you can do to avoid hitting them.

Where Did Usage Metering Come From?
The big problem is scarcity. Bandwidth is like electricity. If we had unlimited amounts at minimal costs, there would be no need to meter it or even limit your line speed. Such is not the case.

Take 5G cellular for instance. The demand for Internet broadband has always been way ahead of capacity buildout for the cellular networks. 2G was pitiful. 3G was still bandwidth starved. 4G LTE greatly improved on cellular capacity to the point that most people didn’t run out before the end of the month.

5G offers the promise of billions of “things” all communicating autonomously and people using fixed wireless from their cellular provider to replace services like DSL, cable and T1 lines.

Have you been watching what is happing with 5G? There is a mad scramble to build towers, feed them with fiber optic cables or microwave backhaul, and lobby the government to assign more and more of the limited radio spectrum to high speed Internet. It’s cellular vs satellite vs independent WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) vs television vs government vs everybody else to grab as much bandwidth as possible.

Why? The amount of spectrum you can press into service determines the speed of your connection and the amount of data to divvy up among users. Thus the feeding frenzy among service providers.

Even wireline and fiber optic services have their limits. Twisted pair landlines are pretty pokey by today’s standards and fiber optic requires a huge capital investment. A fiber bundle has enormous capacity, but only where the fiber has been run. It doesn’t blanket an area like wireless does. Each location needs its own fiber connection.

How Carriers Allot Their Capacity
All bandwidth services have limited capacity. Wireless has the most constraints because the electromagnetic spectrum has only so much available in the popular frequencies that travel reasonable distances and penetrate walls. Fiber and HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) is less constrained but has high costs to build out.

Carriers divvy up their capacity and sell it to users by slicing and dicing what they have. The two limitations that they put on users are speed in Mbps or Gbps and usage in total Gigabytes. Speed determines how much of the total bandwidth you can use at any given moment. Total capacity limits keep a few high data users from uploading and downloading continuously so that other’s can’t get online.

You see, the price you pay for Internet access is much less if the carrier can assume that you aren’t sending or receiving all the time. Much of the time you may not even be accessing remote servers. When you do, you’ll send or receive a certain bundle of data and then pause before doing more. By allowing many customers to share one big line, providers can give everyone reliable access at greatly reduced cost. That’s the principle behind cable broadband, satellite services, and cellular broadband.

In practice, this works well for consumers and many smaller businesses. They just don’t need to be sending enormous files one right after the other. On cable, you may never hit your allotted limit or even know what it is. With cellular and satellite, you may have and “unlimited” plan, but just try continuously streaming video or doing massive data transfers and you’ll run into what the carriers call “fair use” provisions. Yes, there are limits to unlimited plans.

What happens if you consume more that your “fair share”? Your service provider may choose to simply issue a warning, or may slow your speed so you can’t hog so much of their capacity. Or they may charge you for extra GBs of usage. Worst case, they’ll simply cut off your service until the next month’s billing cycle begins.

How to Avoid Usage Metering
Medium and larger businesses and heavy Internet using companies with cloud services and remote backup storage may well exceed even the most generous fair use quotas. The best option then is to order services that aren’t metered at all. Those tend to be private lines and dedicated Internet access.

Dedicated lines without usage metering give you two advantages. First, you are not sharing with other companies or residential users. The capacity of the channel is yours and yours alone. If you order a Gigabit Dedicated Internet Access fiber service, you can feed it traffic continuously and nobody is going to complain. Plus the speed of your service won’t vary with competing traffic, because you have sole usage. This is particularly valuable with business critical applications and real-time services like video conferencing that run in the cloud.

A private line is like dedicated access except that the Internet is never involved. You connect point to point or in a private mesh network where others cannot interfere. Even the core Internet gets congested from time to time. Your private lines are like private superhighways. Your traffic, and yours alone, is what is carried. If you are using cloud services extensively, consider a direct line from your business to your cloud provider for the highest performance.

Have you been hitting the limits of your Internet service or being warned by your provider that they may heavily up-charge you or cut off access? Consider the advantages of ordering dedicated private lines and dedicated Internet access without usage limits to keep your business running smoothly.

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.

SD-WAN is Your Super LAN

By: John Shepler

Are you caught in the great cloud migration? You can almost hear the giant sucking sound of racks and servers being vacuumed up and sent packing to remote data centers. OK, that’s a little dramatic. Even so, the trend of moving more and more telecom and IT functions from in-house to cloud providers is clear. The problem is how to reconnect over vast distances as efficiently as you could with a few hundred feet of Cat6 cable.

The New Internet is SO Much Bigger
The Internet we became comfortable with starting in the mid 90’s is an electronic text messaging system and distributed library of text and images, accessible from anywhere. That has been expanded, of course, to include video content and e-commerce. Even with 20 years of improvements, the traditional Internet experience hasn’t changed that much. You still access what you want through an email client or Web browser. It’s the next morphing of the Internet that makes it so much more comprehensive. This is the expansion of Internet functions to include remote applications and their associated databases, and unified communications in place of the venerable office phone.

The Cloud is a Huge Data Center… But You Can’t See It
There’s really nothing magical or even spooky about “the cloud”. It’s just a metaphor for an enormous data center well beyond your line of sight. Inside the cloud are probably servers, storage drives, routers, switches and miles of cable similar to what you used to have. It’s just the scale that is so jaw dropping. The cost savings that is driving this change of IT operations is due to the multi-tenant nature of clouds. You and a hundred or a thousand of your best friends and total strangers are sharing the same facilities and divvying up the costs.

Where the Internet Goes Horribly Wrong
What we’ll call the legacy Internet is a network of incrementally increasing speed. It mirrors the evolution of the PC. How much have we shelled out over the years to get higher and higher MHz processors, then more and more cores, Kilobytes… Megabytes… and now Gigabytes of RAM, and similar storage capacity that is now in the Terabytes? Similarly, Internet access has gone from a few Kbps dial-up to X.25 connections to DSL, T1 lines, DS3, Cable Broadband, SONET Fiber Optics and now Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE and even 100 GigE. You may need some or all of this capacity to support your growing functions in the cloud, but can you afford it?

The problem with your traditional Internet access is that it evolved in parallel with the traditional Internet services. What’s happened with this cloud paradigm is that there has been a step-change in functionality without a corresponding step-change in connectivity. If you try and move your phones to hosted PBX and your applications to Software as a Service over the same old Internet connection, you can find yourself with an office that hardly functions at all. Voice communications are choppy and even dropped. Video tears up and stops. Your apps still work, but it seems to take forever to get a response from the system. Worst case, you could rue the day you ever tried to save a buck with all this new technology.

Can You Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again?
It IS possible to get back to the time where everything worked seamlessly and the systems were invisible to everyone using them. Employees want appliances to do their jobs, not finicky tech that may or may give the same result twice in a row. For that to happen, you need to make what’s going on in the cloud act like it’s located right now the hall and not thousands of miles away. What that takes is more appropriate connectivity.

