Point to Point Fiber Optic Connections

By: John Shepler

Say you want to link two business locations securely and with medium to high bandwidth. Do you use the Internet for this or…

The Advantage of Private Lines
The Internet has two big advantages: It goes almost everywhere on Earth and access is relatively cheap. Unfortunately, the Public Internet also has a couple of big limitations: Performance is iffy and security is genuine worry.

What’s better? Private lines. Particularly, dedicated point to point private lines. They’re called private because they really are.

Security is ratcheted up orders of magnitude because it’s really hard to hack into something where you have no access. Remember the old spy shows where someone surreptitiously taps into a phone line by connecting directly to the wires? That’s what it takes to get into a private line. You need access to the physical connections themselves. There’s none of this packet snooping on an Internet connection or, worse, over WiFi.

Want to make it even harder to get into your network? Go with fiber optics instead of wires. Even harder? Encrypt your data too. That’ll stop the little snoops in their tracks. Now they’ve got to get physically into your connection somewhere along the line and then break your encryption before they get caught. Good luck with that.

Security is Great. How About Performance?
You really can’t improve over private line performance unless you actually own the network from end to end. That’s actually a possibility. Of course, your LAN is limited to your building or campus. You’ll likely not be able to afford to string wires or trench fiber across town to link separate locations. But you may very well be able to lease dark fiber. If you install your own termination equipment, you pretty much have control over the entire link.

Most of us don’t need to go to that extent. We can lease point to point private line connections at just about any bandwidth we need. As long as you acquire enough bandwidth, network congestion should never be a problem. Packet loss, jitter and latency are minimized with dedicated private lines. There’s no traffic on the link other than yours.

You won’t get that performance consistently on the Internet. The Internet was designed to be robust in the face of line cuts and equipment failure. That’s a great goal, except you may find that your packets take varying routes even between two fixed end points. The packets will almost always get there with TCP/IP… eventually. That’s why real-time applications like VoIP telephone and video conferencing perform much better over private lines.

What Private Line Services are Available?
The two big contenders are SONET and Carrier Ethernet over Fiber. Yes, you can still get T1 lines and they work great. Bandwidth is a limitation, however, T1 is 1.5 Mbps. Bonding T1 lines will get you up to 10 or 12 Mbps, but that’s it. Even at 10 Mbps, fiber is a better deal if available. Fiber bandwidth start at around 10 Mbps and go up to at least 10 Gbps in most areas. For multiple locations or international connections, MPLS networks are an excellent choice.

About SONET Fiber Optic Bandwidth
SONET is the original switched circuit technology used for fiber optic transmissions. It’s implemented on a pair of fibers with a ring topology. That’s for reliability. If one fiber gets cut, the other picks up the load within 50 mSec and keeps going.

SONET is at the core of many networks, especially the legacy telco networks. The most basic service available is OC-3 at 155 Mbps. Other popular levels are OC-12 at 622 Mbps and OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps. Even T-Carrier DS3 service at 45 Mbps that is delivered on coaxial cables travels most of the way multiplexed over OC-3 fiber service.

SONET is a very mature and reliable technology. It’s the way most companies moved into fiber optic bandwidth when copper wireline just couldn’t cut it anymore. Prices have dropped dramatically over the last few years. Even so, there is a more flexible and cost effective solution available today. That is Carrier Ethernet.

Ethernet over Fiber Bandwidth Advantages
If you are wondering why Ethernet over Fiber is taking over the world, you need look no further than you own LAN. Ethernet is the dominant, pretty much universal, protocol used for computer networks. Electronic communications once was analog phone calls. Now the lion’s share of the traffic is digital data and the majority of that is IP video.

Carrier Ethernet, also called Ethernet over Fiber or EoF, is an extension of the LAN standards to make them work over long distances on common carriers. Ethernet has the advantage of directly interfacing to LANs with no protocol conversions required. Unlike SONET, it was designed to be highly scalable. You can get just about any bandwidth you want and upgrade or downgrade it quickly and easily.

Ethernet is also generally less expensive, Mbps per Mbps, than SONET or even the lower speed wireline services. Nearly all businesses can afford 10 Mbps EoF. Most go for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. Both GigE and 10 GigE are popular with more demanding applications and larger companies.

