Will SD-WAN Eat MPLS?

By John Shepler

SD-WAN has become a hot service recently. It is often touted as an alternative or replacement for MPLS networks. Just comparing costs makes a compelling argument that SD-WAN may do to MPLS what MPLS did to Frame Relay. Is this really the case? Let’s take a look.

What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?
The issue is networking, specifically computer networking. Most of us have some need for computers as part of our job. That could be a traditional desktop computer, a laptop in a hotel room or conference center, or perhaps a tablet or or cellphone while we move around. It could also be a point of sale terminal, an industrial process controller, a 3D printer or just a laser printer in the office. All of these things need to be hooked together, or networked, or they just plain won’t work.

It’s actually worse than that. Remember when you bought software in a box? Not much software is sold that way anymore. Now everything is apps and they are delivered and updated virtually. The really heavy lifting software doesn’t even reside on your device. It’s at a remote data site or vendor’s platform. Without a connection, you can’t even run the application.

Private Lines: The Old Gold Standard
If you want to stay in complete control of every aspect of your network, you build your own for your exclusive use. Most companies do that internally. It’s when you leave the building that you have a problem. You need to hand off your packets to a service provider, or carrier, to transport them to another location.

The closest thing to stringing the wires yourself is to order private point-to-point circuits. T1, DS3 & OCx SONET are the traditional PTP circuits. More modern replacements are Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. All of these are still extremely popular with high performance, high security and high reliability. Cost and provisioning time are really the only issues.

MPLS Networks Save Money and Go Worldwide
You can approach the quality and security of private point to point lines using MPLS networks. MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is a replacement for the old-timey Frame Relay networks that were popular when high speed was 64 Kbps. It’s a privately run wide area network that handles multiple customers at the same time without them being aware of each other. Since the core network is shared, the cost is lower than running private lines to every satellite office you want to connect. Plus they’re already built-out, so you only need to provision an access line for each location.

MPLS networks are very popular for connecting companies with multiple business locations in the US or worldwide. Once again, they offer high performance, high security and high reliability. Also once again, cost can be an issue.

Why Not The Internet?
The lure of the Internet is strong. It’s the lowest cost of any method to reach anyone, anywhere in the world. However, there are issues.

Security is an obvious one. Just read the headlines any day and you’ll feel insecure about being online. Encryption, especially IPsec and SSL, make the risk acceptable for e-commerce and banking. However, performance is variable and out of your control. Latency, Jitter and packet loss are not only variable, they’re unpredictable. Companies running high performance business-critical applications wince at the thought of trusting their livelihood to the public Internet. Even so, the cost is really, really attractive compared with other solutions.

The Hybrid Network Compromise
Fact is, most companies need a broadband Internet connection for communications with suppliers and customers and access to the nearly unlimited news and information available online. A popular compromise is to use the MPLS network for internal communications and the Internet to go outside in a hybrid network arrangement.

Another use of the Internet is as a backup in case your private network fails. That happens enough with line cuts that it has a name: backhoe fade. If the broadband connection is just there on standby, all that bandwidth goes to waste most of the time.

SD-WAN Makes the Internet Suitable
The Software Defined Network (SDN) was invented to reduce the time and labor required to run complex networks. It “virtualizes” the network so you don’t have to deal with all the complexity of so many diverse routers, switches and appliances spread throughout the physical network.

SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Network does the same thing for outside networks to connect far flung locations. SD-WAN manages multiple connections according to rules that you set up through a control panel. Once running it automatically directs traffic and works around problems without you having to get involved.

For instance, the SD-WAN can make use of Cable broadband, DSL, T1 lines, MPLS networks, LTE wireless, Satellite links and whatever else you have. It will monitor the characteristics of each path, in both the upload and download directions, for bandwidth congestion, packet loss, jitter and latency. It decides what path to use for each packet based on the instantaneous characteristics of the paths available. These can vary all over the place and change in milliseconds. You couldn’t possible keep up with all of this manually, but the SD-WAN system can stay on top of it.

With SD-WAN, you don’t need to waste the perfectly good bandwidth of your backup connection when the main link is running. SD-WAN will combine the bandwidths and make sure that the more critical apps, like VoIP and UC voice and video run on the best paths available and less critical file transfers use the lower performance paths.

Companies are finding that even having two diverse Internet broadband connections can give excellent performance compared with a single broadband service as long as they are being managed by SD-WAN. Two broadband services can easily cost only a fraction of even one private line for the same or less bandwidth. The core of the Internet usually runs pretty well. It’s the access connections, like WiFi and cable or DSL, that generally get flakey. Using SD-WAN to watch and select the best path at any given instant can dramatically improve the performance of the “virtualized” WAN network.

Is SD-WAN right for your business? You’d be remiss if you didn’t at least take a closer look at what connections are available and at what price for your particular business locations. Remember that you don’t have to go 100% on the Internet. SD-WAN will manage private lines, MPLS networks, satellite and wireless connections as well.

Private Point to Point Connections

By: John Shepler

Sometimes you need to get your traffic from Point A to Point B with as much security and transparency as possible. Let’s look at popular options to do just that.

What Are Dedicated Private Lines?
You can think of a dedicated private line as a connection between two locations that goes through a carrier. This is what you need if you can't just string the wires between buildings on your own campus. The private line acts like your own wiring, except that it is provided by another company. Private lines can go across town, between cities, or even around the world.

T1 Dedicated Lines
T1 lines are the digital equivalent of the old “dry loops” or “equalized loops” that phone companies leased to radio stations and burglar alarm companies. A dedicated T1 point to point line goes between two locations using telco twisted pair wiring. You need routers or other equipment with the T1 interface at each end.

T1 dedicated lines offer 1.5 Mbps in both directions with no usage limits. A popular application is audio transport such as studio to transmitter links (STL) for radio stations.

T1 dedicated lines are still used for cellular traffic backhaul. They were extremely popular prior to 4G LTE, which really needs more bandwidth than you get with T1. In some cases, multiple T1 lines can be bonded together to create a larger bandwidth solution. Where fiber is unavailable, it is possible to get 10 or 12 Mbps from bonded T1 lines.

DS3 Dedicated
The next step up in traditional TDM telecom circuits is the T3 or DS3 dedicated line. These offer 45 Mbps upload / download private links. DS3/T3 is considered a copper-based service. In actuality, most of the transmission distance is handled over OC3 or other SONET fiber optic circuits, with only the curb connection carried by dual coaxial copper cables.

Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is a technical improvement on T1, while using the same twisted pair infrastructure. EoC easily offers bandwidths in the 1 to 10 Mbps range, with some systems delivering up to 50 or even 100 Mbps over relatively short distances. If available, you may find that you can replace a bonded T1 solution or DS3 circuit with EoC for a considerable cost savings.

Fiber Optic Dedicated Lines
Higher bandwidths are more and more in demand. Fortunately, fiber optic private lines are more affordable than in years past. There are two technologies of interest, although it may not make much difference in performance which you choose. SONET is the legacy telco standard, with services such as OC3, OC12 and OC48 providing different bandwidth options. Ethernet over Fiber is the technical upgrade to SONET. It offers advantages of being easily scalable from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps or higher, and is usually the lower cost solution.

Virtual Private Lines
The Internet offers lower cost solutions to interconnect multiple locations, but it is far from dedicated or private. The attractive pricing comes from being a shared resource with universal connectivity available nearly everywhere in the world. You can’t do much about the fact that the bandwidth is shared and not dedicated to your own use, which might affect the performance of your applications. The lack of privacy can be addressed by encrypting your traffic which effectively creates a private “tunnel” or VPN through the Internet.

