The Cloud Offers Communications as a Service

By: John Shepler

The migration of everything to the cloud has coined a new phrase: “as a service”. This implies the business model of pay-as-you-go rather than owning vast capital equipment and software resources and the support staffs that go with them. You still need in-house support for your staff and to liaise with your cloud service provider, but you no longer have to be involved in all the nuts-and-bolts that make the system work.

In addition to the backroom business software humming along in the background, the cloud now offers to take on your electronic communications with the idea of offering a more features for less cost that you’d likely have if you tried to run everything in-house. The name of this new opportunity? Why, Communications as a Service, of course.

Two Flavors of Communications as a Service
If you think of communications as “the telephone”, you are partially right. The landline phone has been the mainstay of business for over a century. It has been joined by the FAX machine to send documents over those same phone lines and the mobile phone that frees us from the wires. The marriage between phones and computers has expanded options to include instant messaging, audio, video and web conferencing, texting, file sharing, call routing and recording, call analytics and integration with business applications like CRM and project management software.

Communications as a Service or CaaS splits off into Unified Communications as a Service or UCaaS and Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS. What’s the difference? UCaaS is intended for use within the company for team collaboration CCaaS is for communicating with customers. You can think of UCaaS as replacing the old PBX business phone system and CCaaS as a technical upgrade to the old call center phone system.

How Unified Communications as a Service Works
With UCaaS the PBX in the closet down the hall or the key telephone set on your desk is gone. If you have a desk phone it connects to your LAN using VoIP rather than its own proprietary phone network. Your new phone system is in the cloud. Since much of your business software is also in the cloud, that makes it easy to integrate traditional phone applications and traditional business software applications.

Phone, or shall we say voice, features including call recording, call forwarding, call routing, teleconferencing, Inclusion of smartphones into the company phone system, and inclusion of work-from-home employees into the company phone system.

But that’s just the start of what can be done. The unification of voice, video and devices means that you are interconnected wherever you are and whatever device you are working from. You don’t have to be near your desk to make or receive calls and you can share documents or collaborate on applications as well as have conversations.

Expanding into Contact Center as a Service
UCaaS is great for interconnecting everyone within a company. Wouldn’t it be great if you could also include customers? That’s been the function of the call center, now renamed contact center. CCaaS supports incoming customer service and outgoing customer marketing.

You still get as many phone sets as you need, but they’re on the network connected to the cloud and not a room full of equipment down the hall. Instead of buying and maintaining all that equipment, you subscribe to the CCaaS system. You’ll get automated outbound dialing, interactive voice response for customer self-service, automatic contact distribution, analytics and other features that have traditionally been part of call center operations.

In addition, CCaaS is omnichannel in that is can communicate with your customers through voice, SMS, video, web sites and social media. Chatbots and virtual agents can handle routine inquiries so that your employees can concentrate on the more difficult issues.

Benefits of Service in the Cloud
With cloud communications as a service, you no longer have to budget large capital outlays for massive amounts of equipment only to have to replace that same equipment years down the road. You are not bothered with having to install constant fixes and upgrades or scheduling time for a vendor to come and service your system. It’s all being done invisibly within the cloud operation. You get the latest features all kept up to date and with enough hardware to run everything. You simply subscribe for as much service as you need when you need it. As your business grows, your cloud service can expand as needed.

You have a choice in how you connect to the cloud. Some companies, especially smaller ones, simply use an Internet service with Direct Internet Access or SD WAN as the most reliable options. For even better performance and reliability a private line direct cloud connection makes the cloud seem part of your facility… as it should.

Are you ready to move up from an antiquated phone system to UCaaS or CCaaS? Talk with a technology expert and find out the features and prices of a system just right for your organization.

The Time for POTS Replacement Has Come

By: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

When Your Broadband Isn’t Stable Enough For VoIP Phones

By: John Shepler

People may point and laugh when you tell them your phones are still on analog landlines. Do you have to crank the phone or spin the dial? Very funny… especially when it turns out the joke is on them.

Those old twisted pair lines were designed to have decent voice quality and rock solid stability. Yes, they can degrade with time. That usually shows up as noise on the line until you can’t make or receive calls. After a quick service call, everything is back in order for another year or two or a decade.

Oh, but that’s so old fashioned. The new phone line is the Internet. You can ditch the separate wiring and expensive line to the phone company when your computers and telephones share the same broadband connection. You can also get more advanced features, such as phones and computers that work together to support customers.

The only real hitch is that sometimes the new phones don’t measure up to the old phones. Oh, the handsets are great. They’re marvels of electronic engineering. Somewhere, somehow, the performance is getting lost. Calls may start out fine and then get garbled. The distortion can be so bad you can’t understand the caller. Worst case the call gets dropped…. and you slam that fancy handset back in the cradle. Not too hard, though. Those phones are expensive.

Where It All Goes So Wrong
The problem with VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony isn’t the fundamental digital technology. It’s that Internet thing. The Internet serves everyone, goes everywhere and is cheap as chips, as they say. Anyone and everyone is online doing pretty much everything possible. Your phone call goes into the fray like every other session and winds up at your VoIP service provider. It’s also completely democratic. Your call is no more or less important than somebody streaming a movie or placing an online order.

What you may not realize is that your old phone calls were really dedicated private connections between you and the party you are talking to. The line itself from your building to the phone company is just a pair of wires that go all the way there. A switching system then connects your line to the other party’s line. You have a dedicated circuit for the duration of the call. If the system gets overloaded, the next caller gets a busy signal. On the Internet, nobody gets a busy signal. The system simply slows down or drops bits. That’s what wrecks nice clean phone conversations.

Is There a Way to Make it Better?
The fundamental problem is more bits per second than a connection can handle. First, stop letting your computers and phones fight for the bandwidth. Set your router up to give phone calls priority. Whatever they don’t use can serve the other equipment. If those operations don’t have enough left over, you are going to have to order a higher bandwidth line.

