Is Managed WiFi Right for You?

By: John Shepler

Broadband is everywhere now. In fact, its become an expectation. For consumers, it’s their way to stay connected when there isn’t a wire to plug into. For businesses, it’s a way to offer the benefit of connectivity to their customers and to unchain their employees from the cable tether.

What about 3G and 4G cellular?
Isn’t cellular the true way to go mobile? Over wide areas, yes. It’s hard to beat cellular broadband on your smartphone. That is, until you reach your monthly usage limit. Then it gets expensive fast. Also, many computers, tablets and other devices don’t have the radios built-in to work on cellular, even if you wanted to pay to add them to your account. The one thing most every device does have is WiFi connectivity.

Enabling WiFi
At the most basic level, you can create a WiFi “hotspot” by simply connecting a wireless access point or WiFi router to your network or broadband connection. This is how it’s done at home and in smaller businesses. As the number of users increases and the area to be covered expands, suddenly managing a WiFi network isn’t so simple anymore. You can either grin and bear the extra effort involved or you can consider moving to a managed WiFi solution.

Managed WiFi in the Cloud
Managed WiFi simply means that a service provider, rather than you, does the heavy lifting of making the larger WiFi network work. A new wrinkle is cloud managed WiFi. This allows a service provider to deploy software updates and generate reports for you behind the scenes. A comprehensive system for cloud managed wireless is the Cisco Meraki system.

What Cisco Offers
The Cisco Meraki access point features high power radios for solid coverage with enhanced receive sensitivity compared to the garden variety WiFi AP. It includes MIMO and beamforming technology to met enterprise-class 802.11ac and 802.11n standards on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. The MR34 AP also has a dedicated security radio that scans and protects against security threats, adapts to interference and automatically configures the RF settings for maximum performance.

Security Features
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has become a user demand and a major headache for the IT department. If anyone can bring anything onto the network, security goes out the window. Who knows what’s going on?

The Cisco Meraki wireless solution feature set accommodates BYOD by identifying clients and automatically applying access policies by device or user groups. The system automatically assigns firewall and traffic shaping rules, VLAN tags and bandwidth limits to enforce policies by user class. Critical apps are prioritized and recreational apps can be limited for management control.

The cloud based analytics generate extensive metrics such as user visit time, repeat visits, apps used. You can manage WAN, LAN , wireless LAN and mobile devices on your control panel. That includes everything from a single location to a campus wide solution. There’s even an iOS and Android mobile app for network management on the go.

Acquiring Managed WiFi
An excellent approach that works well for both large and small installations is to get your managed wireless solution from a bandwidth provider such as MegaPath. This way you have one supplier for all of your connections, including MAN, WAN and WiFi. MegaPath’s network operations center will continuously monitor, configure and troubleshoot your wireless network on your behalf. They also have the most up to date security features the meet the requirements of the PCI (Payment Card Industry) data security standards.

If you are considering a major wireless expansion or installing WiFi access for the first time, get the details on cloud managed WiFi now.

Asymmetric Bandwidth is Hot for Business

By: John Shepler

What has characterized serious bandwidth for business applications has been symmetry, or having the same Mbps capacity in both the up (transmit) and down (receive) directions. That’s being challenged, now, by new service products that promote asymmetry. Asymmetry means having a different bandwidth available depending on whether you are uploading or downloading. Let’s have a look at why this is happening and if it can be advantageous for your business.

Symmetry has its roots in telecom services that go back to the development of digital line transmission a half-century ago. The inventor of the T-Carrier standards, including the ubiquitous T1 line, was Bell Labs. Bell’s mission was to serve the telephone companies, so the digitization of telephone calls preceded computer to computer communications by decades. Switching from analog to digital long lines virtually eliminated the noise, distortion and crosstalk effects that plagued domestic long distance and international phone calls. It also enabled systems that could transmit hundreds and thousands of simultaneous phone calls on a single circuit.

Why symmetrical operation? Phone calls are bi-directional in nature. It doesn’t matter which end of the call you are on. You need the same line characteristics so that you can talk and listen simultaneously. This results in transmit and receive paths that are identical in design.

When T1 lines, DS3 connections and fiber optic circuits were pressed into service to meet the demand for computer communications, they automatically came with symmetrical bandwidth as well as dedicated circuits, synchronized channels and low latency and jitter. These features of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) get the job done, but at a price.

Asymmetry has its roots in the rise of the Internet and consumer based Internet Service Providers (ISPs). When you access a web site, you send a small burst of packets to tell the server what you want and get back a large burst of packets that carry text, images, audio and video. Nearly all web access by users requires a lot more bandwidth in the download direction than in the upload direction.

