When Only T1 Will Do

By: John Shepler

In the age of gigabit fiber connections, the venerable T1 line might be thought of as a relic of the past. Not at all. T1 service is alive and well. It might even be exactly what you need right now in the way of bandwidth and affordability.

Why Would Anyone Want a T1 Line?
T1 is the most mature, most deployed and most available of the telecom line services. You might think that Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) would be the leader in that category. It was. POTS is giving way in many organizations to newer premises VoIP and telephony in the cloud. That still leaves what used to be the POTS lines connected. What are they good for? Think: T1

T1 lines are amazingly versatile. They make perfect telephone trunks for channelized T1 phone, ISDN PRI and even high quality VoIP. They are almost certainly available at your location, wherever you may happen to be. Plus, T1 is readily affordable by just about any size business.

The T1 Telephone Line
Did you know that T1 actually started out as a telephone trunking technology? If the telco companies didn’t have a burning desire to consolidate the mass of wiring that interconnected their switching centers, T1 might never have come about. In the beginning, it was one telephone conversation per pair of wires. Then the phone companies found a way to send multiple conversations down the same pair simultaneously using a method called carrier telephony. It works like the radio band. Each conversation had its own assigned carrier frequency separated from the others so they wouldn’t interfere. This is the analog way to get the job done.

The breakthrough that was T1 involved the conceptual change from analog to digital. By digitizing the phone conversations, you could send 24 of them down the same pair of wires and they wouldn’t interfere. What’s more, digital technology got rid of all that noise and crosstalk that analog long distance lines were famous for in the first part of the last century.

A channelized T1 telephone line consists of 24 time division multiplexed segments or channels that are synchronized at the transmitting and receiving end. Each analog phone signal is digitized into 8 bits by 64 Kbps, which preserves the call quality. What grade of wiring do you need to transmit these calls? Ordinary twisted pair telephone cable will do just fine. With signal regenerators every mile or so, a T1 line can be stretched as far as you like.

ISDN PRI Telephone Trunks
T1 telephone lines are used by in-house PBX business phone systems. In recent decades, that technology has been upgraded to something called ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface. It’s the same T1 line, but with a slightly different format. ISDN PRI provides 23 separate phone lines plus a control and signaling channel that runs the system. This is the preferred option for call centers because of its fast connection times and high voice quality. Multiple T1 lines can be installed to most PBX systems to match the number of outside lines needed.

T1 for VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a different method of achieving the same phone service. VoIP was designed to be compatible with computer networks rather than a unique telephone standard. Even so, VoIP trunks, called SIP trunks are needed to get the phone calls to the telephone service provider in the cloud. Unchannelized T1 lines work great for this because they are highly reliable and offer enough bandwidth to carry two dozen or more simultaneous telephone conversations.

T1 Internet Lines
T1 for Internet access, with its paltry 1.5 Mbps bandwidth might be considered laughable in this age of gigabit broadband. It’s not so funny when your business is on a farm or so far out in the wilderness that you are lucky to have a landline phone. Those landline phone wires can also carry T1. That means if you can get phone service, you can get at least T1 broadband where there is no fiber or even cell towers for miles.

Is 1.5 Mbps truly a problem? It likely is if you want to transfer HD video production. Not really, though, if you have a small business and need the line for credit card verification, a connection back to a franchise office, or just email and casual web browsing. You can increase this bandwidth by combining, called bonding, multiple T1 lines together. This will give you anywhere from 3 to 12 Mbps, depending on the number of lines you bond.

How About The Cost?
People who think T1 is expensive remember back a decade or two, when a single T1 line would set you back at least a grand a month. Today, that figure is more like $200 to $300 in most cases. It still depends on how much competing service is in your area and how far you are from the telco office. Is this expensive? Business grade cable broadband is also priced in that range, but with “up to” higher advertised bandwidth… if you happen to be next to where the cable line runs. Even then, cable is shared bandwidth while T1 is dedicated to your particular company.

If your need is for highly reliable PBX telephone lines, point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access or rural broadband applications, T1 might still be the optimum service for your company. Check out T1 and bonded T1 pricing and availability and compare with your alternative service options.



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100 Mbps Fast Ethernet for your Business

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling the pinch of too little bandwidth to support your more sophisticated business applications, such as cloud services, big data, VoIP telephony, video conferencing or simple video downloads? It’s a good time to take a look at making the move to 100 x 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service. Let’s have a look at a quick video on Fast Ethernet:


Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps is just one option of many offered by Carrier Ethernet providers. You can get bandwidths as low as 10 Mbps or as high as 10 Gbps to support you business needs. What’s even better is that you have the option to order the bandwidth you need today with an easy upgrade path when you need more. By installing a port that can handle your anticipated needs, you can pay for what you need now and add bandwidth incrementally with no more than a simple phone call.

Learn more about Ethernet bandwidth options for your business with free consultation and instant online pricing.

You Pay Too Much For Your Business Phone

While we’ve been busily gathering and servicing new customers, the telephone industry has been changing behind our backs. If you are still using the same phone and provider that you had a decade ago, it’s seriously time for a review. You not only could be, but probably are, paying way more than you would have to and be missing out on some newer productivity features.

What’s so different now? After all, a phone is a phone, right?

Ah, not so anymore. All phones used to be pretty much the same. That’s because they all came from the same supplier, the local telephone company. The phone was a big dumb peripheral to the large scale switching system at the central office. Most single line phones were built from passive components and got their power through the phone line. Multi line business phones were also built from passive components but supplied from a power supply and line card rack in the back room. That was necessary to create such features as flashing a line button when it was on hold.

