Today’s Best Business Broadband Options

By: John Shepler

If you are still using a copper wireline service, such as DSL or T1, for your business Internet connection, it’s time to upgrade your service… before you are forced to.

Forced to? Why would that be? Fact is, the major telecom companies are all in the process of decommissioning their copper wire assets. Basically anything that uses century-old twisted pair wiring is on the way out.

Technology marches on. T1 lines were once considered broadband. They don’t even qualify with today’s standard. DSL? Pretty much an obsolete system that was once a good way to re-purpose standard telephone lines for fast Internet access.

AT&T and others have made it clear that they are either pulling up old copper lines or abandoning them to rust in place. The wire centers or central offices that connect to these lines are being repurposed as data centers for the insatiable needs of AI.

So what are better options? Surprisingly, one of the best is also an older technology that has continuously upgraded to keep it competitive with the times.

Cable Broadband Is a Great Deal for Small Business
That coaxial cable that plugs into the back of a set-top box or cable modem has been a familiar tech standard for many decades. Physically, it’s the same. What’s changed is the signal that comes out that center wire.

Cable was originally analog, just like TV signals back in the day. When the Internet came along, some of the unused TV channels were set aside for digital transmission using a standard called DOCSIS or Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an invention of the industry’s R&D organization CableLabs. The current standard is DOCSIS 3.1 with a migration underway to DOCSIS 4.0.

Today’s cable modems are cable of gigabit speeds, with common service levels of 300 Mbps downstream, 30 Mbps upstream. That’s fast enough for pretty much all web browsing, video streaming and data transfer. What’s hard to beat at those speeds is the price. Cable is easily affordable by both consumers and smaller businesses, often with telephone service included.

Wireless Broadband is Now Both Mobile and Fixed
Like cable, cellular wireless had humble beginnings as a mobile telephone service, but has kept up with the times through multiple technology advancements. The first standard that really supported broadband as well as telephone was called 3G. That’s evolved to the current standards of 4G LTE and 5G. With 300 Mbps or so, an iPhone has all the bandwidth it can really make use of.

That high bandwidth, which can reach a Gigabit per second near some of the 5G towers, is easily competitive with fixed broadband services. The capacity limits have been largely eliminated with 5G buildouts and the extra spectrum acquired from government auctions of unused television bandwidth. Now the wireless companies are in a competitive battle to roll out cellular modems that work like cable modems but without the wires. You can put one at a construction site or a pop-up store in minutes. If you move soon, take it with you and have connectivity at your next location.

Cable broadband is being built into laptop computers and tablets and other devices, called the Internet of Things. Remote data acquisition and control are now possible in remote areas that have cell towers but no other connectivity.

Fiber, The Gold Standard and Secret Backbone
The magic that makes cable and cellular broadband so fast is the fiber optic lines that feed these services. It’s all behind the scenes, of course. Even so, you may want to connect directly to fiber yourself.

What’s the fiber advantage? Nearly unlimited bandwidth for one thing. Today’s service levels run from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps just about everywhere, with 100 Gbps service available in some metro locations. That’s important for medium and larger enterprises with many employees who need simultaneous Internet access.

Another big advantage is symmetrical bandwidth That means if you have 1 Gbps downstream, you also have 1 Gbps upstream. Contrast that with most cable and wireless services that offer much higher download than upload speeds. If you need to transfer files up and down regularly or have demanding video conferencing requirements, this can be important.

A third advantage is very low latency and jitter with minimal congestion. This is because fiber is usually a dedicated service, not shared like cable and cellular. For even higher performance, consider a dedicated line between your company and your cloud service that bypasses the Internet completely.

Need the ultimate in performance? Dark Fiber that you “light” with your own equipment gives you complete control of protocols and bandwidth allocation. It’s like having your own network extended across town or across the country.

Do you need a replacement Internet connection or are ready for a bandwidth upgrade or perhaps even a cost saving? Check out the Business Broadband Options available right now.

10 Mbps Ethernet T1 Line Replacement

By: John Shepler

Early in your business, you needed a robust connection as things were just ramping up on the Internet. Dial-up was too annoying. DSL was too flakey. SONET fiber was just way too expensive and had bandwidth you’d never need. T1 was the right solution at the right time. Always on. Always reliable. Low latency, low jitter and low packet loss. That 1.5 Mbps bandwidth may or may not still be getting the job done, but like all good things, T1 is coming to an end. What to do now?

It Still Works. Why Get Rid of It?
T1 lines were based on telephone lines. That is, twisted pair copper wires. That was the genius of the design. The phone companies could install T1 service using the same wiring they already had in place for multi-line business phones. Just about any business could get T1 and many, many did over the decades.

So, why not stick with a winner? Two reasons, really. First, the Internet today isn’t the nascent Internet of the ’90s. E-commerce is pretty much universal. Nearly every business has a website and most take online orders. A lot of businesses are online only. Those that aren’t still need to be connected for credit card verification, inventory control, supplies ordering and customer interaction. High definition graphics and video have supplemented email and text files that dominated early Internet use. A T1 line’s 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is getting to be a limitation for even small business operations.

The other reason is that copper telco lines are something like incandescent light bulbs. They’ve served us well for more than a century, but it’s time for new technology to take over. Phone companies own the copper lines in the ground and on poles. The costs of maintenance are getting too high considering the dwindling number of users. More and more areas of the country are seeing phone company notices that copper service is being discontinued. The replacement is generally fiber optic or, in some cases, wireless broadband.

A Sensible Replacement for T1 Internet
If you need a bandwidth upgrade or find yourself being cut-off from T1 service, you might be interested in an entry-level fiber optic bandwidth service called 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. What you get is 10 Mbps always on bandwidth versus the T1 line limit of 1.5 Mbps. It is also dedicated to your business only, so that you are not sharing this capacity with other companies. That means your speed won’t be varying depending on what others are doing. This is Carrier Ethernet service that is directly compatible with your Local Area Network. Just plug it into your router and go.

Oh, but how much more will you pay for this faster service? Thanks to extensive buildouts and more competition in fiber networks you may not pay any more for 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA than the old T1 contract you’ve kept renewing. Maybe even less.

Fiber Optic Ethernet is Easily Upgradeable
Once you have fiber installed, you should be good to go for the foreseeable future. That’s because the fiber itself has nearly unlimited bandwidth. What you are using is determined by the terminal equipment installed in your business and how much you want to pay each month. You may start off with 10 Mbps but then find you really need 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps to support your expanding business. These days Gigabit Ethernet is standard for many companies and more are bringing in 10 Gigabit service. In rare instances with unusually high Internet demand even 100 Gbps makes sense.

Typically the provider will install a GigE or 10 GigE port for your service. You can then order up to 1 Gigabit with the GigE port or 10 Gigabits with the 10 GigE port. Many providers will give you an online account that lets you change your bandwidth at will. You’ll automatically get billed for the higher rate when you upgrade. Unlike the old SONET days, upgrading bandwidth won’t generally require a truck roll and change of terminal equipment at your site. You can make the speed increase yourself almost instantly.

Private Lines Also
Ethernet over Fiber offers private lines as well as Internet access. A private line connects two locations directly and does not use the Internet. That means you are unaffected by Internet congestion or other Internet problems. Many businesses are choosing to host their business software in the cloud rather than run their own data centers on-site. A dedicated private line from your location to your cloud service provider, called a direct connection, helps to make the system run smoothly without lags and cutouts.

Are you ready for or in-need of a replacement for your aging T1 Internet line? If so, check competitive pricing on 10 Mbps and higher Ethernet over Fiber service now.

10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access Availability

By: John Shepler

Once considered a massive bandwidth suitable only for carriers, 10 Gbps is rapidly becoming the in-demand connectivity for businesses, municipalities, medical centers, content providers, and e-commerce. But is this bandwidth level readily available at a reasonable price? Indeed, it is.

