Can You Use 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps Circuits?

By: John Shepler

The move to business software in the cloud increased the demand for high speed, low latency bandwidth. The introduction of AI ups the ante even more. What used to be considered high bandwidth may now be an impediment to getting work done. Fortunately, higher bandwidth circuits in the range of 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps are now readily available and at reasonable prices.

What Higher Bandwidth Offers
Why increase your bandwidth to 10 Gbps or above? Because you need it. Or, if you don’t absolutely need it, the improvement in performance and productivity justify the additional cost.

The amount of bandwidth you need is driven by the traffic on your WAN or point to point networks. As long as there is enough and the quality is high enough, the lines are essentially invisible. As soon as there are more packets ready to transfer than there is capacity to transfer them, trouble begins. Your circuit becomes congested. It shows up as increased latency, as packets must be buffered to wait their turn.

Response from the Internet and cloud slows down. Telephone calls have delays even to the point of sounding like you are on a two-way radio. Some packets might get lost creating garbled audio. Same for video. Two way conferencing gets jerky or frozen and may have missing pieces. Anything in real time suffers. Frustration by users increases. Workflow slows.

What Drives the Need for Higher Bandwidth?
Text messaging and email are now the least of the bandwidth drivers. Telephone audio might be if you have a large operation or a call center. Video for conferencing and watching online streaming is definitely a bandwidth driver. Don’t forget that more and more business processes are now being conducted in the cloud or at colocation data centers. The days of everything running on a server and some disk drives in the same building are gone for most everyone. At least some of what you do is processed remotely. That could be ordering, inventory, accounting, simulation and so on.

Replacing a sea of stand-alone PCs with a LAN was the first step. Now the LAN connects to a WAN and Dedicated Internet Access. The amount of traffic leaving the building is often more than what is handled strictly inside.

Don’t Forget About Big Data and AI
Data sets are becoming huge as more and more business and customer data is electronic. You don’t need more file cabinets, but you do need more disk space, including remote backup for safety.

AI is something new that consumes data and bandwidth like never before. As staffs are being encouraged to up their inference level and use as many tokens as they can to gain skill with AI models, the load on the connection circuits increases. Training can be even more of a overwhelming load as data bases have to be uploaded to the model. All of this is a demand on your network you probably didn’t see coming. But it’s here and it is only going to increase.

What Bandwidth is Available?
Most everyone needs Internet access and the best type for most business is DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. That is essentially a private line between your office and your service provider. Most of the congestion comes in the first mile when circuits are shared among many companies and residential users to save cost. Casual and undemanding users may not even notice the difference, but highly demanding businesses can easily see variations in performance throughout the day that are largely unpredictable.

Another form of private connection is direct cloud access, which connects you to your data center or cloud provider without going through the Internet. No sharing means faster and more consistent performance.

Dedicated private lines may also be leased to interconnect your facilities directly. This is like extending your LAN to cover multiple locations. Once again, no traffic sharing with other businesses and definitely no traffic sharing with the general public. Better performance and better security.

Is your network not keeping up with today’s needs? Increase productivity and future proof your connections with Dedicated Internet Access, direct cloud access, dedicated private lines, wavelengths and even dark fiber with bandwidth from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps and above.

Fiber Optic Bandwidth is Closer Than You Think

By: John Shepler

If you’ve had your telecom line contracts for years, maybe decades, you may not be aware of all the connection options that have become available recently. Some have popped up only in the last few years. Don’t continue to assume that something like T1 lines are all that are available without taking another look. You may be surprised at what you find.

 

You Need More Bandwidth
Fiber optic bandwidth has been talked about for years at the wave of the future. When you look at the type of applications that are popular with both consumers and businesses, it becomes obvious quickly that nothing else will accommodate the bandwidths that are needed.

You’ve seen it coming. Static web pages have given way to embedded video clips. SD video has been supplanted by HD Video. Now that clamor is for 4K and, soon, 8K video streams.

How about software? Software used to come on tape reels, floppy disks and CD ROMs. Now software is downloaded. The old “packages” are on their way out, if not gone. They’re being replaced by apps that are acquired over the Internet. That takes a lot more than DSL or T1 bandwidth.

Downloadable apps may have a short lifespan, too. There is a mad dash for the “cloud” for both applications and storage. On-site data centers are emptying out. Massive cloud data centers are popping up as fast as they can be built. When you access everything through the cloud rather than over the LAN, your wide area network bandwidth requirements shoot up by orders of magnitude.

Why It’s Got to Be Fiber
The need for increasing levels of bandwidth have not been lost on service providers. In fact, any carrier that is still married to circuit switched architectures and copper connectivity is just marking time until it is no longer needed.

Ethernet over Copper has extended the life of the installed twisted pair copper plant by offering speeds of 10 Mbps to at least 50 Mbps and sometimes higher. DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 are doing the same for coaxial cable. Premises connectivity is likely the last bastion of copper. It only needs to stretch to the curb, where it connects to… fiber.

What about wireless? It looks like the world is now standardizing on 4G LTE and looking forward to 5G, as everything we do at the desk also needs to be done while mobile. Even so, capacity limitations dictated by the amount of room in the electromagnetic spectrum will keep wireless primarily as a mobile connection. Perhaps meshed WiFi and pico cells will again multiply the capacity of wireless… but it’s never going to be fiber.

An Avalanche of Fiber Now
The beauty of fiber is that it offers unlimited bandwidth as far as we can tell. Each strand might only support 10 Gbps with todays lasers, but DWDM creates dozens or more of those 10 Gbps channels on a single fiber strand. Why install a single hair-thin fiber when you can bundle 100 or more in a cable about the size of the familiar twisted pair bundles?

Of course multiple strand cables are the only way to go. For awhile it looked like way too much capacity had been installed during at the tech boom of the 90’s. Now those dark fiber strands are being lit up en-masse and more capacity is being installed nationwide.

Google has it right. The future… the near future… is fiber and Gigabit bandwidth is something we won’t be salivating over for long. Soon it will be 10 Gbps and then 100 Gbps. There is no end in sight.

It’s not just Google in selected cities or Verizon’s FiOS. Every incumbent telecom company and all the new competitive service providers are in a race to get to fiber as their standard connectivity for both home and business.

Goodbye SONET, Hello Ethernet
The incumbent telcos and the long line providers built their fiber networks with the SONET protocol, as it was the logical upgrade from TDM copper such as T1 and E1. All the new networks are being built around Carrier Ethernet and the older ones are converting rapidly.