Another thing to know is that the first mile is the worst mile for an Internet connection. The core of the Internet has much higher performance than most local Internet Service Providers. The cheaper the connection, the more likely it is that you’ll be in contention with other users. Dump the shared bandwidth services like cable and cellular broadband in favor of a dedicated Internet connection, like a T1 line. The 1.5 Mbps bandwidth of T1 is probably not going to meet your other needs, so consider this just for the phones. Otherwise get a higher bandwidth service for everything using Carrier Ethernet over copper or fiber.

Get Off The Internet
If you really want to get control of call quality, replicate the old dedicated phone line but with newer technology. What you need is a dedicated line service from your company to your phone service provider. Most PBX systems can use a T1 line, ISDN PRI (another flavor of T1), or a SIP Trunk. SIP Trunking is designed to directly support VoIP telephony.

Note that these dedicated lines go directly from point to point. There is no Internet connection involved.

If you want to tie together several business locations, an MPLS network may be cost advantageous. This is like a private Internet. The difference is that the line quality is carefully maintained by the service provider and is not the free-for-all you get on the Internet. Does it cost more? You bet. It may well be worth it, though, for customer satisfaction and employee productivity.

Are you frustrated with the quality of your phone service or the performance of your entire network? It’s time to take a look at voice and data connections that will get the job done and probably save you more money than they cost.

Yes, You can Still Get a T1 Line

By: John Shepler

When the Internet was just beginning to take off and business was starting to migrate to the Web, the connectivity of choice was the T1 line. T1 is no longer king, as business cable broadband and fiber have eclipsed it with much higher bandwidth capability and much lower prices per Mbps. Even so, there are places and applications where T1 is exactly the right fit. The only question is: “Can you still find a T1 line?”.

Why Would You Want To?
T1 is a technical standard introduced by the Bell system in 1962. That’s right, the telephone company. This gives you a hint for where T1 is well entrenched. It is phone systems for small and medium sized businesses. The original implementation of T1 phone lines replaced 24 twisted pair copper analog phone lines with two pair running a digital protocol. A later scheme called ISDN PRI uses the same T1 line to carry 23 phone line conversations plus switching data and caller ID.

When the long distance carriers went to T1 and its higher bandwidth T3 cousin to replace the old analog carrier systems, one thing you immediately noticed was the disappearance of noise and crosstalk. In addition to using fewer circuits, digital technology gave us higher quality conversations.

Where do you find T1 lines for phones? Any business with multiple outside lines is a candidate. The more lines, the easier it is to justify the cost of a T1 or ISDN digital line. Typically six to twelve lines make more sense on digital than analog connections. Many key telephone and PBX (Private Branch Exchange) in-house phone systems support T1 directly or can easily be interfaced.

Rock Solid Performance and Reliability
T1 lines are dedicated point to point connections. It’s a pair of wires or a couple pair that go from your location to a telco equipment office. You may get your service directly from the incumbent local telephone company or from a competitive provider that leases the lines and terminal equipment from the telco.

T1 and ISDN PRI divide the line bandwidth into channels. That’s 24 channels for T1 and 23 for ISDN. The leftover bandwidth is used by ISDN for switching, ringing and Caller ID. Whatever channels are not in use at the moment simply idle and wait to carry a phone call. Unlike typical broadband services, there is no sharing of T1 bandwidth with other businesses or consumers. The bandwidth is dedicated to your usage. It’s also symmetrical by nature. In other words the bandwidth is the same in both directions.

Another important characteristic of T1 lines is that they are synchronized at both ends using PCM or pulse code modulation to convert between analog and digital. This compares with packets used in IP networks, which do not have the timing synchronization as they do not use channels. Why does this matter? T1 lines have minimal latency. It’s just the delay through the equipment and the distance between locations. You don’t get the variable latency of Internet routing or jumbled up packets that cause dropouts and distortion in VoIP calls. This clarity and reliability of performance makes for clean reliable phone calls and also makes T1 lines great for credit card verification.

T1 Broadband…It’s a Thing
The idea of a 1.5 Mbps line called broadband is pretty much laughable these days… unless you can’t get even that. That’s right. Rural broadband is the vast wasteland of our time. There are so many locations in the boonies that get nothing. No cell phone service and certainly no cable or fiber. What they can get is T1 lines. Why? Because they are already wired for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). T1 was designed to run on ordinary phone cables with regeneration equipment every mile so so.

So, if you have a rural business, you can probably hook up with a T1 line or two. Have one for your phones. Another as a “last mile” connection to the Internet. You won’t be downloading 4K movies in any reasonable amount of time, but you probably aren’t doing that anyway. T1 can support your inventory management and other business software. If you need more bandwidth you can bond another T1 for 3 Mbps and more to get up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That much bandwidth won’t come cheap and isn’t available everywhere, but… if you gotta have it.

A Faster Alternative
Technology advancements have resulted in newer protocols than the sixty-something year old T1 standard. One called Ethernet over Copper uses the same multiple twisted pair cable as T1 but runs much faster. The tradeoff is distance from the equipment office. If you are within a mile or two, you may get 10 or 20 Mbps. Way out yonder, EoC probably won’t work, but T1 will. Ethernet over Copper is worth look at if you are just outside the city limits but not served by fiber or cable. Pricing is pretty attractive and you might get all the bandwidth you need.

Are other connections too unstable for your phone system or are you having trouble getting any connectivity? There are numerous carriers still supporting T1 and related technologies. Get a quote on a venerable T1 line and see if it meets your needs.

Is Connection Latency Important to Your Business?

By: John Shepler

We may be inclined to think that connection speed is the most important consideration for private lines and Internet access. If web pages are loading slowly and files take forever to move, then clearly the network is starved for bandwidth. Just order more Mbps or even Gbps and everything will straighten out, right? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes no. There is another network consideration that can affect your business big time. That is latency.

What Does Latency Mean?
Latency is a time lag. Nothing happens instantaneously, but if the time lag is short enough it will seem that way. You know the expression, “in the blink of an eye”? That’s low latency.

In computing, you experience latency as applications that just don’t keep up with what you are doing. If you press a key and it doesn’t appear on the screen for a split second, you’ve got latency. If you type a command and nothing happens for a second, that’s latency.