Where is 10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Available?
Most municipalities have 10 Gig Ethernet readily available because of the rapid deployment of fiber optic infrastructure. Fiber is necessary to provide the bandwidth to support 4G LTE and 5G cell towers, replacing legacy T1 copper lines. Fiber is also at the heart of cable systems even though the connection to the cable modem is still coaxial copper. Cities are now installing fiber infrastructure as a utility to serve all homes and businesses.

Once you have fiber optic cables, getting Gigabit and 10 Gigabit broadband is a piece of cake. Each strand can transport 10 Gbps with only one channel. Those same strands can be set up to use multiple wavelengths to carry numerous Gigabit and 10 Gigabit services. A fiber cable can bundle a few to over a hundred fiber strands. Rest assured, there is plenty of 10 Gbps capacity to go around.

What 10 Gbps Options Are Available?
The universal service in demand is Dedicated Internet Access. Dedicated means that your connection to the Internet carries only your traffic. Any capacity that you aren’t using at the moment is idle and available. There is no competition with other companies sharing your line.

Dedicated Internet Access gives you the best consistency and lowest latency way to access the core of the Internet. This is important if your company has remote servers in the cloud or colocation hosting. It’s also key if you are doing business over the Internet and want your customers to have the best online experience.

There are also 10 Gbps private lines that connect point to point between your business locations or from your company to your cloud service provider. This is a step above using the Internet for access. Private lines give you the lowest latency and least congestion. Having a dedicated private line makes your servers seem like they are right down the hall even if they are on the other side of the country.

Cable broadband is now offering a shared bandwidth service that enables 10 Gbps in the download direction using DOCSIS 3.1 and will offer 10 Gbps symmetrical service with DOCSIS 4.0. By sharing Internet access with other users, you can save a significant amount of money, but with the vagaries of varying bandwidth and congestion.

How about wireless? In some metro areas, microwave wireless broadband can give you bandwidths as high as 10 Gbps with no wired connections. Service can be installed rapidly, sometimes within a matter of days or a week.

What About Pricing?
Fiber optic service prices used to be sky high, but that has changed in recent years due to intense competition among service providers and the economies of scale that come from having so many more customers using high bandwidths. If you haven’t checked 10 Gbps prices lately, you owe it to yourself to get a set of current quotes from multiple providers. Yes, there are likely several carriers that can meet your needs right now.

Bandwidth Without Usage Metering

By: John Shepler

Perhaps the most unpleasant experience of broadband is hitting your data cap. You may have forgotten it was even there. But, like the cop hiding behind the highway billboard, it pops out at the most inconvenient times and, boy, are you in trouble. Let’s have a look at what data limits are all about and what you can do to avoid hitting them.

Where Did Usage Metering Come From?
The big problem is scarcity. Bandwidth is like electricity. If we had unlimited amounts at minimal costs, there would be no need to meter it or even limit your line speed. Such is not the case.

Take 5G cellular for instance. The demand for Internet broadband has always been way ahead of capacity buildout for the cellular networks. 2G was pitiful. 3G was still bandwidth starved. 4G LTE greatly improved on cellular capacity to the point that most people didn’t run out before the end of the month.

5G offers the promise of billions of “things” all communicating autonomously and people using fixed wireless from their cellular provider to replace services like DSL, cable and T1 lines.

Have you been watching what is happing with 5G? There is a mad scramble to build towers, feed them with fiber optic cables or microwave backhaul, and lobby the government to assign more and more of the limited radio spectrum to high speed Internet. It’s cellular vs satellite vs independent WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) vs television vs government vs everybody else to grab as much bandwidth as possible.

Why? The amount of spectrum you can press into service determines the speed of your connection and the amount of data to divvy up among users. Thus the feeding frenzy among service providers.

Even wireline and fiber optic services have their limits. Twisted pair landlines are pretty pokey by today’s standards and fiber optic requires a huge capital investment. A fiber bundle has enormous capacity, but only where the fiber has been run. It doesn’t blanket an area like wireless does. Each location needs its own fiber connection.

How Carriers Allot Their Capacity
All bandwidth services have limited capacity. Wireless has the most constraints because the electromagnetic spectrum has only so much available in the popular frequencies that travel reasonable distances and penetrate walls. Fiber and HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) is less constrained but has high costs to build out.

Carriers divvy up their capacity and sell it to users by slicing and dicing what they have. The two limitations that they put on users are speed in Mbps or Gbps and usage in total Gigabytes. Speed determines how much of the total bandwidth you can use at any given moment. Total capacity limits keep a few high data users from uploading and downloading continuously so that other’s can’t get online.

You see, the price you pay for Internet access is much less if the carrier can assume that you aren’t sending or receiving all the time. Much of the time you may not even be accessing remote servers. When you do, you’ll send or receive a certain bundle of data and then pause before doing more. By allowing many customers to share one big line, providers can give everyone reliable access at greatly reduced cost. That’s the principle behind cable broadband, satellite services, and cellular broadband.

In practice, this works well for consumers and many smaller businesses. They just don’t need to be sending enormous files one right after the other. On cable, you may never hit your allotted limit or even know what it is. With cellular and satellite, you may have and “unlimited” plan, but just try continuously streaming video or doing massive data transfers and you’ll run into what the carriers call “fair use” provisions. Yes, there are limits to unlimited plans.

What happens if you consume more that your “fair share”? Your service provider may choose to simply issue a warning, or may slow your speed so you can’t hog so much of their capacity. Or they may charge you for extra GBs of usage. Worst case, they’ll simply cut off your service until the next month’s billing cycle begins.

How to Avoid Usage Metering
Medium and larger businesses and heavy Internet using companies with cloud services and remote backup storage may well exceed even the most generous fair use quotas. The best option then is to order services that aren’t metered at all. Those tend to be private lines and dedicated Internet access.

Dedicated lines without usage metering give you two advantages. First, you are not sharing with other companies or residential users. The capacity of the channel is yours and yours alone. If you order a Gigabit Dedicated Internet Access fiber service, you can feed it traffic continuously and nobody is going to complain. Plus the speed of your service won’t vary with competing traffic, because you have sole usage. This is particularly valuable with business critical applications and real-time services like video conferencing that run in the cloud.

A private line is like dedicated access except that the Internet is never involved. You connect point to point or in a private mesh network where others cannot interfere. Even the core Internet gets congested from time to time. Your private lines are like private superhighways. Your traffic, and yours alone, is what is carried. If you are using cloud services extensively, consider a direct line from your business to your cloud provider for the highest performance.

Have you been hitting the limits of your Internet service or being warned by your provider that they may heavily up-charge you or cut off access? Consider the advantages of ordering dedicated private lines and dedicated Internet access without usage limits to keep your business running smoothly.

What Replaces DSL, T1, ISDN PRI, EoC?

By: John Shepler

Have you seen recent cost increases for your copper-based telecom services? Did you even get a letter saying that service will be discontinued? This situation will only get worse, as telcos sunset their aging copper wire assets in favor of more modern technologies such as fiber and wireless. It’s time to make a change.

The Copper That Isn’t Going Anywhere
The copper that’s in trouble is twisted-pair analog copper telephone lines. They started the electronic communication revolution over a century ago and have run their course from innovation to obsolescence. There is another copper network line, however, that is still going strong. That is cable broadband using coaxial copper cable as a curb to premises connection.

The copper nature of cable services is something of a fooler. The vast majority of the network is fiber optic based. Only the last few hundred feet is the well known RG-6 terminated with an F-type connector. You might think of this wiring as old-school, but with the latest DOCSIS modems, it can easily deliver Gigabit broadband up to 10 Gbps.

