I Want Fiber But Not Construction Costs

By: John Shepler

The first choice for business private line and Internet connections is now fiber optic bandwidth. Fiber provides a nearly limitless pipe with low latency, packet loss and jitter. Prices are better than ever… as long as you don’t get a giant bill for construction costs.

Why Fiber Has Construction Costs At All
Companies that have depended on T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper or business cable can be stunned when they receive a quote that includes thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in build costs to bring in a fiber line. Twisted pair copper lines rarely have such a charge because the telephone companies routinely install telco wire bundles to every business when the building is first built.

Fiber should have the same status, but we’re not quite there yet to the same extent. Unlike copper, fiber is often installed long after the building is constructed as a retrofit. That can mean running fiber bundles overhead on poles or tunneling under roads and sidewalks. It gets pricey. If the nearest fiber point of presence is miles way, it gets really pricey.

By the way, business cable can suffer the same fate. If the cable doesn’t run right up to your building, you can get dinged for one-time construction fees. These tend to be a lot less than fiber, although if the cable is miles away the bill can be eye-popping.

When YOU Don’t Have to Pay for Construction
Don’t assume that if you’ve never had fiber before, you’ll have a huge construction bill. There are many cases where the bill is zero. Why? Because the construction cost may have already been paid or even waived.

What you want to look for is a fiber-lit building. That’s a facility where one or more fiber service providers has already brought in a fiber bundle and termination equipment to make it operational. Lit means that the fiber has an active laser light shining through it and is capable of carrying traffic.

Fiber buildings were once rare, but now they are very common. As business bandwidth requirements increased, more and more competitive carriers established fiber optic networks and began competing to light buildings. Often the first provider to establish services gets all the business and makes that building unattractive to competitors.

Near Net vs On Net
The best situation is to have your building lit or on-net with a fiber company. The next best thing is to be near-net. That means a building next door or close by is lit and providing service. This is important because running a line from one building to another is relatively inexpensive. Your construction costs will be low or perhaps even waived if the carrier wants to be the provider for your building. If you have other tenants in the building, you can encourage this by all requesting service.

Other Options
If fiber really does turn out to be unaffordable, you aren't necessarily out of luck. In metropolitan areas, wireless microwave companies can give you fiber speeds without the wires. All you'll need is a small antenna on the building. Ethernet over Copper can deliver speeds as high as 30 to 50 Mbps over multiple twisted pair wires that are likely already installed. The available speed depends on how far from the telco office you are. Business Cable might also work. The newest DOCSIS standards offer hundreds of Mbps up to Gigabit speeds on a shared bandwidth basis.

How Do You Get The Best Connection Deal?
Ideally, you want to get quotes from many service providers, not just the phone company or the one fiber company that advertises locally. You are likely unaware of all the potential service providers. However, a bandwidth broker, such as Telarus, Inc, has contractual arrangements with dozens of providers nationwide and can get you a suite of competitive quotes. It takes only a few minutes of your time. Simply request a fiber optic service quote through the online form or call toll free: 888-848-8749. A bandwidth service consultant will gather quotes and help you chose the most appropriate service for your business.

WANs That Act Like LANs

We take our Local Area Networks (LANs) for granted. Every business has them, but they are seldom seen except for that network connector on the wall. You plug-in your computer, printer, phone, etc. and it just works.

Networks vs Utilities
In a way, LANs are now the data equivalent of AC power. You don’t think about it. You just use it. Connections and operations were long ago standardized. You don’t worry about different flavors of Ethernet any more than you stop and think what voltage is coming out of that wall socket.

Now, how about those Wide Area Networks (WANs)? It’s the WAN that gets you out of the building and connected to your other business locations, your cloud services and everyone else in the world. We don’t think about the fact that electrical power is transformed to higher voltages and that there are switching centers between your location and the power generation. It’s just as invisible as the wires running through the walls. If only Wide Area Networks worked the same way (sigh!)

The Difference Between LANs and WANs
The big difference between local and metro or wide area networks is that the local nets tend to be invisible and the longer haul connections may not be. You probably don’t have to be concerned about bandwidth, jitter, latency or packet loss on an in-house network. Wired LANs, especially, do a good job of keeping these issues out of your way. As you leave the premises, those characteristics degrade. Ideally it is not enough to get in your way, but sometimes it’s a major stumbling block.

