Same Budget, More Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Is your network sluggish? Are slow file transfers, telephone calls breaking up, pauses in audio and video streaming, unpredictable delays in getting a response from cloud services, and slow web page loading getting on your nerves?

Is Bandwidth The Answer?
You may well need more bandwidth. You don’t necessarily need to increase the speed of your internal LAN. It’s more likely that your outside, or WAN, connection just isn’t getting the job done anymore.

How Can You Tell?
It’s a likely problem if you’ve had the same level of service for years, yet your business has grown or you’re using a higher percentage of multimedia content than you used to. Even a decade ago, T1 lines were standard for small and some medium size businesses. At that time consumer broadband speeds were also a few Mbps. Users were happy because email and Web pages were relatively small. Many business applications were things like credit card verification and after-hours inventory updates.

Look what’s happened recently. Emails are huge. Why? Because they often contain photos and other high resolution images. Web pages are more interactive and more visual that they’ve ever been. Many contain embedded video players.

The Cloud In The Room
This is nothing compared with the growth of the cloud. Cloud services offer near infinite capacity, ease of scaling up and down as needed, and no requirement for capital investments or maintenance activities. This has proven an irresistible combination for many businesses. What gets lost in all the excitement are the increased bandwidth requirements.

What’s happened is that all the traffic that used to flow effortlessly through your Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet Local Area Network now has to be transported up to the cloud and back down. All those packets have to go through a carrier network for hundreds or even thousands of miles. They have to do that with a minimal time delay and at a price you can afford.

Declining Cost per Mbps
Fortunately, WAN bandwidth services have gotten a lot more competitive, lower in cost and available in a wider variety of options during this same period of change. You may not be aware of it if you’ve simply kept renewing your old line contract or paying month to month since it expired. There’s an excellent chance that you can get the bandwidth you need today without having to jack up your budget… if you’re willing to look at alternatives.

New Quotes Needed
The first thing you need to do is get a fresh set of competitive quotes. By competitive, I mean pricing from as many carriers as possible that serve your location. In the heart of metropolitan business districts you’ll have lots of options. Farther out there will be fewer choices, but almost always two or more. This works to your advantage because the more competition there is, the lower the prices for the exact same service. A number of carriers may have entered your marketplace when you weren’t looking.

Expanded Options
You may also have more options for getting the same job done. For instance, Ethernet over Copper runs on the same wires as T1 service. It offers the same highly reliable dedicated and symmetrical bandwidth. But, Ethernet over Copper can give you twice or more bandwidth than the older T1 technology for the same cost. You may also be able to get higher bandwidth levels with the newer Ethernet services.

How About Fiber?
Impossible to get where you are located? Way too costly? Perhaps not anymore. Fiber buildups have quietly accelerated and carriers have expanded their service footprints around the country. Some of this is driven by the cell phone industry that needs fiber bandwidth to their towers to support 4G LTE. Other runs have been built by the Cable industry that needs much higher bandwidth to deliver digital video channels and video on demand.

The bottom line is that all these fiber operators have bandwidth to spare and they are in fierce competition to get buildings “lit” with their network. They want your business a lot more than they did some years ago. It’s not unusual to find several fiber optic services available where there were none the last time you looked.

New Fiber Options
Like copper-based bandwidth, fiber service is also available in two technologies. The legacy service is SONET, with bandwidth levels such as OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48. Ethernet over Fiber is the newer technology and offers highly scalable fiber services in a wide variety of bandwidth options from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps in most areas. Some locations can now get 100 Gbps if needed.

Just like Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber has a cost advantage over SONET. It’s not unusual to get twice and much bandwidth or more for the same cost as your old Optical Carrier contract.

How Much More Bandwidth Can You Get Now?
You may feel that you are limited in bandwidth by budget constraints. It’s possible, even likely, that the budget you have now can be worth 2x, 3x or more high performance business bandwidth in today’s market. Don’t wonder if this is the case. Find out now by checking out the range of bandwidth options and competitive pricing for copper and fiber services available at your business location.

Double Bonded T1 Cost and Alternatives

Companies are in love with their T1 service. They’ve had those lines for years and have become quite comfortable with the reliability and consistent performance you get from classic T1 lines. Eventually, though, the day comes with 1.5 Mbps just isn’t enough anymore. Does that mean bidding a fond farewell to the venerable T1 line?

No, it certainly doesn’t. If you are comfortable and happy with T1 as your business phone, dedicated Internet or private line connection, you can simply add another T1 and keep right on going. The trick is to order double bonded T1 service rather than a completely separate and unrelated T1 line. Bonding is an industry standard technique for combining the bandwidth of two line services so that they act as one larger service.

In this case, we are doubling the bandwidth by using 2 bonded T1 lines in place of a single line. Your bandwidth goes from 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps in both directions, upload and download. Everything else remains the same. This bonding is done within Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that the service provider installs. It will likely be a T1 router with 2 T1 line inputs.

What happens when you reach the limit of 3 Mbps bandwidth? Is that the end of the road for T1? Not by a long shot. You can triple bond your T1 lines to up that to 4.5 Mbps or quadruple bond to get 6 Mbps. Five T1 lines gives 7.5 Mbps and Six lines offer 9 Mbps. Use 7 bonded T1 lines for 10.5 Mbps and 8 T1s for 12 Mbps. That’s about the practical limit for T1 line service. Beyond that, you’ll need to look at alternative technologies.

