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.

DS3 Bandwidth Alternatives

DS3 WAN connections are popular with companies needing more bandwidth than they can get from T1 lines but less than moving up to a full OC-3 fiber optic SONET service. So, why would you bee looking for other options? It generally comes down to either cost or performance. Most often, cost.

Yes, there are other bandwidth options available that can do the job that your current DS3 is doing. Let’s take a look at options available today that maybe didn’t exist when you signed your DS3 lease.

DS3 straddles the telecom border between copper wireline and fiber optic bandwidth services. It was originally part of the T-Carrier specifications developed by the Bell System for telephone trunking between switching centers. T-Carrier options include T1 and T3. DS3 is the service that rides on the T3 physical circuit.

Today the terms DS3 and T3 are used interchangeably. In practice, you’ll be hard pressed to find a T3 physical circuit. At one time they were available over microwave relay or waveguide pipes. The actual interface to your router is two coaxial cables with BNC connectors that plug into a DS3 interface module. Those cables have a distance limitation of 450 feet. So, how does DS3 service get from the Central Office (CO) to your location?

Most of the distance is covered by fiber optic cabling that doesn’t have this distance restriction. The DS3 signal is often multiplexed onto a higher bandwidth OC-3 SONET circuit. There may be other DS3 services sharing the same OC-3. Yours is dropped off at your building where it is converted to the industry standard coaxial connections.

This suggests a couple of alternatives to DS3. Before you jump into anything new, though, consider that you may not be getting the best price on your current DS3 service. Prices on telecom services in general have plunged in recent years owing to deregulation and considerable new competition. Perhaps the local telephone company was your only provider choice when you had the service installed. Now there may be several competing providers that are ready, willing and able to do the same job. Get multiple price quotes, preferable from a major bandwidth broker like Telarus, Inc., before you conclude that you need to dump your DS3 only for cost reasons.

Something else to consider is how much bandwidth you really need. Did you contract for DS3 because your T1 line was out of capacity? There’s a big gap between T1 at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. Do you really need the full 45 Mbps or is that simply all that was available at the time?

If you really need, say, 10 Mbps, you can achieve it by scaling up from T1 or down from DS3. T1 lines are now readily bonded together to increase bandwidth. The practical limit is 10 or 12 Mbps without distance limitations. DS3 service can be rate limited to create what’s known as fractional DS3. In other words, you still have a DS3 interface installed but the actual line speed you pay for is 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 30 Mbps or some other option.

Both these approaches may save you money compared to what you pay now. An even more attractive option is Ethernet. With Ethernet over Copper you can get bandwidths ranging from 3 Mbps on the low end up to 45 Mbps and sometimes higher on the high end. Prices per Mbps are generally lower, sometimes even half the cost, than the older T1 and T3 technologies. The hitch with Ethernet over Copper is that it is distance sensitive. The farther you are from the CO, the lower the line speed you can achieve.

Ethernet over Fiber picks up where Ethernet over Copper leaves off. Fiber optic Ethernet service is often available from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Popular options are 10 Mbps standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. The speed of the port installed at your facility sets the maximum, not minimum, speed you can achieve. Common practice is to install a 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet port.

Fiber connections aren’t available for every building, but carriers have been so competitive in building out their networks that more locations that ever before are “lit” for fiber and others can be easily connected. Ethernet over FIber is easily scaled so that you can increase your bandwidth quickly by making a simple call to your provider. This means that you only need to order the bandwidth you need today along with a port speed capable of handling whatever speed you expect to need in the foreseeable future.

Ethernet over Fiber is a bargain compared to other telecom arrangements, if you can get it. If not, you might be able to get SONET fiber optic service to your premises. The lowest speed service is OC-3 at 155 Mbps, but in some cases this can be rate limited to provide fractional OC-3 service.

One final option is fixed wireless. This is unlike the lower speed 3G or 4G cellular wireless that is now available to business. Fixed wireless at 50 Mbps or more is a line of sight microwave service only available in major metro areas in the business districts. If your location qualifies, you can get fast and inexpensive installation compared to constructing a new fiber optic run.

So, how do you decide on the optimum solution for your company? Doing the research yourself can be time consuming and you may miss out on some opportunities that aren’t well advertised. Instead, run a quick online business bandwidth availability check for the options you want to consider and compare competitive pricing. You may be surprised by what has become available recently.


Note: Photo of BNC connector courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Cloud Based Unified Communications

Servers in the cloud are now commonly accepted. Many IT organizations are finding it makes more sense to have nearly instant access to nearly unlimited processing and storage than be constantly trying to figure out how much hardware to order for next year. You have a problem either way. Guess too low and you run out of capacity when unexpected business comes your way. Guess too high and you are saddled with expensive resources that sit there idle, using power but not doing much else. It’s a good thing that you don’t have these problems with the phone system. Or do you?

