Ethernet Better Than a T3 Line

By: John Shepler

Not long ago, T3 voice and data lines were a mainstay of medium and larger size businesses. Today, that once impressive 45 Mbps doesn’t seem all that fast. Our business applications demand more like 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps. Medical campuses, design firms and video production houses are more interested in 10 Gbps and looking beyond even that. If you still have a T3 line contract, you may well find that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less cost right now.

What is a T3 Line?
The T3 designation is part of the T-Carrier system developed by Bell Labs in the post-war tech boom. It was originally designed to transport large numbers of simultaneous telephone conversations and still fills that role for some larger businesses and call centers. Prior to T-Carrier, telecom was based on analog technology. T1 and T3 changed that to digital and started us down the path to the Internet we have today.

T3 is specified at 45 Mbps, enough to transport 672 digitized phone calls. That makes it a lot more efficient than creating a bundle of 672 separate twisted pair copper wires as telephone lines. T3 was once transported through large coaxial cables or microwave relay stations. More recently, it has been bundled on SONET fiber optic cables and called DS3. DS3 is the data format that runs on the physical T3 line, so DS3 and T3 pretty much mean the same thing.

The channelized version of T3 is used to carry those 672 phone calls, each in a separate channel or time slot in the data stream. For data transmission, the unchannelized version of T3 carries 45 Mbps worth of data, including the familiar packet switched networks.

Ethernet Replaces T3
Most all communications these days done over digital networks and originates in the most popular protocol, Ethernet. Even telephones have switched to an Ethernet interface so they can hook to the same network as computers instead of having separate wiring. This is called VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. With computers and phones on the same network, it makes sense to transport everything over Ethernet on both the local and wide area networks.

This is exactly what is happening. Carrier Ethernet, the long haul version, is replacing other telecom protocols such as T-Carrier for copper line and SONET for fiber optic. It’s pretty much going all Fiber optic Ethernet now. This is often referred to as Ethernet WAN for Wide Area Network.

Cost and Performance Advantages of Ethernet
The first advantage of long haul Ethernet transmission is that it is directly compatible with most all company networks. You simply plug the Carrier’s Ethernet into your router. There is no need for separate protocol conversion boxes or modules as required to support T1 and T3 lines.

A second advantage is that Ethernet is easily scalable. You can run at any speed up to the limit of the physical port from the Carrier. T-Carrier and SONET protocols were designed for specific speeds and needed to have hardware replaced to upgrade. The bandwidth of your line is set by the Carrier based on your contract. You can easily increase or decrease that as your needs change and it will be reflected in your billing.

Perhaps the biggest incentive to switch to Ethernet WAN service is pricing. You may be shocked at how much your can save by switching from an older telecom service to Ethernet WAN. Ethernet is almost always lower in cost on a per-Mbps basis. Sometimes the difference can be a factor of two or more.

Much of the cost savings comes from a more competitive environment for fiber optic Ethernet versus the old telco services with one provider. There may be several companies offering Ethernet bandwidth for your business at competitive rates.

Fiber is also more available than ever before. The upgrade of cellphone towers to 4G LTE and 5G has demanded a rapid expansion of fiber optic networks. Copper is yesterday’s news and, more and more, it is being left to rust in the ground. Fiber and wireless are the future for networking.

Do you have legacy T3 or DS3 service and want to see if you can get a better deal? That’s easy. Just check prices and availability of Ethernet WAN service for your business address. Chances are good that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less cost than what you pay now.

Upgrading to Fiber FAQ

By: John Shepler

The bandwidth solution you’ve had for years is running out of capacity. It’s worked well for you, but now you have no real choice but to upgrade to something faster, more reliable, lower latency, more consistent or all of the above. How about fiber? You’ve always had twisted pair copper or cable. Does fiber make more sense for the future and… can you afford it? Let’s look at some key questions and answers for making this decision.

What Can Fiber Do That Copper Can’t?
The real beauty of fiber isn’t necessarily what it will do for you today. It’s the virtually unlimited upgradability down the road that is unique to fiber. Every copper technology runs out of capacity at some level. Technology advancements have expanded copper’s capability and extended its life. However, technology advancements have also expanded fiber capacity beyond what most of us can fathom needing.

I Have a T1 Line Now and Love It. Can’t I just Add Another T1?
You bet you can. The process is called bonding. It makes 2 T1 lines act like a single line with twice the bandwidth. You can bond T1 lines up to 10 or 12 Mbps, which is about the entry level for fiber. One limitation is that you have to get all your lines from the same provider to bond them. A more serious limitation is cost. You may find that 10 Mbps fiber is a lot less expensive than 10 Mbps bonded T1.

What About Ethernet over Copper?
EoC is a competing technology to T1 and uses the same twisted pair copper. You can get higher bandwidths at lower cost than T1, but the technology is distance sensitivity. For 10 to 50 Mbps, you need to be geographically close to the office supplying your service. For higher bandwidths, say 100 Mbps and up, it’s rare to find EoC available. At 1Gbps, it’s pretty much fiber all the way.

Don’t Cable Companies Offer Fiber Bandwidth over Cable?
Yes and no. Yes, you can get hundreds of Mbps, perhaps even Gbps, bandwidth over the same coaxial cable that brings in hundreds of TV channels. This is relatively inexpensive service, but it is a “shared” bandwidth that varies with the number of users online. It’s strictly Internet access, not private line, and has no performance guarantees. For demanding business operations, the Cable companies offer competitive fiber optic service using their core transmission networks. This grade of service is similar to what you get from telecom companies.

OK, But Isn’t Fiber Hard to Get?
Not any more. The first fiber technology, called SONET, is a telephone company product and has been both expensive and limited in availability. A newer technology called Ethernet over Fiber is offered by a wide array of competitive carriers, including many traditional suppliers. Nobody is building out copper plant anymore. It’s yesterday’s news. All of the new network construction is fiber and there is a race among carriers to capture the business market

Where is Fiber Available?
Ethernet over Fiber and SONET are both readily available in major metropolitan areas. Fiber is also often available in suburban areas and smaller cities. There is a big push right now to replace T1 lines with fiber to increase the bandwidth of cell towers from 3G to 4G and, eventually, 5G. That is extending metro fiber networks out into the countryside where they haven’t been before. Eventually, fiber will be everywhere.

What About Now? Where Can I Get Fiber?
Your best bet is to be located in an already “lit” building. That means the building has fiber optic service installed and operating. Once the terminal equipment is in place, adding another customer in the same location is trivially easy for the carriers. If you can’t be in a lit building, you’ll need to be near enough that construction costs are minimal. It’s those long distance runs that need new fiber installed that get expensive.

Note: A popular option for companies that find fiber construction costs too much to consider is to locate their high bandwidth equipment, such as servers, in a colocation data center where multiple fiber options are readily available.

So, Where Are These Lit Buildings?
Lit buildings and nearby fiber optic services can be easily located using the Telarus GeoQuote search engine. This is a tool specifically developed to quickly locate existing fiber services. You can find out in seconds what’s available in your area with no commitment.

Great, I’ve Found Fiber Service. Will It Cost a Fortune?
You may be shocked to find how affordable fiber optic service is today. This isn’t consumer grade FTTH (Fiber to the Home). It’s a business grade service that is installed at commercial locations. Bandwidth generally starts at 10 Mbps, which is the same speed as traditional Ethernet. If you’ve had your T1 line for many years and haven’t negotiated a lower priced contract, you may find that you can get 10 Mbps fiber for about the same price. Yes, you’ll pay more for Ethernet over Fiber than today’s T1 lines or low cost business cable broadband, but you can also expect higher performance.

How Much Bandwidth Makes Sense?
Many smaller businesses can get by with 10 Mbps Ethernet over Fiber. High tech or medium size operations will want 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. Nowadays, Gigabit Ethernet is well within reason for companies that need highly responsive cloud applications or make extensive use of video. Municipalities and school districts often find that Gigabit Ethernet or GigE is exactly what they need at a reasonable price point.

How Easy Are Upgrades
Legacy T-Carrier (T1, T3) and SONET (OCx) services can take a long time to provision because each bandwidth level has a unique interface. Ethernet over Fiber is designed to be easily scalable. You install a port with the maximum speed you expect to need (usually 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps). Then you pick the bandwidth you want to start out with. Often a quick call to your provider is all it takes to increase or decrease bandwidth within hours or days. Some services even let you make the changes yourself through a Web browser.