Sometimes the most sensible thing to do is install Ethernet over SONET as an upgrade. When starting from scratch, native Ethernet is the protocol of choice. It’s unlikely we’ll return to a circuit switched world. It’s packet switching as far forward as we can see.

The beauty of Ethernet is that it is directly compatible with the local networks in every home and business, and all of the equipment that connects to them. Carrier Ethernet is designed to be highly scalable, with many more increments in bandwidth than were offered by SONET and fractional SONET services. You can pretty much pick the bandwidth you want, although standard LAN speeds of 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps are popular, with 10 Gbps more in demand every day.

Moreover, Ethernet services are fast and easy to scale. You can generally call your provider and get bandwidth upgrades immediately or within a few days. As long as the installed port for your WAN service can handle it, you can keep upgrading as needed with no change in premises equipment.

How to FInd the Fiber Services Quickly
You can try looking the old fashioned way, by looking in the phone directory for telecom carriers in your area. Or just run an online search. You’ll find some of them for sure, but might miss out on others that are new or not widely publicized.

It makes more sense to use a search engine that is dedicated to finding fiber optic bandwidth and nothing else. That’s the GeoQoute (™) system. How difficult is it to use? Trivially easy, in fact. You simply start by entering some basic contact information and the type of service you want. In a few minutes, the automated system will give you a list of options with budgetary pricing. If you like what you see, a complementary discussion with a product specialist can help you narrow down the choices and find out about limited time special offers that might be an even better deal.

Sound good? Do a fast search for fiber optic network services now and see what you may have been missing for years.

Vocal IP Networx Offers Free SNMP Monitoring

You’re probably used to ordering T1 lines and other bandwidth solutions. You also know that it’s up to you to know when your service is available and not available. Sometimes that’s a bit tricky because you buy the line service from one carrier, install a edge router you get from another vendor and load up the network with firewalls, servers and other devices. It’s a good thing that you are around to monitor all this 24/7. You are available 24/7 aren’t you?

Large corporations have round the clock IT staffing and their own network operations centers (NOCs). Medium and smaller size companies wing it overnight and plan on dealing with issues as they arise. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get some help in monitoring your network operations without it costing you a fortune?

Vocal IP Networx, a leader in IP telephony solutions and services, may have the answer to your need. They are offering free 24/7 SNMP monitoring of every circuit and deployed customer premises equipment (CPE) supplied by Vocal IP Networx. Their state of the art NOC keeps close watch and responds to outages and potential devices failures, even before a problem manifests itself.

Here’s something even more impressive. Vocal practices what they call “open book” management, meaning that you, as a customer, have access to their monitoring system via a secure Web portal. No need to wonder what’s going on when you can log in and see for yourself anytime.

Here’s some of what Vocal IP Networx monitors: Processor load, current memory use, priority queue levels, overheating, bandwidth utilization and spikes, plus interface errors.

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. It is an industry standard protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). When SNMP is running on a network, there are 3 components involved. The first is the managed device, of course. That could be a router, firewall, switch, server or other network element. Agent software is installed on the managed device to gather the data and process it for presentation. At the other end of the line is Network Management System (NMS) software that queries the managed devices.

You may have hear of Vocal IP Networx as a provider of high performance hosted PBX business telephone solutions. One good reason that they enjoy a high performance reputation is that Vocal goes way beyond just providing a switching system for your SIP phones. They offer the entire solution, including private lines, dedicated Internet access and nationwide MPLS service.

Having control of the WAN network plus the managed network devices is a huge advantage in ensuring quality of service. The SNMP monitoring is just part of that. Engineering the solution in the first place to ensure that traffic is properly prioritized into classes of service and that there is sufficient bandwidth and minimal latency, jitter and packet loss is what it takes to confidently go with hosted communications services for your important business needs.

Would you feel more confident knowing that your service provider is monitoring not just the equipment at their end, but the entire network back to your facilities? That’s available as a free bonus when you select Vocal IP Networx as your provider. Get competitive quotes for Vocal IP Networx and other high quality service providers for WAN bandwidth line services and hosted VoIP phone service. You may be surprised to find out that you can get higher performance and more reliable service for what you are paying now.



Note: Image of network operations center courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Types of VPN Connections

Virtual private networking is heavily used in business. In fact, you probably have used a VPN connection today without even realizing it. It’s not a belt and suspenders service anymore. VPN connections are absolutely essential to prevent being robbed blind.

First, let’s take a look at private vs virtually private networks. Your hardwired LAN is a private network. It would take some real effort and a lot of risk for someone to tap into your network wiring and install a device to capture traffic. The same is true if you establish a wide area network or WAN using point to point private lines. A PTP T1 line falls into that category. While it is not impossible to sneak into your wiring closet or even the telephone company and put a tap on the line, it is so difficult that only those with the most secure requirements will go to extremes to protect against this type of attack.

What distinguishes a private network is that 100% of the traffic is yours and yours alone. You are not sharing the lines with anyone else. The advantage to a private network is inherent security. The disadvantage is cost. You pay for all the construction, maintenance and monthly lease fees. It’s unlikely that your private network will be fully loaded at all times. Whatever capacity is unused goes to waste.

Contrast the private network with a public network like the Internet. They are polar opposites. The Internet allows anyone and everyone access by design. Traffic on the Internet is everybody in the pool. Your packets are intermingled with everyone else’s. Even so, a wired connection to the Internet isn’t the worst situation. That belongs to the unsecured wireless network. No need to plant malware in someone’s computer when everything they are doing is perfectly visible on any WiFi enabled computer within range. You are most vulnerable reading private unencrypted emails in a popular public hotspot. Anyone with a laptop computer and some easy to obtain spyware can be reading your messages right along with you.

It seems like such a crying shame that the one network that any employee can access at home or while traveling is such a security nightmare. That’s where the technique of encryption becomes valuable. It doesn’t matter if someone is monitoring your traffic if all they see is gibberish. You encrypt your message at one end and decrypt it at the other end and you have a created what is known as a secure tunnel through the Internet. The public network has now become a virtually private network. It’s not a private network because you are still sharing the transport with many others. It’s virtually private because no one can read your traffic and make any sense out of it.

There are two popular methods of creating Internet or IP VPNs. One is IPsec or Internet Protocol security. The other is SSL or Secure Socket Layers. IPsec is based on software installed in both the company server and the client computer. IPsec encrypts and decrypts each packet, so once you have it installed you have a virtually private line to the company no matter where you hooked to the Internet. Of course, you need to use the specific laptop or other computer set up to work with this system. You can’t just go to any computer and connect back to headquarters.

