Texas Fiber Optic Network Expansion

There are big things afoot in the Lone Star State. In this case, it's big network expansions from partnerships and mergers. The result is more options and fiber network availability for businesses located in Texas.

Transtelco is a major competitive provider with a fiber network that stretches from Houston to Los Angeles and dips into Northern Mexico to pick up Monterrey, Chihuahua, Nogales, and Tijuana. The have expansion plans for both Mexico and Texas routes.

Within Texas, PAETEC, another major competitive provider, has considerable fiber assets serving Dallas, Austin and Houston, to name a few of their Texas POPs (Points of Presence). PAETEC now has offices in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and The Woodlands.

What’s afoot is a joint venture between PAETEC and Transtelco that has PAETEC building out Transtelco’s fiber leg connecting El Paso and Temple. With half ownership in this project, PAETEC gains additional SONET ring diversity for its network across the southern US and into Mexico. They also have access to offer voice, Internet and fixed wireless to agencies of the state government that use services of the State of Texas Department of Information Resources.

What makes this situation even more interesting is that PAETEC has been acquired by Windstream Communication, a competitive carrier serving the southeast and midwest US, including fiber runs into Dallas, as well as a network that extends into Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia. Windstream has major fiber connections planned into other states, plus existing data centers in Newton, Iowa, Brookfield, Wisconsin, Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida, Charlotte, Cary, and Raleigh North Carolina, Ephrata and State College, Pennsylvania and Boston, Massachusetts. Windstream’s existing fiber network spans some 60,000 route miles.

Windstream offers MPLS network services based on a resilient optical core to service companies with multiple business locations. Their network offers VPN (Virtual Private Network) with VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) connectivity. It’s a fully meshed network that allows regional sites to exchange traffic without having to depend on a central hub server. For companies with converged voice and data networks, Windstream offers Real-Time QoS that ensures voice packets receive top priority to keep them from getting slowed down or held up by less sensitive data packets.

Do you need fast and reliable access to the Internet? Windstream offers Ethernet Internet with symmetrical bandwidth up to 1 Gbps. This is a dedicated connection that offers consistency you won’t get in shared cable connections and bandwidth that far exceeds the capability of T1 lines and DS3 connections. Windstream's service level agreement guarantees 99.99% uptime to ensure availability.

Do you have a business presence in Texas with a need for better voice or data connectivity than you have now? Get competitive fiber optic bandwidth quotes from PAETEC, Windstream and other competitive carriers serving Texas, the southern states, or the entire United States, with optional connections to international destinations.


Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

Fast Ethernet over Copper

Fast Ethernet has been a networking standard for many years. You may know it as 100 Mbps Ethernet speed. Nearly every computer, router and switch now has a Network Interface Card (NIC) rated at 10/100 Mbps or 10/100/1000 Mbps. Many smaller networks find 100 Mbps more than adequate. Larger networks use 1000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). The largest corporate and other high performance networks have at least part of their infrastructure running at 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE). Its when you leave the LAN and connect to metro or long distance networks that things slow to a crawl.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same network speed regardless of distance? That way it wouldn’t matter where you were transferring files to or from. The time to transfer would be independent of distance. This is especially important to companies with multiple business locations. The illusion of everyone being on the same network is shattered when it takes ten or a hundred times as long to get information from the remote site as it does within your own building.

What has stood in the way of upgrading network connections to a common speed is cost and availability. Fast Ethernet for MAN and WAN connections have been cost prohibitive for smaller companies. If your location isn’t on a fiber path, getting bandwidth above 10 Mbps or so has been out of the question. Well, not any more.

PAETEC, a major network services provider, is blazing new ground by deploying Fast Ethernet connections over copper as well as fiber. If your buildings are within the service footprint of this new technology you can avoid the budget breaking costs of fiber construction completely. PAETEC uses multiple bonded copper pairs within the same telco conduit to provide bandwidths as high as 200 Mbps.

Chances are that the multi-pair copper conduit is already installed in your building for multi-line telephone and lower speed services like T1. The beauty of T1 lines are that they use standard twisted pair copper telco wire. The major limitation is that the bandwidth is fixed at 1.5 Mbps. You can bond T1s together to get higher bandwidths, up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Technically this works just fine, but it gets pricey because the cost is the price of a T1 line times the number of lines needed.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is much more cost effective. First, the advanced modulation techniques support higher bandwidths per pair of wire used. Second, the cost does not multiply as fast at bonding T1 lines. Third, you can now get Fast Ethernet bandwidth using EoC.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper technology is distance. The higher bandwidths require you to be near the central office that connects to your copper bundle. That’s perfect for businesses with metropolitan locations, especially in major business districts. If you are located out in the boonies, you’ll have fewer options.

