Are Your T1 Lines Saturated?

By: John Shepler

The ideal network connection is transparent. Regardless of whether the link is twisted pair copper, coaxial cable, fiber optic or wireless, if it does anything to affect your network traffic, it is clearly not transparent. The more you notice link limitations, the more your productivity will suffer and the more you need to do something about it.

Artificial Limitations
Best effort shared broadband services, like Cable BB, DSL, 4G Cellular or two-way satellite are limited by both technology and policy. Each type of service has its own capacity for traffic. That capacity is generally available 24/7, aside from occasional outages. Even so, you have access only to a portion of that capacity.

The first limitation is bandwidth. You are entitled to the level of service you order, as a maximum and not a guaranteed throughput. Providers manage this by rate limiting your connection to the service. The line might be capable of 1000 Mbps, but you get 10, 30 or 100 Mbps. Thats the highest bandwidth you can achieve even if there are no other users.

The second limitation is usage limits. These are particularly severe on wireless & satellite links where bandwidth is expensive. Limits of 5 or 10 GB per month severely limit what you can do with the service. Even higher limits of 20 or 50 GB may not be enough for normal business activities. If you go over your limit, you’ll either be charged more, have your connection dropped or have your bandwidth throttled for the rest of the month.

Actual Limitations
Private lines and dedicated Internet access connections usually don’t have artificial limitations. You pay more for these services because you are the only user. There is no need to create policies to ensure fair usage.

Technical limitations remain. Each technology has it’s inherent limitations. There’s no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, even on your own LAN network. What you want is enough bandwidth available that you never run out of capacity.

T1 Line Saturation
T1 lines have been the gold standard of business connectivity since they were introduced decades ago. T1 lines are dedicated connections between two locations or between your location and the Internet. You are the only user and there are no usage limits. The line is constantly running and available to transfer data. You can use as little or much of the available capacity each month. The lease price is fixed.

T1 lines have a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. Actually, the exact line speed is 1.544 Mbps. However, 8 Kbps is needed as overhead to synchronize the line, so the payload rate is 1.536 Mbps. That’s what’s available for your bits of data.

The absolute maximum amount of data you can shove through the line can be figured at 1.536 Mbps x 60 seconds/minute x 60 minutes/hour x 24 hours/day = 132,710 Mbits or 16,589 MB per day, at 8 bits per byte. That’s 16.59 GB of data each day. In a typical 30 day month, that’s just shy of 500 GB.

Line Saturation Problems
Your T1 line becomes distinctly non-transparent when you have big files to transfer and you want to transfer them fast, or you have many users wanting to transfer their files at the same time. The entire line is only capable of transporting less than 17 GB every day, not even 1 GB per hour.

What happens when you try to shove more data down the line than it can carry? Everybody’s traffic slows down… sometimes to a crawl. That’s frustrating and can lead to real productivity issues, especially when need the information to proceed with your next task.

It gets worse when your telephone system is cloud hosted VoIP. Those voice packets get jammed up with all the data packets and don’t get from phone to phone as quickly as needed. The result is garbled voices, pauses in the conversation and perhaps even dropped calls.

Solutions
If you only occasionally reach line saturation, prioritizing traffic can help. Real time services, such as telephone calls and video conferences get highest priority. Whatever they don’t need can be used for interactive business applications, and whatever is left over is available for background activities like file backups.

At some point, you just need to pony up for more bandwidth. Fortunately, this is a lot less expensive to do than ever before. If doubling bandwidth will hold you for awhile, you can go from one to two T1 lines. By bonding those lines, you can double your bandwidth while the two lines act as one larger pipe.

Ethernet over Copper technology uses the same twisted pair copper lines that transport T1, but supports higher bandwidths of 10 Mbps or more. Ethernet over Fiber starts to become cost competitive at that level and can take you from 10 to 100 to 1000 Mbps, and even up to 10 Gbps if you ever need that much. Best of all, copper and fiber Carrier Ethernet services are scalable. That means you can have the line rate limited and pay less until you need the full capacity of the fiber.