Cable companies offer television, broadband and telephone service over the same cable line at a very reasonable cost that is attractive for small businesses, especially those that can use the TV feature for their customer waiting rooms.

Fiber Optic: The New and Improved Copper
The telephone and network industry standard that is replacing twisted pair copper is Ethernet based fiber optic service. The original standard, SONET, is still the backbone of many networks, but has actually transitioned from carrying channelized telephone calls to packet based Ethernet network traffic. Newer networks are all Ethernet, to reflect the standard Ethernet protocol used in the majority of digital networks worldwide.

Ethernet over Fiber has the advantage that it plugs directly into company routers and is vastly scalable, from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps just about everywhere, and up to 100 Gbps in many metro locations. Fiber takes over from copper data services, include DSL, T1, DS3 and even the newer Ethernet over Copper. EoC was meant to provide higher bandwidth using the same twisted-pair infrastructure, but is falling victim to the decommissioning of the copper bundles themselves.

Business telephone, which standardized its own analog and digital networks, is largely switching to a computer networking standard of Voice over IP or VoIP. This offers the benefit of supporting many newer technology features and allows computers and phones to share the same company Local Area Network.

To make VoIP work, your phones need to connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network to make and receive outside calls. This is done using a standard called SIP or Session Initiated Protocol that runs on the network and connects to your phone service provider over an Ethernet WAN connection, using fiber. Both the Internet and direct connections can be employed. SIP trunks replace analog phone lines and ISDN PRI trunks to carry telephone traffic to the PSTN.

The Special Case of POTS Replacement
In many cases, the move to fiber optic private line and Dedicated Internet Access will handle business needs for voice, video and data traffic. There are special cases of FAX, fire alarms, burglar alarms, elevator phones, analog point of sale systems and some others that are specifically designed to phone company standards and don’t work well on packet based networks, such as the Internet.

For these uses, you may want to look into specialized POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) replacement options. These usually work wirelessly through private connections to the LTE cellular phone network and don’t traverse the Internet at all. An advantage of POTS replacement equipment is that it connects directly to the systems you already have.

Fixed Wireless Where There Is No Fiber
The day may come where fiber is everywhere, but today were are still in the build-out phase. Fiber is going into the ground at a rapid pace, but in more rural locations are still waiting for access. Even metro areas that don’t have lit fiber installed may be faced with huge construction costs to connect to the fiber access points.

The alternative is to skip the fiber but get high speed Ethernet bandwidth using Fixed Wireless Access. FWA is similar to cellular broadband but is intended to connect to in-house networks rather than cell phones. In fact, the major cellular companies are in competition to offer 5G Fixed Wireless broadband service to both residential and commercial users.

Other wireless companies, often called WISPs for Wireless Internet Service Providers, don’t handle cell traffic but have towers that serve a limited area with wireless Internet access.

Other microwave-based FWA providers focus on business customers with high bandwidths that can reach 10 Gbps. This can be private line as well and Internet service. An advantage to business FWA is that a small dish or other antenna can be installed on your building for reliable operation and service can get started in days rather than weeks or months for fiber construction.

Are you facing a loss of your traditional DSL, T1, ISDN PRI, EoC or analog telephone service and need replacement soon? If so, you may have an opportunity to upgrade your service and save money at the same time. Check out telephone and network replacement options now.

The Connectivity You Need For Digital Transformation

By: John Shepler

Most every business is now in some phase of digital transformation. It’s the process of moving from analog mechanical and paper based operations to digital and online processes. The promise of this transformation is faster and more efficient business methods that save cost and expand your customer base. But, what do you need to put in place to support this digital transformation?

Plan on Doing Most Everything Online
While most products and services are not digital, the tools to support them now are. Everything from finding prospects to converting prospects to customers, servicing those customers and keeping the products flowing has a digital element to it. The Internet is now the hub of operation for many businesses. Others may be local and walk-in for the most part, but may have an online presence and accounting or other processes in the cloud.

What makes the Internet so compelling is that after a decades of development, it is largely in-place, paid for, and ubiquitous. People who don’t even have bank accounts do have smartphones with Internet apps that allow them to buy, sell and get paid. While there are challenges, especially in the area of security, the Internet is a must for most companies.

Start With High Speed Reliable Internet Access
You’ll need a solid connection to the online world. It will have to be fast enough to be transparent to you and your customers, always available, and have a minimum of latency, jitter and packet loss. The best connections are the ones you never have to think about. That customer on the other side of town or the other side of the world will seem as close as someone in the next office.

There are basically two types of broadband connections. One is called Dedicated Internet Access. The other is Shared Internet access.

Dedicated Internet Access, particularly with symmetrical bandwidth that gives you the same speed uploading as downloading is the gold standard. While the Internet is certainly a shared resource, most of the congestion and outages occur in that “last mile” between you and your service provider. Dedicated connections give you a private road to the Internet. You always have the bandwidth you are paying for, whether you are using it every second or not.

Shared Internet Access is just that. A service provider leases a dedicated access line and then divides it up among many users. If the speed is high enough and there aren’t so many users demanding the same bandwidth simultaneously, you may not even know you are sharing. Sometimes, though, everybody wants to download videos or large files and things slow down. Then, like every traffic jam, they just as mysteriously dissipate and everything is back to normal.

The advantage of dedicated access is performance. The advantage of shared access is cost. Shared services such as cellular and cable broadband can cost a fraction of what a similar speed dedicated fiber or fixed wireless access service costs.

A Hybrid Approach to Increase Reliability and Lower Cost
There is also a third option that has been recently developed. That is the Software Defined Network (SDN) or Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN). What these systems do is take multiple Internet connections and bond them together so that you get one higher capacity, lower latency and more reliable connection. A SD-WAN box can combine a cable broadband line, a cellular broadband modem, and a small fiber optic service. Even satellite and landlines can be included. The software in the controller monitors each line constantly and selects the most appropriate for every packet.

With SD-WAN, your most sensitive applications, such as telephone and conference calling, get the highest priority for speed, latency and jitter. Business process are next in line. Less sensitive needs, like remote backups, get the lowest priority because a few seconds here and there probably won’t make any difference. SD-WAN can save you money compared to one very large fiber line that you can’t keep busy or perhaps can’t even get installed. It is also a lifesaver when one line is accidentally cut or has an equipment failure. SD-WAN will simply use the other connections to keep things running seamlessly.

Don’t Forget Your Cloud Connections
Your main office, store or factory connection to the Internet is critical, but so are the connections for your cloud based operations. Once those servers and applications leave the premises to be co-located elsewhere or run in a public or hybrid cloud, they need the same reliable and transparent connectivity you had in-house.

There are two connections to be concerned with. The first is the connection between you and the cloud. This may be the same Internet access you use for everything else, but for business critical operations you may want to consider a dedicated private line between your office and the colocation center or cloud service provider. This bypasses the Internet completely and gives you much greater control of your traffic since nothing is shared outside of your business.

The other connection of importance is the connection between the remote servers in the colo center or cloud and the outside world. For this you want the same high performance Internet access with enough bandwidth, low latency and minimal jitter and packet loss. Fortunately, this quality of service is easy to find for colo and cloud, as they deal in massive amounts of bandwidth on a regular basis.

Are you properly connected for digital transformation? That old DSL line or bandwidth limited T1 probably won’t get the job done anymore. Consider an upgrade to highly reliable fiber or wireless broadband for your business. Recent buildouts have made this much more affordable than you might expect.

Upgrade your ISP to GigE and 10GigE

By: John Shepler

Regardless of whether your business is strictly e-commerce or a traditional bricks and mortar operation, Internet access is essential to conducting business these days. One thing we never seem to have enough of is bandwidth. This is the right time to upgrade your broadband connection to handle the throughput you really need to efficiently get the job done. Surprisingly, it may be more affordable than you think.