How do MPLS Networks Provide Private Lines?
MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks are Wide Area Networks that are based on a propriety routing technology called label switching. It’s unique to these networks and hard to hack. That’s why MPLS is also known as MPLS VPN or virtually private networking.

Yes, MPLS is a multi-tenant network and not strictly a private line. However, MPLS networks serve a limited number of paying customers and are carefully managed to ensure that each customer has the resources committed to it at all times. You often even have the advantage or “burst” or use more resources than you have committed to as long as excess capacity is available.

Why MPLS? As large private networks, MPLS offers the opportunity to connect many locations at a lower cost than using multiple private lines. The cost advantage is such that it’s often better to use MPLS rather than dedicated private lines for even two internationally separated locations.

Your Best Bandwidth Option
Which bandwidth solution is right for your business? Before you choose, compare performance commitments and prices for SONET, Ethernet over Fiber and MPLS private line solutions


Note: Products with the point to point fiber laser data light burst design shown on this page, along with many other computer and networking themes, are available through the Gigapacket Tech Gifts Store.

Alternative Rural Broadband Solution

Anyone who lives or works out in the boonies faces the frustration of limited bandwidth options. All of the good stuff is in town. Well, maybe not all. There is a way that many rural broadband users can stay connected without breaking the bank or waiting for a national buildout that could take years.

Does this involve DSL or Cable broadband? Not much chance of that. Neither the telephone companies nor the cable companies venture far from the city limits with their digital services. Yes, you can get analog phone service anywhere thanks to a longstanding government policy of universal telephone service. These lines will support dial-up Internet access at 56 Kbps max speed. Actually, there are still a lot of people on dial-up simply because they don’t need much more than email and occasional web browsing. If you are still using dial-up, how would you like much faster broadband service for the same price or less?

That sounds like a pretty tall order, but there really is such a solution. It’s available thanks to the massive nationwide construction of the cellular phone network. Originally for voice only, broadband data transmission has been added to nearly all the cell towers. If all you do is talk on a cell phone, you may be unaware that broadband Internet is streaming from the same towers. All you need is a device to access it.

What I’m suggesting is using wireless 3G Internet as your rural broadband solution. It’s available now, it’s priced at about the same level as DSL or cable broadband services, and it penetrates many rural areas. We’ve become so accustomed to thinking of Internet access through wires, that it’s easy to overlook wireless solutions.

So, can you use your cell phone out in the country where you’d like to be able to also use your computer? Yes? Then you’re probably in luck. Granted, voice service may be available in dead spots for broadband. It’s not a sure indicator that making phone calls means that high speed Internet will also work. The more bars, the better. Sometimes you can connect for data, but at a much lower 2G speed that is more like dial-up. You need a decent signal to support 3G broadband speeds.

Those with smartphones can tell pretty quickly how well they can get broadband service where they want to. There are apps for the iPhone and Android models that run speed tests on your data service and tell you how fast your download and upload speeds are. If you are getting 1 Mbps or better, you’re doing well.

Even faster speeds are available with 4G cellular broadband services. Many towers have been upgraded to support the high speed 4G LTE services that can be 10x the speed of 3G. This is pretty spotty to date. Some areas have excellent 4G service. Others have none at all.

How do you connect? One way is to get a tethering plan for your smartphone and use that to power your desktop, laptop and tablet devices. This saves you the cost of a separate service, but you’ll generally have to commit to the largest and most expensive data plans to get the tethering options.

Another option is to go with a no contract service and a USB modem or mobile hotspot. These plans start at $9.99 a month for a small 200 MB plan. That’s half what you pay for a lot of dial-up and it runs faster. It’s good enough for email and occasional surfing. Heavier users can trade up to larger plans of 500 MB, 1 GB or 5GB.

One thing you need to know about cellular plans is that they aren’t really suitable for streaming movies or download large software updates. There just isn’t enough capacity in the system to handle this kind of demand on the airwaves. Consequently, you will be limited to a maximum of 5 GB or so for the month as compared to 250 GB for a popular cable broadband service.