What’s the Maximum Bandwidth Available?
It’s not likely you’ll ever run out. Gigabit Ethernet service is common. So is 10 Gbps now. In some locations you can get 100 Gbps business bandwidth. That level will become more widely available in the future, as more bandwidth intensive requirements demand it. If you are a really high bandwidth user or have special protocol or security requirements, you might consider wavelength service. Each fiber can carry dozens of wavelengths. Each wavelength transports up to 10 Gbps.

Are you interested in finding out what fiber optic service options are available for your business location and how much they cost? Get fast quotes with no obligation and complementary expert consulting to help choose the best option for your needs.

How Your Port Sets Your Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

As users of MAN and WAN telecom services, we’re acutely aware of the bandwidth we’ve contracted for. What once was seemed like more than adequate line speed now seems a bit confining. In the worst case, applications don’t run right and productivity slows to a crawl as everyone waits on something to download. Now, what’s needed to jack up the bandwidth and get rid of all that congestion?

Every Connection Has its Speed
You can often run any line at less capacity than it is capable of, but not more. Factors that go into the maximum speed include type of transmission medium, such as twisted pair copper, coaxial cable, fiber optic strands, or microwave wireless. They also include the capability of the port on the access router or other customer premises equipment (CPE). Let’s have a look at some common connectivity solutions and their port speeds.

T1 Lines
T1 lines run at a synchronous speed of 1.5 Mbps. Synchronization between source and destination is typical of the TDM or Time Division Multiplexing technologies that include T-Carrier (T1, T3) and SONET (OC-3, OC-12, OC-24, OC-48). The way these lines carry traffic is to chop up a fixed line speed into smaller pieces called channels. T1 happens to have 24 channels of 64 Kbps each. That turns out to be just right for packing one telephone conversation into each channel. For data traffic, all the channels are combined into one large pipe.

It’s easy to see how you can have less than 1.5 Mbps by using fewer channels or rate limiting the data speed. This used to be popular as a cost savings mechanism when T1 lines were very expensive. Nowadays, 1.5 Mbps is considered an entry level broadband at best. So, how do you get more than 1.5 Mbps out of a T1 line?

Short answer: You don’t. Longer answer: You combine or bond two or more T1 lines so they act like a single transmission line. This gives you the option of creating bandwidths from 3 to 12 Mbps. The thing to remember is that every time you want to add another line, it has to be physically installed by the same carrier. They will usually have to change out your CPE as well as connecting the additional line wiring.

T3 Lines or DS3
T3 and DS3 are pretty much the same thing, although there is a hair of technical difference between those designations. They both run at 45 Mbps and are delivered on a pair of coaxial cables to a specific plug-in card on your router. What you don’t see is that the DS3 signal almost always runs multiplexed on a SONET fiber optic service to the curb. All of these are TDM services, like T1 lines on steroids.

SONET Fiber Optic
SONET or Synchronous Optical NETwork is a family of standards that offers an easy upgrade from T-carrier. Yes, SONET still uses the 64 Kbps channels when it is set up for telephone trunking. Otherwise it offers a very large data pipe that can also be used as a SIP trunk.

Like T-Carrier, every flavor of SONET has a different interface. You’ll need specific cards or carrier supplied routers for OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps. You can sometimes get rate limited bandwidth at each level for some cost savings.

Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper (EoC) uses the same twisted pair transmission wiring at T1, but is capable of higher speeds, albeit at shorter distances. Typical bandwidth range from 3 on up to at least 10 or 20 Mbps. In special circumstances, this can be increased to 50 or 100 Mbps.

Ethernet is a bit different from TCM in that there are no synchronous channels. Instead, everything is carried by packets. The number of packets that the line will carry each second is its bandwidth. The bandwidth you can get depends on the capability of your carrier and the speed of the installed port on the CPE. Most often this is a managed edge router they install in your premises.

You simply plug into the Ethernet port on the router using a standard RJ-45 Ethernet cable. Port speeds follow the Ethernet standards of 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps. If you have the 100 Mbps port installed, you can specify the bandwidth you want in fairly small increments up to the technical capability of the connection. Better yet, you can tell the carrier to change your bandwidth at any time and it will be done quickly. Some carriers even let you make the change yourself through your web browser.

Ethernet over Fiber
Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) works just like Ethernet over Copper except that it runs on fiber optical cabling all the way and offers nearly unlimited speed options. Your access ports can be copper or fiber connections. Twisted pair copper jacks make sense for 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps ports. Fiber connections are used for 10 Gbps and above.

Fiber has become far more economical in just the last few years. Today it makes sense to install Ethernet over Fiber service as low at 10 Mbps. With a typical 1000 Mbps port, you typical have all the expansion capacity you’ll need for the foreseeable future. There won’t be any equipment changes needed until you breach the Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth level. Then it’s likely you’ll move up to a 10 GigE port. By that time, 100 GigE ports may be rule rather than the exception.

Cost Considerations
TDM services such as T1, T3 and SONET are proven technologies, but they represent the past in telecommunications and networking. The new competitive carrier networks are designed around Ethernet for scalability and compatibility with the Ethernet protocol that runs nearly every company network. In most cases, you’ll find that Ethernet offers a cost savings over TDM in both the copper and fiber formats. That cost savings can be as much as half or more depending on what’s available in your area.

Is your current connectivity starved for bandwidth? Clearly, it’s time to consider an upgrade. Get competitive quotes on copper and fiber optic services available for your location and be sure to specify a port speed that will handle both your current and expected needs.

Connecting Offices Between the US and Mexico

By: John Shepler

Many companies do business in both the United States and Mexico. There are numerous carriers that serve the US market and others that serve the Mexican market. But what do you do when you need the same service level in both countries?

International Connections
Companies that do business internationally need telecom services that cross national borders. Fortunately, there are a number of carriers that offer international line services. These include connections between US cities and those in Mexico.

What type of connections? Today you have options for voice, data and video services. You can connect just two locations or create a large virtual LAN that includes all of your business locations in North America and beyond.

International Private Lines
The Bell Labs developed T-Carrier system is a standard used throughout North America. That includes the US, Canada and Mexico.

T-Carrier includes T1 (DS1) that runs at 1.5 Mbps and T3 (DS3) at 45 Mbps. In-between those standard levels additional bandwidths can be created by bonding T1 lines together. Two T1 lines give you 3 Mbps, three lines offers 4.5 Mbps and so on. The maximum bandwidth available by T1 line bonding is 10 to 12 Mbps. Above that, you generally run out of copper pairs available to be pressed into service or the bonded service become cost prohibitive.

T3 lines can be rate limited to bridge that gap between 10 Mbps and 45 Mbps. The line itself runs at full speed, but you only pay for the bandwidth that is actually enabled. The cost savings may or may not be attractive for fractional T3 service, depending on your needs.

It’s important to note that T1 and T3 lines are dedicated private circuits that are always available or “nailed up.” You don’t need to dial into them and they are reserved for your exclusive use. Since you are the only customer on the line, the only network congestion possible is due to your own demands on the circuit.

Fiber Optic International Lines
Fiber optic lines were originally developed using SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standards deliberately chosen to be compatible with the T-Carrier system. The entry level service is OC3 which runs at 155 Mbps. It is designed to easily transport 3 T3 line services. In fact, T3 is most often carried for most of the transmission distance by OC-3 fiber service and then provisioned by coaxial copper cable at the customer demarcation point.

SONET is still the core transmission technology of most wide area networks. OC-3 is just the starting point. Other commonly available services include OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps, OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

Like T-Carrier, SONET services are dedicated private lines. You don’t shared the bandwidth with anyone. It is completely reserved for your use and sits idle when there is no traffic.

Ethernet International Services
Telephone traffic was dominant on international telecom circuits for a century. That has changed dramatically to where voice is now the minor traffic and data is dominant. On some networks, video is not the big bandwidth user, followed by large data transfers and then voice traffic.

This change in the nature of telecommunications traffic has spurred a change in the transmission technology. Nearly all local area networks have adopted the Ethernet standard. It’s logical that metro and wide area networks do the same.

The equivalent to T-Carrier or SONET is EPL or Ethernet Private Line. The beauty of Ethernet is that you plug the network line into your headquarters LAN at one end and your branch office LAN at the other. It’s Ethernet all the way. Because of this, you can bridge two LANs so that they perform as one large local network.

Carrier Ethernet, as it is called, offers another service called Ethernet LAN service. This is a meshed network that can connect 3 or more locations as one LAN. It’s perfect for companies with operations in multiple locations.

