The Time for POTS Replacement Has Come

By: John Shepler

Nobody likes change when it is forced upon them. But change we must as technology relentlessly advances. On its way out are innovations from the gilded age. The incandescent light bulb? Gone. The telegraph? Long gone. The telephone line? You guessed it. It’s going fast.

POTS is Kaput!
Alexander Graham Bell’s fantastic invention, the telephone, is going stronger than ever. But, it has morphed into technologies that weren’t dreamt of by Bell or Watson. What’s on the way out is the century-old connection system of twisted pair copper wires and the instruments that connect to them.

Plain Old Telephone Service or POTS is the current jargon for standard telephone lines consisting of two small diameter copper wires connected to a telephone company office that provides the power, switching and signaling needed to allow any phone to talk to any other phone around the world.

Why Ditch It?
There are two answers. Cell phones and Computer Networks. Neither have any use for POTS interfaces. Residential users have long embraced their smartphones to the exclusion of most everything else. Fewer and fewer are willing to pay the phone company ever increasing fees just to have an old-timey desk or wall phone available just in case the cell tower goes out.

Businesses have been on a similar trajectory. Mobile phones have become important business tools, but the desk phone still has a lot of value. The only difference is that the desk phone often connects to the computer LAN rather than its own unique network. This enables a lot more calling features, including a mash-up of desk sets, smartphones, laptops, PCs and tablets.

With this every increasing switch away from POTS, the phone companies find themselves with huge stockpiles of lines and switching equipment but less and less revenue to support them. That’s why the petitioned the FCC to let them decommission their copper resources and convert the central offices to data centers in high demand by AI and other computing needs.

Why Copper Retirement is Actually a Problem
Not everybody is on-board with chucking a perfectly good technology that is serving them reliably. Lots of businesses still have multiple POTS lines with in-house switching. Larger systems use a digital connection called PRI that multiplexes 23 POTS lines into a par of… you guessed it…twisted pair copper wires. Yes, as POTS goes away so does PRI and its cousin, T1 lines, that use the same wiring.

Another problem is FAX. Traditional FAX machines were designed for POTS and don’t like packet switched networks such as the Internet. Other systems specific to elevator phones, fire and burglar alarms, credit card verification, gate access, and emergency call boxes also were designed for POTS and only POTS. You don’t just plug these into your LAN and call it a day. So, what to do?

POTS Replacement Options
While POTS, PRI, T1, DSL and other copper line connections are rapidly fading into the sunset and not likely to return, there are replacement solutions available. Some popular ones are based on LTE cellular with dual SIM cards, battery backup, and failover Internet access. Also important is that a POTS replacement box provides the same signaling and RJ-11 connector that you’d get from a telephone line wall jack.

On a larger scale, SIP trunking is a replacement for carrying multiple phone lines used in offices and call centers. It can be provisioned over the Internet or, better yet, through a direct connection to a cloud phone service provider that interconnects with the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Have you been notified that your POTS service is being discontinued or greatly increasing in cost? It’s time to consider moving on with a new network based system or a POTS replacement appliance that simply drops in place of your old phone line. Get expert technical advice and pricing on POTS replacement solutions now.

Enterprise VoIP Moves to the Cloud

by: John Shepler

Enterprise VoIP has been replacing switched circuit analog telephone business systems for decades. PBX systems transformed into IP PBX, but they were still premises based hardware and software. Now those telecom rooms are emptying as business VoIP moves to the cloud and transforms into Unified Communications.

What’s Cloud Got To Do With It?
Businesses started installing their own phone switching equipment when half a dozen buttons on a desk phone weren’t enough anymore. PBX actually stands for Private Branch Exchange. It mimics the phone company central office but sized just for your company. Even so, that can mean hundreds or thousands of people and phones. PBX systems that can handle this amount of traffic often require their own dedicated staff.

The impetus to move to the cloud centers around clearing out all that equipment and the staff to keep it updated and running smoothly. However, it’s not magic. The common joke about the cloud is that there really is no cloud, it’s just somebody else’s computer. That’s about it. Only cloud providers have huge facilities with huge staffs for economy of scale. You not only get away from the hassle of running a phone system, you can likely save money in the process.

New Capability and No Investment Required
One problem with in-house technology is that it’s easy to outgrow and it goes obsolete really fast. You avoid both issues with cloud services. A decent size cloud can handle as much expansion as you can think of. Software updates are routinely handled by the provider. Most PBX functions are now in software anyway. That means that adding or changing features doesn’t require junking racks full of perfectly good equipment. It’s a simple download to what is likely a virtual server.

Telephone calls are getting to be just one of many functions that companies want in their “phone” system. The old standard desk phone has to easily integrate with mobile smartphones where a lot of the conversations are taking place. Then there is text messaging, email and video conferencing. This is how business people communicate these days. The voice call is just one option. With IP telephony, the concept of voice as an application has been realized. What’s more, you may want to have multiple types of communication going on at the same time. That’s Unified Communications and cloud providers offer it under the name Unified Communications as a Service or UCaaS.

Special Needs of Call Centers
Many businesses find it advantageous to have their own in-house call center rather than outsourcing that function. With managed cloud services this is easily realized. You can add features such as an automated receptionist, call recording, automatic call distribution, interactive voice responses, call queues, skills-based routing, dedicated phone numbers, integration with CRM systems and reporting & metrics.

The beauty of cloud based call centers is that they don’t much care where the employees are located. None of your people will be sitting in the cloud data center anyway. This means that you can easily add remote workers and contractors to your team. They just let the system know when they are available and they’ll start getting assignments until they indicate they are unavailable.

What It Takes to Connect To the Cloud
You need to take special care in connecting your business and your people to the cloud if you want top notch performance. The Internet can be a bit dicey at the worst possible time, so you want the best connections possible. From your home office and remote offices, if possible, dedicated lines or SIP Trunks are best. Just avoid the Internet all together. Home workers may not even have that option or it can be too expensive for one worker locations, so the most reliable high speed broadband available is highly desirable. New SDN or Software Defined Networks make it easy to combine several broadband connection to make one faster and more reliable Internet connection. That can be the difference between distorted and interrupted calls and smooth seamless connections.

Are you getting frustrated with an under-performing phone system or feel you are missing out on productivity by not having the latest UCaaS features? You have many options available and complementary expert consulting to help you pick the most appropriate for your organization. Find out what Enterprise VoIP, Call Center and UCaaS services are available to you now, quickly and easily.

SIP vs PRI Pros and Cons for Business PBX

Business telephone lines have gone through several transformations. What started out as analog landlines evolved into digital T1 CAS trunks, then ISDN PRI, and finally SIP packet based network connections. Amazingly, all of these technologies are still available. We’ll take a closer look into the two most popular configurations used in multi-line PBX business phone systems.

The Primary Rate Interface
ISDN PRI is short for the mouthful of an expression that is Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate Interface. Often the shorthand PRI or ISDN PRI is used for obvious reasons.

ISDN PRI is a standard telecom service that is based on the earlier T1 line specification. T1 got its start as a means of consolidating 24 pairs of twisted wire phone lines into 2 pair to save the expense of long distance cabling and overloading of telephone poles. This was accomplished by digitally multiplexing the 24 separate channels so that they were all transported together on a single 1.5 Mbps digital signal. An additional advantage of going digital was the reduction of noise and crosstalk on long distance phone calls.

A major benefit of the T1 specification is that existing phone company infrastructure can be reused, including wire landlines and microwave relays. High frequency digital signals degrade over distance fairly quickly, so regenerative repeaters were added to the lines to build the signal back up. With this arrangement, T1 could be offered over long distances to serve virtually all of the customers who were using the old analog phone lines.

One issue with T1 was that if each of the 24 channels carried only the audio telephone conversations, other wiring would have to be provided for signaling. A better solution was to multiplex signal bits into the data stream by robbing a bit here and a bit there in each of the channels. This degraded the audio very slightly and allowed the T1 CAS (Channel Associated Signaling) system to be self-contained.