The other thing to know is that even 3G coverage isn’t universal. Way out in the boonies there really is no service for any type of cellular service. However, there are a lot more towers than there used to be and good coverage in exurb areas around major cities. You need to check the coverage maps for any service you intend to purchase to make sure there is solid 3G or 4G signal where you want to have broadband.

Are you interested in a no contract 3G broadband service with plans starting at $9.99 a month? See if this option can provide your connection needs for a rural broadband solution.

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.

Long Range Ethernet Goes Beyond The LAN

Ethernet has grown from its inception in the 1980s to become the dominant Local Area Network (LAN) protocol. The big technical advance in this decade is the rise of Ethernet as a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) protocol of choice. It’s likely that when this process is complete it will be Ethernet as far as the eye can see. What is it that is driving this move to Ethernet everywhere and what advantages does it offer for your business?

What’s solidified Ethernet in the LAN for now and the foreseeable future is economy of scale. Nearly every piece of networking gear you can buy has standard copper or fiber Ethernet connectors. The most popular of these, of course, is the RJ-45 connector. You recognize it immediately without even having to look at the legends near the connector or any equipment manuals. Within the organization, everything plugs into Ethernet sockets to connect to the network.

The big disconnect occurs when you want your traffic to leave the confines of your building or campus. You might find a contractor who will interconnect businesses within an office or industrial park, but that’s about as far as you can install private network cable. You might get a little farther with optical line of sight or microwave wireless transmissions. However, if you want to be able to connect to the Internet or establish a private network around town or across the country, you need to use a telecom carrier.

The first carriers were local telephone companies. Today’s ILECs or Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers offer far more than telephone service. They have twisted pair copper bundles running to every home and business. They also generally have fiber optic cabling for their own use and to lease to major businesses. These services have their own unique protocols invented by the telephone industry to transport phone calls. Copper data transmissions use T-Carrier, such as T1 or T3. Fiber optic transmissions use SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standards, such as OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48.

How do you connect an Ethernet protocol network to a T-Carrier or SONET protocol carrier? Very carefully! You need what’s called a protocol converter. This is generally in the form of a plug-in module for your router. The conversion process changes the signals and timing of one protocol to another so that they can exchange digital data.

This conversion process has worked well for decades, so why change it? The reasons are efficiency, new services and cost.

What’s happened is that new competitive carriers have emerged. These carriers don’t have the legacy of telephone company standards to support and have embraced IP networking for their regional and nationwide fiber optic networks. Since your network runs Ethernet and their network runs Ethernet, it seems logical to interconnect them via Ethernet.

The standardization of what’s called Carrier Ethernet by the industry standards group, Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), has opened the door to handing off network traffic from business to carrier and between carriers within the Ethernet protocol. Getting rid of the conversions makes the process more efficient. More importantly, it has made possible services that you can’t get on the old telco networks. Notably, these are E-Line or Ethernet Line service and E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. The difference is that E-Line connects two locations and E-LAN can connect multiple locations in a mesh network.

By keeping everything as Ethernet, it is now possible to bridge LANs at two or more locations at the layer 2 level using Ethernet switches. Essentially, you take all these individual LANs and join them to form one much larger corporate LAN.

Another advantage of using Carrier Ethernet to transport your traffic is that it was designed from the beginning to be easily scalable in much finer increments than the telco protocols. You install a port, say 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10 GigE, that sets the maximum bandwidth of your connection. However, you don’t need to order the highest speed that the circuit will support you can start off at a quarter or half of that and then increase your bandwidth when needed. Often, all that is needed is a call to your Ethernet service provider. The change can be implemented in hours or days because there are no equipment swaps that need to be made.

Finally, Carrier Ethernet has a significant cost advantage compared to bonded T1, T3 (DS3) bandwidth and SONET services. On a per-Mbps basis, Ethernet often costs just half of what you pay for the older technologies. That mean you can save money for the company on your next telecom contract or double your bandwidth for the same budget.

Does long range Ethernet meet your needs? A good way to find out is to get competitive quotes for both traditional bandwidth and Carrier Ethernetservices and compare cost and features.