This works well for telephone companies providing DSL over shared phone lines and cable companies using spare channels to deliver broadband Internet. Cable, especially, is a one-way medium. When TV was the only service, all channel content went from the head end to the consumer. For asymmetrical broadband, many fewer channels have to be allocated for the upload direction. That leaves the rest available for higher download speeds at premium pricing.

What some businesses, especially the smaller ones, have found is that asymmetrical DSL, cable, wireless and satellite broadband meet their needs just fine. This is especially true when their employees use the Internet primarily for web access and occasional email. Cable broadband is readily available and gives you higher download speeds for a fraction of the cost of a T1 line. When you get into higher bandwidths, say 10 to 100 Mbps, the cost differences are like night and day.

There are some hitches in this rosy scenario. Asymmetry is only one reason why DSL and Cable are cheaper than T1, DS3, Ethernet over Copper and fiber. A big driver in this cost reduction is shared rather than dedicated bandwidth. With shared bandwidth, the Mbps you have in either direction varies constantly depending on what your neighbors are doing. It’s one big bandwidth pool and the more users who are swimming in it, the less bandwidth is available to each user. This can get annoying when you have a critical project in the works and you can’t get much done because other people are downloading high definition videos.

Another difference between the symmetrical and asymmetrical services is that the symmetrical ones tend to be tariffed telecom services with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that specify repair times for circuit outages, usually in a matter of a few hours. The consumer oriented asymmetrical services tend to be classified as “data services” and are provided on a best effort basis. The carrier will take your complaints seriously, but they may not be able to get the line fixed for some time.

Asymmetry doesn’t work for everyone. Applications like disaster backup and recovery, video conferencing, PBX & enterprise VoIP telephony, cloud computing and large file transfers between multiple business sites really need line symmetry for optimum performance. Companies running these applications also tend to need dedicated bandwidth and service level agreements to ensure maximum productivity.

Even so, the heavy competition from cable and other service providers is causing some major telecom carriers to rethink their service offerings. MegaPath, for instance, is rolling out asymmetrical service to customers at a cost savings. They are still differentiating their service with dedicated bandwidth, SLAs and Quality of Service (QoS) options for business applications that need these characteristics. Other big telecom carriers are expected to follow suit.

With so many service providers and connectivity options, how do you choose the optimum service that gives you the performance you need for the least expense? The best way is to get help from a bandwidth broker who works with many service providers and has the volume to get you the best discounts. Get instant online pricing and available consulting for bandwidth services available for your business locations.

Hosted PBX Adds Video Services

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP, is becoming popular with large, medium and small businesses as a way to get the latest phone features without the big investment. Now that capability is being expanded to include video services as well.

MegaPath, a major competitive network carrier and cloud service provider, is adding cloud-delivered unified communications video services to its hosted PBX portfolio.

The key to video with voice is a new generation of business phones that replaces traditional analog desk phones and even VoIP digital phones. Polycom, one of the leaders in IP telephony, calls these media phones. These are telephones with video screens. Think of them as tablets that look like telephones. Some have cameras built-in. Others use a plug-in webcam.

Unified Communications (UC) is the process of combining voice, data and video on a single network. UC in the cloud is the next step. All you need are your company LAN and the network attached equipment that meets your business needs. In many cases, this is desktop computers and telephones. Everything else can go to the cloud. Add video capability and you have desktop conferencing without buying any new servers or making big changes to your network. All the complexity involved in making this work is handled out there in the cloud.

What are the advantages of adding video to your voice communications? You instantly have video conferencing without the infrastructure and inconvenience of setting up special video conference rooms and having people convene there at a particular time. Video conferencing has long been used as a substitute for expensive and time consuming travel. Desktop video conferencing takes that to the next level. Now you can have spontaneous or scheduled video conferences without having to uproot otherwise productive employees just to waste time gathering at the other end of the office.

Where else do you see this type of personalized video communications? Smartphones, of course. Also tablets, Ultrabooks and laptop computers. All of these have one thing in common: mobility.

The fact is that people don’t work in one particular location anymore. You may have your first conversations before you leave home in the morning or on the way to work. Then you spend some time at your desk along with moving around in the office. Many employees will leave the office building at some point to meet with clients or other business and personal related activities. In the old days that means having an operator take your incoming messages or letting callers record voicemail. You’d find out who was calling and why when you got back to your desk.

At the speed of business now, you can’t afford to be incommunicado for hours or even minutes. A missing employee can put an entire team project on hold. A sales prospect may well move on to the next vendor if they don’t get through to a person immediately. You need all of your communications integrated into one unified system.

This is where cloud-based PBX services shine. They support integrating desk phones and mobile phones in a process called Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). With the addition of video and single number calling, you are now connected at all times with the same feature set no matter where you happen to be.

