Connecting Offices Between the US and Mexico

By: John Shepler

Many companies do business in both the United States and Mexico. There are numerous carriers that serve the US market and others that serve the Mexican market. But what do you do when you need the same service level in both countries?

International Connections
Companies that do business internationally need telecom services that cross national borders. Fortunately, there are a number of carriers that offer international line services. These include connections between US cities and those in Mexico.

What type of connections? Today you have options for voice, data and video services. You can connect just two locations or create a large virtual LAN that includes all of your business locations in North America and beyond.

International Private Lines
The Bell Labs developed T-Carrier system is a standard used throughout North America. That includes the US, Canada and Mexico.

T-Carrier includes T1 (DS1) that runs at 1.5 Mbps and T3 (DS3) at 45 Mbps. In-between those standard levels additional bandwidths can be created by bonding T1 lines together. Two T1 lines give you 3 Mbps, three lines offers 4.5 Mbps and so on. The maximum bandwidth available by T1 line bonding is 10 to 12 Mbps. Above that, you generally run out of copper pairs available to be pressed into service or the bonded service become cost prohibitive.

T3 lines can be rate limited to bridge that gap between 10 Mbps and 45 Mbps. The line itself runs at full speed, but you only pay for the bandwidth that is actually enabled. The cost savings may or may not be attractive for fractional T3 service, depending on your needs.

It’s important to note that T1 and T3 lines are dedicated private circuits that are always available or “nailed up.” You don’t need to dial into them and they are reserved for your exclusive use. Since you are the only customer on the line, the only network congestion possible is due to your own demands on the circuit.

Fiber Optic International Lines
Fiber optic lines were originally developed using SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standards deliberately chosen to be compatible with the T-Carrier system. The entry level service is OC3 which runs at 155 Mbps. It is designed to easily transport 3 T3 line services. In fact, T3 is most often carried for most of the transmission distance by OC-3 fiber service and then provisioned by coaxial copper cable at the customer demarcation point.

SONET is still the core transmission technology of most wide area networks. OC-3 is just the starting point. Other commonly available services include OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps, OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

Like T-Carrier, SONET services are dedicated private lines. You don’t shared the bandwidth with anyone. It is completely reserved for your use and sits idle when there is no traffic.

Ethernet International Services
Telephone traffic was dominant on international telecom circuits for a century. That has changed dramatically to where voice is now the minor traffic and data is dominant. On some networks, video is not the big bandwidth user, followed by large data transfers and then voice traffic.

This change in the nature of telecommunications traffic has spurred a change in the transmission technology. Nearly all local area networks have adopted the Ethernet standard. It’s logical that metro and wide area networks do the same.

The equivalent to T-Carrier or SONET is EPL or Ethernet Private Line. The beauty of Ethernet is that you plug the network line into your headquarters LAN at one end and your branch office LAN at the other. It’s Ethernet all the way. Because of this, you can bridge two LANs so that they perform as one large local network.

Carrier Ethernet, as it is called, offers another service called Ethernet LAN service. This is a meshed network that can connect 3 or more locations as one LAN. It’s perfect for companies with operations in multiple locations.

MPLS Networks
For international connections, like US and Mexico, MPLS networks often offer the best value. MPLS is a private “cloud” network with nationwide and international nodes. You can get the same point to point connections offered by dedicated private lines, only on MPLS they are called virtual private lines and virtual private LAN. The virtual designation comes from the cloud structure of the network. You are sharing the network with other traffic rather than having a circuit all to yourself. The MPLS network operator sets up your virtual paths and guarantees bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss.

In the end, you have the sense of private line performance, but a much more affordable rate with the shared network infrastructure.

MPLS networks can carry voice and data traffic simultaneously with class of service provisions to prevent data from overwhelming voice. VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS is VoIP carried on MPLS networks. It provides your telephone service among multiple business locations.

Do you have a need to interconnect offices between the US and Mexico? If so, check out the options available with International private lines and MPLS networks.

Level 3 Network Connections Into Mexico

If you do business in Mexico or are a multi-national company with a strong presence in Mexico, Level 3 Communications has good news for you. They’ve launched a major initiative to bring high bandwidth packet network services to business locations within Mexico.

Level 3 sees a business opportunity in Mexico that may be missed by carriers other than the incumbent, Telemex. it helps greatly that Level 3 recently acquired international bandwidth competitor Global Crossing, which already had significant network connectivity in Latin America. One of those assets is a 3,484 km fiber optic ring that connects Monterrey, Mexico City, Mazatlan and Guadalajara. From there it connects to the Pan-American Crossing submarine cable that runs from South America and Central America to the United States. There’s another connection at Tijuana, with a landing at Grover Beach near San Luis Obispo to connect to the California backbone and trans-Pacific submarine cables.

The Mexico ring is capable of providing Terabits per second of bandwidth capacity for transporting voice, data and multimedia services. Among the network services that Level 3 is now offering in Mexico are EtherSphere, Managed IP VPN, High Speed IP, Dedicated Internet Access, Wavelength Services and Private Line Service.