A more robust solution is provided by MPLS networks. These can be thought of as privately run versions of the Internet that connect only businesses and not the general public. Proprietary protocols are used for routing traffic on the network, which adds security to the transmissions. MPLS networks are often described as MPLS VPN. Network capacity and performance are actively managed by the network operator so that a shared core network can perform like a private line, Over long distances, MPLS offers considerable cost savings over a dedicated copper or fiber connection.

Do you need a high performance dedicated private line connection to support your critical application? If so, get pricing and tradeoffs available for a variety of private line solutions available to your business locations.

Are Your WAN Circuits Monitored For Quality?

By: John Shepler

As we transition from circuit switched telephony and make the move from in-house data centers to the cloud, our WAN (Wide Area Network) circuits become more critical than ever before. A misbehaving network connection that might once have been a mere inconvenience is now a productivity killer at best and a business shutdown at worst. It is essential that every copper and fiber optic line that leaves the building be running at peak performance all the time. But… how do you make sure that is the case?

Do You Know What is Going On Behind Your Back?
Technology has a sneaky side. When your outside network circuits are installed and checked out, the lines are verified to make sure they meet specs for latency, packet loss, jitter and bandwidth. Everything is running great. Tomorrow it’s still running great. But the next day, next week or next month something goes wrong. it might be a subtle change that degrades performance rather than knocking the line out completely.

Where do you point the finger?
The problem could be anywhere in the system. Is your LAN congested or are you dealing with a failing switch? Is it just your computer or telephone set that is having problems? Perhaps it is one of several network circuits that connect you to the outside world. How do you find out for sure?

Circuit Monitoring Is Your Eye on the Network
You can’t just blindly trust that everything is running smoothly. You need a way to look into the system. Likely, you already have that capability. You can run Ping and Traceroute diagnostic tests from your computer whenever you want. That’s great for troubleshooting if you know there is a problem and have time to sit down and run the tests. But what happens when no one is running diagnostics? Hard to say.

That’s where continuous circuit monitoring shines. You don’t have to jump in and run some tests. They are running all the time. Better yet, a monitoring program gives you a chart of how the circuit has been performing over time. Run a diagnostic yourself and you have only a single data point.

Get Automatic Heads-Up Messages
The other beauty of automating the performance monitoring of your WAN circuits is that the monitor can let you know when something goes out of whack. You can get an email when something goes wrong. That way, you don’t have to sit there and watch the screen continuously just in case there is an anomaly. You’ll get notified 24/7. The monitor never sleeps.

Best Deal Ever: Free Circuit Monitoring
The best way to get your WAN circuits monitored is to have it done for free. Ever hear of this? Probably not. This is a fairly new service powered by VXSuite and offered by Telarus on Internet and coax circuits with static IP addresses that they provide. MPLS and other monitoring is available. Telarus is well known for the extensive suite of carriers that they partner with and the best prices on WAN circuits. Now you get this bonus of free circuit monitoring included on both domestic and international circuits.

This circuit monitoring includes a ping and traceroute to that circuit. Packet loss and latency are also measured. If the circuit goes down, you get an email. You also have access to a web-based dashboard to view your current circuit status and performance graphics. A monthly email report is available if you wish.

Do you need WAN circuits you can depend on? Would you like those circuits to be monitored with the powerful VXSuite tools at no extra cost? If so, it is time to get the latest competitive pricing and availability of monitored WAN network circuits for your business.

Connectivity Should Be Invisible

By: John Shepler

Buffering videos, garbled VoIP phone calls, slow loading web pages, interminable waits for files to download, jerky video conferencing, hesitation in response from the cloud. They’re all symptoms of connectivity that makes us painfully aware of its presence.

That’s not what you want. You want connectivity to be invisible, like other utilities. Flip a switch and the lights come on. Turn the faucet handle and out comes the water. Unless something goes horribly wrong, this is how it works every time. So, why do we have lower expectations of our bandwidth connections?

Not So Great Expectations
Perhaps its because so many of us who are in a position to do something about it were around to watch the blossoming of the Internet from a backwater mail service for academics to the primary way we do business and communicate. Perhaps it’s because the technology is still evolving. This is especially true in mobile applications and remote locations, where bandwidth is still a precious commodity and limited in both speed and availability.

Otherwise, it is quite possible to achieve that goal of making network operations a background activity for business users. You can then treat your connected devices as appliances. You turn then on and every function works the same way, all the time. Nothing happens to break your stream of consciousness or give the impression that something is “broken.”

What to Know
You need to be aware of the some key performance characteristics of your network. No, not your LAN. I assume that you’ve already optimized your in-house network. The real Achilles heel is those outside connection, the MAN and the WAN.

The first parameter of importance is bandwidth. The idea behind having “big pipes” is that the conduits are always larger than the quantity of bits per second that you are sending through them. When the circuits can’t handle the volume of traffic, they become congested. It’s like too many cars trying to enter a superhighway. At some point it all clogs up and things slow to a crawl.

Networks, including the Internet, are good at preserving the integrity of the traffic but not so good at keeping the flow moving at top speed when congested. Buffers fill up as each node waits its turn. At some point, packets can no longer be accepted until those in process move on. Does this sound like a busy airport during a snowstorm? The analogy is close.

How Much BW is Enough?
What this all means is that you need to order the level of bandwidth consistent with your current and near-term needs. “Of course,” you say. “That’s obvious.”

Well, it is an it isn’t. There are a numerous ways you can get caught without the bandwidth you need. One is application demand that is creeping up. Those T1 lines you ordered a decade ago have been working reliably until recently. The carrier says they still are. What’s happened is that you’ve added employees, moved applications to the cloud and depend on the Internet for more of your communications. The lines are still working fine. They’re just overloaded. You need more bandwidth.

So, you go out and order a high speed satellite link that has 10x your old bandwidth. File transfers seem to be working fine, but you can’t carry on a telephone conversation because you have to pause for a second between talking and listening. Your cloud business applications also seem to run a lot slower than they did when you ran your own data center. How much bandwidth does it take to fix this situation?

The Latency Speed Bump
No amount will be enough. That’s because your problem is latency, not bandwidth. Latency is a time delay between source and destination. In-house the speed of electrons through wires and photons through fiber is so fast that you’ll be hard pressed to detect it. But, when those locations are connected by a radio wave path that goes up over 22,000 miles to a satellite and back down 22,000+ miles, the delay is noticeable, if not downright annoying. A round trip takes something like half a second… even at the speed of light.

Network congestion can contribute to latency, but an uncontested network can still have latency issues depending on path length and any buffering delays introduced by equipment in the path.

Other Sources of Network Congestion
Congestion can also be caused by contention between your needs and those of other companies sharing the MAN or WAN network. You may have installed more than enough bandwidth for your needs, but the network doesn’t have enough for yours plus everyone else’s. This is a classic issue with the Internet and mobile cell towers. Too many users at once can overwhelm the system and force everyone to take turns using the limited resources.

What can you do about that? First, keep your in-house communications on dedicated private lines or through an MPLS network that guarantees performance. Choose symmetric services with the same bandwidth in the upload and download directions unless your are sure your needs are asymmetrical.

For Internet connections, which we all need, you can bypass most of the “information slow lane” problems with a dedicated Internet connection. This gives you the best performance in terms of bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. The actual core of the Internet is really pretty good. It’s the last mile connections, especially those shared with other users on “best effort” services like DSL, Cable and cellular, that get easily overloaded.