Do you find yourself running out of bandwidth on your venerable T1 lines or other WAN connections? If so, check out prices and availability of higher level bandwidth services available for your business location.

MegaPath Puts Your Complete Office In The Cloud

You’ve been interested in cloud services, but it seems like ordering all those different services and then getting them to work together is more grief than just keeping everything separate. Now there’s a new solution that bundles all the IT services you need to run a small business at bargain pricing.

The thing about smaller businesses is that they don’t have or want to pay for enterprise level technology. The big VoIP phone systems and on-site data centers are ridiculous expenses for companies that only have a few or a few dozen telephones and computers. You may think that the big cost savings are only available through economy of scale. That used to be true, but hosted solutions have changed all that. You can get better pricing, more features and better performance even in a small retail store or professional office.

The magic behind this is called hosting. You might think of hosting as something that powers your website. Up till recently, that’s all that hosting was about. The big change underway is to use the same principles that work for website hosting and apply them to telephone, email, security, data backup and more.

MegaPath Complete Office Solutions bundles scalable voice, data and hosted IT solutions in a package that is designed to increase productivity and save you money. They can do that because MegaPath is a major competitive carrier and provider of IT services. They have massive data centers of their own and can provide you both the hosted services and the business bandwidth to make them work.

That’s important because you need to get to your services in the cloud. If all you have is an unreliable Internet connection or too-small bandwidth line service, even the best hosted services will fail. Get your bandwidth and cloud from the same reliable provider and you’ll have an ally to ensure it all works together optimally.

Here’s what Complete Office Solutions includes. First, you get a hosted voice solution as your business telephone service. Hosted voice means that you no longer have a key telephone PBX system to maintain. All of the switching, including in-house, local and long distance calls are handled by the hosted switching equipment in the cloud. You still have telephones, but they are IP telephones that connect to your company network, not to the telephone company. Your network connection is extended to MegaPath using their bandwidth solutions that are carefully managed to ensure that voice quality is maintained.

By the way, the new telephone sets you’ll need are included in your service price. There is no capital investment required. You pay a very reasonable price per seat per month for everything. You’ll have free use of either of two sophisticated office phones, the Cisco SPA 303G or the Polycom SoundPoint IP 335. These phone give you advanced calling features such as unlimited national calling, call forwarding, call waiting, caller ID, call transfer find me / follow me, HD voice, voicemail and options that include hunt groups, auto attendant and analog faxing.

By the way, this hosted system is easily scalable. That means that you can add seats and even other business locations without the expense and upset of ripping out equipment and installing something with more capacity. All the capacity you’ll ever need is right there in the cloud. All you add is more seats as you need them, any only pay for what you are using.

Beyond business telephone, you’ll have broadband access, 5GB of initial data backup and hosted Exchange email. Hosted SharePoint for collaboration is also available as an optional service. The bundle includes free equipment and free installation. It’s everything you need for a modern business.

Are you ready for a more modern and more integrated office technology solution without the pain of capital investment or the need to get everything working yourself? You may be ready for a cloud hosted business communications solution available on a pay as you go basis. It’s the new way to get the IT and telephony services you need to run your business.

Symmetrical Internet Providers

Most people who use the Internet are consumers, not producers of content. The mix of content has migrated from largely text to largely images and streaming video over the last couple of decades. Even so, the connection arrangement for broadband Internet access has remained asymmetrical with bandwidth in the downward direction 5 to 10 times that provided in the upload direction.

Why is that the setup? Think about how you access the Web on a PC, tablet or smartphone. It almost always involves selecting some content to read or view. The selection process is a matter of mouse clicks or keyboard entry. Those are pretty low bandwidth activities. The viewing of the results or the acquisition of a file is just the opposite. A server assembles those results and delivers fairly large pages consisting of text, graphics, photo images and perhaps video. All of that material comprises a lot of bytes and needs a considerable bandwidth to deliver in any reasonable time.