Where WANs Go Bad
Take the most common WAN we use: The Internet. The Internet is an amazing infrastructure that connects nearly everyone to everyone else. It was designed from the beginning to be extremely robust, so that line cuts and equipment outages are automatically worked around. Its design philosophy and popularity are its limitations. The speed and quality of your connection can vary from minute to minute depending on traffic levels. The least costly connections, like cable and cellular, are shared, increasing the variability even more.

Invisible WANs
If you want the same performance over long distances that you have in-house, you need to order dedicated symmetrical wired, wireless and fiber point-to-point or multipoint services. Yes, a dedicated connection will help Internet performance greatly because most of the issues are in the “last mile” connection to your facility. Dedicated direct lines may make a huge difference in how business critical systems like VoIP telephone and software as a service in the cloud perform. MPLS networks provide similar high performance among multiple business locations, including remote data centers and cloud service providers.

The Almost Invisible WAN
The one sore point with dedicated lines is that can be a bit pricey, especially if you need a lot of bandwidth over very long distances. It’s a cost/benefit tradeoff. Dedicated wins for most medium and larger size businesses, where productivity losses and poor quality voice services are intolerable.

For smaller businesses and less critical applications, however, there is a fairly new alternative that makes the Internet perform more like a direct connection. This is called SDN or Software Defined Network, sometimes also referred to as a SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Network. What the software does is combine multiple lower performing connections to produce a composite service that works much better. The SD-WAN monitors each WAN connection packet-by-packet and routes the most critical packets over the best performing links at that instant. It goes a long way toward making very noticeable Internet services more like invisible direct connections.

Are you frustrated by unacceptably poor Internet or other WAN services or have just hit the limit of your current bandwidth? Discover the range of competitive Wide Are Network connections that are now available for your business locations.

Can Satellite Be The Answer to Your Business Broadband Needs?

By: John Shepler

You’re totally frustrated. Doing business today needs an Internet connection even if you only sell to local customers. You’ve checked out cable and DSL options. No way. Not where you are located. Hey, it’s not like you’ve left civilization. There must be SOME way to get high speed Internet… isn’t there?

In most cases, the answer is yes. You just have to forget about cables and fiber lines. If they aren’t already connected or very near by, it will cost a fortune to bring them in. Instead, look to the sky! Here’s a quick video that explains why:


Here are 10 key points to remember:

1. Satellite Internet for business can provide both primary and backup connectivity.

2. Available satellite broadband speeds have increased to surpass traditional T1 lines and DSL, even to rival fractional DS3 and cable carriers. Exede offers up to 15 Mbps download with 4 Mbps upload capability.

3. Since service is delivered via dish antenna, not even a traditional telephone line is needed, much less high speed telecom infrastructure. That makes it possible to have broadband connections to fishing camps, farms & ranches, rural agri-businesses, and any other enterprise that isn’t served by even 3G or 4G cellular. All you need is enough power to run the satellite receiver/modem, and that can come from power mains or a solar/battery & inverter off-grid system.

4. Primary 15/4 business Internet is available throughout the eastern half of the USA, plus the west coast and partial coverage in Arizona and Colorado. National coverage and higher speeds are coming with a new satellite in 2017. Lower speed 5/1 redundant services is available now in nearly all of the continental USA.

5. Installation can be completed in just 3-5 business days. No need to wait for massive construction projects.

6. Business data plans are available from 20 GB to 200 GB/month with the option to purchase additional data. For many smaller business operations, this is more than enough, although not suitable for frequently streaming HD movies and other video entertainment.

7. Latency is greater than you’d experience with land based fiber, wireless and optical services due to the 22,000 mile path up to the geosynchronous satellite. This may or may not be noticeable depending on how you use the Internet. VoIP telephone works over the satellite, but you need to allow a half second or so between speakers.

8. You’ll need a clear view of the southern sky about half way up from the horizon for the dish to “see” the bird.

9. Pricing is similar or even less than what you’d pay for a dedicated Internet line running 1.5 Mbps upload/download or many of the business cable broadband plans.

10. Don’t think that you are left out of the world of ecommerce or unable to interconnect your many branch offices or stores due to lack of telecom support. Satellite might be just the answer.

Learn more about VSAT satellite broadband Internet service and other available broadband options for your business location now.

When Asymmetrical Bandwidth Works Just Fine

Asymmetrical bandwidth has been pooh-poohed for business applications in favor of symmetrical bandwidth options. In some cases, you can wind up spending too much for the service you really need. In other cases, picking the wrong option will leave you frustrated and unproductive.