Do you need cost effective Fast Ethernet connections to support your business processes? Check Fast Ethernet over Copper availability and pricing now. Fiber and wireless may also be available at lower prices than you imagine. Sorry, no residential service available.

The Rush To Cloud Service Data Centers

There’s a major migration afoot. It’s a move, almost a stampede, from in-house server rooms to public data centers worldwide. Let’s take a look at what this trend is all about and where it may be leading.

The original reason for companies to consider data center colocation was cost savings. The tradeoff is fairly simple. Instead of your organization building and operating its own data center, you ship your servers, switches, routers and network appliances off to a colo facility. That facility offers cost savings through economy of scale. Instead of each business having to come up with environmentally controlled real estate, fire suppression, backup generator power and high bandwidth connectivity, the larger colocation company provides these facilities for hundreds or thousands of customers.

A colo or “carrier hotel”, as they were originally called when the main customers were competitive local exchange carriers, can provide the 24/7 technical staffing that you may not be able to afford. They’ve expanded their suite of services to rent not just rack and cage space, but servers themselves. You no longer have to buy and ship your own equipment. You can rent what you need and have it all set up for you. Even ongoing maintenance can be outsourced to the colo so that your only responsible for the applications you are running.

There is a blending of missions between colocation data centers and hosting companies. The colocation centers have become hosts with the addition of dedicated servers and even virtual servers.

The latest trend in IT is cloud computing and this is where colocation data centers are headed. One good example is PAETEC, a competitive telecom carrier with a national service footprint. PAETEC is known for it’s voice and data services that include T1 lines, DS3, SIP trunking, MPLS networks, OCx fiber optic bandwidth, and Ethernet over copper and fiber connections. Now PAETEC is on a major building spree to nearly triple its 7 data centers spread across the country.

What’s prompting this expansion? It’s all about the cloud. Corporate America has discovered cloud services as a way to control costs, increase flexibility and avoid sometimes unavailable capital investments in infrastructure. The idea of the cloud is very much like the concept of the colocation center with some capability expansions. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows you to rent all the servers and their related facilities that you need. The difference is that the architecture of the cloud is about making it easy to add and subtract resources rapidly. You can do that when servers are virtual and there are massive amounts of networked disk storage to draw from.

PAETEC is offering cloud-based products in their data centers that include dedicated servers, virtual servers, managed storage on demand and more. Hosted Exchange gives companies a Microsoft Exchange E-Mail server with PAETEC technicians and engineers available for support.

Is it time for your company to consider a move to the cloud or relocation to a colocation center to reduce costs and gain access to more resources as needed? If so, get pricing and availability of Cloud and Colocation Data Center Services near your location.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper Rivals Fiber

Ethernet over Copper is rapidly taking over from T1 lines as the bandwidth service of choice for low to medium speed applications. Multiple copper pair can support bandwidths of 20 Mbps up to 50 Mbps in some locations. Beyond that, it’s assumed that fiber optic service has to be brought in. Not any more. Now there’s 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper available from Paetec.

Twisted pair copper has a legacy of connecting central offices to telephone sets for over a century. The enormous installed base of copper connections makes this an extremely valuable resource even in the era of digital communications and fiber optic cabling. The problem is that unshielded small gauge copper wire loops were engineered to carry low frequency audio signals up to several miles. It’s a tribute to clever engineering that these same pairs can be repurposed to carry high frequency digital signals.

Paetec is applying Ethernet over bonded Copper Products from Overture Networks as the technology behind this amazing bandwidth fete. Overture acquired the technology when it purchased Hatteras Networks earlier this year. Their HN product series can deliver up to 15 Mbps per copper pair depending on distance. By bonding up to 32 pairs, bandwidths approaching 500 Mbps can be achieved. Typically, the equipment is used to support user bandwidths from 10 to 100 Mbps.

