Can You Afford a Slow Internet Connection?

By: John Shepler

Time is money. In business, that’s almost always true. Your expenses for labor, facilities and services keep draining the cash register. You need to refill it faster than it is draining or you’ll be out of the game at some point. Things need to keep moving at a steady clip just to make your nut each month. On top of that, customer satisfaction often depends on how fast you can service them. What’s the last thing you need? A process that slows you down!

Where are the Bottlenecks?
Most businesses have at least some online presence and many have their business processes inextricably connected with software running on remote or cloud servers. That means that no matter how much you scurry about in the office or shop, you may be inherently limited by computer processing a thousand miles away and the connections to them.

Let’s assume for the moment that your data center has all the resources needed to process any requests instantly. With elastic computing you don’t even have to worry about peaks and dips in traffic. The system automatically assigns whatever computing hardware and software are required to keep up with the necessary tasks. Let’s also assume that the data center has as much Internet bandwidth as needed to handle all the incoming and outgoing traffic. That's more than likely as major carriers tend to have points of presence with massive bandwidth located within key data centers.

So, where might things slow down? The Internet itself is vulnerable. It is designed to work around traffic jams to keep things moving. Even so, there are times when too many things go wrong and the entire network drags. Far more often, the problem is not within the backbone of the Internet but with your connection to it. This is referred to as the last-mile connection.

Unclogging the Last Mile
Last mile problems tend to be caused by limited bandwidth, congestion from too many users needing that bandwidth at the same time, latency from long paths and repeated transmissions to get the packets through intermittent connections.

Bandwidth is the easiest to address. If you are still stuck with aging T1 lines or DSL you likely don’t have near enough bandwidth to handle modern Web traffic. In the dial-up days, a Megabit per second was considered broadband. Today that’s more like a Gigabit per second. Smaller users may get by with fractional Gbps, but large operations may be needing 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps to keep traffic streams from interfering with each other.

Fortunately, fiber optic bandwidth is more the norm than the exception now. If you have a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps port installed, you should have the bandwidth you need unless your requirements are extraordinary.

Fiber bandwidth also tends to be low in latency. That’s important to responsiveness because when you have enough bandwidth latency will make communication sluggish and adding more bandwidth won’t help. Low latency is especially important in real-time processes including phone calls and video conferencing. You want those communications channels to be full duplex or instantly two-way all the time.

A fiber connection is the gold standard in the office, but you may also need high performance while portable or mobile. That’s where 5G rises to meet the challenge. You likely have this on your smartphone. Other devices can also have built-in 5G or connect through a portable hotspot that is essentially a 5G phone without the user interfaces or apps. It simply converts 5G bandwidth to WiFi. Any WiFi compatible device can then access the Internet.

Private Lines offer Superior Performance
One limitation to the most readily available Internet connections, such as cable and 5G broadband, is that they are a shared resource. The price is kept low by sharing the cable or radio channels with many users at the same time. When things are going well, you don’t even know there is anybody else on the line. But when everybody wants to send huge files are download video simultaneously, you’ll definitely feel the speed bumps.

If the loss in productivity due to varying congestion is a problem, consider a direct private line from your location to your cloud service provider. This bypasses the Internet completely and is available only to your organization. This service is sometimes called “direct access.” You may also want private lines among your facilities and even key suppliers and customers. In essence, you create your own private Internet.

An alternative that can enhance performance and improve reliability of your connection is called SD-WAN. This involves having two or more Internet connections with a special router that prioritizes traffic and selects which path offers the best performance at the time. The SD means software defined, which is the intelligence in the router that monitors your connections and makes instant decisions on how to best route traffic.

Is your business struggling to keep up because your Internet connection isn’t responsive enough? Look into better alternatives for faster, more reliable connectivity to boost productivity and ensure customer satisfaction.

Today’s Best Business Broadband Options

By: John Shepler

If you are still using a copper wireline service, such as DSL or T1, for your business Internet connection, it’s time to upgrade your service… before you are forced to.

Forced to? Why would that be? Fact is, the major telecom companies are all in the process of decommissioning their copper wire assets. Basically anything that uses century-old twisted pair wiring is on the way out.

Technology marches on. T1 lines were once considered broadband. They don’t even qualify with today’s standard. DSL? Pretty much an obsolete system that was once a good way to re-purpose standard telephone lines for fast Internet access.

AT&T and others have made it clear that they are either pulling up old copper lines or abandoning them to rust in place. The wire centers or central offices that connect to these lines are being repurposed as data centers for the insatiable needs of AI.

