Is a Virtual Leased Line Right For Your Applications?

By: John Shepler

Leased lines have been popular with businesses since they were made available from the telephone companies decades ago. But how about a virtual leased line? Could you make good use of this technology?

Before we get into virtual leased lines, let’s take a quick review of what leased lines are and how they work.

Leased Lines vs Shared Bandwidth
A leased line is a telecommunications line that you lease for a particular time period. This is typically 1 to 3 years. During that time, you have exclusive use of the line for your applications.

Contrast that with shared bandwidth, the norm on the Internet. You don’t lease the Internet, you may lease access to the Internet. Once you are on the Internet, your traffic gets in line with everyone else’s and traverses the various networks that get your packets from source to destination.

Last Mile Often Determines Performance
Actually, the core of the Internet works pretty well most of the time. The congestion and latency you may experience is generally caused by the access or last mile connection. Shared bandwidth services such as cellular broadband, satellite, DSL or cable broadband are shared “best effort” services. You get what you get at any particular time because your performance is determined by how much of the bandwidth pool is being used by other customers.

How Can You Improve This Situation?
With a leased line, of course. This is called DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. Typical leased lines include T1 (1.5 Mbps), Ethernet over Copper ( 10 to 50 Mbps), DS3 (45 Mbps), OCx (155 Mbps and up) and Ethernet over Fiber (10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and more).

Why choose this hybrid approach of dedicated access and public shared Internet? It’s to improve the performance of your Internet connection end to end. You need the Internet to connect with customers and vendors and gain access to the wealth of content that is the World Wide Web. DIA gives you the best shot at excellent performance for business.

Dedicated lines are for much more than simply connecting to the Internet. They were in heavy use before there even was an Internet. Radio stations employed specially equalized analog lines to get their signals from studio to transmitter. Fire alarm systems use low bandwidth dedicated lines to send alerts to monitoring stations.

Rise of the T1 Line
Computerization of business made the T1 line popular. This is a dedicated private leased line that offers 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. It’s still used to interconnect retail franchises to headquarters and for connectivity in rural locations where other services aren’t available. T1 has been the standard way to connect cell phone towers to central offices, but that is giving way to fiber optical lines that support 4G and beyond. If 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough for your needs, you can bond T1 lines to get up to 10 or 12 Mbps. A specialized version of T1, called ISDN PRI, provides telephone line trunking for PBX telephone systems.

What T1 and other leased lines offer beyond dedicated use of the line capacity is low latency, jitter and packet loss, along with the security of knowing that you are the only one with access. This is especially valuable for banks and other financial institutions where maximizing security is a very high priority.

Low latency is an important characteristic in preserving the quality of voice communications and teleconferencing. It’s also key to getting the fastest response from cloud based services.

Addressing the Cost Issue
The one drawback of leased lines is that they get expensive over long distances. Every leg in the path requires dedicating or “nailing up” a hardwired circuit (or fiber channel) almost indefinitely. Is there any other suitable option?

Yes. It’s called the virtual leased line (VLL). “Virtual” may sound a bit like “Internet,” but this is something different. Virtual does mean that you share a connectivity resource. In this case, that resource is a privately run MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) network.

MPLS is the answer to cost effective private bandwidth service for nationwide and International connection. Few companies can afford true dedicated private circuits on transatlantic cable or even to multiple locations in the US. MPLS providers create their own core fiber optic networks with huge service footprints. This gives you the connectivity you need to the locations you want to interconnect. The core of the network runs at 10, 40 or 100 Gbps, so you’ll have all the bandwidth you need now and for growth, without having to commit to line capacity you can’t load up at the moment.

How MPLS Works
MPLS is a specialized technology that uses proprietary label switching to set up communications paths. These paths support IP traffic, but the network is not based on IP. That’s a security benefit. More security is derived from MPLS being a “private” network with no access by the general public. If you still want more security, you have the option to encrypt your traffic. The MPLS network will transport it.

The MPLS network operator sets up your virtual leased line from point to point, as you specify. You have a committed information rate (CIR) that defines the bandwidth you are guaranteed. A bonus is that some MPLS carriers allow you to burst above that rate for show intervals, something a hardwired circuit can’t do. MPLS service level agreements also specify the latency, jitter and packet loss you can expect. These are similar to what you’d get with other leased line options.

Related Services
You may hear VLL also described as Virtual Private Wire Service (VPWS) or EoMPLS (Ethernet over MPLS). A related service is Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) that is a many to many meshed network. It gives you the option of creating a LAN that interconnects all of your business locations over a large MPLS network.

