Why Your Next Wire Should Be Glass

By: John Shepler

The telecommunications industry was build on copper wire. So was the computer networking industry. You’re well versed in the installation and maintenance of metal wire technology. Cat5e or Cat6 cabling gets the job done for most of your networking needs. So, why should you be looking at fiber optic exclusively for your next connection?

The WAN vs the LAN
Ethernet over copper works great over short distances. That’s why it is so popular for in-house network wiring. Most users don’t have NICs that run faster than 1000 Mbps and seldom really need even that much bandwidth. Running fiber to the desktop seems like an expensive and unnecessary project.

Where fiber shines in-plant is long stretches between floors or other buildings. It’s also important between some networking equipment that really can benefit from 10 to 100 Gbps or higher bandwidths.

The WAN is another matter. Ethernet was originally designed with short interconnections in mind. The specs for Carrier Ethernet added provisions that let common carriers extend your LAN anywhere in-town, between cities or around the world. There’s even a product called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. It uses multiple pairs of existing twisted pair wiring between your location and the telco office.

That gets Ethernet from in the building to several miles away. But that’s the rub. EoC bandwidth falls off with distance. It is intended to be an upgrade from copper-based T1 lines to increase bandwidth from T1’s 1.5 Mbps on up to 10 or 15 Mbps. In some short run situations, that can be increased to 20, 30, 50Mbps or even higher.

Glass Is The Future
You might be surprised to learn that there is almost a stampeded among businesses from their old copper WAN connections to fiber optic service. Most new installations should really take a look at fiber options first. Only if fiber isn’t really needed because of low bandwidth requirements or unavailability in rural areas, do you want to settle for copper services like T1 or EoC.

The first reason, as you probably suspect, is bandwidth. Business bandwidth needs have multiplied recently. The reason is that more and more business processes are being automated for gains productivity. Software is far more sophisticated than is was a short while ago. Multimedia, especially video content, sucks up bandwidth orders of magnitude faster than text based messaging and reports. More jobs that depend on computers or network connected machines combined with more sophisticated processing means much faster connections are needed for communications.

The “Cloud” is another driver. Behind all the magic, the cloud is really just a big, big data center located too far for a LAN connection. The cloud is sold as a way to transform capital investments into monthly expenses and reduce the cost of local maintenance and support staff. Economy of scale and the ability to scale resources for any given user in near real-time are attractive benefits. The one fly in the ointment is network bandwidth.

Cloud-based computing and telecommunications demands a lot more performance from your wide area connections than simple telephone lines or Internet service used primarily for email and casual web browsing. Productivity, along with voice and video performance, depend on high bandwidth, low latency connections.

Not Yesterday’s Fiber
Fiber optic bandwidth service has a history of being expensive and hard to get. That has changed dramatically in recent years. What started off as a niche technology for the telephone companies to transport huge bundles of phone calls between switching centers has morphed into routine connectivity for private line and Internet service. Buildings are being “lit” at a rapid rate to supply fiber optic bandwidth as a utility, something like electricity and water. In today’s information age, digital connectivity really needs to be considered a utility.

Another big driver is the cell phone industry. In the decades since cellular service was introduced, its use has shifted from simple mobile phone calls to full-blown computer applications running on smartphones, tablets and laptop computers. Carriers can’t build out 4G wireless fast enough to meet the demand. The work on 5G is well underway.

T1 lines were perfect for cell towers handling voice traffic and performed well until 3G start to be replaced by 4G. Even bonded T1 lines can’t keep up with 20 or 30 Mbps, much less higher speeds. That means it has become imperative to get fiber to every cell tower. Fiber is no longer rare. It’s being installed in underground conduit and flying on utility poles everywhere you look.

Fiber That Makes Sense For Your Company
The best deals in fiber optic bandwidth right now are for Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) service rather than the traditional SONET telco standards. EoF has the advantages of being highly competitive among multiple carriers, easy to scale up and down in bandwidth, low in latency, packet loss and jitter and a lot lower priced than you may think.

The most popular Ethernet over Fiber services right now are 10 Mbps as an entry level for smaller businesses, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet for most established companies, and 1000 Mbps GigE for medium and larger operations and companies with high bandwidth demands, such as video production or computer aided design and manufacturing. School districts also find Gigabit Ethernet attractive to serve their many facilities.