So what are better options? Surprisingly, one of the best is also an older technology that has continuously upgraded to keep it competitive with the times.

Cable Broadband Is a Great Deal for Small Business
That coaxial cable that plugs into the back of a set-top box or cable modem has been a familiar tech standard for many decades. Physically, it’s the same. What’s changed is the signal that comes out that center wire.

Cable was originally analog, just like TV signals back in the day. When the Internet came along, some of the unused TV channels were set aside for digital transmission using a standard called DOCSIS or Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an invention of the industry’s R&D organization CableLabs. The current standard is DOCSIS 3.1 with a migration underway to DOCSIS 4.0.

Today’s cable modems are cable of gigabit speeds, with common service levels of 300 Mbps downstream, 30 Mbps upstream. That’s fast enough for pretty much all web browsing, video streaming and data transfer. What’s hard to beat at those speeds is the price. Cable is easily affordable by both consumers and smaller businesses, often with telephone service included.

Wireless Broadband is Now Both Mobile and Fixed
Like cable, cellular wireless had humble beginnings as a mobile telephone service, but has kept up with the times through multiple technology advancements. The first standard that really supported broadband as well as telephone was called 3G. That’s evolved to the current standards of 4G LTE and 5G. With 300 Mbps or so, an iPhone has all the bandwidth it can really make use of.

That high bandwidth, which can reach a Gigabit per second near some of the 5G towers, is easily competitive with fixed broadband services. The capacity limits have been largely eliminated with 5G buildouts and the extra spectrum acquired from government auctions of unused television bandwidth. Now the wireless companies are in a competitive battle to roll out cellular modems that work like cable modems but without the wires. You can put one at a construction site or a pop-up store in minutes. If you move soon, take it with you and have connectivity at your next location.

Cable broadband is being built into laptop computers and tablets and other devices, called the Internet of Things. Remote data acquisition and control are now possible in remote areas that have cell towers but no other connectivity.

Fiber, The Gold Standard and Secret Backbone
The magic that makes cable and cellular broadband so fast is the fiber optic lines that feed these services. It’s all behind the scenes, of course. Even so, you may want to connect directly to fiber yourself.

What’s the fiber advantage? Nearly unlimited bandwidth for one thing. Today’s service levels run from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps just about everywhere, with 100 Gbps service available in some metro locations. That’s important for medium and larger enterprises with many employees who need simultaneous Internet access.

Another big advantage is symmetrical bandwidth That means if you have 1 Gbps downstream, you also have 1 Gbps upstream. Contrast that with most cable and wireless services that offer much higher download than upload speeds. If you need to transfer files up and down regularly or have demanding video conferencing requirements, this can be important.

A third advantage is very low latency and jitter with minimal congestion. This is because fiber is usually a dedicated service, not shared like cable and cellular. For even higher performance, consider a dedicated line between your company and your cloud service that bypasses the Internet completely.

Need the ultimate in performance? Dark Fiber that you “light” with your own equipment gives you complete control of protocols and bandwidth allocation. It’s like having your own network extended across town or across the country.

Do you need a replacement Internet connection or are ready for a bandwidth upgrade or perhaps even a cost saving? Check out the Business Broadband Options available right now.

Ethernet WAN is the New SONET

By: John Shepler

High speed communications lines progressed from copper analog to copper digital to fiber optic digital over most of the last century. The technology that drives fiber has also evolved from time sliced synchronous multiplexing to packet based protocols, mirroring the transition to networked computing for nearly every business. While older SONET telco lines still provide effective connections, there are real advantages to be gained by upgrading to Ethernet WAN, the newer technology for fiber optic service.

It Started With Really Fast Phone Lines
SONET, which stands for Synchronous Optical NETwork, is a phone company invention that was developed to bundle or multiplex thousands of individual phone calls onto an optical fiber for long distance transmission. To make operations easier, SONET was made backwards compatible with legacy T1 service that does exactly the same thing with 24 calls over two twisted copper pair… in other words, ordinary telephone line.

SONET allowed the phone companies to bundle T1 line into DS3 lines into OC3 fiber lines and demultiplex or unbundle them anywhere along the way. Everything was compatible down to the single telephone channel.

SONET to Link Computers
So, how did SONET come to support computer networking? The protocol had to be converted between SONET’s time division multiplexing and Ethernet’s packet switching. That was accomplished using protocol conversion on a plug-in module. To the user, It made no difference what was going on under the hood. Packets would go in one router and come out another miles or thousands of miles away.