Another feature of many hosted VoIP systems is HD audio. We’re used to the sound of standard “toll grade” voice quality. This has somewhat degraded with the introduction of mobile phones and some inadequate VoIP systems. HD audio reverses the trend to make VoIP a higher voice quality service than traditional analog and digital TDM arrangements.

Are you feeling that your current business phone system is hurting rather than enhancing your productivity. Are you having maintenance headaches or face a major capital investment in new equipment? Don’t commit yourself to any particular solution until you’ve had the chance to evaluate Hosted PBX Cloud Services for audio and video communications.

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.

Latest Evidence Of An Ethernet Juggernaut

There’s an overwhelming force building. If it hasn’t gotten to you yet, it will soon. This force looks to redefine the telecommunications industry in a way that will fundamentally alter our communications networks from a telegraphy and telephony orientation to a digital packet orientation. After nearly a couple centuries of evolution, we’re now looking at a revolution that’s arisen in a couple of decades. That revolution is Ethernet and it’s gaining speed while we watch.

The acceleration of Ethernet services into traditional metropolitan and long distance telecom networks points out that the digital network, particularly the local area network, has become the center of communications activity. Worldwide traffic was primarily telephone calls until recently. Actual voice conversations are now the small part of the traffic. Data file transfers and video are now the big network activities. In fact, video has taken over the Internet and is driving the deployment of more and faster content delivery networks (CDN) to offload high definition video programming from the Internet.

Think about how you communicate. The office desk phone used to be the primary tool for business communications. “Data” was on paper and the interoffice mail was the network that moved it around. Today, you are as likely to use email, text messages and social media as you are to pick the phone and dial somebody. Data is now on hard drives and electronic data networks move it around. Even cell phones are still called “phones” out of tradition. Texting, Tweeting, emailing and posting are used as much or more than the voice side of the system. Wireless voice channels have been established technology for years. All the scrambling and innovation is focused on building more and faster data channels.

The switchover of the worldwide electronic communications network from telegraphy to telephony to computer data networking has taken place in steps with one methodology gradually yielding to another. Most long distance computer links use trunk lines originally designed to transport telephone calls digitally. The process of using analog phone lines to carry digital signals, called “dial-up,” ran out of capacity quickly at less than 100 Kbps. Digital telephone trunks, known as T1 lines, DS3, and SONET fiber optic services, start at 1.5 Mbps on the low end and go up to 100 Gbps on the very high end.

This system works, but the translation of loading data packets into telephone channels and then back again costs in efficiency and a limitation of network services. Since nearly every LAN is now running Ethernet, the most sensible change is to re-work the metro and long haul networks to also use Ethernet. You can then optimize for one protocol from end to end.

One technology shift that has enabled long distance or “Carrier” Ethernet is the industry shift from the original collision domains to switched Ethernet. This change doubled the speed of the links, since nodes can transmit and receive at the same time. More importantly, there is no need to constrain the length of the network to ensure detection of colliding packets. Nearly all LANs now use switches in place of hubs as a matter of course. This adds the possibility of running very long connections between switches, say 1,000 miles or more, and still create networks that behave like one large LAN.

Some of the latest announcements in this field are that a major carrier, Windstream, is now offering a product called Carrier Switched Ethernet. This is a wholesale bandwidth service that allows other carriers access to Windstream’s 980 network exchanges. Using E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interfaces greatly expands the service footprint of any network to include the networks of other service providers. Another announcement is that MegaPath, a major North American network service provider, has been building out its Ethernet over Copper (EoC) capability so that it is now the largest EoC provider in the country with 19 major markets serving millions of businesses at speeds up to 45 Mbps. That’s significant because it means you can now get last mile Ethernet connections over twisted pair copper lines, replacing bonded T1 lines and DS3 bandwidth.

The triple threat of Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber and Ethernet Network to Network Interfaces creates the opportunity to go “all Ethernet” in connecting multiple business location and dedicated access to the Internet. There are big cost savings available with this new technology, as well as multi-point mesh network services that were hard to implement previously. Could your company benefit from these Ethernet services? Check Carrier Ethernet pricing, availability and features and compare with what you are using now.

What Ethernet over Copper Is All About

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is perhaps the most exciting new business bandwidth service available. Any company currently using T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth or other connection services needs to compare what they have with Ethernet over Copper options. Why? Because the cost and bandwidth benefits are too great to ignore.

Let’s take a look at what’s behind EoC and how it compares with competing telecom services. First, let’s define Ethernet over Copper. You’re certainly familiar with Ethernet, the near universal standard protocol of local area networks. This is also Ethernet, but extended for metropolitan and wide area network transmission.