Some of business phones you can buy today are not much more sophisticated that the one’s that Ma Bell supplied. One difference is that they may have a plug-in power supply or batteries to power the electronics inside. The one to four line key telephone systems that you can buy from office supply stores have replaced the old electromagnetic switching with smaller electronic boxes. Still, they all work on the same old telephone lines called POTS.

POTS stands for Plain Old Telephone Service. It consists of independent analog business lines that run from your office to the phone company over twisted pairs of copper wires. Power and switching signals are provided by the telco switching system. The in-house key system lets you have more than one line on a phone with LEDs to show what’s in use or on hold.

Did you know that you can get POTS service from companies other than your local phone company? The telephone industry has been deregulated so that other providers can lease the bare copper wires that run to your office and supply you with local and long distance service. There can be a cost savings in doing nothing more than switching providers. Your phone system will work exactly the same as it does now only you’ll get a lower monthly phone bill.

If your system has grown to more than a half dozen lines, especially if you have upgraded to an in-house PBX switching system, you could benefit from bringing in a digital trunk line instead of all those separate analog lines. A digital trunk called T1 CAS or ISDN PRI bundles up to 23 or 24 separate lines into a single line that still keeps the phone conversations independent. Why do this? You could realize a big cost savings from consolidating your lines. Chances are that your PBX system already has a T1 or PRI connection or you can upgrade with a adaptor card.

You may be wondering if VoIP telephony is for you. The consumer grade services that run on the Internet may not give you the call quality consistency that you need for good customer support or other business communications. What can work very well and save you considerable money is something called a SIP Trunk. This is a digital line that transports both telephone calls and broadband Internet access but keeps them completely separate so they don’t interfere. It’s a way to take advantage of VoIP technology without losing call quality or reliability.

The latest innovation is cloud based communications, also called Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. This is sort of like going back to just having phones in-house connected to the phone company’s switching center. The difference is that you aren’t stuck with the local phone company as your only choice. Using SIP Trunks, you can connect to many different providers, all competing for your business. Not only can you save money on your monthly bill, but you’ll avoid investing in expensive PBX or Key telephone systems and get advanced features like being able to include your smartphones in the system.

Does this whet your appetite to investigate what is available for your business telephone needs? Get prices and features for a variety of business phone service options so you can be fully informed before making any new commitments.

VoIP Compatible High Speed Internet

Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is attracting more and more business users all the time. There are big advantages over traditional Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) in features and cost savings. The big issue is what to do with the outside phone lines.

Why is this even a question? It’s because the century old public telephone system has been based on analog transmissions over twisted pair copper wiring. Many smaller companies still have multiple analog business lines connected directly to their phones or to Key Telephone systems or in-house PBX systems. Others who are big enough to need at least a half-dozen outside lines have moved to digital transmission via ISDN PRI, also called T1 PRI.

So, if PRI is digital then what’s the issue with VoIP?

Well, there’s digital and there’s digital. PRI telephone trunks are actually digital replications of the old analog lines. Each PRI consists of 23 channels that each carry one digitized phone conversation. One other channel is used for switching and data, like Caller ID. Those 23 PRI “B” channels are strung together end to end for transmission. Each channel is 8 bits wide and sampled 8,000 times a second. At the far end, the channels are separated and converted back to analog phone signals.

Note that nowhere here is any mention of packets. You know that computer networks all communicate using standardized packets of information. Each packet has both address and data bits. This allows switches and routers to get them from wherever they originate to wherever they are intended.

TDM (Time Division Multiplexed) lines, such as PRI, use channels instead of packets. The switching function is provided by the central office switch. When a phone call is in process, there is a direct electrical connection between the two callers. That connection is set up at the beginning of the call and torn down when the call is over.

If you are thinking that PRI service isn’t really compatible with VoIP, you’d be partially right. It’s really a conversion process between your office phone system that might be VoIP and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) that is still analog and TDM based. What VoIP really needs is a telephone line that is compatible with packet switched technology.

The first obvious option is to use the Internet to connect you with your VoIP phone service provider. After all, the Internet is readily available, relatively inexpensive to access, and packet based. Remember that Internet Protocol (IP) is the basis of VoIP.

What gets missed is that there is a big difference in the technology that includes Internet Protocol and the actual performance of the public Internet itself. One issue is that the Internet is open to anyone to do pretty much anything they want on it. There is no traffic manager ensuring that each user gets adequate resources for their particular application. There is a pool of resources and it’s first packet come, first served. Your voice packets may be competing with users backing up their files to the cloud, accessing ecommerce websites or downloading HD videos. If there is enough low latency bandwidth for everyone, then no problem. If the pipes get clogged up like rush hour on the Interstate, then you get what you get.

That can be a big problem for sensitive packet streams such as VoIP calls. Network congestion can cause dropped packets that distort the voice, delay some packets so they arrive out of sequence and are discarded, or impose a noticeable delay that makes two-way conversations difficult.

You can improve your chances of getting decent VoIP voice quality by using dedicated instead of shared bandwidth for your connection. That means Ethernet over Copper or T1 lines instead of cable broadband or DSL. You can also impose QoS (Quality of Service) through your own router so that at least your VoIP conversations aren’t competing with computer file transfers in your own office.