Additional features, such as caller ID, were introduced by the phone companies and desired for business phones and especially call centers. This is where PRI comes in. The same basic T1 line organization was kept, except that only 23 channels were assigned as individual telephone lines. One complete channel was assigned to handle all of the signaling, data and other background services.

Most PBX systems today have interface cards where you directly plug-in a ISDN PRI cable and have 23 phone lines (or as many as you have ordered) at your command. If you need more than 23 lines, you plug in additional PRIs to add more channels.

Is there a Secondary Rate Interface?
No, but there is a related standard called BRI or Basic Rate Interface. The phone companies thought this would catch on as a two phone line system or higher speed dial-up modem service. By the time it was heavily deployed, computer communications had moved on to broadband and BRI never caught on. It has been popular for radio station broadcasts and remote announcing, such as voice over artists, because it can carry high quality audio signals. Recently, this service has been replaced by broadband Internet and is very difficult to find anymore.

What is SIP and How Does It Compare to PRI?
SIP is Session Initiation Protocol. It is a technology competitor to PRI. SIP is really a standard for transmitting VoIP or Voice or Internet Protocol phone calls over networks typically shared with other computing devices.

As you probably suspect, SIP is a packet based protocol versus the channel based protocol used by ISDN and T1. In channelized systems, a complete voice channel is assigned to a phone call for as long as the call is in progress. If no one is talking, the line just sits there idle. There is no sharing of facilities. In VoIP telephony, the conversation is broken up into small packets that are routed on the network to their destination. Many conversations can be on a network at the same time along with file transfers, print jobs and everything else digital. If there is a pause in one conversation, no packets are sent to the network for that channel only.

As you can see, VoIP is more efficient at sharing the network facilities. It comes at a cost though. Sometimes everybody wants to talk or send data at the same time. Unless the network is carefully designed, it can become flooded with too many packets to handle and things back up. This network congestion causes delays in transfer that breaks up phone conversations. Any packets lost will also distort the conversation.

Network Considerations for SIP
Careful network engineering is necessary to ensure that the sensitive voice packets are transferred without delay or corruption. Usually, these data streams are given a priority using Class of Service mechanisms within the network.

A network line dedicated to SIP is called a SIP trunk. This is the equivalent of an ISDN PRI line. Any digital line capable of carrying Ethernet packets can be a dedicated SIP trunk, although T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth and Carrier Ethernet services are often used for SIP. By giving the SIP phone conversations their own line, there is no interference from other data packets. SIP trunks are most often used to connect business and call center PBX systems directly to phone service providers. Like PRI, most PBX systems have network interface cards that plug directly into a SIP trunk.

SIP vs PRI
One protocol isn’t necessarily more appropriate than the other. It depends on the application. Most PBX systems can be set up to connect to SIP trunks or PRI trunks regardless of whether the phone sets themselves are analog handsets or VoIP phones. SIP trunks are particularly useful with newer Unified Communications or Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) systems that integrate computers, desk sets video conferencing and mobile phones into a single interoperable system. In these systems everything is in packet format and running on a single network.

Which is Right For You?
The best choice in telephone trunks is the one that works best with the system you have or the system you desire, and at the lowest cost for the performance you need. Prices of both PRI and SIP have fallen dramatically over the last few years, so you owe it to yourself to see what telephone trunk line options are available for your business needs.

The 3 Types of VoIP Lines for Business

By: John Shepler

Businesses large and small have been migrating to VoIP telephone technology for years now. Some are delighted with the move and have never look back. Others feel like they’ve lost something in the way of performance. The calls are often muddled and it’s hard to carry on a two way conversation. Would you believe that its the exact same technology involved? Why is it that VoIP telephony can range from excellent to unacceptable? Let’s take a look.

What’s VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a means to convert telephones into computer peripherals. The reason to do that is both to save money and enable applications that just won’t work on the old style telephone network. Network voice is a powerful tool, but can more easily be degraded that simpler analog phones.

Old School Phone Systems
Business phone lines are sometimes called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. They consist of twisted copper pair wires that run directly from the phone set all the way to the telephone company. Each phone has its own set of wires. Once you get more than a few phones, however, you face a mounting phone bill since the telco charges you to make internal as well as external calls.

Companies get around this by installing their own phone switches. Small systems use Key Telephone Systems where multiple outside lines are available on each phone but you can also call within the building on your own wiring. Larger companies install PBX (Private Branch Exchange) switches that manage a pool of outside lines that can be assigned to any phone as needed.

If you only have a couple of phones, each with their own line, the phone company takes care of all the switching for you. With many phones, you become your own little phone company for inside calls. That means you have to take care of all the special phone wiring and the Key or PBX switching equipment. Plus, you have to pay for multiple outside analog lines or a digital PRI trunk to get to the public telephone system.

How VoIP is Different
With VoIP, each phone plugs into your company LAN. That gets rid of the second special phone network. You still need something to switch the calls between phones. This can be a VoIP PBX or IP PBX that you have in-house. It can also be a much larger hosted PBX system from a hosted VoIP service provider. Hosted means that a specialized company “hosts” or run the system. You are one of many clients that they host. It’s pretty much like buying web hosting. You simply pay by the month for service instead of having to install and maintain your own equipment.

VoIP Phone Line Needs
All VoIP phones connect to a local network. This can be a small home office network that has only a computer, WiFi router, VoIP phone adaptor (for a regular phone) and broadband modem. Or, it can be an extensive corporate LAN that is bridged into multiple business locations nationwide and even overseas. The principles and the requirements for high quality performance are the same.

Since the network is shared with many phones and other computing devices, it take some doing to make sure that you get high performance. With dedicated analog lines, that’s the phone company’s problem. With VoIP, it’s now your IT problem.

What’s needed is plenty of bandwidth to accommodate all the phones and other devices. But that’s not enough. You need to give the voice packets priority over data because phone calls will start sounding muddled and choppy long before you notice that the file is loading slower. The network also needs low latency, packet loss and jitter to be transparent to the packets carrying the VoIP digitized phone conversations.

3 Types of VoIP Phone Lines
All analog phone lines are alike. All ISDN PRI trunks are alike. VoIP phone lines can be quite different. They range from Internet VoIP to SIP Trunks to MPLS private networks.

Using the Internet as Your Phone LIne
The low end of the market, which keeps costs low for home offices and small businesses, uses a broadband Internet service to connect to the VoIP service provider. You can share your broadband connection with a couple of computers, a WiFi router, and a few VoIP phones. You’ll need a router that creates CoS (Class of Service) to prioritize the phones or the computers will interfere with your calls. Sometimes the service provider will give you an adaptor that does this.

The advantage of using the Internet as a phone line is that it’s cheap. You probably already have broadband for your computer. The lure is to save money by “eliminating the separate phone line.” The downside is that the Internet was never designed for telephony. It was intended to reliably transport data files. There is no prioritization of voice on the Internet and most access lines, like DSL, Cable, Satellite and Cellular, are shared broadband. It’s a cost vs performance tradeoff. You may find that some calls sound perfect but others break up or sound muddled. It all depends on what else is happening on the Internet while you are making your call.

One way to improve Internet VoIP is to use a dedicated Internet access (DIA) like T1 or Ethernet over Copper. This keeps your neighbors from disrupting your calls while they download large video and software programs, but you are still subject to network congestion on the Internet itself.

Private Line VoIP Service
Companies that depend on high quality phone service for customer support and employee productivity usually sidestep the Internet in favor of something more predictable. The outside line that compares most closely to the legacy analog and PRI lines is the SIP Trunk. This is a digital broadband line, but it is a private line that is not shared with others. It’s called a SIP trunk because it supports SIP or Session Initiation Protocol, the switching system for VoIP calls.

A simple SIP trunk is a T1 line that runs from your network to your service provider. It supports up to a couple dozen simultaneous phone conversations or a combination of phone calls and Internet. The Internet service has a lower priority than the phone calls and uses whatever bandwidth isn’t needed for the phones at any given time. Smaller companies that don’t have dozens of phones find this is a great cost saver compared to maintaining separate phone and broadband lines.