What’s special about Ethernet as a connection service? Other services, like the venerable T1 line, are products of telephone technology. They use transmission standards and technologies that aren’t directly compatible with computer networks. They can be interfaced, of course, with the appropriate protocol and signal conversions. This is why you can’t just plug a T1 line into any LAN switch or router. You need an interface card to make the two networks, LAN and telecom, compatible.

Ethernet over Copper is already in the right protocol. Your connection to the outside world is a common RJ-45 jack. It’s like extending your network over miles or even hundreds to thousands of miles. In practice, the service provider will often install a managed router as Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) to connect their network to yours. This way, they can monitor the MAN or WAN network automatically to ensure that everything is working the way it should and take corrective action if problems arise.

The term Ethernet over Copper may seem obvious, but there is an important distinction to be made. In this case copper doesn’t refer to Cat 5e or Cat 6 cabling. It is referring to the twisted copper pair telecom cable that connects your facility to the local telco office.

Telephone wire? Yes, indeed. This is one of the secrets to the general availability and low cost of Ethernet over Copper services. Nearly every company has multiple copper pair cabling already installed and hooked-up for telephone service. The pairs that aren’t used for telephone lines are available to supply T1, ISDN PRI or Ethernet over Copper.

For Ethernet over Copper service to be available, the central office that connects at the far end of the telco cable for your building needs to have EoC equipment installed. MegaPath, a major provider of Ethernet over Copper as well as other telecom services, has over 400 central offices (COs) nationwide already set to connect Ethernet over Copper. This includes major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC. This year they are expanding to include Austin, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Newark New Jersey, Portland Oregon, Sacramento and Tamp. Other providers are equally aggressive and deploying EoC technology as fast as they can.

So, what’s all the excitement about Ethernet over Copper? It’s primarily more bandwidth at lower prices for businesses. This is a business service, not targeted for consumers. The primary competition is T1 lines and DS3 bandwidth connections. For instance, MegaPath’s basic 2 x 2 Mbps EoC directly replaces a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. You might think that you’d have to pay more for the extra bandwidth, but actually it’s less. Prices are about the same for T1 lines and 3 x 3 Mbps EoC. That’s twice the bandwidth for the same money.

What’s more, Ethernet technology is more easily scaled than T1. You can bond T1 lines together to get 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9, 10.5 or 12 Mbps. The cost of the service is the cost of one T1 line times the number of lines bonded. Ethernet over Copper also uses multiple copper pair, but the bandwidth goes up much faster than the pricing. MegaPath is offering up to 45 Mbps EoC service in some areas. That’s equivalent to a DS3 connection supplied over fiber optic link at a higher cost.

Do you have proactive monitoring of your current telecom circuit? Are you guaranteed 99.99% reliability backed up by a Service Level Agreement (SLA)? Can you easily scale bandwidth to grow your business quickly? Are you paying more than you would have to by sticking with older technology?

If these questions have you wondering, you should see what you are missing. Why not get an instant online Ethernet over Copper price quote to see what bandwidths are available for your location and what they cost. If you like what you see, rapid ordering and provisioning service is readily available.

Hosted Voice Goes Mobile

There’s a major migration in progress right now. Can you guess what it is? If you answered “to the cloud,” you’d be right, of course. If you answered “PBX to the cloud,” you’d have read my mind. Companies are abandoning their PBX telephone systems in favor of cloud communications systems. You may know these as hosted PBX or hosted VoIP. Now, that also includes mobile.

Megapath’s Hosted Voice Mobile gives you the ability to have one-number VoIP calling from your desk phone, desktop computer or smartphone. The key is the one-number capability. Do you have one of those business cards with half a dozen different phone numbers? I’ll bet that confuses your customers and prospects. Hey, what are you supposed to do. You can’t be in the office all the time. Sometimes you are at your desk, sometimes you are out and about, the rest of the time you are at home. If a really important call comes in you aren’t about to quibble that you are “off duty” at home.

Legacy approaches to solving this problem include having a calling service that will try to locate you, carrying a pager (very legacy), remembering to forward to your phones, one by one, when you make a move, having a secretary take messages for you and leave them on your desk or just relying on voice mail that you check all the time. None of these approaches has been ideal, but they sure beat missing a critical communication.

This is where cloud technology shines. Location doesn’t mean a thing to the cloud, because it covers all locations. With cloud services you can be anywhere and access your account in the cloud using whatever compatible device you happen to have handy. With Hosted Voice Mobile, you use an easy-to-manage Web portal that controls call routing using a single VoIP number. That’s right. You hand out one number and know that you’ll get calls to that number no matter where you happen to be.