A better idea, although a bit pricier, is to use a dedicated private line called a SIP trunk between your network and your service provider. QoS is maintained by the service provider from end to end. As long as you have enough bandwidth to support all the calls you want to make, everything should work beautifully all the time. SIP trunks can be set up to provide you with both telephone service and broadband Internet access. This is done by dividing up the trunk so that phone calls and Internet are kept completely separate.

Are you considering a change to your business phone system because you are dissatisfied with how it works or are looking to add features or reduce costs? Investigate enterprise VoIP and hosted PBX solutions with SIP Trunks as a better approach for your company.

How to Get Your Business Phones For Free

You’d like to update your phone system, but the cost is hard to justify. After all, you can still receive and make calls just fine. What you are missing out on are all the cool features that the more advanced phones have to offer. You may also be stuck with a phone system that doesn’t work with your wireless phones and other mobile device. What do you do? Sit and watch as your competitors gain productivity advantages?

Would you be surprised to learn that you can easily afford all those up to date phone features and put new high tech phones on every desk? Would you be more surprised to find out that you won’t have to invest a penny of your own money to make this upgrade?

It’s hard to believe, but true. The secret is a change in business model from owning everything to paying for what you actually use by the month. This is the power of cloud based communications.

The big technical advance that makes telephony in the cloud a winner is getting the telephones on the data network and off their own proprietary network. There are a couple of key reasons this better both technically and financially.

The technical reason is that LAN and WAN networks have far more bandwidth available than common telco channels. These include traditional analog business lines and multiplexed calls over ISDN PRI digital trunks. Both are good for something like 64 Kbps or less. No problem for voice conversations that are limited to less than 4 KHz. Also no problem for low speed data like Caller ID or dial-up modem service. Now compare this to network connections that start at 1.5 Mbps (T1) and go up to 1,000 Mbps (GigE) and beyond. This opens the door to transport dozens or hundreds of simultaneous calls on one trunk and enabling other features like HD voice for higher call quality.

In fact, there is so much bandwidth available that you can use the same WAN network connection to transport both telephone and Internet data over a single trunk line.

But, wait, aren’t there call quality issues when you send phone calls over the Internet? The trick is not to let the phone calls themselves touch the Internet. Broadband Internet and telephone calls are combined at the provider and then separated at the user location. The combination process uses the same line, but keeps voice and data from interfering. This is done by giving voice packets priority status, something you can’t do on the Internet.

You get higher bandwidth for more call capacity and both broadband and telephone service on a single network line. This is part of the cost savings. More comes from being able to select your provider from many competing cloud communications providers. What a lot of people don’t realize is that analog copper telephone lines are owned by the local phone company. Network connections can go anywhere and aren’t owned by the local telcos.

The last piece of the puzzle is moving the call switching system from the telephone company or a back room in your building to the cloud. Cloud hosted PBX systems have the economy of scale and spread the cost over many customers. Since the hosted PBX provider specializes in this service, these systems are kept up to date with the latest feature sets.

So how do you get free phones? Some, but not all, cloud communications providers include new IP desk telephones as part of your monthly service fee. This allows them to optimize their systems for particular phone models, buy in quantity, and ship you brand new telephones to replace the old ones you have now. If staff up and need more phones, they care shipped to you ready to plug into your network.

Would you like to upgrade your current business phone system without having to make a capital investment? Are providers offering free phones more cost effective than those that don’t? The way to find out is to get competitive quotes for a variety of hosted PBX service providers and see what best meets your needs.

MPLS Network Design Supports Global Business

Many companies now have a business presence outside of the United States. This creates a need to connect these facilities back to headquarters and to other regional headquarters or satellite offices. What’s proving to be the best solution for enterprise-grade connectivity is international MPLS networks. Let’s take a look at why.

The low end approach to worldwide communications is the Internet. It already goes everywhere and connects just about everyone. All you need are a broadband connection at each location and you are good to go... or are you?

The problem with the Public Internet is that it serves anyone and everyone with the price of admission, which can even be a free WiFi hotspot. This includes lots of casual users updating their Facebook pages and downloading movies, businesses selling to the general public, and a significant number of bad actors. Malicious attacks on corporate data centers and personal computers continue to grow because it is a lucrative endeavor. This means you don’t dare transmit sensitive data or allow access to your corporate servers without some type of encryption to create a VPN or Virtual Private Network tunneling through the insecure Public Internet.

The other issue is performance. Everybody’s packets are treated exactly alike on the Internet. There’s no such thing as Class of Service (CoS) to put time sensitive packets such as VoIP telephony or video conferencing in a “fast lane.” If you want preferential treatment, you need to move to a private network.

Private point-to-point line services have been the traditional mainstay of private digital business communications. If you only need to connect two locations, then it seems logical to order a dedicated line between those locations. If you need to add more locations, then you are in the Wide Area Network (WAN) business. Typically you create a star network with corporate headquarters at the center and links to each remote location. You then decide the routing to determine how locations communicate to each other.

The private network is highly secure and performs very well because you have total control of all resources. Unfortunately, you have to run the network yourself, solve any connectivity issues that arise, and pay for all those expensive lines.

A more practical approach is to use a privately operated MPLS network to connect from 2 to any number of locations. These can all be within U.S. borders or they can be located in just about any country overseas. All you need is a last-mile connection from each location to the MPLS network. The network operator will manage bandwidth, latency, packet integrity and class of service. That’s right, MPLS networks are designed to support multiple classes of service to support even the most sensitive data streams.

MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. This isn’t an IP network, although it can transport IP data. It can also transport just about any other protocol needed. The core of the network is based on label switching routers using a proprietary protocol. That makes it inherently more secure than the Internet or other IP based networks. MPLS service is often touted as a VPN or Virtual Private Network, even though encryption is not required.

What’s available today that may not have been previously is a number of MPLS networks with worldwide reach. They have POPs (Points of Presence) in dozens or more countries and contract with local service providers for the last mile connection. This can be anything from DSL to T1/E1 to SONET fiber or Ethernet. Each location can have the connection that supports its needs. All connect to the core of the MPLS network, which is high speed fiber with massive bandwidth. You have a sense that you are the only one of the network, even though there are many simultaneous users transmitting important data. The fact that the core infrastructure is shared greatly reduces costs compared with an all private line solution.

Do you have a need to connect multiple business locations in a small geographical area, nationwide, or across international borders? If so, get quick pricing quotes for International MPLS Networks and compare cost and quality with your other connectivity options.

How Does a VoIP Call Work?

VoIP telephony is in the process of displacing traditional landlines, include digital trunks such as T1 and ISDN PRI. What is it that is different about VoIP phone calls and what advantages does this technology offer?

You’ll hear VoIP referred to as a network service rather than a telephone service. This is an important distinction for network engineers and business owners, but not of much concern to users. One telephone set looks pretty much like another. When you lift the handset, you expect to hear dial tone and be able to dial out. When the phone rings, you expect to pick up the handset and hear the party on the other end and have a conversation.

A lot of engineering work has gone into making VoIP phone calls mimic traditional landline telephone calls as much as possible. The ideal has been that you shouldn’t be able to tell a difference. Now that this goal has been generally achieved, the new ideal is to make VoIP calls sound more lifelike than anything you’ve heard through a telephone. It’s something called HD or high definition voice.

The telephone connection is what determines whether you are using traditional telephony or VoIP. A traditional analog telephone line is based on technology that goes back over a century. It consists of two copper wires twisted together that connect a particular phone all the way to the telephone company office and into the central switching system. This line has certain AC and DC voltages and other characteristics. Often the phone line provides power to the telephone set. The phone itself has evolved from electromechanical components to relatively simple electronics. It just needs to have the proper characteristics to interface with the analog line.

This carries over to in-house telephone systems such as Key telephones or Private Branch Exchange (PBX). These are small switching systems that handle internal calls to keep them off the public telephone network. The in-house phone system connects to each phone in the company with a pair of wires that mimic the line from the phone company.

VoIP uses your company computer network as its phone line. For this to work, the phone has to include circuitry that makes it look like a network peripheral and be compatible with everything else on the network, including computers, printers, servers and so on. Phones that do this are called IP phones or SIP phones. They have a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack on the back of the phone to connect to the network. They can be powered over this same connection by special POE (Power over Ethernet) switches or have separate plug-in power supplies to operate the internal electronics.

Smaller companies and residential users of VoIP can use regular telephone sets by plugging them into an ATA or Analog Telephone Adapter. This adapter has the electronics that you would find inside an IP Telephone.

VoIP gets its name from Voice over Internet Protocol. That doesn’t mean it has to run on the Internet, although some low cost VoIP services do use the Internet as your line to the service provider in order to save money. IP or Internet Protocol describes the technology used by Ethernet Local Area Networks. It’s what makes the Internet work and also runs many networks that don’t connect to the public Internet.

Actually, it’s easier to achieve high voice quality by avoiding the public Internet completely and connecting to your phone service provider through an extension of your network called a SIP Trunk. SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is the switching technology for VoIP systems. The SIP Trunk takes the place of the analog, T1 or ISDN PRI telephone line that normally goes to the local telephone company.

You can set up a VoIP telephone system in your company that shares your computer network, including any WAN (Wide Area Network) connections between business locations. You’ll install a IP PBX to handle switching calls between office phones and connect to your service provider for outside lines. A newer option is to skip the IP PBX and rent Hosted PBX telephone switching from the same service provider that connects you to the public phone system. This saves a major investment and allows you to add more phones as you need them.

Are you considering installing a new business phone system or expanding or replacing one you already have? Get features and pricing for hosted PBX and telephone trunking optionsto help decide what makes the most sense for your company.

Business Phone Goes Hosted

Business telephone service has expanded over the years, from the single line analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) to multi-line PBX systems that handle hundreds and thousands of phone sets. What’s the next logical development? Could it be even larger and more sophisticated in-house PBX systems? No, just the opposite. The PBX is moving out as business phone service goes hosted.

Hosted business phone is another term for telephone switching in the cloud. Hosted means that a service provider hosts your telephone service on their equipment. The responsibility for running the PBX system and providing the lines to the public telephone system are effectively transferred from your company to your service provider’s.

Why would you want to go the hosted route? It generally boils down to finances and flexibility. The first financial advantage is that you no longer have to buy expensive capital equipment and provide a space for it in your building. This is seldom a one time allocation. Every so many years you find that your equipment has become obsolete and too expensive to maintain or it can no longer keep up with the demands placed on it. You need a newer and likely larger system to replace it. That process is called a “fork lift upgrade” because it you can’t often salvage any of the existing equipment. A fork lift truck drives in and hauls out the old PBX system. It then drives back in to deliver the new replacement.

