T1, DS3, EoC or Fiber?

if you need more than a Gigabit of bandwidth, you’re down to a choice of fiber or fiber. But what about less demanding network needs? Say you need from 1 Mbps on up to 100 Mbps. Now you have a number of flavors of twisted pair copper and coaxial cable connectivity, as well as fiber optics. What’s the best way to go these days?

It’s Important and It Isn’t
What you choose for a bandwidth connection can seem like a critical decision. Relax. The fact is that as long as you choose dedicated Internet access or point to point private lines, you’ll be getting similar performance. What’s different will be the availability of each service and the price.

A Word About Dedicated vs Shared
I should point out that there is a tremendous difference between dedicated and shared bandwidth. You get a lot more bandwidth when you choose something like business cable broadband. But, that bandwidth has different upload and download speeds and you share what’s available with other users. That means your slice of the pie will vary all the time. Even so, when you get up to 10 or 100 times the download bandwidth at the same price, it’s a pretty enticing deal. If it works for your needs, that can be the smart way to go.

T1 vs EoC
T1 lines have traditionally been the entry point for business bandwidth. You get a rock solid 1.5 Mbps x 1.5 Mbps circuit with low latency, jitter and packet loss. Availability is excellent. Even prices have come down dramatically in recent years. The only weakness is that bandwidth level. While 1.5 Mbps used to be pretty decent broadband, it hardly qualifies anymore.

You can bond T1 lines together to create higher connection bandwidths. Two lines give you twice the bandwidth or 3 Mbps. Add more and you can ramp this up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That’s still plenty for many businesses, but it gets a bit pricey as you go up in bandwidth.

A competing technology is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This service uses the same multiple twisted pair copper, but bandwidths are usually higher. EoC starts about 3 Mbps and easily goes up to 10 or 15 Mbps. Maximum bandwidth capability goes down with distance from the originating office, but close-in you can get 25, 30 or 50 Mbps. Occasionally even higher.

How about the cost comparison between T1 and EoC. EoC is cheaper for the same quality of service. If available, you can often cut you bandwidth costs in half for symmetrical, dedicated private lines or Internet access. The higher the bandwidth, the better the deal.

T1 or EoC vs DS3
The traditional upgrade path from T1 used to be DS3. It’s a jump from 1.5 Mbps (or 12 Mbps bonded) up to 45 Mbps. In some cases you can get fractional DS3 that creates intermediate bandwidth options.

The thing about DS3 is that it really isn’t a completely copper solution. The connection to your equipment is a pair of coax cables. But, most of the distance to the carrier’s office is handled by SONET fiber, typically OC3. That means there needs to be some fiber in the area for DS3 to be available.

Today the upgrade path is from T1 to Ethernet over Copper. DS3 is a possibility, but you need to compare costs to see what is a better deal at your particular location. Any of these technologies will give you reliable high performing connections.

Ethernet over Fiber
Fiber optic service used to mean SONET, the legacy telecom standard. SONET is still available with service levels of OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48. It’s a rock solid service, but doesn’t upgrade quickly or easily and can be pricey by today’s standards.

The new gold standard is Ethernet over Fiber. Most new network services are designed around Ethernet for several reasons.

First, it’s a very easy interface to your local network. Ethernet connects to Ethernet seamlessly. It also enables additional services, such as layer 2 switched LAN to LAN connections.

Second, Carrier Ethernet has been designed to be easily scalable. Instead of a few fixed service levels, you can order just about any bandwidth increment. If you change your mind or have a greater need later, you can get a bandwidth increase with a simple phone call to you provider. In some cases, you can do it yourself via a Web browser.

Third is cost. Ethernet over Fiber is the core of many new service providers with regional, national and international footprints. Even the big legacy carriers are making the move from switched circuit to packet switching technology (Ethernet) because that’s the future. As a result, there are a lot more opportunities for Fiber Ethernet service options than traditional fiber services and greater competition. You’ll generally pay dramatically less for service at the 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps level. Even 10 Gbps is becoming readily available at affordable prices for more demanding needs.

Choosing Your Bandwidth Options
Like every other business decision, the best option is to gather as much information and quotes from as many service providers as possible. You can do this with one simple inquiry to get competitive bandwidth service quotes and expert recommendations.



Note: The humorous mousepad about needing more bandwidth, along with many other items in the same theme, is available from the Gigapacket Zazzle store.

Advantages of a Wireless Business Continuity Plan

Is it true for your business that all that stands between being up and running and dead in the water is one thin line? That line is your vital bandwidth connection. You may be one equipment failure or backhoe accident away from being unable to conduct business.

In the days of paper order pads and medical records, your telecom connections were important, but not necessarily critical. The telephone lines were probably more valuable than the broadband connection. That’s all flipped upside down now. Yes, telephone service is vital to most businesses, but so is that all-important connection to the cloud. Lose it and you’ve lost most of your office functions. After all, everything is in the cloud now. That includes your vital business data and the cloud-based apps that make your office run.

We know that wireline bandwidth connections are highly reliable... but not perfect. What do you do in those rare instances when your line goes dead? Wait it out? For simple equipment outages and line breaks, that might be the logical approach. Chances are that you’ll only lose half to one business day. How much is that worth to you?

If your losses from being down for 4 to 8 hours are minimal because the Internet or private line connection are more of a tool for your business rather than essential to keeping things running, then perhaps you’re fine. In the new model of cloud services, you’ll have more than the mere inconvenience of not being able to update inventory right away. Your entire operation will be dead in the water. For a high volume retail or distribution operation, the losses can mount up quickly. Hundreds? Thousands? How much per day will you lose?

Now, what if you could have an entire year’s worth of backup protection for less than one day’s losses without such protection? Would that be worth it?