When operating on local area networks and in-house data centers, latency may not be all that noticeable. Programs are responsive. Video is nice and smooth. Files move quickly. If the system can keep up with you, latency just isn’t an issue.

When Latency is Noticeable
You often get your first taste of latency when you connect to the Internet or the cloud. Suddenly things seem to be a tad sluggish. It gets destructive when the system is so slow to respond that it interrupts your workflow. You almost feel like you’ve gone back to the days of batch processing where you submit a program and wait for the results to print out.

Worst case latency shows up in real-time processes. VoIP telephony gets a bad name when latency exceeds a hundred milliseconds or two. On a phone call, you expect to carry on a normal conversation. That includes both sides talking at once sometimes. If you ask a question and don’t get a response immediately, you might start taking agin. Right then, you hear the other person’s response just as you say something else. It quickly becomes intolerable. If you are stuck with the situation, you can work around it by consciously taking turns, like you would with a two-way radio.

Higher Bandwidth, Lower Latency
One cause of latency is network traffic jams or congestion. In any size WAN pipe, expressed by bandwidth in Mbps or Gbps, you can only send so many packets per second. If you try to send more, they pile up in a transmission buffer or, worse, get dropped. The fix for this type of latency problem is to simply add more capacity. If your T1 line is full, a 10 Mbps Ethernet line may be way more than enough. Likewise you may really need 100 Mbps or a full Gigabit per second for the connection to appear transparent.

Another way to relieve latency-induced madness is to prioritize traffic. Real time processes like VoIP telephony and teleconferencing take highest priority and can work great on even limited capacity lines. As long as there is still some bandwidth left, you should prioritize business applications in the cloud next and file transfers and backups last. If you run out of bandwidth so that the lowest level processes never finish or take forever, you need to add more bandwidth, pure and simple.

Higher Bandwidth, Same Latency
What happens if you increase your bandwidth by 10x or 100x and nothing improves? “Hello, is this line working?”

With congestion relieved, something else must be slowing things down. Remember that latency is simply a time delay between transmission and reception and that nothing happens instantly. Signals can move only as fast as the speed of light, which even at 186,000 miles per second turns out to be 186 miles per millisecond. If both ends of the connection are 1,860 miles apart, you’ve got a built-in transmission time of 10 mSec each way or 20 msec total. If you need lower latency than this you’ll just have to move closer.

Know that light through fiber optic cable and transmission equipment may impose an additional penalty over a third more than ideal latency. Still not a big problem, as latencies in the tens of millisecond range are not bothersome for nearly all processes. But, what if that connection goes to a geosynchronous satellite? Now you are talking maybe 500 msec round trip. That’s most definitely noticeable and probably a show-stopper for most phone calls and some cloud services. This is why the new Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations are so eagerly anticipated. At distances of a few hundred miles up instead of thousands, latency can be back to nearly fiber optic line performance.

Other latency issues can be traced to network equipment that isn’t working correctly or the inherent nature of the good old Internet. Remember that the Internet was designed by the defense department to be robust and not particularly efficient. Packet routing can take long and convoluted paths and suffer various levels of congestion within the Internet. If you are using a shared bandwidth service, such as cable broadband, DSL, satellite or cellular broadband, other users can clog the link and up goes your latency. Even more maddening, performance can vary from minute to minute so you have no consistency. Dedicated direct connections to your cloud provider can dramatically improve performance if this is your problem.

Are you having network performance issues, especially if you’ve recently moved from an in-house data center to the cloud? Your cloud service can be working perfectly well even though it seems to drag. You might be surprised by ping testing your line and discovering that it is the weak link in the system. Find out now what low latency bandwidth options are available and what it costs to upgrade and relieve your performance issues.

Enterprise VoIP Moves to the Cloud

by: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Replacements for GigaMAN and Other Discontinued Line Services

By: John Shepler

AT&T announced that it is going to discontinue some of its line services because the demand just isn’t there anymore. “Ho, Hum,” you say, “Who needs telegraph lines anymore anyway?”

Not So Old-Timey
Well, it turns out that the services in question are not corroding copper lines in the middle of nowhere. They are cutting edge technology from not so long ago. I’m talking about GigaMAN Gigabit Ethernet point to point service and DecaMAN 10 Gigabit Ethernet service that interconnects geographically separate LANs.

The affected customers include those in 11 states: Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin.

Take a second and pick your jaw up off the floor. How is it possible that high speed fiber optic Ethernet service could be on the discontinue list so soon? Even more important, what replacement options are available?

Replacement Technology
It turns out that technology really is moving this fast. GigaMAN and DecaMAN serve very useful purposes for companies that need dedicated high bandwidth, low latency connections they can count on. AT&T has come up with an even better technical solution called ADE or AT&T Dedicated Ethernet that goes beyond the GigaMAN and DecaMAN solutions. ADE offers speeds ranging from 1 Gbps up to 100 Gbps.

The new AT&T technology supports not only Ethernet formats, but other protocols as well. Their system embeds data signals within an Optical Transport Network (OTN). That network offers a standardized way to “wrap” various protocols in containers that can all be carried on the same industry standard format fiber optic wavelengths.

Where is This All Going
The two digital transport technologies that are growing rapidly are fiber and wireless. Fiber demand is being pushed by ever increasing amounts of video content being generated and exchanged. It is being pushed even more by the move from local data centers to remote cloud services. High connection speeds with low latency are essential if you want the same or better productivity from your applications when they are cloud hosted as when they are in the server room down the hall.

Ironically, perhaps, another huge demand for fiber optic transport capacity is the move to higher speed wireless services. Older generation cell towers could be served well by copper-based T1 lines that were almost universally available and provisioned over the same twisted pair cables that provide landline telephone service. LTE 4G and the coming 5G bandwidths far exceed the capacity of even multiple bonded T1 lines. Only point to point wireless and fiber optic lines have the necessary bandwidth to support 4G, 5G and beyond.