MPLS Networks
For international connections, like US and Mexico, MPLS networks often offer the best value. MPLS is a private “cloud” network with nationwide and international nodes. You can get the same point to point connections offered by dedicated private lines, only on MPLS they are called virtual private lines and virtual private LAN. The virtual designation comes from the cloud structure of the network. You are sharing the network with other traffic rather than having a circuit all to yourself. The MPLS network operator sets up your virtual paths and guarantees bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss.

In the end, you have the sense of private line performance, but a much more affordable rate with the shared network infrastructure.

MPLS networks can carry voice and data traffic simultaneously with class of service provisions to prevent data from overwhelming voice. VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS is VoIP carried on MPLS networks. It provides your telephone service among multiple business locations.

Do you have a need to interconnect offices between the US and Mexico? If so, check out the options available with International private lines and MPLS networks.

Benefits of Migrating From T1 to Fiber

By: John Shepler

If you’ve been using T1 lines for years, maybe decades, you know how solid and reliable they are. Your natural inclination is to stick with what’s working. After all, why mess with success? You should know that there are really good reasons to do just that.

What’s So Great About T1 Lines?
The appeal of T1 lies in its design and technical maturity. T-Carrier technology, which includes T1, E1 and T3 (DS3) line services, was developed in the mid-twentieth century for long distance telephone trunking to replace noisy analog carriers. Being digital, it was easy to expand the role of T1 lines to carrying packets as well as PCM audio telephone calls.

T1 Service Characteristics
T1 lines come into your building on one or two twisted copper pair using the same wires that carry multi-line telephone. This means that you can get T1 just about anywhere you can get regular POTS phone service. The service is symmetrical, meaning that upload and download speed are the same. There are no usage limits. Whatever you can load on the line during the month, you can transport. This is a dedicated private line, meaning you are the only user and security is high. So, with all that going for T1, why would you want to make a change?

Time Marches On
The 1.5 Mbps bandwidth of T1 was more than enough for business users… once upon a time. Today, 1.5 Mbps is still enough for credit card verification, email, casual Web browsing, and backup for small computer systems. It’s not a bad choice for small retail operations and offices, especially in rural ares where other bandwidth services are hard to come by.

Most users are used to higher bandwidths now, even on their smartphones. They expect faster response and really need it to efficiently do their jobs. That’s OK. You can get higher bandwidth from T1 lines. It’s done by bonding two or more together to make one large pipe. The size of that bandwidth pipe ranges from 3 Mbps on up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. If you need more than that, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

How About T3/DS3?
A faster version of T1 is T3, also known as DS3. The terms T3 and DS3 generally mean the same thing, although, strictly speaking, T3 refers to the physical line and DS3 is the organization of the data.

T3/DS3 isn’t just a little faster than T1, it’s a lot faster at 45 Mbps. This is more than enough for most small operations and many medium size companies. That makes T3/DS3 the logical upgrade from T1, right?

Yes and no. T3/DS3 is, indeed, a popular line service. It’s available in many business locations, but not nearly as many as T1. That’s because T3 doesn’t use twisted copper pair wiring. It’s provisioned on a pair of coaxial cables. That’s only for the last few hundred feet at most. T3/DS3 is transported primarily by fiber optics. If the fiber passes near your location, you may be able to get T3/DS3. If not, you’ll need to stick with copper.

The Ethernet over Copper Option
A newer technology than T1 is called EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This never was a a telephone company product. It’s an extension of the LAN Ethernet protocol for metro connections. Whatever goes on your LAN can be carried by EoC.

The big advantage of Ethernet over Copper is that it uses the same twisted copper pair as T1 lines. A more advanced modulation scheme allows EoC to offer speeds ranging from 3 Mbps on up to 50 Mbps, sometimes higher. The tradeoff is that the farther you are from the provider office, the less bandwidth is available. EoC is quite popular in the 10 and 20 Mbps bandwidths.

Moving Up to Fiber
Carrier Ethernet is available over fiber as well as copper. This is called EoF or Ethernet over Fiber. Once you move up to fiber, the bandwidth limitations disappear. Fiber optic service typically starts at 10 Mbps, with 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps as popular service levels. Some companies and now requiring 10 Gbps EoC, which is more and more available.

You may already know that fiber optic service comes in two protocols: SONET and Ethernet over Fiber. SONET is an older service that is the fiber optic extension of T-Carrier. DS/T3 is generally transported to the curb over a SONET service.

Choosing Ethernet vs SONET
SONET fiber services typically range from OC3 at 155 Mbps on up to OC-192 at 10 Gbps, although higher bandwidths are available. The increments are 155 Mbps, 622 Mbps, 1.2 Gbps, 2.4 Gbps and 10 Gbps.

Carrier Ethernet works differently. There aren’t large increments in bandwidth. You can pretty much specify the bandwidth you want in the 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps range. Popular service levels are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. You’ll recognize these as standard Ethernet LAN speeds.

Ethernet over Fiber is not only much more scalable than SONET, it is generally less expensive. The cost difference can be dramatic in some locations. You may pay half or less for EoF as you would for SONET. You’ll still get highly reliable professional grade service with low latency, jitter and packet loss.

Are you feeling stymied by the limitations of your old T1 lines? Now may be the perfect time to migrate your connectivity to Ethernet over Fiber at a lower cost than you might expect. You’ll also be laying the groundwork for future expansion, with higher bandwidth levels quickly available as you need them.

Asymmetric Bandwidth is Hot for Business

By: John Shepler

What has characterized serious bandwidth for business applications has been symmetry, or having the same Mbps capacity in both the up (transmit) and down (receive) directions. That’s being challenged, now, by new service products that promote asymmetry. Asymmetry means having a different bandwidth available depending on whether you are uploading or downloading. Let’s have a look at why this is happening and if it can be advantageous for your business.

Symmetry has its roots in telecom services that go back to the development of digital line transmission a half-century ago. The inventor of the T-Carrier standards, including the ubiquitous T1 line, was Bell Labs. Bell’s mission was to serve the telephone companies, so the digitization of telephone calls preceded computer to computer communications by decades. Switching from analog to digital long lines virtually eliminated the noise, distortion and crosstalk effects that plagued domestic long distance and international phone calls. It also enabled systems that could transmit hundreds and thousands of simultaneous phone calls on a single circuit.

Why symmetrical operation? Phone calls are bi-directional in nature. It doesn’t matter which end of the call you are on. You need the same line characteristics so that you can talk and listen simultaneously. This results in transmit and receive paths that are identical in design.

When T1 lines, DS3 connections and fiber optic circuits were pressed into service to meet the demand for computer communications, they automatically came with symmetrical bandwidth as well as dedicated circuits, synchronized channels and low latency and jitter. These features of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) get the job done, but at a price.

Asymmetry has its roots in the rise of the Internet and consumer based Internet Service Providers (ISPs). When you access a web site, you send a small burst of packets to tell the server what you want and get back a large burst of packets that carry text, images, audio and video. Nearly all web access by users requires a lot more bandwidth in the download direction than in the upload direction.

This works well for telephone companies providing DSL over shared phone lines and cable companies using spare channels to deliver broadband Internet. Cable, especially, is a one-way medium. When TV was the only service, all channel content went from the head end to the consumer. For asymmetrical broadband, many fewer channels have to be allocated for the upload direction. That leaves the rest available for higher download speeds at premium pricing.

What some businesses, especially the smaller ones, have found is that asymmetrical DSL, cable, wireless and satellite broadband meet their needs just fine. This is especially true when their employees use the Internet primarily for web access and occasional email. Cable broadband is readily available and gives you higher download speeds for a fraction of the cost of a T1 line. When you get into higher bandwidths, say 10 to 100 Mbps, the cost differences are like night and day.

There are some hitches in this rosy scenario. Asymmetry is only one reason why DSL and Cable are cheaper than T1, DS3, Ethernet over Copper and fiber. A big driver in this cost reduction is shared rather than dedicated bandwidth. With shared bandwidth, the Mbps you have in either direction varies constantly depending on what your neighbors are doing. It’s one big bandwidth pool and the more users who are swimming in it, the less bandwidth is available to each user. This can get annoying when you have a critical project in the works and you can’t get much done because other people are downloading high definition videos.

Another difference between the symmetrical and asymmetrical services is that the symmetrical ones tend to be tariffed telecom services with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that specify repair times for circuit outages, usually in a matter of a few hours. The consumer oriented asymmetrical services tend to be classified as “data services” and are provided on a best effort basis. The carrier will take your complaints seriously, but they may not be able to get the line fixed for some time.