In a way, your PBX switching system can be thought of as just another server. Chances are that it is a proprietary design that only the vendor supports. It’s also deals with IO (Input/Output) that is unique to the telephone industry. Just how scalable is this system? Probably not much. You start out ordering as much capacity as you can anticipate and most of it sits idle awaiting the business to grow into in. At some point you run out of capacity and no more phones or lines can be connected. For awhile, you can work around these limitations by ordering additional interface boards. Then the whole design goes obsolete and you start all over.

How would you like to get rid of this headache and greatly expand your voice communications options? As you might suspect, the answer is in the cloud. With cloud based communications, all switching and message storage is done on cloud based servers. You simply need a user access device known as a SIP telephone or IP Phone. These devices piggyback on your data network can connect to the cloud using a specialized WAN connection called a SIP Trunk. Out goes all that phone wiring as well as the old clunker PBX and the expense of maintaining it and periodically buying a newer model. The cloud keeps all the hardware and software up to date.

Need more capacity? Just bring it online the way you order up more cloud servers. In this case, the capacity is measured in terms of “seats.” One seat is one telephone. You need more phones? Order additional seats as required. You pay for these per seat per month. Many times the price you pay is a fixed amount that includes your domestic local and long distance calling plus a plethora of features.

Speaking of features, cloud based PBX or hosted PBX systems can do tricks that your old in-house PBX hardware can’t. For instance, much of today’s business communication is done on smartphones. PBX equipment doesn’t know what to do with a smartphone. There’s no wire to plug it into a port on the machine. So, what you wind up with is a stand-alone office phone and a separate smartphone with its own features on its own network. If you spend a lot of time in the field, you’ll need to call into your desk phone voice mail from time to time just to see if there are any important messages. Well, at least when you’re in the office you can have both your desk phone and smart phone at hand.

Wouldn’t you rather have one number for clients to call and let the system sort out where to send it? That’s the idea behind unified communications. Instead of having all sorts of different ways that you communicate, each with their own device and connectivity, you integrate everything into one system that can handle it all. This can include traditional landline telephones plus wireless smartphones, but it can also include video conferencing, text messaging, email and FAX. What all of these have in common is that they are all network communications that are integrated on your own network. The SIP trunk connects your network to your provider’s network and vast cloud resources.

One provider, the global communications company Masergy, has expanded the role of cloud based unified communications to include CRM system integration, call accounting, call recording, automated attendants, hunt groups and call center features. Your access is by telephone, video phone, desktop computer, mobile device, laptop computer and business systems. They’re all connected to the cloud, making it possible to connect across diverse platforms. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you are doing. You always have access to the same calling features and applications.

Have you just about reached the end of the “line” with your old in-house PBX phone system? Before you invest a fortune in a newer model and perpetuate the same old frustrations, consider a move to cloud based unified communications. You’ll probably find that you can get more productivity at less cost by switching to the latest cloud communications services.

10 Mbps Is The New T1

T1 service has long been the gold standard for business connectivity. They’re deployed as point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access, and PBX telephone trunks. T1’s are readily available, reasonably priced and highly reliable. Their one limitation was once their prime selling point. It’s the fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps.

Now it’s true that 1.5 Mbps still meets the needs of many small retailers and companies that aren’t technology driven, although even that is starting to change fast. Everyone from insurance professionals, physicians, video producers and engineers is now highly connected. Some of those connections are private lines or virtual private lines. Others are dedicated access to the Internet. What they have in common is a need for far more than yesterday’s bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps.

What’s more appropriate for today’s needs? It’s looking like 10 Mbps is becoming the new gold standard. Why is that? First, let’s look at what’s happened to bandwidth requirements. Nearly everyone connected to the Internet now has broadband rather than dial-up access. The wireless industry is under tremendous pressure to move from 3G speeds of around 1 Mbps, not that much different from T1, to 4G speeds of 3, 6, 10 and higher Mbps downloads and at least 1 Mbps upload.

Broadband speeds are under the gun because they are now the limiting factor to the success of computing. The PCs themselves, including Macs, have gone to multi-gigabyte memories, terabyte storage and multi-core processors. They’ve got the horsepower to create whatever user experience is required. Even tablets are now multi-core and connected to WiFi, 3G or 4G broadband. The WAN is the limiting factor in getting information into and out of the computing platform.

This wasn’t the big deal a few years ago because most all computing was done locally. You either had a software package on your PC or accessed a corporate server over a Local Area Network. Web pages were small, static and mostly text and low resolution graphics. Email is an undemanding text-based service. Ecommerce solutions may have sophisticated processing on the back-end, but don’t necessarily need to transmit that much data back and forth during a transaction.

