Ethernet Private Line Service With Granular Bandwidth

Our experience with private line service has always been with point to point dedicated telecom services, such as T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, and OC3 fiber optic connections. Now there’s a new service available that gives you all the advantages of traditional private line services with some improvements and better pricing.

This new network service is called Ethernet Private Line Service, or E-Line. That’s not just a clever marketing term. It’s the official name of the service as defined by the MEF or Metro Ethernet Forum. In other words, E-Line is a standardized Carrier Ethernet service with enterprise level performance in metropolitan and long haul networks.

Let’s take a look a what we expect from a private line service and see how Ethernet Private Line Service measures up. A typical private line is a permanent point to point connection. For that reason, it is sometimes referred to as a “nailed up” connection to differentiate it from a temporary switched service connection such as a telephone call. The private line is truly private. The company that leases the private line expects to have full time exclusive use of the circuit. If they are not sending traffic at the moment, the line idles while it waits for the next burst of traffic.

A very typical implementation of private line service is the T1 point to point connection. A T1 line offers 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth in both directions. It behaves as an empty pipe connecting two locations for voice, data, video or whatever digital service is needed. T1 point to point lines are used to connect branch offices to headquarters, transmit medical images from a clinic to a hospital, or even carry program audio from a radio station studio to the transmitter site. A special arrangement called a “tie line” allows you to connect to PBX telephone systems together.

Higher bandwidth uses of point to point telecom lines include video transport for production and television broadcast, connecting business information systems, engineering simulation and overnight file backups to remote data centers. You can usually get as much bandwidth as you need for your application. It’s just a matter of price.

What makes private line services expensive is that they must be specifically engineered to meet a particular need. If the link is only across town, it may stay within the footprint of one carrier. But if you want to connect two locations in different states or on opposite coasts, your packets may traverse many different networks to get from point A to point B. That runs up the lease cost and may take a considerable time to install. If you want to change the amount of bandwidth once your connection is in place, the process has to start all over.

Qwest, a major player in the business bandwidth marketplace, is offering a private line service based on the latest technology. They already have in place a core MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) network based on fiber optics using DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. That gives them the ability to offer 100% committed bandwidth and traffic engineering while being fully MEF certified.

The advantages of implementing E-LIne over a pre-provisioned MPLS 10 GigE backbone network are that implementation to connect your locations can be much faster and you can select from a huge range of bandwidth options between 5 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps. This is called granular bandwidth, something difficult or impossible to obtain with traditional telecom services. Those bandwidth options are scalable in the sense that you can generally change your bandwidth level quickly and easily with a call to your service provider.

Qwest calls their new low-latency Ethernet Private Line solution “Qwest iQ E-Line.” It allows for point to point or hub and spoke connections within or between any of their 16 markets that include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Mo, Los Angeles, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sunnyvale, Tampa and Washington DC.

Are you in the market for high performance point to point network services or would you just like to see if you can get more bandwidth for less money? Check pricing and availability for Ethernet Private Line Service now.



Note: Photo of network switches courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Cloud Recovery Mirrors Your Servers and Data

Redundancy is a time honored way to protect what is valuable, especially what you need to run a business. That’s why we do periodic backups. You just never know when those flying heads are going to crash into the disk platter and destroy thousands, even millions of dollars worth of valuable data. But how about the entire operation of your business? Do you have that protected?

Just having a backup disk in the company safe won’t be much help if your servers smoke or a tornado comes along and leaves nothing but a concrete pad where your building once stood. With so much of most businesses depending on computer automation, it makes sense to replicate everything. All you need is a completely duplicate IT infrastructure.

Sounds good, but where do you come up with the capital to replicate your server rooms, applications, complete data set in real time, and the glue that ties all this together? Relax, you don’t really have to. Qwest will take now take care of that for you.

What’s new is Qwest Real-Time Application Recovery. It’s a partnership with Geminare, a company that has pioneered RaaS or Recovery as a Service. Qwest has the WAN network structure and robust data centers to host a copy of your business. Geminare has the technology to make the process seamless to the user.

One thing you don’t need is a big capital budget. In fact, you don’t need any additional hardware on-site at all. This is a cloud based service that’s fully managed by Qwest. They replicate your servers, applications and data on a real-time basis. When disaster strikes, availability to access your data and applications continues uninterrupted. Your office building can be blown away, flooded or burned down. The business goes on as if nothing ever happened. Thus is the magic of the cloud.

How do you pay for this? There’s a monthly fee for the service. For that you get automatic failover, continued access to applications and data, immediate remote operational capability, complete data protection, platform and application support, real-time disaster recovery tests and 24/7 support. There’s near-zero down time, no capital expense, no technological lock-in and no administrative costs. Qwest takes care of all those details. It’s like they are a duplicate IT center that you rent by the month.