How to Choose
Ultimately, it’s a cost vs performance tradeoff. Cable broadband works great for residential and home office users and can work just fine for businesses that don’t have critical requirements. Most medium and larger businesses, however, need to move up to private lines and dedicated Internet connections if they want their connectivity to become invisible to users.

Do you wish your connectivity was more invisible that it is now? Look into high performance MAN and WAN bandwidth options that are available for your business location.

Why Fiber Optic Metro Ethernet Makes So Much Sense

By: John Shepler

You know that there are multiple options for connecting your headquarters, branch offices, warehouses, factories, stores, schools or medical centers. Are you sure that you have an optimum solution for the network performance you need? Let’s take a closer look at at Metro Ethernet networks and see why they might be exactly what you need.

Metro Ethernet or Metro E networks are a special implementation of Metro Area Networks (MAN). MEN instead of MAN give you two big advantages or other networking options. First is that your network protocol remains as Ethernet from end to end. Second is the pricing advantage that optical Metro Ethernet networks have over other solutions.

The Ethernet in Metro Ethernet is also called Carrier Ethernet. It’s the same switched Ethernet protocol that you have running on your local area networks, but extended for transport over longer distances. The big difference between LANs and MANs or WANs is that once the traffic leaves the network you own, it needs a telecom carrier to get it across town or across the country. You can’t provide this transport on your own. You need to contract with a carrier or service provider that has the long distance connectivity.

If you have been using T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth or SONET/SDH fiber optic services to carry your traffic, you know that a protocol conversion is involved. These telecom services are based on circuit switched technology rather than the packet switched technology running on your network.

The protocol conversion is done inside an appliance or, more often, a plug-in module for your network edge router. This makes the MAN setup unique to the service and bandwidth level that’s engineered for your specific needs. Anytime you need to change something, like make a bandwidth increase, equipment and perhaps network design needs to change. This takes a lot of time and sometimes a bundle of money to implement.

Metro Ethernet networks take a different approach. The core network is IP or MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) so that it can easily transport Ethernet packets without having to convert to and from one of the TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) protocols. This opens up the opportunity to connect your networks at the layer 2 switching rather than the layer 3 routing level.

The three layer 2 Ethernet services you should be aware of are Ethernet Line (E-Line), Ethernet LAN (E-LAN) and Ethernet Tree (E-Tree). Ethernet Line is a private line connection from point A to point B. This can directly replace older technology T1, DS3 or OCx connections.

E-LAN is a meshed multipoint to multipoint service that is often the best answer for how to easily and securely connect multiple business locations on a single private network. All locations can talk to each other but each location only needs a last mile connection to the Metro Ethernet network.

E-Tree is a special service of interest to service or content providers. It is a one to many network topology that transfers files form your root out to dozens or hundreds or thousands of “leaves” that can communicate with you but not each other.

Metro Ethernet networks have a cost advantage over dedicated point to point services when you need more than a single line. You pay for use of the multi-tenant metro network plus the last mile connectivity for each location. There is another valuable cost and performance savings that comes from all-fiber solutions.

Remember that traditional Metropolitan Area Network connections are set up specifically for a certain bandwidth level. It’s hard to scale much because of equipment changes that are needed when you jump from one standard bandwidth to another. Carrier Ethernet works differently. An Ethernet connection can handle any bandwidth up to the maximum speed of the installed port. If you have a 10 Mbps port, you can have any bandwidth up to and including 10 Mbps. A 100 Mbps port will handle all bandwidth levels up to 100 Mbps. The service levels are easily scalable, often in increments as small as 1 Mbps.

What this means is that you don’t have to order all the bandwidth you think you’ll ever need just to be sure that you can quickly accommodate increases in business levels. You simply order ports (10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10,000 Mbps) to support your expected requirements. Then order the bandwidth you need now with the knowledge that your ports have the reserve to quickly scale up later.

Why do all-optical Metro Ethernet solutions make sense? One advantage is that fiber can easily handle any bandwidth you require now or in the future. Another, more subtle, reason is that many service providers can connect you on fiber they own rather than something they have to lease from the local phone companies. This one-provider solution offers a significant cost savings as well as a single responsible service provider for all issues.

Do you need connectivity to multiple locations within one or more metropolitan areas? Learn more about your available Metro Ethernet options and pricing now.


Note: Photo of city lights courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Private IP Networks vs The Internet

By: John Shepler

Private vs Public. This is a big dividing line between business connectivity services. Let’s take a closer look at what the differences are and how you go about picking the right solution.

Private lines have been a staple of business operations since they were first offered by the telephone companies. They are renowned for their high reliability, excellent consistent performance, desirable specs… and high prices.

The Internet is the new kid on the block, relatively speaking. Remember the dial-up days? Long gone. Now just about everyone who wants a broadband connection and can pony up $40 to $60 a month can hook into a universal worldwide network from just about anywhere. In fact, if you have a business and want to connect with consumers you WILL be on the Internet.

That suggests an interesting approach. If you have to be connected to the Internet to do business with your customers and, often, suppliers, why not use the Internet for everything? If it would work, you could save a bundle of money and only have to worry about your last-mile access connection instead of an entire wide area network. Somebody else will take care of making sure the Internet core will be available 24/7.

The actual Internet core network is highly reliable. The issues that business users have generally break down into performance, security and reliability of that last mile connection.

Let’s take the last mile first. You know that you can connect to the Internet using a business version of the same DSL, cable and wireless broadband services that are popular with consumers. The price is right, but you will be dealing with variable performance due to the bandwidth being shared among many users, asymmetrical (much higher download than upload speeds), and no service level agreements to give you the priority you need when things occasionally go wrong.

The solution to these limitations is DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. This is a last mile connection using a T1 line, DS3, Ethernet over Copper or Fiber or SONET fiber optic service. Now your last mile is every bit the quality of a private line. So, does that also make the Internet the ideal business network?

Not necessarily. The Internet is designed for universal access and is self-healing to maintain connectivity even if one path is cut or routing equipment fails. That’s good, right? It sure is if you want to make sure your packets get from one place to another. Not so good if you need consistency in bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. Remember, you are sharing the Internet with millions of other eager users. That can result in things backing up, like the congestion you get on a public highway. Nobody guarantees performance, so you get what you get. For nearly all consumers and many businesses it’s a good tradeoff.

Security is another matter. There is no security on the Internet. It’s open to anyone and everyone. However, you can create your own security by using data encryption to build a private tunnel through the public network. SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption is the standard for ecommerce and can be used for private business communications, too.

It the Internet won’t cut it for your critical internal operations, you can construct your own private IP network using point to point dedicated lines and your own switches and routers. The PTP lines simply extend your network around town, cross country or internationally. This is the ultimate in performance and security, but it costs a pretty penny. Is there anything else that will work?

MPLS networks are becoming the new gold standard for private business communications. This means connections between multiple business locations, remote data centers or cloud services. Only paying customers get on this network and the Multi-Protocol Label Switching technology is proprietary to the network. This is why they’ll often be referred to as MPLS VPN or virtual private networks. The network operator ensures that each user has the connectivity they need with committed bandwidth and guaranteed levels of low latency, jitter and packet loss. From your perspective, you are the only one on the network. In actuality, there are likely thousands of other customers using the same core network. There is no interaction between them.

MPLS networks are considerably less expensive than building your own private network but more expensive than using the Internet. So, how do you decide? In many cases, the answer is to use both. The Internet is perfect for connecting prospects and customers to your public-facing servers. The private network connections are perfect for sensitive internal communications, VoIP telephony, video conferencing, and efficient cloud connections.

