How Your Internet Connectivity Works

How much do you know about the technical inner workings of the Internet? We tend to think of it as a very, very large cloud… and it is. Let’s take a peek inside, courtesy of this fascinating Internet Infographic from Telex:

What Connectivity Do You Need?
To take full advantage of what the Internet can actually do, you need a solid connection from your business location to the backbone of the Internet. This is what a Tier 1 service provider can give you. You can’t afford to make that direct connection, but a large carrier can. What you order is called “dedicated Internet access”. That’s bandwidth that is assigned to your operation and no one else. With DIA, you’ll get the most consistent bandwidth along with the lowest latency, jitter and packet loss available. It the next best thing to a private network or a direct point to point line service.

Mix and Match Interconnection Services With Telx

In the cloud, it’s all about connectivity. In fact, connectivity is becoming the weak link in the chain as cloud service providers establish larger, faster, more robust clouds. You may be able to compute at Terabits per second, but that doesn’t help if you can’t get the data in and the results out fast enough. Inadequate connections threaten to stifle innovation in the cloud. That threat is being met by a new suite of service options from Telx called the Connect Portfolio.

Telx made its name in colocation. Their 17 data centers nationwide offer world-class facilities for space & power, HVAC protection, redundancy, security & access controls. If Telx had remained a colocation center, they would be among the top choices for outsourcing data center facilities. But what Telx saw, that others are only now starting to realize, is how the cloud would so quickly become the service model of choice.

The other core competency that Telx has developed is connectivity. They were into connectivity before most companies realized how critical it would become in cloud-centric world. The original impetus for Telx’s connectivity portfolio was in support of their colocation customers. Moving your servers to a colo facility gets you off the hook for providing your own backup power, environmental control and security. You still need to worry about how you will connect to the world. That’s where having an extensive suite of connectivity options gives colocation a leg up on private data centers. The bigger the colo, the more carriers want access to the meet-me room. How many carriers are going to establish POPs in your company’s communications closet?

In a sense, Telx has captured the cloud. Instead of being satisfied with being a high bandwidth switchboard that connects many companies to many bandwidth providers, Telx has invited cloud service providers to move in to Telx facilities. With a suite of cloud providers in-house, businesses needing high performance cloud access are invited to do the logical thing and move right on into Telx facilities also. It doesn’t take long before there is a big cloud of providers and a large field of users that interconnect without ever leaving the building.

What’s the advantage of that? The big one is minimal latency along with nearly unlimited bandwidth. Connectivity is short runs of copper and fiber cabling run through a central patch panel. Latencies are measured in nanoseconds and microseconds. All the switch, router, regenerator claptrap associated with long haul networks is eliminated.

Another advantage is cost. Within a Telx facility there are multiple service providers for everything vying for your business. That’s a lot different from trying to convince a carrier to build out a fiber run to your facility and have them eat the cost. With the effort of in-house connections being almost trivial, construction costs disappear from the decision process. It’s then a buyer’s market for companies who’s equipment racks are surrounded by service providers.

So important is the cloud, that Telx has rebranded its colo facilities as C3 Cloud Connection Centers. Within those centers, customers can choose from a suite of connectivity options in the Telx Connect Portfolio. These are divided into four categories. Dynamic Connect includes EtherConnect, Video Conferencing Connect and Carrier Connect. The Direct Connect option offers ultra low latency connectivity through use of passive Cross Connect interconnection panels. The IP Connect option focuses on IP networks within the Telx C3 data centers, accessed through the Telx Internet Exchange and Dedicated Internet Access products. The Network Connect option lets businesses establish multiple location connectivity, including a Metro Connect option that connects multiple data centers within the same geographical area.

Are you frustrated with the limited connectivity options available to your company? You may be a candidate for high performance interconnection services from Telx and other high performance service providers.

Cloud Connection Centers Go Beyond Colocation

Companies considering a relocation of their IT assets from local data centers to colocation facilities have a new option to consider. It’s the Telx Cloud Connection Centers. Let’s have a look at what you can get in a cloud connection center that is above and beyond traditional colocation or carrier hotel services.

Traditional colocation offers cost savings and service enhancements based on economy of scale. The idea is that one larger environmentally controlled, highly secure and well connected data center is more efficient than hundreds or thousands of stand alone private data centers that have to meet the same requirements. This certainly makes sense. A server in your rack may be the same as the server in the colo rack, except they host hundreds or thousands of them. The backup generators at the colocation center aren’t hundreds or thousands of times larger or more expensive than the one you have in its own building out back. Nor is the fire suppression equipment, HVAC, or 24/7 staffing.