Larger SIP trunks are also available for bigger companies or call centers. Both copper and fiber optic bandwidth is available to support as many calls as you need.

Voice over MPLS Networks
Major corporations generally have many business sites located around the country and even in other countries. They still want any employee to easily call any other employee without paying long distance toll charges. They also need to make outside calls to anyone with a phone.

A sophisticated solution is called VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS networks. MPLS is a private network arrangement with a regional, national or international service footprint. The network operator ensures that each paying customer has the necessary Class of Service, bandwidth and low latency, packet loss and jitter that they need for high performance.

VoMPLS works a lot like VoIP using SIP Trunks. The difference is that instead of having to run dedicated private lines among all your locations, you simply need an access line from each location to the MPLS network. This can give you a major cost savings, especially on those long international connections, while maintaining high network performance.

Are you in search of a better telephone solution, to reduce costs, increase available features or both? If so, there are VoIP telephone solutions you should take a close look at.

Achieving Call Quality Momentum With Cloud Communications

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with your decades old in-house phone system that is getting more obsolete by the minute? Or, do you have a horror story that revolves around moving to VoIP only to find the reliability bad and the call quality worse? It’s time you gained some momentum with a superior cloud communications solution… like one from Momentum. Have a look….


If you are new to IP based voice communication, you may not be aware of the pitfalls that can ruin a good network voice system or the solutions that are just bad to begin with. This is where you need a “best of breed” vendor to ensure your success.

There are a couple of competing approaches to enterprise level VoIP. The first is to have the system located and operated in-house. You treat it as part of the IT infrastructure. That’s different from traditional approaches that have kept the telephone network and IT network forever separate.

Some companies only go so far as to replace their T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI trunks with SIP trunks in order to get a better deal from a competitive service provider. Nothing changes in-house other than a new way to connecting to the phone company.

While this is the least amount of upset to the status quo, it does nothing to modernize your phone system. You gain none of the advanced calling features that VoIP systems have to offer. For that, you need to combine voice and data.

Enterprise VoIP, as opposed to a home office or small office with one or two phones, involves making the IT network also your phone network. You can add adaptors to your current analog phones so they connect to Ethernet, but you’re probably better off upgrading to IP telephones that have the network interface built-in plus all sorts of other capabilities.

Once you get all the phones on your LAN and off the phone wiring, you reach another fork in the road. Do you buy an in-house IP PBX system and continue to run everything yourself, or do you offload the switching system and connections to the public phone system to a cloud vendor?

Cloud communication is becoming a very attractive option. You avoid the capital investment of upgrading your in-house system and the ongoing maintenance costs. You also gain the ability to include remote workers in the system so you can communicate the same way no matter where you happen to be. Being tied to a desk, especially by a phone cord, can damage both your flexibility and productivity.

Momentum, the service provider, has some very attractive pluses in cloud communications. For one thing, they offer measurable call quality. Getting network voice right can be a tricky prospect and your customers will know if your phone system degrades. You also gain mobility, cloud disaster recovery and call center features. Best of all, you may find that your next phone system upgrade can save rather than cost you money.

Is your business ready to tap the advantages of cloud hosted communications? If so, find out what Momentum and other top tier providers have to offer. You may be surprised at what you can get for the same or less than you spend now.

Choose Your Trunk, Choose Your Handoff

By: John Shepler

The telephone system isn’t what it used to be. Mostly that’s good. Technology has given us wireless mobile smartphones, enterprise VoIP, cloud hosted services and sophisticated call center operations. Many companies, though, can’t afford to shuck their considerable infrastructure investment in order to gain the advantages of the latest advancements. Is there any way to mash up the old and the new and have it work?

Indeed, there is. The magic is in something called a “handoff”. This is the interface between your telecom lines and your equipment. Let’s take a look at what type of handoffs are available to keep your phone system up to date.

In the beginning, “Ma Bell” offered one type of handoff. It’s the venerable analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line that is still popular today. Every phone was an analog phone and every line was an analog line. The handoff was in the form of a single twisted pair of copper wires. All the switching was handled by the public telephone system.

This type of connection still works well for businesses that need only a single telephone line. The phone plugs into a jack on the wall that connects to the telco POTS line. It’s the ultimate in simplicity. This arrangement supports both single wired handsets and the newer cordless phones. You can have multiple cordless handsets connected to a single POTS line.

A slightly more sophisticated business phone system allows multiple desk phones along with multiple outside lines. Each line is still an analog POTS line with its own phone number. It’s called a key telephone system because each phone has a button or “key” for each line. You can see the status of each line, typically 4 or 8, on the light for that line. You select the line you want by pushing the button for that line. You have to provide the switching intelligence for the system by answering the line that is ringing or selecting an unused line for calling out.

You can have as many analog phone lines as your key system will support. Since the lines are independent, there is no economy of scale with this arrangement. Two lines cost twice as much as one line, and so on. To gain a cost advantage, you need to move up to a trunk ing arrangement.

A trunk is a telecom line that supports multiple independent phone conversations. Originally, these were also analog using frequency division multiplexing. In the last 50 years, the old analog trunks have been replaced by digital trunks. T1 phone lines are a popular trunking system. Each T1 line supports up to 24 simultaneous phone calls carried on separate time multiplexed channels. The physical connection is two copper twisted pair. One is for transmit and the other is for receive.

Lets say you have a good size key telephone system with a dozen outside lines. You can provide those lines as individual POTS lines or with a single T1 line that carries all 12 phone lines with room to spare. The T1 line will likely cost less for a dozen lines. If you used all 24 channels, the cost savings would be even more dramatic. The issue you have, though, is how to connect a digital T1 line to your analog telephone system.

The answer is in a piece of interface equipment called a “channel bank.” This device converts between analog and digital signals so that both the phone system and the trunk line have the signal format and electrical characteristics they expect. As far as your phone system is concerned, the connection is exactly the same as if you had separate analog lines all the way to the phone company. This is called an analog handoff.

Another application for analog handoff is older in-house PBX (Private Branch Exchange) phone systems. A PBX is a key system with a brain. The PBX takes care of routing incoming calls and the bank of outside lines. When you dial “9” for an outside line, the PBX gives you the next available one. You don’t know or care which line it has selected. They all work the same.

Many PBX systems will accept one or more T1 lines directly. There is no need to go through the intermediate analog conversion using a channel bank. This is called a digital handoff. It may also be called a T1 CAS (Channel Associated Signaling) digital handoff or an ISDN PRI digital handoff.

ISDN PRI is a special type of T1 line that supports 23 simultaneous calls. What happened to the other channel? It’s used for signaling and switching to make the system faster and capable of slightly higher voice quality. Many PBX systems now have a connector for one or more PRI (Primary Rate Interface) trunks, as this is the most popular service for medium and larger phone systems.

Enterprise VoIP is the current technology being adopted en-masse by medium and larger companies. This replaces the analog or proprietary digital telephone wiring with network connections to the company LAN. The PBX is updated to an IP PBX that supports IP telephones. It also supports a packet switched phone line technology called SIP Trunking.

A SIP Trunk is digital, like T1 or PRI, but not separated into individual channels. Instead, the transmission protocol is Ethernet packets and a VoIP-centric switching format called SIP or Session Initiation Protocol.

An all-VoIP business telephone system would have IP phones and an IP PBX sharing the company LAN. A SIP Trunk connects the PBX to the telephone service provider. This is called a SIP handoff.

Another use of SIP Trunks is for cloud hosted VoIP services that provide the switching as well as connectivity to the public telephone network. With a cloud solution, you no longer have a PBX or IP PBX in-house.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. You can often select your preferred phone trunk technology and specify the handoff you require. Just like T1 and PRI can be set up to provide analog handoff, SIP trunks can provide SIP, T1 digital, PRI digital, or analog handoffs. This means that your old phone system, with whatever interface it supports, can connect to modern networks and telephone trunking options. It often makes economic sense to continue using your current phone system until you can migrate to the latest technology.

