Lit Buildings Expand Fiber Optic Bandwidth in Houston

Houston, Texas, the fourth largest city in America, is a major center for healthcare and research, oilfield equipment and energy development, manufacturing, aeronautics, and home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Demand for high speed telecom services, especially fiber optic bandwidth, is high and rising every year. To meet this critical business need, Alpheus Communications is extending its Texas fiber network to light key buildings in the Houston business district.

What is a lit building? In this sense, it means having fiber optic service installed and turned up within the facility. The “lit” reference is to the laser light that carries the digital signals through the fiber. There is also such a thing as “dark” fiber. The dark variety consists of fiber strands that have been pulled into the building but not connected to any equipment.

The advantage of having already lit fiber available in your facility is that you can be connected quickly and easily at any bandwidth up to 1 Gbps, or even higher in some cases. The terminal equipment is already in place and running. Other tenants in your office building may already be connected for fiber service. It’s generally no trouble at all to add an additional cable and run it to your particular location. You may even have such wiring in place from when the building was constructed.

In addition to being guaranteed connectivity and having it provisioned rapidly, being in a lit building saves you the often huge expense of bringing fiber in when it isn’t already available. That process can involve trenching for new conduit or threading fiber cable through existing conduit underground. In some cases, the fiber is “flown” overhead on utility poles. There is nothing inexpensive about pulling in new fiber.

So, if there is considerable expense in fiber installation, then why is Alpheus lighting buildings on its own dime? The demand for high bandwidth levels is already there and expected to only increase over the next few years. The buildings that Alpheus has selected are already business centers that can make good use of professional bandwidth services. These are located at 1001 Fannin St., Two Allen Center at 1200 Smith St. and 601 Travis St. Once connected, these buildings will be considered “on-net” for fiber optic service.

Other buildings are expected to follow, with Alpheus making additional investments this year. They have a goal of connecting 100 buildings in Dallas and Houston to their fiber network. Beyond that, the core Alpheus network connects to more than 300 central offices and POPs (Points of Presence). This includes both fiber and copper connections.

Copper? Yes, indeed. Twisted pair copper bundles are already installed to nearly every business location. Fiber easily outperforms copper when it comes to sheer bandwidth. However, not every business needs a Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) connection. Many companies have been getting by with T1 lines running at 1.5 Mbps for years. Cloud services and other business applications are quickly rendering T1 service obsolete. However, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) offers much higher bandwidth using the same twisted pair copper wiring that now supports T1 and multi-line telephone service.

Entry level EoC service typically begins at 3 Mbps for about the same cost as 1.5 Mbps T1. That’s twice the bandwidth for the same money. It is easy to ramp that up to 10 or 20 Mbps at reasonable cost. Some locations qualify for 50 and even 100 Mbps EoC bandwidth. The catch is that Ethernet over Copper is distance limited. You need to be located fairly close to the telco central office to get the really high bandwidths. Even so, many companies are finding that they can get by just fine with EoC right now and put off the investment in fiber construction until necessary. With carriers lighting buildings at a rapid rate, that fiber may even be in place by the time you need hundreds or thousands of Megabits per second.

Alpheus Communications is a high performance competitive carrier serving the DASH (Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Houston) business marketplace. They offer Metro Ethernet, private line, managed wavelength MPLS network, Ethernet LAN (E-LAN), Ethernet Line (E-Line) and both PRI and SIP telephone trunking.

Are you located in Houston or other business locations in the United States, or have connections to the US? If so, there are many high bandwidth, low cost copper and fiber optic network services available to connect your business locations together and to the Internet. Check pricing and features to see what is available at your particular location.


Note: Photo of Houston skyline at night courtesy of Bobby L. Warren on Wikimedia Commons.

All My Access Is In Texas

If the state of Texas is where you do business, you’ll want to be aware of Alpheus Communications and their regional network connecting the major cities in Texas. In addition, they have colocation data center facilities in the Lone Star State. This gives you the advantage of security, reliability and low cost connectivity while keeping everything reasonably nearby.

The Alpheus regional fiber optic network offers high bandwidth and low latency between Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Bryan, Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, McAllen, Harlingen, Corpus Christi, Victoria and Houston. Long haul connections can take your traffic anywhere in North America at bandwidth speeds ranging from DS-1 (1.5 Mbps) up to OC-192 (10 Gbps).

Network connectivity is available in a wide range of options. These include Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Metro Ethernet, Private Line and Managed Wavelength. Alpheus clients can connect with each other through a cross connect arrangement called Metrolocity. You can choose from bandwidth speeds ranging from DS-1 to OC-12 (622 Mbps) and peer with other enterprises and competitive communications service providers. You do not have to colocate or build facilities to other carriers to make these connections. They’re provided by Alpheus as part of their Metrolocity peering.

