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.

Optical Ethernet Connections To The World

Fiber optic connections are becoming common for network operations. How about for WAN (Wide Area Network) connections? Are you limited to what’s available on Ethernet over Copper or forced to abandon Ethernet for an unrelated telecom protocol?

Not any more. Ethernet connections have become established and far more common than you might think. This does include the lower bandwidth options over twisted pair copper, but it also includes high speed services over fiber optic connections. With fiber, you can pretty much have all the bandwidth you care to pay for. That payment may also be a lot less than you think.

Ethernet over FIber or EoF offers a set of high bandwidth services that meet the specifications of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). All together, these standardized services are referred to as Carrier Ethernet as distinguished from Ethernet that runs on a local area network. These two types of Ethernet are highly compatible. Carrier Ethernet runs in the switched configuration only. There is no CSMA/CD capability. This is actually the way most networks run today. Nearly all use switching and routing to gain full duplex performance. Carrier Ethernet also has provisions for OAM or Operations, Administration and Maintenance that is needed by carriers to ensure that the link keeps working reliably.

There are some real advantages in having standardized services available that meet the MEF requirements. Like standardized equipment, you know what you are getting and that it will interoperate or work with similar services from other vendors. Part of the rapid expansion of Carrier Ethernet is due to the ability of exchanging traffic between service providers through an Ethernet NNI or Network to Network Interface. All carriers have limited fiber optic assets and would be constrained by their own service footprints if they couldn’t interconnect with other carriers. By entering into traffic sharing arrangements, it is possible for carriers to span the nation and the globe.

Two of the standard Ethernet services you may be interested in are E-Line or Ethernet Line and E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. E-Line is the equivalent of the point to point private line available with T-Carrier and SONET telecom services. E-LAN is something different. This is a multipoint connection that can be used to network multiple business locations as if they were on the same bridged LAN. Everything operates at layer 2 so that switched Ethernet is available across town or to the other side of the globe.

Carrier Ethernet connections are through ports on a UNI or User Network Interface. Typical fiber optic port speeds mirror standard LAN speeds of 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps GigE and 10,000 Mbps 10GigE. This differs a bit from standard telecom services that have unique circuit interfaces for T1, DS3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, etc. Many carriers find it easy to install Gigabit Ethernet ports as a standard practice and then rate limit the bandwidth to the amount ordered by the customer.

The port itself will accept traffic at any speed up to the limit of the port capability. Let’s say that’s 1 Gbps. Since you have only ordered and are paying for 150 Mbps bandwidth, that’s what you’ll have on your Ethernet Line or LAN service. The real beauty of this system becomes apparent when you need to upgrade from 150 to 500 Mbps. All you need to do is call your service provider and notify them of the change. They’ll adjust the rate limit to increase your bandwidth up to the 500 Mbps level. There is no physical change to any of the equipment in the signal path. That means the change can be implemented in a matter of days or hours rather than weeks or months.

Ethernet bandwidth services often have many bandwidth increments available. You don’t have to jump from 150 to 500 Mbps. You may be able to get 200, 250, 300, 400 or some other increment offered by the carrier. Most carriers have a fine layer of granularity available because it’s all done in software.

Can you make good use of fiber optic Ethernet connections to the Internet or other business locations? If so, get prices, features and bandwidth levels available for optical Ethernet connections to your business location.



Note: Photo of Earth from space at night courtesy of NASA on Wikimedia Commons.

Meshed MPLS Forms a Cloud of Clouds

MPLS networks have risen to prominence lately as replacements for old-school Frame Relay networks that link multiple business locations. MPLS networks are highly popular because of their ability to transport nearly any protocol with high quality and reliability. One remaining wish has been the ability to use a multitude of carriers at various locations and still have them interconnected by a managed MPLS network. That desire has now been realized.

AireSpring, one of the fastest growing and most innovative competitive carriers, is now offering what they call a Meshed MPLS Network. Just what does such a networking scheme do and how is it different from the meshed network connections inherent in any MPLS network?

MPLS networks can be thought of as classic clouds. You connect each of your locations to the cloud by means of a last-mile access network and then instruct the MPLS network operator how each location should connect to the others. These can be private point to point links, a star network with corporate headquarters at the center, or a meshed network arrangement. The meshed approach is highly popular because it allows any location to communicate with any other location at will. You don’t have to be actively managing or even monitoring the network, as the service provider takes care of that.

The one fly in the ointment is that you need to contract with one MPLS network provider for all your connections. That service provider will take care of getting the access connections, even if it means subleasing copper or fiber from another carrier. But what if you already have contracts with carriers to provide MPLS mesh networks for particular geographical territories?

This can happen easily if your company grew by mergers and acquisitions. It can also happen in decentralized organizations or conglomerates of businesses that haven’t traditionally had a need to connect with each other. Not all carriers have a nationwide footprint. It’s common for some carriers to be strong in parts of the country and not have a presence at all in others. All of this results in the head-scratching problem of how you tie together disparate WAN networks.

This is the problem that AireSpring’s Meshed MPLS Network solution addresses. Their MPLS Mesh (tm) creates a NNI (Network to Network Interface) that ties together multiple carrier solutions running at T-1 or higher speeds into one MPLS Virtual Private Network. You then have the choice of linking all of your sites into a single IP network or segmenting your data into multipole secure networks. Note that the segmenting can now be logical and not geographical.

Meshed MPLS technology gives companies a flexibility that they haven’t had before. You can now pick and choose which carrier you want to serve which locations to minimize your telecom costs. Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms ensure that you can converge your entire network for voice, data and video. Your critical business applications will get the prioritization that they need for high quality performance.

Are you frustrated with your current hodge-podge of disparate telecom services that don’t quite perform the way you need and cost you a small fortune? It’s time to take a look a consolidating all that with a more advanced networking solution. Get MPLS network service pricing and features for all your business locations now. You’ll likely find you can have higher performance and lower cost at the same time.