The Internet is a two-edged sword. It’s attractiveness comes from being able to connect anywhere to anywhere, anytime, at dirt-cheap prices compared to private telecom lines and networks. The downside is that it is a public resource where everybody and everything is moving around in one big swarm. You can get clogs where it all moves at a snail’s pace. Some of the information just mysteriously disappears. How you are getting from point A to point B is a mystery and the routing changes by the minute for no discernible reason. That’s OK if you are just looking something up in Wikipedia or buying some parts from a wholesaler. The system was designed to work accurately as long as you can be a little flexible on how fast things run. It’s real time functions like telephone, video conferencing and interactive apps that can’t take the variability in performance without choking.

This is why a lot of the bigger companies have gone to direct cloud access using private point to point connections like Fast Carrier Ethernet or GigE fiber. These lines provide the closest you can get to what you had on your local network. Traditional Internet access is handled by a separate connection that is a lot less expensive for uses that are a lot less demanding.

SD-WAN To The Rescue
A new approach to handling the Internet has appeared in the last few years to improve the performance of broadband connections so they can work with the new cloud applications but not break the bank. It’s a clever mash-up of connectivity that takes advantage of the fact that no two connections over the Internet are likely to experience the same problems at exactly the same time. One broadband service may vary all over the place with speed, latency, jitter and packet loss. Combine several diverse connections and an electronic traffic cop and you’ll have one much, much better service. The cost of two or three cheap wireline, wireless, Cable or satellite services can be a LOT less expensive than a single dedicated line service, but give you nearly the same experience.

What’s happening in the Software Defined Wide Area Network, as it’s called, is that each path through the Internet is monitored constantly as to how it is performing. When the next packet enters the network, the system decides right there and then which path to use. The next packet in line may go the same way, or it might get routed on a different connection if that one is better at that particular instant. There’s a lot of decision making going on in this SD-WAN, but it is invisible to you. You’ve got one connection from your local network, just like you did before.

Are you dissatisfied with using the Internet to support your business, but can’t cope with the eye-popping cost of a dedicated fiber line? Perhaps an SD-WAN approach could give you the performance you really need at a fraction of the cost. Get pricing and learn more about how SD-WAN can make the cloud work so much better.

Internet SDN Mimics MPLS At Much Lower Cost

By: John Shepler

High performance, high cost. Low performance, low cost. This has been the story of WAN bandwidth connections for business. You can save a bundle with Cable or DSL Internet broadband, but the reliability and performance variations may drive you nuts. Or, you can pay up for a proprietary private line solution or MPLS network and enjoy high reliability, low latency and consistent line speed… if you can afford the price. If there was only a way to make the Internet perform like an MPLS network, that would be a huge cost saver. Well, thanks to SDN, now there is.

What SDN is All About
SDN is the latest buzzword for the cutting edge of telecommunications connections. Sometimes you’ll see it described as Hybrid SDN or SDN-WAN. Here’s what those acronyms mean and how they can work to your advantage.

SDN simply means Software Defined Network. That’s to distinguish it from the traditional hardware-based networks that were pioneered by the telephone companies and later used to create digital private lines and the backbone of the Internet. Today’s IP networks are chock full of individual routers and switches that set the architecture of the network. MPLS networks have an even more rigid topology created from specialized label switches that do the traffic routing.

A software defined network moves the intelligence of how the network makes decisions away from the pre-determined and hard to change path and routing assignments to a software program that orchestrates how the hardware elements behave at any given time. SDN-WAN is a Wide Area Network running under SDN control. This may be a hybrid of Internet, private line and MPLS networks all connected together to make one virtual WAN network.

What’s Holding Back The Internet?
The lure of the Internet is a siren song that has been easy to embrace, but, sometimes, with dire consequences. The reason is that the Internet was never designed to be a replacement for the hardware defined circuit switched telecom networks. It was meant to be a shared pool of resources that moves packets of data from one place to another accurately, no matter what goes wrong on the network. TCP/IP ensures intact files. It doesn’t offer any guarantees as to when those files will get to their destination. Your files aren’t any more or less important than anyone else’s.

Consequently, today’s Internet users experience variations in performance that might be annoying to a home user trying to watch a movie, but a productivity killer to a business running software as a service in the cloud. Voice and video two-way communication is dicey because network neutrality means there is no way to prioritize traffic. The streams of VoIP packets take their turns with huge file transfers. When the paths get congested, conversations become garbled and calls sometimes drop.

Making The Internet Great For Business
Take a closer look at what’s going on in the Internet and you’ll see that most of the problems are concentrated in “the last mile” connections and not the core network. The reasons that compromises are made to keep the cost of connecting low. For instance, DSL and Cable, the two lowest cost wireline broadband access technologies, include shared and asymmetrical bandwidth with no service level agreements. You take what you get in the way of instantaneous bandwidth, network congestion, latency, packet loss and reliability.

You can improve on this by moving to Dedicated Internet Access or DIA. That includes T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, OCx SONET, Ethernet over Copper, and Fiber Optic Carrier Ethernet. All of these “carrier grade” solutions provide a more solid connection to the Internet, but at a price. That price is anywhere from 2 or 3x the cost on up to 10x or more.

Where Do Private Lines and MPLS Fit In?
You can get the highest performance network in terms of high bandwidth, low latency, jitter and packet loss, and availability by building your own private Internet. A classic way to do this is to run dedicated private lines between every location you wish to connect. That gets very pricey very fast. MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks improve on cost by essentially giving you a private Internet among all your desired locations for a price that’s better than dedicated private lines but still much higher than the Internet.

Companies have embraced MPLS for their internal communications among headquarters, branch offices and data centers when performance is paramount.

How SDN Mimics MPLS at Lower Cost
Truth be told, the performance of Cable Broadband solutions is far superior to what you could get a decade ago. You can get bandwidth levels of 100 Mbps or even 1 Gbps at bargain rates. It’s the variability that’s the bugaboo of Cable, DSL, 4G Wireless and the Internet itself.

What SDN controllers do is manage your connectivity resources on a continuous basis. You’ll need more than one connection for the SDN to have something to manage. These might include Cable broadband, DSL, 4G, Dedicated Internet access, private lines and even satellite in remote areas. The SDN will decide what traffic goes over what circuit depending on the characteristics of each network moment by moment. If no circuit is perfect, it might send the same traffic over multiple paths. More critical applications, such as VoIP and video conferencing, will get priority on the higher performance paths.

In essence, you are creating classes of service to prioritize your traffic even though the Internet itself does no such thing. Your costs will be lower than an all-private solution and you have the added advantage of being able to connect anywhere on Earth, including to your customers and suppliers, via the Internet. The world-wide core infrastructure is already in place and the cost is being amortized over many millions of users.

Do you suspect that you are paying much more that you could be for your wide area network connections? Find out now if there is a readily available lower cost SDN-based bandwidth solution that meets your requirements.