Does this technology sound like what you need right now for your applications? Get more information and latest pricing on dedicated leased private lines and virtual leased line options now.

Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber to Your Door

Big data, cloud services, medical images, video production and other bandwidth intensive applications are stretching the capacity of many traditional WAN services to point of congestion. That’s were bad things happen to good data. Frustration, productivity loss, delays in file delivery and unworkable telephony and video conferencing rear their ugly heads when there just isn’t enough bandwidth to go around. Fortunately, solutions are easier to come by than ever before.

The answer to big bandwidth demands is big bandwidth services. T1 lines were left in the dust years ago. Many companies thought that moving up to DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps would keep them in good stead for the foreseeable future. That future came sooner than foreseen. While Ethernet over Copper and fixed wireless can give you 50 or 100 Mbps of reliable symmetrical bandwidth, they’re also being left in the dust. What remains? Fiber optic WAN services in both SONET and Ethernet flavors.

SONET is the grandaddy of fiber optic bandwidth. It’s a standard developed by the telephone companies for transmitting or “trunking” large bundles of telephone calls between switching centers and overseas. Options begin at OC-3 with 155 Mbps. If that’s not enough, then OC-12 at 622 Mbps is the next step up. OC-24 offers 1.2 Gbps, but isn’t so widely available. You may be required to take OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps. In some cases, you’ll be able to contract for OC-192 at 10 Gbps or even OC-768 for 40 Gbps. Those are usually reserved for network operators themselves, but are now becoming more available to businesses.

So that solves the bandwidth dilemma, right? It would except for budget constraints. OCx SONET services have traditionally been pretty pricey. Those costs have plunged in recent years due to increased competition, but the need for bandwidth is expanding faster than corporate budgets. Fortunately, there is another alternative. That’s Ethernet over Fiber.

EoF, as it’s called for short, has some real advantages over traditional SONET optical carrier services. First of all, it’s Ethernet. Yes, the same Ethernet that runs on your local network but extended so that it can reach across town or even around the world. That makes interfacing easy and efficient. There’s also the cost factor.

Ethernet over Fiber typically costs a fraction of what you pay per Mbps for equivalent SONET bandwidth. A lot of this has to do with competition that has come into the market after deregulation of the phone companies. With SONET, you almost always have the local phone company involved in running the last mile connection. Ethernet has been adopted by newer competitive carriers who operate their own fiber networks, including owning the fiber. They can run a drop from their closest point of presence (POP) to your building and give you just about any bandwidth you require.

Not only are these carriers hungry for business, they have a much wider range of bandwidth options at their fingertips. Carrier Ethernet, as it is called, was designed from the get-go for ease of scalability. SONET has fixed bandwidth levels known generically as OCx. Each OC level has its own interface requirements and they don’t intermix. If you want to jump to the next level, the service provider will have to roll a truck and plug in a different module. They may also have some changes to make in their network to ensure they can deliver the contracted bandwidth.

Contrast that with Ethernet over Fiber. The interface to your equipment is called a “port”. A port has a maximum speed that it can run but no lower limit. You could install a 10 Mbps Ethernet port, but today’s practice is to install a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet port or a 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet port. With a GigE port, you can order, say, 200 Mbps now and know that you can ramp up to 500 Mbps or even 1000 Mbps with little more than a phone call. In fact, it takes just hours to a few days to increase your line speed. Compare that to traditional practice that can require weeks or months.

Installation is still a consideration. Many business locations are still not connected to any fiber optic carrier. That doesn’t mean they can’t be. Metro Ethernet Networks are expanding rapidly, especially in larger business districts. Even if you couldn’t get anything last year, you might have a couple of providers to pick from this year. You’ll almost certainly be served if your equipment is in a colocation center or you are renting cloud computing services. All of these data centers are served by multiple fiber optic bandwidth providers. That gives you the option of moving your demanding applications to where the bandwidth is readily available and then connecting back your facility with a lower but adequate speed service like Ethernet over Copper.

Another strategy is to get together with other tenants in your office building or park to woo a fiber carrier who might not otherwise think the investment is worth it. With multiple clients all ready to commit to fiber bandwidth, the combined capacity can lure service providers to run a drop to your facility where each customer can connect their equipment to the provider's edge router. You might even get a substantial break on construction costs or pay nothing at all if the commitment is high enough.

Are you interested in more bandwidth for your business? If so, check options and get free consultation on what’s available in high bandwidth fiber optic network services.

Fiber Maps At Your Fingertips

You’d like to move to higher bandwidth services, but you have no idea what that is going to cost. Horror stories of fiber optic construction costs abound. How can you tell if the cost of moving up from copper to fiber optic bandwidth services will be trivial or unacceptable?

