Dedicated Symmetric Internet Connections

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with the performance of the Internet for business use? Are you inclined to think that the entire thing is really more intended for entertainment and casual browsing that actually getting work done in a timely fashion? Yet, there’s really no alternative. Your customers and suppliers and all the information you need is online. Even your software packages and communications may be on the cloud now. Perhaps all you really need is a higher performance broadband connection that is more suited to the workplace.

What’s Wrong With My Internet Service?
Chances are that your Internet Service Provider is delivering the service you ordered exactly as advertised.There is nothing really wrong with it. It’s just that the particular connection you are using is not up to the job. That’s especially true if you are making demands beyond what the typical Internet user expects. Some of the key parameters you need to be aware of include bandwidth, symmetry, dedication, latency, jitter, and packet loss. Let’s take those one at a time and see why they make a difference.

Bandwidth
Do fire fighters try to put out a blazing building with a garden hose? Of course not. A small pipe can’t deliver the huge volume of water needed. Same with bandwidth. A small or low bandwidth connection might keep up with emails, credit card verification, casual browsing and some video streaming. it can’t keep a dozen, a hundred or a thousand employees working efficiently. Once the “pipe” (yes, it’s actually called that) is at capacity you experience congestion. Too many packets per unit of time. Somebody has to wait their turn… and wait, and wait and wait.

You need bandwidth appropriate to the job. That means you’ll have to kiss DSL goodbye. T1 lines are reliable but way too slow these days. Same for budget cable broadband, 3G or even 4G wireless. Move up to fiber optic service if you can possibly get it without too much construction cost. Otherwise, Ethernet over Copper may work. Depending on the application, you might get by with 100 Mbps to 1000 Gbps DOCSIS cable.

Symmetry
Not all broadband is the same by a long shot. One big difference is symmetry of upload and download bandwidth. Symmetry means how much alike they are. Cable, satellite, DSL and similar connections that primarily serve the consumer market are not symmetrical. They are called asymmetrical. You may get 100 Mbps in the download direction but only 10 Mbps in the upload direction.

What difference does it make? Consumers don’t care. They mostly download. Businesses transfer large files between locations and upload them to remote web servers. Enterprise software packages transfer data in both directions. Offsite backups are primarily in the upload direction. If you can watch videos easily but can’t backup your files, you’ve got a symmetry problem.

Dedication
We’re all dedicated to the job, right? That’s not what this is about. The two choices in bandwidth are dedicated and shared. Once again, those low cost broadband services are actually shared bandwidth. You and a dozen or a hundred other customers are all drinking from the same pipe. When everybody wants service at the same time, there isn’t enough to go around and things slow down. It’s really bad when they slow down during business hours and worse when you are working to a deadline.

Dedicated bandwidth services are yours and yours alone. Don’t get me wrong. The Internet backbones themselves are always shared. That’s not where the problem usually is. The real pinch point is that last mile between you and your service provider. You want that to be a dedicated connection if you expect consistency high performance.

Latency
Latency is a time delay. It’s a pause. Every circuit has latency. Even your local area network has some. The trick is to keep the latency so low you don’t notice it. What adds latency? Long distance connections with lots of equipment on the line. The worst is geostationary satellites. No matter what you do, there’s a half-second or more of time delay between action and response. Ten milliseconds of latency likely won’t hurt anybody. A hundred milliseconds will probably be noticeable. Half a second to a second? Maddening. Real time services such as VoIP telephone and video conferencing will be the most affected. If you need to use a satellite, be prepared to pause to let the other person speak or you’ll talk all over each other.

Jitter and Packet Loss
Jitter is a variation in arrival between packets. It’s another congestion problem. Jitter distorts conversations. Worse is packet loss. That means some packets get sent and never received. Data transfer protocols will simply request a resend. Voice and video will have holes in the stream that add more distortion. If packet loss is too bad due to a nearly unusable connection, even website performance and data backups will slow to a crawl.