Broadband for the Bandwidth Starved

By: John Shepler

To say that we live in a connected society sounds like belaboring the obvious. It’s seems clear that everyone, and especially everyone in business, has pretty much claimed their piece of the bandwidth pie. But… not so fast. We’re not ALL connected the way we need to be. There are pockets of broadband wasteland out there that are still starved for bandwidth. If you find yourself in this situation, what hope is there?

Yes, Virginia, There IS Broadband
Earlier in the century, there were islands of broadband access and vast areas where dial-up access was all that was available. That situation has pretty much reversed. Today, there is almost nowhere you can’t get at least some broadband Internet access. It’s just a question of what type of broadband service is available and how much you are going to pay.

Fiber Optic - The Cadillac of Bandwidth
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We’re heading toward an almost all-fiber world. There really isn’t anything else that has the capacity of glass fiber strands. Try sending 10 Gbps down a copper pair. That’s only going to happen within a building. That signal is certainly not going to make it across town. The same 10 Gbps is child’s play for fiber. One strand with one laser can provide that bandwidth. You can easily multiply that by 10 to 100 times using WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing.

Fiber Everywhere?
You might think it’s fiber, fiber everywhere and not drop to drink. Actually, it might be not a drop to be had. Fiber really is everywhere. That long country road? There’s a good chance there’s fiber buried in the utility right of way. Highways, railroads and pipelines are popular routes for fiber conduit. The reason most of this fiber is invisible is because there are few drops, or places to connect with all that fiber.

That’s changing. What’s happening is that both consumer and business applications have become more bandwidth intensive. The cloud? You don’t dial-up into the cloud. You better have a decent bandwidth connection or you’ll wish you kept those servers at home.

The Fiber - Mobile Connection
Another big driver is mobile broadband. Feature phones are pretty much extinct. Everybody has an iPhone or an Android. Now they’ve got to have a 4G LTE smartphone. The latest apps and streaming content demand 10, 20 or 30 Mbps of bandwidth. In the future, even that capacity will seem like dial-up.

What’s fiber got to do with mobile? What gets transmitted from the towers has to get to the towers in the first place. That’s where fiber comes in. The T1 lines that have traditionally fed 2G and 3G cellular don’t have the capacity for 4G and the 5G to come. Carriers have long since realized this and have have been in a building frenzy to get fiber to the towers. In-town that’s no big deal. Out in the boonies? It’s a major construction project. No matter, there is a lot of fiber going in the ground and connecting to cell towers here, there and everywhere.

The end result is two-fold. One, wireless broadband speeds are going up like crazy (wireless is becoming the fiber for portable and mobile applications). The other benefit is that the actual fiber is becoming available in many, many more locations.

What Fiber is Available?
The ancient standard in fiber optic connectivity is called SONET. It’s far from obsolete, since many if not most long haul networks run over SONET rings. SONET makes a great backbone, but it’s often not the best connectivity for business.

The newer standard is called Carrier Ethernet. It’s an extension of the Ethernet that runs on your LAN. Because they are on the same technical standard, you simply plug your LAN into the Carrier Ethernet WAN and your network connects across town, to another state or around the world. Connect to the Internet using fiber and you have high speed access to your employees, suppliers and customers.

Carrier Ethernet comes in two flavors. Ethernet over Copper is the low speed standard. It runs on twisted pair copper and is good for 10 Mbps or so. Ethernet over Fiber starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps and beyond. That’s the advantage of fiber Ethernet. It’s pretty hard to run out of bandwidth no matter how big your company grows.

Another advantage is scalability. You can start out at 10 Mbps and go to 100 Mbps or 1000 Gbps any time you want. The fiber can handle it. If you install a fast enough port, chances are that you won’t even have to replace equipment. Just call your provider and request a bandwidth increase.

What If There Still Is No Fiber?
Don’t write off fiber until you’ve gotten a new set of quotes. The fiber footprint for every carrier is changing daily. Just because you got turned down last year doesn’t mean you are still in the middle of nowhere. But… sometimes you still are.

For smaller or less bandwidth demanding businesses, such as small retailers and some farms and ranches, the trusty T1 line may still get the job done. You get a solid 1.5 Mbps up and down. That’s certainly good enough for email, much casual web browsing, and even online ordering. Video? Not so much. But, maybe that isn’t your critical need.

The beauty of T1 lines is that they are available nearly everywhere you can get a landline phone. They can also be bonded to double or triple your bandwidth. In some cases, 10 Mbps is entirely possible. That’s about the limit. Prices per line are a fraction of what they used to be, so you might find T1 is your most affordable option.

Can We Ditch The Wires?
Wireless is also more of an option than it used to be. Those same cell towers that are powering 4G smartphones can also feed a fixed receiver at your location that will give you broadband over your LAN. Today, most businesses are within good signal range of at least one cell tower.

For a lot of applications, bandwidth won’t be your problem. Usage will be. Wireless is a scarce resource, so even the so called “unlimited” plans have “fair usage” limits. If you go over, you’ll pay overage charges or have your service rate limited or cut off. Even so, many businesses are still not Internet-intensive and can get their online jobs done without going over, say, 10 GB per month.

Bird Is The Word
If you are so out in the woods that nothing else will work, there’s always satellite. Yes, you do need to be able to peek through the trees to see the southern sky. Yes, you do need to power the satellite equipment. If neither of those is a big problem, you can get broadband service for sure.

Satellite broadband used to be something of a joke. Bandwidth was pitiful and usage limits were paltry. Newer generations of bigger, higher power satellites have made a lot of those problems go away. You can get decent broadband levels, although nowhere near fiber capability. Still, 5 to 15 Mbps is reasonable for many businesses. Like cellular, there are usage limits on satellite and 10 GB per month is not untypical, although there are higher usage plans available. Once again, this is for web access and email, not video streaming.

The other issue you should be aware of is latency. The big birds are flying some 23,000 miles up there and it takes even a radio wave a half-second or more to get up, down and back again. Latencies of 500 mSec to 1 Sec or more mean that telephone calls over satellite are more like two-way radio conversations. You have to wait your turn. The same is true for video conferencing. Expect other cloud services to be similarly sluggish over geosynchronous satellite broadband.

What Flavor of Broadband Will Satisfy Your Bandwidth Appetite?
Options available to many locations include fiber, T1, cellular wireless and satellite. One of these should be usable for your applications. In many cases, you have more than one choice. Sometimes even cable broadband or high speed fixed point to point fixed wireless service are additional options. How do you know what’s available? It starts with a no-obligation quote from multiple service providers that you can request in just a minute or so.



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10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps Internet Upgrades

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling stymied by your company’s low Internet speeds? It’s to be expected. Today’s online applications are far more demanding than the static websites and text based email that were the norm when you got your first T1 line. Today, 10 Mbps can be considered entry level for most businesses. Demands for 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps are entirely reasonable. So, what’s the best way to upgrade?

Movin’ On Up
You can sometimes get away with incrementally increasing your bandwidth as needs grow slowly. Bonded T1 lines can give you 3 to 12 Mbps in 1.5 Mbps steps. You need to order all your lines from the same provider and there will be equipment changes every time you want to step up. Even so, this can be the best option in rural areas where there isn’t much service available.