Does your business need solutions for internal connections, public communications or both? Check out the different options for Internet and private IP connections available for your business locations.

100 Business Locations and 1 Bandwidth Bill

By: John Shepler

If your business has grown from a single small operation to a nationwide or international enterprise, chances are that your network connections have grown in a piecemeal fashion over the years. Now you’ve got a major management problem handling dozens, hundreds or even thousands of individual contracts. Moreover, there’s that nagging feeling that you may be paying a lot more that you could be with an optimized solution. You’re probably right.

So, what can you do to get your arms around all this complexity? First of all, don’t try doing it all yourself. You are ill equipped to search out that optimum solution of providers and service levels. Chances are that you’ll sill wind up with too many bills from too many providers and not the best bandwidth connections. Instead, get support from a company that specializes in consolidating all your business bandwidth services.

UNSi (United Network Services, Inc.), formerly American Broadband, Inc. , is just such a company. Their specialty is managing broadband connectivity for companies with 100 or more locations. They can give you multiple types of connectivity matched to your location needs and consolidated in a single broadband bill. They specialize in optimizing bandwidth solutions, taking that monkey off YOUR back. You’ll wind up with more and better connectivity at a lower cost that what you’re paying now… and without the management headaches.

How does UNSI do this? It starts with their nationwide MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) network. MPLS provides the reliable high bandwidth core that can cost effectively carry network traffic of nearly any protocol with high security. Beyond their own network, UNSi and unique NNI (Network to Network Interface) capabilities that allow them to mesh with more than 150 other carrier networks to create a single expansive network. No matter where your business locations are, you’ll find a suitable connection via DSL, Cable Broadband, Ethernet over Copper, Carrier TDM or Metro Ethernet. A recent merger with Airband adds fixed wireless connectivity to the mix of options.

Other network assets include 18 strategic regionally located points of presence (POPs) serving over 155,000 lit buildings. Network operation centers (NOCs) are geographically dispersed to survive any foreseeable disaster.

What type of services are available? In addition to the core MPLS network that ties everything together and connections for each of your location, UNSi offers dedicated Internet access (DIA), cloud connectivity, managed services that include routers, firewalls, colocation, hosted monitoring and even managed LAN. A special service is called SIF or Same IP Failover. This is a disaster recovery and business continuity solution that provides automated failover between the primary MPLS/DIA circuits and a broadband backup circuit. The automated system ensures that the same customer IP range will operate over both the on-net primary circuit and the backup circuit. If the primary goes down, the system will switch seamlessly to the backup to ensure continuous operation.

Are you managing a single business location or hundreds to thousands located domestically or internationally? See if you can reduce your telecom management workload and save money in the process with network and bandwidth service consolidation.

Is MPLS The New Telephone Network?

The telephone network, as we’ve come to know and love it, is based on incremental improvements to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. This is a copper and fiber infrastructure that switches circuits to connect analog, cellular and digital phone calls from any party to any other party. Most business phone systems have depended on or mirrored the architecture of the PSTN to connect even their in-house calls. That’s all changing, with various technologies vying to become the next solution for connecting telephone calls.

What’s prompting the change? It’s not wireless. The cellular phone system was designed to be tightly integrated with the PSTN. The earliest cell phones were analog, with TDM and other digital multiplexed protocols following. What hasn’t happened yet is the wholesale transition to packet switched voice on the wireline or wireless phone networks.

Where packet switching, notably VoIP, has flourished is on private telephone networks set up by enterprises for their own use and on connections to the PSTN through the Internet to avoid the phone company local loops.

Why is VoIP such a big deal? More and more businesses are migrating their in-house phone systems to VoIP solutions. Part of the reason is the cost advantage of eliminating the separate phone wiring network in favor of using the corporate LAN to connect computers and telephones. Another reason is to avoid long distance toll charges by interconnecting business locations on a converged voice and data network. A third reason is features. IP telephones are really more like computers than the old desk sets. They can be integrated with business applications to provide things like “screen pops” of customer information based on who is calling.

The migration from circuit switching to packet switching was originally accomplished by replacing the traditional PBX (Private Branch Exchange) with an IP PBX. Think of the PBX as a small version of the PSTN switches that handle massive amounts of public traffic. The PBX resides on your premises and does all your in-house call connections so you don’t have to pay the phone company to make a call from one desk to another. You also need the capacity to make and receive calls with the outside world, so your PBX has to connect to the PSTN through one or more outside lines called trunks.

Trunk lines are bundles of telephone lines. Most businesses need more than one outside line. They may start off with a single analog business line and add more over the years. At some point it makes sense to consolidate all those separate lines into a single digital trunk that can carry up to 24 separate phone conversations.

Just because the trunk lines have been switched from analog to digital, doesn’t mean you are using VoIP. Yes, VoIP telephony is digital, not analog. But the digital protocol used by T1 and PRI digital trunks is time division multiplexed switched circuit, not packet switched IP. With an IP PBX, you can switch to IP telephones in-house and connect your IP PBX to the company LAN so that you don’t have to maintain the separate telephone wiring. Your connections to the outside world will still by the same analog or digital trunk lines to the PSTN.

Where you really cut the cord, so to speak, is when you replace those PSTN trunk lines with something called a SIP Trunk. This is a private line connection between your IP PBX and your telephone service provider. That service provider takes the place of the local telephone company and connects to the PSTN at their end. You can still make all the local and long distance calls you want, but perhaps at a considerable cost savings.

The alternative to the SIP Trunk is the Internet. The Internet connects literally from everywhere to everywhere. It is a massive public infrastructure that economy of scale makes very inexpensive. Connecting from telephone to service provider for residential users is done using the Internet. Many small businesses have also taken this approach to minimize costs.

The tradeoff is that voice quality over the Internet varies quite a bit. It depends on the capacity of your connection plus whatever else is happening on the Internet. Traffic jams called “congestion” can degrade voice quality with distortion and delay. One minute everything sounds great, the next minute the caller sounds garbled. If it gets really bad, the call may be dropped.

Many businesses can’t stand this variability of performance. They want the same quality of phone conversations they had with the PSTN, but with the advanced features and cost savings offered by VoIP. The technical answer has been to use a private line connection between your company and the service provider. These SIP trunks can support multiple conversations, even scaled for hundreds or thousands of simultaneous calls.

The latest development is cloud hosted PBX systems. Cloud computing offers businesses the opportunity to avoid capital investments and maintenance costs in favor of paying by the user by the month to use a cloud based infrastructure. Cloud computing has been extended to include telephone service through a cloud hosted VoIP or cloud hosted PBX system. All of your in-house switching and outside calls are handled through the cloud. You have IP telephones on your premises plus a gateway device that connects through a private line to your cloud service provider.

This is great for single business sites, but does the entire setup have to be replicated at multiple locations?

Yes and no. Yes, you still need your IP phones and gateway at each branch office or other location. However, you can route your calls through the same cloud hosted PBX. Now it becomes more sensible to connect all of your locations to your cloud service provider through a MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) network rather than pay the cost of a private line for each location.

MPLS networks are privately operated, as opposed to the public Internet, and maintain enough resources to simultaneous support the needs of all of their customers. This includes class of service tagging so that voice calls get the priority they need to maintain call quality. Each location simply needs a last mile connection, such as T1 or Ethernet over Copper, to the very large MPLS network. The network takes care of traffic routing between your locations and your cloud service provider where all the switching takes place.