If you want to do that, you need SSL (Secure Socket Layer). The beauty of SSL is that the software is already built into Web browsers and some email programs. SSL has been popularized for ecommerce and online banking. When you go to a SSL enabled webpage, you’ll notice that the http:// has become https:// The “s” means secure page. To access it you need a user account ID and a password at a minimum. Some sites go further and ask personal challenge questions or display special graphics that give you confidence you are logged into the correct site.

For corporate wide area networks, an alternative to private lines is the MPLS network. These are multi-tenant networks that spread the cost of building and running the system among many users. MPLS networks are considered VPNs because they use a proprietary label switching protocol that isn’t compatible with IP tools. This unique protocol plus access controlled to a limited number of business clients and not the general public give MPLS networks an enhanced level of security.

Do you need private or virtually private network connects to conduct business? If so, compare VPN options and prices to help decide which mix of network techniques is right for your company.

2x2 Ethernet Takes on T-1

T1 lines have been the go-to commercial telecom service for small and medium businesses over the last decade. Now a challenger is taking on the venerable T1 line. It is a brand new service called 2x2 Ethernet that’s just been launched by MegaPath, a major nationwide competitive carrier. Let’s see what 2x2 Ethernet has to offer.

You might not think that T1 lines were subject to much competition. After all, the technology is half a century old and heavily entrenched. T1 was the first broadband digital line connection readily available to businesses. It came out of telephone company research and was used as a trunking system to transport telephone calls between switching centers long before it was offered to commercial companies. With repeater technology and the ability to be deployed over two unshielded twisted pair telco wires, T1 has risen to become dominant for digital telephone, point to point connections and dedicated broadband access.

Ethernet came out of the computer industry rather than telephony. Ethernet has grown to dominate local area networks for most companies. Until recently, Ethernet was considered a LAN technology and T1 was considered a WAN technology. There’s not much chance that T1 will move into the LAN, but Ethernet has been steadily encroaching on the metropolitan and wide area networks over the last few years. Now, it’s ready to make its move to take over the role that T1 lines still serve. But why?

Part of the answer is bandwidth. T1 lines offer a fixed 1.5 Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth. You get the same line speed in both the upload and download directions. Ethernet offers a variety of line speeds over both copper and fiber optic cables. The MegaPath 2x2 Ethernet runs at 2 Mbps for both upload and download. That’s a bit faster than T1, although the bandwidth increase alone isn’t what makes this service so attractive. In addition to the 33% increase in capacity, 2x2 Ethernet is easy to interface. The handoff from WAN to LAN is a standard Ethernet connector. No extra CSU/DSU interface circuitry is required, like you have with T1 lines.

What really makes the MegaPath 2x2 Ethernet service compelling is that it is priced less than a T1 line. Ethernet has enjoyed a per Mbps cost that often beats traditional telecom services, especially at the higher bandwidths. But this is a 2 Mbps service that costs less than a 1.5 Mbps service. Not only that, but you have a choice of configuring this service for either data only or voice plus data. With at least five lines of digital, analog or SIP trunking telephone service, the 2x2 Ethernet line cost is reduced even more. It would appear that we are in the twilight era of T1 dominance.

But what about availability? MegaPath has addressed this with Ethernet over Copper connections through 1,900 central offices nationwide. They estimate that over 90% of small and large businesses are within the footprint of one of these COs. MegaPath is actually a super CLEC or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier. The company is a merger of MegaPath, Covad and Speakeasy, all significant carriers in their own right.

Is your business in need of new connectivity or are you simply interested in seeing if you can get a better deal that what you’ve been paying for your existing T1 line service? If you have an older contract, that T1 might be costing you twice as much as it should. Find out for sure with a quick pricing and availability inquiry for Ethernet over Copper services. Higher bandwidths are also available for your more demanding applications.

Telexplainer Expectations For 2011

Here we are at the start of new and hopeful year for both business and technology. Let’s see if we can divine some of the important trends for 2011 and how we can take advantage of them.

Bandwidth needs are going to grow this year. They do every year. The increase in business activity coming out of the Great Recession will almost certainly see more people generating more traffic in the process of doing their jobs. Look for BW demand to more than increase linearly with employment. In the process of dealing with the protracted downturn, companies have found that they really can get more done per person by investing scarce resources in computerized productivity tools. Many of these now require connectivity with the public Internet and private connections to other company facilities, suppliers and customers.

As more people come back to work, they’ll find that their jobs and tools have changed. While the connectivity has increased, there are new aspects to business such as social networking and increased use of video. Paper may not be disappearing, but it certainly isn’t increasing at the same rate as new data is generated. In fact, the need to print something can be seen as both inconvenient and quaint when your main business tool in the field is an iPad.

Clouds were a hot topic in 2010. The move to everything in the cloud is still in the early part of the learning curve. I think we’ll see more and more orientation toward cloud based services that include cloud computing and cloud-based storage. Just as the client-server model made dealing with hundreds or thousands of desktop computers and their associated software a manageable task, the cloud services model will eliminate purchased software packages and their updates completely. Also swept away will be many private data centers with their associated power consumption and HVAC requirements. Everything will be out there, somewhere.

Of course, just closing your eyes and trusting implicitly in the always-available cloud has its risks. What happens when the cloud is running just fine but you can’t get to it? It’s a little like locking your keys in a running car. For that reason, WAN connectivity will take on a new importance. Not only will you need more bandwidth as employees access cloud services rather that servers on your own LAN, but redundancy is going to be essential to ensuring connectivity. Not just bringing in a second line, mind you. You’ll need diverse connections that can’t be easily taken down by natural disaster or careless backhoe operation.

Mobile connectivity requirements are also on the rise. We’ve gotten so comfortable with 3G that there’s no going back to less than broadband wireless connections. In fact, the push for 4G will increase right along with the adoption of cloud services and tablet computers. Carriers are already sweating the lack of available backhaul bandwidth and both carriers and the FCC are sweating the limited amount of suitable wireless bandwidth. Look for a virtual treasure hunt to ensue, as everything that now uses spectrum will be scrutinized to see if it has more of a claim than the 4G juggernaut that needs all the BW it can get.

Telexplainer is primarily focused on telecom and networking, so it stands to reason that we have a keen eye on the bandwidth markets. Many businesses may be surprised to discover that they both need and can afford fiber optic connectivity this year. Chances are that this will be Carrier Ethernet from a competitive provider rather that traditional SONET/SDH services. For multi-site and international connectivity, MPLS networks have an extensive reach and prices lower than ever before.

How is your company set for doing business this year? Are you feeling a bit constrained by your network connections or concerned that you are still paying too much per Mbps? If so, now would be a perfect time to check prices and availability of WAN networks services. The sooner you get better service installed, the more capability you’ll have for the entire year.