A competing approach is to order Ethernet over Copper rather than T1. It’s available in most metro areas, although not so much beyond the city limits. EoC can give you higher bandwidth levels, 3 to 20 Mbps, at lower cost than bonded T1 solutions. It’s distance sensitive, so the closer you are to the office supplying your service, the higher your bandwidth.

The best option today is looking more and more like Ethernet over Fiber. Yes, fiber optic service used to be rarely found and very expensive. The legacy SONET fiber services still are pricey, although they’ve come down dramatically in recent years. Ethernet over Fiber is a newer approach that offers a number of advantages for business users.

What Ethernet over FIber Offers
Ethernet over FIber (EoF) is pretty much like it sounds. It uses the same Ethernet protocol that runs on your company LAN, but adds some features that make it suitable for telecom carrier use. You’ll also hear it called Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet. This is currently a metropolitan service. There isn’t much fiber in the boonies, although more is being installed all the time to boost the capability of cellular towers.

Because it’s Ethernet, EoF is easy to connect to your network. Your handoff from the service provider is a fiber or copper Ethernet connection. Plug it into your edge router and you’re in business

Ethernet over Fiber was designed to be highly scalable. That means upgrades are very easy and probably don’t need equipment changes. Compare that to legacy services that always required the carrier to swap out termination equipment and often took weeks and months to complete. With EoF, you make a phone call and your speed will be increased in a matter of hours or days. The latest offerings let your make changes on-demand. You can increase or decrease your bandwidth right from your computer.

How about bandwidth?
Ethernet over Fiber typically starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps or more. Popular speeds mirror the standard Ethernet LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 1000 Mbps. Actually, you can get many increments in-between these standards. If you like, start off at 10 Mbps and then upgrade to 20 or 30 Mbps and eventually move on up to 100 Mbps or more.

The one consideration that makes this easy is the port speed you install. That the speed of the connection to the provider’s equipment. You’ll want at least a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet connection to provide 10 to 100 Mbps. If you expect to go into the hundreds of Mbps, you’ll want at least a Gigabit Ethernet port. Want more than 1 Gbps? Get a 10 Gbps port installed initially so you won’t need equipment changes from running out of port speed.

The Pleasant Cost Surprise
Many traditional and new carriers are now offering Ethernet over Fiber, since it has become so popular. This makes for a highly competitive marketplace and that’s great for you as a buyer. EoF pricing is far more attractive per Mbps than bonded T1, DS3 (T3), or any of the SONET (OC-3, OC-12, OC-48) services. You can easily find yourself paying half or less than you would with other telecom services. You retain highly reliable service with low latency, jitter and packet loss.

Does this sound like just the business Internet access you need now? Check out prices and available of Ethernet over Fiber bandwidth options for your business location now.

Business Broadband Options in Rural Areas

By: John Shepler

Companies lucky enough to be located at the heart of metropolitan business districts are in an enviable position when it comes to broadband Internet access. There are multitude of service providers that can connect you via cable, twisted pair copper, fiber or wireless links. Out in the country… not so much.

Businesses located in rural areas may feel starved for connectivity. Unlike their city counterparts, they don’t have service providers fawning over them with competitive offers. That doesn’t mean that there are no broadband options. Only that the low population density makes marketing to the rural markets less compelling than in cities with commercial customers every few steps down the block.

Now you don’t have to depend on sales people from telecom carriers finding you in out of the way places. You can have instant access to a myriad of bandwidth services that will connect to your business location, regardless of where you are. The options vary, of course, by location. So let’s take a look of what probably is and is not available to you away from metro areas.

Two services that are hard to come by beyond the city limits are cable and fiber. Business cable piggybacks on the cable television systems licensed by each community. This is a high density business that needs customers every hundred feet or so in order to be profitable. Business cable broadband works just like the consumer version. It offers fairly high asymmetrical shared bandwidth at a lower monthly fee than just about anything else. Unfortunately, the infrastructure doesn’t extend much beyond subdivisions on the edge of town. If your business is located near a growing retail and residential area, the cable may now pass your location and give you access to broadband as well as television and telephone service via cable.

Fiber is also a metro service, although that is changing a bit. Fiber optic connections are inherently high capacity and insensitive to distance. Most of the fiber terminates at telecom offices in town. Yes, fiber runs right next to railroad tracks and country roads, but it keeps going to the next town. Without a place to connect, you can’t get access.

What’s changing is that fiber is being run now to cellular towers in support of 4G LTE wireless broadband. This backhaul connectivity has traditionally been handled by T1 lines. 4G speeds and volume are so high that T1s have hit their limits. Fiber to the tower is expanding rapidly. That means that if you are close to where the fiber is being dropped off, it may be practical to run a drop to your business. If so, you’ll have all the bandwidth you can possible use for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of T1, it’s the long distance capability of T1 line service that made it attractive for remotely located cell towers in the first place. The technology was designed to connect over a wide area from the central office and is available just about anywhere you can get landline phone service. The cost of T1 lines has been falling rapidly, even in rural areas. That means a service that was unaffordable a few years ago can make sense now. You should also know that T1 lines can be bonded to make higher capacity circuits. These range from 3 Mbps on up to 10 or 12 Mbps.

Ethernet over Copper service isn’t often available out of town, although Ethernet can also be carried on T1 lines. This is called Ethernet over DS1 or EoDS1. It offers the advantage of being able to support Ethernet services like E-Line and E-LAN and is often lower in cost than equivalent T1 and bonded T1 services.

One way to get around the lack of wiring to rural areas is to bypass the wires completely. Wireless broadband in the form of 3G and 4G cellular are readily available in country locations. Special business grades of cellular broadband are available that are highly reliable and can drive your network directly. The cost is very attractive. It’s on the order of cable broadband if it was available.

If you can’t get cellular broadband because of too few bars of signal, consider satellite. Satellite broadband has improved greatly and now offers 4G bandwidths at a reasonable cost. Satellite doesn’t work well for VoIP or video conferencing because of the long time delays or latency caused by having to send the signal tens of thousands of miles up and down to the satellite in geostationary orbit. It may work just fine, though, for web access, email and even credit card verification. Satellite signals penetrate where other broadband doesn’t reach since they come from above. They require only a clear view of the southern sky and electrical power to run the satellite receiver.

Is your rural business hurting because you are stuck with dial-up Internet or no access at all? Do you have broadband now but want to see what other options are available? Learn what broadband services and pricing are available for your business location now.


Note: Photo of country road courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Secure Any Public WiFi Hotspot

You know how it is. You’re away from the office and the enterprise grade security on your corporate LAN. Or you’re out and about with your personal computer and away from the security of your encrypted WiFi router. You don’t have a 3G or 4G service for your laptop, but that doesn’t matter. There is WiFi available just about everywhere. The only problem is how much do you have to worry about these unsecured WiFi hotspots.

Worry a lot. Certainly, there isn’t some malicious hacker lurking in the dark corner of every coffee shop and restaurant. But how can you be sure that there isn’t somebody running Firesheep or another spyware program just when you want to send some private email or sensitive corporate data?