Is Copper a Goner?
Twisted pair copper connections have served the telecommunications industry well for over a century. Even T1 digital has been widely deployed for half a century. Will it still be with us half a century from now? I seriously doubt it.

Cellular phones are now so ubiquitous that the majority of consumers see no need for the old wired landline anymore. Businesses are dropping POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) for VoIP telephony and Unified Communications. Both of these newer protocols run on computer networks, not traditional telephone wiring. Smaller companies may opt to connect to their service providers via cable broadband, but medium and larger companies connect directly with fiber optic lines.

It has gotten so bad that telephone companies are petitioning the FCC to let them abandon their old copper lines in the ground rather than having to deal with ever corroding connections for fewer and fewer paying customers. It will no doubt begin as a refusal to connect new locations, but how long before even existing customers are told that they’ll no longer have dial tone? Months? A few years?

That leaves the interesting situation of businesses who still have analog POTS phone service, ISDN PRI multiple phone lines, T1 dedicated data lines and Ethernet over Copper point to point and dedicated Internet service. These connections may still be widely available while demand is high. You know, though, as more and more buildings are lit for fiber, business will quickly jump on the fiber links that offer higher bandwidth options and lower costs per Mbps. It’s likely that line of sight and 5G cellular wireless will fill the gaps where fiber construction costs are just too high for some locations.

How To Ensure Continuing Service
The best way to ensure that your business will have the voice, data and video transport services that you need is to make sure you have options. That’s easier today than ever before. A generation ago, the incumbent local telephone companies ruled the roost and you took whatever they had available and paid whatever the bill said. No more.

Deregulation has spawned a wealth of competition. Initially that meant new companies renting those same telephone company lines to deliver alternative service, often at a better price. Fiber optics has changed that landscape. Now there are many fiber optic network companies that own the fiber in the ground and will connect you directly to their networks, avoiding the phone company facilities completely. The result is price competition that is reducing the cost of bandwidth by an order of magnitude or more. Get 10 Mbps Ethernet for what you used to pay for a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Get 100 Mbps for a few times that price. Gigabit Ethernet is now affordable for many if not most businesses. Even 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps are within reason if you need that much capacity.

Are you concerned about upcoming loss of your voice, video or data connections or what might be in the planning stages? How would you like to get more bandwidth for less cost that you pay now? If that sounds interesting, see just how many competitive bandwidth options are available right now for your business locations.

VXSuite Takes the Scary Out of VoIP

By: John Shepler

You know that Unified Communications based on VoIP telephony is the future of business communications. You also know that it is likely a good UC solution can improve the productivity of your business. You’ve been hesitating, though, because ripping everything out and moving to the new technology is downright scary. The phones work fine on their old twisted pair wiring. Well, if by fine you mean you can make and receive calls on your desk phones. That’s pretty much the end of the road for analog and TDM technology. If you want more, you’ll have to make the leap to IP networking all the way around.

Not So Fast...
Oh, but you’ve heard horror stories about companies merging their phones onto the computer network. All of sudden, voices get distorted, calls get dropped. Who wants that? Perhaps it’s better just to stay old school and let somebody else take on the new technology.

Can You Afford Not To?
OK, but you are also letting them take the profits that come with the increased efficiency of having your business apps, desk phones, smartphones, video conferencing, and call center all on one integrated system. Wait long enough and your competitors responsiveness will improve so much that they’ll run circles around your company and start siphoning off customers, then employees.

Looking Under the Hood
What if there were tools that could take the guesswork out of implementing VoIP and UC on your network? Most of the issues you’ll encounter arise from the fact that a network set up for computers can work just fine for file transfers but be a disaster when it comes to handling real-time apps like voice and video. You need to protect those interactive streams from getting crushed by mountains of data moving around. To do that you need to look inside the network and see what is happening.


VXSuite is a toolset ideally qualified to analyze your currenct legacy network and report if you have bandwidth, latency, jitter or congestion issues that will make a mess out of VoIP. You’ll need to implement class of service on your network so that each type of packet stream has the priority and other characteristics it needs to perform optimally.

Before the Move
First, use VXSuite to analyze your system before your make any changes. VXSuite will report on your current voice call volume and usage. It uses that data to calculated min, max and average bandwidth requirements that will support VoIP when you switch. Find and fix problems here and you’ll have a much smoother transition.

A Quality of Experience Assessment is an automated test that deploys software agents on your network to create VoIP test calls to see what bottlenecks arise. Each test call is analyzed for delay, jitter & packet loss and then assigned an MOS score that indicates the quality of the voice communications.

After the Move
Once you deploy your new VoIP and/or UC system, you are not left in the dark. VXSuite monitors call quality and network issues during the rollout phase that can include both VoIP and legacy PBX systems simultaneously. You’ll get reports on how things are working and alarms if there is trouble.

Continuing Support
As ongoing support, the VXSuite cloud-based analytics toolkit continues to monitor your network environment to ensure that voice quality is maintained and issues diagnosed and resolved. You can set threshold levels for delay, jitter, packet loss, MOS, CPU utilization, memory utilization and so on to enable your IT staff to know instantly when problems develop. No more worrying that trouble is sneaking up behind you.

The Toolset You Really Need
Have you been putting off making the technology changes you should because you are worried that things will get worse, not better, when you make the move to VoIP and Unified Communications? If so, now’s the time to get more information about how VXSuite tools and cloud based communications
can improve your productivity and likely reduce cost at the same time.

Why Business Needs Unified Communications

By: John Shepler

Time was when there was only one method of electronic communication. It was that heavy black phone on your desk. Now look what we have. Sure, there’s still a black phone on your desk, but it’s a lot lighter thanks to modern plastics and solid state electronics. There’s also a raft of other ways we communicate electronically. How many of these do you use: email, text messages, mobile phone calls and video chats? How about the platforms: desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones and soon… a watch?

One of the biggest communications issues, especially in business, is that all these different platforms and applications don’t necessarily play together well. One solution is to just make sure you have them all with you. That used to mean a pager on the belt, a cell phone in the pocket, a laptop in the briefcase, and somebody to forward you messages from your office when you were in the field. A better solution soon became a crying need.