Ethernet MPLS Has Cost and Bandwidth Advantages

Two of the hottest voice, video and data networking technologies right now are Carrier Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet, and MPLS networks. But did you know that Ethernet and MPLS can work together to give you more bandwidth at lower cost?

What Ethernet brings to the table is a way to avoid the big protocol speed bump that has traditionally existed at the demarcation point between customer network and telecom network. These two networks have very different historical development and would be completely incompatible were it not for some very clever interfacing. Today it is possible to transport packets from one LAN to another LAN via a telephony-based telecom network designed for voice channels, not datagrams. But why should you?

With Ethernet in the metropolitan and wide area networks, the speed bump between inside and outside networks disappears. Ethernet packets flow seamlessly down the line as far and the connections exist. Often that is right into a branch office or other remote site LAN owned by the same company. Metro Ethernet point to point line service makes it easy to interconnect business locations.

Because it is Ethernet all the way, there is an extra advantage to Ethernet transport services. These connections can be set up to operate at the layer 2 switching level rather than layer 3 routing. That gives you the ability to connect your headquarters LAN to a branch office LAN or remote data center and create what amounts to a very large bridged network for your entire company.

So where to MPLS networks fit into this? MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is a technology that accommodates just about any protocol. You can use it to transport telephone calls, data backups, video feeds, and anything else you need to get from point A to point B. In a way, an MPLS network is something like a postal or shipping service. It doesn’t care what’s in the boxes. It just gets them there on time and undamaged.

MPLS networks are an alternative to the public telephone network or the Internet. They are operated by telecom carriers with regional, national or international service footprints. What MPLS networks offer technically are carefully engineered network services with guaranteed bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss characteristics. What they offer economically are very cost effective ways to transport your sensitive voice, video and data with a high level of quality and security.

Now, combine Ethernet and MPLS and what do you get? You get the performance and cost advantages of Ethernet connections from your business locations to the MPLS network cloud. Within the network, your Ethernet packets are transported transparently between locations. You simply specify what type of connectivity you want among the locations you choose and the service provider sets that up.

Ethernet MPLS solutions are readily available and highly competitive. That provides an opportunity for you to consolidate your telecom services and reduce costs while maintaining quality of service. Check Ethernet MPLS pricing and availability now.

Level 3 Shows How The Converged Business Network Saves Money

Network convergence has been an initiative for larger organizations since IP became accepted as the default network protocol. But smaller companies, with smaller or non-existant IT staffs, have paid little attention. That’s all changed recently. Now, convergence is for everyone.

Why the big change? The primary driver is cost savings, as it has always been. Cost savings has become an ongoing business process in this era of continuing austerity. But the real enabler is the availability of managed convergence. The carrier becomes your partner rather than simply a vendor. This relieves you of the burden of network management, especially WAN network management.

Level 3 has entered this space with its Converged Business Network solution. The idea is to use one bandwidth pipe for voice, Internet and VPN instead of three separate pipes. In one example, Level 3 replaces three separate T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps each with a single 3 Mbps connection that handles everything. That 3 Mbps link could be bonded T1 lines, or it could be one of the newer Ethernet services. They show stand alone services at $ + $ + $ being reduced to converged services for $.

A 3 to 1 reduction? That’s not unreasonable. After all, 3 Mbps Ethernet over Copper services are often priced about the same as a single T1 line.

How can you get a 3:1 line cost reduction without destroying quality of service? The answer is in two pieces. First of all, the bandwidth reduction isn’t that dramatic. You are going from 4.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps. Cost is going down faster than bandwidth. Second, the question assumes fully loaded line services. That’s seldom the case. Many companies have T1 lines because that’s the smallest commercial grade line service available to them. They wind up ordering 3 lines in order to keep voice, Internet and VPN applications separate so they won’t interfere. In reality, only a fraction of that available 4.5 Mbps is needed at any given time.

This is how a converged 3 Mbps WAN network can do the same job cheaper. QoS or quality of service controls are maintained on that connection so that time sensitive voice packets have priority over less time-sensitive data packets. At times when there are fewer telephone conversations in progress, that bandwidth is released for use by the broadband Internet or VPN services. This is called dynamic bandwidth allocation. In a situation with separate lines, any unused capacity simply goes to waste. It is not available for any other use.

A converged voice and Internet service called Integrated T1 has been on the market for years. However, its availability has been spotty and its focus has been on traditional analog and PBX telephony rather than the more advanced features of enterprise VoIP systems. Level 3’s service goes way beyond Integrated T1 with Ethernet connection speeds up to 100 Mbps as a standard package. That makes it an attractive service for medium and larger companies that long ago outgrew their T1 lines.

Is your company on the lookout for ways to save money while preserving quality of services? If so, you should inquire about the cost and benefits of network convergence. You could be missing out on a major advantage for your business.

VPLS Is The Ethernet Cloud

We’re all familiar with the term cloud network. Various technologies are used to provide the infrastructure of the cloud and the services you can get through the cloud. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have your own cloud that included all your business locations?

In a way, you can. While it’s generally not practical to create a completely proprietary cloud network, you can get very close with VPLS or Virtual Private LAN Service.

The “virtual” in VPLS means that you are sharing a privately operated multipoint network that you don’t own. The most popular network for this purpose is MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching. A characteristic of MPLS networks is that they can transport any type of traffic from point to point, point to multi-point or in a fully meshed network. That includes Ethernet traffic of most any bandwidth.

VPLS is an Ethernet based meshed network that is implemented using an MPLS cloud with Ethernet access connections. Pseudo-wires are used to create any-to-any Ethernet connectivity through the MPLS network. Using layer 2 pseudo-wires allows maintenance of a single bridged domain. This is what gives the perception that all of your sites are interconnected on your own Ethernet cloud. It is truly a virtual private LAN.

VPLS makes sense if you have multiple sites in a single metropolitan area but want the experience of having everyone working in a single large, indeed very large, office building. With VPLS the PC or printer in the next office is exactly as close on the network as the PC or printer ten miles away. But VPLS isn’t limited to metropolitan area networks. You can network many cities in the state or many cities in many states. The extent of your network is limited only by the service footprint of your service provider.

Actually, provider footprint is not even a limiting factor anymore, thanks to Ethernet Exchanges like Telx that interconnect participating carriers. It is even possible to include international locations in your VPLS cloud. AboveNet is a competitive carrier that offers international VPLS for the US and major cities in Europe.