How Much Do You Need?
Small businesses, including home offices, single person professional offices, small retail stores and the like, may find that 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service is plenty. You might even get by with less than that… for now. For every other situation, you’ll want to look at bandwidth fast enough to be transparent. Transparent means you don’t even know it is there. There’s always enough that you won’t get slowed down no matter what you are doing. That’s the gigabit range. Consider Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE).

Why speeds so much higher than you’ve expected over the years? Today’s business is different. Much of what we call content is high consumption video versus email messaging. Images are much larger, if not in physical size then in Mbps. Databases are huge. They don’t call it “big data” for no reason. On top of all this, most processing has moved or is moving to the cloud. Those high speed Ethernet cables that connected you in-house have to be replicated between you and your cloud provider.

Really Fast Connections Readily Available
Fortunately, the networking industry is keeping pace. The incentives of greater business demand, 4G and 5G wireless, and consumer cord cutting has pushed providers to expand their networks and lower the cost per Mbps and Gbps. You likely have multiple options to get the bandwidth you need at a price you can afford.

You should know that Internet Server Provider (ISP) bandwidth comes in multiple flavors, each with its own characteristics and pricing. There’s a reason why they don’t all cost the same. The first reason is provider competition. The more options that are available in a particular area, the more competitive pricing will be, especially on the higher end business connections.

Another reason is whether you can live with shared bandwidth or need to have exclusive use. Your lower cost options, of which cable is the biggest provider by far, have the bandwidth multiplexed or shared among many users. You’ll notice that your bandwidth is “up to 1 Gbps” rather than guaranteed to be that speed at all times. The idea is that not everyone is using the line to full capacity at all times. In fact, that’s highly unlikely. So, while you are reading something online, somebody else is downloading a file… and vice versa.

If you are running a server or running business critical software in the cloud that needs to hesitate as little as possible, you’ll want Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) at a minimum. In fact, you may even need to upgrade to a direct connection between you and your cloud provider to get the performance you desire. That gets you off the Internet and its vagaries completely. Dedicated Internet Access keeps you on the Internet, but you don’t share your “last mile” bandwidth. That’s where most of the congestion occurs anyway.

Another consideration is whether you need symmetrical bandwidth or not. Most Internet services that offer shared bandwidth are also asymmetrical. That means the download speed is much higher, sometimes 10x higher, than the upload speed. It makes sense if you are mostly accessing web sites or downloading videos, like most consumers. However, if you run cloud processes where you upload as much as you download or do large backups to remote storage, you’ll want symmetrical bandwidth options.

Your ISP Bandwidth Options
So, what’s available? Cable broadband using DOCSIS 3.0 or 3.1 standards will get you 100 to 1000 Mbps shared bandwidth Internet access, usually asymmetrical. It’s quite reliable these days and you can’t beat the price.

If you are out in the boonies where there is no cable, you might get by with 4G or 5G wireless broadband. Yes, it’s the same broadband that runs your smartphone, but with a special modem that connects an office network. Another option is satellite business broadband. This will work just about anywhere and offers decent bandwidth. Latency can be an issue, especially for VoIP telephony and video conferencing, but otherwise may be just the ticket. Note that both of these wireless options have limited resources so that you may run into usage limits.

Fiber optic bandwidth is the gold standard these days. It’s more available than ever before and you can generally get as much bandwidth as you care to. This is where you find DIA and symmetrical options. You'll also find the services to directly connect you to your cloud provider or other business locations.

Fixed Wireless Access used to be very limited and only in major downtown metro areas. It’s expanded quite a bit recently and can often function as fiber optic without the fiber. That works to your advantage when fiber construction costs are high or you can’t wait long for service installation.

Should you upgrade your ISP to GigE or 10 GigE? Perhaps even 100 GigE? If your current Internet service is stifling your business you really can’t afford not to. Check high speed business Internet and direct connection prices and availability now to see what is available for your business locations.

Fixed Wireless As Fiber Backup

By: John Shepler

You need large amounts of rock solid bandwidth to enable your business systems, including telephone, conferencing and business process software in the cloud. Normally, that says fiber optic connectivity. But what if that fiber gets cut (it happens) or just can’t be installed soon enough or the construction is just too expensive? Then what? If you happen to be located in the right areas, fixed wireless can be your best solution.

What is Fixed Wireless?
Cell phones have brought mobility to all of us, including having both a phone and a small computer in our pockets. This is wireless mobility. Each device has a modem and radio that communicates with the nearest cell tower. As you move, the session keeps getting handed off to the next towers as you get closer to them. All of this is imperceptible to you, the user. The complexities of handling mobile signals is hidden in the cellular network.

Perhaps you’ve tethered your phone to your PC to keep working when your cable or landline Internet service was interrupted. That’s an example of fixed wireless. It’s the same as mobile wireless, but you’re not moving.

Cellular Fixed Wireless
Ideally, you’d like to tether your entire network to your phone during an outage rather than just one PC. Some phones allow this by acting as WiFI hotspots. In a small business, you may find this work-around to be just fine for short periods of time. Not being able to walk away with your phone can be a real inconvenience. Running out of minutes and getting cut off or big overage charges can be an even bigger inconvenience.

Fortunately, there are fixed cellular services designed for exactly this use. The box you receive looks something like a Wi-Fi router. It has better antennas than your phone, an Ethernet jack to feed your network, and, perhaps, built in WiFi routing. Some have provisions for mounting an antenna outside in weak signal areas.

Best of all, fixed cellular wireless services for business know that you can’t get by with a few Gigabytes a month. You can order 100 GB and more, even unlimited (within reason) usage. Services include 4G LTE and, now, 5G to give you the speed you need to run your business.

Microwave Fixed Wireless
The big brother to cellular is point to point microwave fixed wireless. This is a modern version of the old telco point to point microwave relay. You get a small dish or other microwave antenna that attaches to the side of your building or sits on the roof. It points directly at the provider’s antenna at their central location. This is a line of sight service and generally limited to metropolitan areas.

A major advantages of this type of service is that it is private and dedicated to business use. You won’t be competing with everybody else’s cell phones for bandwidth. The bandwidths can be as high as 1 Gbps or even 10 Gbps. They can also be symmetrical, unlike cellular. With many services your upload and download speeds are the same and your bandwidth is guaranteed. Usage limits? Not usually an issue.

You might even think of microwave fixed wireless as fiber optic without the fiber. Ditching the physical fiber means fewer construction headaches and delays. It is possible that you can have service installed in as little as a few days compared with weeks or months if your building isn’t already lit for fiber.

An unexpected benefit is that fixed wireless can have lower latencies than fiber services with the same bandwidth. That’s because the wireless signal is a direct beam from provider to you. Fiber systems tend to weave all over town with lots of switching gear in the path. Lower latency is critical to some businesses, especially in financial trading. It’s a boon for improving the quality of VoIP phone calls and video conferencing, and for interactive processes running in the cloud.

Cellular broadband uses the Internet and whatever latencies and congestion exist. Fixed Wireless can avoid the Internet and its limitations, or be connected to the Internet so that you can easily connect to customers and suppliers.

Why Not The Best of Both Fiber and Wireless?
Perhaps the best arrangement for your business is a combination of fiber optic service and fixed wireless service. Why both? One reason is to get service started fast with fixed wireless and then add fiber when you can get it installed.

Once you have both running, consider keeping your fixed wireless as a backup to the fiber. Fiber interruptions, often caused by the cable being cut during unrelated construction work, can take days to repair, leaving you high and dry. With automatic failover installed, your traffic will simply move to the wireless link without interruption. When the fiber comes back online, the system will switch back.