Since bandwidth is a scarce commodity, relatively speaking, there is a noticeable cost involved in providing the wireline or wireless channel for transport. There is no point in provisioning a fast upload link if it is only going to be lightly used. It’s download that customers value and demand as much as they can get for their broadband dollar.

Social media is changing the mix of upload and download requirements. When most of us were web page readers, the low bandwidth upload and high bandwidth download channels were the obvious setup. Today, many more users are creators as well as consumers of content. They post to blogs and Facebook. They upload photos and videos as well as download them. New applications like VoIP telephony and video conferencing consume equal amounts of bandwidth in both directions. The pressure on service providers is for more upload bandwidth as well as download bandwidth.

Businesses have had the symmetrical bandwidth requirement for a long time. It’s the businesses that run those servers that provide content to their customers. Large files going to the server need lots of bandwidth. There may be more email flowing out of a business than into it. Some businesses are providing streaming video content to the Internet and consume more bandwidth in the upload direction than the download direction. Cloud services have heavy traffic moving in both directions.

Right now, your choices in Internet bandwidth services can be divided into symmetrical and asymmetrical categories. Symmetrical means that upload and download speeds are the same. Asymmetrical means one direction is much faster than the other. That’s almost always the download stream.

Traditional telecom services are symmetrical. They were developed by the telephone industry and later adapted for transporting data. Telephone is inherently two-way with no difference in the amount of traffic flowing in one direction versus the other. If you order a T1 line, Ethernet over Copper, DS3 connection or OC-3 fiber optic service, you will get symmetrical bandwidth by default.

Symmetrical bandwidth services also tend to be dedicated Internet services, abbreviated DIA for Dedicated Internet Access. What does dedicated mean? It means that the bandwidth is assigned exclusively for your use. A 10 Mbps EoC Internet service gives you 10 Mbps in both directions, called 10 x 10 Mbps, anytime you want to use it. Any bandwidth you don’t need at the moment sits idle until you do.

Symmetrical bandwidth services are often covered by Service Level Agreements or SLAs. These agreements spell out the technical characteristics of the line, such as bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss. They also define such things as MTTR or Mean TIme To Repair for any outages that might occur. There are generally remedies available, like refunds on your bill, if the service provider can’t deliver to the terms of the SLA.

Asymmetrical bandwidth services are generally targeted toward consumers where price is far more important than performance. The bandwidth is shared among multiple users, not dedicated to you alone. That means that your download and upload speeds will vary depending on how many others are trying to use the service at the same time. Instead of SLAs, asymmetrical services are provided on a “best effort” basis that lacks any guarantees.

There’s quite a difference in price and performance between symmetrical and asymmetrical bandwidth services. Which is right for your business? Get prices and features from business broadband Internet providers to compare options and select the best match for your company needs.

Broadband Access Wireless Internet Providers

When we think of wireless Internet, the first thing that comes to mind is WiFi hotspots or 3G & 4G cellular broadband. It’s a mobile Internet technology, right? It is, but did you know that there are also wireless Internet services that are appropriate for fixed business locations like offices and retail stores?

One of the lowest cost wireless broadband services uses the same towers and resources that deliver broadband to your cell phone. Only this wireless service offered by Accel Networks is designed for fixed locations. What Accel has done is contract with major wireless carriers to use their bandwidth. By combining the coverage maps of several carriers, Accel can deliver 3G data rates to most locations that need it. You get similar bandwidth to a T1 line for about half the price. Installation is a matter of days, not weeks or months. Service reliability is 99.9% per the service level agreement.

Who is this service right for? It’s perfect for convenience stores, gas stations and other retail locations that need PCI compliant connection to process credit cards. Traditionally, these stores have ordered DSL, Cable broadband or satellite. When you are not on the path for wireline connections this wireless service can give you the bandwidth you need. You can even order it for temporary holiday locations, conventions and conferences, and construction sites.