SONET was developed for fiber and all of the early fiber optic links for computer networks were connected using one of the SONET levels. OC3 was the lowest speed at 155 Mbps. This was the first fiber service that most corporations ordered when they outgrew their T1 and T3 lines. Each increase in speed required swapping out an adaptor module for the particular SONET level.

In fact, the Internet was built on SONET. SONET rings, which offer redundant paths, formed the core of the Internet as it grew. Internet service providers would connect via SONET and then divvy up the bandwidth for multiple 64Kbps dial-up modems or, later, DSL or Cable broadband modems.

The Ethernet Revolution
Ethernet, developed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the mid to late 1970’s, grew to become the dominant networking protocol, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of the personal computer at the same time. Most small and large users adopted Ethernet, as adaptor cards, cabling, hubs and routers became more and more affordable. Every PC soon came with an RJ-45 Ethernet jack as standard equipment and peripherals, such as printers, did the same for compatibility.

Once Ethernet became the de-facto networking standard and computer data traffic greatly exceeded voice traffic, it started to make sense to just adopt Ethernet for Wide Area Networks as well as Local Area Networks. When business phones became digitized and used VoIP to connect on the same network as the computers, the need for a separate voice network faded away.

Another factor that has moved WAN services from SONET to Ethernet is the rise of competitive network service providers independent of the telephone companies. Since these companies had no legacy analog phone service to support, they could simply focus on offering Ethernet connections to their customers in competition to the telcos.

By this time the original Ethernet protocol has been expanded to provide technical specifications for Carrier Ethernet, which is the same as LAN Ethernet but extended to support the MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network).

What Ethernet WAN Has to Offer
You remember that SONET has distinct service levels, each with it’s own bandwidth and specific adaptor requirements. Ethernet doesn’t have this limitation. Instead, you have an Ethernet port with a maximum bandwidth, say 1 Gbps. It will support any bandwidth up to the max limit of 1 Gbps. You can order 100 Mbps service today and easily upgrade to 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps later. Only if you want a service level above 1 Gbps, will you need to have a higher capacity port installed. This process is so seamless that many providers will let you change service levels at will by logging into your online account.

Ethernet services tend to be less expensive than SONET. Usually, much less expensive. You pay for the service level you want, be it 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and so on. Remember you can change this easily after you have service installed and your bill will be adjusted to the new level you select.

Since there are many, many competing Ethernet MAN and WAN service providers, pricing per Mbps has dropped rapidly over the years and continues to do so. Some of the service providers are the traditional telephone companies, but with much improved pricing. Others are independent carriers serving regional, national, or international areas. They can also provide excellent customer service, high reliability, and very good deals on bandwidth.

There are usually two types of service you’ll be interested in. One is a dedicated connection to the Internet at a bandwidth you select. The other is a point to point dedicated private line that is just like having a very long Ethernet cable connecting two LANs separated by many miles. These are useful for interconnecting main offices and branch offices, warehouse, manufacturing centers and so on with maximum performance and privacy. Another popular application is a direct connection between your offices and your cloud service provider. This avoids the vagaries of Internet performance and makes the cloud seem like it is right down the hall.

Perhaps you still have legacy SONET service that was installed years ago. It’s been working fine so no one has paid much attention. This would be a good time to see if competing Ethernet WAN services can give you more bandwidth for the same budget or offer a considerable cost savings if you are happy with the bandwidth level you have now. It doesn’t cost anything to look, so why not see what’s available?

Broadband Business Internet Service Options

Nearly every business today is connected to the Internet or soon will be. Even those mom and pop operations that still use the mechanical credit card machines will soon use electronic card verification, email and at least a brochure website. Businesses that are already seasoned users of the Web are looking to upgrade their bandwidth to support a move to cloud services. Let’s compare and contrast the various options you have for a broadband Internet connection.

Business Internet broadband services generally fall into two categories. They are shared and dedicated connections. Shared connections are similar in design to residential broadband services. The fact that the bandwidth is divvied up among many users lowers the cost for all. Dedicated services allocate a certain bandwidth to your connection and it does not vary regardless of what other users are doing. These services also tend to come with SLAs or Service Level Agreements that spell out technical parameters and availability commitments.

Shared bandwidth services include Cable Broadband, DSL, 3G and 4G Wireless, and two-way Satellite Internet. What they all have in common is that the actual bandwidth you’ll see varies with the number of other users and what they are doing. These services are sold as speeds “up to” a certain number of Mbps. That means what it says. You may get the full speed the connection is capable of or you may get a tenth of that at any given time.