One excellent example of where this approach is optimized is the XO Hosted PBX service offered by XO Communications. XO is also a network operator, so they can provide both the cloud PBX and the MPLS network to connect your business locations in one optimized system. This gives you one vendor to deal with if problems ever arise.

Sounds a little like the old Bell System, doesn’t it? You deal with a single provider who makes the connections to your phones and does the switching. In this case, you have a choice of vendors and a far richer feature set than offered in the old days of phone monopoly. Today’s cloud hosted PBX systems can include your wireless phones as well as your desk phones so that you only need one telephone number no matter where you are.

MPLS is a likely candidate to become the new telephone network. It supports hundreds or thousands of customers without interference or service degradations. Of course, there needs to be a way to interconnect customers on different networks. This is currently done by routing outside calls through the PSTN. Eventually, Network to Network Interfaces (NNI) may allow larger cloud PBX providers to peer traffic so that most of your calls will be on-net and not subject to toll charges. Even the PSTN may evolve to a very large MPLS network based on VoIP technology, abandoning the analog and TDM legacy technologies that have been the standard for the last century.

Is your company interested in more advanced phone services with potentially large cost savings? If so, get prices and features for enterprise grade VoIP and cloud services now.

Secure To The Core Cloud Hosting

Moving to cloud based solutions is making sense for more and more companies. The cloud offers easy scalability, near-infinite resources, high performance, no maintenance headaches and the opportunity to avoid capital investments and pay only for what you use. The one nagging issue is how secure is the cloud, really?

MegaPath, a major player in private networking and hosted IT services, has taken a big step toward assuring businesses that their data and business process will remain private by introducing a concept it calls “secure to the core.” Just what does secure to the core mean and how can it work for your business?

Nearly every cloud service provider touts its security. This generally centers around the data center itself. Many are SAS 70 Type II and SSAE 16 compliant with physical security that include biometric scanning, a full time security staff, video surveillance and a walled fortress. Inside there are redundant power and cooling systems, fire suppression and multiple WAN connections to the outside world. However, this last group is really more about reliability than security.

With proper personnel screening and all the physical and technical barriers to entry, it’s not that hard to physically keep people out who don’t belong in the data center. It’s more difficult to keep them out when they come in through the Internet.

The Internet is a weak link when it comes to any data security program. The most motivated and talented of wrong-doers operate in this domain. They eagerly stalk potential targets to penetrate and make off with intellectual property, credit card numbers, personal data that can be used for identity theft and anything else of value. It takes talented network security people and an array of firewalls and security appliances to protect high value business, organizational and government assets that face the Internet.

This is where MegaPath has a leg-up on a lot of cloud service providers. They also have the latest in high security data centers that meet stringent industry compliance standards. What MegaPath has that most providers don’t is a large private network completely independent of the Internet.

When you think about it, companies with multiple locations or Intranets that include key suppliers and customers don’t really need the Internet for internal communications. In fact, it is highly desirable to keep internal communications on a private network for both security and performance. MegaPath makes this affordable for all size businesses through their nationwide MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) fiber optic network. The label switching technology of MPLS makes packet forwarding simple and efficient. It also allows customers to chose from eight levels of QoS (Quality of Service) so that time sensitive packet streams get the priority they need to maintain integrity end to end. This is ideal for enterprise VoIP telephone systems and video conference or telepresence.

MegaPath can offer you MPLS network connections throughout the United States plus Managed SSL VPN, Retail Access SSL and Business Continuity SSL. Their compliance services help companies meet regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, FFIEC/NCUA, HIPAA/HITECH, GLBA and SOX.

Of course, you probably want Internet connections as well to serve the general public and commercial buyers, and for employee access to the vast information resources available worldwide. MegaPath offers a comprehensive security array called UTM or Unified Threat Management. This includes advanced firewall, intrusion prevention, anti-virus protection, Web filtering, anti-spam, Web application control and data loss protection. These UTM services can be implemented within the cloud, at the customer’s premises or in a hybrid configuration.

Are you looking for cloud services that have rigorous physical and network security protections? Get features and pricing for secure network and cloud services from MegaPath and other high quality providers.

All My Access Is In Texas

If the state of Texas is where you do business, you’ll want to be aware of Alpheus Communications and their regional network connecting the major cities in Texas. In addition, they have colocation data center facilities in the Lone Star State. This gives you the advantage of security, reliability and low cost connectivity while keeping everything reasonably nearby.

The Alpheus regional fiber optic network offers high bandwidth and low latency between Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Bryan, Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, McAllen, Harlingen, Corpus Christi, Victoria and Houston. Long haul connections can take your traffic anywhere in North America at bandwidth speeds ranging from DS-1 (1.5 Mbps) up to OC-192 (10 Gbps).

Network connectivity is available in a wide range of options. These include Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Metro Ethernet, Private Line and Managed Wavelength. Alpheus clients can connect with each other through a cross connect arrangement called Metrolocity. You can choose from bandwidth speeds ranging from DS-1 to OC-12 (622 Mbps) and peer with other enterprises and competitive communications service providers. You do not have to colocate or build facilities to other carriers to make these connections. They’re provided by Alpheus as part of their Metrolocity peering.

Alpheus operates four hub facilities in Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Their network operations center (NOC) is also located in Houston. The Austin and Houston data centers are SAS 70 Type II Audit Certified to meet the demanding needs of enterprise clients. These data centers give you the security, reliability and scalability you need to host enterprise applications, disaster recover solutions, high performance websites, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and general IT operations infrastructure. You’ll find hubbed and point to point service from DS-1 to OC-192, Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps managed wavelengths.

Some clients find even SONET, GigE and wavelength services too limiting. To meet their needs, Alpheus Communications offers dark fiber solutions. With dark fiber, capacity is determined by the terminal equipment, usually DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing). In essence, you become operator of your own fiber optic network. That means you have the ability to transport any protocol or multiple protocols at once. Leverage wavelengths to create massive bandwidth for transporting near-limitless amounts of information.

Perhaps a Gigabit Ethernet connection is enough to meet your needs. Alpheus is set up to connect you across the metro markets in Texas or across the country. You can choose from point to point or point to multipoint GigE connectivity. Bandwidth options vary from 51 Mbps on up to 1 Gbps if you don’t need the full 1,000 Mbps right away. Rate limiting is flexible. There are three different classes of service available. The highest is load sharing. With this, Alpheus provides two physically diverse unprotected connections and you have two client interfaces. You take care of the protection switching. The other grades are Network Protection, which does have network protection features but no client protection, and completely unprotected service.

Are you interested in Texas Metro Ethernet service? If so, Alpheus can give you layer 2 networking services that include point to point, point to multipoint and any to any WAN connectivity. This connectivity takes place over a redundant MPLS network on a self-healing DWDM fiber backbone. Your port interfaces include 10/100 Mbps FastE, 1000 Mbps GigE and 10 Gbps Ethernet. Alpheus has last mile connectivity solutions that include Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over NxT1 and Ethernet over NxDS3 plus Ethernet over Wireless to get you connected no matter where you happen to be.

Do you need network access in Texas? You’re in luck. Get pricing, features and availability of Texas metro and long haul network connections from Alpheus and other high quality network service providers.



Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

The Age Of Managed Networks Is Upon Us

It’s a sign of changing times. Competitive carrier AireSpring is now providing proactive networking monitoring free of charge to customers of its MPLS and Voice over MPLS solutions. That’s 24 hour continuous SNMP monitoring of the network that will generate alarms and reports if any deviation occurs. You can be sound asleep, but the NOC (Network Operations Center) will be keeping an eye on your MPLS network.