What’s the cost of bonded T1 lines? That’s easy to calculate. You simply take the cost of a single T1 line and multiple it by the number of lines you want to bond together. Unfortunately, with T1 technology there is no real economy of scale. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. However, you may wind up paying much less than twice the cost of your current T1 line.

Why? Because there is a lot of competition for these lines and chances are that prices have dropped since the last time you signed a service contract. Bonded T1 lines need to all come from the same provider. Your choice is to call up your current carrier and ask to have a second T1 line bonded to the one you have, or go out for competitive bids. A new service provider will install the bonded T1 lines you need on a new contract, probably for less than twice what you pay now. If you have very old T1 service and haven’t received any price reductions over the years, it is conceivable that you can get a double bonded T1 line for the same price as you pay now for a single line.

There’s another way you can get twice the bandwidth for the same price. That’s with a newer technology called EoC or Ethernet over Copper. EoC uses the same twisted pair telco wiring that provides your T1 lines. However it uses different terminal equipment at your location and at the far end installed in the telco central office.

One advantage of Ethernet over Copper is that you can get higher bandwidths than the 12 Mbps or so available using bonded T1. While 3 Mbps EoC is popular as an alternative to T1 lines or double bonded T1, many companies are moving up to 10 Mbps or even 15, 20, or 30 Mbps. EoC technology is distance sensitive, so the closer you are to the CO, the higher the bandwidth that can be installed. In business districts, it is not uncommon to get EoC service as high as 45 Mbps which competes with fiber delivered service.

Unsure as to which way to go? Why not take a look at both approaches and decide which makes the most sense for your business location or locations. Get pricing and bandwidth levels for both T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper services for a complete picture of available line services.

IP T1 Line Service

T1 line service has been available for decades. It originated as a proprietary telephone company technology designed as a trunk for transporting multiple phone calls between switching centers. Later, T1 was made available for businesses to support their PBX phone systems. When the Internet came along, T1 lines were pressed into service as dedicated Internet connections. But now we live in an IP world. Can T1 also act as an IP connection?

Yes, it can. That may seem counterintuitive to those who understand the origins and technology behind T1 service. The T-Carrier specifications, of which T1 is the most popular line service, describe a system organized as multiplexed channels 64 Kbps wide. That channel size was optimized to transport a single independent digitized telephone call using PCM (Pulse Code Modulation). Clearly, T1 is oriented toward the switched circuit based public telephone network.

That’s true, but the important thing to remember about digital network technologies is that a bit is a bit. It’s either true or false, one or zero, regardless of the particular physical layer or higher level protocols involved. That means that a time division multiplexing technology like T1 can be used to transport a packet oriented technology like IP or Ethernet with a little protocol conversion.

That’s essentially what’s being done when T1 lines are used for data transmission. It’s been a long time since anything but Ethernet has been the standard for local area networks. Ethernet is an IP technology, based on packet switching. Those packets can be queued up and loaded into T1 frames for transmission through T1 lines and even multiplexed into T3 and SONET frames for longer haul transmission. At the far end, the packets are offloaded and sent on their way through an IP edge router connected to the T1 CPE (Customer Premises Equipment.)

If you want to connect your Ethernet networks over metropolitan and wide area networks, one technology you’ll be interested in is called Ethernet over T1 or EoT1. This is also called EoDS1 for Ethernet over DS1.

DS1 is simply the data service or protocol that runs on T1 lines. The reason there are two designations is that T1 describes a physical line consisting of two twisted pair copper telco loops running at 1.5 Mbps. The DS1 is all the bits formated for transmission just before loading into the actual T1 line. You can take that same DS1 and feed it into an add/drop multiplexer and transport it along with many others on a T3 circuit or a fiber optic service like OC-3. At the other end, the DS1 can be demultiplexed from the other services on the same line and delivered separately.

In practice T1 and DS1 refer to the same thing to the actual user. What’s important is that Carrier Ethernet service can be delivered on a T1 line, albeit bandwidth limited to 1.5 Mbps. Who would want service that slow? Lots of companies need connectivity between locations, but don’t require high speeds. They may be using the service for retail credit card verification, communication with corporate headquarters, or to upload files to their web server. The big advantage they have with T1 lines is that they are almost universally available. If you can get business phone service, chances are that you can also get a T1 line installed. They are connected over the same telco wiring.

The competing service to Ethernet over T1 is Ethernet over Copper. That may seem like a fine line of distinction, but it is important. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) also uses twisted pair copper but a different modulation scheme that offers higher bandwidths but with distance limitations. If you are within a mile or two of the central office that has Ethernet over Copper equipment, you may be able to get 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps or even higher bandwidths from EoC. Some installations are transporting in excess of 100 Mbps over multiple copper pair.

Ethernet over T1 bandwidth can also be improved by adding more copper pair. The process of combining the bandwidths of several T1 lines into one larger bandwidth is called bonding. EoT1 bonding can deliver up to 10 or 12 Mbps to both metropolitan and rural areas, providing the equipment is available.

Are you interested in an IP connection for your computer or converged voice and data networks? If so, get pricing and availability for Ethernet over T1 or Copper now to see how much bandwidth is available for your business locations.