Granted, smaller PBX systems that support branch offices or retail locations may be something you can pick up and carry yourself. Even so, the “fork lift” metaphor applies. It’s out with the old and in with the new. Hopefully you can pay off the old system before it’s time to replace it.

With a hosted PBX system, there are phones but there is no PBX or telephone switching system in-house. That lets you avoid a major capital expense and also the guessing game of trying to predict how much capacity you’ll need during the lifetime of that system. If you guess low, you’ll be replacing it while it still works just fine. If you guess high, you’ll pay for capacity that you never use. Either way, it’s hard to know the future well enough to pick just the right size PBX.

The other financial advantage is that PBX phone systems cost more than just the purchase price. Every time to you to do a “move, add or change” with your telephones, somebody has to do some rewiring and change some programming in the system. That could be a dedicated staff member who is the telephone manager full or part time. Otherwise it is a contractor known as a VAR for Value Added Reseller. Either way, there’s ongoing expense to run the system and keep up with the changes.

How do hosted business phone systems save you all that grief and expense? The service provider has a much larger shared PBX system and the staff to run it 24/7. They keep up with day to day maintenance and upgrades. Because this system is so large, it can accommodate many customers and easily expand to meet your changing needs. That’s the principle behind the cloud. You don’t have to worry about all the hardware, software and personnel needed to keep the phone system running. The service provider specializes in this and handles it for you.

What’s available in the way of hosted phone services? There are a number of cloud communications providers who offer this capability. They generally provide the service on a “per seat” per month basis. Each phone has internal, local and long distance switching capability included. Most of the time its a single price for all calling other than international and for all the features. Some providers can include your mobile phones so that they are part of the PBX capabilities. Some providers even include the physical phones. These are IP Telephones than plug right into your company LAN. You connect to the provider with a network connection called a SIP Trunk.

Can hosted business phone make sense for your company? There are solutions for every business from the smallest retailer to the largest corporation. Get prices and features for competing hosted PBX service providers now and see if you can save both money and effort.

Take a Bow For The SIP Revolution

There’s a revolution underway in companies large and small. No, it’s not political, social or process related. This is a quiet revolution that few employees are aware of. It’s not really visible. It doesn’t force anyone to change the way they do things. All it does is give you more capability and save you money. Meet the SIP revolution.

What’s SIP and why is it so revolutionary? Here, watch this and get a quick introduction...



SIP is the language of VoIP telephony. If you think that VoIP is all about making home phone calls on your Cable broadband so you can ditch your telephone landline, you are only seeing a small piece of what SIP is all about. The reason that you can piggyback phone calls on a broadband service is that VoIP using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for control and signaling transforms voice calls into a protocol that networks can transport.

Consumer VoIP services are all about trying to save money by having Internet broadband do double duty as a computer network and phone line. Once you get off the telephone company owned wiring, you can get your dial tone and local service from anywhere, just like switching long distance service. This same principle works for businesses, although using the Internet for this purpose is fraught with quality issues. It’s the concept of merging voice and data onto a single company network that’s important and where the big cost savings are.

A SIP Trunk is a line that can transport multiple telephone calls simultaneously along with data such as private point to point links or broadband Internet access while protecting voice quality at all times. SIP Trunks work for all size businesses, but they are especially attractive to companies with multiple business locations. This includes any company with branch offices, warehouse and factory sites, remote sales offices and regional headquarters.

What’s special about multi-site operations? Business productivity today depends on office automation. That automation is based on sophisticated software programs and databases running on a complex IT Infrastructure. Nearly every desk has a PC connected to the corporate LAN. The corporate LAN has MAN and WAN connections to include those remote sites as well as headquarters. It’s a sophisticated and expensive network but it is totally necessary. Unfortunately, it’s often duplicated by a separate multi-site network supporting the in-house telephone system.

What SIP Trunking can do is let your multi-site network support voice, data and Internet so that you don’t need a separate telephone network or separate outside telephone lines and broadband connections at every location. A central IP-PBX can handle switching internal calls among locations and connections to a telephone and dedicated Internet service provider. Are the savings that result from doing this significant? Does 20 to 60% cost savings sound significant to you?

Can your company benefit from the SIP revolution? You’ll never know until you get competitive pricing and system features for SIP trunking solutions appropriate to your size operation.

What Is VoIP For Business?

There’s a lot of buzz these days about the advantages of converting from traditional telephone services to VoIP. There are, indeed, major advantages for businesses to go with enterprise VoIP solutions. However, there are some pitfalls to avoid if you want to make the transition successfully. First, though, let’s take a closer look at just what VoIP is and how it differs from the phone service you have now.

One confusing aspect of VoIP is the name itself. The term VoIP is an acronym for Voice over Internet Protocol. The thing that jumps right off the page at you is the term “Internet.” It immediately conjures up visions of broadband phone solutions that piggyback on top of Cable broadband or DSL connections. That is, indeed, VOICE going OVER the INTERNET. It’s also one example of VoIP. However, it is far from the complete story.

The idea behind broadband phone is that with the right equipment you can use your broadband Internet service to connect you to a competitive phone company. The whole impetus for this is that the local telephone company, called the ILEC for Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, pretty much owns you for local phone service. It’s easy to switch long distance providers, but much harder to change local services. Why? Because the ILEC owns the copper wires between your location, business or residential, and the switching equipment in their office. You can’t dig up the wires and move them elsewhere, so you need an alternative “phone line.” The Internet provides just such an alternative connection.