What’s happened now is that graphics are going high resolution to match higher resolution screens and the natural output of higher resolution still cameras and HD video cameras. Video content is a greater portion of the traffic on any WAN connection. Even more importantly, everything is moving off to the cloud. The cloud is your data center, somewhere, out there, and everything flows to and from the cloud over your WAN connection. This might be a private line or an Internet access service. Either way, it better be a fairly large pipe or you will be feeling constrained in everything you try to do on your computer.

TelePacific is one carrier that is embracing the demand for higher business bandwidth levels and deploying what they call EoX or Ethernet over Anything. That’s Ethernet over copper, TDM, fixed wireless or fiber optic cabling. Why Ethernet? It has the cost advantage over traditional telecom services, an easy interface to corporate LANs, and rapid bandwidth scalability. Most popular is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. What EoC offers is provisioning over the same type of twisted pair copper telco wiring that transports T1 lines, but with higher bandwidths and lower prices per Mbps than T1.

For instance, to get 10 Mbps over T1 lines you need to bond 7 T1 lines together at a cost of 7 times the price of a single T1 line. For half that cost or less, you can get 10 x 10 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. If need be, you can easily ramp that up to 15, 20 or 25 Mbps or more when the need arises. As a reference point, the price you were paying for a single T1 line a few years ago will get you 10 Mbps EoC service today.

Are you feeling constrained by your WAN bandwidth, especially that aging T1 line? If so, it’s time for an upgrade that is likely less expensive than you think. You can probably afford 10 Mbps or more right now. Find out by getting prices and availability for Ethernet bandwidth services suitable for your business location.



Note: Ethernet patch cords photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

How To Deal With Sudden Massive Bandwidth Demands

You’ve been cruising along with fairly stable but slowly increasing network bandwidth demands for years. Then, one day, you are faced with an “out of the blue” requirement to crank up your WAN bandwidth by a factor of 10x or 100x. How did that happen and what can you possibly do to deal with this kind of uncertainty?

It would be strange, indeed, if everybody in the company suddenly decided to start downloading HD movies on the sly. Would it blow your bandwidth allocation? You bet. Does it make any sense? No, of course not. Bandwidth demand doesn’t suddenly mushroom for no reason at all. If you get caught unable to support the need, it’s likely that there is a logical reason and one that makes a lot of sense in retrospect. The question is should you be able to see this coming in time to plan for it?

Sometimes you can’t help but get caught off guard. At a large company where I was working I got an email message with a curious attachment. When I opened it, there was a short video animation of a dancing baby. Not having seen this before, I watched it a few times and sent it on to some colleagues. Turns out that this was an early example of viral video. Everybody in the company was getting this video and passing it on to everybody else.

The IT department was flummoxed. All of a sudden they were running out of disk space. It took a day or two for them to figure out that all of our mail boxes were full of separate copies of the dancing baby video. They were multiplying faster than baby rabbits. Soon a missive came out from IT management demanding that we stop sending this thing around and delete the copies we already had. Crisis averted. Gigantic new disk drive order cancelled.

Today we grab everything off the Internet. Instead of getting a file in our email, it’s a Web link. You probably won’t be filling up the storage drive farm anymore, but any content brought down to the screen is going to have to traverse the WAN. It doesn’t take much of a viral anything to clog up a dedicated Internet connection if the file is big enough and enough people want it simultaneously.

Here’s a more recent example of where IT departments are getting caught short. C-level management gets a case of cloud fever when they see the potential cost savings and insist on moving every application possible to the cloud as fast as possible. In the mad scramble that ensues, the local data center goes dark while the same apps light up at a remote cloud provider. With nearly infinite CPU cycles and GB of storage on demand, everyone expects that the days of bottlenecks are over and that every process will just scream. Shock, horror, and disappointment permeate the office when users discover that formerly snappy responses from the system have gotten sluggish.

How can this possibly happen? Adjusting performance at the cloud doesn’t seem to make any difference. What got forgotten is that all that traffic that ran smoothly on the LAN all of a sudden transferred to the WAN. The line capacity is too small and the latency is too great. Whoever had the bright idea of saving a fortune by accessing the cloud via the Internet is finding out that network neutrality favors Netflix viewers as much as Salesforce.com users, as everyone’s packets take their turn on the Information Superhighway.

This scenario can be avoided with carefully planning and enough lead time to get the right bandwidth resources in place. That can be a challenge when bandwidth provisioning time is the long pole in the tent. You can hedge against future upsets by installing connections that have easier scaling than traditional telecom services. Carrier Ethernet is just such a service. Install a 1 GB port but only commit to 250 Mbps of service right now. When, out of the blue, some VP gets every employee signed up for an online video training course on the latest trendy productivity or quality initiative, at least you can grab the phone and tell your provider to crank up the bandwidth immediately.