Do you want to connect your current phones or phone system to the telephone service of your choice but aren’t sure how to make that connection? Find out what business telephone trunking options and pricing are available for your business location.

Fiber Optic Service FAQ, Part 2

Here are some more frequently asked questions and answers about fiber optic service for your business You may also be interested in the first list of fiber FAQs.

Q: What types of services are available over Ethernet fiber?

A: The Metro Ethernet Forum has standardized three popular services that are of interest to business users. Ethernet Private Line or E-Line is a dedicated point to point connection between two business locations or from your location to the Internet. Ethernet LAN or E-LAN provides a meshed network service that interconnects multiple locations. Ethernet Tree or E-Tree is a one to many connection popular with companies that distribute content to many subscribers.

Q: How do you connect multiple location LANs together

A: E-Line and E-LAN can do this easily. E-Line is appropriate for two locations to connect as a single bridged network. E-LAN makes sense for 3 or more locations, even those located internationally. E-LAN can make many separate LANs work like they are one larger network.

Q: What is Ethernet over SONET?

A: Most Ethernet providers offer a “native” Ethernet that powers their entire network. If you are in a location that can only get SONET, some carriers offer Ethernet that runs over the SONET fiber. From your prospective, this is the same as any other Ethernet over Fiber.

Q: Can Ethernet carriers interconnect?

A: Yes. The equipment that does this is called E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface. It allows service providers to seamlessly transfer network traffic back and forth. This allows both carriers to expand their service footprints to wider geographical areas.

Q: What are low latency fiber routes?

A: Most fiber networks strive to minimize latency or time delay between locations. Those advertised specifically as low latency routes are specially engineered to minimize the fiber route length using the straightest path available. They also minimize equipment along the route that can introduce additional latency. Low latency fiber services are in big demand for financial companies that deal in high speed trading.

Q: What is Metro Ethernet?

A: Metro Ethernet or MetroE is a fiber optic network that connects business and other locations within a limited geographic region, usually a single city or metropolitan area consisting of city and suburbs. MetroE connections can also connect to other locations nationally or worldwide.

Q: Does Ethernet support telephone service?

A: Ethernet is a great choice for enterprise VoIP phone service. A specialized service known as SIP Trunking connects your networked telephones or IP PBX to a distant service provider. The higher the bandwidth, the more simultaneous conversations can be supported. Traditional analog phones are better supported with analog phone lines or ISDN PRI service over T1 lines.

Q: Is Ethernet over Fiber distance limited like Ethernet over Copper?

A: No. Fiber offers unlimited transmission distance at any speed you wish. Most service providers have regional networks that serve multiple states or offer nationwide service. Some carriers connect worldwide using undersea cable between continents.

Are you interested in what fiber optic bandwidth service can do for your business? If so, get get instant online pricing up to 1 Gbps and complementary consultation with a bandwidth expert if you wish.


You may also be interested in reading Fiber Optic Service FAQs, Part 1 and Part 3.

Is MPLS The New Telephone Network?

The telephone network, as we’ve come to know and love it, is based on incremental improvements to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. This is a copper and fiber infrastructure that switches circuits to connect analog, cellular and digital phone calls from any party to any other party. Most business phone systems have depended on or mirrored the architecture of the PSTN to connect even their in-house calls. That’s all changing, with various technologies vying to become the next solution for connecting telephone calls.

What’s prompting the change? It’s not wireless. The cellular phone system was designed to be tightly integrated with the PSTN. The earliest cell phones were analog, with TDM and other digital multiplexed protocols following. What hasn’t happened yet is the wholesale transition to packet switched voice on the wireline or wireless phone networks.

Where packet switching, notably VoIP, has flourished is on private telephone networks set up by enterprises for their own use and on connections to the PSTN through the Internet to avoid the phone company local loops.

Why is VoIP such a big deal? More and more businesses are migrating their in-house phone systems to VoIP solutions. Part of the reason is the cost advantage of eliminating the separate phone wiring network in favor of using the corporate LAN to connect computers and telephones. Another reason is to avoid long distance toll charges by interconnecting business locations on a converged voice and data network. A third reason is features. IP telephones are really more like computers than the old desk sets. They can be integrated with business applications to provide things like “screen pops” of customer information based on who is calling.

The migration from circuit switching to packet switching was originally accomplished by replacing the traditional PBX (Private Branch Exchange) with an IP PBX. Think of the PBX as a small version of the PSTN switches that handle massive amounts of public traffic. The PBX resides on your premises and does all your in-house call connections so you don’t have to pay the phone company to make a call from one desk to another. You also need the capacity to make and receive calls with the outside world, so your PBX has to connect to the PSTN through one or more outside lines called trunks.

Trunk lines are bundles of telephone lines. Most businesses need more than one outside line. They may start off with a single analog business line and add more over the years. At some point it makes sense to consolidate all those separate lines into a single digital trunk that can carry up to 24 separate phone conversations.

Just because the trunk lines have been switched from analog to digital, doesn’t mean you are using VoIP. Yes, VoIP telephony is digital, not analog. But the digital protocol used by T1 and PRI digital trunks is time division multiplexed switched circuit, not packet switched IP. With an IP PBX, you can switch to IP telephones in-house and connect your IP PBX to the company LAN so that you don’t have to maintain the separate telephone wiring. Your connections to the outside world will still by the same analog or digital trunk lines to the PSTN.

Where you really cut the cord, so to speak, is when you replace those PSTN trunk lines with something called a SIP Trunk. This is a private line connection between your IP PBX and your telephone service provider. That service provider takes the place of the local telephone company and connects to the PSTN at their end. You can still make all the local and long distance calls you want, but perhaps at a considerable cost savings.

The alternative to the SIP Trunk is the Internet. The Internet connects literally from everywhere to everywhere. It is a massive public infrastructure that economy of scale makes very inexpensive. Connecting from telephone to service provider for residential users is done using the Internet. Many small businesses have also taken this approach to minimize costs.

The tradeoff is that voice quality over the Internet varies quite a bit. It depends on the capacity of your connection plus whatever else is happening on the Internet. Traffic jams called “congestion” can degrade voice quality with distortion and delay. One minute everything sounds great, the next minute the caller sounds garbled. If it gets really bad, the call may be dropped.

Many businesses can’t stand this variability of performance. They want the same quality of phone conversations they had with the PSTN, but with the advanced features and cost savings offered by VoIP. The technical answer has been to use a private line connection between your company and the service provider. These SIP trunks can support multiple conversations, even scaled for hundreds or thousands of simultaneous calls.

The latest development is cloud hosted PBX systems. Cloud computing offers businesses the opportunity to avoid capital investments and maintenance costs in favor of paying by the user by the month to use a cloud based infrastructure. Cloud computing has been extended to include telephone service through a cloud hosted VoIP or cloud hosted PBX system. All of your in-house switching and outside calls are handled through the cloud. You have IP telephones on your premises plus a gateway device that connects through a private line to your cloud service provider.

This is great for single business sites, but does the entire setup have to be replicated at multiple locations?

Yes and no. Yes, you still need your IP phones and gateway at each branch office or other location. However, you can route your calls through the same cloud hosted PBX. Now it becomes more sensible to connect all of your locations to your cloud service provider through a MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) network rather than pay the cost of a private line for each location.

MPLS networks are privately operated, as opposed to the public Internet, and maintain enough resources to simultaneous support the needs of all of their customers. This includes class of service tagging so that voice calls get the priority they need to maintain call quality. Each location simply needs a last mile connection, such as T1 or Ethernet over Copper, to the very large MPLS network. The network takes care of traffic routing between your locations and your cloud service provider where all the switching takes place.

One excellent example of where this approach is optimized is the XO Hosted PBX service offered by XO Communications. XO is also a network operator, so they can provide both the cloud PBX and the MPLS network to connect your business locations in one optimized system. This gives you one vendor to deal with if problems ever arise.