One of the major pitfalls of broadband phone is that the Internet was designed for transporting data reliably, not for transmitting voice quickly. Everything on the Internet is transported in packets. That includes data bits representing digitized phone conversations, video clips, websites, email and many other things. What they have in common is a standardized packet structure called IP or Internet Protocol.

Now, here’s where the trouble comes in. The Internet treats one packet just like the next. It doesn’t matter if they are zipping along smoothly or all clogged up. The system is set up to get each packet from Point A to Point B sooner or later. Having data correct is much more important than having it as soon as possible. If a packet gets lost or corrupted, another protocol called TCP or Transmission Control Protocol sees that the packet never arrived at its destination and retransmits it. As a user, this is all invisible. All you know is that your email or web page displayed correctly.

Voice differs from data in that it is a real time protocol. A voice packet that shows up late is of no use because the conversation has already moved on. VoIP is set up to discard missing or out of sequence packets. A few here and there won’t make a difference, but a lot of missing packets will punch holes in the conversation and make it hard to understand.

Video is equally sensitive or even more so. The way video stays intact is to have the packets go to a staging area before they are displayed on the screen. This area is the buffer. Buffering collects packets however they come in and then feeds them out smoothly to create a continuous picture stream. Buffering also works for audio and is used for Internet radio stations extensively. That way any congestion on the net won’t cause the audio to drop out.

Buffering could be used for VoIP, but not very much or it will create havoc. The tradeoff is that phone conversations are two-way. The buffer will cause a big delay from the time you start talking until the other person hears it. Buffering and other delays show up as something called latency which turns two way conversations into more like walkie talkie conversations. Only one person can talk at a time and you have to wait before taking your turn.

What’s better? Bypass the Internet and use a private line connection called a SIP Trunk. SIP is the switching and signaling protocol for VoIP telephony. The SIP Trunk is carefully engineered to give voice packets priority over data packets and to have enough bandwidth to avoid congestion that causes latency and jitter.

SIP Trunks connect your company to your business VoIP service provider. The provider takes care of all outside lines to the public phone system. You can connect the PBX phone system you have now using a SIP Trunk or use an IP PBX that uses IP telephones rather than standard analog phones. Even more interesting is hosted VoIP, which eliminates the in-house PBX system completely. The service provider gives you both lower rates to use the public telephone system and takes care of switching both inside and outside calls.

As you can see, there are various flavors of VoIP phone service available today. You want to be careful to pick a solution that not only saves you money but has the features and voice quality you need to conduct business effectively. Enterprise VoIP providers have solutions for all size businesses at attractive prices. Compare features and costs now to discover what’s available for your particular locations.

Dedicated Bandwidth vs Cable

There are a couple of good but quite different approaches to business Internet connectivity. One is dedicated bandwidth, as exemplified by T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper. The other is Cable broadband. Let’s take a look at what each has to offer and how you would pick the right service for your business.

Small and medium size businesses that pick dedicated bandwidth services do so either because there is no shared bandwidth service readily available or because they value the consistency and service level agreements provided by the dedicated telecom providers. Companies that choose Cable broadband do so because they get a lot of bandwidth for a relatively small price. Cable BB is an established service that has been proven in years of service to residential and business users. The service availability is generally quite good, especially during business hours, and the low prices may be more important than service guarantees.

It’s important to note the definition of the term “dedicated” in this context. It doesn’t mean working extra hard like, say, a dedicated employee. What dedicated means is that a certain amount of bandwidth is reserved or dedicated to your exclusive use. If you order a T1 line, you can count on having 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download capability available at all times. There is no such thing as overage charges or fair use policies. You can load that T1 line up to the limit and run it that way all month. You’ll be charged the same as if you lightly used the service during business hours and let it idle overnight.

Cable broadband is sold on a different basis. First of all, the bandwidth is shared not dedicated. You’ll notice that Cable bandwidth is specified as “up to” 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and so on. At any given moment you may experience the full bandwidth or a small fraction of it. Why? It’s the sharing involved. What Cable companies do is lease large dedicated bandwidth circuits and then divvy that bandwidth up among their subscribers. The chunk allocated to your area may be shared by dozens or hundreds of other users. Whether or not that makes a difference depends on what you are doing on the Internet and what others on the same service are doing.

Cable broadband is designed to match the expected activities of the typical Internet user. You know that when you are looking something up online, you first query a search engine. Then you read through the first page or two of listings deciding on what site to visit. Finally, you select a site and it downloads in your browser. You may quickly go to visit another page on that site or you may spend a minute or two reading what’s on the screen.

Notice that what you were doing was sending out commands from your keyboard, waiting for a page download and then not accessing the Internet at all while you perused the material. That’s why shared bandwidth works. Not everyone is going to be typing on their keyboard or in the midst of a file download simultaneously. While you are reading, someone else can be downloading and vice versa.

This is also the reason why asymmetrical bandwidth works so well for Internet access. Asymmetrical means that upload and download speeds are vastly different. You may order 30 Mbps download with 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps upload and be perfectly satisfied. It only takes a small amount of data from the keyboard to trigger much larger data packages in the form of websites or videos to download.

Dedicated bandwidth services like T1, DS3, EoC, EoF and SONET fiber optic tend to be symmetrical. The upload and download speeds are the same. This is particularly valuable if you are communicating between organizations, sending files back and forth, uploading to a remote server or backing up files. In these cases, upload capacity counts.