Any company or organization with multiple point of presence should have a look at VPLS as a cost effective and seamless way to interconnect their voice, video and data networks. It is right for you? Find out with a quick inquiry for cost and availability of VPLS services serving your locations.

Ciena Takes New Bandwidth Technologies On The Road

If you happen to be near Waltham, MA today, June 29, you have an opportunity to see the latest in carrier bandwidth technology right at your doorstep. Simply step into the Ciena Innovation Lab and check out the demos of their optical, Ethernet and software solutions. Next stop is White Marsh, MD on July 15.

What’s the Ciena Innovation Lab? It’s a semi trailer chock full of the newest telecom and networking developments. Here, take a look:



If you are involved with Gigabit and Terabit bandwidth applications, you are familiar with Ciena... or should be. Certainly, fiber optic service providers keep a keen eye on developments from the Ciena labs. But now major corporations, content providers and large medical organizations need to familiarize themselves with packet-optical transport and switching systems. Today, you may be just broaching the idea of installing Gigabit Ethernet service. Tomorrow, you may well be ordering dark fiber for your own private point to point networks.

Ciena now has platforms that make deploying 40G and 100G fiber optic connections as easy as 10G. They are ready to support carrier Ethernet services, including high speed access, backhaul and aggregation. Their software suites make it easier for you to manage optical networks, Ethernet services and other high bandwidth networks services.

Is your company ready to move up to gigabit and higher levels of service? If so, you’ll benefit from a discussion with our Telarus bandwidth brokerage consultants. No charge for this service, of course. Take just a minute or so and describe your bandwidth needs in an easy online inquiry.

Trade In Your T1 Line For 10 Mbps Ethernet

Is your T1 line lease about to come up for renewal or has it already expired and you’re just paying month to month? Don’t be too quick to re-sign that agreement until you see if you can get 10 Mbps Ethernet for the same money.

What? How can that be? Business telecom services are priced on both bandwidth and distance from the carrier. How can you possibly expect to get 10 Mbps for the same price as 1.5 Mbps at the same location?

It is indeed possible for many business locations to upgrade from the T1 service they’ve had for years to much higher bandwidths. It’s all because of a revolution that has taken place in the telecommunications market recently. You’re aware that traditional landline telephone services are being quickly replaced by wireless and VoIP telephony. Well, the same thing has been happening with the underlying networks. They’re all being upgraded from switched circuit time division multiplexing technology to packet switched IP networking.

This revolution in wide area networking (WAN) technology has also opened the door for new competitive carriers who don’t have a legacy telephony switching system to support. They’ve hit the ground running with all-IP fiber optic networks with both fiber and copper access. In some cases, wireless access at speeds similar to T1 lines is also available.

To be fair, the pricing on both T1 lines and the newer Ethernet services have dropped substantially over the last few years. But you wouldn’t be aware of that unless you shopped competitively for bandwidth using a service such as GeoQuote. The Telarus GeoQuote search engine calculates the distance from your business address to the nearest carrier points of presence (POPs). It then accesses the carrier databases to get pricing information for various levels of service.

Now, here’s what’s really exciting about the quotes I’ve seen coming out of GeoQuote lately. T1 line prices have been on a steady and rapid decline over the last few years. At the same time, Ethernet services have been expanding at a rapid rate with both higher bandwidths and lower costs per Mbps. If you are a long time user of T1 line services, you may well be paying a small fortune on your T1 line lease. But I’ve seen some quotes for 10 x 10 Mbps Ethernet coming in at less than the quotes for standard T1 that were common only a few years ago. If you simply traded in your expired T1 line lease for Ethernet over Copper (EoC) service, you could easily double or triple your bandwidth for the same cost. It’s even possible in some cases to move from 1.5 Mbps to 10 Mbps without having to increase your telecom budget.

Like all business telecom services, Ethernet pricing and availability is highly dependent on location. In fact, two businesses across the street from each other could have different lease rates for exactly the same service. So, how do you find out what’s available and how much it is going to cost? The fast and easy way is to simply run an online check for business Ethernet service for your building’s address and see what shows up. A Telarus consultant will be happy to discuss your particular needs and budget and see if there are any current special offers that are available at even better than the standard rates.

When Networks Get Too Big To Fail

Remember when computer networks were helpful business tools? That was back in the days of stand-alone PCs, FAX, and overnight document mail. Seems quaint, but you’ll long for those days when the network goes down and stays down for hours. These days, LANs are as important as electric wires and WANs are as vital as roads and highways. You just don’t get by without them.

Businesses that are too big to fail seem to get financial bailouts. Networks that have become too big to fail need a different type of protection. They need an infrastructure that continuously monitors their operation and jumps into action at the first sign of trouble.

You may feel that you’ve got things under control in-house. Your IT staff monitors the LAN 24/7 and even off-duty personnel get text messages when something goes awry. But how about those lines that leave the premises? Who’s staying on top of those?

Here’s an example of a network that is truly too big to fail. Your medium size business has grown and grown to become a major corporate enterprise. You have operations in a dozen or more states. Headquarters, staff, engineering and manufacturing used to fit comfortably in one large building. Now they all have separate facilities, along with warehousing and field offices. But you still want to act as one company with the sense that you are at least virtually co-located. Thus, you’ve build a comprehensive corporate network that is essential to getting the job done.

Chances are that the giant network you’ve put in place is the result of adding pieces when needed. There’s a point to point line here, a VPN connection there, various connections of various speeds from headquarters to each facility, and one massive routing operation at the central hub. It’s works and gets the job done, but it’s not exactly optimized the way you would design that same network from scratch today. It’s also becoming a big headache for the headquarters staff to manage and a potential disaster if centrally located equipment goes down.

So, what can you do to ensure that your network is not going to fail no matter how big it has grown? Hire more staff? That’s a tough request in economic times like these. But how about dividing up the job so that your key people can concentrate on the part of the network they know best and someone else can provide support for the rest?

The way you can do that is with managed network services. This is for the WAN portion of your network that you have little control of anyway. Instead of just ordering lines and dealing with outages as they occur, why not lease a managed line and let the service provider ensure the line’s integrity from end to end?

The way this is done by managed service providers is that they control both the line and the terminating equipment. Sometimes these are called managed router services because they most often install a provider owned and monitored router with the proper interface cards. Since they have control of the edge connections at both ends, the service providers can monitor and run diagnostics to ensure the integrity and performance of their line services.

A more comprehensive service that does this is the MPLS network. it’s a multi-protocol privately operated network with network specific equipment called tag routers. You can use MPLS for point to point connections or a complete mesh network that links all of your facilities. Instead of you having to manage all those lines and routing, the service provider does that for you.