How do these symmetries work? Symmetrical bandwidth means that the upload and download speeds are exactly the same. You’ll see this identified as 3 x 3 Mbps Ethernet or 100 x 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. The classic example of symmetrical bandwidth is the venerable T1 line. It offers a fixed 1.5 Mbps in the upload or transmit direction and 1.5 Mbps in the download or receive direction.

T1, DS3 and SONET are all symmetrical bandwidth services. The reason for this is historical. These are standards developed by the telephone companies to transport phone calls in bulk. The same bandwidth is needed for talk as well as listen on both ends. Ethernet over Fiber and Copper also tends to be symmetrical. It’s because these services were designed as replacements for T1, DS3 and SONET when used in business.

Asymmetrical bandwidth is characterized by differences in the upload and download speeds. This can be as much as an order of magnitude or 10x. You might order a service with 20 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload or 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload.

Asymmetrical bandwidth is dominant in consumer broadband services. These include DSL, Cable, 3G and 4G wireless, two-way satellite, WiFi hotspots and WiMAX. Why? It’s the nature of the Internet.

Most people browse the Web or download software and video while they are online. When you are doing these things, you are sending commands via your keyboard to the remotely located Web server. These commands are inherently low bandwidth and are based on text you type or links you click on. Neither of these has very many bytes of data involved. Downloads are another matter. Web pages, video clips and streams, music and other audio, software updates and large files are all bandwidth intensive because of their large file sizes. You want the maximum bandwidth available for downloads to minimize load times. You don’t need much bandwidth at all in the upload direction for the usual Web browsing.

What changes this picture? Any process that results in sending out large files as well as receiving them. Examples are remote backups, video conferencing, posting photos and movies online, and making large updates to Web servers. Most consumers do some of these things some of the time. Businesses are far more likely to be sending as much as they receive. But... not all.

If you are heavily involved in big data, cloud computing, enterprise VoIP, video production and distribution, medical image transmission or similar large file operations, you’ll want to opt for symmetrical bandwidth. Fast download speeds may not be so valuable when you wait forever to upload something or try to conduct an HD video conference.

Why pick asymmetrical bandwidth options? The primary reason is to save money. The asymmetrical services like Cable, DSL and 3G wireless are usually priced at a fraction of the cost for symmetrical services. This is generally due to more than symmetry. Asymmetrical services are most often shared rather than dedicated bandwidth. This reduces costs dramatically but means that your bandwidth will vary depending on what other users are doing. There are generally no service level agreements or performance guarantees on asymmetrical bandwidth services. That may be changing as business service providers begin offering dedicated asymmetrical bandwidth options.

What is the best bandwidth option for your business? Find out by comparing prices and features for a wide variety of asymmetrical and symmetrical bandwidth options on carriers serving your business location. Free consulting is also available to help you make the appropriate choice.

Get Your Business Bandwidth Free

You know that telecommunications costs represent a significant budget item, even for small business owners. We've already discussed how you can potentially slash your costs in half by switching to lower cost providers. You can check voice and data line pricing here. But how about taking an even bolder step? Why not get your business bandwidth for free?

Hear me out before you click away. There is a way to do this that can give you the same professional quality of service you have now but at a net zero cost to your business. It's based on a real estate model that you are probably already familiar with. It's legitimate and it could potentially work for you.

Here's the principle. A friend explained it to me years ago when he was looking to find a new apartment. The owner of the apartment complex explained that he could rent a nice apartment for a certain amount each month. Or he could buy a fourplex and move into one of the apartments. The rent from the other three units would be enough to cover the mortgage payments in full. He would then be living there for free.

There are no doubt may real estate tycoons who have gotten their start this way. Many families after WWII found that they could afford to have their own homes if they bought a duplex and rented out the upper floor. In today's economic tough times we may be headed back to an era like this to make real estate affordable again.

But how does real estate strategy translate to, say, Internet connections? Basically you do the same thing that my friend was pitched. You order the service and a router. Then you become the local service provider and collect enough monthly fees to pay the line lease.

Let's take an example. You are in a small strip mall (or office building) with three other businesses. You would all like to have T1 line service if you can get it at an affordable price. In this case, we will assume that the line costs $500 per month on a 3 year lease that includes a managed router at no cost. You'll need four switched outputs, which may come with the router or can be added with an inexpensive Ethernet switch. Now you plug in network lines from the four businesses into the router or switch and charge your three clients $200 a month each for T1 service.