What heralds the future in this announcement is that service provider management of WAN services is on its way to become the default standard. That’s a far cry from the last half-century of bandwidth services. You ordered your dedicated lines, set up your networks and supplied your own staff to monitor operation. If something went haywire when the lights were off overnight, it got discovered and dealt with in the morning. A multi-national or otherwise 24/7 operation provided its own NOC to keep track of LANs and WANs worldwide.

Perhaps it has been the constant hammering on cost reductions caused by the deep recession that were are just now coming out of. Company budgets have been beaten down and beaten down to the point where business as usual a decade ago is just plain unaffordable anymore. Out of desperation, companies have sought out new methods of getting business done that don’t involve so many people and so much investment.

Into this opportunity gap have stepped the managed IT service offerings. That’s everything from outsourcing your entire IT department to partnering with suppliers to take over responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the line service you lease, to closing data centers and shipping the equipment to a colo center or selling it off in favor of doing everything in the cloud.

The common theme is lease versus ownership. Ownership certainly has its advantages. It also has its responsibilities. Medium and larger companies liked the idea of having everything under their tight control in-house. After all, who’s going to look after your interests like you do yourself? It’s easier to control security and network configurations when your people are running the show. If you have to go outside to get a connection, like you do with telecom services, you simply have the carrier nail up a line between point A and point B. If and when it fails, your terminal equipment will set off the alarms and you get on the phone to file a trouble report and then monitor the progress of the repairs.

What downsizing pressures and lack of available capital have done is slowly pry the tight grip of total control away from corporate staff in favor of letting outside suppliers provide some services and take responsibility for their performance. What many companies are discovering, to their surprise, is that providers can be trusted to deliver and maintain everything from networks to computing resources and business telephone switching.

Managed WAN services can be anything from a point to point T1 line to a complex international MPLS network with hundreds or thousands of connections. The demarcation point becomes the managed router rather than the smart jack. By installing Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), service providers have a view of everything on the WAN between your LAN edges. That includes all last mile connections as well as what’s going on with the core network.

That CPE is destined to move farther and farther into the local network as customers come to trust their IT service providers. Once they realize that the carrier or cloud provider is catching and fixing problems faster than they had been doing themselves, the reluctance to lease rather than own resources will fade away. The desire to return to an era of high capital investments, higher staffing levels and slow response to sudden demand changes will disappear. The flexibility of the company to adapt to change will correspondingly increase and older paradigms will seem as quaint as stacks of punched cards and racks of glowing vacuum tubes.

Are you being squeezed for investment capital and personnel, yet dependent on high performance information technology and telecommunications to be competitive? If so, perhaps now is the perfect time to consider managed IT and network services. Compare the costs and flexibility and see if managed solutions can be of service to your company.

Your Ethernet Connection To The World

It’s a given that you need to connect your business location to the outside world to reach your own geographically separated business locations and to reach anyone, anywhere, on Earth. There are various protocols that will get you this connectivity. The most popular is quickly becoming Carrier Ethernet service. Let’s see why.

Carrier Ethernet is an extension to the switched circuit Ethernet protocol that is nearly the universal for Local Area Networks (LANs). You know that there is a distance limitation to LAN Ethernet networks, especially for those running on Cat 5e/6 twisted pair copper wiring. How is it that Ethernet can now reach across town, to the other side of the country and around the world?

You can thank the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) for setting the standards that make long distance Ethernet possible. The MEF is an industry alliance of over 175 organizations who have a vested interest in Carrier Ethernet. Because carriers and manufacturers have agreed to work within these standards, it is possible to have interoperability among Carrier Ethernet systems worldwide.

What’s different about the MAN and WAN versions of Ethernet is that they are transported rather than running natively on the copper or fiber cabling. Technologies that enable this are Provider Backbone Bridges (PBB), Provider Backbone Bridge Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) and Carrier-Ethernet Transport (CET). Connectivity-Fault Management (CFM-OAM) technology adds operations, administration and management features needed to operate metro and long haul communications networks.

Note that the term Carrier Ethernet applies to Metropolitan Ethernet, also called Metro Ethernet, as well as longer haul networks that go beyond the immediate metropolitan area that is the domain of Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN). That’s because metro and wide area networks are more alike than different. They all involve use of a common carrier to transport the signal rather than private ownership of an in-house local area network.

The MEF has standardized Carrier Ethernet services regardless of the transport mechanism. E-Line is the familiar private point to point line service that is popular with T1, DS3 and SONET telecom services. E-Line gives you a direct ethernet connection between two Ethernet ports located across town or at any distance. E-LAN, or Ethernet LAN Service, is a multipoint to multipoint mesh network that covers multiple locations. These could be branch offices or franchise locations. E-LAN can bridge your multiple site LANs so that they act like one larger network.

Another service is E-Tree which is a point to multi-point service, not meshed. The center or root locations can communicate with any of the remote or leaf locations, but those leaf locations cannot directly communicate. They have to route all traffic through the roots that may or may not pass it on. This is similar to the proprietary star networks that companies have deployed to create their own private wide area networks.

Ethernet can be carried over twisted pair copper as EoC or Ethernet over Copper. It can also be transported over T1 (EoDS1) or DS3 (EoDS3) to take advantage of existing infrastructure. Ethernet can also be provided over fiber optic networks including legacy SONET/SDH and the newer Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) running on native IP networks. MPLS networks can easily transport Ethernet services as pseudowires using MPLS label switched paths. This expands the offerings to include Virtual Private Wire Service (VPWS) and Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS).

In addition to the availability of standardized Ethernet services over MAN and WAN distances, Carrier Ethernet also offers the advantages of easy interfacing, granular scalability with nearly any bandwidth level available, and considerably lower cost than traditional telecom services. It is not unusual to get twice the bandwidth for the same price or cut your bandwidth costs in half by switching to Carrier Ethernet services.

Is your company looking for a bandwidth upgrade or to expand connectivity beyond your current network? Perhaps you’re curious to see if you could realize a considerable cost savings? If so, get pricing and options for Carrier Ethernet solutions now.

AboveNet Offers Gigabit Ethernet For Enterprises

Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) has pretty much taken over the LAN in large and even medium size enterprises. But what about the WAN? Are you still hobbled by the slowdown that occurs when you are sending files beyond your network edge? Isn’t it time to consider Gigabit Ethernet for the WAN as well as the LAN?

Running a Gigabit LAN and using something like DS3 bandwidth or even OC3 fiber optic service for your MAN or WAN service is like connecting a drinking straw to a fire hose. The flow can’t help but slow to a trickle when it goes through that edge router. There once were good reasons why very modest WAN connection speeds were just fine. Today, there’s much less of a case to be made for order of magnitude or larger differences in LAN and WAN speeds.

What’s happened to demand higher connection speeds today? Computer networks were once strictly internal to a company. In fact, anything connected to the network from the outside aroused suspicion. If you wanted to transfer data somewhere, you used a reel of tape or a cassette. Slowly, data communication networks arose starting with dial-up modems and Frame Relay networks. Then came the Internet. It been a speed race ever since.

Now nearly every company has a dedicated broadband connection to the Internet and perhaps one or more VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to connect with employees working for home or on the go. Companies with more than one site often have private line or MPLS network connections to tie everyone together. With the amount of data flying around, tapes and removable disk packs are yesterday’s means of data transfer. Today it is high speed network links.

Not only has computer technology changed, but so have business practices. Now nearly everything has some form of automation involved. Business productivity is leveraged upon real-time computer systems and electronic storage. Nobody at headquarters wants you to create a report and send it overnight mail anymore. They want a video conference presentation featuring you delivering the report live. Oh, and they want it right after lunch.