The other advantage that you find in colocation centers is connectivity. There is no way that multiple carriers are going to move into your company just to give you the option of connecting with them. They do just that at the colo. Carriers love to set up shop in colocation centers because they know that there are plenty of potential customers needing high bandwidth WAN connections. Once established, all that is needed is a simple cross connect to connect users and carriers.

In itself, this is a good reason for you to move to a colocation center. Even if you are perfectly happy with your infrastructure and technical staffing costs, how easy is it to get bandwidth? Well located business have many options to choose from. Companies that have built off the beaten path may find that fiber optic services are hard to come by or very expensive to bring in. There’s a strategic advantage in moving your high performance servers and bandwidth demanding public facing applications to a colocation facility. You can then use more modest bandwidth to communicate with your server farm.

Telx takes this to the next level with their Cloud Connection Centers. Telx is a major player in colocation services and carrier connectivity. This year, they’ve started offering a new service called cloudXchange that is a global community of providers and users of cloud services. Members colocate within the Telx facilities. Telx provides the cross connects and other interconnections to link users and providers.

Isn’t the whole idea of the cloud that it is “somewhere, out there” and you save money by buying cloud services on pay as you go basis instead of managing your own equipment? For smaller companies, especially those who don’t want to deal with technicalities, that’s a model that works. Larger organizations have found problems with this simplistic model. A big problem is latency and bandwidth in connection to the cloud. Other issues include the need for private as well as public clouds to ensure security and performance while reducing costs.

The whole movement to the cloud has become so important that Telx has rebranded their 15 colocation and connection centers as Cloud Connection Centers. Within those centers, you have easy access to cloud computing, storage and Software as a Service (SaaS) resources. You have an almost infinite array of options from running your own equipment to completely outsourcing to cloud vendors and any mix in-between.

How strong is this trend to everything in the cloud? Strong enough that Telx is breaking ground on a brand new 215,000 square foot data center in Clifton, N.J. to complement their existing Clifton facility and their New York City center at 60 Hudson St. A private fiber ring will connect 60 Hudson and Clifton to minimize latency.

Are you in the midst of doing private vs public vs hybrid cloud tradeoffs against traditional colocation and operating your own private data center? This would be a good time to explore additional options offered at a Cloud Connection Center to complete your cost/benefit analysis.

New York City Internet Infrastructure

When it comes to high bandwidth network services, you would expect New York City to be among the most infrastructure rich places in the world. You’d be right. One key hub in this infrastructure is the network colocation center at 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. This is where Telx operates their flagship carrier hotel and network interconnection facility.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Ben Mendelsohn discusses his short documentary, Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors, which includes a tour of the Telx facility at 60 Hudson. You can watch it right here and get a fascinating view into the inner workings of network interconnections, like those at the heart of the Internet.



The Telx data center at 60 Hudson is their flagship colocation and interconnection facility. Within the walls of the old Western Union Building, Telx offers low-latency access to more than 400 carriers, financial exchanges, application providers, media and content providers, SaaS providers and other enterprises through a single connection. This is why companies that need high bandwidth, low latency connections choose to colocate at 60 Hudson or in another Telx facility. It’s hard to get much closer to your service provider than to be situated in the same building.

Cross connections are at the heart of the Telx colocation centers. This is nothing more than simple wired or fiber connections from a customer’s equipment rack, cabinet or cage to a passive interconnection panel in the interconnection space. The cross connect allows you to connect to any of the other services in the facility. If you change your mind or want connection to additional providers, it’s a simple matter of patching from your panel to theirs.

In addition to the passive cross connects, Telx also offers dynamic interconnections. They are a pioneer in Ethernet Exchange through a E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface. What this service does is allow Ethernet service providers to connect to each other through a standardized interface so that each provider extends the reach of their network. This is especially valuable for IP core networks which would otherwise have to first convert another protocol like SONET/SDH to achieve commonality with other networks.

In addition to 60 Hudson Street in New York City, Telx has another facility at 111 Eighth Avenue in NYC, two locations in New Jersey, two facilities in Chicago, two more in Dallas, plus colocation and interconnection centers in San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, Charlotte, Los Angeles and Santa Clara. That’s 15 buildings spread out nationwide, with at least one close to your business location. They also have partnerships with Tata and Interxion for global locations.