Asymmetry doesn’t work for everyone. Applications like disaster backup and recovery, video conferencing, PBX & enterprise VoIP telephony, cloud computing and large file transfers between multiple business sites really need line symmetry for optimum performance. Companies running these applications also tend to need dedicated bandwidth and service level agreements to ensure maximum productivity.

Even so, the heavy competition from cable and other service providers is causing some major telecom carriers to rethink their service offerings. MegaPath, for instance, is rolling out asymmetrical service to customers at a cost savings. They are still differentiating their service with dedicated bandwidth, SLAs and Quality of Service (QoS) options for business applications that need these characteristics. Other big telecom carriers are expected to follow suit.

With so many service providers and connectivity options, how do you choose the optimum service that gives you the performance you need for the least expense? The best way is to get help from a bandwidth broker who works with many service providers and has the volume to get you the best discounts. Get instant online pricing and available consulting for bandwidth services available for your business locations.

Fiber Optic Leased Lines for Business

Copper-based leased lines have been the go-to solution for connecting business sites and for dedicated access to the Internet. However, copper’s days are numbered as big data, HD video and a migration out of the corporate data centers and into the cloud accelerate. The era of fiber-everything is approaching. Fortunately, prices are lower and options greater than ever before.

Fiber optic leased lines have been employed for decades by major corporations and businesses, like video production and distribution, that can’t function without the bandwidth fiber affords. Nearly all of this bandwidth has been supplied by a telephone industry standard called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETworking.

SONET picks up where T-carrier stops. T1 is good for 1.5 Mbps and up to 12 Mbps when multiple T1 lines are bonded. T3, often called DS3, is a 45 Mbps service, although it can be rate limited to 10 or 20 Mbps to lower costs. DS3 stands at the crossroads between copper and fiber. DS3 bandwidth is most often carried on a multiplexed SONET service for most of the transport distance and then converted to coaxial copper connections at the customer site.

SONET fiber optic lines start with OC-3 at 155 Mbps. Like DS3, OC-3 can be rate limited to offer fractional OC-3 bandwidth at 50 or 100 Mbps. Most often it is leased as a full rate OC-3 service.

Other SONET service levels offer increasing bandwidth. OC-12 runs at 622 Mbps. OC-24 is a Gigabit service running at 1.2 Gbps. It is not widely offered. The next popular SONET service is OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. OC-192 steps this up to 10 Gbps. OC-768 is a 40 Gbps line service that has been popular as a carrier backbone but now offered to businesses in some areas.

Note the big gaps in bandwidth between the SONET optical carrier levels. If you need a Gigabit connection, you may have to order an OC-48 service even though it has twice the bandwidth you require. We’ll take a look at how Carrier Ethernet is far more scalable and can give you fine degree of granularity for selecting just the right bandwidth for your applications.

Another thing about SONET is that it is a TDM or Time Division Multiplexed technology. This means that the signal is a string of bits divided into small channels and carefully synchronized to communicate with other SONET lines. Why this arrangement? It is the telephony legacy of SONET. It was designed to be compatible with Bell’s T-Carrier standards that are also TDM-based. Each channel in a T1 line or OC-768 is 64 Kbps to support one telephone call. Of course, these channels can now be combined so that you can use the entire line capacity less overhead to transport your data packets.

Since SONET is not a packet switched protocol, you need a protocol converter to translate between TDM and Ethernet in order to get your network data from place to place. That is generally a plug-in module for your router. Each SONET level has a specifically designed module that is unique to that optical carrier level.

What SONET has going for it is a long history and extensive deployment worldwide. You don’t have to worry about the intricacies of protocol conversion or signal interfacing, as they problems were solved long ago. SONET is most popular when deployed in rings of two redundant fibers that can switch in under 50 Msec to keep the data flowing even when faults in the system occur. Most metropolitan and long haul fiber optic networks are set up in the SONET ring topology for reliability.

What now competes with SONET is Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). Yes, this is the familiar Ethernet protocol that runs on your LAN but extended for long haul transport. The extended protocol is called Carrier Ethernet.

The advantages of Carrier Ethernet include easy and rapid scalability, a packet oriented protocol directly compatible with nearly all company networks and edge routers, and a considerable cost savings compared with SONET. Typical service levels start at 10 Mbps, the standard Ethernet service level. Other popular options are 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE).

You aren’t limited to these particular service levels. You can pretty much pick any bandwidth you like as long as the Ethernet Port installed at your facility can support the maximum speed you require. Easy scalability also means that you can often simply call your service provider and request an increase in bandwidth. It’s likely to be available in a matter of days if not hours.

Ethernet over FIber was almost unknown even a few years ago but now widely deployed. If available at your location, you’ll find that the cost per Mbps is much lower than SONET, perhaps half the cost for the same bandwidth. This is why Carrier Ethernet is rapidly taking over the fiber optic transport market, although SONET prices have also been plunging in response to the new competition.

Does your company require higher bandwidths that you can get from copper wireline services? Are you using fiber now but wondering if you can get a better price? Do you have a new application and want to get the best deal on bandwidth? If any of these apply, get competitive quotes on SONET and Ethernet fiber optic leased lines available for your business location.

DS3 Bandwidth Alternatives

DS3 WAN connections are popular with companies needing more bandwidth than they can get from T1 lines but less than moving up to a full OC-3 fiber optic SONET service. So, why would you bee looking for other options? It generally comes down to either cost or performance. Most often, cost.

Yes, there are other bandwidth options available that can do the job that your current DS3 is doing. Let’s take a look at options available today that maybe didn’t exist when you signed your DS3 lease.

DS3 straddles the telecom border between copper wireline and fiber optic bandwidth services. It was originally part of the T-Carrier specifications developed by the Bell System for telephone trunking between switching centers. T-Carrier options include T1 and T3. DS3 is the service that rides on the T3 physical circuit.

Today the terms DS3 and T3 are used interchangeably. In practice, you’ll be hard pressed to find a T3 physical circuit. At one time they were available over microwave relay or waveguide pipes. The actual interface to your router is two coaxial cables with BNC connectors that plug into a DS3 interface module. Those cables have a distance limitation of 450 feet. So, how does DS3 service get from the Central Office (CO) to your location?

Most of the distance is covered by fiber optic cabling that doesn’t have this distance restriction. The DS3 signal is often multiplexed onto a higher bandwidth OC-3 SONET circuit. There may be other DS3 services sharing the same OC-3. Yours is dropped off at your building where it is converted to the industry standard coaxial connections.

This suggests a couple of alternatives to DS3. Before you jump into anything new, though, consider that you may not be getting the best price on your current DS3 service. Prices on telecom services in general have plunged in recent years owing to deregulation and considerable new competition. Perhaps the local telephone company was your only provider choice when you had the service installed. Now there may be several competing providers that are ready, willing and able to do the same job. Get multiple price quotes, preferable from a major bandwidth broker like Telarus, Inc., before you conclude that you need to dump your DS3 only for cost reasons.

Something else to consider is how much bandwidth you really need. Did you contract for DS3 because your T1 line was out of capacity? There’s a big gap between T1 at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. Do you really need the full 45 Mbps or is that simply all that was available at the time?

If you really need, say, 10 Mbps, you can achieve it by scaling up from T1 or down from DS3. T1 lines are now readily bonded together to increase bandwidth. The practical limit is 10 or 12 Mbps without distance limitations. DS3 service can be rate limited to create what’s known as fractional DS3. In other words, you still have a DS3 interface installed but the actual line speed you pay for is 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 30 Mbps or some other option.

Both these approaches may save you money compared to what you pay now. An even more attractive option is Ethernet. With Ethernet over Copper you can get bandwidths ranging from 3 Mbps on the low end up to 45 Mbps and sometimes higher on the high end. Prices per Mbps are generally lower, sometimes even half the cost, than the older T1 and T3 technologies. The hitch with Ethernet over Copper is that it is distance sensitive. The farther you are from the CO, the lower the line speed you can achieve.

Ethernet over Fiber picks up where Ethernet over Copper leaves off. Fiber optic Ethernet service is often available from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Popular options are 10 Mbps standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. The speed of the port installed at your facility sets the maximum, not minimum, speed you can achieve. Common practice is to install a 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet port.

Fiber connections aren’t available for every building, but carriers have been so competitive in building out their networks that more locations that ever before are “lit” for fiber and others can be easily connected. Ethernet over FIber is easily scaled so that you can increase your bandwidth quickly by making a simple call to your provider. This means that you only need to order the bandwidth you need today along with a port speed capable of handling whatever speed you expect to need in the foreseeable future.