Will You Save With Fractional Line Services?

If you need and want professional-grade telecom line services but don’t need the full line rates, can you save by ordering fractional rates? Conventional wisdom says yes. Reality may be different.

The idea behind fractional bandwidth is that it ought to be cheaper to buy less than the full line rated bandwidth. For instance, the smallest line service you can generally get with dedicated bandwidth and a service level agreement is the T1 line. These used to be very expensive and cost over $1,000 even in metro areas. At the same time, bandwidth demands in many smaller companies weren’t all that high. Something like 500 or 750 Kbps was plenty for email and text file transfers. Seemed a shame to have to pay for 1.5 Mbps and not make full use of it.

That’s where the idea of fractional T1 lines came from. If you don’t need and can’t afford 1.5 Mbps, then why not order a T1 line but only have it deliver a fraction of the full bandwidth? There should be a cost savings, since the service provider didn’t need as large a backbone network to serve many customers who are only running fractional T1 lines.

Well, yes and no. It’s true that Internet access has a port cost of so much per Mbps. But what about point to point dedicated lines? Is there really any savings to throttling back a line that’s used for only one customer? Plus there is the basic cost of the line itself. A T1 line runs synchronously at 1.544 Mbps whether it is carrying any traffic or not. That’s the basic technology. The pipe, if you will, has a certain diameter regardless of how much is flowing through it.

At any rate, many telecom service providers have offered fractional T1 lines and fractional DS3 service to accommodate customers who can’t pony up the cost of full line speed. This may have as much to do with marketing as anything else. The cost has never been scaled as much as the fraction of maximum rate. In other words, you can order a half-speed fractional T1 line but pay three-fourths or more of the price for a full T1 line.

Now it’s becoming more expensive in some areas to get fractional line speeds as it is to simply order a full T1 line. Why? It’s because a T1 line is a standard product and the fractional service is a special order that needs additional engineering. In that case, you might as well order the full T1 line and just not use all the capacity. It’s cheaper.

Traditional switched circuit telecom services such as T1 lines, DS3 connections, OC3 fiber optic service and the like never were very scalable. They were designed as a technology family with large standard increments between the service levels. But there is a newer service that may be just what you are look for in the way of bandwidth scalability. That’s Carrier Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet, also called Metro Ethernet, was designed from the beginning to be highly scalable. There are standard network speeds, such as 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps, but there are a plethora of in-between bandwidth levels available. Popular Ethernet service levels are 2 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps and above.

What’s important with Ethernet is to have a port installed that can handle the maximum speed you expect to want. Then buy just the bandwidth you need right now and upgrade later. If you’ve got the right port in place, you can often upgrade your bandwidth quickly and easily with just a phone call to your service provider.

Are you looking to get just the bandwidth you need and not pay extra for unused capacity? Compare pricing for fractional T1, DS3 and OC3 services with Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber and see what is most cost effective for your applications. Prices will vary with location, so you need a specific quote for your business address.



Note: Image of fraction dice courtesy of Arjan on Wikimedia Commons.

Gaining Ethernet Internet Access

You’ve no doubt heard by now that access to the Internet for business locations offers cost and bandwidth advantages over traditional telecom connections. So, how do you gain Ethernet Internet access? That’s easy. Just use this handy Ethernet Internet Finder.



You’ll likely find that there are a number of options for Ethernet Internet service, although not all of them are available at every business address. Note that this is a business service only. If you need residential or home office broadband, try “Can I Get DSL?” for DSL, cable, satellite, wireless 4G, and fiber to the home.

Your least expensive option for Ethernet Internet access is probably Ethernet over Copper, where available. That’s generally in metropolitan and suburban areas with dense populations. EoC, as it is called, offers bandwidths typically from 3 to 20 Mbps. You’ll pay about as much for a 3 Mbps Ethernet connection as you’d pay for a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. A very popular service is 10 Mbps Ethernet access, which is the standard Ethernet network speed.

Of course, local area network bandwidth has increased dramatically since Ethernet was first introduced. Most LANs are now operating at the Fast Ethernet speed of 100 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbps. Would you be surprised to know that Ethernet WAN connections are also available at 100 and 1000 Mbps? That includes dedicated broadband Internet access with Ethernet in the first mile. These services require a fiber optic connection over SONET or native IP network.