If you have a need for high speed Internet access, cloud access, content delivery, low latency connections or other private line or network services, it is well worth your while to look into services and pricing for colocation and interconnection services from Telx and other premier service providers.

Ethernet over Copper Connects Nationwide

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has quickly made a name for itself as a last mile access connection for dedicated Internet, MPLS networking, and linking two or more company LANs. The flexibility, ease of interface, and cost savings make this a service in demand. What’s held it back to date is lack of availability. Well, that’s about to change.

MegaPath, one of the country’s major competitive carriers, is moving in with Telx, a major network interconnection provider. What does that mean? It means that your Ethernet over Copper connection can go a lot farther than it used to.

MegaPath has been on a major construction effort to roll out EoC equipment to over 680 central offices within the next year. The central office is key because this is where the subscriber copper loops terminate. MegaPath used specialized G.HSDL technology with up to 8 bonded copper pair to deliver line speeds to 100 and even 400 Mbps in selected area. Their standard symmetrical speeds are 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 20 Mbps. Both layer 2 and layer 3 services are offered along with QoS/CoS to support business data and real-time voice and video simultaneously.

For its part, Telx operates 15 data centers with direct access to over 950 customers who have chosen to colocate within the Telx facilities. These include major telecom carriers, Internet service providers, content producers and delivery networks and cloud service providers. Telx is a pioneer in Ethernet Exchange, a way for carriers to exchange Ethernet traffic without having to first convert to another protocol like SONET. The E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface benefits each carrier who participates because now they can directly access customers on other carriers and vice-versa.

Ethernet over Copper along with Ethernet over Fiber form the basis of Carrier Ethernet. This is the familiar Ethernet protocol that runs on your LAN adapted for use on telecommunication networks. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has standardized a number of Carrier Ethernet standards so that they are compatible across network boundaries. These include EPL, EVPL, and ELAN.

EPL stands for Ethernet Private Line. This is equivalent to the point to point private line services familiar with T-Carrier and SONET services. EVPL is Ethernet Virtual Private Line. This is very similar to EPL. The virtual designation means that you can have a number of EPL services running to a single physical Ethernet port. This is particularly useful for companies that want to run private lines from a single headquarters location out to multiple branch locations. Together, EPL and EVPL form what is known as E-Line or Ethernet Line service.

ELAN stands for Ethernet LAN Service. You may also see this written as E-LAN. What differentiates E-LAN from E-Line is that E-LAN is a many to many or mesh network service. You can use it to tie together multiple business locations so that any location can communicate with any other.

Have you been interested in Ethernet over Copper services but concerned that they may not be available to support your particular location or your many locations nationwide? This is a rapidly changing market, with more service being rolled out almost daily. If you haven’t checked lately, you may be pleasantly surprised at how much connectivity is available and how much bandwidth your can get for your telecom budget. Check pricing right now, if you like. Ethernet over Copper prices from 1 to 100 Mbps are available instantly online. Other services for business locations will be promptly quoted by a Telarus bandwidth expert, upon request.

Cloud Service Providers Colocate With Customers

There’s a new migration on. No, not the migration from local data centers to the cloud. It’s a migration of cloud service providers to colocate with their customers.

Why? It’s the rude awakening that companies suffer when they find that applications running way out there don’t have the same zip as the ones running on servers down the hall. That can be fixed, of course. It requires engineering your connections to the cloud so that they have sufficient amounts of bandwidth and very low latency, jitter and packet loss. But why go that that expense when you can just cozy up to your service provider with little more than a long patch cord connecting you?

That’s what Telx thinks. They’re throwing open their doors and working to lure cloud service providers to take up residence in one or more of their high performance colocation centers. It’s an acknowledgement that the speed of computing has gotten to the point where interconnections are the weak link. The venerable T1 line or DS3 connection that worked so well when all you needed to do was surf the Web, exchange email or generate sales leads quickly chokes when you start adding virtual servers by the dozens or hundreds.

There are a couple of big crunches that strain the cloud service model. One is business processes that are now automated and support hundreds or thousands of employees. The other is high performance e-commerce, with enormous catalogs and thousands of simultaneous shoppers who have little patience for sluggish servers and none at all for errors in their shopping experience.