Ethernet over Fiber is a bargain compared to other telecom arrangements, if you can get it. If not, you might be able to get SONET fiber optic service to your premises. The lowest speed service is OC-3 at 155 Mbps, but in some cases this can be rate limited to provide fractional OC-3 service.

One final option is fixed wireless. This is unlike the lower speed 3G or 4G cellular wireless that is now available to business. Fixed wireless at 50 Mbps or more is a line of sight microwave service only available in major metro areas in the business districts. If your location qualifies, you can get fast and inexpensive installation compared to constructing a new fiber optic run.

So, how do you decide on the optimum solution for your company? Doing the research yourself can be time consuming and you may miss out on some opportunities that aren’t well advertised. Instead, run a quick online business bandwidth availability check for the options you want to consider and compare competitive pricing. You may be surprised by what has become available recently.


Note: Photo of BNC connector courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Long Range Ethernet Goes Beyond The LAN

Ethernet has grown from its inception in the 1980s to become the dominant Local Area Network (LAN) protocol. The big technical advance in this decade is the rise of Ethernet as a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) protocol of choice. It’s likely that when this process is complete it will be Ethernet as far as the eye can see. What is it that is driving this move to Ethernet everywhere and what advantages does it offer for your business?

What’s solidified Ethernet in the LAN for now and the foreseeable future is economy of scale. Nearly every piece of networking gear you can buy has standard copper or fiber Ethernet connectors. The most popular of these, of course, is the RJ-45 connector. You recognize it immediately without even having to look at the legends near the connector or any equipment manuals. Within the organization, everything plugs into Ethernet sockets to connect to the network.

The big disconnect occurs when you want your traffic to leave the confines of your building or campus. You might find a contractor who will interconnect businesses within an office or industrial park, but that’s about as far as you can install private network cable. You might get a little farther with optical line of sight or microwave wireless transmissions. However, if you want to be able to connect to the Internet or establish a private network around town or across the country, you need to use a telecom carrier.

The first carriers were local telephone companies. Today’s ILECs or Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers offer far more than telephone service. They have twisted pair copper bundles running to every home and business. They also generally have fiber optic cabling for their own use and to lease to major businesses. These services have their own unique protocols invented by the telephone industry to transport phone calls. Copper data transmissions use T-Carrier, such as T1 or T3. Fiber optic transmissions use SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standards, such as OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48.

How do you connect an Ethernet protocol network to a T-Carrier or SONET protocol carrier? Very carefully! You need what’s called a protocol converter. This is generally in the form of a plug-in module for your router. The conversion process changes the signals and timing of one protocol to another so that they can exchange digital data.

This conversion process has worked well for decades, so why change it? The reasons are efficiency, new services and cost.

What’s happened is that new competitive carriers have emerged. These carriers don’t have the legacy of telephone company standards to support and have embraced IP networking for their regional and nationwide fiber optic networks. Since your network runs Ethernet and their network runs Ethernet, it seems logical to interconnect them via Ethernet.

The standardization of what’s called Carrier Ethernet by the industry standards group, Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), has opened the door to handing off network traffic from business to carrier and between carriers within the Ethernet protocol. Getting rid of the conversions makes the process more efficient. More importantly, it has made possible services that you can’t get on the old telco networks. Notably, these are E-Line or Ethernet Line service and E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. The difference is that E-Line connects two locations and E-LAN can connect multiple locations in a mesh network.

By keeping everything as Ethernet, it is now possible to bridge LANs at two or more locations at the layer 2 level using Ethernet switches. Essentially, you take all these individual LANs and join them to form one much larger corporate LAN.

Another advantage of using Carrier Ethernet to transport your traffic is that it was designed from the beginning to be easily scalable in much finer increments than the telco protocols. You install a port, say 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10 GigE, that sets the maximum bandwidth of your connection. However, you don’t need to order the highest speed that the circuit will support you can start off at a quarter or half of that and then increase your bandwidth when needed. Often, all that is needed is a call to your Ethernet service provider. The change can be implemented in hours or days because there are no equipment swaps that need to be made.

Finally, Carrier Ethernet has a significant cost advantage compared to bonded T1, T3 (DS3) bandwidth and SONET services. On a per-Mbps basis, Ethernet often costs just half of what you pay for the older technologies. That mean you can save money for the company on your next telecom contract or double your bandwidth for the same budget.

Does long range Ethernet meet your needs? A good way to find out is to get competitive quotes for both traditional bandwidth and Carrier Ethernetservices and compare cost and features.

Many Ways To Connect To MPLS Networks

MPLS networks are becoming very popular for connecting multiple business locations. Let’s take a look at what MPLS networks are all about and the many ways you can get connected to them.

The simplest situation is when you have two locations and want to tie them together. The logical thing to do is order a point to point private line. These lines come in all sizes, bandwidths actually, to meet your needs. They are exactly what they sound like. One end of the line connects to location #1. The other end of the line connects to location #2. It’s like there really is a long piece of wire that extends across town or across the country.

There is one difference between a private line and a piece of wire. Private lines are actually telecom services deployed on those wires or fiber optic strands. There is a certain protocol and speed for each type of line. A T1 private line, for instance, gives you 1.5 Mbps bidirectionally to interfaces meeting the T-carrier specification. You’ll need T1 cards for your routers at each end. Nothing else will work. They have to be exactly the same for the T1 line to function.

You could build a larger network with 3 or more locations the same way. It will cost the least if you set up a star network configuration and do the routing at headquarters with lines running to each business location. Then HQ can decide who can communicate to who. You might set it up so that any location can send files to any other, having them routed through headquarters. Or, you may set it up so that each location can communicate with HQ only and then headquarters will decide where, if anywhere else, the data goes.

Like the two site private line arrangement, if all your lines are T1s, then every port will be a T1 interface. In this case, though, you have gained a bit of flexibility. You can use T1 lines for the smaller operations and install T3 lines for the larger ones. The setup at HQ will require a mix of T1 and T3 interfaces to handle various size remote locations.

Here’s where MPLS networks come in. The MPLS network is a cloud as far as its users are concerned. If you peek inside, you’ll see that it is a fairly large scale fiber optic network. Many MPLS networks have regional or national service footprints. Some even span the globe. What’s special about MPLS is the protocol used. It’s not T-carrier, SONET, IP or anything else. It’s a proprietary technology called label switching that wraps each packet in a special label that is used to manage traffic. The label gets attached when entering the network and removed upon exit.

What this does is make an MPLS network “protocol agnostic.” That means it doesn’t care what protocol you are transporting. It’s also speed agnostic. It doesn’t really care how fast your line is running as long as it connects via an appropriate interface port. Once on the network, all packets have the bandwidth needed to prevent congestion.

This really opens the window to connecting all locations, large and small, via the MPLS “cloud.” You simply need to get your voice, video or data to the network. From there on, the service provider is responsible for getting packets from one location to wherever you have specified that they go. Each location has a “last mile” connection that is the on and off ramp to the MPLS network. Those last mile connections can be just about anything.

Typical MPLS connections include T1, bonded T1, E1, T3 (DS3), E3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber, 3G and 4G fixed wireless and DSL.

You don’t have to use the same connection at every location. The network will handle the traffic regardless of how it connected. However, there can be an advantage to standardizing on Ethernet as you only protocol. That way you can make use of standard Ethernet services such as E-Line and E-LAN. Ethernet LAN service is especially valuable because it lets you tie all your LANs together in one large bridged LAN at layer 2.

Do you have two or more business locations that you would like to link together? Get expert advice and competitive pricing for MPLS network services and last mile connections that meet your requirements.

Differences Between Fiber and EoC

Many companies, constrained by their dedicated Internet and private line bandwidth, are doing the trade studies necessary to justify a move to fiber optic services. Now they have another option to throw in mix. It’s Ethernet over Copper or EoC.

Just what is it about EoC that presumes to place it in the same category as fiber optics? Perhaps surprisingly, it’s both bandwidth and cost.

Traditional fiber optic services are based on the SONET or Synchronous Optical NETwork standard developed by the telephone industry. SONET services start with OC-3 at 155 Mbps. This is 3x the speed of DS3 or T3 service. More importantly, SONET was designed to be compatible with T-Carrier standards so that T1 lines and DS3 services can be readily transported on SONET. It is common practice for these copper-based services to hitch a ride on fiber optic carriers for long haul connections.