Hosted PBX systems relieve you of the responsibility to maintain a small telephone switching system in your back room. This function moves to a much larger platform at your cloud service provider. All you have in-house are IP phones, a voice gateway that delivers telephone services, plus your mobile smartphones. The hosted system contains the functionality for such features as Find Me / Follow Me and Visual Voicemail. Now that includes your smartphone as well as your desk phone.

Megapath goes beyond some of the basic hosted PBX services to include features like HD voice for crystal clear call quality, free domestic calling that includes long distance and the ability to replicate key telephone systems.

What’s a key system? If you have a phone system that has individual buttons for all the outside phone lines, you have a key system. Key phones have lights next to each line switch so you know when the line is busy. If you want to make an outgoing call, you select an unused line. If you want to join a conversation in progress, you push the button for that line and you are conferenced in.

PBX telephone systems differ from key systems in that the PBX manages the outside lines. You don’t have the ability to pick a line and probably don’t even know how many lines there are. They are placed in a pool and assigned as needed. That’s when an incoming call comes into the system, or someone requests an outside line by dialing a number, usually “9.”

Are you feeling constrained by the limitations of your present phone system or are experiencing outages that are time consuming and expensive? Before you get a loan to buy yet another in-house phone system, check out the options available with one of the newer hosted VoIP systems. You’ll avoid large capital investments, pay per seat per month, and gain valuable features such as mobile integration that you don’t have now. Compare competitive cloud hosted communications systems with what you have now and see what you’ve been missing.

Cyber Security Threat Protection In the Cloud

In days of yore, when castles were in vogue, the nobles found that massive stone fortifications were not enough to secure them from determined invaders. What they did was to ring the castle grounds with a deep water-filled ditch called a moat. This effectively prevented sieges from battering rams and tunneling under the castle walls. The lesson here is that your infrastructure is much easier to defend if you don’t let the bad guys anywhere near the main line of defense.

Now let’s fast-forward to the 21st century and see how these medieval lessons-learned can protect our networks. Our massive stone castle wall is now a firewall. It’s effective in preventing most penetrations into the network. Like real stone fortifications and wooden gates, that firewall can only hold out so long against massive assaults at the network edge. What we need is a modern day moat. This is an electronic moat, of course, and it needs to surround our network but not be in it. Where can we get that layer of protection? How about in the cloud?

The cloud might just be the perfect first line of defense for local networks. It’s an idea that makes so much sense that MegaPath, a major networking service provider, is taking exactly that approach in a solution they call Unified Threat Management (UTM). This suite of managed security services can be implemented completely in the cloud, completely on-site or within a hybrid private/public configuration.

MegaPath’s UTM suite is offered in the form of Security as a Service (SaaS). It’s a multilayer approach that can easily fend off unsophisticated attempted break-ins and stand up to higher threat blended attacks. This suite also coordinates security alerting, logging, reporting, compliance and response.

What’s in the SaaS suite? It starts with an advanced firewall that features deep packet inspection with up to 500 firewall policies. Intrusion prevention features multi-layered and blended attack detection that handles both known and unknown threats. A powerful anomaly detector identifies and stops zero-day threats to all network types, including wireless.

No good network security system would be without anti-virus and anti-malware these days. This one has both signature and rules based blocking. Anti-spam deals with the onslaught of unwanted messages and deletes or simply tags them depending on your policy. There’s nothing like having to work your way through hundreds or thousands of spam messages each day to kill employee productivity.

Speaking of productivity, just what are all those employees browsing on the Internet anyway? Make sure their time is spent on company sanctioned activities with white and black lists and policy-based content filtering. Web application control goes a step further to give you precise control of apps like IM, chat, and voice or video on social media sites.

You’ll have data loss prevention with real time detection and prevention of your sensitive company data being transferred outside the company. That includes credit card, healthcare or financial data that is literally worth its weight in gold. Vulnerability scanning checks internal and external IP addresses to find and fix vulnerabilities in real time. Quarterly scans are implemented for PCI compliance. File integrity monitoring watches for unauthorized access or changes to critical system or configuration files.

Managed logging and security information management round out the MegaPath SaaS suite. These collect data and provide the alerting, reporting and archival you need for proper management. Portal based workflow management and tracking demonstrates due diligence in meeting organizational security policies and compliance reporting.

Are you feeling a bit vulnerable with the limited firewall and virus protection you have now? Sadly, the cost of one major breaking can far exceed the amount you’d spend preventing it with an effective cyber security solution. Now would be an excellent to investigate managed security services from MegaPath and other top tier network service providers.



Note: Photo of medieval castle and moat courtesy of Christophe.Finot on Wikimedia Commons.