Let’s Combine Everything into One
The answer that you might expect is to integrate all of these communications systems into one. That won’t really do. There is no one platform that can handle everything equally well. The desk phone is tethered, as is the desktop computer with the nice big screen. The smartphone screen is way too small for a lot of serious work. The tablet makes a ridiculous telephone held up to your ear.

There are forces still pulling in that direction. Enter the “phablet.” It’s a giant cell phone that’s almost, if not really, too big for your pocket. Tablet computers now have clip on keyboards so you can touch type from the coffee house. Laptop computers are shrinking, getting lighter and some have screens that detach from the keyboard and act like tablets. If there was only a way to get a great big screen that you can actually see along with keys that fit your fingers along with a telephone that lets you take calls privately, handles email and text messaging, and all fits neatly in your shirt pocket.

Well, there isn’t. There isn’t even anything on the horizon that fits this description. Someday, the QWERTY typewriter keyboard may become as quaint as the crank telephone. Siri might actually become your best friend and be able to read your mind as well as understand everything you’re mumbling. Something akin to Google Glass may project that big screen in front of your face anywhere. That’s not today, though. Today we need a solution that let’s us communicate anyway we like anywhere we happen to be.

It’s Called Unified Communications
The development that takes what we have and makes it into the closest approximation of what we really want is UC or Unified Communications. The “unified” part means doesn’t mean trying to get one platform to do everything. It recognizes that each device has its strong points and weaknesses. The master solution is to make all of this stuff play together well. In fact, so well that you needn’t be afraid that you are missing out just because you don’t have a particular platform with you at the moment.

A simple example is the lowly telephone call. Every business is still dependent on the telephone simply because it is the only universal medium of voice communications. For a long time, this meant having a business number that you printed on your business cards and a separate home phone number that was printed in “the book.” If you were at home you didn’t get your business calls unless you had a secretary working late to give the caller your home number or forward the call. You came in the next morning and found a raft of pink “while you were out” call sheets on the your desk.

The introduction of the cell phone only made matters worse. Now you’ve got a third phone number that only certain people know. What if they call the office instead of your cell when you are out? Will you miss the sale? Could be.

Unified communications starts with voice mail to replace the secretary and the telephone message sheets. You don’t have to fear missing a call because they’ll leave a voice message you can pick up anywhere. Even better is a “find me follow me” service that routes your calls to wherever you happen to be. With this type of automation you can hand out a single phone number and have it try your office phone, your cell phone or go to voice mail. You can even have it send you an email with the audio file of the call. Toll free number? Just have it routed to your unified business number.

The Technology Behind UC
The most popular platform for implementing unified communications is the cloud. Why? Because the cloud provides a common place to collect and distribute everything with near-infinite resources. All that processing power can easily handle everything from an independent professional up to the largest corporation. You don’t need to make a big capital investment or try to keep up to date on installing the newest features. The cloud provider takes care of that.

Cloud UC is driven by computing power and that computing power understands IP or Internet Protocol. The “Internet” part of IP doesn’t necessarily mean the public Internet. It just means the technical protocol that is also used by the Internet. For security and highest voice quality, you may not want your internal communications on the Internet at all. You will, however, want access to the Internet both in the office and on the road. That can be done carefully so that you use the Internet when you want to but private channels when you don’t.

What UC Can Do For You
Unified communications can be a gateway to both productivity improvement and cost reduction. It augments or replaces your in-house PBX phone system with a more powerful VoIP system that uses a common network with your computers and other digital devices. You can get tools for ease of collaboration among employees as well as the obvious single phone number benefits. Your laptop becomes your desktop with remote desktop access. Voice and video conferences can take place anywhere with a diverse group scattered in offices and hotel rooms around the globe.

Will all this cost a fortune? It’s probably cheaper than you think and may even offer all the new benefits at a lower cost than you are paying now. There’s only one way to find out. Get a set of competitive quotes for unified communications solutions and review the benefits and costs specific to your situation.



Note: The humorous mousepad about unified communications, along with many other items in the same theme, is available from the Gigapacket Zazzle store.

Business Phone Line Options

By: John Shepler

One thing every business, large or small, needs is at least one telephone line. Phone lines may seem pretty mundane, but you may have more options than you think. Are you sure that you have the right phone line for your business?

Plain Old Telephone Service
The historical phone line that we’re all familiar with is the analog phone line, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. It’s that vanilla.

POTS lines are as simple as they come. They consist of a single twisted copper pair that runs from a standard RJ-11 phone jack on your wall all the way back to the telephone company central office. The phone conversation is carried by a varying current in the wires.

What you may not realize is that POTS is a self-contained phone system. Phones were traditionally made of passive electrical components. They got their power right off the phone line… and still can. The value of this is that even if the electrical power goes off at your location, you still have phone service.

What’s happened lately, however, is that even single line phones have gone electronic and require AC power supplies and/or batteries to power the circuitry. This is especially true of cordless phone systems with multiple handsets. You can still get dial tone during a power outage, but you need to have a backup battery supply to operate the phone, not the line.

Multiple LInes
You are not stuck with just a single POTS line. You can have as many as you want. Mind you, there is no economy of scale. There is a fixed price for each line whether you have one phone per line or share the outside lines using a Key Telephone System or PBX.

Wireless as an Option
Can you get rid of the telephone line completely? That’s what cellular phone service is all about. No more “landline”. Everything is done with cell towers instead of wires. Wireless can work just fine for independent professionals who are always out of the office anyway. With a data plan you can have both Internet and voice telephony on the same device. You can enhance your mobile setup with an incoming toll free number, fax transmission and reception, and international dial-around calling. Shared plans can support a small office as well as a single user. Operations larger than that will still need wired landlines.

Moving up to Trunks
A telephone trunk is multiple phone lines coming in on a single cable. There used to be analog trunks, but that technology has all gone digital. The most popular trunks are T1, ISDN PRI and SIP.