Alpheus operates four hub facilities in Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Their network operations center (NOC) is also located in Houston. The Austin and Houston data centers are SAS 70 Type II Audit Certified to meet the demanding needs of enterprise clients. These data centers give you the security, reliability and scalability you need to host enterprise applications, disaster recover solutions, high performance websites, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and general IT operations infrastructure. You’ll find hubbed and point to point service from DS-1 to OC-192, Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps managed wavelengths.

Some clients find even SONET, GigE and wavelength services too limiting. To meet their needs, Alpheus Communications offers dark fiber solutions. With dark fiber, capacity is determined by the terminal equipment, usually DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing). In essence, you become operator of your own fiber optic network. That means you have the ability to transport any protocol or multiple protocols at once. Leverage wavelengths to create massive bandwidth for transporting near-limitless amounts of information.

Perhaps a Gigabit Ethernet connection is enough to meet your needs. Alpheus is set up to connect you across the metro markets in Texas or across the country. You can choose from point to point or point to multipoint GigE connectivity. Bandwidth options vary from 51 Mbps on up to 1 Gbps if you don’t need the full 1,000 Mbps right away. Rate limiting is flexible. There are three different classes of service available. The highest is load sharing. With this, Alpheus provides two physically diverse unprotected connections and you have two client interfaces. You take care of the protection switching. The other grades are Network Protection, which does have network protection features but no client protection, and completely unprotected service.

Are you interested in Texas Metro Ethernet service? If so, Alpheus can give you layer 2 networking services that include point to point, point to multipoint and any to any WAN connectivity. This connectivity takes place over a redundant MPLS network on a self-healing DWDM fiber backbone. Your port interfaces include 10/100 Mbps FastE, 1000 Mbps GigE and 10 Gbps Ethernet. Alpheus has last mile connectivity solutions that include Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over NxT1 and Ethernet over NxDS3 plus Ethernet over Wireless to get you connected no matter where you happen to be.

Do you need network access in Texas? You’re in luck. Get pricing, features and availability of Texas metro and long haul network connections from Alpheus and other high quality network service providers.



Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

Texas Fiber Optic Network Expansion

There are big things afoot in the Lone Star State. In this case, it's big network expansions from partnerships and mergers. The result is more options and fiber network availability for businesses located in Texas.

Transtelco is a major competitive provider with a fiber network that stretches from Houston to Los Angeles and dips into Northern Mexico to pick up Monterrey, Chihuahua, Nogales, and Tijuana. The have expansion plans for both Mexico and Texas routes.

Within Texas, PAETEC, another major competitive provider, has considerable fiber assets serving Dallas, Austin and Houston, to name a few of their Texas POPs (Points of Presence). PAETEC now has offices in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and The Woodlands.

What’s afoot is a joint venture between PAETEC and Transtelco that has PAETEC building out Transtelco’s fiber leg connecting El Paso and Temple. With half ownership in this project, PAETEC gains additional SONET ring diversity for its network across the southern US and into Mexico. They also have access to offer voice, Internet and fixed wireless to agencies of the state government that use services of the State of Texas Department of Information Resources.

What makes this situation even more interesting is that PAETEC has been acquired by Windstream Communication, a competitive carrier serving the southeast and midwest US, including fiber runs into Dallas, as well as a network that extends into Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia. Windstream has major fiber connections planned into other states, plus existing data centers in Newton, Iowa, Brookfield, Wisconsin, Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida, Charlotte, Cary, and Raleigh North Carolina, Ephrata and State College, Pennsylvania and Boston, Massachusetts. Windstream’s existing fiber network spans some 60,000 route miles.

Windstream offers MPLS network services based on a resilient optical core to service companies with multiple business locations. Their network offers VPN (Virtual Private Network) with VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) connectivity. It’s a fully meshed network that allows regional sites to exchange traffic without having to depend on a central hub server. For companies with converged voice and data networks, Windstream offers Real-Time QoS that ensures voice packets receive top priority to keep them from getting slowed down or held up by less sensitive data packets.

Do you need fast and reliable access to the Internet? Windstream offers Ethernet Internet with symmetrical bandwidth up to 1 Gbps. This is a dedicated connection that offers consistency you won’t get in shared cable connections and bandwidth that far exceeds the capability of T1 lines and DS3 connections. Windstream's service level agreement guarantees 99.99% uptime to ensure availability.

Do you have a business presence in Texas with a need for better voice or data connectivity than you have now? Get competitive fiber optic bandwidth quotes from PAETEC, Windstream and other competitive carriers serving Texas, the southern states, or the entire United States, with optional connections to international destinations.


Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

iWeb To Help Queenie The Elephant

An advocacy project that my wife and I are involved in is helping circus and zoo elephants find a better life at animal sanctuaries such as the Performing Wildlife Animal Society (PAWS) and The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. One elephant of particular interest is Queenie, also known as Boo. You may have seen her performing or giving rides at the Shrine Circus. Queenie has been marooned in Texas, sometimes chained to a tree, since the USDA ordered her off the road and pulled the license of her exhibitor months ago.

We’ve been advocating that the USDA transfer Queenie to the rolling grassy hills of the PAWS sanctuary in California, where she is wanted and will be well taken care of for life. However, just last Friday we heard that the USDA has made the decision to send her to a small, dark and barren elephant exhibit area at the San Antonio Zoo. This is being done against the wishes of the owner and all of us who recommend a transfer to PAWS at no cost to the government or the owner.

Well, friends, this is America, the land of free speech and personal initiative. Since our business and social network is primarily online, we immediately decided to take action by spreading the word on the plight of poor Queenie and asking for quick action on the part of those sympathetic and willing to spend a few minutes to help Queenie get a better deal. But how could we get an attractive and informative website up quickly enough to do any good? The answer is iWeb. It comes included with every iMac computer as part of the iLife software bundled with the system. Could it do the job?



You decide! I had the welcome page for Help an Elephant up in less than an hour with a basic appeal for help and links to the IDA Blog from In Defense of Animals and the PAWS news statement as backgrounders. The template is the “travel” theme, one of many designs included with iWeb. I kept all the defaults for layout, font face and color. The picture of Queenie is one I took myself when she appeared at the Shrine circus in Loves Park, IL last June. Notice that her back leg is chained to the truck with only a few feet of chain. All I did was drag the picture from my photos file to a blank spot on the page template and there it is.

At the time I was working on the welcome page, Barbara wrote a blog post and added another picture of Queenie giving rides at the event. iWeb includes a blog feature as part of the tool. All you have to do is select what type of page you want and it takes care of the code details for linking and provides an RSS Subscribe button. At some point we’ll add a YouTube video using the YouTube widget in iWeb.

How easy is it to get one of these sites online? Pretty easy. You have a choice of using your MobileMe cloud service from Apple if you are a subscriber. Or you can publish to your own domain on your hosting service, if you prefer. I’ve got a reseller account that I use for many commercial websites, so I just added another account there and entered the settings into the iWeb FTP client. You don’t need a separate FTP with iWeb ‘09, although the earlier ’08 version does require it. This site went up Friday Night. I did a quick submit to the search engines at the same time. By Sunday afternoon, I found it listed in Google on the first page for a search of “help an elephant.” Pretty fast.

There are two morals of this story. First, if you have a cause or point of view that would benefit from being on a website, you can get something really nice looking and functional up and running in a matter of hours using iWeb. From there, you can promote it in the search engines and using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Second, if this story tugs at your heartstrings and you’d like to spend just a minute or so helping Queenie get to a better life, make a quick phone call to USDA Secretary Vilsack’s office at (202) 720-3631. The nice lady will add your name to a petition to send Queenie to the PAWS sanctuary. The idea here is to show public demand by flooding the government phone system and letting them know there are a lot more of us that care about this issue than they might think. I’ll let you know how it works out. Best of luck also with your own advocacy, charitable or political initiatives.

Houston, We’ve Got A 4G Solution

How’s your broadband experience? Lovin’ it or... You know. The speed really drags. It’s dead half the time. Even when it works, it seems to cost a lot more than it should. Worst of all, there are lots of places, even in town, where you can’t even get connected.

Well, you won’t have to put up with that treatment anymore if you happen to be living in Houston, Texas and nearby locations such as The Woodlands, Pasadena, Baytown, Mission Bend, Missouri City, Lake Jackson, Alvin, Conroe, or League City. CLEAR, the new 4G wireless broadband service being deployed by Sprint and Clearwire, has installed their WiMAX Internet service and it’s up and running right now. Can you get it? Enter your zip code and see if you’ve got coverage.



So, is it only the lucky residents of Houston that can get 4G wireless broadband service? No, not by a long shot. There are 10 states and 30 cities that are already on the air with WiMAX service. Others are in the works right now. That’s millions and millions of users who have the opportunity to cut the cord and get away from DSL and Cable if they aren’t satisfied.

One of the unique features of this service is that you can get both fixed and mobile service on the same account. Remember -- this is wireless broadband. That gives you the opportunity to be working on a project at your desk and then take it on the road using the same broadband service. You don’t need to pay twice to get desktop and mobile WiMAX service from different providers. CLEAR will give you both at an attractive price.

What kind of bandwidth is available? The service runs at 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps for downloads and up to 1 Mbps for uploads. That compares favorably with the better DSL and Cable services and completely blows away 3G cellular broadband.

Do you live in the Houston area? If not, are you curious to see if 4G wireless broadband is available for your location? If so, simply Enter your zip code and see if you’ve got coverage.