Business Broadband Options in Rural Areas

By: John Shepler

Companies lucky enough to be located at the heart of metropolitan business districts are in an enviable position when it comes to broadband Internet access. There are multitude of service providers that can connect you via cable, twisted pair copper, fiber or wireless links. Out in the country… not so much.

Businesses located in rural areas may feel starved for connectivity. Unlike their city counterparts, they don’t have service providers fawning over them with competitive offers. That doesn’t mean that there are no broadband options. Only that the low population density makes marketing to the rural markets less compelling than in cities with commercial customers every few steps down the block.

Now you don’t have to depend on sales people from telecom carriers finding you in out of the way places. You can have instant access to a myriad of bandwidth services that will connect to your business location, regardless of where you are. The options vary, of course, by location. So let’s take a look of what probably is and is not available to you away from metro areas.

Two services that are hard to come by beyond the city limits are cable and fiber. Business cable piggybacks on the cable television systems licensed by each community. This is a high density business that needs customers every hundred feet or so in order to be profitable. Business cable broadband works just like the consumer version. It offers fairly high asymmetrical shared bandwidth at a lower monthly fee than just about anything else. Unfortunately, the infrastructure doesn’t extend much beyond subdivisions on the edge of town. If your business is located near a growing retail and residential area, the cable may now pass your location and give you access to broadband as well as television and telephone service via cable.

Fiber is also a metro service, although that is changing a bit. Fiber optic connections are inherently high capacity and insensitive to distance. Most of the fiber terminates at telecom offices in town. Yes, fiber runs right next to railroad tracks and country roads, but it keeps going to the next town. Without a place to connect, you can’t get access.

What’s changing is that fiber is being run now to cellular towers in support of 4G LTE wireless broadband. This backhaul connectivity has traditionally been handled by T1 lines. 4G speeds and volume are so high that T1s have hit their limits. Fiber to the tower is expanding rapidly. That means that if you are close to where the fiber is being dropped off, it may be practical to run a drop to your business. If so, you’ll have all the bandwidth you can possible use for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of T1, it’s the long distance capability of T1 line service that made it attractive for remotely located cell towers in the first place. The technology was designed to connect over a wide area from the central office and is available just about anywhere you can get landline phone service. The cost of T1 lines has been falling rapidly, even in rural areas. That means a service that was unaffordable a few years ago can make sense now. You should also know that T1 lines can be bonded to make higher capacity circuits. These range from 3 Mbps on up to 10 or 12 Mbps.

Ethernet over Copper service isn’t often available out of town, although Ethernet can also be carried on T1 lines. This is called Ethernet over DS1 or EoDS1. It offers the advantage of being able to support Ethernet services like E-Line and E-LAN and is often lower in cost than equivalent T1 and bonded T1 services.

One way to get around the lack of wiring to rural areas is to bypass the wires completely. Wireless broadband in the form of 3G and 4G cellular are readily available in country locations. Special business grades of cellular broadband are available that are highly reliable and can drive your network directly. The cost is very attractive. It’s on the order of cable broadband if it was available.

If you can’t get cellular broadband because of too few bars of signal, consider satellite. Satellite broadband has improved greatly and now offers 4G bandwidths at a reasonable cost. Satellite doesn’t work well for VoIP or video conferencing because of the long time delays or latency caused by having to send the signal tens of thousands of miles up and down to the satellite in geostationary orbit. It may work just fine, though, for web access, email and even credit card verification. Satellite signals penetrate where other broadband doesn’t reach since they come from above. They require only a clear view of the southern sky and electrical power to run the satellite receiver.

Is your rural business hurting because you are stuck with dial-up Internet or no access at all? Do you have broadband now but want to see what other options are available? Learn what broadband services and pricing are available for your business location now.


Note: Photo of country road courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

EoDS1 Extends Ethernet over Copper Distance

Demand for Ethernet over Copper has outstripped its availability. Some of this is because
EoC termination equipment is not available yet in all central offices. More is caused by simple distance limitations. What can be done to make Carrier Ethernet available to all the businesses that want it?

MegaPath, a major competitive carrier, has an answer. It’s called EoDS1 or Ethernet over DS1. Now, just what is EoDS1 and how does it differ from EoC?

Both EoC and EoDS1 are copper wireline services. Both are provisioned over ordinary twisted pair telco wiring. This is the same copper bundle that brings in multi-line telephone service. Both use multiple bonded pairs to increase bandwidth. However, one has distance limitations and the other doesn’t. Why is that?

It has to do with the technology that sends the digital signals down the line. Ethernet over Copper is seen as a big improvement over T1 lines because bandwidth options go far beyond the 1.5 Mbps that T1 offers. Typical entry level for EoC is 3 Mbps. Many companies are opting for 10 Mbps now. High bandwidth users can get 20, 30, 45, 60 and even 100 Mbps using the copper plant that is already installed to their business. Prior to Ethernet over Copper, companies that needed higher bandwidths had to bring in fiber or do without.

Ethernet over Copper has changed all that for many businesses, especially those in dense metropolitan areas where central offices are plentiful and nearby. The technical issue is that high speed digital signals degrade rapidly with distance. You can only send data so fast on a twisted pair of small diameter copper wires buried in the ground. EoC gets around this to some extent by using multiple pairs to divvy up the datastream so that each pair can run at a slower speed. When added together at the far end, you can get a lot of bandwidth out of 4 or 8 pairs. Even so, the closer you are to the central office that terminates the wiring from your location, the more bandwidth options will be available.

So why does EoDS1 not suffer from these same limitations? Remember the venerable T1 line running along at 1.5 Mbps? DS1 or Digital Signal level 1 is the definition of the way the data is formatted on a T1 line. Sometimes the terms DS1 and T1 are used interchangeably.

You know that T1 lines and their DS1 signals can be connected miles from the central office. In fact, there aren’t very many locations even out in the boonies that don’t qualify for T1 line service. Until recently, it was the preferred backhaul connectivity for cell phone towers. It’s not just the lower line speed that makes this possible. T1 was developed by the telephone companies to interconnect their own switching centers. These can be long distances apart, so a signal regenerator was designed to boost the T1 signal every 6,000 feet or so. Multiple regenerators can be used on one line, greatly extending the transmission distance.

Here’s something else you should know about T1 lines. They can be pair-bonded, just like EoC, to increase the delivered bandwidth. Bond two T1 lines together and you get a 3 Mbps service. Bond 8 T1 lines to get 12 Mbps, pretty much the maximum speed available using multiple T1 lines.

As you might suspect, EoDS1 is nothing more than Ethernet over T1 lines. In many cases, you can order bonded T1 or EoDS1 and get the same bandwidth result. So why not just stick with T1?

The reason is Ethernet services. Your local area networks run the Ethernet protocol. You can interconnect LANs at multiple locations with T1 lines by going through protocol conversions to and from Ethernet. If you keep everything in the Ethernet protocol, the transmission process is more efficient and you have the option to link your LANs at the layer 2 level. This means that ordinary Ethernet switches can be used to route traffic on what is essentially one large Ethernet network.

Are you considering new Carrier Ethernet service or wish to expand your multi-location links to include places where EoC isn’t available yet? If so, take a closer look at the cost and benefit of Ethernet over DS1 bandwidth service.