Sounds a little like the old Bell System, doesn’t it? You deal with a single provider who makes the connections to your phones and does the switching. In this case, you have a choice of vendors and a far richer feature set than offered in the old days of phone monopoly. Today’s cloud hosted PBX systems can include your wireless phones as well as your desk phones so that you only need one telephone number no matter where you are.

MPLS is a likely candidate to become the new telephone network. It supports hundreds or thousands of customers without interference or service degradations. Of course, there needs to be a way to interconnect customers on different networks. This is currently done by routing outside calls through the PSTN. Eventually, Network to Network Interfaces (NNI) may allow larger cloud PBX providers to peer traffic so that most of your calls will be on-net and not subject to toll charges. Even the PSTN may evolve to a very large MPLS network based on VoIP technology, abandoning the analog and TDM legacy technologies that have been the standard for the last century.

Is your company interested in more advanced phone services with potentially large cost savings? If so, get prices and features for enterprise grade VoIP and cloud services now.

Packet Voice Moves to the Cloud

Many businesses and individuals have already switched to VoIP for their telephone service. The original impetus is a cost savings over legacy phone service. Beyond that, enterprise VoIP services offer the opportunity for reduced staff and maintenance coupled with a richer feature set. Just when you thought that VoIP was a settled technology, a new wrinkle comes along. That’s VoIP up in the cloud.

Why move your phone service to a cloud? Let’s take a look at why this might be advantageous to your company and how we got from the old-timey candlestick and desk sets to something as amorphous as a cloud.

A generic technical term for VoIP technology is packet voice. Packets are a computer network protocol most often associated with Ethernet. A packet is a self-contained piece of data that has all the information needed to get it from source to destination. Packets are packets. It doesn’t matter what’s inside. Packets can carry voice, images, video, data and whatever else you can reduce to binary digits.

The major technical leap in packet voice is changing from a switched circuit telephone network to a packet switched network. Switched circuit means that every telephone call has an electrical circuit set up to connect the two (or more) phone sets involved in the conversation. This is unique to the public telephone system and has been that way since its inception. All telephone activity was originally voice calls made between electrically passive telephone sets. Look at one of those old phones. Do you see an AC cord? No way. The electrical power for the call was supplied by batteries at the telephone switching center.

When computer networks became more prevalent than telephone networks, the idea of what a network is changed dramatically. Both telephone and computer networks can run over twisted pair copper wire equally well. What’s different is that computer networks don’t set up and tear down electrical circuits every time that one piece of equipment wants to exchange data with another. The circuits that connect each computer device are continuous. What is switched is the data packets themselves. Ethernet switches or routers ensure that packets get to their intended destinations without having to create new circuit connections on the fly just for a single or group of packets.

Here’s why that’s important. VoIP or packet voice is transported over computer networks rather than switched circuit telephone networks that are only used for telephones. By connecting the phone to the LAN, you can eliminate the separate telephone network. All that wiring and the personnel needed to maintain it and change connections as phones are moved, added or deleted goes away. The cost of running the telephone network also goes away.

Something much larger doesn’t go away. That’s the switching system needed to interconnect telephones, even those using packets, and connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for outside lines. That specialized switching system is most often called a Public Branch Exchange or PBX. Small businesses with few phones and outside lines may use a simpler system called KTS or Key Telephone System. Those are the phones with individual line lights that tell you if a particular phone line is being used or available for your call. Medium and larger companies have the more automated PBX equipment that manages both internal calls and multiple outside lines.

This is where the cloud comes in. An in-house PBX system can be set up to work with legacy analog phones (switched circuit) or the newer IP telephones used for VoIP. You can connect the phones and PBX to your computer network to eliminate the separate telephone wiring, but you still have to make connections to the public phone network if you want to take or make outside calls. PBX systems aren’t cheap, either. They require a major investment, ongoing maintenance efforts and the likelihood that you’ll have to replace the one you have when it goes obsolete or runs out of capacity.

Why not move that PBX to the cloud the same way that you move servers from in-house to the cloud? That’s the idea behind Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP. The hosting is done by a very large packet voice switching system located at a cloud service provider. You don’t have to buy this system, maintain it or worry about upgrades and obsolescence. That’s the job of the cloud service provider. You simply pay a monthly fee for each phone or “seat” that you need.

Ironically, this concept takes us back to the early days of telephony when there was a large central switching system that connected to each telephone. The difference between the old “Ma Bell” approach and Hosted VoIP is that you are no longer tied to the single phone company that owns the phone wires. You can order network connections called SIP trunks to connect to any cloud provider you want. VoIP technology also allows new applications that integrate telephones and computers, important for call centers and contact centers.

Packet network technology has enabled computers to network within companies and all over the world. This technology is now being used to transmit video conferences and telephone calls on the Internet and private network connections. The rise of cloud computing companies takes packet switching equipment to the next level by moving the central hardware to the cloud, where it can be managed by specialized service providers. The advantage to you is lower costs and more features.

Are you wondering whether your business telephone system is optimum for your current requirements? Why not explore other options that include VoIP, SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX services? Get pricing and features for competing enterprise grade VoIP services to compare with your current setup.

Give Yourself Enough Time to Save on Telecom Costs

Everybody likes to save money. Anyone managing anything within a business makes it their mission to get the best deal possible for their company. Telecom cost savings? You bet! Who wouldn’t want the most service for the least money? You can have that, you know. There are really only two things you need to do. The first is knowing where to look. The second is allowing enough time to implement the optimum solution.

Knowing where to look has gotten real easy within the last decade. Instead of a half-hearted effort thumbing through the phone book and calling whoever you happen to find that looks appropriate, or working yourself into a frenzy trying to mine the Internet for potential vendors, all you have to do is contact a telecom broker who represents several dozen providers.

At least a few of these providers will have the right size solution for your needs and be serving your business location or locations. You get multiple competitive quotes and free consulting support, if you want it. Chances are good that you’ll be offered deals you never could have found on your own.

Who is this award winning telecom broker that makes your life easy? It’s Telarus, Inc. They invented, and patented, the GeoQuote (tm) telecom search engine that gives you instant online quotes for everything from telephone trunks to Gigabit Ethernet private line bandwidth. You can access the GeoQuote input form on our T1 Rex website, among others. Go ahead and give it a try. See if the results are better that whatever else you’re finding.

Now that you know where to look, you also need to know when to look. This is where a lot of business owners and managers go awry. The natural tendency is to wait until your current contract is almost up for renewal before looking at alternatives. It may be that you are unaware of the expiration date until somebody from that supplier calls you about renewing for another 1 to 3 years. It could be that someone from accounting put the renewal notification on your desk a month ago but it got lost in the shuffle. It might even be that you know it’s coming up but you’re just too busy to give it any attention. After all, you’re probably getting roughly the best deal anybody else would give you, right?

Wrong! The telecom industry has gotten incredibly competitive since deregulation was implemented decades ago. Time was when you could choose from your local telephone company or nobody to get analog or digital lines. Now there are dozens of competitors, large and small, each with their own service footprint and specialized offerings. A provider doesn’t have to be based in your area to serve your location. Many have installed equipment in local telco offices and lease whatever last mile connections they need to complete your circuit.

The other thing to be aware of is that new technology has multiplied the number of options available to meet your needs. You may have started your company with a few telephone lines and a DSL or T1 line, but now you should also be looking at Ethernet over Copper, MPLS networks for linking multiple locations, lower cost fiber optic connections, ISDN PRI or SIP digital trunks, and cloud hosted services.

Cloud services have become the most sought after solutions to many business needs because they give you the opportunity of paying per user per month rather than a flat monthly lease fee or having to invest in expensive on-premises equipment. Hosted VoIP telephone systems, Software as a Service, cloud storage, managed routers and virtualized servers are all fairly recent developments that could potentially save you a lot of money and meet your needs better than what you’ve been using all these years.