Ethernet over Copper Connects Nationwide

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has quickly made a name for itself as a last mile access connection for dedicated Internet, MPLS networking, and linking two or more company LANs. The flexibility, ease of interface, and cost savings make this a service in demand. What’s held it back to date is lack of availability. Well, that’s about to change.

MegaPath, one of the country’s major competitive carriers, is moving in with Telx, a major network interconnection provider. What does that mean? It means that your Ethernet over Copper connection can go a lot farther than it used to.

MegaPath has been on a major construction effort to roll out EoC equipment to over 680 central offices within the next year. The central office is key because this is where the subscriber copper loops terminate. MegaPath used specialized G.HSDL technology with up to 8 bonded copper pair to deliver line speeds to 100 and even 400 Mbps in selected area. Their standard symmetrical speeds are 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 20 Mbps. Both layer 2 and layer 3 services are offered along with QoS/CoS to support business data and real-time voice and video simultaneously.

For its part, Telx operates 15 data centers with direct access to over 950 customers who have chosen to colocate within the Telx facilities. These include major telecom carriers, Internet service providers, content producers and delivery networks and cloud service providers. Telx is a pioneer in Ethernet Exchange, a way for carriers to exchange Ethernet traffic without having to first convert to another protocol like SONET. The E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface benefits each carrier who participates because now they can directly access customers on other carriers and vice-versa.

Ethernet over Copper along with Ethernet over Fiber form the basis of Carrier Ethernet. This is the familiar Ethernet protocol that runs on your LAN adapted for use on telecommunication networks. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has standardized a number of Carrier Ethernet standards so that they are compatible across network boundaries. These include EPL, EVPL, and ELAN.

EPL stands for Ethernet Private Line. This is equivalent to the point to point private line services familiar with T-Carrier and SONET services. EVPL is Ethernet Virtual Private Line. This is very similar to EPL. The virtual designation means that you can have a number of EPL services running to a single physical Ethernet port. This is particularly useful for companies that want to run private lines from a single headquarters location out to multiple branch locations. Together, EPL and EVPL form what is known as E-Line or Ethernet Line service.

ELAN stands for Ethernet LAN Service. You may also see this written as E-LAN. What differentiates E-LAN from E-Line is that E-LAN is a many to many or mesh network service. You can use it to tie together multiple business locations so that any location can communicate with any other.

Have you been interested in Ethernet over Copper services but concerned that they may not be available to support your particular location or your many locations nationwide? This is a rapidly changing market, with more service being rolled out almost daily. If you haven’t checked lately, you may be pleasantly surprised at how much connectivity is available and how much bandwidth your can get for your telecom budget. Check pricing right now, if you like. Ethernet over Copper prices from 1 to 100 Mbps are available instantly online. Other services for business locations will be promptly quoted by a Telarus bandwidth expert, upon request.

MegaPath Pushes EoC to 400 Mbps

The bandwidth of Ethernet over Copper services has been setting new standards on a regular basis. It’s now at the point where you have to think seriously whether you really need to invest in fiber optic construction to light your building or if EoC will get the job done. MegaPath has just upped the ante for those doing copper/fiber tradeoffs. The new upper limit is 400 Mbps.

Many companies that are using Ethernet over Copper are doing so as T1 line replacements to get twice the bandwidth for the same cost. The 2x2 Mbps and 3x3 Mbps options are especially popular for this application. Other companies are moving to mid-band Ethernet where even bonded T1 cannot go. These are bandwidths in the 10 to 20 Mbps range, suitable for many mid-size operations. It’s the companies that have hundred or thousands of employees to support or are engaged in high bandwidth requirement applications that have been stuck with fiber as their only option.

That’s all changed within the last year. More sophisticated modulation schemes and bonding to 8 copper pairs have pushed the bandwidth limit past 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps and even 200 Mbps. Now, MegaPath is offering a new service that can exceed 400 Mbps. This could be a strong option for companies that have specified OC-3 SONET fiber optic service at 155 Mbps and even OC-12 at 622 Mbps.

To be fair, the 400 Mbps speed is only specified on the download path. Upload speeds could be a fraction of that. Does asymmetrical service make sense in a business environment? It could, depending on what you are doing with it. Internet access is typically asymmetrical in nature, with download speeds 10x what you use for upload. That’s because most internet usage at the desktop consists of sending keyboard requests for Web pages or files and then viewing the results or making other use of the data in applications. The principal is that the huge files are almost always coming to the user rather than being sent.

That’s especially true for video, now the number one source of traffic on the Internet. It takes relative little upload activity to request the video files, even streaming, and a considerable amount of download bandwidth over extended periods of time.

Some cloud applications also fall into this category. If you routinely send huge files to the cloud and expect little back, then the asymmetry is wrong for you. However, if most of your bandwidth activity is using large information packages delivered from the cloud, then an asymmetric bandwidth connection could work in your favor.