You may also be served better by contracting with an MPLS network provider instead of running your own private network of point to point dedicated lines. It’s a major reconstruction effort to upgrade bandwidth on all those lines, especially if you have to go from copper to fiber. Your MPLS provider may be able to give you higher committed rates quickly or allow you to burst to handle unexpected peaks. Best to discuss these possiblities before signing a service contract.

It’s always possible to get deluged with a difficult or impossible to foresee spike in resource demand, including bandwidth. Know that there are services available now that make scaling BW up and down a much easier and quicker process than traditional approaches. Do a little planning now and see what’s available in Carrier Ethernet and MPLS Network services designed for rapid scalability.

What’s Wrong With Bring Your Own Bandwidth?

When you go out to contract new IT services, you are often faced with a choice. You can start fresh with both services and connectivity from your new provider. Otherwise you can layer the new IT services on the network setup you have now. Seems that if your MAN and WAN connections are working to your satisfaction, it would be smart to leave well enough alone. But, what other considerations should play into this decision?

Not every service provider deals in bandwidth. Many VoIP, cloud computing and other service providers specialize in the specific service they offer. They may make recommendations, but getting connected from your facility to theirs is your responsibility.

Other companies have a far larger array of services to offer. Some started off as competitive telecom carriers and later added other services such as colocation, cloud infrastructure, hosted PBX, Software as a Service and so on. Talk to these companies and they’ll express a definite preference for providing both the IT or telecom service plus the connectivity. Is this simply being offered as a convenience to the customer, a desire to get as much of the client’s business as possible, or are there other reasons? If so, what would they be?

A common industry term for using the network connections you have now is “bring your own bandwidth.” You’ll hear this term used most often by VoIP, hosted PBX and cloud computing providers. There’s a reason that this expression keeps coming up in provider literature and consulting discussions. It’s far more than just industry jargon.

What’s unique about cloud services of all sorts is that the performance of the cloud service is highly dependent on the performance of the connection between your facility and your provider's. Issues with customer provided bandwidth pop up so often that providers have become wary.

A common application is hosted VoIP. Unless you have an IP PBX switching system in-house, any VoIP service you are using is probably hosted VoIP. Hosted means that the service provider owns and operates the switching system and the trunk lines to the public telephone system. You only need to have IP phones and perhaps a gateway device in-house.

Hosted VoIP can best the best thing that ever happened to your company or an unmitigated nightmare. In fact, the very same service that works beautifully for one company can be a disaster for another. Why? It’s because voice services, particularly network voice services like VoIP, are highly sensitive to the characteristics of the long haul network connections to them.

Voice is a touchy application because it is real-time and easily corrupted. Any network congestion that holds up packets, drops them or brings them in at a variable rate will be reflected in the call quality. Many network anomalies show up as audio distortion that garbles conversations. Other problems are delays that chop off the beginning of sentences and intermittent outages that drop calls.

This is why major business providers with reputations to protect cringe at the thought of their clients bringing their own bandwidth when it is a shared bandwidth DSL or Cable Internet connection. Those low end services work just fine for e-mail and general website access. Add a third party broadband phone services and you are really taking your chances. Why? Your network may not be set up to give voice packets priority, the bandwidth on your broadband Internet service may vary all over the place, and even when those things are working well, the Internet itself has all sorts of vagaries.

Even the Cable companies themselves are aware of this situation and don't run their bundled telephone services over the Internet. What they sell you is a VoIP phone service that uses their Cable network to connect to their own VoIP switching center. Your telephone calls never touch the Internet itself. Call quality is just too dicey and hard to predict when you are dealing with a public network where no packet has an advantage, by design.

What major VoIP service providers really prefer is that you get a dedicated SIP trunk from them to provide your voice and Internet service. This way they can control the WAN connection and keep the voice and data packets from tripping all over each other. With the right bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics, you can have excellent voice quality and all the advantages of hosted PBX telephone services.

The same discussion applies to high bandwidth cloud connections. What some companies are finding is that the WAN connection to their new cloud provider isn’t nearly as capable as the LAN connection they had to their in-house data center. The big issues are bandwidth and latency. You need sufficient bandwidth so that users don’t have to queue up when they access the cloud. Latency introduces a delay that makes the cloud applications seem sluggish. In some instances this has become such a problem that Amazon has make arrangements with Level 3 Communications and AboveNet for special AWS Direct Connect service at 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps for its high performance cloud computing services.