T1 lines were devised as replacements for multiple analog POTS lines. Instead of separate wires, T1 lines are multiplexed to divvy up the available bandwidth into 24 independent channels. Each channel can be thought of as a separate phone line.

What if you already have a dozen phones and want to replace all those separate phone lines with a single T1 line? Chances are that you’ll get the same or better service at a lower monthly cost. A box called a “channel bank” handles the conversion between T1 channels and analog lines. Just plug your phones in like you always have.

T1 vs ISDN PRI
ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface is a variation on the T1 line. It uses the same channelization scheme, but dedicates one channel to dialing and switching for all the others. That means you have a maximum of 23 outside lines available on a PRI trunk. The tradeoff is that your phone calls will switch faster on ISDN PRI. That’s important for call centers and others who need highly efficient telephone operations.

Most PBX systems now have the interface circuitry for T1 and ISDN PRI already built-in. You simply plug in the trunk line and the system handles all of the necessary conversions.

SIP Trunks
Many, many companies are considering switching to VoIP technology or have already made the move. SIP trunks are the natural complement to VoIP phone systems. Their advantage is that they use the same protocol, SIP, as the phone themselves. Remember that VoIP or SIP phones connect directly to an Ethernet LAN, usually shared with computers, printers and other network devices. The SIP trunk extends the network so that it also connects to the VoIP service provider.

Like T1 and ISDN PRI, SIP trunks support multiple simultaneous telephone conversations. The difference is that these conversations consist of packet streams all combined on one line instead of breaking the line into separate channels.

Another advantage of SIP trunks is that they can carry Internet traffic as well as phone calls. After all, everything is in packet format. What’s important is that the trunk be setup to prioritize telephone traffic over data traffic to ensure voice quality. This is called Class of Service or Quality of Service.

What phone line is best for your business? One way to find out quickly is to get multiple competitive quotes for everything from POTS through SIP Trunking as business phone line options.

Fractional and Full Gigabit Ethernet Options

By: John Shepler

Today’s demanding application push for higher and higher bandwidths. Right now 10 Mbps is considered entry level and most businesses need at least 100 Mbps WAN bandwidth to ensure that real-time (VoIP, videoconferencing) and latency sensitive (cloud connections) applications won’t succumb to degradation from network congestion at peak load times. Technology intensive businesses and medium to large scale operations can easily require Gigabit connections. Fortunately, they are easy to come by and relatively inexpensive compared to times past.

One major technology upgrade in the last decade is the standardization and deployment of Carrier Ethernet. This represents a major change in MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth. The legacy services are SONET/SDH, a TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) switched circuit technology originally developed for massive telephone trunking between central offices. Carrier Ethernet acknowledges the fact that packet switched traffic is dominant on networks worldwide. With Ethernet on the local networks, it seems logical to keep everything in the Ethernet protocol from end to end.

Carrier Ethernet can be transported on both copper and fiber lines. The lower bandwidth offerings are found on EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This is a twisted pair technology that uses the same installed cabling that supports T1 and analog phone lines. EoC typically starts at 1 to 3 Mbps and goes up to 10 or 20 Mbps, although there are special situations that will support 50 and even 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. These tend to be locations very close to the telco CO where the termination equipment is installed. Copper based Ethernet loses bandwidth capacity rapidly with distance.

Ethernet over Fiber is the logical solution for many, if not most, high performance applications. Bandwidth typically starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps. Popular service levels are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. These mirror the LAN speeds of standard, fast and gigabit Ethernet.

There are factors that make Carrier Ethernet more affordable and more flexible than the longstanding SONET services. Numerous competitive carriers have deployed their own regional and national fiber networks independent of the public telephone system. They own the fiber and terminal equipment, including last mile drops to your building. This is a very competitive field right now and lease prices per Mbps have plummeted in recent years.

Another real cost savings opportunity arises from the easy scalability designed into Carrier Ethernet services. TDM based bandwidth is technically unique at each service level. T1, DS3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and other installations require specific terminal equipment. If you wish to upgrade to a faster service, you need different equipment installed. That helps drive costs and leads to long installation times.

Carrier Ethernet bandwidths are somewhat arbitrary. Everything works the same regardless of how much traffic is being transported. In other words, Ethernet is Ethernet. What’s important is the speed of the installed port at your location. It is the maximum capacity of the port that sets a limit on the bandwidth you can order. A Fast Ethernet port is good up to 100 Mbps. A Gigabit Ethernet port raises that ceiling to 1000 Mbps.

There is nothing that prevents you from operating your network connection at a speed less than the maximum port capacity. Fractional line speeds that are rate limited by the service provider have been available for other services, such as DS3 or OC3. There are cost savings available with these, but they are not nearly as dramatic as what you’ll find with Ethernet.

In fact, scalability is a big selling point with Carrier Ethernet. Many carriers offer bandwidth upgrades with only a phone call required. The additional capacity can be online in a matter of hours or days. That compares with weeks or months for equipment changes on older services.

This is where Gigabit Ethernet makes sense even if you don’t need that much capacity today. The idea is to install a Gigabit Ethernet port, which is commonly available with a managed router provided by the carrier. The output is a standard copper or fiber Ethernet jack. You can then place your initial bandwidth order at 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps or some other level that represents your current need. When you need more bandwidth, that phone call will get you 500 Mbps, 750 Mbps or one of many other increments. These fractional Gigabit speeds can be increased until you are at the full Gigabit capacity of the port.

Is Gigabit Ethernet still too restrictive? The answer, as you may suspect, is to order a 10 GigE or even 100 GigE port. That’s the practical limit today. As bandwidth demands continue to increase, carriers will upgrade their core networks to Terabit per second and higher speeds. Soon afterwards these speeds will be available to business or organization customers with highly demanding applications.

Are you being squeezed for metro and long haul bandwidth to support your organization? If so, it is well worth your while to look into the availability and cost of fractional and full Gigabit Ethernet services, and higher if needed.

Is Your Network Capacity Drying Up?