MegaPath is also offering symmetrical Ethernet bandwidth up to 100 Mbps x 100 Mbps for point to point, point to multipoint and dedicated Internet access. Other options include Ethernet over DS1 and Ethernet over DS3 to address the inherent distance limitations of Ethernet over Copper service. As part of rolling out the new higher bandwidth services, MegaPath is increasing the number of central offices with EoC equipment from 200 to over 680 within a year.

Are your bandwidth requirements increasing, perhaps because of a current or planned move to cloud-based services? If so, you should know that fiber optic connections are only one option to get the line speeds you need for efficient operation. Get competitive quotes now for low, mid-level, and high bandwidth Ethernet over Copper line services for your business location. Sorry, no residential service available.

MegaPath Merges Integrated and Hosted Voice

Telephone switching has migrated over the decades from the local telephone company to the enterprise and now out to the cloud. MegaPath is building a bridge from in-house phone systems to cloud telephony by adding hosted services to their Integrated Voice services. This could be the cost effective transition you’ve been looking for.

If all you are doing is buying a few analog business lines from your local phone company and running them through a small business phone system you got at one of the big box office stores, you’ve pretty much got what you are going to get. Small companies have a way of growing to become medium size companies, however, and a two or four line system with a half dozen desk sets is quickly outgrown.

This is where most businesses call in a local phone system dealer who installs and maintains a particular brand of business phone system. With an in-house PBX (Private Branch Exchange), you’ll be adding more outside lines but now you have the opportunity to shop around. You can get your analog lines from a competitive provider or move up to digital trunk lines to save money once you get more than 6 to 12 lines.

MegaPath, a major competitive carrier with a nationwide service footprint, has a service called Integrated Voice specifically tailored to SMBs with their own PBX systems. They provide the outside lines that connect your PBX system to the world. The interface can be traditional analog lines for smaller systems, T1-CAS or ISDN-PRI digital trunks for medium and larger systems, or SIP Trunking for the newer IP PBX systems that support enterprise VoIP.

The Integrated feature of Integrated Voice is that you get both telephone and broadband service over the same dynamic DSL, T1 or Ethernet connection. This is a bit different from simply adding a third party VoIP service to your broadband service. With Integrated Voice, the combined data/voice is carefully managed to ensure that voice packets have priority over data packets so that using your computers won’t cause the telephone calls to break up. Any time a phone wants to make or receive a call, the bandwidth for this is reserved from the Integrated pool. Bandwidth not used for phone calls is automatically assigned for broadband Internet access.

Integrated Voice services are popular with small to medium size businesses because nearly every business needs both telephone lines and broadband Internet access. You can pay for these separately or have a more efficient and cost effective solution that combines the two.

Hosted Voice is a different animal. With hosted services, you no longer have a PBX system on your premises. Instead, you use a much larger PBX that is located at your service provider. It’s as if the service provider has become the new phone company. All you have in-house are telephones. These can be traditional phones that connect to an adaptor called a voice gateway or SIP Phones that are designed to connect directly to your network.

Hosted Voice services, also known as hosted PBX, are popular with companies that haven’t invested in their own PBX system or want to avoid the capital outlay for a needed upgrade and the ongoing maintenance headaches. All of those issues move to the service provider. As a user, you don’t perceive that the phone system is in the cloud rather than in the basement of your building. You may also enjoy advanced features such as remote worker, find me/follow me, simultaneous ring, auto attendants and hunt groups that weren’t available on your old PBX system.

MegaPath has been offering both the Integrated Voice and Hosted Voice services. What they’re doing now is giving businesses the chance to add Hosted Voice features to their Integrated Voice service as an overlay to their lines or trunks. This offers the opportunity for companies to gain more features almost instantly without the headache and expense of completely redoing their phone system right away. It’s something of a hybrid cloud approach where some of the equipment is on-site and some is in the cloud at the service provider’s facility.

Are you interested in upgrading your current business phone system with more advanced features or getting a better price on phone lines and trunks? If so, check out Integrated and Hosted Voice Services for business locations to find the mix that works best for you.

Do You Need A Managed Security Services Provider?

Network security worries have gotten way beyond concern over bemused hackers nosing around to see how far they can penetrate to achieve bragging rights among their peers. Cybercrime is now major crime. The goal is no longer the thrill of outwitting the local IT staff. It’s all about the money. If there is something worth stealing, there’s a motive for cyber criminals to target your network.

You really don’t have a choice when it comes to protecting your network, servers and other resources. The only choice you have is whether to do it yourself or outsource it. Outsourced security is often referred to as managed security services or SaaS, Security as a Service.