The beauty of fiber is that it has nearly unlimited bandwidth potential. When fiber optic cable is brought in, it’s not just a small diameter cable with a couple of fiber strands. There are almost always dozens if not a hundred or more fiber strands in that cable. Why? Because the big cost is in the construction. Trenching underground, installing conduit and pulling the fiber cable is way more expensive than the difference between a very small fiber cable and a larger one.

How about the fiber bandwidth? Each strand can easily transport 10 Gbps or more. If you add coarse or dense wavelength division multiplexing to send multiple beams on each fiber strand, you can ramp that bandwidth capacity up by 10 to 100x. Future technology advancements may increase capacity even further. It’s clearly going to be a very long time before businesses start to “fill up” their fiber optic cable capacity... once they have it.

Therein lies the rub. The reason that almost 2/3 of business locations still don’t have fiber optic service is that the construction costs are overwhelming. You need to be reasonably near a carrier’s service and then pony up to have a drop run to your building and the termination equipment installed. More and more buildings are being “lit” for fiber optic service every day. Some day every business location will be pre-wired for fiber just like they are for telephone and electricity. That day may be well off in the future, however.

So, where does this option of EoC come in? One main selling point for Ethernet over Copper is that you may be able to avoid construction costs completely. The copper involved is nothing more than twisted pair telco wire that runs between your building and the telephone company’s nearest central office (CO). Residential lines typically contain 2 pair. Business cables can easily have 25 or more copper pair installed as a matter of course. Some of these are used for business telephone lines. Others can be used for T1 lines. Still others can be employed for Ethernet over Copper. What’s important is that your CO has EoC termination equipment installed.

Let’s say that you can get Ethernet over Copper service at your location. What’s available and what does it cost?

EoC carriers use up to 8 unused copper pair to provision your service. More pairs mean higher bandwidth. How much depends on the CO equipment and how long the copper run is. Within a few miles of the CO, you can generally get 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, even as much as 45 Mbps over 8 pair. In some situations that can be pushed to over 100 Mbps if you are mere blocks away from the CO, which is not that unusual in metropolitan areas. The 45 Mbps level is popular because it is a direct replacement for DS3 bandwidth that is most often transported over fiber.

How about the cost? EoC is typically half the cost of T-Carrier or SONET bandwidth or you can get twice the bandwidth for the same money. For instance, many smaller companies are upgrading to 3 Mbps for the same price as their older 1.5 Mbps T1 line. In addition to lower monthly lease prices, construction costs are minimal to zero compared to new fiber construction.

EoC can effectively compete with lower level fiber optic services because many companies have been forced to make the jump from T1 to DS3 to OC3 because of limited options. Really all they needed was 10 or 20 Mbps, but those are not standard telecom line speeds. Ethernet services are far more scalable, with increments of 1 or 5 Mbps rather than large jumps. You can often increase your service bandwidth by simply making a phone call to your provider. No equipment changes are necessary as long as you are below the maximum port bandwidth.

Should you be considering EoC in place of fiber optic services? Get current pricing for Ethernet over Copper and Fiber as well as SONET optical services to see what works best for your business location.

T3 Bandwidth And Its Competitors

When T1 bandwidth isn’t enough anymore, the next logical step is to move up to T3. But just what is T3 bandwidth and is it the best option for businesses looking for increased WAN network bandwidth options?

Both T1 and T3 are part of the same family of telephone industry technical standards called T-Carrier. This technology was invented after WWII when it started making sense to use digital carriers to replace analog carrier telephony. What carrier telephony does is let one pair of telephone wires transport multiple conversations. Analog implementations set up a multiplexed arrangement much like radio stations on the AM or FM band. Each phone call was loaded into its own channel on the carrier system. At the far end, they were demultiplexed to extract them into individual telephone lines.

Analog carrier telephony had its issues. One was that the lines tended to get noisy and crosstalk between channels over long distances. If you are old enough to remember long distance services in, say, the 1960s, you remember hearing hiss and garbled conversations in the background. Once digital carriers were deployed, all that noise and crosstalk disappeared. A long distance call is every bit as quiet as a local call.

As technology progressed, the need for long distance digital lines to carry computer data became important. T-Carrier technology was already in place to digitize phone conversations and transport them as bits instead of varying voltages and currents. The logical move was to use these digital line services to also carry computer bits and bytes. The demand for digital circuits really took off when the Internet was commercialized in the 1990’s. Since the lowest speed standard T-Carrier is T1 at 1.5 Mbps, it was T1 that became the choice for business connectivity.

Most businesses were fine starting with T1 private lines and dedicated Internet access. Some needed more bandwidth immediately and others outgrew their T1 bandwidth. The next step up is T3. However, T3 is not 3x T1 bandwidth as you might suspect. It is 28x the bandwidth when you round off the actual bandwidth numbers. A T3 line runs at 45 Mbps.

T1 and T3 differ by more than just line speed. T1 is provisioned over ordinary twisted pair telco wiring like you’d have for multiple line telephone service. There really isn’t a T3 line that runs from your business to the telco central office. That’s more of a colloquialism. T3 is delivered on two small diameter coaxial cables with BNC connectors. That interface has a relatively short maximum run, so it is mostly used within the building or for a short run from the curb to the demarcation point in the building. The actual T3 “line” to the service provider is most likely a fiber optic run.

The terms T3 and DS3 are used interchangeably, but there is a fine line of difference. T3 is a physical line. DS3 is a data service that runs on T3. DS3 can also be multiplexed onto a OC-3 or other fiber optic service and be transported that way. That may sound like splitting hairs, and for many purposes it is, but it can be a problem when go you to order service. For instance, if you order a T3 line you’ll be getting DS3 if it is available. That will depend on having fiber optic service running nearby. If not, you probably won’t be able to get T3 or DS3 at all.

Does that mean that you are stuck with T1 bandwidth? No, not necessarily. Technology advances since the invention of T-Carrier have created more options. The first is a process called bonding that combines the bandwidth of two or more T1 lines. A double bonded T1 circuit delivers 3 Mbps. Triple bonding takes you up to 4.5 Mbps, and so on up to the practical limit of 10 or 12 Mbps. That’s not T3 capacity, of course, but it meets the needs of many companies that don’t need the full 45 Mbps T3 bandwidth.

Another advance is called Ethernet over Copper. This is the familiar LAN protocol extended to run over telecom lines. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) also uses multiple twisted pair copper wiring, so it is easy to connect as long as the proper terminal equipment is in place at your central office. EoC is distance sensitive, but if you are within a few miles of the central office you can get bandwidths of 2 to 45 Mbps over copper. What’s more, Ethernet over Copper bandwidth is less expensive than T-Carrier on a per-Mbps basis. You may well get T3 bandwidth levels for as little as half the cost, depending on your location.

Is your company tight on bandwidth and considering an upgrade to your T1 line service? If so, get a complete set of competitive quotes for bonded T1, Ethernet over Copper and T3 service options specific to your business location.

EoC Takes On Fractional DS3

Before Carrier Ethernet became widely available, you had two logical migration paths from T1 to gain more bandwidth. You could take the big step up to T3 or DS3 service or bond T1 lines for a more incremental approach. EoC or Ethernet over Copper gives you a new and very attractive dedicated bandwidth option.

T1 lines have become popular because they are so readily available and have offered the right bandwidth for smaller companies and specialized uses by larger companies. A T1 line is rated at 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions.

The other line service in the same T-Carrier family is T3 rated at 45 Mbps in both the up and down directions. At one time T3 was delivered over microwave and coaxial cable or waveguide, but that is rare to find now. Instead, the digital service the T3 delivers, DS3, is widely available over SONET fiber optic service. It is transported over a standard SONET service, OC-3, which can carry three DS3 services multiplexed onto the OC-3 fiber. DS3 is then demultiplexed and dropped off at the demarcation point through a standard DS3 interface. That interface is two small diameter coaxial copper cables with BNC connectors.

This works for a lot of companies. If you happen to be in a metropolitan area where metro fiber is readily available, it’s not hard to get provisioned for DS3 service. If you can make good use of 45 Mbps bandwidth and can afford it, DS3 is a fast and reliable telecom service. The question is what to do if you don’t need 45 Mbps, the budget isn’t there, but 1.5 Mbps is really cramping your style.

There are a couple of traditional approaches that can help you out here. One is to move up incrementally from T1 service. The other is to order a fractional DS3 service. It’s DS3 that’s throttled back do deliver less bandwidth at a lower cost.