Speeds in the hundreds of Mbps, even up to 1 Gbps, over copper have been announced in experimental setups. Now, you can order 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper as a standard bandwidth service. This is particularly significant in that 100 Mbps “Fast” Ethernet is a standard LAN speed. By extending this into the MAN and WAN, the bandwidth speed bump experienced when exiting the office is eliminated. Two locations can share files as if they were side by side in the same building.

Ethernet over Copper technology has been gaining in popularity as the need for higher speed network connections increases. Business automation, medical file transfers, video transport and the move to cloud based services is rendering low bandwidth connections obsolete. T1 line used to be considered a broadband service at 1.5 Mbps. Now many companies need at least 10 Mbps to get their jobs done. So, too, wireless backhaul was fine using T1 lines as long as the traffic was voice and low speed data. Since 3G and 4G have become so popular, slow backhaul is no longer acceptable.

Why not just switch to fiber optic service with it’s unlimited bandwidth? Someday that will be the case. Right now, ready fiber access is available in core business districts and colocation centers. Many metropolitan buildings remain unlit for fiber. Small and medium size towns are relatively fiber-poor. Yes, there is a lot of fiber construction underway. But why pay a king’s ransom and wait six months to a year when there are multi-pair copper cables already run into your building? By employing Ethernet over Copper technology to take full advantage of that existing wiring, you can have higher bandwidths now without enormous construction costs.

Can high speed copper-based bandwidth be the solution that works best for your company? Find out by getting availability and pricing for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet over Copper service for your business locations.

New Phoenix Data Center Offers Colocation Services

Data centers are expanding as the business climate improves and companies pursue productivity increases and lower costs. Many businesses that never gave a second thought to using colocation facilities are taking another look. In the Southwest USA, a good place to consider is the new PAETEC Data Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

PAETEC has just cut the ribbon on their 4,400 square foot Phoenix data center as part of an expansion program that adds to their facilities in Bethlehem and Conshohocken, PA, Andover, MA., Houston, TX and Milwaukee, WI. Why? Customer demand. The role of Information Technology is changing and the “cloud” has a lot to do with it. PAETEC is positioning itself to capitalize on this movement with services that improve business continuity, information safeguarding, network latency reduction and a reduction of management needs.

The idea behind the cloud is one of economy of scale. You can have every company buying servers and racks, putting them in environmentally controlled rooms, providing the electrical power for both equipment and the cooling needed to take away the heat generated by the equipment, and hiring a staff to tend to the data center facilities. Alternatively, you can have a service provider create a much bigger facility and let companies buy their computing and storage services for a fee.

This is what cloud service providers do. They figure out the IT services that are common to many businesses and then provide those as a service themselves. But isn’t that six of one and a half dozen of another? How is the cloud a net saver of anything?

This is where economy of scale comes into play. The cost of operating a cloud services company doesn’t go up linearly with size. You need a certain amount of real estate, electrical power, HVAC, bandwidth and staffing to create a data center of any size. Having twice as many servers, disk drives and network appliances doesn’t necessarily mean you need to double your staff. Yes, you’ll need more floor space, air conditioning, electrical power and backup generation, but it probably won’t cost twice as much. The same is true for bandwidth. It gets cheaper by the Mbps and Gbps when you order big lines compared to little ones. Your staff can also be more specialized, since they are only dealing with a certain range of facilities and a defined set of services.

The contrast is even more dramatic when you compare the startup cost for small companies to create their own IT services compared to simply purchasing what is needed from a company that already has the facilities and expertise. Web site hosting, for instance, has gotten so cheap when purchased from a large hosting service that small businesses are hard pressed to justify buying and running their own servers. Many of them are now finding that offloading their telephone systems to a Hosted PBX service saves investment and staffing.

The colocation center fits somewhere in-between running your own facilities and outsourcing to the cloud. The colo offers the economy of scale for environmentally controlled and secure server space and WAN bandwidth. Yet, you have the option of providing your own equipment that you maintain yourself. Some colocation providers are now offering cloud-like services that include renting servers and storage they already have available and handling maintenance and repair through their 24/7 technical staff.

Should you be going to the cloud or relocating to a colocation facility instead of trying to do it all yourself? It may be time for a quick study to compare the capital and expense costs that you pay now with the monthly fees to get the same services outside. Get complementary support for pricing and availability of cloud and colocation services so you can do a good job.



Note: Photo of Phoenix skyline courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.