EtherSphere is a worldwide Ethernet-based WAN service, connecting Ethernet transport services from 150 locations that support 26 cities around the globe. EtherSphere offers Virtual Private LAN services (VPLS) specifically intended for companies with geographically dispersed business locations. VPLS is a mesh network technology running on the Level 3 MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) core network. It’s also called Transparent LAN Service. The idea is to connect multiple Ethernet LANs together as if they are one bridged network serving all locations.

EtherSphere is a comprehensive VPLS service that supports six Classes of Services to prioritize traffic and enable network convergence on a large scale. You can easily scale bandwidth in various increments between 1 Mbps and 2 Gbps, although the system does support bandwidth above 2 Gbps. You have a choice of service types through the network that include multipoint to multipoint (mesh), point to multipoint (hub and spoke) and point to point connectivity similar to Ethernet private lines.

Level 3’s IP VPN service runs on their converged MPLS backbone rather than the public Internet. This gives you six-level Class of Service (CoS) for high performance voice and video transport as well as data connections. Level 3 owns more than 100,000 fiber miles connecting 450 markets in more than 45 countries. Your last mile connection can be anything from T1 through Gigabit Ethernet.

Level 3 is one of the world’s most connected Internet Service Providers. Their Dedicated Internet Access offers IP port speeds from DS-1 (1.5 Mbps) to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. High bandwidth users can opt for High Speed IP (HSIP), a dedicated wholesale high speed Internet service.

For the ultimate in high bandwidth service, Level 3 Wavelength service offers high performance, low latency fiber optic wavelength services over their high speed DWDM network. Available speeds are GigE, 2.5 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 10 GigE and 40 Gbps. You can order both protected and unprotected point to point configurations. Native Fiber Channel and FICON protocols are supported.

Level 3 Private Line services are available worldwide in over 45 countries. These connections are delivered over proven SONET and SDH architectures that are protocol independent. You can transport IP, voice, data and video as Layer 2 or Layer 3 traffic.

Do you have connectivity needs that include service to locations within Mexico or other international destinations from the United States? If so, get prices, features and availability for International fiber optic network services.



Note: Map of Mexico courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Foul Odor of Decaying Prepaid Calling Cards

Prepaid calling cards have become popular for international calls, primarily because of their jaw-dropping low advertised rates. They’ve probably caught your eye in the store with their large numbers of very small cents per minute. You may think that you’re going to call around the globe at will for a couple of cents, but you won’t be calling anywhere when the card goes bad.

Goes bad? You mean like milk and fish? Yes, exactly. You see, most prepaid calling cards decay once you start using them.

Think I’m kidding? Get out your magnifying glass and read the small print on the back side of the card. What will you see? Horrible things. Things like connection fees, minimum call times of 10 or 20 minutes, and weekly service fees.

What’s a weekly service fee? Hold your nose. You’re not going to like the smell of this.

A weekly service fee is a charge placed against your card every week after you first start using it. Buy a prepaid calling card and sit on it for a month. You’ll still have all the minutes you paid for. Buy a prepaid calling card and make a short call on it. Then put the card back in your wallet. Make another call a month later and you’ll probably find that some of the minutes have magically disappeared. They’ve been eaten up by those nasty service fees.

That’s the decay I’m taking about. Your minutes start to go bad as soon as you open the card. You don’t even have to stick your nose in the refrigerator and sniff. After a year or so that card that you thought was good for a few cents per minute has just run out of minutes. Add up the minutes that you’ve actually spent on the phone and you’ll find that you’ve paid over a dollar a minute. Not so cheap in the end, is it?

There are two ways you can avoid the stench of calling card decay. First, when you start using one of these cards use it up as fast as you can. Preferably, just make one long call. That way you’ll only pay one connection charge, not be affected by a minimum call charge, and be done before the service fees start.

What’s the other way? Use a service that gives you the cheap international rates that you want from a prepaid calling card, but doesn’t have the small print and seamy side to using it. A good choice is TEL3Advantage.

What’s different about TEL3Advantage is that there are no little paper cards involved. You order the service online for $10, $25 or so. Then you use it from any phone, including your cell phone. The process is similar to using any calling card. You dial a local access number or toll free number to reach TEL3Advantage. Then you dial the international number you want to reach from the US or Canada. You’ll pay the low per minute rate but no connection, hidden or monthly fees. You only need to avoid letting your account go inactive for a year.

But what about the rates? They can’t beat prepaid calling cards, can they?

What if I told you that you could make calls to China for 1 cent per minute right now? Is that cheap enough? OK, that’s a limited time promotion rate. The standard rate is 1.7 cents per minute. I’ll bet that’s cheaper than most of the calling cards you’ll find at the convenience store.

Here’s a bonus. Depending on how much service you choose to sign up for, you can get free bonus minutes added to your account. How many? Oh, how about as many as 900 free minutes to China? Does that sound reasonable?

Of course, there are low rates to all of Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and so on. You don’t need a special card to maximize your savings to any particular part of the World. Just sign up for TEL3Advantage international calling service and the world is at your fingertips. Call all you like. If you run low on minutes, just recharge your account. Best of all, there are no service fees draining your account. Oh, that does smell sweet.