Note that fixed wireless offers a true diversity path to fiber. That means fiber and wireless are very unlikely to exhibit failures at the same time. Some businesses think they have this in place by ordering redundant fiber lines or even fiber services from two separate providers. What they don’t realize is that all the fiber serving their location runs in the same bundle or conduit and can all be taken out at the same time by one accident.

Do you need fast installation of high speed business connectivity and/or a robust backup to the fiber you already have? Consider microwave fixed wireless service for your bandwidth needs.

Dark Fiber Gives You Control

By: John Shepler

Higher and higher bandwidths are expected in business IT infrastructure. That includes the local networks and leased lines for metro and wide area bandwidth. It’s about more than that, though. Just as important are parameters such as latency, packet loss and jitter. Security is a major concern for all network operations. Finally, the ability to make changes, create workarounds and rapidly bring resources online are important to keeping network operations running smoothly.

Big Bandwidth Means Big Pipes
The need for increasing bandwidth has resulted in a mass migration from copper wirelines to fiber optic cables. Copper may still make sense to the desktop, but outside network connections need the capacity of fiber.

Fiber leased lines are available from 10 Mbps to at least 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps service becoming more readily available. They can be configured as point to point dedicated lines or dedicated Internet access. Many companies need some combination of the two. The Internet is essential to communicating with customers and suppliers. Direct lines to cloud service providers and between company facilities provide more consistent performance, lower latency and higher security.

Wavelengths are Like a Private Fiber Link
Fiber optic cables are said to have unlimited bandwidth. While that might seem like an exaggeration, in practice it is pretty hard to run out of bandwidth. Each cable has multiple fibers, sometimes as many as 100 in a bundle. Each of those fibers can carry multiple streams of non-interfering data through a process of wavelength division multiplexing.

There are two schemes. Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing can divide the fiber into a dozen or more laser colors called Lambdas, all traveling the same time. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing ups that count to 80, 96 or more separate wavelengths using more sophisticated equipment.

Note that each wavelength acts like its own fiber. It is unaware of other wavelengths on the same strand. When you lease a wavelength your data is not multiplexed with anyone else’s. You have exclusive use of all the bandwidth on that wavelength, which might be as high as 10 Gbps. Need more bandwidth? Lease another wavelength. Until the fiber bundle is fully loaded, you’ll never have to run more cable.

Dark Fiber Gives You Ultimate Control
What’s better than a wavelength? Having the entire fiber to yourself. That sounds great until you think about the cost of running your own fiber. It makes total sense on your own property, but what about connections across town or across the country? Unless you are in the business of providing carrier services, you’ll find trenching your own fiber to be cost prohibitive.

There is a way to get pretty much your own fiber. Lease an unused strand from a service provider. That’s more doable than you might think. Remember that it doesn’t make sense to go to all the trouble of burying a single fiber strand when you can bury a multi strand cable or even multiple multi strand cables for not much more cost. That way, a carrier only has to lay in the fiber once and have capacity to spare for decades.

These unused strands are called “dark” fiber because there is no laser light illuminating them. It could be your job to light the fiber. The carrier will simply give you access at each end of the fiber and the rest is up to you.

Clearly this beyond the capability of smaller companies, but they are likely well served by lit fiber options already available. Larger and more sophisticated IT organizations may be able to make good use of dark fiber for research labs, medical campuses, video content creation and transport, engineering & manufacturing, and other demanding applications.

Benefits of Dark Fiber
Owning exclusive rights to use an entire fiber is the next best thing to building your own. You do need to provide the termination equipment at each end and manage those resources. That may include your own DWDM equipment to generate multiple wavelengths for all the bandwidth you can reasonably use.

Without competing customers, there is no need for multiplexers to add and drop connections along the route. The fiber serves your locations only. The lack of unnecessary equipment in the line minimizes latency. Unlike the Internet there is no need for routers every so often to direct traffic. You not only have minimal latency, there is no reason it should vary from common carrier routing decisions, and no congestion as long as you are not overloading the capacity of the fiber or individual wavelength.

Security is another big benefit of dark fiber. There is no sharing of bandwidth among customers. This is similar to the old “nailed up” copper private point to point line. You need to trust the operator of the fiber, but don’t have to worry about the other customers. Of course, encryption on top of dedicated fiber gives you the most security you’ll get in point to point transmission.

Dark Fiber Availability
As fiber is being extensively deployed for Internet, cable television, and cellular towers, dark fiber is also becoming more and more available. Competitive fiber network operators and some cable system operators have lots and lots of extra capacity installed. They are more than happy to lease out unused strands when there are dozens sitting dark.

Do your needs demand the capacity, flexibility, and security that dark fiber offers? Find out what dark fiber options are available for your business locations.

DOCSIS 4.0 Expands 10 Gbps Cable Broadband

By: John Shepler

Fiber Optic service is expanding faster and farther than ever. It’s the gold standard in the quest for unlimited business bandwidth. Many businesses, frustrated by their inability to get fiber lit into their buildings or locked-out by the high cost of fiber construction, turn to their next best option: Cable broadband. Now the latest cable standard, DOCSIS 4.0, brings symmetrical streaming and increased upload speeds to ordinary coaxial copper cable service. Would you believe 10 Gbps download and 6 Gbps upload? Fiber has some serious competition from cable.

What is DOCSIS?
DOCSIS is the technology that enables traditional cable TV providers to also offer broadband Internet service on the same cable at the same time. The term is an acronym for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. It is the product of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc., CableLabs, a non-profit group supported by the cable system operators.

DOCSIS has evolved along with the Internet. The original spec was DOCSIS 1.0 released in 1997 and defined standards for 40 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. VoIP and QoS mechanisms were added by the early 2000’s, along with a boost in upstream data rates to 30 Mbps.

A significant improvement was introduced with DOCSIS 3.0 in 2006. Now cable companies could offer 1 Gbps downstream and 200 Mbps upstream with channel bonding. Support for IPv6 was also introduced at this time. With these improvements, it could be said that cable was a serious competitor to fiber optic services.

DOCSIS 3.1 in 2013 increased maximum downstream capacity to 10 Gbps with 1 to 2 Gbps upstream and is widely embraced by cable operators. DOCSIS 4.0, the latest version, increased the upstream rate to 6 Gbps in 2017. DOCSIS 4.0 is still in the early stages of production testing and deployment. The ultimate plan is to have full duplex symmetrical bandwidth on cable of 10 Gbps.

How Can Copper Cable Run So Fast?
Truth be told, it’s been a lot of years since cable TV networks were built with coaxial copper cable from the antennas at the head-end all the way to individual households and business locations. Virtually all systems of any size now use a technology called HFC or Hybrid Fiber Cable. The core network is fiber optic cable just like fiber network providers operate. The difference is that those companies run fiber right to the demarcation point within the building, while cable service terminates the fiber somewhere in the neighborhood and the makes the final run with the familiar coaxial cable. It was HFC that really enabled cable providers to offer serious broadband service.

Access Cable Fiber Networks Directly
Cable networks serve extensive metropolitan areas and their suburbs. Multi-system operators have fiber that interconnects their networks and connects to the Internet backbone. Major cable companies have gotten into the business of competing directly with competitive fiber optic networks by offering businesses the option to connect to their fiber networks without going through the copper interface.

There are advantages in going the fully fiber route. You may be able to get faster speeds and fully symmetric and dedicated connections by avoiding the cable modem. Remember that cable broadband is an inherently shared service. You are on the same last-mile Internet connection as dozens or hundreds of your neighbors. As such, you may find the the congestion level and speed of service vary throughout the day. It all depends on what everybody else is doing.

This is the reason that businesses, especially those with significant business processes running in the cloud, opt for dedicated Internet access and point to point private lines. You can get those at low speeds with traditional telco services such as T1 lines and higher speeds with DS3 bandwidth, SONET fiber optic services, Ethernet over Fiber and MPLS networks.