But isn’t it just as costly to buy managed services as to hire more staff and do the job in-house? No, not generally. A managed network services provider's entire business is based on maintaining high reliability WAN network connections. You may find that the managed services are no more expensive than doing everything yourself, perhaps even less expensive. How can you know for sure? Get competitive quotes on managed network services for your business locations.

Comprehensive Network Services From Telarus

Building and managing a network for your business can be problematic. For smaller businesses, it’s a distraction from the main focus of the company. For medium and larger operations, it can be a money pit and either a boost or a hinderance to productivity. What can really get painful is integrating your LAN and WAN networks to create one smooth running entity. Is there anything that can help?

You bet there is. There’s a service that can help regardless of whether you are a small office with no tech support to a major corporation with international operations. Imagine getting the hardware, software, installation, maintenance, operation, upgrades, plus connectivity from switched circuit analog telephone right on up to gigabit Ethernet, all from one source. Now, THAT’s comprehensive service!

The service I’m referring to is actually a family of services under one umbrella called Telarus. I first became associated with this company when they launched their groundbreaking “Shop for T1” service over 6 years ago. The revolutionary idea was that you could get T1 line pricing for your business location in under a minute on your Web browser. You still can. Just use the Shop for T1 real-time quote engine on our T1 Rex site.

Competitive T1 line pricing soon expanded to a wide variety of telecom bandwidth services that now encompass DS3, SONET fiber optic connections, Metro Ethernet, MPLS networks, wireless point to point and Dedicated Internet service, colocation servers, ISDN PRI, SIP trunking, and managed routers for everything.

When it comes to WAN services, Telarus offers one-stop shopping for nearly every business bandwidth service you can get. What’s more, being a telecom brokerage service means they can often offer you multiple competitive quotes for the service you need. The Telarus bandwidth consultants can help you weigh the tradeoffs among an often staggering amount of options so you can get the service that meets your business needs at the best price. The cost of all this to you? Zip. It’s free to any organization with serious professional requirements.

But you know that bandwidth is only one piece of the puzzle. How about all that internal infrastructure that keep the packets flowing?

This is where the complementary Telarus VAR Network service comes into play. What’s a VAR? That means Value Added Reseller. It’s an industry term for independent business telephone and computer network companies that specialize in sales and service. VARs will take your business requirements and offer you a package deal for PBX phone systems, routers, network switches, fiber optic cabling, copper wiring, connections and whatever else it takes to build your telephone, data or converged network.

VARs often offer turnkey solutions that include both the equipment and installation. Since the VAR Network is part of the Telarus family, participating VARs also have access to the complete range of bandwidth solutions that Telarus offers. This gives you the advantage of one-stop shopping and a single point of contact for any issues that arise. Accessing the VAR Network is as simple as entering a quick summary of your business needs using the VAR Network online request. That triggers the automated database to alert qualified VARs in your area to contact you for complete details.

Can you do any better than this? I doubt it. If you are not familiar with these Telarus services, go ahead and give them a try. The cost to you is zero, the time required is minimal, and the cost savings can be way more than you might think.

Why The WAN Lags The LAN

Networks are often thought of as nearly transparent to the flow of data between nodes. Corporate LANs are managed to ensure there is enough bandwidth to prevent productivity killing network congestion within the organization. But it doesn’t take long to find the real choke point in most networks. It’s the connection with the outside world, called the WAN.

The WAN or Wide Area Network differs from the LAN or Local Area Network in more than name. They traditionally use completely different technologies.

LANs are based on the Ethernet standard. Devices that connect to the LAN have standardized NICs or Network Interface Cards. That includes PCs, servers, printers and other peripherals. The most popular interface is 10/100 Mbps. That means the device will operate on Ethernet LANs running at the standard 10 or 100 Mbps speeds. The 10/100/1000 Mbps interface is becoming more popular and increasingly seen in new devices. It maintains compatibility with 10 Mbps Ethernet and 100 Mbps, also called Fast Ethernet, and adds a new speed of 1000 Mbps, also called Gigabit Ethernet or GigE.

Now, compare these network speeds with typical WAN connections. The most popular WAN service is the T1 line running at 1.5 Mbps. Larger businesses often have DS3 connections that run at 45 Mbps. Only the largest or most bandwidth-dependent organizations have higher speed fiber optic WAN connections. These range from OC3 at 155 Mbps to OC48 at 2.5 Gbps. The largest ISPs and telecom carriers may have backbones at OC-192 or 10 Gbps. Nationwide fiber optic network backbones run at OC-768 or 40 Gbps.

Chances are your business is likely running a LAN network at 100 Mbps. When you access the Internet or connect to another of your company’s facilities via dedicated point to point data line, you may be connecting over a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps. That’s almost two orders of magnitude difference. You’ll notice the difference in file transfer times. Within the walls of your building file transfers might be measured in seconds. Go outside and the same size files will require minutes.

A larger corporation might have a LAN backbone running 1000 Mbps between switches and perhaps even to the desktop. If your WAN connection is DS3 at 45 Mbps, you still have a substantial choke point for data entering and leaving the organization. It can be a significant bottleneck when running overnight file backups to a remote data center or transferring important files to a client. If your desktop computer is connected at 100 Mbps, the slowdown might be a little more than double. But if you are transferring between two servers that have 1000 Mbps connections, the slowdown to 45 Mbps is more like 20x.

So, why don’t companies just increase their WAN bandwidth to match their LAN bandwidth? The reason is cost. WAN connections have traditionally been very expensive. Management can rationalize that the company generates far more traffic across its LAN than goes out on the WAN, so that a slower WAN isn’t that much of an impediment. Well, that depends on what is entering and leaving the building. If customers can’t access your servers in a reasonable time, they’ll think your website is broken and go elsewhere. If your medical organization can’t transfer medical images in a reasonable time, staff might be tempted to shy away from electronic medical records.

Is there anything that can help this situation? Probably the most promising technology is Carrier Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet. Prices for Ethernet WAN connections are significantly lower in general than traditional telecom service pricing. Bandwidths that match LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10 Gbps are readily available at quite reasonable pricing.

With a better WAN to LAN bandwidth parity, network performance will be much more consistent, regardless of file source and destination. That can really help productivity and encourage staff to make better use of electronic file transfers and paperless office techniques.

What will it cost to improve your network’s WAN connection performance? Probably less than you might think. Even if you don’t match your LAN speed completely, you can likely get more bandwidth for your current budget. To find out how much, check Ethernet WAN bandwidth service pricing now.

Welcome To The Big Bandwidth Era

You remember the big band era? Tommy Dorsey? Glenn Miller?