Beyond mere connectivity for transmitting files electronically instead of faxing or mailing paper, companies and their computing systems are becoming estranged. The data center used to be right down the hall or in the basement. Now it’s on the other side of the country and is owned by somebody else. More and more companies are buying their computing and even their telephone service through a cloud service provider. The LAN no longer connects you to the server racks. Now you have to go through a WAN connection. Does it make sense that the bandwidth that used to be good enough for a few overnight file transfers can’t begin to support real time business applications running in the cloud?

The idea of Gigabit Ethernet connections used to be a fantasy. Now it’s becoming a given. You need the high bandwidth connections to support the amount of data moving between organizational locations and back and forth with the cloud. If you are supporting financial trading, high performance SaaS, video conferencing or enterprise VoIP, you need not just high bandwidth but also low latency and jitter with minimal packet loss. In some cases, you may also require links to overseas locations with the same network characteristics.

Where do you go to get Gigabit level connectivity? AboveNet is a premier supplier of domestic and international fiber optic services. They are recommending moving to Ethernet rather than the legacy SONET fiber services. Why? SONET/SDH services are a legacy telephone company technology. They were designed to support trunking massive numbers of telephone conversations from office to office. These protocols can be made to work with computer networks but they are not directly compatible.

What is? Ethernet! The Ethernet that runs on your LAN can now traverse your WAN to the Internet or to another LAN on the other side of the country or across the Atlantic. This makes for a simpler and more efficient overall network setup. It also enables services such as layer 2 Ethernet LAN Service that bridges two distant LANs as if they were in the same building. Ethernet scales much faster and more granularly than SONET, allowing you to buy just the bandwidth you need now with the option to quickly scale up when the need arises. Best of all, Ethernet has a cost advantage over SONET/SDH. You get more bandwidth for the same money or pay less for the same service level.

If you are feeling the pinch from too small WAN connections, this would be an excellent time to check your current options for Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet services from AboveNet and other fiber optic carriers. You can get instant pricing for bandwidths up to 1 Gbps and rapid quotes with helpful consultation for all other services you may be interested in for your company.

Level 3 Vyvx Connects The Super Bowl

While you are busy dipping chips in salsa, screaming at the refs, cheering the plays and rolling on the floor laughing at the commercials, there is one thing you won’t have to think about on Super Bowl Sunday. That’s how the broadcast is getting from there to you. It’s not magic. It’s a carefully engineered service called Level 3 Vyvx VenueNet+

VenueNet+ is a bundled service for special event broadcasters. It’s already installed in every major-league stadium in the United States. That includes Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The fiber optic network is lit, the termination equipment installed, and everything is managed by dedicated Vyvx staff.

So, what’s Vyvx and why would you want to order VenueNet+ service? If you’ve ever been involved in a broadcast “remote”, radio or TV, you know that it can be a hit or miss proposition. You need to bring your own transmitter truck and hope you can get the antenna over any obstacles between you and the station or skyward to the “bird.” Otherwise, you need to install a permanent antenna or contract with the phone company for line service (radio) to get the broadcast out of where you are and to the studio intact.

In the age of HD television, this gets even dicier. There is massive bandwidth involved in providing a clean signal that can display high speed action without turning the picture into pixel mush. Can you afford glitches and maybe an all-out outage on game day? Ha! Last year’s Super Bowl was viewed by more than 110 million people, few of whom are in a mood to be patient with technical issues. With multi-million dollar budgets involved in giving you 30 second commercials of clever animal antics that you’ll talk about for weeks, can you afford even a second’s dead air? Nope. Whatever you lose you’ll never get back. There are no re-dos on the Super Bowl.

This is were Level 3 steps in to make life easy. Forget trying to raise an antenna mast or get a leased line connected. The Level 3 fiber network is already in-place at the venue and ready to transport your streaming video. The fiber network has been set up to transport high-definition video optimized for sports events. Vyvx supports HD-SDI, SD-SDI, DVB-ASI and MPEG2/4 and JPEG 2000 encoding. Some venues even support uncompressed HD video. In addition to video encoding and transport, VenueNet+ also provides high speed Internet and telephone service.

The VenueNet+ panel connects to a Level 3 Gateway that gives your video access to the Level 3 MPLS video and data network cloud that can deliver HD video with more than three times the bandwidth currently available by satellite. The fiber network connects to Level 3’s television operation center, broadcast networks, teleports to international and cruise ship destinations, and Level 3 CDN (Content Delivery Network) streaming. Once you hand the raw video to Level 3, they get it where it needs to go, properly encoded.

Level 3 has been delivering the Super Bowl for nearly 25 years. It’s also carries the pre-game and post-game feeds to NFL operations centers in Mt. Laurel, N.J., Culver City, California and NFL Network master control facilities in Atlanta.

The Super Bowl is certainly a showcase for the quality and reliability that Level 3 Vyvx video services can provide. It’s perhaps the best advertising they can have to demonstrate the capability of fiber optic video transport. Even if you are not involved in the Super Bowl or anything of that magnitude, Vyvx can make your life easier for video transport from stadiums and event venues. They’ll get your video to from here to there with the highest quality and least fuss. If you have a project in the works or just want to compare services with what you have now, get pricing and options for video transport and related services now.

WAN Providers Bandwidth Service Options

WAN bandwidth connections are all but necessary for doing business today. What you may not realize is the wide variety of WAN bandwidth options available. Let’s see what’s on the market now and how you can get prices quickly.

WAN or Wide Area Network bandwidth is how you connect from your business to other businesses and your customers. For the sake of simplification, we’ll include MAN or Metropolitan Area Network connections along with WAN. What they have in common is that they start where your LAN leaves off.

WAN bandwidth has always been the domain of telecom companies. You don’t have your own WAN. You lease what you need from a service provider. What’s changed recently is that many competitive providers have come into the WAN marketplace to compete with incumbent telephone companies and traditional long haul networking providers.

Perhaps the most popular of all WAN services is the T1 line. It’s been around for half a century and comes in various flavors. A basic data T1 offers 1.5 Mbps symmetrical bandwidth with full duplex. You can get a point to point private line to connect two business locations or a dedicated T1 Internet connection for business broadband. T1 lines are also popular as telephone trunks for PBX phone systems. The original T1 telephone line supports 24 business phone lines. The newer ISDN PRI offers 23 phone lines plus Caller ID and faster switching.

The direct competitor to T1 is Ethernet over Copper. EoC will typically give you twice the bandwidth for the same money. Most popular is 3x3 Mbps Ethernet running at 3 Mbps in both directions. Where available, the price is generally the same as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Ethernet over Copper is easily scaled up in bandwidth, so you can order 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps, 20 Mbps or higher bandwidth over twisted pair copper telco wiring. T1 lines can also be bonded to increase bandwidth up to about 12 Mbps at the most. The one limitation is EoC is that it is a distance sensitive technology that is mostly available in metropolitan areas where you are located close to the central office where your telco wiring terminates.

Another WAN option that is becoming popular with smaller businesses is business Cable broadband. You may be able to get 100 Mbps x 10 Mbps service for the same price as a T1 line. While these speeds are impressive, note that the service is not symmetrical. The upload speed is only a fraction of the download speed. That works well when you are using it to access the Internet for email, Web browsing and video downloads. Cable broadband is an Internet connection. However, you can set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) for two Internet connected locations so that you can transfer files much like a point to point T1 line. Also note that Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. Your bandwidth will vary considerably depending on what other Cable users are doing online.