The best thing you can do is get a set of competing quotes from many carriers that have facilities in your area. That’s going to take a lot of time and energy, isn’t it? Not if you approach it the right way. By going through a telecom broker, like Telarus, Inc., the effort on your part is next to nothing and you’ll have results quickly. Moreover, you get a comprehensive report that gives you pricing from all the important carriers in your marketplace.

Want to find out right this minute if there is fiber nearby? You can do this in a matter of seconds with just a quick click to the Ethernet Today Shop For Ethernet search box. All you need to do is enter the street address of your building, city, state and zip code and the system will automatically search the database and give you a map and list of buildings lit for Ethernet fiber optic service nearby.

Why Ethernet? The best prices for higher bandwidth services have changed from SONET services, such as OC-3, OC-12 or OC-48, to Ethernet over Fiber services such as 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet or 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). If you request pricing, you can also ask for equivalent SONET service prices so you can compare and see how much you are saving. In some situations, you may already be set up for SONET and happy with the arrangement. That’s fine, but you might as well get better pricing on your next contract.

Location is everything when it comes to fiber optic services. The best situation is already being in a building that is lit for the fiber optic service you want. The bandwidth level isn’t important. What is important is that someone has already paid the cost of bringing in the fiber and getting it working. Fiber has so much bandwidth capacity that there is plenty for whatever your needs require, even if another tenant in the building is already connected to that carrier.

What if you want Ethernet and your building is only lit for SONET? Have a look at the cost figures, including any construction charges, and decide whether it is better to just stick with SONET bandwidth or have Ethernet brought in. Sometimes you can get what’s called Ethernet over SONET that has better pricing than the traditional OCx service levels.

Don’t despair if you aren’t in or next door to a building lit for fiber optic service. Carriers are more competitive than ever. One or more may well waive the construction fees to get your business. The chances of this increase dramatically if you round up other tenants in the building and all offer to subscribe to fiber services with a very attractive combined bandwidth.

Here’s something else. Even buildings too expensive to light with fiber can get bandwidths far above the traditional T1 lines that come in on telco copper. Today’s Ethernet over Copper technology bonds multiple pair to bring in bandwidths of 10, 20, 50 and even 100 Mbps. That’s done over already installed copper wiring, so construction costs are minimal to nothing. This much bandwidth is adequate for many, many businesses.

Are you at least curious as to what fiber optic services may be nearby? If so, instantly check for lit buildings near your location and then request the pricing and recommendations you need to get the best deal for the least cost.

Fiber Ethernet WAN Bandwidth Advantages

Large businesses and other larger organizations generally require more bandwidth than is available through T1 lines or other broadband services that can be provisioned over copper twisted pair. Fiber optic connections can provide nearly unlimited bandwidth, but what is the most cost effective service?

If you are a current user of fiber optic bandwidth, you are probably leasing a SONET/SDH service such as OC3, OC12, or OC48 for your wide area networking needs. These are traditional telecom services that were originally developed for the telephone companies to carry large numbers of telephone calls. They are circuit switched channelized networks that have been adapted to transport today’s demand for high data bandwidth connections.

A newer service that is offering serious competition to the legacy telco services is Ethernet over Fiber or EoF. It’s a packet-switched network that transports Ethernet at the layer 2 switching or layer 3 routing level. Within metropolitan areas, this service is known as Metro Ethernet. Over long distances, it is called Carrier Ethernet or Long Haul Ethernet. Just about all bandwidths are available, but generally you’ll find fiber Ethernet being used to carry 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gbps 10 GigE. Even high bandwidths, including 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps, are used for carrier backbone networks.

One advantage of fiber Ethernet is that it is scalable. You may start out with 100 Mbps service but quickly find out that you need more bandwidth. With traditional SONET services, there can be long delays in upgrading your service to the next level. There may also be a big jump in bandwidth and cost to get to that next level. OC3 gives you 155 Mbps. But OC12, the next readily available increment, runs at 622 Mbps.

Fiber optic Ethernet can easily scale up to the limit of the installed port. For instance, if you have a port that is capable of 1,000 Mbps, you don’t necessarily have to buy that much bandwidth. It’s common to order a fraction of the port’s capability, say 100 Mbps and then upgrade to 200 Mbps when demand justifies such a move. Often this can be done with only a phone call to your Ethernet service provider. Only when your demand exceed the 1,000 Mbps capacity of the port will new equipment need to be installed.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of fiber Ethernet services is cost savings. In additional to the traditional telephone companies, there are numerous competitive carriers that have their own regional or nationwide fiber optic networks and points of presence. These carriers can build-out a fiber connection to your building. It may not be that expensive if you can guarantee a high enough bandwidth level to justify the construction. You’ll find the monthly lease rate attractive, too. They are often only a fraction of what you’d pay for equivalent OCx services.