What service will meet your needs depends on how sensitive your operations are to line speed and latency, along with jitter and congestion. Cable broadband, especially at the DOCSIS 3.0 and above levels, provides many, many businesses with highly usable and reliable service at excellent pricing levels. Other companies with more sensitive needs may need to access fiber itself and set up more dedicated and private connections to achieve the performance they require for maximum productivity.

Find out now what cable, fiber and twisted pair copper broadband options are available for your business and what each has to offer.

Are T1 Lines Still Used?

By: John Shepler

In these days of gigabit fiber optic connections and cable broadband, it may seem quaint to talk about twisted copper pair lines for WAN networking service or Internet access. Yet, the venerable T1 line is still in use today. OK, but why would anyone choose this legacy technology option?

Who Needs a T1 Line?
In an ideal world, we’d be swimming in choices when it comes to networking offerings. Some people actually are, but you’ll find them in the commercial districts of major U.S. cities. Every networking provider wants to serve New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. How about out where the cows moo, well beyond the incorporated limits of podunk towns that dot the countryside? Any takers?

No, not so much. The problem is that we, as a country, haven’t accepted Internet access as a basic utility yet. Time was when electricity was in the same category. It was considered a luxury item. By 1936 it was obvious that standard AC electrical power was of strategic importance to the country and should be distributed everywhere. Thus, the Rural Electrification Act brought power lines into every farm, ranch and rural homestead. Everybody got the same quality of electrical service regardless of where they were located.

Fast forward to today. Broadband Internet access is still widely considered to be an optional service for businesses and home use despite the fact that you can hardly access a government service, take a school course or run any sort of business without getting online. So, you either pony up for whatever service is available in your area, do everything on your phone, or settle for shared options like the public library or free WiFi hotspots.

How T1 Fits In
T1 lines are no screaming broadband service by any stretch of the imagination. But they work and work well, often in places where even wireless service is unavailable.

How’s that possible? it’s by design. The original purpose of the T1 Carrier System was to transport multiple telephone conversations on a single digital line. That’s right. It’s a phone company invention that was intended for phone company office use. What T1 did was replace up to 24 telephone wires strung on poles between offices with a pair of lines that carried all 24 calls at once without them interfering with each other.

As a telephone company standard, T1 was designed to use ordinary twisted pair wiring just like plain old telephone service. it was also designed with repeaters spaced every mile or so to boost the signal so it could reach as far as needed.

When the Internet came along decades later, T1 was already heavily in use for phone service. The local phone companies began to offer it to businesses as an upgrade to the dial-up Internet access of the time. T1 was considered broadband in the ’90’s. Instead of carrying multiple phone calls, a T1 line provides 1.5 Mbps of always-on and dedicated bandwidth. There’s no competition with other users and no busy signals.

T1 Lines Today
Just as you can still get landline telephone, you can still get a T1 line installed for your business in many locations. Some businesses have multiple phone lines coming into a local PBX phone system on a T1 line set up as ISDN PRI. At the same time, they may have another T1 line for Internet access or a T1 private point to point connection between two locations.

A few things have changed over the years. T1 is no longer the broadband of choice for most business users with other options simply because the bandwidth is so limited. Prices have come down dramatically from eye popping levels to something much more reasonable, although that is starting to reverse in areas that are phasing out T1. Indeed, this legacy service still works great but is slowly being replaced by fiber optic lines and microwave fixed wireless.

What you do get for your monthly T1 lease is a rock solid line at 1.5 Mbps in both the up and down directions. These lines are highly reliable and quickly repaired if something goes wrong. That may not sound like much bandwidth, but it can easily work for modest retail or office operations that need credit card verification, email, updates to simple websites, inventory updates, ordering, and casual web browsing.

Note that Point to Point T1 lines offer an interconnection that avoids the public Internet and the congestion and security issues that come with that giant network. You get a private, dedicated, symmetrical link between your locations that's like extending your own network over long distances.

Where can you get a T1 line installed? Do you have a landline phone? Can you get one? Chances are the same location can still have T1 line service installed.

Alternatives to T1 Lines
These days, cable broadband is pushing farther and farther out of town to serve industrial parks and residential subdivisions. Fiber optic providers are also expanding their service areas as they extend their cable to more remote cell towers. Fiber prices have come down dramatically, as service areas have increased.

Speaking of cellular towers, most areas have at least some cell service and 4G LTE broadband, if not 5G. You can get a specialized cellular modem designed to connect to your computers or WiFI router at a reasonable price. The companies that offer this service have plans with generous usage limits available.

Some rural areas have what are called WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers that serve the underserved locations that are too few and far apart to attract wired connections. A WISP is like a very large WIFI hotspot and some use the same frequencies. Most often, you’ll need to install an outside antenna and point it at the WISP tower to get connected. When you do, you’ll get fairly high speed broadband.

In business districts, fixed microwave wireless offers bandwidths and latency similar to fiber but without the fiber. Instead, a small dish on your roof points at the service provier's tower to deliver a highly reliable high speed connection. This is similar to WISPs but can deliver dedicated rather than shared bandwidth.

Satellite broadband is also widely available just about anywhere with a clear view of the southern sky and some electrical power. This is true broadband service, with plans that can accommodate most business users. It’s a shared service, so your bandwidth will depend on how many others are accessing the same “bird”. There’s also the matter of a half-second delay or latency because the satellite is in geostationary orbit far above the Earth. Many business users think satellite broadband works just fine for their needs, especially with the newer higher power and higher throughput satellites that have become available recently.

So, is a T1 line still the right solution for your network access needs? Or is one of the fiber or wireless solutions a better choice? Before you decide, find out just what bandwidth service options and pricing are available for your particular business location.

100, 1000, 10000 Mbps Internet Speed

By: John Shepler

Business Internet speed requirements have increased dramatically as computer and software technology has advanced. It’s also true that our long distance WANs (Wide Area Networks) have become more like umbilical cords than transmission pipes. Today, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and even 10000 Mbps Internet connections are common and necessary. Fortunately, pricing has plunged as speed has jumped, making these bandwidth levels affordable.

100 Mbps Fast Ethernet
100 Mbps is the new benchmark bandwidth, replacing the traditional DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps. DS3 is part of the telco TDM standard as an upgrade to slower T1 lines. At one time, DS3 could be supplied on a T3 coaxial copper line or microwave signal, but is now demultiplexed or “dropped off" by a SONET OC3 legacy fiber optic service.

The lower cost option for 100 Mbps bandwidth is cable broadband running DOCSIS on small diameter coaxial lines. These are the familiar “cables” installed for cable TV and broadband. In most cases, 100 Mbps is the download speed. The upload speed may be 10 Mbps or less. The service is also multiplexed or shared among subscribers, so actual bandwidth may vary somewhat. Even so, 100 Mbps cable broadband works very well for many work from home situations, home based businesses, small offices and small retail businesses.

For larger or technically more demanding applications, 100 Mbps Ethernet over Fiber gives you 100 Mbps upload and download speeds or symmetrical service. This service is also dedicated or private. You and you alone have access to all the bandwidth and it is consistent at 100 Mbps. While this service requires a fiber drop rather than cable, pricing is quite reasonable and readily available for most business locations.

1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet or GigE provides 10x the bandwidth of Fast Ethernet. Like the 100 Mbps service, you can now get this level of service through a cable broadband provider in many areas. The step up in speed makes it easier for many users to connect in your office. It also facilitates more demanding applications like heavy video streaming or conferencing.

Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber is a premium service that is getting more affordable every day. Many medium and larger businesses opt for this service as it is highly reliable, with low latency, jitter and packet loss combined with high enough bandwidth to be transparent even with many concurrent users. The symmetrical bandwidth enhances the performance of cloud based applications and remote backup where upload speed is important.