See what just happened? All four of you have T1 Internet access at 1.5 Mbps. The other businesses each pay less than half what it would cost to have their own T1 line. You pay nothing. In fact, you make $100 a month for your trouble since 3 x $200 = $600 per month.

This is called bandwidth sharing and it's something that apartment owners have been quietly doing for years. You are not limited to just four users on a T1 line. In fact, you can have as many as 25 casual users on a T1 and not be bogged down excessively. As long as you don't have a bandwidth hog who is doing something like constantly downloading video or running a streaming audio or video server, your service will be plenty zippy.

The figure of $500 a month that I quoted is not uncommon in metropolitan areas. I've seen lines go for under $400 in highly competitive markets or twice that or more in more sparsely populated areas. You'll need to get a T1 line service quote for your business location to get an exact figure.

Depending on how close your offices or shops are located, you may be able to just plug your T1 line into a wireless router and provide service without having to pull wires to your telecom closet.

You are also not limited to T1 bandwidth. T1 lines can be bonded to give you 3, 6, 9 or even 12 Mbps. Metro Ethernet is available from 5 to 50 Mbps over copper and up to 1000 Mbps over fiber optic cabling. That should be plenty for even the most demanding medical centers or architectural and design firms, advertising agencies, and even video producers. The principle remains the same: share the bandwidth and everybody gets a price break. You make out best of all, considering that your bandwidth is free.

Tired of Flaky Internet Connections?

It's hard to do business when your tools are intermittent and unreliable. You'd expect that advancements in technology would really improve things, but often the opposite is true. The more sophisticated and interconnected processes become, the flakier they seem to get. A simple cash box transaction turns into an e-commerce disaster. Why can't things just work right all the time?

All the time might be a bit much to ask. Anything technical is going to hiccup occasionally. But most of the time, the vast majority of the time, your business systems should run like clockwork. If they don't, you need to find the weak link in the chain. For many small businesses it comes down to a flaky Internet connection.

When the Internet was a novelty, it was pretty much a world of students, researchers, entrepreneurs and the generally curious. Now it's a utility. Nearly every business demands an Internet connection or an equivalent way to transfer electronic data. The Internet tends to be the network of choice because it is universally available and connects to practically everyone, everywhere. But the Internet is the flakiest, most insecure, unreliable, congested public resource there is. Isn't it? It doesn't have to be.

A lot of what makes the Internet feel like such a flaky medium is what's called the "last mile" connection. That Internet jack on the wall never goes directly to the backbone of the Internet. Not unless you're a major ISP or Internet Service Provider. A Tier 1 ISP is part of the inner workings of the Internet and peers with all other T1 networks. Other ISPs buy their access from these networks and, eventually, one of them sells service to you via a last mile connection. The high speed fiber optic core of the Internet is blazing fast and highly reliable. What you get may be something quite different.

It generally comes down to cost and availability. In major metropolitan networks, you may have a dozen or more ISPs vying for your business. Out in the boonies, you have fewer choices. There is also a huge difference in price vs performance among various connections. The lowest priced service is generally DSL or Cable Modem. These are shared access "information services" rather than dedicated telecommunications services. What's the difference besides price?

An information service isn't regulated the way a telecommunication service is. It is offered on an "as available" basis with no guarantee as to availability or time to repair when failure occurs. Even when the connection is working, bandwidth can vary all over the place. That's because the service is oversubscribed to keep the cost down. Just like getting bumped when the airlines sell more seats than they have on a plane, your connection can slow to a crawl because the ISP sold more connections than they have the bandwidth to support. They assume that only some of the subscribers are online at any time. When too many show up at once, they have to share what is available.

What's better? Dedicated Internet service improves your experience dramatically. If you order T1 dedicated Internet access, what you get is 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth for both upload and download. It's consistently available at all times. On rare occasions when line breaks or equipment failure take down the circuit, these telecom services get fast attention and are usually restored in a few hours or less. The dedicated designation means that you don't share the available bandwidth. It's there for your use whenever you need it.

Other dedicated connections include bonded T1 lines for faster access in increments of 1.5 Mbps. That's 3, 4.5 ,6, 7.5, and 9 Mbps typically. Ethernet services start at 10 Mbps and go up to 100 Mbps and, in some areas, 1000 Mbps. Ethernet is available in metro areas. T1 service is available just about anywhere.

If you are being driven crazy by flaky Internet service, you'll breathe a lot easier and your business operations will perform better by moving up to dedicated Internet access. The price differential is probably less than you think. Find out now by checking prices and availability for dedicated Internet access at your business location.