The cloud is becoming a victim of its own success. Cloud service providers have mastered the technology of being able to ramp up or down the number of servers online in a matter of seconds. Storage is a bottomless well that data fills as needed. Public-facing bandwidth is easily handled with multiple Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Internet connections with enough margin to serve all customers. While cloud companies have gotten used to this scale of resources, most businesses have not. They don’t have the private line connectivity to take full advantage of near-infinite, near-instantaneous computing resources.

More savvy companies have mastered the connectivity issues, but who’s going to turn down the opportunity to get more performance for less money? The notion of being on the same floor of the same building with your service provider and ditching the telecom line in favor of a local fiber or wire connection has a lot of appeal. The issues of bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss simply disappear.

A lot of medium and larger companies already have equipment in colocation centers, such as Telx. The economic tradeoff between running your own environmentally controlled facilities with backup power, fire suppression and round the clock monitoring and simply renting space in a larger facility with its economies of scale makes colocation attractive. On top of that is the fact that you have easier access to competitive carrier services with more attractive pricing than you can get locally. Now, add to these advantages the opportunity to connect to a cloud service provider in-house and you are looking at really attractive cost vs performance figures.

The new Telx Cloud Connectivity Centers with cloud-optimized infrastructure to support cloud service providers in each of their 15 data centers is an idea who’s time has come. Enterprise users and cloud companies are like opposite magnetic poles trying to get as close to each other as possible. Colocation is the obvious answer.

Can your business benefit from colocation as a service provider or service user? Get pricing and technical specs for the IT resources you need and compare with what you are doing now.



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

GTT Expands Ethernet Footprint With PacketExchange

Global telecommunications carrier GTT is moving to expand its Ethernet service footprint worldwide by acquiring Ethernet service provider PacketExchange.

PacketExchange is a London based carrier with an impressive 10 Gigabit fiber optic IP backbone network that covers Europe, the United States and Asia. A good portion of this network was acquired when PacketExchange acquired MZIMA Networks in 2010. The combined resources provide private line services plus MPLS and VPLS networking and peering.

GTT’s acquisition of PacketExchange reinforces the idea that we’re entering the age of Carrier Ethernet. Up till now, the world’s networks have been dominated by telephone company technology for switched circuit operations. The popular T-carrier wireline services and SONET/SDH fiber optic services were all devised to be compatible with time division multiplexed voice and data. The new paradigm is packet switched networks, with Carrier Ethernet gaining prominence.

You see this reinforced by the emergence of Ethernet Exchanges, such as Telx, that offer E-NNI (Ethernet Network to Network Interface). What E-NNI does is create a peering opportunity for IP network operators to exchange data and, thus, expand the reach of their networks. This opportunity speeds up the ability of Ethernet to take over the world’s telecommunications traffic without the necessity of one dominant international carrier to dictate standards.

PacketExchange makes a nice complement to GTT which is already a global network integrator with many POPs (Points of Presence) in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. GTT serves 80 countries in all with a wide portfolio of Private line, Ethernet, DSL broadband, point to point Wireless and managed network services. They are often the carrier of choice for companies that need to interconnect offices across international borders. MPLS network services that are particularly useful in linking multiple locations include MPLS VPN and VPLS services.

Ethernet and MPLS networks complement each other nicely. MPLS networks use a proprietary routing technology called label switching in place of IP routing or SONET/SDH multiplexing. Label switching encapsulates virtually any protocol and transports the packets form location to location. At the network edges, packets enter and leave the network unaltered. This allows MPLS networks to support layer 2 switched services such as Ethernet Private Line and Ethernet LAN. It’s entirely possible using Ethernet access to MPLS networks to create an international bridged LAN that includes locations worldwide.

The power of Ethernet as a universal network protocol to support converged voice, video and data networks is only beginning to be seen. It’s a natural development, considering that corporate LANs long ago standardized on the switched Ethernet protocol. What makes more sense than to seamlessly expand those LANs into the metropolitan and long haul connections necessary to support regional, national and international business.

Does your company have a need to connect multiple business locations, domestically or internationally? If so, take a closer look at Ethernet business bandwidth solutions to support your organization’s technical goals at a cost often lower than with traditional telecom services.



Note: Ethernet switch photo courtesy of Justin Smith on Wikimedia Commons.

Telx Cloud Exchange Reduces Service Lag Time

The idea behind cloud services is that you can shut down your local data center and rent everything you need in the way of infrastructure, platform and software from a service provider somewhere out there. You’ll save a ton of money and the users will never know the difference. Except some of them do notice a difference. Things can bog down in the cloud.