These variations may or may not bother you. If you are running enterprise VoIP or bandwidth sensitive business processes, your variable connection may not support the performance you have in mind. On the other hand, if you use the Internet at work the same way you use it at home for email, Web browsing, or accessing pre-recorded audio and video, you may be quite satisfied with the service and delighted with the cost savings. Some services, like 3G wireless and Satellite are often used to support electronic credit card machines in lieu of using a phone line.

Dedicated Internet access connections, such as T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper, have rock solid bandwidth and generally excellent latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics. These are the same lines that you would use to interconnect business connections on a private line service. As Internet connections, they have one termination at your location and the other at your Internet service providers location.

Dedicated Internet access supports Web and email servers. The also support multiple users accessing the Internet and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). If you are going to stream content to Internet users, you’ll want a DIA (Dedicated Internet Access) connection from the server to the Internet.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has become very popular as both a private line and DIA connection. You can often get twice the bandwidth you could with a T1 line costing the same price. Like T1, EoC is provisioned over twisted pair copper telco wiring to keep construction costs down.

Larger companies and those with demanding applications such as video transport move up to fiber optic services, such as OC3 to OC768 SONET and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps GigE and 10 Gbps 10GigE bandwidth services. All of these are dedicated services with service level agreements.

How do you decide which broadband service is right for your business? Perhaps the best way is to compare prices, availability and features for the range of Broadband Business Internet Service options available for your location. Most business grade broadband services are available only for business locations and not residences, despite similarities with consumer Internet services.

3G 4G Mobile Bandwidth

The Internet long escaped the desktop and moved onto the mobile phone. The problem is that it has been following a similar learning curve that took us from 300 baud telephone modems to DSL & Cable broadband and now to high speed wireless and fiber optic service. Mobile bandwidth is undergoing a steady evolution, with the demand for higher and higher speeds pushing the technology. Let’s have a look at what’s available and what’s coming soon.

The benchmark today is 3G wireless. This service offers somewhere between 500 Kbps and 1.5 Mbps and is owned and operated by the cellular carriers. The same company that sells you your cell phone minutes also sells you 3G wireless Internet access. The signals come from the same towers, so if you are in a dead spot for phone reception you won’t be surfing the Web or watching videos either.

The 3G build-out has been proceeding at something of a panic level, especially since the introduction of the Apple iPhone. The first iPhone used the AT&T EDGE network, which is actually called a 2.5G network. That means it has considerably less bandwidth than the newer HSPA or High Speed Packet Access 3G network, perhaps as little as a tenth as much. HSPA is offered by GSM carriers AT&T and T-Mobile and is also known as HSUPA.

A competing 3G service is offered by CDMA carriers Verizon and Sprint using a different technology. Theirs is known as EV-DO and EV-DO Rev A. Download bandwidths are in the range of 1 to 2 Mbps, depending on signal conditions.

Note that 2.5G and 3G cellular broadband not only gives cell phones the ability to download videos and surf the Web but also gives you the option of adding 3G to your laptop computer. The functionality is added using a plug-in wireless modem aircard. These are sold with data-only service plans, since they don’t work as telephones. The aircard and wireless service has been a boon to field sales people who don’t always have the ability to set up shop within a WiFi hotspot.

The newest service on the market is called 4G mobile bandwidth. Right now the run away leader is the WiMAX service offered by Clearwire and Sprint under the CLEAR trademark. WiMAX is yet another wireless standard, albeit a global one not associated with the cellular phone system. WiMAX offers a powerful signal that covers an entire city. It’s strong enough to penetrate buildings so that you can have the same WiMAX broadband on your desktop and laptop computers. Download bandwidth typically ranges between 3 and 6 Mbps, considerably faster than 3G networks.

The cellular companies aren’t sitting still, though. Both AT&T and Verizon plan to deploy another standard called LTE to compete with WiMAX. It will likely be a year or two before these two 4G technologies are competing head to head in most populated areas. For now, WiMAX gives you the most mobile bandwidth at the lowest cost in the cities and states where it is available.

Rural Broadband Stimulus Hopes To One-Up Dial-up

Just before the 4th of July holiday, the long-anticipated rural broadband stimulus funding was launched with release of the official government "Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA) and solicitation of applications."

If you want to get in on the action, you best get a move on. Applications are only being accepted between July 14 and August 14 of this year, 2009.