Are you acquiring bandwidth for a new location or looking to upgrade the copper service you already have? Now is the perfect time to take a look at what’s available in fiber optic bandwidth service for business.


Note: Products with the humorous theme "A Wire Made of Glass" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

Pair Bonding Boosts T1 and EoC Speed

Like many businesses, your company may be pushing the limits of the bandwidth that has worked well for years. An increase in business activity, more employees, business automation or a move to cloud services can all result in higher bandwidth requirements. So, how can you increase the speed of your lines without breaking the bank?

Perhaps the first thing to consider is simply ramping up the bandwidth of the line technology you have now. But isn’t a T1 line fixed at 1.5 Mbps? Indeed it is. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one T1 line. You don’t really want two separate T1 lines for point to point connections or dedicated Internet access. What you really want is a way to combine the bandwidth of those two lines so they act like one larger line.

There’s a standardized process in place for doing this called bonding. When lines are bonded, their bandwidth is merged so that you don’t have to worry about which line is carrying the traffic. They both are sharing that traffic.

For copper technologies, bonding is also called pair bonding. That terminology comes from the fact that the physical layer of this network connection consists of twisted pair copper wires. These are the familiar telephone wires that are bundled in cables called binder groups and run from your business location to the nearest telephone company central office.

Copper pair can carry telephone calls or digital data. The old school way of transporting computer data was to use analog modems that converted the binary ones and zeros to audio tones to mimic a voice conversation. The upper limit to this approach is a very low bandwidth of around 56 Kbps. Get rid of the analog modems and transmit the digital signals on the copper wire directly and you can get much higher bandwidth.

T1 have been the mainstay of business bandwidth over copper pair. This line technology runs at 1.5 Mbps using two pair, one for transmit and one for receive. Since T1 was invented, more efficient modulation schemes have been devised that further increase the bandwidth that can be carried by twisted pair copper. These newer modulation techniques are now used to transport T1 on one or two copper pair. They can also be used to transport a competing technology called Ethernet over Copper.

Pair bonding will boost the bandwidth you can get over copper by pressing more pairs into service. It stands to reason that 4 pair should delivery more speed than 2 pair and 6 or 8 pair will boost that speed even more. It’s a lot like superhighways. The more lanes you have, the more traffic you can carry.

T1 and Ethernet over Copper bandwidths are not the same. T1 was invented first and intended to be synchronized with the public switched telephone system. It has a rigidly fixed 1.5 Mbps bandwidth per T1 line. You can bond a second T1 line and get twice the bandwidth, or 3 Mbps. Three lines gives you 4.5 Mbps, four will give you 6 Mbps and so on. T1 line bonding tops out around 10 or 12 Mbps. It’s hard to get more pairs to bond-in and it gets expensive. The cost of bonded T1 is the cost of a single T1 line (one or two pair) times the number of lines you have bonded.

Ethernet over Copper doesn’t have a fixed bandwidth. It varies with distance. The farther you are from the central office, the less bandwidth can be carried by this technology. The solution for higher bandwidth is to bond more pair. Typical EoC speeds are 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 15, and 20 Mbps, with others often available. In some cases, Ethernet bandwidths up to 100 Mbps are available using bonded copper pair.

Since both T1 and EoC bandwidth is determined by pair bonding, how do you pick one over the other? The best way to make that decision is to get competitive bandwidth quotes for your exact location. Compare the bandwidth and price for each type of service and see which makes the most sense for you.



Note: Image of twisted copper pair courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Future Proofing Your WAN With Ethernet

The nature of wide area networks is changing. Once the exclusive domain of telephone technologies, core networks are being re-engineered for packet switched services. Voice will always be important, but data and video are now the dominant forms of network traffic. How does this affect your business connections and should you be doing anything to stay ahead of the curve?

Most businesses and organizations are being affected by increased requirements for bandwidth. As their line service contracts come up for renewal, savvy managers are taking a look at what’s available now and rethinking their options. Do you simply renew the T1 line contract that you’ve had for years or switch to a newer Ethernet service?