Even if your business is located a bit beyond the service footprint for EoC or fiber optic delivery, it may still be possible for you to get Ethernet over DS1. Bonding T1 lines together may give you the Ethernet bandwidth you need at a reasonable price.

Does Ethernet Internet Access offer advantages for your business? Use the Ethernet Internet Finder to run a quick check and see.

Speed of Metro Ethernet Zooming

What’s faster than a speeding bullet? Superman.

What’s faster than conventional business bandwidth solutions, such as T1 and DS3, and also cheaper? Metro Ethernet.

What’s new and in demand at an incredible rate of adoption? Sorry Superman, it’s Metro Ethernet.

Metro Ethernet is the WAN connection service that’s a real triple threat. Its speed may be one or two orders of magnitude above what you have now. It’s spreading like wildfire among business users. It’s generally cheaper per Mbps than your other bandwidth options, even the venerable T1 lines.

But can it leap tall buildings in a single bound? Your data certainly will. It will zoom in and out of your building at megabit to gigabit rates. That’s another advantage of Metro Ethernet - it’s scalable. You can start with enough bandwidth to meet your current needs and perhaps a little extra margin. When business picks up and your WAN connection becomes a bottleneck, you call up your service provider and ask them to increase your bandwidth.

Scalable bandwidth isn’t a characteristic of all network connections. Often if you want a higher service bandwidth, you need to go through a lengthly order and provisioning process. Metro Ethernet is designed with scalability built-in. The only real limitation is whether you have a fiber optic connection or use bonded copper pair.

Copper pair bonding is desirable for a lot of businesses because it frees them from the limitation of the single T1 line at 1.5 Mbps and allows them to move up to 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps standard Ethernet speed and even the equivalent of DS3 at 45 Mbps. All of these service levels are available over twisted pair copper, as long as you are reasonably close to the carrier’s facilities. In metro areas where you’ll find Metro Ethernet, that’s often the case.

Of course, fiber optic service to your building gives you a much larger range of service options. You can easily get 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet, and often even 10 Gbps Ethernet.

Even more impressive than the line speeds are the lease rates for Metro Ethernet services. Don’t drop your coffee cup if you are quoted a rate that’s just a fraction of what you are paying now for traditional telecom services. It’s for real. Competitive carriers are looking to capture their share of the business bandwidth market and you can get some excellent deals on 1 to 5 year contracts. Recently I’ve seen Metro Ethernet services that offer more bandwidth for less cost than even T1 lines.

Would your company benefit from switching to Metro Ethernet or other Carrier Ethernet services? Find out by checking availability and pricing for Metro Ethernet service now.

Bandwidth Stimulus For The Boonies

Things are changing out there among the amber waves of grain. Rural America is about to get plugged-into the Internet in a big way. This is the goal of the new broadband stimulus program that has $7.2 Billion to spread among the states on programs that speed up our access to the Internet.

Well it's high time for high speed. At a time when the South Koreans have announced plans to provide Gigabit broadband connections to their citizens, too many Americans go begging for 1/1000 of that. It's really two problems in one. First, sparsely populated areas have few Internet options compared to metropolitan areas. Second, broadband is pretty pricey and out of the range of many low income budgets.

It's not that rural America has NO Internet service. Dial-up Internet at a maximum of 56 Kbps can be had most anywhere there is a telephone. Thanks to universal telephone initiatives of past administrations, standard telephone service really is available just about everywhere. Prices of dial-up access have matured to where you can get a service such as NetZero HiSpeed for under $10 a month. That includes an accelerator to improve Web page download times.

Who still wants dial-up? You may be surprised at how many people really don't live their lives on the Internet. For them, checking email once or twice a day and being able to browse the news headlines or do a Google search for information is all they really want. Others may feel frustrated by slow loading multimedia content sites and little access to online video, but ten bucks a month is all they've got. The computer they picked up second hand may not be up to high bandwidth applications anyway.