The other service that works much better over dedicated rather than shared bandwidth is VoIP telephony. In fact, you are much better off connecting directly to your VoIP service provider with a dedicated T1 line or SIP trunk than using the Internet at all. The Internet offers no class of service controls so your sensitive voice packets can easily get pushed around by someone else’s data packets. That situation is even worse on shared bandwidth access services where your bandwidth varies all over the place.

Is your business in need of Internet access, point to point connections or multi-location connectivity? Check prices on dedicated and shared bandwidth options and get complementary expert advice on what services make the most sense for your business requirements.

Is Voice Over MPLS The New PSTN?

It’s clear that packet switched networks are taking over from circuit switched networks. So much so, that the FCC is considering pulling the plug on the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) at some point. It’s a clear omen that the end is near for the telephone system that has served us for over a century. But what will take its place? Will it be VoIP? How about cellular?

It’s likely that VoIP is going to be the answer, but not the VoIP that we know today. What VoIP has going for it is established standards for coding & decoding, signaling, and a packet protocol that is compatible with Ethernet data networks. What’s holding it back from taking over virally is a wide variety of incompatible implementations, fear by wireless carriers that it will bring down their networks, and unpredictable voice quality on the Internet.

That hasn’t stopped major organizations from switching to enterprise VoIP solutions. They avoid the problems that consumers face using Voice over the Internet by rigidly controlling the performance of their in-house networks. For calls that need to go outside the organization, enterprise users will terminate outside calls to the PSTN through ISDN PRI digital trunks or have a third party SIP trunking provider terminate the calls.

Clearly, the larger the organization, the higher the percentage of calls that can be kept in-house. When companies have multiple locations, they have a decision to make. Each location can have its own PBX telephone system and connect to the PSTN for calls leaving the building. Or, a corporate PBX telephone system can handle all facilities with private trunk lines running between locations.

Chances are that a multi-location business needs data connectivity between locations anyway. So, adding voice packets to the data stream makes sense. That way call quality can be assured while avoiding the per-minute costs of using the public telephone system. The question is what type of network will work best for this application.

MPLS is increasingly becoming the network architecture of choice for converged voice and data networks. MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is designed from the ground up to handle whatever protocol you want to transport. But even if everything is IP, MPLS has some big advantages over rolling your own network with private lines.

MPLS are privately operated and available only to customers of the service. That gives the network operators the ability to ensure the availability of enough bandwidth to prevent congestion and the resulting latencies and dropped packets that slow data and destroy voice services. QoS or Quality of Service control ensure that voice packets get the priority treatment they need to maintain high audio quality.

MPLS networks are also mesh networks, which makes them ideal for interconnecting multiple business locations. You can do this yourself with a hub and spoke arrangement with headquarters at the hub and routing traffic among the other locations. But your costs will be higher and the latency between locations greater when everything has to go through a central routing hub on private point to point trunk lines.

MPLS makes so much sense that the large telecom carriers are converting their core networks to MPLS to handle today’s traffic and whatever will be coming through the pipes tomorrow. Data, voice and video are handled equally well and can be transported in traditional TDM channel as well as packet protocols. What we call the PSTN today may well become interconnected MPLS networks in the future.

In the meantime, you can be enjoying the quality, security and cost advantages that MPLS networks have to offer. Learn how MPLS for VoIP networks can work for your organization.

Residential and Small Business VoIP Rates Crushed

VoIP telephony, sometimes called broadband phone service, has gone from a geeky computer app to full-fledged competition for mainstream telephone service in the course of a few years. The enablers for this have been the widespread replacement of dial-up Internet access with broadband services and the installation of Internet connections in small businesses. But just as ample rain leads to bumper crops, ample broadband has led to a bumper crop in VoIP providers. One of the most aggressive in this space, Phone Power, is now tweaking the industry by causing rates to plunge to less than $15 a month on unlimited residential and small home-based business service plans. That cost plummets even lower to just over $8 a month when you prepay for a year.

Granted, you can still pay even less for specialized services such as MagicJack and Skype. But both of these require you to use your computer as part of the phone system. When the computer is off, so is your phone. Plus you’ve got to deal with potential contention for processor resources when you try to use the phone while you are actually using the computer.

Phone Power and many other VoIP services that vie for your telephony dollar don’t work that way. They share your broadband connection in lieu of a traditional telephone line but don’t have any connection to the innards of your computer. Instead, they use a hardware device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor to turn a phone jack into an Ethernet jack that connects into your router or broadband modem. Phone Power gives you the adaptor free while you are using their service. Some other vendors also do that or you can buy an adaptor at your local electronics outlet.

The cost of VoIP phone services seems to have settled into the $20 to $30 range for aggressive services that you see heavily advertised and somewhat more for some of the familiar name bundles. That’s not unreasonable, considering that VoIP has typically offered both unlimited local and long distance calling. A traditional landline plan is local service only with an additional per-minute charge for long distance calls. Additional features, such as Caller ID, are usually offered as ala-carte add-ons to your basic service.

The big telephone carriers also offer competitive bundles of local and long distance minutes or unlimited calling plans with popular features included. But at $14.95 a month? Try twice that. When you look at Phone Power’s 12 Month Prepay option, the difference is even more pronounced. This is a new customer promotional rate for $199.95 prepaid for a year’s service. But as part of this special promotion, Phone Power will include a 2nd year’s service for free. That brings your equivalent monthly rate down to about $8.33 for unlimited calling to US and Canada numbers and free lease of the telephone adaptor.