You can never be sure. The problem is that cybercrime has turned into big business and the tools needed to lurk on your conversations wirelessly are easy to obtain. You may never get hacked or you might lose sensitive data this afternoon. Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?

The threat of someone lurking nearby with a packet sniffer on their otherwise innocent looking laptop has made many of us a bit paranoid. You may not care who’s watching you read the news or check the weather, but do you really want to open your email or log-into personal services in that environment? You can either pay up for 3G and 4G cellular services, which are harder to crack but not impossible, just forget doing much online when you are out and about, or set up Private WiFi for your computers.

What is Private WiFi? It’s a service that creates a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for anything you send over the Internet. If you work from home, your company may have set you up with a corporate VPN so that you can securely access company data. Usually, this involves installing special VPN encryption software on your PC that only works with similar software in the corporate data center.

What’s different about Private WiFi is that it isn’t limited to any particular business or any business at all. This is a VPN that secures your Internet connection, even over public WiFi networks. The way a VPN works is that it encrypts or scrambles the data you transmit and receive while it is on the wireless link. That way it is nearly impossible to decode, and way beyond the capability of the identity thieves sipping a late in the next booth. This is why they call it a virtual private network. It virtually creates a private connection for you across a public network.

The way Private WiFi works is that you install the VPN software on your computer and it creates an encrypted tunnel for your data anytime you use the Internet. That encrypted connection is between your computer and the secure Private WiFi servers. Those servers connect to the Internet using high speed connections. Private WiFi uses industry standard 128-bit encryption, the same technology used by your bank or credit card company. Everything you do on any WiFi or other Internet connection uses this VPN to protect your data.

Private WiFi works with both PCs and Macs and costs about ten buck a month. That’s a lot cheaper than other wireless access if you already have WiFi readily available to you. There are also family plans and corporate discounts available. If you aren’t sure this is for you, why not take a free 3-day trial and see how it works? Go ahead and start your Private WiFi Free 3-day trial now and stop worrying about who’s lurking at your favorite WiFi hotspots.

Dynamically Allocate T1 Service

T1 lines have been used for decades to carry both voice and data. It’s commonly assumed that you need to specify which you are going to transport prior to installing the line. If you want voice, a channelized T1 line or ISDN PRI configuration is ordered. Each of the 23 or 24 channels will handle one telephone conversation. On the other hand, if you want a point to point T1 data line or dedicated Internet access, then you order a clear channel T1 line so you can use the entire 1.5 Mbps as a single pipe.

Many companies have multiple T1 lines installed because they need both high volume telephone service and dedicated Internet access. They may also have T1s available as dedicated private lines to branch offices or other business locations. All of these lines are ordered and configured separately. Is there any possibility of combining functions?

Indeed, there is. Let’s consider the channelized T1 line. Each of the 24 channels is independent and can carry one digitized voice call or 64 Kbps of data. The line doesn’t know or care what those bits represent. At each end, you have to know which channels are voice and which are data. The voice calls are all separate, of course. The data channels can be combined into one larger stream.

Early implementations of combined voice and data or integrated T1 lines did exactly that. They set up a channelized T1 line so that some channels were used to support business telephone calls and some were used for broadband data. Let’s say we simply divide the line capacity in half. That way 12 channels are used for 12 business phone lines. The other 12 are used for dedicated Internet access. 12 channels times 64 Kbps per channel gives you 768 Kbps of broadband service.

Why go to this trouble? A considerable portion of the cost involved in provisioning a T1 line is the local loop. That’s the twisted pair copper wires that run from your building to the telephone company central office. From there they can go to a competitive service provider or the phone company can use them for its own services. If a competitor wants the line they have to pay the phone company a lease fee that is passed along to you as a loop charge. Every time you add a T1 line you add an additional loop charge. If you can get one T1 line to do two functions, you only pay that loop charge once.

Integrated T1 service works well for smaller businesses that don’t need more than 12 outside phone lines or high bandwidth Internet service. Many smaller retailers use the data capability for credit card verification and for inventory control and other back office functions with headquarters. That plus telephone service takes care of their needs.

One glaring inefficiency in using a T1 line this way is that allocations are fixed. Any of those phone channels not in use simply sit there idle. That seems like a waste, since that idle bandwidth could help speed up Internet traffic if it was available. This is why newer implementations of integrated T1 use a different technology. Instead of dealing with all those channels independently, they convert the phone calls to packets and merge them with the data packets from the computer network. The combined data stream fills the T1 capacity of 1.5 Mbps. There is no idle capacity. Everything that isn’t voice is used for data.

Of course, for this to work the latency and congestion sensitive voice packets must have priority over the less critical data packets. That’s exactly what is done using Class of Service tagging. Voice packets always get higher priority. Whatever capacity they don’t use is automatically available for broadband data. This process is called dynamic allocation of bandwidth.

If that sounds a lot like the way a SIP trunk works, it’s because that’s exactly the way it is organized. In fact, SIP trunking is the new Integrated T1. Small SIP trunks use T1 lines, but you can also get higher capacity trunks using bonded T1, Ethernet over Copper, DS3, OC-3 or Ethernet over Fiber. The line works the same way on all of these. It is only the bandwidth that is different.

Could your business benefit from the cost savings of using a single Integrated T1 or SIP Trunk to supply both telephone and broadband Internet service, while maintaining excellent voice quality? If so, get prices and availability of dynamic line services like SIP trunks and Integrated T1.

Wireless Internet Access For Farms

There are many advantages to living and working on a farm, but one of the disadvantages is that broadband Internet access is harder to come by. No, DSL and Cable broadband probably aren’t in your future. But there are options available at reasonable prices right now.

It’s true that DSL and Cable are popular with independent professionals, small businesses and home-based occupations. You get a decent amount of bandwidth at a reasonable cost. The one hitch is that these services are distance limited. DSL signals decrease rapidly as you get a mile to two from the telephone company central office. Cable is a wired service that goes only where the Cable company has decided that there is enough population density to justify stringing the coaxial cable. Unfortunately, those factors keep Cable and DSL within or close to the city limits.

What you really want are either line services that don’t have distance restrictions or wireless services that don’t require stringing or burying cable of any type. There are several options that meet this description.

First is T1. This is a telco digital line service first used between telephone company switching centers. The beauty of T1 is that it is designed to be provisioned on two pair of ordinary telephone wires, available just about everywhere. The second advantage is that it was designed to work with regenerator boxes that clean up and boost the signal so that it can go another mile. You can generally get T1 line service miles from the nearest town, although it gets more expensive as you get farther out in the country.

Second is satellite. Satellite broadband service comes from above and needs no wires. All it requires is AC power that can even come from a gas generator or solar panels and an inverter. Disadvantages include the need to get a professionally installed two-way satellite dish installed on your roof and a half-second or so of latency due to the long path up to the stationary satellite. For many email and Web uses, this slight delay from issuing a command to getting data back is no big deal.