You may be wondering how you scale up from T1 since DS3 is the next step up in the digital hierarchy. The answer is to combine the bandwidth of multiple T1 lines in a bonding process. You can order a second T1 line and have it bonded to the one you have to get 3 Mbps instead of 1.5 Mbps. Later on, you can add more lines and gradually work your way up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That’s pretty much the practical limit of T1 line bonding.

There are a couple of advantages to this approach. First, you don’t have to make a big bandwidth or cost commitment because you are moving up incrementally. This is the way a lot of businesses grow so it’s a good match. Second, your T1 service is provisioned over twisted pair telco wiring that’s likely already in place for multi-line telephone service. The added T1 lines use vacant pairs in the binder group, the bundle of wires that runs from your location back to the telco central office.

Why is that important? Because it eliminates big construction costs which you may not be able to avoid if you have new fiber optic service installed. If no DS3 is available, you may be stuck with copper or forced to pay a large construction bill. Even if DS3 is an option, fractional DS3 service may not save you that much money over a full DS3 service. The cost savings is not proportional to the bandwidth reduction.

Is there a good solution for this dilemma? Oh, yes. There is now. It’s a fairly new service called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Like T1, EoC is provisioned over twisted pair telco wiring that is already installed. Like fractional DS3, you can get bandwidths far above what T1 lines offer. Unlike either bonded T1 or DS3 and fractional DS3, EoC has a very attractive per-Mbps pricing.

2x2 Mbps and 3x3 Mbps are very popular Ethernet over Copper services for smaller businesses. The 2x2 means 2 Mbps upload and 2 Mbps download. It’s also called 2 Mbps EoC. The 3 Mbps bandwidth level works similarly. What you might not know is that you can get 2 or 3 Mbps EoC for the same price as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Exactly how much you can get for T1 price levels depends on how competitive the carriers are in your location. Either way, it’s more bandwidth for the same money.

The other interesting feature of Ethernet over Copper is that you can easily get 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 and perhaps even 45 Mbps delivered over copper and not fiber. Pricing per Mbps beats T1 and DS3 and can be as little as half the monthly cost. The limiting factor is distance from the CO. Ethernet over Copper technology is distance limited and not readily available more than a mile or two from the central office. Still, that covers a majority of business locations nationwide.

Are you stymied by the lack of bandwidth options or the costs involved in trying to connect via T1 or DS3? If so, check out Ethernet over Copper prices and availability for your particular business locations. You may be surprised by how much you can get for your bandwidth dollar.

Bandwidth Management Gets Easier With Ethernet

Bandwidth demand can be all over the map. It goes up, it comes down. It’s fine now but could go parabolic in 6 months to a year. Or not. How can an IT manager ensure that adequate resources are in place when needed without paying through the nose for idle resources?

Exacerbating this problem is the procurement and provisioning process that worked better in less volatile times. Typically a need is identified, a budget is created, approved and released, requests for quotes go out, vendors are narrowed down, a purchase order is cut, it winds its way through the carrier’s front office, eventually resulting in an installation, turn-up and the start of billing. If something happens and you need more, the whole process starts all over.

In a way, the whole system is tuned to match the technical characteristics of circuit switched line services. Take a T1 line, for instance. You order the line and you get 1.5 Mbps. No more, no less. If you only need 500 Kbps right now, the other 1000 Kbps goes to waste. You have to pay for the entire 1,500 Kbps because the day is coming soon when you’ll fill that pipe and you need to be ready.

The same is true for DS3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and other traditional telecom services. Moving from one of these to the other, up or down, is a major deal. DS3 is nothing like T1. If you need DS3, you’ll have a completely different demarcation connection from the carrier and you’ll need a completely different interface card for your edge router. It’s a major bandwidth jump, too. You’re moving from 1.5 Mbps up to 45 Mbps.

Not enough? The next jump is to OC3 SONET fiber at 155 Mbps. Once again, there is a long procurement and installation process with unique equipment for a particular service level. If you failed to order enough bandwidth, you’ll be dealing with network congestion for some time. If you way over-order, you’ll be paying a pretty price for a largely empty pipe.

Is there anything that can take some of the risk out of bandwidth management? You bet there is. It’s called Carrier Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet services are fairly new compared to T-Carrier or SONET. They are available for metro, long haul and access networks. Carrier Ethernet is often touted as a technology that can link company LANs at two or more locations. It has an easy interface which is the same Ethernet connection used on your LAN, copper or fiber.

If that wasn’t enough, Carrier Ethernet costs are generally less than equivalent bandwidth levels for T-Carrier or SONET. It is not unusual to get twice the Mbps for the same money as you are currently paying for legacy telecom services. This cost savings is compelling, but may not even be THE important reason to embrace Ethernet in the MAN and WAN.

What Ethernet offers that other protocols don’t is easy scalability. Ethernet MAN and WAN networks are being designed for rapid remote management so that no truck rolls are needed when a customer wants more or less bandwidth. It’s all done at a computer screen so that you can pick up a phone can request a move from, say, 10 to 15 Mbps or 100 to 150 Mbps and you’ll have the extra resources available in as little as a few hours.

Carrier Ethernet is set up something like your LAN in that there are standard port speeds. You know that your switches, routers and PCs all have NICs (Network Interface Cards) with specs of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10 Gbps. Usually, its some combination like 10/100/1000. The Ethernet port that you order installed will generally be 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps, although it could be 10 Gbps if you really need that much. As long as you stay below the maximum capacity of the port, you can have just about any bandwidth level you want.

Very low bandwidths may have increments of 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps. Higher bandwidths might go up in jumps of 100 Mbps. Carrier Ethernet gives you a lot more choices so that you can more closely match the bandwidth you are paying for to the bandwidth you need. The ability to rapidly scale up that bandwidth means that you don’t have to order too much in anticipation of need. Get a port that will handle what you can reasonably expect to require but only order the bandwidth level you need to handle current business activity. If you suddenly enjoy a flood of customers or need to support a new video distribution, you can make that call and get the extra resources when you need them.

The result, clearly, is a major cost savings in not be over-provisioned for bandwidth plus less stress in worrying about what you have to do to be ready for tomorrow’s needs. Could your operation benefit from having this capability? If so, get prices, features and availability of Carrier Ethernet bandwidth services for your business locations.

Ethernet Bandwidth For Rural Areas

It is commonly assumed that there is no such thing as Ethernet WAN service beyond the city limits. That’s not really true, as you do have Ethernet connectivity options even in rural areas. Let’s see how that’s done.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is becoming the bandwidth service of choice for small and medium businesses. It offers the ease of Ethernet interfacing, ability to transport Ethernet services like E-Line, E-LAN and VPLS, relatively high bandwidths of 3 to 50 Mbps and even 100+ Mbps in select areas, all with provisioning over multiple twisted pair telco wiring that is already installed. Best of all, pricing is more than competitive. Where available, you’ll pay a lot less for EoC vs traditional telecom services like T1 or DS3 on an Mbps basis.

"Where available" is the catch. Ethernet over Copper technology has strict distance limitations. The modulation scheme that is used can transport high bandwidth levels, but signal levels fade rapidly as you get farther and farther away from the telco Central Office (CO). Within a mile or so you can get all sorts of bandwidth options using 2 to 8 twisted pair. As you start moving out to 2 or 3 miles away, signal levels degrade to the point where they are unusable even at low bandwidths.

That pretty much rules out EoC for most rural locations. Beyond the city limits, population densities are low and wire runs are long for telecom services. Fiber may be running right next to the gravel road you are standing on. The hitch is that there is no drop-off. The fiber just keeps on going to the next metropolitan area.

Now, there are exceptions. If you have a rural business location that luckily happens to be within a few thousand feet of the incumbent telephone company’s office, you may qualify for Ethernet over Copper services. What’s needed is for the telco or a competitive service provider to have EoC terminal equipment installed in that CO. You are less likely to find EoC equipment in smaller offices because of the limited number of businesses connected to that facility.

Don’t despair. As I said earlier, you may still have options. There is another way to transport Ethernet over copper lines with virtually unlimited reach. This is called Ethernet over DS1 or EoDS1. If DS1 sounds familiar, it’s because DS1 is the Digital Signal protocol used for T1 lines. DS1 is part of the half-century old T-Carrier specifications that define the technology for T1 and T3 lines. DS1 was originally developed to transport telephone conversations in groups of 24 channels or time slots within a time division multiplexed bit stream. Later, a concept called clear channel T1 was implemented to combine all those channels into one larger channel. That boosted bandwidth per channel from 64 Kbps up to 1.5 Mbps and made it practical to transport data using DS1.