Is cloud recovery something that could mean the difference between staying in business or going under in the event of a major disaster? Is it worth what it costs when you consider the implication of lost business or the capital and operating expense of doing this yourself? Why not find out quickly and easily. Get competitive quotes on cloud recovery, networking and other services now. Don’t wait until you are in real trouble. It would be too late then.

Qwest Embraces Ethernet over Copper to Reach Rural Business Locations

Qwest Communications is one of the country’s premier telecom services providers, with a fiber optic backbone that spans the nation with data transmission rates of 40 Gbps. Their next step up will be 100 Gbps. When major enterprises need serious bandwidth, they find that Qwest has all they need and then some. But what about those locations that are a bit off the beaten path? Are they pretty much out of luck or what?

Not any more they aren’t. While it’s true that remote offices of even the largest corporations have a hard time justifying the construction costs involved in trenching fiber cable so far away from the carrier POPs (Points of Presence), that doesn’t mean they can’t get significant bandwidth at decent prices.

The magic that makes it possible for even out of the way locations to get Ethernet services at Ethernet speeds is called Ethernet over Copper. The copper we’re talking about is standard twisted pair telephone cable. Not only that, it is the same telco cable that is already in the ground. Nearly every business location gets multiple pair cabling installed by the local telephone company during construction. It’s traditionally used for multi-line telephone service and, more recently, to bring in DSL and T1 broadband Internet access. The new way to employ the same old wires is to install specialized equipment to transport Ethernet signals over copper.

Qwest has just announced new Ethernet services for nationwide availability. These include 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 7 Mbps and 10 Mbps, all delivered over bonded copper pair. The bonding process is a software solution that combines what are normally separate signals on independent copper wire pairs so that they act as one much higher speed conduit. That process was originally employed by carriers to bond T1 lines to increase bandwidth beyond the 1.5 Mbps T1 limit. With different terminal equipment, those copper pair can now deliver Ethernet services as well. You need up to 8 pair to get the maximum 10 Mbps speed level.

Most smaller businesses and branch offices of medium and larger size businesses can run just fine with 10 Mbps bandwidth for last mile connectivity to MPLS networks, dedicated Internet connections, or Ethernet Virtual LAN service. Since the copper is already in place, construction costs are minimized and service can be deployed rapidly. They are also scalable. You can start off with 3 Mbps bandwidth, if that is all you need, and then scale up to 5, 7 or 10 Mbps as your business level requires.

Is your office, plant site or warehouse struggling with too limited bandwidth because you think that a speed increase is prohibitively expensive? You may be surprised and delighted by how much bandwidth you can get for the same budget you have now. The way to find out quickly is to check prices and availability for Ethernet over Copper service in your area right now.

Qwest Offers Synchronous Service Transport For Massive Bandwidth

Do you have the need to move massive amounts of data from one location to another. Within your building or campus, you can pull your own fiber cables and transport as much data as fast as required. But when you leave your own property and connect across town or across the country, you need carrier services that can keep up. Quest’s has just the solution called SST or Synchronous Service Transport.

SST is a high speed point to point data service that uses fiber optics and SONET, the Synchronous Optical Network. SONET technology is a mature and highly reliable carrier service based on TDM or Time Division Multiplexing. It was developed for the telephone companies and offered to large businesses and organizations that need unusually bandwidths. Most of the core telco networks are based on SONET.

QWEST offers five bandwidth options throughout their 14 state local service territory where the facilities exist. The bandwidth levels are OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps, OC24 at 1.24 Gbps, OC48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC192 at 10 Gbps. In addition, Ethernet can be transported on SST. QWEST can provide 10 Mbps standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, and 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The can even support a situation that has an Ethernet interface at one end and and SONET interface at the other.

The “Fat Pipe” is a popular use for SST. If your operation has exceeded the capacity of a DS3 circuit at 45 Mbps, then you’ll be moving up to fiber optic connections if you don’t already have them. Installation times are much faster, of course, if facilities already exist. Otherwise fiber has to be pulled and termination equipment installed in the building. Some large office buildings and industrial parks are installing fiber optic service as a utility to “sweeten” the deal for potential tenants. With a significant number of users, this can even become a profit center for the operator.

SST can also be used in a Gather/Distribute mode. A number of lower bandwidth services, such as DS1 and DS3, can be gathered and multiplexed onto a higher level service such as OC3. The reverse process, called demultiplexing, can be used to distribute multiple services from a single high capacity service. This is a technology used primarily by service providers themselves.

Another application is using SST at a transport facility. SST can carry a wide variety of protocols, such as video over ATM or LAN interconnections. SST can transport most private line, packet and switched services.

If your business requires significant amounts of bandwidth, you may have multiple options to choose from and at prices that may be significantly less that what you expect. Use the GigaPackets website to explore fiber optic service availability and prices and/or talk over your business needs with an expert consultant.