Dedicated Symmetric Internet Connections
The gold standard in professional grade business Internet service is dedicated symmetric lines. Even better are dedicated symmetric lines that go directly from location to location, like branch offices or to a cloud service, and avoid the Internet altogether. If you are going to use the Internet, though, give yourself the best performance possible. Insist on a dedicated symmetric Internet access, preferably with a service level agreement. Plan on paying considerably more than you will for a budget connection, but consider it worth the price in productivity and better customer relations.

Long Haul Voice, Video and Data via MPLS Networks

By: John Shepler

Many companies need to transport voice, video and data over long distances, between cities, coast to coast or even internationally. Both the Internet and dedicated private lines are ways to effectively do this. But there is another option that you may not be aware of. That’s using MPLS networks for the majority of the distance involved. Why does this make sense? How do you choose among the options?

Internet Transport
The big advantage of the Internet is that it is already in place. You can get from just about anywhere on Earth to anywhere else with a simple broadband connection at each end. If your location and your destination are already Internet connected, there is no need to do anything special even if your two locations have never communicated before. Just send your packets from the source address to the destination address and they’ll get there.

This system works great for email, Web pages and non-time critical file transfers. It starts to fall down on real time interactive communications, such as VoIP telephone calls and video conferences. The quality of transmission can vary all over the place from minute to minute. Security is nonexistent for anything sensitive unless you add your own encryption. That’s called creating a VPN tunnel.

The reason that the Internet works great for certain applications and not others lies in its design. The Internet grew out of a government research project for creating a robust computer network that could withstand all sorts of natural and manmade disasters. The Internet automatically does its best to get your packets where they are intended regardless of network congestion or line cuts and equipment failures.

The Internet will almost always get your files transferred… eventually. If the packet loss is high, multiple retransmissions may be needed to get a perfect copy at the far end. If some or all of the network is congested, your files will get through when they get their turn. Most of the time this is no problem, but on occasion there will be delays.

For voice and video, congestion, jitter and packet loss are disasters. If the content is sent as a complete file, it can be treated like data and transmitted without error. But, if the content is streaming or two-way, resending lost packets doesn’t much help. By the time they get there, the stream has moved on.

One way streaming voice and video works much better is when you use a buffer to load in the packets as they arrive and then feed them out to the application at the desired rate. The worse the network conditions, the bigger the buffer you need to ensure your stream won’t stop or break up.

Two-way real time streams are much more sensitive. Buffering doesn’t help because it only adds time delay or latency. You say something and the party at the far end hears it a second or two later. If you’ve ever tried to communicate via a geosynchronous satellite you know how annoying this can be, and that is only a half second to a second of latency.

Dedicated Private LInes
The consumer world is tied to the Internet and its vagaries. Businesses with quality, timeliness and security concerns have long used dedicated private lines to handle their traffic. The beauty of a private line is that it only goes from point to point and doesn’t need to be routed. Since these lines are dedicated to your exclusive use, you don’t get contentions with other traffic on the network. As long as you have sufficient bandwidth and a high quality connection, the line will be transparent to your packets.

Another important characteristic of private lines is security. It’s pretty difficult for anyone but the most dedicated and skilled snoops to “tap” your line and read your traffic. There is no public access because it’s your private line. These lines are highly secure but can be made more impenetrable by using encryption between end points.

Private lines beat the Internet in all but a couple of areas. One is cost and the other is connectivity. Using the Internet is cheap because the cost of all that network infrastructure is spread of millions and millions of users. Consumer and low cost business connections are bargain priced because they are shared bandwidth that is offered on a “best effort” basis without any performance guarantees.

Private lines are at the other end of the cost spectrum. The cost of the line and necessary support equipment is spread over one user… you. You have to pay the full cost of the line but you do have exclusive use and the security and high performance that comes with it. This can get pricy when you need a line that goes for thousands for many thousands of miles.