A third option is wireless terrestrial Internet service. Many communities have WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers. These tend to be locally owned and have a very limited service area. More often than not, WISPs target rural subdivisions and small towns to get enough customers to justify the cost of the equipment and bandwidth.

One of the most exciting new services is fixed wireless or cellular broadband. This service uses the data channels that every cell phone carrier has available for mobile phones and laptop computers. Accel Networks is a leader in this field and has contracts with the major carriers (AT&T, Verizon and Sprint) to connect with their broadband data channels. By combining the coverage areas of multiple carriers, Accel can pretty much blanket the nation except for mountainous and remote areas of the West where there is no cell phone coverage. If you can get a decent cell phone signal, you can probably get fixed wireless service.

The way this works is that Accel Networks customizes their standard interface box and antenna to optimize the signal strength for your particular location. That gives you a really good chance of getting a solid signal that will deliver decent bandwidth. How much bandwidth? This service is competitive with T1 lines with a minimum rate of 750 Kbps download and 250 Kbps upload, bursting up to 1 Mbps on downloads. This is more than adequate for most farm uses, such as getting agriculture reports, using email, general Web surfing and even watching video clips. It’s not intended for high intensity usage like downloading HD movies or running a server.

What makes fixed wireless broadband service so popular in rural areas is that it is readily available and costs half the price of a T1 line or less. Is this the right service for your farm, ranch or rural business? Get pricing, availability and complete details on fixed wireless broadband now. Installation is fast, often within a matter of days.

3G Fixed Wireless For Business

We all know how 3G cellular wireless service has transformed the mobile phone into the smartphone. Did you also know there is a fixed wireless service available that uses the same technology? It’s a unique solution to getting business grade Internet access where everything else is too expensive or not available at all.

What the cellular industry has done is to build out a vast infrastructure of wireless base stations all over the country. You can think of these as a blanket of mobile phone coverage and you’d be right. You can also think of this infrastructure as a blanket of broadband coverage. You’d be equally right. The familiar cell towers are transmitting both voice and data signals on different channels through their microwave radio equipment.

On the data side, the 3G (3rd generation) wireless broadband service acts like a collection of Wi-Fi hotspots with much greater coverage and all linked together. You need a wireless modem aircard and a subscription to pick up this service. It doesn’t use the same channels as WiFi. It’s also not free, but for businesses the cost can be lower than other alternatives.

Many small and even medium size businesses use T1 lines that are available almost everywhere. Cost varies with location, but is typically several hundred dollars per month. Fixed wireless broadband can be had for half of that for a primary connection and even less if you only want backup service.

Unlike DSL and Cable, other SMB bandwidth choices, T1 and 3G wireless are available just about anywhere you want service. That includes locations that are off the beaten path if they can still get solid cell phone service. Fixed wireless is unique in that installation can be in a matter of days and you can have it installed at temporary business locations, such as fairs, conventions, and short term holiday stores.

Accel Networks is a leader in 3G fixed wireless for business. Their equipment and system are optimized for consistent bandwidth and high reliability. That includes proprietary RF optimization and RF level management and a proprietary antenna design that maximizes signal strength. This goes far beyond the simplistic design of the USB aircard modems you buy for mobile computing.

The other advantage of Accel Networks is that they have agreements with all three major providers (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon) to ensure extensive signal coverage. You know that no matter which carrier you pick, there are places where you’d be better off with one of the other carriers. It’s a matter of who has the most towers and channel licenses in a particular area. Accel picks the carrier that has the best signal at your particular business location. Since this is fixed service, it doesn’t matter that they’d make a different choice if you were located in another town.

What is 3G fixed wireless best for? Credit card verification is extremely popular. Accel Networks specializes in this technology and offers a layer 2 PCI compliant network meeting credit card industry requirements.

Most small businesses need credit card verification, but many also need general access to the Internet for Web browsers, email, and perhaps automated ordering, inventory, bookkeeping or data transfers between locations. Accel Networks managed broadband wireless solutions offer a minimum of 750 Kbps download and 250 Kbps upload broadband speeds. They also provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that includes 99.9% availability, minimum acceptable data rates, maximum acceptable latency, and mean time to restore.

Is fixed wireless a good fit with your business? Get a complete set of options and prices so you can compare 3G Fixed Wireless For Business with competing services, and then choose what’s right for your situation.

What Is a PRI Line?

PRI lines are popular for providing multi-line phone service to businesses. But just what is a PRI line and what options are available?

PRI is part of a telephone technology standard called ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network). It was envisioned as a digital line service that would replace analog telephone lines for both residential and business users. At the time that ISDN was being introduced, connections to the Internet were mostly dial-up using 56 Kbps modems at best. Many of those 56K modems really connected at something around 30 to 40 Kbps due to noise and other limitations on most phone lines. All-digital lines offered basic ISDN service with 64 Kbps data plus one standard telephone service on a single line.

This basic service is called BRI for Basic Rate Interface. It consists of 3 channels. There are two “B” or Bearer channels at 64 Kbps each that can be configured as either voice or data. That can be a 64K digital Internet connection and a phone line, 2 phone lines, or 2 combined data lines for 128 Kbps Internet. The third channel is called a “D” or Delta channel. It has only 16 Kbps, but is used for signaling and control.

If you’ve never heard of ISDN BRI it’s because it never took off. By the time it was starting to be deployed in a big way, technology had moved on and broadband over DSL and Cable was taking over the role of Internet access.

The second standard introduced with ISDN is PRI for Primary Rate Interface. This much higher bandwidth service offers 24 channels configured as 23 B + D. In this case the D channel bandwidth has increased to 64 Kbps just like the B channels. Why stick with 64K channels? It’s because 64 Kbps is just the right amount of bandwidth to transport one digitized telephone conversation using the industry standard G.711 coding standard.

You can configure a PRI circuit to carry voice, data or a combination. Some ISPs used these to connect to modem banks in the dial-up days. Today, the most popular use of ISDN PRI is for PBX telephone trunking with 23 outside voice lines and one control channel that also handles Caller ID for the other 23. Most PBX switches come already configured for at least one PRI line or can be interfaced with a plug-in card.

BRI was designed to be provisioned over the same twisted pair cable that brings in analog phone service. PRI is provisioned over T1 lines because of its higher capacity. T1 was designed to use 2 twisted pair of telco cable and is almost universally available as a standard business-grade digital telecom service.

Recently, another PRI option has become available. That is business grade telephone trunking provided by Cable companies, such as Comcast. The coaxial cable used to bring in television has tremendous capacity and easily supports broadband services up to 100 Mbps. The same cable can transport individual analog telephone lines or ISDN PRI to support a business PBX phone system. With Cable PRI, you may have the option to order fractional PRI service with as few as 6 phone lines. You can then add more, even one at a time, as your business needs increase.

Are you interested in lower cost multi-line business telephone service to support your in-house phone system? If so, get prices and availability for PRI line service options. Single line service and VoIP SIP trunking are also often available.

IP Transit vs Peering vs DIA

We live in a world of networks and networks of networks. The Internet is the ultimate example of networks upon networks upon networks. All of these networks need some way to communicate. For that, you have the choice of IP transit or peering.