There are lots of exciting possibilities to consider, but you won’t be taking advantage of any of them if your contract runs out today and you have the choice of signing the renewal papers on your desk or going without telephone or Internet service. The time to start the savings process is well in advance. Allowing three months ahead of contract expiration is a good rule of thumb for many companies. This gives you time needed to make contact, get competitive offers, mull them over, ask questions, refine your needs, place an order and give the vendor time to install your new service. If you are looking to connect a lot of branch offices, run lines across international borders or get high bandwidth fiber that needs construction, you should at least be asking questions as soon as you know what you need.

Don’t be shy about asking the vendors to help you define your requirements or customize a solution that does everything you need. Some will come back with off the shelf offers, but there are quite a few today who are anxious to do whatever it takes to get your business. These companies have expert engineering teams who know their systems inside and out, and they have the technical savvy to make sure your network is capable of supporting the high performance bandwidth or latency sensitive voice services you are asking for. Some providers are quite happy to augment or even be your IT department if that’s what you need.

Does this discussion get you excited about looking into new possibilities or a little nervous that you are running out of time? Either way, the best thing you can do is check prices and request information on telecom services that meet your needs at the best prices in the industry.

Take a Bow For The SIP Revolution

There’s a revolution underway in companies large and small. No, it’s not political, social or process related. This is a quiet revolution that few employees are aware of. It’s not really visible. It doesn’t force anyone to change the way they do things. All it does is give you more capability and save you money. Meet the SIP revolution.

What’s SIP and why is it so revolutionary? Here, watch this and get a quick introduction...



SIP is the language of VoIP telephony. If you think that VoIP is all about making home phone calls on your Cable broadband so you can ditch your telephone landline, you are only seeing a small piece of what SIP is all about. The reason that you can piggyback phone calls on a broadband service is that VoIP using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for control and signaling transforms voice calls into a protocol that networks can transport.

Consumer VoIP services are all about trying to save money by having Internet broadband do double duty as a computer network and phone line. Once you get off the telephone company owned wiring, you can get your dial tone and local service from anywhere, just like switching long distance service. This same principle works for businesses, although using the Internet for this purpose is fraught with quality issues. It’s the concept of merging voice and data onto a single company network that’s important and where the big cost savings are.

A SIP Trunk is a line that can transport multiple telephone calls simultaneously along with data such as private point to point links or broadband Internet access while protecting voice quality at all times. SIP Trunks work for all size businesses, but they are especially attractive to companies with multiple business locations. This includes any company with branch offices, warehouse and factory sites, remote sales offices and regional headquarters.

What’s special about multi-site operations? Business productivity today depends on office automation. That automation is based on sophisticated software programs and databases running on a complex IT Infrastructure. Nearly every desk has a PC connected to the corporate LAN. The corporate LAN has MAN and WAN connections to include those remote sites as well as headquarters. It’s a sophisticated and expensive network but it is totally necessary. Unfortunately, it’s often duplicated by a separate multi-site network supporting the in-house telephone system.

What SIP Trunking can do is let your multi-site network support voice, data and Internet so that you don’t need a separate telephone network or separate outside telephone lines and broadband connections at every location. A central IP-PBX can handle switching internal calls among locations and connections to a telephone and dedicated Internet service provider. Are the savings that result from doing this significant? Does 20 to 60% cost savings sound significant to you?

Can your company benefit from the SIP revolution? You’ll never know until you get competitive pricing and system features for SIP trunking solutions appropriate to your size operation.

ISDN PRI For PABX

The Private Automatic Branch Exchange, PABX, also known as the PBX, is the telephone system of choice for medium and large companies. If your company is large enough to invest in a PABX, it’s got enough employees to require multiple outside phone lines. The question is what is the best technology to supply those phone lines?

Businesses that only need a handful of telephone lines usually start off with a few analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines and add more, one at a time, as needed. At some point you start to wonder if a digital trunk makes more sense than a dozen separate POTS lines. You are likely right.

Digital trunks are a technology to transport multiple phone calls to a subscriber using fewer wires. Each analog line requires a separate pair of wires. A trunk may use one or two pair to carry 23 or 24 phone calls.

How is this accomplished? The most popular technique is digitizing each phone call and then multiplexing all those bits onto a serial data stream. The line is synchronized at both ends so that individual time slots can be separated into channels. Each channel holds one concurrent call. This technology was standardized by Bell Labs in the T-Carrier system. The most popular of the T-Carriers is T1, although T3 is still used but generally called DS3.

The basic T1 telephone line consists of 24 identical channels of 8 bits each sampled 8,000 per second. That adds up to a line speed of approximately 1.5 Mbps. T1 lines were the first deployed as digital telephone trunks. PABX systems often have T1 interface cards and connectors so you can just plug in a T1 line and have up to 24 outside lines available. Larger systems have multiple line interfaces for 48 or more outside telephone lines.

T1 telephone is still highly popular, but is generally deployed in the form of ISDN PRI. PRI means Primary Rate Interface which uses a channelized T1 line for transport. ISDN is another standard called Integrated Services Digital Network. ISDN uses 23 of the T1 time slots for telephone lines but reserves one channel for data and switching. You give up the capability of one telephone line but gain much faster call switching plus Caller ID and ANI (Automatic Number Identification) for the other 23 phone lines.

ISDN PRI is readily available, less expensive than ever before and compatible with most PABX systems. With the capability of handling up to 23 outside lines, it has the capacity to handle the needs of most small to medium size offices and contact centers. By adding additional interfaces, a PABX system can handle 46, 69, 92 or over 100 outside telephone lines.

The competition for ISDN PRI is a newer service called SIP Trunking. SIP is the switching system used for VoIP telephone systems. A SIP Trunk is basically a packet network line with the bandwidth to handle multiple simultaneous calls and perhaps data transfers as well. Voice packets are given priority on a SIP Trunk to prevent call distortion and dropping of phone calls. A T1 line can be used as a SIP Trunk as well as for ISDN PRI, depending on how it is connected at each end.

Many PABX systems can now directly connect to SIP Trunks as well as T1 telephone lines and ISDN PRI. Some are IP PBX systems that use IP telephones as well as standard analog desk phones. What threatens all of these trunks now is not a new design of PABX but dumping the PABX completely in favor of hosted telephone services.

Hosted voice or telephone in the cloud moves the PABX from your office to a cloud service provider hundreds or thousands of miles away. You swap our your phones with IP telephones and a SIP Trunk. At the far end, the service provider does all of your in-house and outside line switching. It’s the provider who contracts for ISDN PRI trunks or other connection to the public telephone system. You simply pay per phone per month for local and long distance service plus in-house call switching. Often that is one flat fee per “seat.”

Which type of telephone system and trunking arrangement is right for your company? Get competitive quotes for POTS, T1 telephone, ISDN PRI, SIP Trunking and Hosted Voice to help with your trade study and selection.

Can SIP Trunking Supplant ISDN PRI?

Companies large enough to use multiple business telephone lines are good candidates for digital trunk lines. It used to be that you needed a dozen or two outside lines before digital trunks made sense. Now just a few lines plus broadband Internet can make telephone trunks attractive.

Just what is a telephone trunk? It’s a collection of telephone lines, all bundled together. We tend to think of landlines as individual connections. One analog landline is a single pair of small plastic coated copper wires twisted together in a spiral. This isn’t just to keep related wires in pairs to form a complete circuit. The twisted form causes induced magnetic fields to cancel out over distance. This reduces the amount of hum, noise and crosstalk from other telephone lines.

Companies that have a few outside lines often have what’s called a key telephone system. The “key” refers to the line select buttons on the phones themselves. It’s up to the user to note which lines are being used by observing an indicator light for that line button. Unlit line button are free lines that you can use to call out. Each line is an individual analog phone line. They generally come-in through cables of 25 pairs or more called binder groups. You might think of this large cable as an analog trunk line.