By: John Shepler

It can sneak up on you without warning. One day, the network is running smoothly. Next day it’s all congested. How did that happen? More importantly, what can you do about it?


Network capacity, especially MAN and WAN network capacity, can dry up quickly as applications become more demanding. Video is a major bandwidth hog. Backups to remote data centers can also chew up a lot of your capacity. Worst of all is The Cloud. You might think that your troubles are over when you outsource your applications to cloud service providers. What is often forgotten is that all that user bandwidth supplied by your LAN must now be supplied by the WAN. Not just any bandwidth, mind you. It needs to be low latency bandwidth or you’ll still have troubles.

Why low latency? You know that latency is critical for sensitive real time apps like VoIP telephony or high definition video conferencing. But how about those business applications that moved from the local data center to the cloud? Latency is easy to control locally. It can be an issue on long distance connections, especially if you elected to use the Internet as your cloud connection service. Latency shows up as hesitation in cloud response. A little can be annoying. A lot can be a major productivity killer.

Fortunately, high bandwidth low latency connectivity is easier than ever to fit into your IT budget. Prices have plummeted in recent years on everything from old school T1 lines on up to the SONET/SDH and fiber optic Ethernet. Even MPLS networks for connecting multiple business locations may cost less than you think.

If you haven’t gone out for competitive price quotes in a few years, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. You may find that you can double your MAN or WAN bandwidth for the same telecom budget that you have now. By upgrading from TDM based SONET fiber optic services to Ethernet over Fiber, you may well be able to afford a lot more capacity than you have now. The cost per Mbps or Gbps is much more attractive for Carrier Ethernet, especially if you get your service from a competitive provider who can provide both core network and last mile connections on their own network.

Could you use a bandwidth upgrade soon? Perhaps even right now? Get fast bandwidth quotes customer tailored to your particular needs now.

MPLS Networks vs The Internet

By: John Shepler

Businesses with multiple locations have a requirement that single location companies don’t. They need to reliably connect their various offices, factories, warehouses, medical centers or school campuses at a reasonable cost. Let’s take a look at how MPLS networks, private lines, and the Internet can be deployed to do just that:


What it really comes down to is how much network performance is required to support your business activities and what you are willing to pay. If you have stringent demands for high voice quality on outside calls, such as customer service lines, or expect high productivity from your critical cloud services, you need to seriously consider private line or MPLS network solutions. You won’t be happy with what you get from the Internet and it may wind up costing you way more than you save on monthly telecom costs.

On the other hand, if you are a small operation that primarily communicates via email and websites, perhaps with cloud data backup, you may well get by with Internet VPN services. This is especially true if you have more patience than money and need a low cost solution no matter what. You’ll greatly improve your satisfaction level if you employ a dedicated private line as your last mile connection to the Internet. Most Internet issues are caused end user connections that just aren’t designed for demanding needs.

Why not take a few minutes and investigate what’s available in network bandwidth connections for your particular business locations.

MPLS and Cloud Banish The PBX Monster For Good

By: John Shepler

Are you aware that you no longer have to deal with high investment, maintenance costs, staffing and vendor squabbles for your business telecommunication needs? Two technologies have emerged to make those frustrations a thing of the past for all size businesses. They are cloud hosted telephony and MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks. Both technologies are valuable in their own right. In combination, they make an unbeatable solution to your voice and data requirements.

Telesphere is a best-in-class provider of cloud-based managed services and solutions for unified communications as a service (UCaaS), especially for companies with multiple locations nationwide. Let’s have a look at the problems businesses need to solve and how Telesphere goes about solving them:


As I’m sure you know, cloud hosted PBX systems have been around awhile and are touted by many vendors. But, are you aware of the extra value that a private MPLS IP network adds to the solution?

Lower end hosted VoIP depends on the public Internet to act as a trunk line between your business locations and the vendor’s facilities. This appears to be a cost advantage since most companies already have broadband Internet installed. Why not just piggyback the phone system on the already paid for high speed Internet connection?

This does work to a degree, especially for the smallest most cost sensitive businesses. The Internet can easily handle voice, data and video simultaneously. Performance is another matter. The lack of resource control and quality of service mechanisms mean that you get what you get and that always isn’t the highest quality your employees and customers have come to expect.

A private MPLS network is engineered to handle the traffic from many customers simultaneously while guaranteeing the bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics you would enjoy from private lines, at a considerable cost savings. Telesphere owns and operates the largest nationwide MPLS IP network of the pure play cloud communications providers. This means that you have one vendor for delivery of your voice, data and Internet services and a system that is set up for high quality, high performance 24/7.

Do you recognize yourself as one of those frustrated users of business communications who have to deal with vendors pointing fingers at each other when things go wrong and that nagging feeling that you are paying too much for too little? It’s time to take a closer look at cloud based unified communications services to better meet your needs.

On The First Class of Service the Network Gave to Me…

By: John Shepler

One of the big impediments in getting networks to work well for all types of traffic is that different types of traffic have different needs. Treat all packets the same and you’ll enjoy excellent results in some cases and unacceptable results in others. What’s the solution? You need to add a touch of class to your network.

The idea behind class of service or CoS is that different types of traffic get different priorities on the network. For instance, do you really think that data backups are as sensitive to network characteristics such as latency and jitter as VoIP telephone conservations? Of course not. If your network has the capacity it may not matter. With infinite bandwidth all traffic will flow smoothly from source to destination. The problem is that we don’t have infinite bandwidth or infinitely large anything else.

This really shows up in MAN and WAN connections. These telecom links are almost always more limited than your LAN resources simply because of the cost involved. How many companies can afford 10 or 100 Gbps private lines cross-country? In fact, even 1 Gbps is a stretch for many IT departments. Many companies will have to get everything done with 10 Mbps Ethernet or 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet MAN and WAN service.

Can this work? It likely can if you carefully manage your traffic and don’t have so much that you saturate the network. The trick is in establishing multiple classes of service and assigning each type of traffic to one of those classes. Do it right and everything on the network will run smoothly.