Is bring your own bandwidth a good idea or a bad idea? It depends on how robust your current metro and long haul network connections are and what services you intend to add. A good approach is to discuss connectivity at the same time you are evaluating new IT services to make sure you have what you need to get optimum performance. You can get expert consultation and a wide variety of telephone, cloud and bandwidth services through our telecom broker, Telarus, Inc. A simple online inquiry will get the process started immediately.

Cloud Connection Centers Go Beyond Colocation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OC-48 Pricing Reductions Make 2.5 Gbps Affordable

OC-48 bandwidth is a staple among regional Internet service providers and larger corporations. It forms the core or many fiber optic network backbones implemented as SONET rings over hundreds or even thousands of miles. Even with more availability than ever before, many businesses shy away from even considering this high bandwidth service in fear of the budget-busting sticker shock that they reasonably expect. It’s time to reconsider that decision.

OC-48 is one of the SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standard service levels. These bandwidth levels pick up where T-carrier copper services leave off. DS3 or T3 lines provide 45 Mbps of transport. The equivalent OC or Optical Carrier level is OC-1 at 52 Mbps. OC-1 isn’t readily available as an actual line service. In practice the lowest level SONET fiber optic service is OC-3 at 155 Mbps. The next practical step up is OC-12 at 622 Mbps. In some areas you can get OC-24 at 1.25 Gbps, but a more popular level is OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. Beyond that is OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

What makes OC-48 so popular? Many incumbent and competitive carriers constructed their fiber optic networks around OC-48, although some of the largest have moved on to OC-192 and OC-768. OC-48 is widely used for tributaries from OC-192 backbone nodes. Some newer fiber networks are built upon IP cores, completely bypassing legacy SONET technology. Many more are running MPLS or Ethernet over SONET.

One reason for this is that the SONET core is already in place, including all the routing and switching equipment. Another is that SONET is a proven technology that is widely supported and designed for carrier-class services. For instance, most SONET rings are dual rings that offer protection from fiber cuts and equipment failures. In the event of an outage, switching from one ring to another is accomplished in less than 50 mSec.

Once a technology that carriers kept for themselves, OC-48 pricing has dropped so much over the years that it is now a popular connection for many businesses. This includes large hospital and medical center networks, video producers, content delivery networks, broadband Internet service providers, computer aided design firms, businesses with substantial e-commerce activities, popular websites, and heavy users of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is something of a two-edged sword. The advantages include fast scaling of services up and down as your needs change, high reliability, and the ability to empty local data centers to avoid ongoing capital and operating expenses. What might get lost in the initial zeal to outsource to the cloud is how you connect with your new virtual data center located hundreds or thousands of miles away. All of a sudden, WAN connections that were perfectly adequate when most of the IT servers were still on the corporate campus are now sluggish and unresponsive.

If you want to maintain or regain that snappy performance that comes with high speed low latency dedicated private line connections, you’ll need to upgrade your connections between your headquarters and your cloud services providers. OC-48 fiber optic bandwidth may be just the ticket. At two and a half times Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth, you’ll have the capacity you need to avoid network congestion. With a protected service and SLA (service level agreement), you’ll have the reliable service you need for critical business operations. Finally, with recent price reductions from competitive service providers, you can now afford a level of service that previously seemed out of reach.

Have the requirements of your business increased because of business automation, new technologies such as video transport, or a move to the cloud? This is a good time to get a new set of lease prices for both Carrier Ethernet and SONET fiber optic services. High bandwidth circuits, such as OC-48, are now more affordable than ever before.

SONET Rings To Support Ethernet

The hot bandwidth service these days is Carrier Ethernet. Everybody wants it once they see the cost advantage over the WAN connection they have now. The big question is can they get it?

In most cases, the answer is yes for a couple of reasons. First, new competitive carriers are rapidly building out their fiber optic core networks based on IP from the start. These networks are tailor made for Carrier Ethernet services. It’s relatively easy to get a point to point Ethernet connection between two distant business locations and use it to link their respective LANs. The result is one larger bridged LAN that enables all employees to be on essentially the same corporate network.

The other reason that Ethernet WAN services are so readily available is that established SONET fiber optic networks are being pressed into service to deliver Ethernet to the customer. This is known as Ethernet over SONET or EoS. The core of the network is still SONET, but operations at that level are invisible to you. As far as you are concerned, your connection is Ethernet all the way.

There’s no reason that SONET can’t transport Ethernet, ATM or other protocols. It was designed as a transport technology and has been adapted over the years to carry whatever traffic required hauling. The origins of SONET, like T-Carrier, are with the telephone industry. The name is an acronym for Synchronous Optical NETwork. Note the term synchronous. That tells you SONET is set up to be a highly synchronized network. The designed is based on multiplexing thousands of small channels called DS0s that each hold one telephone call. These DS0 building blocks can be combined to create T1 and T3 lines or SONET services such as OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48.