As a potential user rather than a provider of broadband services, you'll have to wait awhile longer before you can expect a nearby on-ramp to drive your buggy onto the information superhighway. Yes, buggy not sports car. If you've been eagerly anticipating FTTF (Fiber to the Farmstead), you may find the definition of broadband a bit disheartening. The bar has been set at a breathtaking speed of 768 Kbps download and 200 Kbps upload to meet the criteria of "broadband" Internet service.

Why such a poky broadband standard when AT&T and Verizon are slugging it out to see who can deliver 50 & 100 Mbps to the most residential users where their U-verse and FiOS services, respectively, are in a feverish construction phase? Simply because some people way-out-there are lucky to get 56 Kbps dial-up modem service on their telephone line. The idea is to get universal digital service in the same way that we've finally gotten universal telephone service and rural electrification.

The one difference is that electricity and telephone service standards are the same everywhere. There isn't one set of standards for city dwellers and another for those in the boonies. But broadband is a different animal. It's always been tiered service, with those who live in denser populated areas and willing to pay more getting to go first class.

Perhaps this is the natural difference between mandated universal service and the workings of the competitive marketplace. I've argued before that broadband should be treated like a utility. Even more than that, it should be considered a strategic infrastructure for the country. Broadband is a lot more than the amusement value of YouTube and Twitter. It's about the commercial value of online shopping, working remotely, and creating value with new Web services. It's about the educational importance of having an immense library at your fingertips that would have stunned Andrew Carnegie, as valuable as the bricks and mortar libraries he donated were to earlier generations. It's about the democracy of collaboration to advocate for a cause or support a political candidate on the other side of the state or the country.

The commercial marketplace will never be all-inclusive. It's profit driven. Where the numbers look good, the infrastructure will be built and the head-to-head competition will be brutal. Areas where the population is too thin to recover capital costs in a timely manner are simply passed over. You can see this today even with cellular phone service. In the city there may be a carrier branded cell phone store on nearly every corner. But drive out where the highway turns into a cow path and you'll find gaping holes in the service footprint. No bars in these places unless they're country taverns.

The opportunity that may be missed here is the chance to lift the entire population to a new plateau. That may sound a bit fanciful, but consider the downward slope we've been on as a society from our post-WWII productivity and world dominance high. The national debt is through the roof. The auto industry nearly died this summer. The banking system had to be brought back from death's door this spring. Anyone looking to "upgrade" their house or job this year? Hanging-on is the new moving up.

We've been told repeatedly by industry and government officials that we're competing in a new world marketplace. Just what tools do we have to compete with? If this is the long anticipated information age, many of us are going to miss it. We going to miss the knowledge jobs. We're going to miss the massive productivity multiplier that instantaneous collaboration offers. We're going to miss the opportunity to live where it's beautiful and still participate in the 21st century economy. We're going to miss the next leg up in technological progress that will be based on video instead of text. We're going to miss it because 768 Kbps is a pittance, not a stimulus.

Hopefully, the minimum will not become the standard and the builders of the rural broadband initiative will exceed expectations, giving us something of real value for our $7.2 billion. Perhaps your company will be one of those that wins a grant to trench fiber or put up a WiMAX tower. If so, I hope you'll think big and set the performance standard high. As a society on the edge, we truly need the best you can possibly do.

Bandwidth Stimulus For The Boonies

Things are changing out there among the amber waves of grain. Rural America is about to get plugged-into the Internet in a big way. This is the goal of the new broadband stimulus program that has $7.2 Billion to spread among the states on programs that speed up our access to the Internet.

Well it's high time for high speed. At a time when the South Koreans have announced plans to provide Gigabit broadband connections to their citizens, too many Americans go begging for 1/1000 of that. It's really two problems in one. First, sparsely populated areas have few Internet options compared to metropolitan areas. Second, broadband is pretty pricey and out of the range of many low income budgets.

It's not that rural America has NO Internet service. Dial-up Internet at a maximum of 56 Kbps can be had most anywhere there is a telephone. Thanks to universal telephone initiatives of past administrations, standard telephone service really is available just about everywhere. Prices of dial-up access have matured to where you can get a service such as NetZero HiSpeed for under $10 a month. That includes an accelerator to improve Web page download times.

Who still wants dial-up? You may be surprised at how many people really don't live their lives on the Internet. For them, checking email once or twice a day and being able to browse the news headlines or do a Google search for information is all they really want. Others may feel frustrated by slow loading multimedia content sites and little access to online video, but ten bucks a month is all they've got. The computer they picked up second hand may not be up to high bandwidth applications anyway.