The impetus for digital trunk lines is the opportunity to use less copper wiring to transport the same number of phone calls. Stretching miles of binder cable from your location to the telephone company central office (CO) costs a goodly sum. That’s nothing compared to the cost of running long distance lines dozens or hundreds of miles. The first digital trunk was the T1 line. It uses multiplexing to create a stream of 24 channels in 24 serial timeslots. Each channel represents one telephone line. The T1 trunk itself uses 1 or 2 pair of wires versus 24 pair for an equivalent analog trunk.

A T1 telephone trunk can be connected to a channel bank that converts between the digital line and analog telephones. This allows companies with key telephone systems to lease a T1 line at lower cost than 24 separate analog phone lines. A more popular use for this many lines is to connect to an in-house PBX or Private Branch Exchange. The PBX system automatically manages all the outside lines and offers 3 or 4 digit dialing for in-house calls.

An upgrade to the T1 telephone line is the ISDN PRI trunk. The two standards are very similar. ISDN PRI stands for Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate Interface. This is quite a mouthful, but is part of an industry standard that has become very popular for business telephony. The difference between T1 telephone and ISDN PRI trunks is that ISDN reserves one of the channels for switching and data. ISDN PRI offers 23 phone lines plus Caller ID, ANI, and much faster switching. Both T1 and PRI interfaces are common on modern PBX phone system designs. They are either a standard features or can be added with a plug-in card.

What’s the advantage of T1 telephone or ISDN PRI to the business user? They cost less than ordering 23 or 24 separate analog phone lines. The person in the office taking a call on their desk phone can’t tell how the phone lines come into the back room. The manager paying the monthly phone bill sure can.

There’s an even newer form of digital telephone trunk available now called the SIP Trunk. SIP refers to the signaling system used by VoIP telephones. It is computer network based rather than telephone industry based. This allows voice and data to be combined or “converged.” Once you have a converged network, you no longer need separate LAN and telephone wiring. Everything in on the LAN.

What the SIP Trunk does is connect your LAN to your phone service provider. This is a long haul private point to point connection so your “phone company” can be located anywhere. It doesn’t matter where those twisted pairs in the ground go. On the network, one location is as close as another.

The other advantage of SIP Trunking is that it can transport both telephone calls and broadband Internet service at the same time without one interfering with the other. Telephone calls have priority in this system so that voice quality is preserved regardless of what is happening on the Internet. Your calls never actually go on the Internet. The simply share a trunk that transports both.

This offers a terrific advantage for smaller companies. Most every business now uses both telephone and Internet service, so why not have them both provided on a single line instead of two? This maximizes the efficiently of the trunk line and saves money for the business user.

ISDN PRI is still wildly popular as a trunk line for PBX systems. Newer IP PBX systems will support both ISDN PRI and SIP Trunking. Why make the change? Compare prices and features to see if SIP Trunks can save you significant money. Smaller companies that can’t possibly imagine using 23 outside phone lines will likely find that SIP Trunking can be scaled down to the number of lines they really need and that’s all they have to pay for. The option of having broadband delivered on your SIP Trunk is also a plus for smaller companies that don’t need the whole trunk for telephone lines.

A potential game changer is the rise of hosted PBX systems or PBX in the cloud. Hosted services connect via SIP Trunk and there is no PBX equipment or phone lines at your location. You pay per user by the month. This offers tremendous flexibility, as you can always order up more “seats” when business increases and you need them.

Are you interested in new business telephone service or are at the point where your current phone system is out of capacity or too costly to maintain? Don’t lock in your decision on how to proceed until you check the latest prices and features of ISDN PRI, SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX services.

Can You Save 50% With Unified Communications?

Have you noticed that your telephone expenses have grown right along with the expansion of your organization? Of course. In fact, they’ve gone up like crazy over the years. Have you seriously questioned why?

Why? Because you have more people on the telephone, of course. That’s the obvious answer, but it may be so obvious that you don’t look further. The fact is that not all telephone charges are created equal. Some are difficult to avoid and a necessary part of doing business. Others can be eliminated through the use of better technology. The technology that works this magic is called unified communications. Let’s take a look at a quick animation that explains everything...



Here are some important points made in the video and how they apply to you. Unified communications is all about merging your voice, data and video networks into one unified network. Many businesses can save money by doing this, even if they are smaller companies and even if they have only one location. Not mentioned is the hosted PBX solution that works especially well for smaller companies that don’t have a large IT staff.

The real cost cutting comes from consolidating the communications across multiple business locations. Some companies grow linearly with optimization every step of the way. Most don’t. If any of your growth has been from mergers and acquisitions, you can be pretty certain that your telephone network is not anywhere close to optimized. That’s probably true to some extent even if all you’ve done is add branch offices.

Why? Because the tendency is to have a phone system at each location. That means a stand-along PBX with trunks to the local phone company and different bills from different providers at each location. Then there’s the matter of communication among locations and back to headquarters. Chances are that this is done by making long distance phone calls and incurring long distance phone charges. Ding-ding-ding. You can just hear those telcos ringing the registers.

What’s better optimized? Moving your voice communications, i.e. telephone calls, from their own individual networks to your main corporate network that interconnects all locations. You need it for data anyway. Why not let voice packets piggyback on the same network?

What happens with this arrangement is that all your internal calls are free of charge. The phone company can’t charge you if you don’t use their network. So, stay off the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) until you absolutely have to use it. That’s for outside calls to other companies or your own customers.

By letting a major competitive carrier, like Level 3, be your network and phone service provider, you can get by with a single IP PBX located somewhere on the network to route outside calls through one set of PSTN trunk lines. Level 3 has the advantage of being licensed as a competitive phone company in all 50 states, so they can get you local numbers wherever you want to establish a presence.

Is it really possible to save 50% of your phone bill by using unified communications? It can be that lucrative. How much can your operation save? Get competitive quotes for unified communications SIP trunking for all your business locations and see just how far your eyes bug out at the answer.

Bandwidth Cost Reduction Ideas

It’s not all about cost these days, but getting the best deal you can on everything you buy is important for the viability of the business. Bandwidth is no exception. Telecom costs can be a major line item expense. Fortunately, there are ways to save without having to pick a service that degrades your productivity.

The most basic step you can take is one that might come as a surprise. It works for any technical requirement, can be accomplished in a matter of minutes, and won’t cost you a thing. Guess what it is yet?

The simplest solution is sometimes the most effective. Get a fresh set of competitive quotes. Honestly, if you haven’t been in the market for telephone line or data bandwidth prices lately, the numbers you have in mind are almost certainly obsolete. Things are changing that fast.

So how can you do this in minutes when last time it took a week to find 3 to 6 providers, discuss your needs with each of them, and then wait and wait for formal quotes? Put the power of automation to work. There’s an online application for this and it’s called GeoQuote by Telarus. This is an automated pricing engine that connects with dozens of service providers and aggregates their price quotes. For wireline services like T1 lines, ISDN PRI telephone, DS3 and even Ethernet connections to 1 Gbps, the process runs automatically and gives you budgetary pricing on your computer screen in a minute or so. Other services, like SONET fiber optic lines or MPLS networks need some human intervention, so you’ll probably wait a few hours to a day or so for these quotes.

Now that you have service pricing, you can start working tradeoffs. For instance, if you’ve got the newer Ethernet over Copper available for your business location or locations, you’ll likely find that you can get twice the bandwidth of a T1 line for the same price. Or replace a bonded T1 solution with 3x3 Mbps EoC and cut your monthly line cost in half.

You’ll find the same it true for higher bandwidth services, such as DS3 or OC-3 fiber. Ethernet likely comes-in much cheaper for the same line speed and service level agreement.

How about telephone? There’s a fairly simple tradeoff between multiple analog phone lines and a digital trunk like IDSN PRI. Anywhere between 6 and 12 lines is the tipping point to move to a trunking solution. Did you know that there’s another good choice if you are using 6 outside lines or less? It’s SIP Trunking. With a SIP Trunk, your provider gives you both telephone lines and broadband Internet service over the same trunk. This isn’t like the issues you see with broadband phone because the telephone and Internet packets are kept from interfering. The way it works is that voice packets have priority at all times. Any bandwidth not needed for phone calls is automatically reassigned to the broadband pool.