How can you determine if fiber Ethernet services are the best option for your business or organizational needs? You can get a quick answer with multiple vendor quotes and recommendations now using the Fiber Ethernet Services Inquiry form that you’ll find at Ether Rabbit. It’s fast service on fast Ethernet services.

Ethernet DS3 Bandwidth Comparison

Business bandwidth requirements have been steadily increasing since T1 lines became standard for dedicated Internet access and private point to point connections. If you are a current user of DS3 bandwidth services or considering an upgrade, you’ll be interested in how your various WAN bandwidth options compare.

The traditional high bandwidth network connection is DS3, a 45 Mbps service. This is also the speed of a T3 line. Today, most DS3 services are provisioned over fiber optic cables with a copper handoff at the demarcation point. In some cases, you can get DS3 brought in over coaxial copper or wireless transport.

DS3 is popular for dedicated Internet access in larger organizations, video transport, links to offsite backup and storage and smaller ISPs. DS3 telephony bundles hundreds of outside phone lines for large companies and call centers.

The competitor to DS3 is Carrier Ethernet, especially Metro Ethernet in larger cities. Ethernet services offer standardized speeds of 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps to match the common LAN speeds. But most Ethernet providers also offer other increments in 1, 5 or 10 Mbps steps. A 50 Mbps Ethernet service provides similar bandwidth to DS3.

So how do you choose one service over another? If you need the channelization of traditional TDM services for telephony or other applications, DS3 already meets this standard. It is easily multiplexed and demultiplexed to interface with T1 lines on the low end to OCx SONET fiber optic services on the high end.

Most networking applications are now packet based and more easily interfaced to Ethernet WAN services than legacy telco standards. But since the interface circuitry is generally an off the shelf router module, it may not matter all that much. If you go with a managed router, the service provider will take care of providing the proper customer premises equipment and monitoring the line and interfaces for proper operation.

To muddy the waters a bit more, fractional DS3 services are available that offer less than 45 Mbps for a lower monthly lease cost. You can often get the bandwidth you need by bonding T1 lines together to create increments of 1.5 Mbps up to around 10 or 12 Mbps bandwidth. Or you can get fractional DS3 bandwidth at the speeds where T1 bonding becomes impractical. On the Ethernet side, you can specify nearly any bandwidth from 1 Mbps up to 10 Gbps and often upgrade to higher levels with just a phone call to your service provider.

The fact is that DS3 and Ethernet bandwidths compare favorably. Which you choose for your particular application will most often be determined by which service offers the best pricing for your particular business location. How can you find that out? The easiest way is to check DS3 and Ethernet prices and availability using the GeoQuote online search tool.

Ethernet From Coast To Coast

You have Ethernet running from office to office on your LAN. But what if that same Ethernet network could exit the building and hookup to your other facilities around town and across the country. Would you like to have one comprehensive network that stretches from coast to coast?

That capability is here today. It goes by the name Carrier Ethernet. This is the same Ethernet that you are running on your LAN today. But now it’s been upgraded and standardized to run on metropolitan and long haul networks.

How do you get Carrier Ethernet? You need to sign up with a private network services carrier that offers that service. These are competitive carriers that have built nationwide footprints of fiber optic transport with points of presence in major metro areas. Often the core network is an IP based MPLS network that supports whatever protocol the customer needs.

Access to the nationwide network can be by fiber optic connection, Ethernet over copper or wireless Ethernet. The physical medium is less important that the fact that the network protocol is Ethernet from end to end. What the physical medium generally does dictate is the maximum access speed through the local loop. Even so, standard 10 Mbps Ethernet access is generally available in metro areas with lower speeds available just about anywhere via Ethernet over DS1 connections.

One advantage to the end user is that access to the Ethernet WAN (Wide Area Network) at each location is a standard RJ-45 connector. Just like with your in-house LAN, you plug into the Ethernet connector and you are on the network.

An even more important advantage of Carrier Ethernet versus traditional telecom services is cost. It’s not unheard of for an Ethernet service lease to cost half of what a company has been paying for similar bandwidth DS3 or OCx services. Sometimes the cost advantage is even more dramatic. It all depends on service availability in your area and how long ago you entered into your telecom services lease.

Would you be interested in less expensive WAN service with more bandwidth options? If so, check out Carrier Ethernet prices and availability for your business locations. Be prepared for a pleasant surprise.