Many businesses have multiple wireline services to protect against just such a disaster scenario. With bonded T1 or EoC (Ethernet over Copper), the loss of a single copper pair reduces the available bandwidth, but the connection keeps running. That offers some protection but doesn’t help if the situation was caused by the entire wire bundle being cut by a backhoe digging too near the cable right of way. It also doesn’t save you if the problem is an equipment failure on either end of the line.

This argues for dissimilar connections. One approach is to get your business up and running with copper wireline solutions while you are waiting for a much larger capacity fiber line to be installed. Once the fiber is provisioned, you keep the less expensive copper connection as a backup. There’s a good chance that the fiber and copper don’t share any common terminal equipment or run in the same conduits, preventing a single point failure of both. That’s not always the case, but it does offer some protection compared to having two of the exact same line services.

Another approach is to have a wireless bandwidth service for business continuity. The proliferation of cellular towers with high speed bandwidth channels now means that virtually every business location is in range of at least one and probably several tower sites.

Bandwidths have also greatly increased. Nearly universal 3G service offers speeds similar to T1 lines at 1 Mbps download. The more advanced 4G service is good for 5 to 12 Mbps download and 1 to 5 Mbps upload. That’s fast enough for most small to medium businesses, especially as a backup solution.

The beauty of commercial cellular-based wireless backup is that it is very affordable, with a cost less than half what you pay for a T1 line and installation measured in days rather than weeks or months. The equipment comes already set up to work with the strongest signal at your location. Most companies can install what looks like a WiFi router themselves and be running the same day the gear arrives. The router includes a port for your existing wireline service, T1 or EoC, and offers automatic failover in the event of a wire outage.

Another use for rapidly installed wireless bandwidth is to support newly opened or temporary business sites. This includes new store openings, temporary holiday store locations and construction sites. You can lease the service by the month without a long term commitment.

Do you have a situation where you need connectivity right now and can’t wait for the usual installation times? Are you feeling a bit insecure that you can lose substantial business if your connection fails for even a day? Are you digging out from a recent disaster and need private line or Internet service immediately? If so, you are an excellent candidate for wireless business continuity service. Get pricing and details to see how well this will work for your situation.

Cloud Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting

You have many options when it comes to hosting for email, websites and application software. Let’s take a look at the tradeoffs to consider what's involved in making a good decision for your particular business situation.

You might think that the best solution is to do it yourself. This is how many, many companies got their start on the Internet and how larger companies still roll. At a minimum, you need a computer that acts as the file server plus a bandwidth connection. In-house that connection can be your LAN. If you want remote access, you’ll need a telecom line to get you to the Internet or as a private line connection.

An advantage of in-house hosting is that you have easy access to the equipment and complete control over what gets done to each server and when. Security is enhanced when everything is done over the LAN with no outside connections.

The downside of being able to do everything yourself is having to do everything yourself. You need to buy the equipment, build the environmentally controlled data center, provide physical security, do all installations, repairs and maintenance, and keep a constant vigil in case something goes awry. As you know, there are always things going awry.

This is the reason many companies consider buying their hosting rather than being in the hosting business themselves. You can start by simply outsourcing the data center itself. Companies that provide public data center facilities offer colocation services. You colocate or move into a provider’s facility. That facility provides the equipment racks and cages, redundant electrical power, environmental control, fire suppression, physical security and easy connectivity to telecom bandwidth services. You provide the servers and other appliances, which you install or contract for the colo facility personnel to install.

Some colocation companies have gone beyond just providing space and hookups. You can now rent servers and the labor to install and maintain them. You are still responsible for what’s running on the server other than the operating system, but you’ll have a tech staff available 24/7 to monitor your equipment and effect repairs if necessary.

It’s only a small step from renting equipment at a colocation center to renting a hosting service and not having to worry about the equipment at all. Small companies and home-based businesses may be able to get by with shared hosting, where you share a single physical server with many other clients. You have no access to the common operating system, but can upload files for your business. Shared hosting has become a commodity service and only costs a few dollars a month now. However, the performance of your site can vary depending on how heavily others are loading the server.

To regain control, you’ll probably want to rent a dedicated or private server. This is a physical server that only runs your files. Most of the time you'll gain root access to the machine, something that you never get with shared hosting. If you need even more capacity, you can upgrade to a larger server with more memory, CPU cores and disk storage.

Cloud hosting goes a step further. Cloud services are virtualized, often under the control of VMware. The cloud facility consists of rack after rack of physical servers and hard drives. They are connected to the outside word by multiple fiber optic bandwidth services. The idea is to have enough physical resources to handle any conceivable customer request. You don’t rent a particular server in the cloud. You rent a virtual server. It behaves just like a physical server, but may be one of many virtual servers running on the same machine. It is also possible that your one virtual server may span multiple physical servers.

Both dedicated hosting services and cloud hosting services allow you to rent rather than own the IT resources you need. You also save the expense and staffing required to operate this equipment around the clock. This is referred to as trading CAPEX (Capital Expense) for OPEX (Operating Expense), or rent vs buy.

The cloud goes one step further in virtualizing all physical resources. Many clouds are self-healing, such that if one piece of equipment fails another is automatically substituted. Cloud resources are also rapidly scalable. You typically have a web-based control panel that you use to provision (order) more or fewer resources. Extra servers can be added in minutes rather than days or longer. They can also be released when they are no longer needed so you aren’t paying for unneeded resources.

Are you suspicious that owning and running your own IT data center resources may be costing you more that you really need to be paying? You’re probably right. Which solution is the right one is a decision specific to your company. Get more information and pricing for cloud hosting vs dedicated hosting services to compare with what you are doing now.



Note: Photo of data center equipment courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.