10,000 Mbps Gigabit 10 Gig Ethernet
10 Gigabit Ethernet or 10GigE is the fastest bandwidth service available to most business users. At this level, you can connect large offices, factories, warehouses and retail stores to the Internet or as point to point private lines. Bandwidth is symmetrical and private, as you would expect. While DOCSIS cable is theoretical capable of supporting 10 gigabits, this is currently a fiber optic service almost exclusively.

When you get to these bandwidth levels, some other options become available. You can opt for the standard fiber optic connection or lease an entire wavelength or lambda on the fiber. This increases your privacy and, thus, security level. For even greater control, you can lease an entire dark fiber and light it yourself or have the carrier do that.

Advancing Bandwidth Levels
Like processing speed and number of cores on a chip, metropolitan and wide area network bandwidths are continuously increasing. In select areas, 100 Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber service is now available for business. With Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, you can easily achieve that by lighting dark fiber and, perhaps, even move up to Terabit per second bandwidth levels if the budget allows.

Are you looking for reasonable high business bandwidth levels at your current location or needing to connect a new facility? Know that high bandwidth broadband and private line services are more available and affordable than ever before. Get quotes from multiple providers and decide the best option for you.

Wireless Business Internet Options

By: John Shepler

We live in a wired world. Your business is tethered to infrastructure of electrical power, telephone and Internet by a variety of copper cables. Electric power and landline phone are almost universally available, thanks to national plans and regulations.

Internet? Not so much. While copper and fiber optic broadband are readily available in metro and suburban areas, as you get farther from the city center you options go down. Out in rural areas? There’s often no such thing as wired Internet infrastructure. You either go without or… go wireless.

Point to Point Microwave
Think of point to point microwave as fiber optic without the fiber. At high enough frequencies that could be an actual light beam from a laser, although it is much more common to use the centimeter and millimeter wave bands.

PTP microwave uses small dish antennas at the sending and receiving ends. This is a fixed, not mobile, service and you need the antenna on your building high enough to see the other dish without obstructions. These high frequencies don’t penetrate objects well, but they can supply high bandwidths of a Gigabit per second or more.

While PTP microwave established itself in dense metro areas that might be expensive to add fiber or cabling or take too long for construction, you see these little dishes on cell towers out in the country for the same reason. If there is a provider serving your area, you might be in luck for this service.

Wireless Internet Service Providers
A WISP, as it is known, is a centrally located tower that provides wireless Internet service to a small service area circling the tower. This is point to multi-point rather than a dedicated PTP link. Think of WISPs as high powered WiFI outdoor routers. Like PTP, you’ll need an outdoor antenna, perhaps one of those small dishes, pointed at the tower. They may operate in licensed or unlicensed spectrum and deliver typical broadband speeds.

WISPs are popular where fiber and cable don’t reach, but they are local operations. You may or may not have one that serves your location.

Cellular Broadband Service
Just about everyone has a smartphone these days and making phone calls is the least of the services we expect. No, it’s the broadband Internet connection feeding a myriad of apps that keeps us glued to the screen. That same broadband can be harnessed for business applications using an access point that has all the circuitry needed for broadband but minus the screen and telephone capability.

For limited or infrequent use, you might pick up one of these access points at a big box store. Have it set up for the carrier of your choice. These work well in areas where the cellular signal is strong and usually come with fairly limited usage plans. Plug the access point into your router or buy one that comes with a WiFi router and you can serve your entire business.

A more robust version designed especially for business uses specially designed antennas for better signal pickup or an outside antenna that will give you a strong signal even in rural areas. These business grade access points are usually 4G LTE or 5G where available. They also come with more extensive data plans, some even unlimited… just what you need to run a business with employees.

What makes this really attractive is that the cellular infrastructure is already widespread and extending out into many rural areas and smaller towns. If your business needs to move from job site to job site or your operate pop-up stores, cellular broadband may be the only reasonable option that will follow you.

Satellite Broadband
Yes, there are areas really out in the boonies where there is no cellular service and even landline phone and electric power are hard to come by. You can still get Internet, though. How? With a satellite dish pointed at the southern sky where the geostationary communication satellites are parked. Newer high power satellites offer high speeds, reliable service, reasonable data plans for business and reasonable prices.

The big limitation of satellite business broadband is the latency that is inherent in the long distances that the signal must travel up to the bird and back down. This half to one second or so delay can be an annoyance for business processes that use the cloud or VoIP phone calls and video conferences. For email, web browsing, remote data acquisition and file transfers, latency might not be much of an problem at all.

The latency issues will likely be solved by the new constellations of Low Earth Orbit or LEO satellites. These orbit hundreds rather than tens of thousands of miles up and support latencies similar to cable or long haul fiber. SpaceX is first to market with an extensive fleet of broadband satellites that will provide worldwide coverage, even at sea, in a few years. Other providers will likely follow, as the potential market for connecting the disconnected is enormous.

Are you in serious need of reliable broadband Internet service for your business at a reasonable price? Find out what wired and wireless solutions are available for your locations now.

Lower Cost Last Mile Fiber

By: John Shepler

What is the most critical part of the Internet? To you, the user, it’s that last mile connection to your place of business. That’s usually the limiting factor and where most of the problems are. What you need is a better connection, and fiber is the gold standard.

Last Mile Limitations
Don’t get me wrong. There are no guarantees on the Internet. Your priority is the same as everyone else’s. When nodes get congested or name servers go down, the people connecting on a shoestring and the well-healed are both affected. That said, the Internet has matured to the point where the backbone networks are highly reliable and have plenty of bandwidth.

If you need the ultimate in connection quality between multiple business locations, you need to look to private solutions, such as point to point dedicated connections and MPLS networks. These have much stricter control of bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. They are pricey and they don’t connect to the general public. That’s why the Internet is indispensable for nearly all businesses for sales and customer service.

The last mile connection is where pricing and quality vary all over the place. The biggest differentiator is shared vs dedicated bandwidth. Dedicated bandwidth means that you have exclusive use of the line capacity. What you don’t use simply idles until it is needed.

Seems like that’s the way it should always be, but the Internet wouldn’t have expanded geometrically the way it has if everyone had to pay for a dedicated line. Instead, carriers such as cable and wireless companies, buy high capacity dedicated lines and then multiplex them to share among many users. The idea is that not everyone is online at the same time and even if they are, most are not uploading or downloading at a given moment.

Prior to so many people working at home, most of the heavy consumer activity took place in the evening and business use was limited to daytime. Now, daytime demand is heavy for everyone using shared bandwidth. When it gets too heavy, line speed for everyone is reduced until the load lightens.

Dedicated High Speed Connections
Your best performance will come through a dedicated, symmetrical high speed link. Symmetrical means that upload and download speeds are the same. That tends to be case with dedicated lines. Shared bandwidth tends to be asymmetrical with much higher download than upload speeds.

You also want to connect through a top tier Internet Service Provider. These are larger companies that pay to connect directly to the Internet backbone. Smaller ISPs pay transport fees to the larger companies to connect through them to the Internet. It’s one more link in the chain.

You can get dedicated lines in both copper and fiber technologies. There are some microwave service providers who can deliver an equivalent connection wirelessly. These tend to be short range line-of-sight connections in major metro areas.

Copper solutions include the traditional T1 and DS3 (also called T3) lines. Newer technology is Ethernet over Copper which uses the same twisted pair cabling as T1 lines, but can support much higher speeds, although bandwidth tends to decrease with distance to the central office.

Fiber used to be a rare and expensive proposition, but that has all changed in recent years. Even cable companies have deployed fiber as their main transport network and some will sell you dedicated fiber optic Internet connections in addition to their more typical coaxial copper shared bandwidth services.