The beauty of synchronization for circuit switched architectures based on time division multiplexing is that everything is orchestrated so tightly and you can easily multiplex and demultiplex channels and higher level services. The device that does this is called an ADM or Add/Drop Multiplexer. An ADM can drop off a T1 line, DS3, OC3 or other service at your door from a much higher speed fiber line that carries traffic for many customers.

How does Ethernet squeeze into those tiny telephone channels? It takes some doing, considering that each DS0 carries exactly 64 Kbps. That’s about the speed of an old dial-up modem. What the industry has done is replace the telephone oriented channels with large concatenated frames and various mapping techniques to more efficiently carry Ethernet packets. SONET networks can now readily carry Ethernet services from standard 10 Mbps Ethernet to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE).

A feature of most SONET networks that makes them highly reliable is their twin ring design. Two separate fiber strands are used simultaneously. Each carries the same traffic, but in opposite directions. If a fault occurs in the working ring, the network switches over to the protection ring within 50 mSec. This self-healing property works best when the two rings are widely separated so that a single backhoe cut or equipment fault doesn’t take out both rings at once.

Ethernet over SONET and native IP networks are making Carrier Ethernet services of all speeds readily available for businesses looking to upgrade their bandwidth connections at reasonable costs. How much are we talking? Find out with an instant online Ethernet Fiber quote for 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps service levels. Higher bandwidths and SONET services quotes need some manual effort but will be sent to you promptly.

Combine T1 Lines For Higher Speed

T1 lines have been popular with small and medium businesses for decades. They are highly reliable, private, dedicated bandwidth, and easy to come by. With fierce competition bringing down prices in recent years, what’s not to like? If only you could get T1 lines to run faster....

There’s a way to do that and still keep all the advantages of T1 line technology. The technique is called bonding. It’s an industry standard method of combining the bandwidth of multiple T1 lines so that they behave as a single much larger connection.

You can’t really hot-rod a single T1 line. The system was designed to be synchronized so that the line can be segmented into 24 separate telephone lines or multiplexed into higher bandwidth services. A T1 line runs at 1.5 Mbps and that’s that. What bonding does is let you bring in another T1 line and hook the two together for 3 Mbps.

Why upgrade in the first place? Bandwidth demands are increasing. You know that every few years you need to upgrade the processing power and RAM in your PCs to keep running efficiently with upgraded browsers and other applications. Expect the same to be true of your WAN connections. Whether it’s file transfers from point to point between business locations, Internet access or a connection to cloud services, you’ll need higher bandwidth to stay competitive.

T1 lines can be combined in larger groups to give you even more bandwidth. Bonding 3 T1s provides 4.5 Mbps, 4 T1 lines offer 6 Mbps, 5 bonded lines equal 7.5 Mbps, 6 T1s provide 9 Mbps, 7 T1 lines offer 10.5 Mbps and 8 bonded T1 lines get you to 12 Mbps. Eight line bonding is about as high as most carriers go. The cost of bonded T1 is equal to the price of a single T1 times the number of lines used. When you get past 8 T1s it is generally cheaper to move up to DS3 or even fiber optic connections.

How do you connect all these T1 lines coming into your facility? Your service provider will take care of that. They supply a managed router with multiple WAN Interface Cards (WIC) that handled the interface to each T1 line. The router then does the bonding in tandem with carrier equipment on the other end and delivers a single bandwidth port (RJ45) running at the higher bonded speed.

This is important. For bonding to work, you need to get all of your T1 lines from a single provider. If you try to mix and match vendors, they have no way of coordinating line operation and you just wind up with Individual T1 lines. You can do load balancing with your own routers or buy a bandwidth aggregation appliance to combine unrelated lines, but this is not true bonded T1.

Does any other service compete directly with bonded T1? Yes, Ethernet over Copper does something very similar. It bonds multiple twisted copper pair (up to 8 pair) to deliver a single bandwidth service from 2 Mbps to over 100 Mbps. The trick in delivering the higher bandwidths is a more sophisticated modulation scheme that is distance sensitive. The nearer you are to the central office, the higher the speed available. If available, you can probably get higher bandwidths and better prices than bonded T1 services. However, availability is generally limited to metropolitan areas at this time.

What are the best bandwidth services available to support your applications? Get instant online pricing for bonded T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper to compare prices and availability at your business locations.

MPLS Network Services

Wide area networks are almost a utility service for businesses today. You can’t get much done without broadband connectivity and the ability to securely transfer information between business locations. Do you really want to go back to FAX messages and overnight mail to conduct business? On the other hand, can you afford to do everything you need to do electronically? You can with the right WAN connections.