DS1 defines the signal. T1 is the particular physical line consisting of 2 twisted pair copper telco wires with particular voltage and signal shape characteristics. Normally, DS1 and T1 go together. However, It is possible technically to transport Ethernet using DS1. What that means is that Ethernet can be sent over T1 lines. Since T1 was designed to use signal regenerators to boost sagging signal levels every mile or so, T1 service can go out into the boonies for miles, sometimes even 20 miles or more.

Ethernet over DS1 gives you the option to get Ethernet service where only T1 is available. You aren’t limited to the T1 line bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. T1 lines can be bonded to increase bandwidth, which works for EoDS1 too. Add more lines and you get more bandwidth. It’s the number of lines bonded times 1.5 Mbps.

What about cost? EoDS1 doesn’t offer the same cost advantages as EoC because the price of T1 lines doesn’t go down if you bond more of them together. You have to pay for each line. EoDS1 also isn’t available from all carriers or in all locations.

What’s the best bandwidth solution for your company? It depends a lot on where you are located and what services you require. There’s an easy way to compare options. Simply get competitive quotes for Ethernet and other telecom services from multiple service providers, each tailored to your particular requirements.

What’s The Best Business Internet Service?

Does your new business need Internet service for the first time or does your established business need improved access? Perhaps you just have a nagging feeling that you could be getting more bandwidth for less money. You might be right. To answer all these questions, let’s take a look at what’s available in the way of business Internet service now.

The preferred professional-grade business Internet connection has long been the T1 line. Why? It is highly reliable and has a rock solid bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. This is called symmetrical bandwidth. You’ll see that not all Internet connections are symmetrical. The rock solid nature of the bandwidth is also not guaranteed on some of the other services. T1 is a dedicated bandwidth service. That means that you have 1.5 Mbps set aside for your exclusive use. Once again, not all Internet connections are exclusive. Service reliability is often guaranteed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that spells out how fast line problems will be fixed and what the remedies are if the provider fall short of the agreement.

In addition to these attributes, T1 is popular because it is almost universally available. Would you be surprised to learn that T1 technology, also called T-Carrier, was developed over 50 years ago? Using T1 to connect to the Internet is much newer. It was originally developed for telephone trunk lines. For both applications, T1 is provisioned over one or two pair of twisted copper telco wiring. That wiring is available in nearly every business location.

The two drawbacks of T1 is that it is relatively expensive compared to low-end data services and the 1.5 Mbps limitation. A decade or two ago, 1.5 Mbps was a lot of bandwidth for most businesses. Today it still works for smaller concerns but is too little for medium and large companies. You can work around this limitation by bonding multiple T1 lines together to achieve anywhere from 3 to 12 Mbps of total bandwidth.

A similar but newer technology service that is catching on fast is Ethernet over Copper (EoC). It also uses multiple telco pairs to transport the signal, but works a bit differently. T1 bandwidth is always 1.5 Mbps no matter how far the line runs, even into rural areas. EoC offers higher bandwidths near the central office and less farther out. Several miles is the distance limitation of Ethernet over Copper. However, if you are within the service footprint, you can easily get 10, 20, 30 or even 45 Mbps. Sometimes even 100 Mbps on EoC. The other big advantage of EoC is cost. You can get twice the bandwidth for the same price as a T1 line or the same bandwidth for half the cost of bonded T1 lines.

Small retailers, especially chain stores or franchises, have used two way satellite Internet for years. Satellite will work anywhere you have a clear view of the Southern sky, even in the back woods if power is available. Satellite is often less expensive than T1, although the difference is shrinking. It has limited bandwidth available and latency, or time delay, makes it unsuitable for telephone or two-way video. It does work well for point of sale terminals and general Internet access.

Like T1, satellite has a newer competitor. This is 3G fixed wireless. It is a business grade Internet service similar in bandwidth to T1 lines or satellite but using the broadband capability of the cellular phone network. Unlike simple wireless aircards, 3G fixed wireless service uses a special antenna and modem system that makes the system more reliable and usable in most all business locations nationwide and in Canada. The cost is about half that of T1 service. It is perfect for POS terminals and is offered with PCI level security for credit card transactions.

If your application needs more bandwidth, Ethernet over Fiber or SONET fiber optical services will provide all you can use up to 10 Gbps. This level of bandwidth costs more, of course, and isn’t available for all locations. Construction costs to connect a particular building are often the deal breaker.

Two asymmetrical, shared bandwidth services of note are DSL and Cable broadband. These were designed for the consumer market and cost considerably less per Mbps than dedicated telecom services. However, you do get what you pay for and shared bandwidth services achieve their cost savings by creating a “party line” arrangement where you and many other users share the same bandwidth pool. That means your bandwidth will vary up and down all the time. There are also no SLAs because these are “information services” not telecom services. Even so, with Cable business broadband you can get 100 Mbps download & 10 Mbps upload for about the price of a T1 line. If the cable passes your business and cost is paramount, this service might well meet your needs better than any other connection.

Scratching your head as to which way to go? A more business-like approach is to get availability, features, and prices for several business Internet service options suitable for your location and needs. You may be surprised by how much has become available recently and at reduced costs compared to years past.

Copper First, Then Fiber Bandwidth Solution

What do you do when you really need to get your business connected, but fiber optic service installation just isn’t going to happen soon enough? One option is to adopt a two-stage process that gets you going now and then steps up to the bandwidth you really need when it's available. The key is utilizing two different technologies to take advantage of their strengths.

Fiber optic bandwidth, either SONET or Ethernet, will get you the bandwidth you need for any conceivable application. The low end starts around 50 or 100 Mbps and goes up to at least 1 Gbps, with many locations eligible for 10 Gbps Ethernet (10 GigE) or OC-192 SONET (10 Gbps).

Copper bandwidth, either T-Carrier or Ethernet, will get you the bandwidth you need much faster. That bandwidth, though, is going to be a lot slower than what you can get with fiber. T1 lines are reasonably priced, available almost anywhere, and can be installed in a matter of weeks. The base bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps. Not enough to even consider? Then multiply that bandwidth by bonding additional T1 lines. You can get 12 Mbps over T1 by bonding 8 T1 lines together to act as one big bandwidth pipe.

An alternative is Ethernet over Copper. This service uses the same twisted pair copper telco lines as T1, but has a more efficient modulation scheme. You can easily get 10, 20 or 30 Mbps using 8 copper pair. EoC technology trades off bandwidth and distance, unlike T1 which is 1.5 Mbps no matter how far you are from the central office. If you are within a mile from the CO and the office is properly equipped, you may be able to get 50 to 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. Those speeds are starting to get competitive with OC-3 (155 Mbps) and Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps).

If fiber is what you really want, you could be looking at months to complete the installation. That’s especially true if the metro fiber is running down one side of the highway and you are on the other side. Or, if the nearest fiber connection is blocks away in the city. It’s much faster if your building is already “lit” for fiber optic service, even if you are not a subscriber. Adding customers to an already existing fiber installation is relatively easy. It’s also reasonably fast and easy if there is a fiber lit building next door.

You’ve got the idea that fiber installations aren’t a given for any particular business location. Not yet, anyway. Some estimates are that less than 25% of all business buildings are lit for fiber optic service. On the other hand, nearly 100% of all business buildings are already being served with copper telco lines. Most often these are multi-pair bundles installed for multiple line telephone service. Unused pairs can be quickly pressed into service for Ethernet over Copper or T1 line service. After all, they are already hooked up at both ends of the cable run.

With that in mind, here’s a two step solution that I’ve seen work when a business needs both high bandwidth and fast installation. What you do is work with a carrier that has both copper and fiber technologies available. That’s fairly common now. Have them install bonded T1 or Ethernet over Copper at the highest bandwidth they can quickly install. At the same time, place an order for fiber optic service at the bandwidth you really need. The trick is to get an agreement that you can drop the copper service without penalty once your fiber service is turned up.

By working out this type of arrangement, you may get as much as half the bandwidth you need on a fairly quick schedule. By the time you get used to doing business on the copper lines, your fiber will be cut-in and it will seem like someone opened the bandwidth floodgates. You’ll only have to pay for one service at a time, although you might think about it and keep the copper connection as a backup for your fiber if the budget permits.

Do you have a situation that needs special consideration for connectivity? There may be more options than you think. Get consultation and bandwidth option prices and provisioning times now.