Cellular broadband isn’t appropriate for applications where you need large amounts of continuous uploading and downloading. But there are fixed wireless services that are designed for just that. These are dedicated connections using directional antennas on special licensed frequencies for this service. The provider installs a small equipment and antenna box on the outside of your building and runs an Ethernet connection inside for your router. Dedicated fixed wireless can give you DS3 levels of bandwidth (45 Mbps) and replace bonded T1 lines and even lower speed fiber optic connections. The one kicker is that you need to be located near the carriers transmitting location, which is almost always downtown in a major metropolitan area.

Satellite is a two-way wireless service that has been popular with businesses that don’t need high bandwidth levels but do need connectivity in locations that have little to no wireline service and perhaps even no cellular service. These satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, just like the ones that deliver satellite TV service. The difference is that they are providing business broadband service. Satellite has the advantage that you can get service just about anywhere in the US where you have clear view of the southern sky and some way to provide electrical power. It doesn’t even have to be from the grid. Solar and batteries will work just fine.

Satellite and 3G cellular services are bandwidth limited and tend to have caps on the amount of data you can upload or download in a given period of time. They tend to have higher latency than wireline services. Geosynchronous satellites, especially, are unsuitable for such applications as VoIP telephony. But many businesses don’t need a broadband telephone service or video conferencing. What they do need is access to the Internet for email, credit card verification, viewing Web sites, using search engines, reporting inventory and ordering supplies, etc. These activities don’t require massive amounts of capacity or very high speeds.

If you have a business application that needs broadband access to the Internet but haven’t been able to find reasonably priced wireline services that meet your need, get prices and availability on broadband access wireless Internet providers that serve your business location.

You Are A WiFi Finder

The ultimate in Internet geekiness may be available through ThinkGeek. It's a t-shirt that glows to indicate the strength of nearby WiFi hotspots. Put this on and Internet addicts will follow you anywhere. Better yet, BE the hotspot and you'll have them eating out of the palm of your hand... or at least the signal you're radiating.

The Wi-Fi Detector Shirt by ThinkGeek is a black cotton t-shirt with a removable decal that shows a tower and radiating signal lines. Those lines light up in proportion to the signal strength of a nearby 802.11b or 802.11g WiFi hotspot signal. The closer you get, the more it glows.

Oh, wait. I can see a couple on the beach running toward each other. Their detector shirts get brighter and brighter as they approach until finally...ZAP. The power of love was just too much for the detector circuits and they fizzled.

OK, that's probably a bit far-fetched. But there is a way to make your detector shirt glow brighter as you approach the object of your affection. All they need is to be carrying a MiFi Personal Hotspot. That's the cool new device that slips in a shirt or jacket pocket, or can be tucked into a laptop bag or purse. The MiFi combines a wireless modem aircard for Sprint or Verizon Wireless Internet service along with a WiFi card to create a completely wireless roving hotspot. It can be used to secretly give you broadband access where others have none. Well, not so secret when someone with a detector shirt nears.

Say, are you still in pursuit of a compatible significant other? In that case, YOU bring the MiFi hotspot and wear the shirt. Geeks in the know will immediately recognize your radiating 2.4 GHz powers to connect and gather near. You can let up to 5 of them share your walking broadband connection. Will they love you for it? Will they buy you food in return for your generous connectivity? They better. Otherwise, they get shunned as a more promising follower is enabled for WiFi Internet. As Tom Petty said, "It's good to be king."

By the way, if you aren't into being a hotspot on the hoof but still want to draw attention to yourself, there's also an equalizer T-Qualizer Shirt. It has one of those spectrum analyzer displays with the signal bars that you see on many stereo receivers. It's got a built-in microphone, so all you need to do is swagger into a club or party and switch on the EQ display. Why, the moving lights in time to the music might even have a hypnotic effect on those you wish to impress. It will be up to you to use that power for good and not evil... as I'm sure you will.