The simplest example is to establish two classes of service. One is for latency sensitive applications. The other is for everything else. A good example is a SIP trunk that provides you with both VoIP business phone service and Internet access. This is becoming a popular setup for smaller business locations because of the cost savings involved in having only one outside trunk line. The VoIP traffic is extremely sensitive to latency and jitter so it goes into the class that has priority. Most of what you do on the Internet isn’t that sensitive, so it goes into the non-priority class.

You need this type of division because voice traffic is typically low bandwidth per conversation and will break up if there is any network congestion. Data transfers and web page downloads aren’t so sensitive to congestion and will take all the bandwidth they can get. If there isn't enough, they may slow down a bit but you won’t lose any data.

Class of Service keeps the big data and video downloads from pushing the more sensitive voice and two-way video conferences to the side. This can make your network perform much better overall without increasing bandwidth. Even so, there’s no free lunch. When the network gets congested enough, you are going to notice the slowdown on non-critical traffic and will have to increase bandwidth to make everything run as fast as it can.

Class of Service is one of the big differentiators between the Internet and private networks. There is no CoS on the Internet. In fact, it is a matter of pride that all packets are treated equally. This principle is called network neutrality. It makes the public Internet fair for all users, but inhibits performance on latency and bandwidth sensitive applications.

Is there a reason to create more than two classes of service? There is for more sophisticated operations. XO Communications is offering what they call Premium CoS with six different classes.

At the lowest level is standard class service for data and Internet traffic. The next step up is Priority class for data and Internet traffic that has a more urgent need to get through quickly, such as email messaging. Up from that is Priority Plus for traffic that has some sensitivity to delay and jitter such as FTP transfers.

Critical, the next class up, is for business applications such as SAP that will affect productivity if they are delayed. Critical Plus goes a step higher for applications such as Telnet Routing Protocols. The real time applications are at the top of the heap for priority. These include voice and two-way video. One way video can take a lower class because it is easily buffered to compensate for most jitter and latency issues.

Are you frustrated by the problems that have arisen as you’ve expanded the expectations of what types of traffic your network is expected to handle, especially for MAN and WAN connections? If so, a private network with two or more classes of service may get everything running smoothly again at a reasonable cost. Get more information about MAN and WAN class of service network solutions, along with pricing and availability.


Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Super Cheap Business Phone Service for the SMB

By: John Shepler

With the economy recovering at a snail’s pace, it’s still important to keep a sharp eye on all business expenses. This includes the monthly business telephone bill. Have you had this nagging feeling that you are paying a lot more for phone service than you could be? You are most likely right… and here’s why.

Most businesses start off by equipping their office or store with at least one traditional analog phone line that they get from the local telephone company. The smallest businesses get by with a single phone and its dedicated line. As they grow, the business may install a cordless phone system with two to four handsets all sharing that same line. Eventually, you may need to add a second line so two people can take or make calls without waiting.

SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) users may never get past this stage. You need an office full of staff to justify a PBX system or enterprise VoIP. You could be feeling left behind when you find out all the handy features these systems offer and how they can save money over just adding more and more analog phone lines to your location. Is there anything appropriate for small operators who just can’t justify the cost of these more sophisticated systems?

You bet there is. You can take advantage of the latest technology and cut the phone bill you have now by half or even more. How? By doing what the big guys do and move to a network voice solution.

Network voice? That’s another term for VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. VoIP can run on private networks or over the Internet, as the name implies.

The reason for the term network voice is that your phone calls, voice conversations, are converted to a protocol that will run on computer networks rather than the specialized telephone company lines. Why do this? Most every business now has broadband Internet service. You almost can’t do business without it these days. What you may not realize is that the broadband connection you already have can do double duty as a phone line as well.

This is where a lot of the savings comes from. Right now you pay for two lines. You pay one bill for your broadband line and second bill for your telephone line. Disconnect that telephone line and you save a chunk of change each month.

Sounds good, but if you get rid of your phone line what do you plug your business phone into? You can’t just plug it into your router. The connectors are completely different sizes.

What you need is an adaptor, also called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor. This is the electronics that converts telephone signals to Internet signals. You plug your phone into one jack and your cable or DSL modem into the other. There is an additional jack to plug your router into. Now everything is connected to the Internet and it all works just like before… except you are minus one outside phone line and that expensive monthly bill.

You still need a phone company, don’t you. Yes, but with VoIP you can choose a lower cost provider that gives you dozens of calling features that you are probably paying for a-la-carte right now. Choose wisely and you’ll get a provider that will give you that telephone adaptor box for free.

One of the premier companies in this field is Phone Power. They specialize in VoIP phone service for small and home offices and other small business users. You can use this as your home phone service as well if you office is in your home. That’s because a cloned second line is included with your service.

That adaptor box I was talking about, the ATA, comes with not one but two phone jacks from Phone Power. This allows you to have two simultaneous conversations on separate connections. You still have a single phone number but you can share that line and not interfere with each other’s conversations.

On top of the cloned second line, you’ll get a total of 45 features including 3 way conference calling, call hold, call waiting, call waiting Caller ID, call blocking, call return, call forwarding, do not disturb, voice mail, speed dial and a lot more. You even get an hour’s worth of international calling included each month so you don’t have to pay extra for international calls. Oh, both local and long distance calling to the US and Canada are also included, so there’s no need for a pricey extra long distance service.

How much does all of this cost? Would you be shocked to hear $8.33 a month? Sorry if just did a spit-take, but it’s true. The best plan, prepaid for a year with a second year’s service added free, comes out to a $8.33 monthly average. If you prefer to go month to month it’s $19.95 a month. That's probably much lower than your current bill.

Do a lot of International business or need to talk to friends and relatives around the world? The Phone Power Unlimited World Plus plan gives your unlimited calling to 75 countries and 26 mobile areas for just $24.95 a month plus taxes that you pay no matter what service you have.

Intrigued? You really should check out all the details on Phone Power phone services and compare with what you are paying for what you get now. You may well do what other small businesses have done and make the switch, pocketing the considerable cost difference.

Choose Your Trunk, Choose Your Handoff

By: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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