Network to network communication would be unnecessary if the Internet was constructed the way most people envision it. When we think of the Internet, we think of one giant network that links everyone to everyone. It generally works that way for the end user, but the notion of a monolithic universal network is an illusion. Look inside the Internet and you’ll find it to be a collection of large, medium and small networks that all work together to get packets from one point to another. Let’s see what that takes.

At the top of the heap are Tier 1 networks. These are huge international IP networks that have points of presence in key locations around the world. Tier 1 networks are indeed the superhighways of the Internet. But like all highway systems, they don’t go everywhere. In order to create an Internet, you need to connect these superhighways together.

The connection process is called peering. The name suggests that this is a connection between equals or peers. That’s exactly right. Huge networks have huge amounts of traffic. If two of these networks peer to exchange traffic on an equal basis, then each network effectively doubles its reach. Network A has access to all the customers on Network B and vice versa.

Tier 1 networks peer on a settlement free basis. In other words, the networks are interconnected via high capacity routers and the traffic flows back and forth at will. Settlement free means that there are no toll booths at the border. Neither network pays the other because they are getting equal value through peering.

Not all networks are the same size. Smaller networks, called Tier 2, have less capacity and less reach than Tier 1 networks. Tier 1 networks aren’t about to peer with Tier 2 networks at no charge because the smaller network would be getting a lot more value from the arrangement than the larger one. What Tier 2 networks can do is ban together and peer among themselves to create a much larger entity that can compete with those Tier 1 networks. If they want access to the Tier 1 networks, they can pay a settlement charge based on the traffic imbalance. That charge is called IP transit.

Internet Service Providers have a choice when it comes to accessing the Internet. They can spend the capital and maintenance cost to build out their networks to the point where they can peer with other large networks, or they can just purchase IP transit services from a large network and avoid the investment in equipment and personnel.

Very small networks or medium size companies with their own internal networks will choose to buy Dedicated Internet Access rather than IP transit. You need to be a network operator with an assigned AS or Autonomous System number (ASN) that identifies each network on the Internet in order to qualify for IP Transit services. Some large organizations with connections to multiple networks may fit this definition, as well as large scale ISPs.

Everyone else, from local WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) to SMBs (Small to Medium Size Businesses) simply purchases Dedicated Internet Access by the Mbps or Gbps of bandwidth. Operation of the Internet is left to those networks who specialize in that service.

What type of Internet connectivity makes the most sense for your business? It depends on whether you are a large ISP, a content delivery network, a large corporation with international locations, or a network of retail stores. Why not compare pricing options for IP Transit, Peering, or Dedicated Internet Access, as appropriate? Complementary consulting services are available to help you sort through the possibilities.

Fight For Your Right to Broadband

Sick and tired and falling asleep while your PC downloads software updates or high resolution photos? Videos unwatchable because they're constantly stopping and starting? Are you a victim of pitiful bandwidth? Well, you're not alone. In fact, if you are an American it's your lot in life. We may be the world's super power, but we're laggards when it comes to Internet access. Instead of just grumbling, let's see what we can do to improve the situation.

Just how far behind are we, anyway? Start cheering "we're number 16." That's our rank in broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. The U.S. weighs-in at 11.4 per 100. South Korea is #1 with 24.9 per hundred.

Oh but that's because we have much better connections, right? Wrong! South Korean users typically have DS3 level access at 45.50 Mbps. Japan is number one in the speed category. Japanese surf at 61 Mbps. The median download speed is 21.7 Mbps in Finland, 18.2 Mbps in Sweden, and 7.6 Mbps in Canada. The United States? We zip along at a medium speed of 1.97 Mbps.

Where are these numbers coming from? They're in a report called "Speed Matters" by the Communications Workers of America. SpeedMatters.org is also a Website dedicated to promoting high speed Internet as a strategic asset for the country. They're calling for 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload as the broadband access benchmark by 2010. What is our current country's standard? 200 kbps.

The need for universal broadband at higher speeds is more than just a boost of adrenaline for online gamers or the ability to download movies in a couple of minutes. There are serious applications in telemedicine, advanced education, easy remote access to government services, economic growth for rural areas, and enabling people with disabilities.

I got to thinking about this and some more ideas popped to mind. One of our looming problems now is the skyrocketing cost of gasoline and diesel fuel. Perfectly good houses are sitting empty in the suburbs not because they are too expensive, but because people can't afford the cost of gas to commute to the cities. One way to take pressure off oil supplies and immediately cut consumer gasoline costs by 20% is simply to have everybody stay home one work day a week.

The way you avoid a productivity drop of an equal magnitude is to have them do their jobs remotely. That might not work too well for pipefitters, but anyone who lives on the computer all day is a prime candidate for telework. Imagine if you had the same 61 Mbps connectivity as they have in Japan. You would have your own desktop telepresence system for meetings and could access even the largest files over a VPN network.

The same could be true for middle and high school students. By restructuring the educational week, it might be possible to let the students interact in virtual classrooms one day a week and do all their reading and tests online. Just stopping all the school buses one day a week would cause a noticeable drop in diesel consumption and expense and would cut pollution as well. But who's going to watch those kids who should be in school? Why, the parents of course. They're home on the same days sharing that impressive 61 Mbps.

I'll bet you can come up with some even better ideas on how massive amounts of bandwidth, available to everyone, could change the way we live and work for the better. But to make any of it happen, we need to elevate high speed Internet in the minds of lawmakers as a matter of national infrastructure instead of a luxury item. If you agree, take a few seconds and sign a petition to the 2008 Presidential Candidates that urges them to make high speed Internet access a priority in their campaigns.

DSL, Cable and Satellite Internet service providers have also been steadily improving their broadband options. If you haven't checked in awhile, see what residential and home office broadband options or business location bandwidth options are available for your location now.

Why You Need Dedicated Bandwidth

You might think that broadband is broadband and one high speed connection to the Internet should be as good as another. But that's an illusion. Sadly, business users might not learn the truth without losing sales opportunities and valued clients.

The backbone structure of the Internet is pretty robust. Packet loss, latency, and bandwidth seldom pose a limitation for all the most time critical applications. The biggest difference among Internet access services is experienced in the last mile connection. That's the link between your router and the service provider.

Broadband connections can be divided into two major categories: shared and dedicated. Shared Internet connections include the popular DSL and Cable broadband connections. Dedicated connections are provided by T1, DS3, and Ethernet business services. Notice the term "business". Shared Internet services originated to make broadband affordable for residential and home office users. Medium to larger size businesses have always used dedicated connections for their voice and data circuits. But smaller businesses, including quick service restaurants, professional sales offices, and owner-operated shops may opt for shared connections being sold as business versions of consumer Internet services.