Higher speed WAN bandwidth requires fiber optic lines. DS3 at 45 Mbps is generally transported on a fiber optic line, although your connection is via coaxial cable. Both traditional SONET and the newer Ethernet over Fiber are available if your building is lit for fiber. Once the fiber is in place, you can easily get anywhere from 100 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps for business applications. Carriers themselves often use 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps fiber for their network backbones.

Wireless connections are also possible. Low bandwidth fixed wireless uses 3G and 4G technology and is popular for retail credit card verification. Higher bandwidth fixed wireless can replace DS3 and Fast Ethernet wireline services but is generally limited to downtown business districts. Satellite broadband works where no other service is available.

For really wide area connectivity, consider an MPLS network. These have regional, national and international connectivity. You can get nearly any bandwidth you require and connect dozens, hundreds or thousands of business locations securely.

With all these options available, how do you choose? The best way is go through a telecom broker that represents dozens of different carriers and has an application that makes it easy to get pricing quickly. The GeoQuote tool from Telarus, Inc. does just that. For many options you can get WAN bandwidth pricing and availability instantly online. Other services will be manually quoted in short order to meet your requirements. With that information in hand, you can do the price/performance tradeoffs and choose what make the most sense for your particular situation.

EarthLink Means Business With 10 GigE Fiber

Most of us remember EarthLink from land rush days of the Internet when anyone and everyone just had to get on the net now, and dial-up 56K service was the best you could get. EarthLink is still a viable ISP for consumers with both dial-up and broadband access available. But there’s another side to this famous company. EarthLink Business is a facilities-based competitive carrier serving everything from SMB to enterprise needs with over 28,000 miles of fiber installed and more in the works. They’re in the process of installing two new 10 Gigabit Ethernet fiber rings in Ohio and Eastern Pennsylvania. There’s also a new high speed fiber route going in between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

What’s with all the new high-bandwidth construction by EarthLink and others? In case you haven’t heard, business is automating like crazy and heading to the cloud. The enduring slowdown in economic expansion has given corporations a chance to re-examine their operations and re-engineer for what they’ll need in the future. One thing they’ve found is that office automation can be as big an enabler of employee productivity as the factory automation of decades past. That means more computers, more processing and more communication between business sites, vendors, customers and remote employees. Any business that has outsourced overseas has found that a key to making this work efficiently is to tie together the far flung operations as if they were right next door. You can’t do that physically, of course, but you can do it virtually if you have the right networking.

The cloud is also seen as a game changer in a world where it’s hard to predict what resources you’ll need next season or even next month. Traditional in-house data center construction is a capital and time intensive approach. If what you are doing will run just as well in a remote data center, you gain the advantages of avoiding capital investments and buying what you need by the moment with the knowledge that additional resources are always available when you need to scale up. Scaling up is the expected path as a company grows over the years. Now you have the option to scale up and scale down as business fluctuates so you never have idle resources running up expenses.

The one thing that process automation, outsourcing and cloud operations have in common is that they are bandwidth intensive. That bandwidth was fairly easy to come by when everything was on your local network. Now you need the same big conduit going between cities, across the country and perhaps overseas.

SONET is the proven core network technology for fiber optic WAN networks. You can certainly run legacy OC3, OC12 and OC 48 fiber optic connections for your business connectivity. But today it’s Ethernet services that are hot. No problem. Ethernet runs over SONET just fine. In fact, many advertised Ethernet fiber optic networks are really running SONET at their core. OC-192 is a good match for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with a special WAN-PHY protocol designed especially to transport 10 GigE on a OC-192 optical carrier.

EarthLink is expanding their nationwide fiber network and their suite of business telecom services that include MPLS networking, full and fractional DS3, EVDO 3G wireless, SIP trunking and Metro Fiber Ethernet. They added three new data centers in Rochester, NY, Marlborough, MA and Columbia, SC with 10 Gigabit fiber rings connecting each location to the network backbone. Such high bandwidth connections allows them to offer real time data replication and cloud services to interested companies.

Is your business re-engineering for higher productivity and more agile operations? If so, you may benefit from some of the new cloud services and high bandwidth network connections that have become recently available. Even your current operations can cut costs while retaining the same performance with competitive telecom services.

Types of VPN Connections

Virtual private networking is heavily used in business. In fact, you probably have used a VPN connection today without even realizing it. It’s not a belt and suspenders service anymore. VPN connections are absolutely essential to prevent being robbed blind.

First, let’s take a look at private vs virtually private networks. Your hardwired LAN is a private network. It would take some real effort and a lot of risk for someone to tap into your network wiring and install a device to capture traffic. The same is true if you establish a wide area network or WAN using point to point private lines. A PTP T1 line falls into that category. While it is not impossible to sneak into your wiring closet or even the telephone company and put a tap on the line, it is so difficult that only those with the most secure requirements will go to extremes to protect against this type of attack.

What distinguishes a private network is that 100% of the traffic is yours and yours alone. You are not sharing the lines with anyone else. The advantage to a private network is inherent security. The disadvantage is cost. You pay for all the construction, maintenance and monthly lease fees. It’s unlikely that your private network will be fully loaded at all times. Whatever capacity is unused goes to waste.

Contrast the private network with a public network like the Internet. They are polar opposites. The Internet allows anyone and everyone access by design. Traffic on the Internet is everybody in the pool. Your packets are intermingled with everyone else’s. Even so, a wired connection to the Internet isn’t the worst situation. That belongs to the unsecured wireless network. No need to plant malware in someone’s computer when everything they are doing is perfectly visible on any WiFi enabled computer within range. You are most vulnerable reading private unencrypted emails in a popular public hotspot. Anyone with a laptop computer and some easy to obtain spyware can be reading your messages right along with you.

It seems like such a crying shame that the one network that any employee can access at home or while traveling is such a security nightmare. That’s where the technique of encryption becomes valuable. It doesn’t matter if someone is monitoring your traffic if all they see is gibberish. You encrypt your message at one end and decrypt it at the other end and you have a created what is known as a secure tunnel through the Internet. The public network has now become a virtually private network. It’s not a private network because you are still sharing the transport with many others. It’s virtually private because no one can read your traffic and make any sense out of it.

There are two popular methods of creating Internet or IP VPNs. One is IPsec or Internet Protocol security. The other is SSL or Secure Socket Layers. IPsec is based on software installed in both the company server and the client computer. IPsec encrypts and decrypts each packet, so once you have it installed you have a virtually private line to the company no matter where you hooked to the Internet. Of course, you need to use the specific laptop or other computer set up to work with this system. You can’t just go to any computer and connect back to headquarters.

If you want to do that, you need SSL (Secure Socket Layer). The beauty of SSL is that the software is already built into Web browsers and some email programs. SSL has been popularized for ecommerce and online banking. When you go to a SSL enabled webpage, you’ll notice that the http:// has become https:// The “s” means secure page. To access it you need a user account ID and a password at a minimum. Some sites go further and ask personal challenge questions or display special graphics that give you confidence you are logged into the correct site.

For corporate wide area networks, an alternative to private lines is the MPLS network. These are multi-tenant networks that spread the cost of building and running the system among many users. MPLS networks are considered VPNs because they use a proprietary label switching protocol that isn’t compatible with IP tools. This unique protocol plus access controlled to a limited number of business clients and not the general public give MPLS networks an enhanced level of security.

Do you need private or virtually private network connects to conduct business? If so, compare VPN options and prices to help decide which mix of network techniques is right for your company.