MegaPath, a major competitive carrier, offers a suite of managed security services that includes a managed firewall, intrusion prevention, anti-malware/anti-virus, web filtering, anti-spam, application control, data leak prevention, managed logging, vulnerability scanning, security information management, file integrity monitoring.

One area where the need for network security is particularly important is for electronic payments. There are millions, perhaps billions of dollars flying through networks as data packets at any given time. The payment card industry that includes all businesses involved in issuing and accepting electronic payments has strict standards in place for credit and debit cards, prepaid cards and other electronic payments. These are referred to as the PCI DSS for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

How confident are you that your retail or other business not only meets the letter of the law regarding PCI DSS but complies with industry best practices? It’s not just the large companies that are being targeted by organized crime. There is easier prey among smaller and mid-size organizations that lack the resources to adequately protect their own and cardholder data.

Don’t feel alone if you are concerned about being stretched thin and perhaps vulnerable when it comes to security resources. In a white paper called “The Compliance Trap”, MegaPath references comments by the Yankee Group that many companies with fewer than 50 employees often don’t even have a dedicated IT person. Companies with 100 employees typically have 2 IT staffers, and companies with 500 to 999 employees have five or fewer people with no security specialists on staff.

Certainly, you can take this as a cautionary tale and move to hire a security staff and the requisite hardware and software to fortify your network. Most companies with little or no security staff don’t have the budgets to embark on a major security upgrade in this challenging economic environment. But that needn’t stop you from improving the situation by getting your security as a service. Hiring an expert company that has already developed the necessary protocols and has trained staff available 24/7/365 can get you up to speed quickly and likely at a cost far below what you would have to spend yourself.

Do you need managed security services? If there is any question in your mind, why not get complementary cost quotes for security as a service and see how it fits your budget. You may decide that managed security is the way you want to go permanently.

2x2 Ethernet Takes on T-1

T1 lines have been the go-to commercial telecom service for small and medium businesses over the last decade. Now a challenger is taking on the venerable T1 line. It is a brand new service called 2x2 Ethernet that’s just been launched by MegaPath, a major nationwide competitive carrier. Let’s see what 2x2 Ethernet has to offer.

You might not think that T1 lines were subject to much competition. After all, the technology is half a century old and heavily entrenched. T1 was the first broadband digital line connection readily available to businesses. It came out of telephone company research and was used as a trunking system to transport telephone calls between switching centers long before it was offered to commercial companies. With repeater technology and the ability to be deployed over two unshielded twisted pair telco wires, T1 has risen to become dominant for digital telephone, point to point connections and dedicated broadband access.

Ethernet came out of the computer industry rather than telephony. Ethernet has grown to dominate local area networks for most companies. Until recently, Ethernet was considered a LAN technology and T1 was considered a WAN technology. There’s not much chance that T1 will move into the LAN, but Ethernet has been steadily encroaching on the metropolitan and wide area networks over the last few years. Now, it’s ready to make its move to take over the role that T1 lines still serve. But why?

Part of the answer is bandwidth. T1 lines offer a fixed 1.5 Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth. You get the same line speed in both the upload and download directions. Ethernet offers a variety of line speeds over both copper and fiber optic cables. The MegaPath 2x2 Ethernet runs at 2 Mbps for both upload and download. That’s a bit faster than T1, although the bandwidth increase alone isn’t what makes this service so attractive. In addition to the 33% increase in capacity, 2x2 Ethernet is easy to interface. The handoff from WAN to LAN is a standard Ethernet connector. No extra CSU/DSU interface circuitry is required, like you have with T1 lines.

What really makes the MegaPath 2x2 Ethernet service compelling is that it is priced less than a T1 line. Ethernet has enjoyed a per Mbps cost that often beats traditional telecom services, especially at the higher bandwidths. But this is a 2 Mbps service that costs less than a 1.5 Mbps service. Not only that, but you have a choice of configuring this service for either data only or voice plus data. With at least five lines of digital, analog or SIP trunking telephone service, the 2x2 Ethernet line cost is reduced even more. It would appear that we are in the twilight era of T1 dominance.

But what about availability? MegaPath has addressed this with Ethernet over Copper connections through 1,900 central offices nationwide. They estimate that over 90% of small and large businesses are within the footprint of one of these COs. MegaPath is actually a super CLEC or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier. The company is a merger of MegaPath, Covad and Speakeasy, all significant carriers in their own right.

Is your business in need of new connectivity or are you simply interested in seeing if you can get a better deal that what you’ve been paying for your existing T1 line service? If you have an older contract, that T1 might be costing you twice as much as it should. Find out for sure with a quick pricing and availability inquiry for Ethernet over Copper services. Higher bandwidths are also available for your more demanding applications.