You actually can get broadband just about anywhere you live. How? The same way you get TV - by satellite. HughesNet and Wild Blue satellite broadband Internet use a separate dish with a transmitter mounted on the feed so that you can both upload and download from the "bird" without having to use a phone line. Speeds are similar to DSL levels, from 512 Kbps to 1.6 Mbps. But prices from $55 to $80 a month plus equipment purchase or rental are well above most DSL services. With limited satellite capacity, fair use policies will cause the provider to cut your bandwidth if you do an excessive amount of uploading or downloading. There is also a half-second delay called latency that makes satellite unsuitable for activities needing instant response or VoIP telephony.

Businesses in rural areas can order T1 lines or bonded T1 lines to get increments of 1.5 Mbps dedicated bandwidth that comes with a service level agreement. Since T1 is provisioned over standard telephone wiring and can be boosted with regenerators, it is available in most business locations that have phone service. T1 is priced at business, not consumer, levels and even bonded lines are limited to 10 to 12 Mbps.

So what with the new stimulus plan do to change the bandwidth / pricing situation? The intent is to build out line and wireless services to cover as many people as possible with as much bandwidth as possible, while making higher bandwidths affordable in rural and low income metropolitan areas.

Why focus on broadband? The fact is that the Internet is to this century what other utilities such as electricity, telephone, and roads were to the development of the 20th century. Most jobs now involve some computer usage. We search online instead of running down to the library for research. More and more shopping is done on websites every year. If you are looking for a job, you'll likely search and post your resume online. Email messages have pretty much replaced personal letters. Most business now have an online presence and those that don't are few and far between.

The reality is that high speed Internet access, perhaps even to the Gbps level, is an enabler of higher productivity and commercial growth as well as personal potential. The stimulus package will make an impact over the next couple of years to advance our capabilities, but it will likely be just a good boost to an already expanding industry. Hopefully the infrastructure installed during this period will be enhanced and expanded in the future as what we consider high bandwidth today becomes low bandwidth by tomorrow's standards.

Burstable Bandwidth Offers Flexibility

You're used to buying WAN bandwidth to support voice and data services. For most companies, that's dedicated service. But there's another option you should know about that can save you money. It's called burstable bandwidth.

Let's look at business broadband service. DS3 dedicated Internet access gives you a solid 45 Mbps of bandwidth in both the download and upload direction. That full capacity is available at all times. If you want to transmit a large image or backup your files to remote storage you max out at 45 Mbps. When you are not using the full capacity of the line, it simply idles waiting for more packets.

With the recent price reductions in DS3 bandwidth, most medium to large size companies will simply order DS3, Fast Ethernet, or higher levels of fiber optic line service. But smaller companies with only occasional needs for large amounts of bandwidth are in a pickle. Do they order a full DS3 to accommodate their peak needs? Or do they go with a fractional DS3 service that costs less but is limited to speeds much less than 45 Mbps?

The compromise solution is burstable DS3. You order a line with the capacity to accomodate the full 45 Mbps of dedicated DS3 Internet access. But you only pay for a fraction of that amount, say 5, 10 or 20 Mbps. As long as you stay under your committed rate, you pay just the cost of the fractional DS3 service. But for those times when you need to transfer large amounts of data such as a video stream, software package download or engineering dataset, the line will run up to its full capacity.

Dedicated services are sold on a flat lease charge regardless of actual usage. Burstable services are monitored by the service provider. During periods when your traffic bursts above the committed rate, you'll pay additional charges based on the overage. A typical industry standard is the "95th Percentile" method. Traffic levels are monitored in 5 minute increments. The highest 5% readings are thrown out for billing purposes. You'll pay the rate for the highest bandwidth you used during the other 95% of the time.

Burstable bandwidth is commonly available in colocation hosting centers. It allows a company to operate its Internet servers without worrying about running out of bandwidth. A Website might normally generate a consistently low traffic level. But if there is an unexpected increase in demand, the line can burst to a higher rate to accommodate the sudden influx of customers or inquiries.

Which bandwidth solution is right for your company? Fractional, full rate or burstable? Let out team of expert consultants help you pick the T1, DS3, Ethernet or OCx bandwidth service that is most cost effective for your needs.