How can that be? One premise of cloud computing is that there is a near infinite well of resources to draw from. You need more processing, you bring it online almost instantly. You need more disk storage, you take it. After all, there is plenty to go around. So how can responses that were snappy when the data center was in the basement become sluggish when the same facilities are in the cloud?

It all comes down to connectivity. Everybody knows that electrical signals move at the speed of light, right? You might guess that’s so fast that it shouldn’t make any difference if the wire is a hundred feet long or a thousand miles. At the speed of light a human can’t possibly detect the travel time of electrical impulses over wires and fiber optic cables. That’s right, isn’t it?

It sure sounds nice in theory, but in practice the speed of light isn’t infinite and the speed of communication signals never gets near light speeds anyway. Remember that the speed of light so often quoted is in a vacuum. That’s 186,000 miles per second when your laser beam is shooting through space. On terrestrial circuits, 186,000 miles per second translates to 186 miles per millisecond or 10 milliseconds for 1,860 miles. Those signals can’t even go that fast because any medium slows them down. You’ll be lucky to go 2/3 as fast, or a millisecond for every 124 miles.

Are we forgetting something? You bet. There’s no such thing as communicating over one long strand of pure wire or fiber. There’s circuitry at both ends and amplifiers, regenerators, add-drop multiplexers and other equipment in-between. Those will add milliseconds or tens of milliseconds more.

That’s still nothing compared to what happens when packets are routed on the Internet. They get from point A to point B alright. But they seldom go in a straight line. They go from router to router to router to router and eventually to the destination. There’s no guarantee the next packet will take the same route as the last one. There’s also no guarantee that the packet will even get there intact. Oh, one is missing? TCP/IP will resend it and all will be well. The file being transferred will certainly be intact at the other end, but how long did it take to replace all the lost packets and wait for traffic jams congesting certain nodes?

Cloud providers and companies sensitive to lag time, also known as latency, are taking a close look at colocation to have the shortest and most direct communications paths possible. A step beyond even standard colocation facilities is the new cloud exchange service from Telx. It’s branded cloudXchange and it may be the future of data centers.

Telx’s breakthrough comes in inviting cloud service providers to move in with them, literally. A service provider can locate their infrastructure in one or all 15 Telx facilities. What they gain is access to a wealth of carriers who have created point of presence within the Telx facilities and major corporations, content delivery networks and others who are just down the hall in the same building. For long haul connections, Telx has access to low latency fiber routes between data centers and to worldwide destinations.

This may be where we’re all headed. Instead of every company having its own server racks connected directly to the corporate LAN, most infrastructure will be outsourced to a cloud service provider or collocated in the same building to form a hybrid cloud. User connectivity will be over high speed dedicated lines, perhaps just to the nearest colo facility where service providers will have a portion of their infrastructure. A separate Internet access path will be available to browse the Web, share email with outsiders, and connect with consumers.

Are you a user or provider of cloud services who is unhappy with their networking connections? Perhaps you can benefit from an upgrade to higher bandwidth, lower latency connectivity to get rid of the lags that are plaguing your business processes.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

Colocation and Connectivity in Miami

If you want to connect with South America, Central America, the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, you’ll do well to colocate and connect through Miami, Florida. Telx has all the facilities to help you do just that.

Telx has made a name for itself serving the needs of the financial services industry by providing ultra-low latency connections to the electronic trading floors. Their services range far and wide, literally. With 15 colocation facilities in the United States and global connectivity to more than 800 carriers, you are clearly well connected with Telx.

Let’s take a look at what Telx has to offer through their Miami facility. It’s all about the interconnections. You lease a secure cabinet or private cage to house your servers and other network equipment. Telx supplies the AC or DC power you need, plus the environmental control and physical security. If you want to connect with any other customers of their facilities, Telx technicians will perform a cross connect within 24 to 48 hours. You have choice of media that includes Ethernet copper, DS3 coax, and fiber optic cabling.

What about outside connectivity? You’ll find major carriers located right in the facility, including AT&T, Bell South, Global Crossing, Level 3 Communications, TW Telecom, Verizon Business, and XO Communications, to name a few. You also have access to international cable landings that include ARCOS, ARCOS II, Americas II, Columbus III, Emergia (Telefonica) GlobalNet Brasil Telecom, Maya-1, and Mid-Atlantic Crossing .

What’s more, Telx has a private optical ring to NAP of the Americas, also located in Miami. This ring support all Ethernet, TDM and SONET/SDH services. Through NAP of the Americas, you’ll be able to connect to dozens more of the world’s most important carriers.