The idea behind MPLS networks is the ability to send anything, anywhere, anytime without in any way affecting the voice, video or data involved. Many networks can’t do this very well. Take the Internet, for example. It definitely lets you connect to anybody, anywhere on Earth. How robust that connection is and how transparent it is to the packets that traverse it is another matter.

The whole reason for using TCP/IP to transmit data is to ensure that what you send gets delivered intact at the other end. It won’t necessarily happen on the first attempt. If is doesn’t work, TCP gives it another try. Eventually, everything you need to recreate a file on the far end that exactly matches the one that was sent arrives and can be re-assembled in order.

Time sensitive transmissions, such as interactive voice and video, may not fare so well. Just about any little upset causes them to glitch noticeably. Video may pixelate. Audio starts to distort and break up. As delays in transmission time mount, it may be hard to maintain an interactive conversation. You just don’t know when the other person will start speaking.

Little wonder that companies tend to stick with legacy technologies, like analog voice, that they know work, or create their own proprietary and very pricy internal networks. At least when you build it yourself, you have some control of the results.

The high cost and labor intensive nature of private networks combined with the flakiness of the public Internet is what makes MPLS networks shine. An MPLS network is a carefully engineered and managed wide area network for hire. MPLS networks have a regional, national or international footprint. You connect each of your locations to the network through an access connection, which may be anything from a T1 line or ISDN PRI, to a DS3, SONET/SDH, or an Ethernet over copper or fiber service.

MPLS networks are often referred to as “cloud” networks. You connect to and from the cloud, but don’t have to worry about managing the internals of the network. What’s happening inside the MPLS cloud is that special tags are added to your packets as they enter the network and removed when they leave. While on the network, those tags are used to route your packets from source to destination. The actual content of your packets is not disturbed in the process.

The MPLS network itself has to be transparent to all the traffic flowing through it. That means having adequate bandwidth available to support all users. MPLS supports all types of traffic, including IP data transfers, VoIP telephony, ISDN PRI telephony, video conferencing, video streaming and so on. You can specify the quality of service characteristic for each of your packets and the network will ensure that you have the bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss characteristics to support that quality. The MP in MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol, and that’s exactly what it is.

MPLS networks have largely replaced Frame Relay networks, a lower speed & less sophisticated approach to the same service. They are also replacing proprietary corporate networks constructed from multiple point to point line services. When it comes to connections that span the country and even reach out to international destinations, MPLS networks offer significant cost savings while maintaing high quality of service.

Do MPLS Networks make sense for your operation? Find out by checking the cost and availability of MPLS Network Services. Then compare price, effort and quality with what you are doing now to make the best decision.

FastE and GigE WAN Connections

The need for business bandwidth is growing, but corporate budgets are not. So, does that mean that businesses will be stifled for throughput and perhaps lose customers to slow performing ecommerce websites?

No. There’s a telecom bandwidth solution available that can give you the extra network performance you need to keep up with productivity and customer satisfaction demands. That solution is Ethernet.

Standard Ethernet connections at 10 Mbps are readily available over both copper and fiber optic cable. But higher speeds are also available. These are Fast Ethernet or FastE at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE at 1000 Mbps. You’ll notice that these line speeds exactly match the common LAN speeds of 10/100/1000 Mbps. Yes, you can get WAN connections to match your LAN speed so that your network performance is consistent regardless of whether packets are traveling in-house or across the country.

In rare cases, it may be possible to provision FastE service over bonded copper pair. But that only works if you happen to be very close to the carrier POP or Point of Presence. The usual way that FastE and GigE service are brought into the building is by fiber cable. If you already have a fiber connection, you may find that you’ll save considerable cost by switching your WAN service over to Ethernet.

If your building isn’t yet “lit” for fiber, it may still be possible to have fiber brought in at little or no construction cost. It all depends on the bandwidth demand. For instance, if you happen to be in a large office building with many business offices that could benefit from higher bandwidth options than the T1 lines that they typically have now, a carrier might be interested in lighting that building to get the ongoing bandwidth business. The same is true of industrial parks where modern manufacturing and warehousing businesses need high speed connectivity. Don’t automatically write off high bandwidth services just because you don’t have them now. Telecom carriers have gotten very competitive and may well want to enable you to get their higher performance services.

What can Ethernet connections do better than conventional telecom services? First, there is improved network performance because the protocol is Ethernet from end to end. There’s no need to convert between Ethernet and other protocols and suffer the inefficiencies that come from that process. The interface is trivially easy. It’s the same RJ-45 connector that you use for all your network connections now. You can get Ethernet for point to point connections or multi-point to multi-point to connection your far flung business sites. Dedicated Internet is also available.

By far, the most popular reason to switch to Carrier Ethernet services is the cost savings. You may find that you’ll spend half the cost or less per Mbps when you switch over to Ethernet. Sound interesting? Explore the FastE and GigE WAN connection options available for your location.