I mention Ethernet because Ethernet in the WAN, also called Carrier Ethernet and Metro Ethernet, are becoming the network connection resource of choice. What’s behind it is a recognition that virtually all business, organizational and home networks are based on standardized Ethernet. That includes the wildly popular WiFi wireless routers and hotspots that have Ethernet inputs and outputs. It seem intuitive that Ethernet would make a good metro and wide area connection technology.

What’s held back Ethernet WAN services is the entrenchment of telephone technology line services. Until deregulation, there was a century of monopoly ownership and development of analog phone lines, carrier telephony, T-Carrier digital line service and SONET/SDH fiber optic services. All of these services were designed to support the basic core element of the individual two-way telephone conversation. Even the vast cellular networks were designed with telephones in mind first and data piggybacked on later as an afterthought.

With data and video dominating digital traffic, it makes sense to take another look at what network characteristics make the most sense for now and in the future. Network providers, including incumbent telephone companies, have done this and are moving rapidly to IP networks and connections. The two most on the ascendancy right now are Ethernet and MPLS Networks. MPLS is an excellent choice for creating a virtual private network cloud that can transport nearly any type of traffic across the country or worldwide. It readily supports Ethernet, making those two network technologies a powerful combination.

While there are other network protocols for specialized applications, it looks right now like we are headed toward an everything-over-Ethernet world. It’s an easy connection from your switches and routers to the carrier that transports your packets to remote destinations. You just plug-in and go. You also have the option of ordering a layer 2 Ethernet service so that you can make all your distant sites connect like they are on the same bridged LAN. In a way, Ethernet makes the WAN portion of the network disappear.

Is it the right time for you to move to Ethernet services? You’ll likely find that they are less expensive per Mbps that other options and offer scalable bandwidth anywhere from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps or more. Check out the cost and availability of Ethernet WAN service for your locations before you commit to other options. You could be missing out of a better deal.

DS3 Internet Service Options

Medium size businesses and large corporations that have long exceeded the bandwidth available from T1 lines have migrated to DS3 Internet Service as the next logical step in telecom line services. Now there are more options than ever before for smaller businesses that have large bandwidth requirements and larger operations that need and want this level of service.

DS3, or Digital Signal level 3, is a longstanding telecommunications standard for digital transmission. It offers highly reliable 45 Mbps bandwidth for dedicated point to point, PBX telephone, or Internet connections. Smaller Internet Service Providers find DS3 service to be the right size and price to serve their customers. Other key applications are medical image transmission, video transport, and call center operations.

When DS3 was first deployed by the telephone companies, it may have been delivered by coaxial cable, microwave relay tower, or even rigid waveguide pipes. As soon as fiber optic trunk cables were available, DS3 logically moved to fiber based delivery. This is still the standard transmission medium for DS3, especially over long distances. Multiple DS3 signals are often multiplexed onto an OC3 or higher level SONET fiber optic carrier and demultiplexed to be dropped off where needed.

Recent developments by new network service providers with their own regional and nationwide fiber optic networks have dramatically lowered the price of DS3 services to where they are affordable by businesses and organizations that couldn’t previously afford the lease rates. They’ve also deployed additional deliver platforms so that there are multiple ways to get DS3 Internet.

If your building is already lit for fiber optic service, that’s likely the best option for DS3 Internet. If not, you might consider moving your high bandwidth Internet servers to a colocation center. Colo centers generally have the best prices on WAN bandwidth and the availability of multiple carriers to choose from. Construction costs are minimal due to everything being in the same building.

For business locations in a metropolitan areas, including nearby suburbs, there are a couple of other options for DS3 Internet. One is wireless transmission. This is line-of-sight microwave transmission on licensed bands from a carrier’s point of presence to an antenna on your building. It only works fairly close to the carrier and if there are no obstructions in the way.

DS3 over Copper isn’t affected by terrain or building density. This service uses multiple pair of standard twisted pair cabling to transport a DS3 level signal. Special modulation equipment is needed at each end of the path, which is provided by the carrier. DS3 over Copper (DS3oC) is also a relatively short range transmission scheme and is generally available only near carrier facilities.

Would your business benefit from a dedicated DS3 Internet connection, or do you already have one? If so, you owe it to yourself to check prices and availability of DS3 Internet for your business location. You may be surprised to find lower prices and more options that you expect.