Telx is located in downtown MIami in a seven story, 50,000 square foot building structurally designed to withstand natural disasters, including Category 5 hurricanes. It’s located outside the FEMA 100 year designated flood zone and the Miami-Date hurricane evacuation zone. This makes the Telx Miami colocation center a premier gateway for South American and Latin American international voice, video and data traffic.

More and more businesses are taking a closer look at cloud services and colocation because of the connectivity and cost savings available compared to running their own data center facilities. Telx can provide you with a secure location to install your equipment, connections to many carriers that can often be hard to reach from your location and enough competition among carriers to give you the best bandwidth prices you can get. They have a technical staff on duty 24/7/365, something that is becoming a luxury for many companies.

Is colocation right for you? The way to decide is to run the numbers compare your current costs of operation with what you’ll pay at a colocation center. Don’t forget to include special connectivity that you may not be able to get where you are, such as ultra low latency connections. Compare prices and services at data center colocation facilities, including Telx, with friendly expert consultation to help you sort through the myriad of options.



Note: Photo of downtown Miami buildings courtesty of Dtobias on Wikimedia Commons.

Ethernet Exchange For Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the replacement for the Public Switched Telephone Network may well be Carrier Ethernet. More evidence for this is the expansion of Ethernet Exchanges that allow carriers to transport each other’s traffic. Telx, a major colocation and interconnection service company, has just added Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles to its suite of Ethernet Exchange facilities nationwide. Let’s take a look at why Ethernet Exchange matters and how it influences the direction of international wide area networking.

The century long dominance of the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network can be attributed to its universal acceptance. Every phone can connect to every other phone in the world and work correctly. This network has been adapted for data and well as voice service for worldwide connectivity. It’s a circuit switched rather than packet switched network, but with proper interfacing and protocol conversion it gets the job done.

Another model of universal connectivity is the Internet. The Internet is an IP network that is based on packet switching rather than circuit switching. Isn’t the Internet the model to emulate for the next generation in commercial connectivity?

Actually neither the PSTN nor the Internet are ideal for high performance network services. The PSTN has a telephone legacy and is organized around small independent channels bundled together to create larger amounts of bandwidth. It’s also a different set of protocols than are running on a majority of the world’s data networks. The Internet was designed by the government for survivability in the event of war or natural disaster. As such, it’s so autonomous that routes can change spontaneously and there is no such thing as class of service or guarantee of bandwidth, jitter, latency or packet loss.

Carrier Ethernet seems like the ideal protocol for today’s metropolitan and long haul networking. After all, the network most likely to need transport is running Ethernet in the LAN. More and more, that’s converged voice, data and video over Ethernet. When you go to the trouble of carefully engineering your internal networks, it only makes sense to expect to link those networks transparently.

The only fly in the ointment has been network reach. The companies most active in deploying Carrier Ethernet services have not had protected monopolies like the old telcos nor government R&D like the Internet. These are commercial companies, some with legacy telco assets and some with all-new IP core fiber optic networks. While each competitor may have thousands of buildings on-net, nobody blankets the Earth.

Here enters the Ethernet Exchange. The idea is a facility that enables Ethernet network operators to exchange traffic. By doing this, each carrier increases the reach of its network into the footprint of other carriers. Even Ethernet Exchanges can partner. Telx has a partnership with Neutral Tandem to provide access to each other’s exchange locations.

With demand for Ethernet services growing rapidly each year, cooperation benefits all parties involved in transporting high bandwidth Metro and Carrier Ethernet services. Ethernet connections are now available in metropolitan areas throughout the US and in many countries around the world. The cost advantage, scalability and portfolio of services available with Ethernet is working to establish Ethernet as the new WAN networking standard at the expense of legacy telecom services.

Have you been missing out by not taking advantage of Ethernet connectivity for your business? Get pricing and availability for Ethernet network services now. You may be surprised by what’s become available only recently.

What Makes High Frequency Trading Work

You’ve heard about computerized securities trading and what’s called high frequency trading. There was a lot of talk about this related to the “flash crash” last spring. But like it or not, we are in the era of automated stock trades. Some are initiated by human traders. Others are triggered by algorithms pre-programed to wait for certain conditions and then place the buy or sell orders automatically. Now, CBS News has gotten an inside looks at the machinery that makes this all possible. Watch “Robot Traders of the NYSE” and see if your jaw doesn’t drop.