You actually can get broadband just about anywhere you live. How? The same way you get TV - by satellite. HughesNet and Wild Blue satellite broadband Internet use a separate dish with a transmitter mounted on the feed so that you can both upload and download from the "bird" without having to use a phone line. Speeds are similar to DSL levels, from 512 Kbps to 1.6 Mbps. But prices from $55 to $80 a month plus equipment purchase or rental are well above most DSL services. With limited satellite capacity, fair use policies will cause the provider to cut your bandwidth if you do an excessive amount of uploading or downloading. There is also a half-second delay called latency that makes satellite unsuitable for activities needing instant response or VoIP telephony.

Businesses in rural areas can order T1 lines or bonded T1 lines to get increments of 1.5 Mbps dedicated bandwidth that comes with a service level agreement. Since T1 is provisioned over standard telephone wiring and can be boosted with regenerators, it is available in most business locations that have phone service. T1 is priced at business, not consumer, levels and even bonded lines are limited to 10 to 12 Mbps.

So what with the new stimulus plan do to change the bandwidth / pricing situation? The intent is to build out line and wireless services to cover as many people as possible with as much bandwidth as possible, while making higher bandwidths affordable in rural and low income metropolitan areas.

Why focus on broadband? The fact is that the Internet is to this century what other utilities such as electricity, telephone, and roads were to the development of the 20th century. Most jobs now involve some computer usage. We search online instead of running down to the library for research. More and more shopping is done on websites every year. If you are looking for a job, you'll likely search and post your resume online. Email messages have pretty much replaced personal letters. Most business now have an online presence and those that don't are few and far between.

The reality is that high speed Internet access, perhaps even to the Gbps level, is an enabler of higher productivity and commercial growth as well as personal potential. The stimulus package will make an impact over the next couple of years to advance our capabilities, but it will likely be just a good boost to an already expanding industry. Hopefully the infrastructure installed during this period will be enhanced and expanded in the future as what we consider high bandwidth today becomes low bandwidth by tomorrow's standards.

XOHM, XOHM's Got The Range

Sprint's XOHM (say zome, like home) wireless broadband service is off and running in Baltimore. This is the start of the long anticipated deployment of WiMAX as the next generation of high speed Internet service. If Sprint is able to realize its 4G dream, WiFi hotspots may become a thing of the past. DSL? Cable? Who wants to be tethered by a wire when you can roam wirelessly, gloriously, free?

The dream is built on a new wireless technology that has been standardized for worldwide application in both fixed and mobile applications. WiMAX or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, offers coverage measured in dozens of miles and bandwidth that could extend to dozens of Mbps. Sprint's deployment offers 2-4 Mbps download and 0.5 to 1.5 Mbps upload. That's comparable to the majority of DSL, Cable broadband and even professional grade T1 and Ethernet connections.

WiMAX is often thought of as the big brother to WiFi. It's not a bad comparison if you are thinking in terms of laptop computers using wireless adaptors for broadband Internet access. WiFi's limitation is that it has a footprint pretty much limited to a single building. Drive away from the restaurant, home, or business office and your signal disappears. The best you can do is find another "hotspot" where you can resume operations.

WiMAX is meant to cover a town or major area of a city. It uses higher power signals on licensed frequencies. In Sprint's case it is their exclusive 2.5 GHz spectrum. The higher power levels of WiMAX transmissions allow their wireless signals to penetrate buildings and vehicles. OFDMA or Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Multiple Access modulation is resilient to service dropouts due to interference. MIMO or Multiple Input Multiple Output antenna technology also helps to improve system performance in the presence of multipath distortion that occurs when signals bounce off buildings in metro areas.

Sprint offers an XOHM base station modem for home or small office use. It looks a little like a high tech coffee brewer in shiny black. This device is self-contained with built-in antennas and Ethernet jack output. For mobile use, they have WiMAX aircards for PCMCIA slots or USB.

The direct competitor for WiMAX is 3G cellular broadband. Sprint also provides that service as EV-DO. You can order EV-DO service and air cards for nationwide access in most medium and major cities. Verizon offers a competing EV-DO service and AT&T has its own HSDPA broadband service, popularized by the Apple iPhone 3G.

XOHM is on its way to Chicago and Washington DC, with systems planned for Dallas, Fort Worth, Boston, Providence and Philadelphia. Nationwide deployment should roll out in the years ahead, economics permitting. Who knows, in the future there may well be XOHM where the buffalo roam.