This offer is intended for residential addresses, including home office users and home-based businesses. If your business is large enough to have its own physical address, there are also business packages available for single and multi-line users, with a wealth of add-ons and upgrades to give you the power of a on-site PBX phone system without the capital expense.

If you are considering switching your residential or business phone service or are just feel you are paying too much for the service that you have now, you should take a look at Phone Power Residential and Business VoIP before you commit to buying any other service.

TDM vs VoIP - Why Not Both?

Are you scratching your head over the great divide in enterprise telephony? Should you stay with your trusty TDM based PBX phone system or toss everything out in favor of VoIP? Stick with the tried and true and you fear that you may be missing out on services that could improve productivity. Scrap it all for a brand new VoIP solution and you may have a eye-popping capital expense to swallow. What to do?

Regardless of the impression you get from technical news reports and vendor ads, you have more options than you think. You don't have to make an all-or-nothing decision either way. You can decide whether to have analog, digital, or IP phones on each desk and whether to go with TDM or VoIP telephone services to connect with the outside world. Some systems will even allow you to mix and match. TDM? VoIP? Both? Why not?

Most any phone system that handles more than a few telephone handsets gives you an option on how to connect to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Perhaps you've accumulated analog phone lines to the point where you have a dozen or two plugged into FXO (Foreign eXchange Office) interface cards. In this case, a move to TDM or Time Division Multiplexing would make economic sense. TDM is the digital standard for standard telephone trunking. A T1 voice line or ISDN PRI is an example of a TDM connection that multiplexes up to a couple of dozen phone lines onto a single TDM trunk line.

T1 lines using the TDM protocol are the mainstay of enterprise PBX telephone systems. Most all offer slots for one or more T1 TDM-based telephone trunk lines. An alternative is the T1 PRI or ISDN PRI line that offers the same trunkline service plus additional services such as Caller ID.

Well, what about VoIP? A pure VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol phone system operates completely in the IP world from handset to call termination. The PBX equivalent is the IP PBX which is may be a dedicated system or software, such as Asterisk, running on a standard Linux server. The handsets are referred to as SIP phones. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching protocol that controls the phone calls on packet based networks. Even your phone service can be brought in on a SIP Trunk, which is a private line or Internet connection to your VoIP service provider. Calls between subscribers to the same VoIP service provider stay completely on the network and never enter the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Calls to and from non-subscribers are terminated to the PSTN at the provider's location.

As you might guess, there are purely Analog phone systems, purely digital and TDM phone systems and purely VoIP phone systems. Most of the time, though, you can mix and match. A VoIP system may well have FXS (Foreign Exchange Subscriber or Station) ports to connect to analog handsets, as do traditional PBX systems. The phone service connection may be analog, T1 or ISDN, or SIP Trunking.

In general the newer IP PBX telephone systems offer a wider range of handset and phone service connection options than legacy PBX systems. But before you make any big purchases or plans to scrap you current system, why not review your options with one of our expert voice and data service consultants. You may have better options than you think.

Fonality Call Center in a Box

Are you ready to start a new call center, but blanch at the up-front investment and set-up costs involved? A major call center is a major undertaking, but what if you simply want to add call center operations to your company or start small and grow as revenues increase? What you need is something simple, yet powerful. How about a call center in a box?

Fonality has just such a product. The box is actually an off-the-shelf PC tower running as a Linux server, which can be upgraded to a rack-mount server if you need the power. What turns a PC into a call center is the proprietary software and hardware interface cards.

The software that powers Fonality's PBXtra Call Center Edition is based on the popular Open Source Asterisk PBX software from Digium. You can get Asterisk software and third party interface cards and roll your own PBX, but you won't have what you get with Fonality. A good part of their value added is the modifications to the native Asterisk code that improve reliability & stability and add enterprise-class features in five different areas: Management software including a Web-based administration software and User Panel, easy integration of telecommuters, simple phone provisioning, system health monitoring, and LAN Interoperability with your existing network.

The other key piece in making a server into a PBX telephone system is the hardware interface. Fonality offers a range of plug-in cards that provide the signals necessary to operate analog telephones and telephone company lines. You have the option of using standard analog telephones or you can buy SIP-based VoIP phones from Fonality. Your phone service can be multiple analog phone lines, T1 / PRI digital phone lines with up to 96 channels, or SIP trunking service from a business grade VoIP carrier. A popular combination is to use VoIP phones within the call center and T1 / PRI voice lines for local and long distance calls.

The Fonality Call Center functions include everything you'd expect in a standard PBX telephone system, plus extras useful for call center operations. Unlimited call queues, full featured automatic call distribution, skills based routing, graphical queue reports, agent call recording, remote agents on cell phones or home analog phones, and support for unlimited VoIP providers are all included.

Most of the Call Center Edition upgrades to the PBXtra functionality is related to management and evaluation of call center agents. This product is intended to support from 2 to 200 agents, allowing you to start with a small phone order taking operation and expand to major catalog sales, customer support, or stand-alone call center services.

All this without the need for major in-house technical support. Fonality supplies its PBXtra and Call Center Edition servers pre-configured and ready to go. Phones also come pre-programmed to work with your system and are essentially plug and play. They include an Ethernet bridge so that a VoIP phone and desktop PC can share a single LAN connection.

If you are currently running a call center operation and would be interested in cost savings for your inbound and/or outbound calls, both local and long distance, our voice line telecommunications experts can negotiate among numerous carriers to get you the best per-minute rates.