Latest Evidence Of An Ethernet Juggernaut

There’s an overwhelming force building. If it hasn’t gotten to you yet, it will soon. This force looks to redefine the telecommunications industry in a way that will fundamentally alter our communications networks from a telegraphy and telephony orientation to a digital packet orientation. After nearly a couple centuries of evolution, we’re now looking at a revolution that’s arisen in a couple of decades. That revolution is Ethernet and it’s gaining speed while we watch.

The acceleration of Ethernet services into traditional metropolitan and long distance telecom networks points out that the digital network, particularly the local area network, has become the center of communications activity. Worldwide traffic was primarily telephone calls until recently. Actual voice conversations are now the small part of the traffic. Data file transfers and video are now the big network activities. In fact, video has taken over the Internet and is driving the deployment of more and faster content delivery networks (CDN) to offload high definition video programming from the Internet.

Think about how you communicate. The office desk phone used to be the primary tool for business communications. “Data” was on paper and the interoffice mail was the network that moved it around. Today, you are as likely to use email, text messages and social media as you are to pick the phone and dial somebody. Data is now on hard drives and electronic data networks move it around. Even cell phones are still called “phones” out of tradition. Texting, Tweeting, emailing and posting are used as much or more than the voice side of the system. Wireless voice channels have been established technology for years. All the scrambling and innovation is focused on building more and faster data channels.

The switchover of the worldwide electronic communications network from telegraphy to telephony to computer data networking has taken place in steps with one methodology gradually yielding to another. Most long distance computer links use trunk lines originally designed to transport telephone calls digitally. The process of using analog phone lines to carry digital signals, called “dial-up,” ran out of capacity quickly at less than 100 Kbps. Digital telephone trunks, known as T1 lines, DS3, and SONET fiber optic services, start at 1.5 Mbps on the low end and go up to 100 Gbps on the very high end.

This system works, but the translation of loading data packets into telephone channels and then back again costs in efficiency and a limitation of network services. Since nearly every LAN is now running Ethernet, the most sensible change is to re-work the metro and long haul networks to also use Ethernet. You can then optimize for one protocol from end to end.

One technology shift that has enabled long distance or “Carrier” Ethernet is the industry shift from the original collision domains to switched Ethernet. This change doubled the speed of the links, since nodes can transmit and receive at the same time. More importantly, there is no need to constrain the length of the network to ensure detection of colliding packets. Nearly all LANs now use switches in place of hubs as a matter of course. This adds the possibility of running very long connections between switches, say 1,000 miles or more, and still create networks that behave like one large LAN.

Some of the latest announcements in this field are that a major carrier, Windstream, is now offering a product called Carrier Switched Ethernet. This is a wholesale bandwidth service that allows other carriers access to Windstream’s 980 network exchanges. Using E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interfaces greatly expands the service footprint of any network to include the networks of other service providers. Another announcement is that MegaPath, a major North American network service provider, has been building out its Ethernet over Copper (EoC) capability so that it is now the largest EoC provider in the country with 19 major markets serving millions of businesses at speeds up to 45 Mbps. That’s significant because it means you can now get last mile Ethernet connections over twisted pair copper lines, replacing bonded T1 lines and DS3 bandwidth.

The triple threat of Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber and Ethernet Network to Network Interfaces creates the opportunity to go “all Ethernet” in connecting multiple business location and dedicated access to the Internet. There are big cost savings available with this new technology, as well as multi-point mesh network services that were hard to implement previously. Could your company benefit from these Ethernet services? Check Carrier Ethernet pricing, availability and features and compare with what you are using now.

Texas Fiber Optic Network Expansion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

Windstream’s Enterprise Level Managed Security

The larger your organization, the more important network security becomes. You have more assets to protect, there are more nodes where something hostile can enter, the consequences affect more users, and you may be under stricter scrutiny from regulating agencies. Examples are HIPAA in the medical field and PCI DSS for financial transactions.

The simplistic firewall solutions that work fine for individuals, small organizations and even some medium size companies are just not sized for organizations with hundreds or thousands of users. They may not be robust enough to meet the threats, either. While some large organizations build an in-house security staff and effectively manage their own network security, others are finding that buying a managed security service is more cost effective.

Managed security for large and enterprise level organizations is a specialty of Windstream. Known as a provider of broadband Internet, phone services and digital television with millions of customers in 23 states, Windstream Communications also offers a wide range of IP-based voice and data services to business and government agencies. They’ve got the scale and expertise to meet the expectations of larger companies. Their newly expanded managed security service for enterprise businesses is well worth a look if your operation has outgrown its network security solution or if you are considering options to cut expenses.

Windstream’s security solution is fully managed and monitored around the clock. They’ve partnered with Fortinet, an acknowledged leader in unified threat management, to offer a highly robust security service. Since Windstream can now provide both the WAN bandwidth and security, they are in a prime position to be able to protect your organization from network intruders.

What do you get with Windstream managed network security? It’s a suite of service that include firewalls, antivirus protection and intrusion detection. Application intelligence detects and prevents malicious traffic gaining network access. You’ll have protection against the nearly continuous onslaught of viruses, worms and phishing attacks that are a fact of life with computer networking. Site to site Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections are IPSec encrypted. Remote access VPN and remote desktop options are available. Secure WiFi options are also available, as more and more companies are including wireless access points. Web content filtering is also included to protect employees from objectionable Web content.

Do you have a need to meet or exceed industry compliance standards such as HIPAA and PCI DSS? Windstream has a managed solution that will ease the burden of this.

If your organization has a need for large scale and robust network security and you like to let an expert service provider hand this for you, or you just want to see if managed security makes more economic sense than doing it in-house, then you should take a few minutes to put in a request for pricing and consultation from our Telarus consultants. It costs you nothing and could be a big money saver as well as offering peace of mind.