In the bigger picture, the entire Internet is a shared bandwidth resource. So what's the difference if your connection is shared or dedicated? The primary difference is something called "oversubscription." Oversubscription for Internet service providers is similar to overbooking for airlines. The idea is that not everyone is going to show up at the same time, even if they've paid for a ticket, or Internet service. Rather than allow those airline seats to go unfilled or that bandwidth capacity to go unused, service providers will deliberately sell more capacity than they have available. It's not really a problem until every customer really does want service at the same time.

Say your ISP (Internet Service Provider) has an OC3 backbone connection to the Internet. That a dedicated fiber optic link with 155 Mbps of capacity. Now they divvy that out to 100 customers. If they wanted to provided dedicated access, each customer would be limited to 1.5 Mbps. That way if all users were running at their maximum rate, the capacity of the OC3 connection still would not be exceeded. But chances are they'll offer each customer "up to" 10 Mbps. If only 15 customers are running their connections flat out downloading big files or video, there is still plenty of capacity for everyone. But what if all 100 want to download a video simultaneously? There's only 155 Mbps available, so each user get throttled at 1.55 Mbps.

This explains why your broadband connection seems to work faster some times and slower at others. The slow times tend to be when the most users are online and running high bandwidth applications. Even more dramatically, some ISPs might try to spread that OC3 backbone over 1,000 users, not 100. During periods of very high usage, your share of the bandwidth could be as low as 150 Kbps. Remember, the service provider is offering "up to" 10 Mbps, not any particular speed at any particular time.

As your connection speed decreases, download times increase and some applications may start to sputter. VoIP telephone calls and video feeds, including video conferencing, are particularly sensitive to bandwidth congestion. Shared bandwidth services are generally offered on a "best effort" basis, with no guarantee of performance, packet loss, latency or even availability.

With a dedicated connection, your bandwidth is set aside by the service provider and always available for your use. If you are streaming audio or video, this could be critical. Even larger grocery stores or retailers with dozens of credit card terminals need bandwidth always at the ready. In fact, any business that depends upon online access to make client presentations, manage inventory or enter orders needs a solid, dedicated Internet connection.

Dedicated Internet bandwidth and secure, private point to point connections cost less now than ever before. Don't settle for a limited service that only appears inexpensive, until you check prices on dedicated bandwidth for business locations.

T-1 Bandwidth Suits the SMB

The SMB or Small to Medium size Business is no longer a stand-alone entity, even when independently owned and operated. Business operations from small insurance offices to the ubiquitous QSRs or Quick Service Restaurants have become either Internet enabled or Internet dependent. Why? Because the benefit to cost ratio is so favorable.

The most popular digital communication connection for SMBs is the T1 line. It is a business-grade regulated telecommunication service that has dropped in price over the past few years due to increasing demand and fierce competition among providers. In some cases, you'll pay less than half for T1 service than you did five years ago. How many of your other business expenses have done that?

T-1 bandwidth is a solid 1.5 Mbps in both directions, upload and download. It is a precisely synchronized transmission protocol that can be thought of like a water pipe. Regardless of how much is currently being used, a set capacity is always available. If you need more, it's as simple as bonding in additional T1 lines to multiply your available bandwidth by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or more times.

So how do small and medium businesses employ their T-1 bandwidth? In addition to the obvious applications such as email and Web browsing, many businesses use their T1 lines to order supplies, upload accounting reports to a main office, check inventory at remote warehouses, monitor security cameras and enable telecommuting by home workers or employees on the road.

Many companies have become completely or partially Internet based operations. E-commerce is a typical application, so that customers can order from an online catalog anytime, even when stores are closed. Sales organizations have the ability to "carry the business" to a customer's office. Product information can be displayed at the customer's desk using laptop computers equipped with cellular broadband cards. Stock can be checked and orders entered right on the spot.

Other companies have realized cost savings by integrating their telephone and Internet data through a single T1 line. There are a couple of ways to do this. Integrated T1 Service is a specialized product that allocates T-1 bandwidth between voice and data. Any bandwidth not needed for telephone calls is automatically available for Internet use. One nice feature of Integrated T1 Service is that it works with your current telephone system, even if it is a key telephone system with a half-dozen analog phone lines.

Another approach is to use a single T1 dedicated Internet data line to support a VoIP telephone system and multiple Internet users. The VoIP supplier connects to the in-house iPBX system via the Internet. IP security cameras can be also be accessed via the Internet from managers' homes or remote security services.

Where data security is concerned, SMBs can still use the Internet as a convenient WAN or Wide Area Network. Information is protected from prying eyes by encrypting it during transmission. This approach is often referred to as a VPN or Virtual Private Network.

Another use for T1 lines is for private point to point connections. Very typical is a business with multiple locations that uses P2P T1 lines to interconnect all its telephones and/or send data directly between locations.

Is your small to medium size business in need of upgraded broadband service? Would you like to see if you can get better pricing on the T1 service you are already using? If so, you can find out in less than a minute what services and prices are available for your business location using our T1 Rex automated online T-1 bandwidth search.

Telnes Broadband for T1 Dedicated Internet

Businesses need highly reliable connections to the Internet. What once was occasional use of the Web is now an integral part of doing business. Even non-Internet companies are now Internet-enabled, requiring consistently available bandwidth to connect to their customers and suppliers and even their telephone service provider. The gold standard for Internet connectivity is the dedicated connection. For most businesses that's provided through a T1 data line with guaranteed availability.

Telnes Broadband is an Internet Service Provider or ISP that is focused on businesses, not residential users. In fact, over 99% of their customer base is comprised of business and government users. They've become a popular provider for companies who depend on their WAN (Wide Area Network) connections to the Internet, especially those who need fast installation and connections for multiple branch offices, distribution centers, franchisees, or customer sites.

Telnes Broadband distinguishes itself by providing coverage out of more than 10,200 central offices nationwide supported by over 800 field technicians. A T1 connection consists of a local loop that connects point to point from your business location to a central office and then a port to the Internet via the provider's network. More than 3,200 central offices in major population centers are designated for "core services" that offer the lowest prices and quickest installations. Expanded services cover smaller markets and more remote areas. The beauty of T1 lines is that they are almost universally available.

Telnes provides their T1 service with a 99.99% guaranteed uptime, also referred to as "four nines" availability. They also guarantee network delay (latency), packet delivery, time to repair and installation time as well. One the distinguishing features of business class services versus consumer Internet connections is this type of Service Level Agreement or SLA.

Telnes goes a step further by offering managed services, including managed security and full time link monitoring. They will provide you with a 100% managed firewall that is operated and monitored by their full time security team. Techniques such as intrusion detection, virus and spyware protection, vulnerability scans and network perimeter protection keep pests and predators out, while letting you make full use of the Internet for business purposes.

Once you have a rock solid connection to the Internet, you can do much more than just browse the Web and share emails. You have the option to host your own servers, conduct full motion video conferences, view security cameras, communicate among offices using VoIP telephony, enable remote workers, store and retrieve data off-site, and share data files with remote sites, customers and vendors.

Is your company looking to add T1 Dedicated Internet service or simply looking for a better price or higher performance than the Internet service you have now? If so, let our team of experts help you find the best business broadband services from Telnes Broadband and other competitive providers.