No, I didn’t think so. It was a bit before my time, too, although I do enjoy the music of that era. Back then technology was radio and bandwidth was measured in cycles per second and kilocycles. Today, technology is digital and bandwidth is measured in Mbps and Gbps. Welcome to the big bandwidth era.

So how much bandwidth is needed to qualify as big? NuVox, a major competitive carrier, defines big bandwidth as anything over 10 Mbps. That’s the level that consumer Internet service providers are targeting, now that video is becoming the true killer app of the Web. It’s also where businesses are headed... and fast.

What’s driving that need for speed? Video is certainly part of puzzle, with many companies being both producers and users of online video. Cloud services are also a big emerging driver. By moving the server infrastructure and storage network into the cloud, companies see a way to get out of the expensive upgrade and maintenance cycles while still having the IT services they need. Add to that the mad scramble to replace everything paper with everything electronic, especially in the medical field, and you’ve got WAN networks getting pretty congested.

So, what does it take to get 10 Mbps or more connected to your network? T1 lines (1.5 Mbps) are still a readily available and affordable to get reliable business bandwidth. A industry standard process called bonding allows multiple T1 lines to act as one larger pipe with higher bandwidth. Two bonded T1 lines gives you 3 Mbps, four provides 6 Mbps, 8 bonded T1 lines will deliver 12 Mbps, a “big bandwidth” solution.

Another form of twisted pair copper transport is EoC (Ethernet over Copper) It uses the familiar telco trunk lines that are installed at most business locations. But special equipment at each end creates an Ethernet transport service. NuVox is offering a variety called Etherloop that is a half-duplex transmission technology capable of providing bandwidths up to 30 Mbps up to 10,000 feet from the carrier POP or Point of Presence.

Moving up from copper to fiber optic services, a very popular traditional service is DS3 at 45 Mbps. Other fiber based services include Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbps. Now we’re really talking about BIG bandwidth.

Is your company needing to move into the big bandwidth era? You’ll find that the cost of these higher capacity services may be much lower than when you looked into them a few years ago, thanks to competitive carriers like Nuvox. How much lower? Find out now by getting a quote for big bandwidth services available at your business location.

Ethernet Is The New T1

You've been hearing about the rise of Metro Ethernet as a desirable access technology for businesses WAN connections. The key word has been "metro." Metro is short for metropolitan, which means larger cities with their larger, concentrated business districts. They've been the first target of competitive bandwidth providers with IP core networks and lower per-Mbps pricing. But you have to be located downtown or in a large suburb to take advantage of Ethernet WAN services, right?

Not for long. Hatteras Networks has just announced a line of repeater and line power modules that can enable service providers to deliver Mid-Band Ethernet up to 25 miles over ordinary twisted pair telephone wire.

Hey, wait a second. Hasn't this been the domain of T1 lines? You bet it has. The competitive advantage of T1 lines is that they can be deployed on two pair of ordinary twisted pair copper. That's the type of telco wiring that's been pulled into nearly every business for multi-line telephone service.

T1 lines are reasonably cheap and available just about anywhere you can get landline phone service. After all, T1 is just a digital service that runs on the same type of wiring as analog voice. The key to making T1 as popular as it is has been is the repeater or regenerator. This is a device that you install a mile or so down the line to boost the signal so it can go farther. As a digital repeater, the voltage of the signal is amplified and the shape of the digital waveform is regenerated or brought back to its original specs. When the signal leaves the regenerator on its way down the line, it looks just the same as it did when it left the original T1 router.

How far can you repeat a T1 signal in practice? About 25 miles is reasonable. That puts nearly every business, including those in rural areas, within reach of a telco office that provides T1 line service.

But now Hatteras has done the same thing for Ethernet over Copper or EoC services. EoC has been in demand in metro areas because businesses can get anywhere from 5 to 45 Mbps of bandwidth without having to pay expensive construction costs to bring in fiber optic services. The hitch is that your building had to be within a few miles of the carrier's POP or Point of Presence. Those are similar to a telephone company's CO or Central Office. But with this new repeater equipment, competitive carriers will now be able to offer Ethernet services far from their metropolitan POPs. It's the long-awaited high bandwidth solution for suburban, exurban and rural areas.

Carrier Ethernet services are still in the rapid growth phase. What you can get for your business depends on location and which competitive carriers have a service footprint in your area. Use the easy Etherent Building Services Finder to see what's now available in the way of high bandwidth / low cost Ethernet for business addresses.

Juniper Has Routers For The 100 Gbps WAN

In the ever expanding need for speed, Verizon and Juniper are up to something big. It's 100 Gbps fiber optic connections.

Carriers have been dabbling with 100 Gbps transmission for some time now. It's an order of magnitude above the standard 10 Gbps pipes that are common on long haul networks. There are also 40 Gbps transport systems in use. Now it looks like 100 Gbps is getting ready for deployment. Juniper's contribution is an interface that will handle this bandwidth directly. Currently, carriers have to aggregate multiple links to achieve that speed. Verizon has demonstrated a 111-Gbps channel over 1,040 km.

So, what's all this bandwidth going to be used for? You can pretty much bet it isn't desperately required for telephone calls, email or casual Web browsing. The bandwidth crunch that's upon us is all about video.

If you've ever had the pleasure of editing and exporting movies or other video, you know the feeling of shock and horror that you felt when you first realized that moving and manipulating video files takes minutes and maybe hours, not seconds. I got a taste of it this weekend when I found that the 10 minute movies my digital camera took so easily require long rendering times when you try to do anything with the raw files. For those of us used to working with Web pages, still photos, text and code, the amount of disk space and bandwidth even simple video files can chew up is absolutely astounding.

Now, consider that the entire world is moving not just to video everything but to HD video everything, and you can understand why the telecom carriers and Internet Service Providers tremble at the thought of the Internet going from HTML to HDTV. It's not just an incremental increase in traffic. It's a large and generally unplanned step change.

It's not just Cable broadband and DSL providers that are inundated with video traffic. Wireless carriers are getting their share as the new 3G touchscreen smartphones are bought in significant numbers. Video clips from YouTube just whet the appetite. Now with Slingbox capability on the iPhone as well as laptop computers, people expect to access their satellite receivers and DVRs from anywhere they happen to be. The transition of broadcast TV from analog to digital is truly the tip of the iceberg. The lion's share that's represented by the underwater part of the berg is IP video destined for wireline and wireless broadband transmission.

Little wonder that both WiMAX and LTE networks are going ahead, recession or no recession. Little wonder, too, that Juniper's 100 Gbps is being heralded as not just the solution to today's bandwidth demands, but a stepping stone to Terabit transport channels. Could they be more than a few years away?