Fiber solutions include traditional telco Optical Carrier services such as OC3, OC12 and OC 48. The newer technology is Ethernet over Fiber. it’s generally much less expensive and highly scalable. That means you aren’t stuck with the bandwidth you first installed. You can start off with 10 or 100 Mbps and easily scale up to 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps as the need arises. That alone is a great cost saver. The competitive nature of today’s fiber marketplace has greatly reduced the price of bandwidth far below what you might expect.

The buildout of cellular towers for 4G LTE and 5G has created a fiber construction boom. Many buildings have also been connected by fiber for business use. These are great places to have an office because the heavy construction costs of bringing in fiber have already been paid. If you don’t have fiber in your office yet, it may still cost little or nothing to bring a fiber bundle in. That’s because there is likely a point of presence fairly close and carriers each want to be first to “light” a building and garner the business of the tenants.

Do you need a reasonably priced highly reliable last mile connection to the Internet? Get multiple competitive quotes now and see how much bandwidth you can really afford.

10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access Has the Speed You Need

By John Shepler

Gigabit Internet is something of a gold standard for high speed business connections. Sometimes, though, even 1 Gbps doesn’t get the job done. At that point you need to consider a move up… to 10 Gigabit Internet.

Who Needs 10 Gbps Bandwidth?
Most small businesses and probably all residential Internet users have no real need for this performance. The bragging rights are far offset by significant monthly lease fees. This is serious bandwidth for demanding applications that make having it more than worth the cost.

Not long ago the only place you’d find 10 Gbps pipes were in the backbones of carrier networks, including the Internet itself. Time marches on and what was adequate a decade ago is marginal performance today. Those 10 Gbps lines have gone from rare and hard to get to fairly common and readily available to business.

Cloud services and colocation centers certainly need access to gigabit, 10 gigabit and even higher connection speeds. Large corporations with thousands of employees, all connected, can also justify this speed. High tech firms and those using high tech tools may also require higher speeds. Content providers? Absolutely. Hospital and medical centers with large imaging requirements certainly can’t be waiting around for file transfers.

What’s Involved In Acquiring 10 Gigabit Service?
Speeds this high are almost always going to be delivered on fiber optic cable. The interesting thing about fiber is that once you have it installed it is as easy to get high speeds as it is to get much more modest service. That’s because the fiber itself is capable of tremendous throughput. The limiting factors are the number of strands in the fiber bundle and the termination equipment on both ends.

The first standard for high speed fiber transmission was developed by the telephone companies and called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. You may have heard of OC-192, which is the 10 Gbps SONET Optical Carrier level. Nowadays, most competitive networks and even the telcos are moving to Carrier Ethernet. Ethernet is directly compatible with nearly all local area networks. It is also easily scalable from typically 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and even higher speeds. What’s even more important for most business users is that Carrier Ethernet, also called Ethernet over Fiber, is generally far more available and far less costly than the older SONET technology.

Many competitive regional, national and international carriers now offer 10 Gig Ethernet access as well as point to point private lines. That means you may have several competitive offers to consider.

Why 10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access?
Think of the Internet as the proverbial electronic superhighway with a backbone of major interstate and international roadways and millions of on-ramps. Unless you are part of the Internet itself, you will be connecting through one of these on-ramps. They vary greatly in performance.

The best performance you can expect on the Internet is to connect to the network backbone through a high tier provider using a dedicated connection. Dedicated means that you and you alone have use of the bandwidth you have leased. That sounds like the way it should be, but most Internet connections designed for consumers and smaller businesses are shared, not dedicated. By multiplexing many customers on the same line, cable, satellite and cellular wireless companies can offer low cost reasonable speed connections to their customers.

The other characteristic to look for is symmetric bandwidth. That means 10 Gbps in both the upstream and downstream connections. Those low cost options are usually asymmetrical, with download speed high and upload speed low.

Bandwidth to Grow With Your Needs
Since Carrier Ethernet is so scalable, you can often order the bandwidth you need today with the option of upgrading incrementally as your needs grow. With a 10 Gbps port, you can order 1 Gbps, 5 Gbps or some other speed and pay for the performance you are actually using. As long as you have enough port speed, you can often upgrade with just a phone call to your supplier or even through your online account.

Are you cramped for bandwidth but concerned that what you really need is not available or too expensive? You’re likely in for a pleasant surprise, so go ahead and request competitive quotes from Dedicated Internet Access providers serving your business address.

When Your Broadband Isn’t Stable Enough For VoIP Phones

By: John Shepler

People may point and laugh when you tell them your phones are still on analog landlines. Do you have to crank the phone or spin the dial? Very funny… especially when it turns out the joke is on them.

Those old twisted pair lines were designed to have decent voice quality and rock solid stability. Yes, they can degrade with time. That usually shows up as noise on the line until you can’t make or receive calls. After a quick service call, everything is back in order for another year or two or a decade.

Oh, but that’s so old fashioned. The new phone line is the Internet. You can ditch the separate wiring and expensive line to the phone company when your computers and telephones share the same broadband connection. You can also get more advanced features, such as phones and computers that work together to support customers.

The only real hitch is that sometimes the new phones don’t measure up to the old phones. Oh, the handsets are great. They’re marvels of electronic engineering. Somewhere, somehow, the performance is getting lost. Calls may start out fine and then get garbled. The distortion can be so bad you can’t understand the caller. Worst case the call gets dropped…. and you slam that fancy handset back in the cradle. Not too hard, though. Those phones are expensive.

Where It All Goes So Wrong
The problem with VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony isn’t the fundamental digital technology. It’s that Internet thing. The Internet serves everyone, goes everywhere and is cheap as chips, as they say. Anyone and everyone is online doing pretty much everything possible. Your phone call goes into the fray like every other session and winds up at your VoIP service provider. It’s also completely democratic. Your call is no more or less important than somebody streaming a movie or placing an online order.

What you may not realize is that your old phone calls were really dedicated private connections between you and the party you are talking to. The line itself from your building to the phone company is just a pair of wires that go all the way there. A switching system then connects your line to the other party’s line. You have a dedicated circuit for the duration of the call. If the system gets overloaded, the next caller gets a busy signal. On the Internet, nobody gets a busy signal. The system simply slows down or drops bits. That’s what wrecks nice clean phone conversations.

Is There a Way to Make it Better?
The fundamental problem is more bits per second than a connection can handle. First, stop letting your computers and phones fight for the bandwidth. Set your router up to give phone calls priority. Whatever they don’t use can serve the other equipment. If those operations don’t have enough left over, you are going to have to order a higher bandwidth line.

Another thing to know is that the first mile is the worst mile for an Internet connection. The core of the Internet has much higher performance than most local Internet Service Providers. The cheaper the connection, the more likely it is that you’ll be in contention with other users. Dump the shared bandwidth services like cable and cellular broadband in favor of a dedicated Internet connection, like a T1 line. The 1.5 Mbps bandwidth of T1 is probably not going to meet your other needs, so consider this just for the phones. Otherwise get a higher bandwidth service for everything using Carrier Ethernet over copper or fiber.

Get Off The Internet
If you really want to get control of call quality, replicate the old dedicated phone line but with newer technology. What you need is a dedicated line service from your company to your phone service provider. Most PBX systems can use a T1 line, ISDN PRI (another flavor of T1), or a SIP Trunk. SIP Trunking is designed to directly support VoIP telephony.

Note that these dedicated lines go directly from point to point. There is no Internet connection involved.

If you want to tie together several business locations, an MPLS network may be cost advantageous. This is like a private Internet. The difference is that the line quality is carefully maintained by the service provider and is not the free-for-all you get on the Internet. Does it cost more? You bet. It may well be worth it, though, for customer satisfaction and employee productivity.

Are you frustrated with the quality of your phone service or the performance of your entire network? It’s time to take a look at voice and data connections that will get the job done and probably save you more money than they cost.