Two T1 Lines For The Price of One

T1 lines are bursting at the RJ-45 connector. Businesses are pushing more data than ever before through their constrained WAN connections. But how do you go ask to buy more bandwidth in these economic times? It’s easy when you can get 2 T1 lines for the price of 1.

Whoa! Who is offering a two-for-one deal on business bandwidth?

Actually, lots of competitive carriers can do this for you. Think I’m kidding? Check T1 line prices now.

I will introduce a slight caveat. The pricing I’m referring to compares what you’ll pay for a dual-bonded T1 line today versus what you paid for a T1 line on a contract signed several years ago in many metropolitan areas. That’s not unreasonable, since professional bandwidth solutions such as T1 lines, DS3 connections, and Metro Ethernet are sold on a lease basis with 1 to 5 year contracts in locations where there are competing carriers.

Many, many companies have 3 year T1 line contracts expiring right now. What do you suppose they are going to do? Some may just ignore the fact that the contract is expired and keep paying the same invoice on a month to month basis. A lot of carriers will let you do that just like with cell phone contracts. Other companies will probably just renew their existing contracts for the same amount as before or with a slight discount. If you do either of these, you are leaving money on the table.

The fact is that the telecommunications market has gotten very competitive recently. There are more carriers interested in your business and there are more technology options than ever. But it’s likely that you are aware of only a single option through your local telephone company or perhaps one other bid from a service provider with a local office. The larger the population center where you are located, the more service options there are. But these carriers don’t have infinitely large sales staffs or advertising budgets, so you may not have been contacted by them.

Well, if they’re not calling you to vie for your business, how do you get their attention? Actually, it's much easier today than ever before because of telecommunications service brokers. Arguably the best of these is Telarus, Inc., developer of the GeoQuote (tm) online telecom service search engine. You can use GeoQuote (tm) to get T1 line quotes in under a minute and confirm what I’ve been saying. You’ll discover even more options if you let a Telarus ShopForT1 consultant call you because they have knowledge of short term special deals that don’t show up in the automated search process.

Did you run a search for your business address? Am I right about the cost of 2x T1 line service at 3 Mbps? Here’s something else to think about. Metro Ethernet is a hot new competitive technology that can give you even more bandwidth at lower prices than bonding a bunch of T1 lines. If your location qualifies, you may be able to get all the bandwidth you need and still meet your telecom service budget this year. It’s well worth your while to check it out.

Colocation Leverages Your IT Staff

Most businesses today, even the largest and most well known, find it hard to justify staff increases in this economic climate. That makes it tough on the IT department. Not only can't they expand to meet increasing demands for their time, but they may be subject to hiring freezes or even across the board staff reductions. Is there any way to keep this situation from heading into a morale and productivity meltdown?

There is one idea that can take some pressure off. What you need is leverage. That's the ability for each valued member of the team to be able to get more done without destroying their own health or getting so overextended that they start creating more problems than they solve. Forget trying to cram more work down fewer throats. Instead, use a technique that can multiply the effectiveness of your IT team.

That technique is called colocation. Basically, it's a way to outsource some of what you do while retaining control over the results. I know that outsourcing has gotten a tarnished reputation, especially among those who have seen their jobs moved overseas. This isn't that. In fact, everything remains nearby. What moves is not the hands-on customer service you enjoy in house or the business strategy that is core to your operation. What you are moving is the mundane, everyday infrastructure needed to run a data center.

With colocation, you move your equipment not your jobs, not your people. You rent rack space or a completely secure caged room where your servers, appliances and their WAN connections will reside. You still operate everything remotely and have access to the physical equipment when needed. What you don't do is provide physical space, main power and backup power, light, fire protection, and security. You can elect to have the colocation personnel do server maintenance and upgrades or just rent server capacity instead of owning it.

But isn't this a zero-sum game? You move the equipment from one spot to another but you still need all the resources you already have, right?

Not really. A colocation facility gains efficiency through economy of scale. A colo center can staff for monitoring, maintenance and security for hundreds of companies much cheaper than a hundred companies can do individually. The same is true for backup generators, data center facilities, and WAN bandwidth.

You may be having trouble getting the bandwidth you need because your facility just isn't located near enough to carrier facilities to make high bandwidth drops cost effective. But a colocation center often has multiple carriers with POPs (Points of Presence) in the building. They have all the bandwidth you could want and you'll get it at a bargain per Mbps or Gbps. The construction costs are as little as running a fiber or copper cable from your choice of carrier to your equipment location. You might pay very little. You might not have to pay anything.

Want to find out what colocation services can do for your business? Simply call the toll free number or enter a quick online quote request for colocation services now.