Aggressive Passive Optical Networking

PON or Passive Optical Networking is proving to be a cost effective technology for establishing fiber to the premises for residential and business users. So fast is this technology developing that PON is blowing through standards almost as soon as they are released. The latest increment is 10 Gbps GPON being demonstrated by Ericsson. Do I hear 100 Gbps? How about Tbps?

Well, not so fast (so to speak). Bandwidth demands are certainly rising in home applications and business WAN networks. But the transition from wireline to fiber has really just gotten underway. Not that you'd know it by watching the development of PONs.

The big appeal of passive optical networks versus the active variety is capital expense. In a SONET or Ethernet fiber optic network the cable is passive but transmission, reception and control is done with active electronic circuits at every node. This results in fine increments of multiplexed bandwidths and support for a wide variety of protocols and upgrades. That's the beauty of optical fibers. Once the considerable cost of construction has been paid off, the possibilities for pressing bandwidth into service is almost limitless. It gives carriers a lot of flexibility but at a price.

The thing about residential broadband is that cost really matters. In fact, the daunting bill for replacing the sunk costs of the century old copper wire infrastructure with higher capacity fiber has held back the telcos, cable operators and competitive carriers alike, until just recently. PON changes the equation. PON doesn't make high bandwidth packet transmission cheap, but it does make it much cheaper.

It's the P in PON that does the trick. The passive designation means not just the cable, but the distribution system as well. There is an active Optical Line Termination or OLT at the central office. Each premises gets an ONU or Optical Network Unit, which is also an active electronics box. In between everything else is practical. Passive optical splitters divide the fiber beam from the main line to multiple drops. There are typically 32 drops from a single trunk line, although that can vary from more to fewer depending on the length of the lines.

Then there are the PON standards. The first was APON or ATM based Passive Optical Networking. ATM or Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a technology based on small cells instead of large packets. It was primarily for business applications.

Next is BPON or Broadband Passive Optical Networking. This ITU-T G.983 standard offers downstream and upstream speeds of 155 (OC3 bandwidth) or 622 Mbps (OC12 bandwidth).

Speeding this up further is GPON or Gigabit Passive Optical Networking, standardized as ITU-T G.984. GPON offers downstream speeds of 1.25 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps. Upstream speeds supported are 155 and 622 Mbps, plus 1.25 and 2.5 Gbps.

The EPON or Ethernet Passive Optical Networking standard is supported by IEEE 802.3ah and offers 1.25 Gbps both upstream and downstream.

Now comes 10 Gbps GPON offering 10 Gbps of passive optical networking or 4x the capacity of GPON. There is also a 10GEPON. That's 10 Gigabit Ethernet Passive Optical Networking now in development under IEEE 802.3av. Seems like that should be enough for now, but with 100 Gbps core networks being demonstrated and 40 Gbps being deployed by long haul carriers, 100 Gbps GPON may not be that far in the future.

The mad dash for fiber optic deployment is having a beneficial effect of reducing the cost per Mbps for Ethernet WAN business users as well as residential broadband/television/telephone users. Just in time, too, as video and other high bandwidth application are sucking up packet speed as fast as it becomes available.

What is Ethernet WAN?

The most exciting development in business broadband since the plunging prices in T1 service is Ethernet WAN. Just what is Ethernet WAN and why should you be interested?

As you probably know, Ethernet has become the reigning standard in LANs or Local Area Networks. One might say that Ethernet is now ubiquitous. Every PC desktop and notebook computer comes with an RJ45 Ethernet jack. You may or may not get a CD ROM drive, probably won't get a floppy disc drive, and may never use the telephone modem jack anymore. But you will get an Ethernet connection. The speed of that connection has been creeping up from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps and, soon, 10 Gbps.

Now consider that your company's LAN runs at 1 Gbps. Your computer's Ethernet drop is likely running at 100 Mbps and your connection to the outside world is an astounding 1.5 Mbps. No, that's not a misprint. It's 1.5 Megabits/second not 1.5 Gigabits per second. That's the typical dedicated Internet bandwidth for many small and medium size companies. It represents the bandwidth of a T1 line, which is 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download speeds. That's less than 2% of the bandwidth your computer can support.

Now there are a couple of good reasons for this. First, There are usually many more computers on a company LAN than accessing outside resources at any given time. That means the LAN backbone needs much higher bandwidth than the outside or WAN (Wide Area Network) connection. Second, WAN bandwidth is orders of magnitude more expensive than LAN bandwidth. Only the T1 line price reductions of the last few years have made T1 connections affordable. Larger companies might bond multiple T1 lines together to get higher bandwidths. Or, take the next step to DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps.

What's changed the picture recently is an increasing demand for higher bandwidths brought on by the need to move larger files faster and the convergence of voice and data onto a single network. VoIP telephony gets rid of a completely separate telephone network, but taxes the LAN and WAN bandwidths of the data network. Video uploads and downloads can really swamp a WAN connection. So can overnight file backups for off-site storage.

The service that offers the best chance to relieve this network congestion is Ethernet WAN. It's just what you might guess. Ethernet extended off-premises or into the Wide Area Network. How wide? Metro Ethernet services a single town or metropolitan area. Long Haul Ethernet can easily span the country or the world. It's not at all unreasonable to connect two or more locations separated by thousands of miles and have the network behave like they are right next door. That's the beauty of Ethernet. There's no fancy protocol conversion required to transport it on legacy telephone company services, such as SONET OC3, OC12, OC48, etc. It comes to you on an RJ45 jack that plugs into your switch or router. If you can connect two buildings on your site, you can connect the New York office to the one in Los Angeles. This long haul service is also called Carrier Ethernet and there are many carriers offering it.

The other big advantage of Ethernet WAN service is that it is far cheaper than traditional fiber optic services on a Mbps basis. You can save as much as half the cost on a Fast Ethernet vs DS3 connection, a Gigabit Ethernet or GigE connection vs SONET OCx service, and even traditional T1 lines. Prices vary as does availability. Metro areas are the most highly connected, with many buildings already wired for Ethernet service by competitive carriers. If you are in one of these office buildings or within a mile or so, you could be getting a huge price break on your bandwidth needs right now. Even if your area isn't lit with fiber optic cable, Wireless Ethernet is becoming available at very attractive prices with quick installation times.

So, how do you cash in with Ethernet WAN services? You can check for fiber lit buildings near your location using our handy Ethernet Buildings Instant Locator. Whatever the results, talk it over with our Ethernet consultants and see what can be done to get you a better deal on voice and data network pricing.