Multiple business locations present their own challenges. Many companies start hooking up private lines from headquarters to satellite offices only to find after a few years that they have a slew of lines and an enormous bandwidth bill. Now would be a good time to re-evaluate. A MPLS network can likely replace that rat’s nest of dedicated point to point lines for a lot less cost, while protecting your security and providing new options like mesh any-to-any networking.

Here are two critical point to remember. In the last few years, prices have gone down and options have gone up. Both of those work in your favor. Why not let them? Get new bandwidth options and pricing quotes now.

What’s Wrong With Bring Your Own Bandwidth?

When you go out to contract new IT services, you are often faced with a choice. You can start fresh with both services and connectivity from your new provider. Otherwise you can layer the new IT services on the network setup you have now. Seems that if your MAN and WAN connections are working to your satisfaction, it would be smart to leave well enough alone. But, what other considerations should play into this decision?

Not every service provider deals in bandwidth. Many VoIP, cloud computing and other service providers specialize in the specific service they offer. They may make recommendations, but getting connected from your facility to theirs is your responsibility.

Other companies have a far larger array of services to offer. Some started off as competitive telecom carriers and later added other services such as colocation, cloud infrastructure, hosted PBX, Software as a Service and so on. Talk to these companies and they’ll express a definite preference for providing both the IT or telecom service plus the connectivity. Is this simply being offered as a convenience to the customer, a desire to get as much of the client’s business as possible, or are there other reasons? If so, what would they be?

A common industry term for using the network connections you have now is “bring your own bandwidth.” You’ll hear this term used most often by VoIP, hosted PBX and cloud computing providers. There’s a reason that this expression keeps coming up in provider literature and consulting discussions. It’s far more than just industry jargon.

What’s unique about cloud services of all sorts is that the performance of the cloud service is highly dependent on the performance of the connection between your facility and your provider's. Issues with customer provided bandwidth pop up so often that providers have become wary.

A common application is hosted VoIP. Unless you have an IP PBX switching system in-house, any VoIP service you are using is probably hosted VoIP. Hosted means that the service provider owns and operates the switching system and the trunk lines to the public telephone system. You only need to have IP phones and perhaps a gateway device in-house.

Hosted VoIP can best the best thing that ever happened to your company or an unmitigated nightmare. In fact, the very same service that works beautifully for one company can be a disaster for another. Why? It’s because voice services, particularly network voice services like VoIP, are highly sensitive to the characteristics of the long haul network connections to them.

Voice is a touchy application because it is real-time and easily corrupted. Any network congestion that holds up packets, drops them or brings them in at a variable rate will be reflected in the call quality. Many network anomalies show up as audio distortion that garbles conversations. Other problems are delays that chop off the beginning of sentences and intermittent outages that drop calls.

This is why major business providers with reputations to protect cringe at the thought of their clients bringing their own bandwidth when it is a shared bandwidth DSL or Cable Internet connection. Those low end services work just fine for e-mail and general website access. Add a third party broadband phone services and you are really taking your chances. Why? Your network may not be set up to give voice packets priority, the bandwidth on your broadband Internet service may vary all over the place, and even when those things are working well, the Internet itself has all sorts of vagaries.

Even the Cable companies themselves are aware of this situation and don't run their bundled telephone services over the Internet. What they sell you is a VoIP phone service that uses their Cable network to connect to their own VoIP switching center. Your telephone calls never touch the Internet itself. Call quality is just too dicey and hard to predict when you are dealing with a public network where no packet has an advantage, by design.

What major VoIP service providers really prefer is that you get a dedicated SIP trunk from them to provide your voice and Internet service. This way they can control the WAN connection and keep the voice and data packets from tripping all over each other. With the right bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics, you can have excellent voice quality and all the advantages of hosted PBX telephone services.

The same discussion applies to high bandwidth cloud connections. What some companies are finding is that the WAN connection to their new cloud provider isn’t nearly as capable as the LAN connection they had to their in-house data center. The big issues are bandwidth and latency. You need sufficient bandwidth so that users don’t have to queue up when they access the cloud. Latency introduces a delay that makes the cloud applications seem sluggish. In some instances this has become such a problem that Amazon has make arrangements with Level 3 Communications and AboveNet for special AWS Direct Connect service at 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps for its high performance cloud computing services.

Is bring your own bandwidth a good idea or a bad idea? It depends on how robust your current metro and long haul network connections are and what services you intend to add. A good approach is to discuss connectivity at the same time you are evaluating new IT services to make sure you have what you need to get optimum performance. You can get expert consultation and a wide variety of telephone, cloud and bandwidth services through our telecom broker, Telarus, Inc. A simple online inquiry will get the process started immediately.

Call Center Contact Center Phone Service

Call centers and contact centers are major users of telephone services, especially long distance and toll free number services. What’s the best option for your call center to ensure that you have the right features and the best pricing? Well, there are several good technical options available right now. Let’s take a closer look at them to see what they can offer.

Traditional telephony has been based on basic business phone service, also called POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. Old is right. Analog phone lines have been used for over 100 years and are still going strong. They’re highly reliable, deliver clear voice quality and don’t suffer from digital artifacts like latency.

Analog lines were originally intended to be one line per telephone. Key systems allow multiple lines on each phone so you can select which one to answer manually. All the but the smallest call centers have more lines and more agents than a key system can handle. That means using a PBX or Private Branch Exchange to automatically assign lines and direct incoming calls.

What PBX offers is automation. If you only need a half dozen or so outside lines, analog business lines still make economic sense. You connect them to your PBX using FXO (Foreign Exchange Office) ports on interface cards that plug into your PBX system.

When you need more than a half dozen or so outside lines, digital trunk service starts to make sense. Why? It’s because there is a cost advantage to bundling multiple phone lines into one trunk line. You may already have multiple analog lines coming in via a multi-pair binder cable. This is different. A T1 line uses two twisted copper pair to carry 23 or 24 separate phone lines digitally. Yes, those are the same copper pair that would otherwise be used for analog phone service.

The way this works is that the phone conversations are digitized at one end using an analog to digital converter and converted back to analog at the other end using a digital to analog converter. Each call is assigned its own digital timeslot or channel. They are kept separate so that there is no cross-talk between calls. T1 is a synchronous system that has strict timing at both ends of the line. Latency is almost non-existant. However, any unused channels are transmitted empty. All channels are constantly being exchanged between your PBX and your telephone service provider.

Why the choice between 23 and 24 phone conversations on a T1 line? All 24 channels can be used for telephone calls. This is called a T1 telephone line or T1 trunk. The other option is to use 23 channels for conversations and use one channel for switching, signaling and data, such as ANI and Caller ID. That option is called ISDN PRI or T1 PRI. PRI trunks are very popular with call centers because they offer the Caller ID information and faster switching times than normal T1 phone lines. Your PBX system may have multiple PRI ports so that you can have 23, 46, 69 or more outside lines for your call center.

SIP Trunking is an alternative to ISDN PRI. It is based on VoIP technology and uses packets rather than channels. SIP Trunks can be interfaced to older technology PBX systems and the newer IP PBX phone systems. There may be cost advantages for SIP Trunking, especially if using a lower bandwidth CODEC (Coder/Decoder) than the industry standard G.711. Some newer CODECs offer high call quality while transporting more simultaneous calls on the same line bandwidth.

SIP Trunking also opens the opportunity for cloud communications or Hosted PBX. With a hosted system, both the outside lines and the PBX switching system move to the cloud. You have only phones and a VoIP gateway in-house. The advantage to a cloud hosted solution is that you avoid heavy capital investment, pay for service by the agent seat per month, and don’t have to worry about maintenance or upgrades. The service provider takes care of all this for you.

Are you starting up a new call center or contact center, facing an upgrade cycle or expanding operations? If so, this is the perfect time to check business phone service options and prices for call centers and contact centers. You could gain performance advantages at lower prices now.