Did you catch the part about how they had to equalize timing for all traders to keep the system fair? Once they started up this 3 football fields size data center, it turned out that where your servers were located physically in the infrastructure determined how fast you could get your trades to market. Yes, just the length of the cabling and whatever routing equipment was involved gave near-end locations an edge over far-end locations. How much can this really be? It was only microseconds, but in high frequency trading microseconds count.

The NYSE leveled the playing field by equalizing the access time to 65 microseconds for all players. Now, no one has an advantage... or do they?

Not all trading is executed on the New York Stock Exchange or on computers collocated within the NYSE facility. You could be trading other exchanges in New York, New Jersey or Chicago. You may need to access an overseas market from the US or vice-versa. What many broker dealers, investment management firms and hedge funds have done is collocate to a commercial facility, such as the ones that Telx operates close to major financial districts. Telx focuses on ultra-low latency connections to speed transactions to market. Through a partnership with Tata Communications, Telx offers colocation facilities in Canada, South Africa, Europe, UK and Asia. Telx and other carriers also now offer line services designed specifically for the lowest latency possible.

Do you have a requirement for unusually low latency facilities or connections? Find out what’s available in International International Low Latency Data Networks now.

Business Booming For Telx Interconnection and Colocation

While many companies remain hunkered down and wringing their hands while they wait for the economy to improve, colo provider Telx is on a building boom at their premier data center in Chicago. What kind of sense does that make in recessionary America?

It makes lots of sense if you’re clued-in to what is transforming business and finance. It’s been a long time since accountants wore green eye shades and engineers worked slide rules. Most companies have adopted computer-based workstations connected to servers in the back room. This client-server architecture had a lot to do with increasing the speed of doing business and improving employee productivity in the last few decades. But now some of the savviest companies are adopting new methods and systems to give themselves an edge over their competitors.

Remember when the original justification for computerizing processes was elimination of paper? The “paperless office” became a joke as cheap laser printers and copiers spit out reams of paper faster than they could be hauled to the recycling bin. But when you consider how the speed and volume of transactions has increased, every desk should be piled to the ceiling and the aisles crammed full of paper documents. All the paper you don’t see is in the form of bits and bytes on hard drives spinning away inside your computer and in network storage within the data center. It’s turned out that less paper is the minor benefit of computerization. The big benefit is speed.

We simply do more faster. Companies don’t mail us product brochures anymore. We pull them up online. The time from identifying a need to researching solutions to placing an order has shrunk dramatically. It can all be done from the comfort of the desktop, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Need to coordinate team activities? Let them collaborate online so that those in Seattle can mark up documents for those in New York in real time.

Nowhere has the demand for speed become more dramatic than in the financial industry. You’ve heard of high frequency trading? These are complex algorithms running on high speed servers to electronically issue buy and sell orders to the markets. We’re at the point where milliseconds and even microseconds make a difference in trade profits. The Einsteinian limit of how fast light can move through glass and wire introduces a time delay between locations that simply can’t be reduced. So, how do you beat the competition? You get closer to the markets... physically closer. That’s what Telx provides. Its proximity to the exchanges and the buy-side and sell-side firms at Telx’s strategically collocated facilities. If the upper limit to your potential speed of transaction is a length of patch cord, you are in an advantageous position compared to the competitor hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Low latency colocation facilities near the action are essential for the most advanced players in high frequency finance. But there are other reasons for collocating with suppliers, customers and service providers. The cost of bandwidth is a good reason. With many competing carriers within arm’s reach, or at least down the hall, you’ve got access to the best rates per Mbps or Gbps and none of the expensive build-out costs of stringing wires or fiber cable for miles. If bandwidth is becoming one of your biggest expenses, moving to the colo facility can be a major cost saver. This can easily be the case if your product is video or high volume e-commerce or a popular application with millions of users.

Even smaller companies that aren’t located in a downtown sweet spot for low bandwidth prices may find that colocation gives them the advantage of keeping their physical location where it is but moving their bandwidth-hungry applications to where costs are lower. Cloud computing is another way to leverage the economy of scale in putting the software and servers where the bandwidth is cheapest and accessing the service from wherever you choose to be.

Does your company have demands for low latency or high bandwidth that would benefit from Telx or similar facilities? Are you just looking for ways to reduce your bandwidth costs? If so, you should take a look at the cost advantages of colocation and cloud computing services.