The other issue is that not all locations can be connected with many private lines. It’s true that T1 lines (1.5 Mbps) are pretty much universal, although they need to be specifically installed at each end before you can send any traffic. Higher bandwidth solutions, such as Ethernet over Copper, SONET fiber, and Ethernet over Fiber may not be available where you want to go.

Why MPLS Networks Make Sense
It seems like the perfect solution is a network that is widely available, like the Internet, but performs like private lines without the high costs. Perhaps surprisingly, there are such networks. They are called MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching.

That mouthful of a name means a couple of important things. First of all, MPLS can transport a variety of protocols, including voice, video and data in most any format you need. Second, the label switching technology is unlike that of Internet routers, so MPLS networks are much harder to “hack.” Since there is no public access, the chances of some rogue troublemaker gaining access to the network are slim. For this reason, they are often called MPLS VPN networks because the technology of the network makes it virtually private without encryption. Of course, you can always add your own encryption to make your traffic even more impenetrable.

Yes, when you are using an MPLS network you are using a shared resource with many other customers of the network. However, it isn’t the free-for-all of the Internet. There’s no such thing as network neutrality on MPLS. Each customer pays for the bandwidth it needs (commonly called the CIR or committed information rate) and is guaranteed similar to private line performance with a service level agreement (SLA).

How about cost? Since the cost of the MPLS network infrastructure and operating expenses are spread over many clients, your cost of using the network is considerably less than leasing your own private lines. This is especially true if you are connecting internationally or need multiple private lines between different destinations. Think of the MPLS network as a cloud that is connected to each of your locations by a much shorter private line. The network cloud takes care of routing the traffic among your last mile connections.

Which is the best solution your long haul voice, video and data transport needs? Get comparative pricing and features for dedicated Internet access, point to point private lines and MPLS networks now.

Many Flavors of Business Internet

By: John Shepler

You need to connect your business to the Internet. In fact, it’s almost impossible to do business now without a broadband Internet connection. Your customers, your cloud services, your emergency backup, your suppliers and perhaps the connection to your home office, remote sites or franchisees are all via the Internet. The only question is how to best achieve that connectivity.

Most businesses don’t have a lack of options for getting Internet service. What they have is a confusing situation with may different services offering different characteristics at different price points. Choosing the lowest price option may result in frustration when the connection can’t support your particular business activities. Automatically picking the highest priced option can increase your internet costs significantly and may also not provide the connectivity you need. Let’s see if we add some clarity to this decidedly unclear situation.

Business Internet options generally fall within two categories. The first are telecom services, usually regulated and tariffed. These were the first connections invented and adopted by business as well as the carriers themselves. The other category includes information services that are were primarily designed to serve the consumer market but now available for businesses too.

Telecom services include familiar names such as T1 lines, DS3, SONET fiber optic services and the newer Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber connections. These are almost always intended for commercial and large organizational use. Most carriers won’t even provision these services to residences. That’s seldom a problem, because these telecom services range from several times to an order of magnitude higher in price than what residential users are used to spending.

What do you get for your telecom dollar? These services almost always offer symmetrical, dedicated bandwidth with a service level agreement (SLA). The service level agreement specifies the technical characteristics of your line service, the expected availability and how fast problems get attention and repaired. It’s a type of guarantee that you’ll get top rate performance.

Dedicated bandwidth means that you have exclusive use of the bandwidth you are paying for. You have access to a certain number of Mbps or Gbps on a 24/7 basis. You can run traffic occasionally or load up the line to full capacity continuously. The price is the same. It’s your bandwidth and nobody else gets access.

Symmetrical means that you get the same bandwidth in both the upload (transmit) and download (receive) directions. This isn’t important if you are just browsing websites, but it can be critical if you are running a server, backing up files to a remote data center, using cloud computing services, video conferencing or VoIP telephone.

Consumer oriented services are also referred to as “information services.” This is intended to imply that they are not a guaranteed telecom service and offered on a more casual basis. That basis means “best effort” delivery. The providers will make a good faith effort to ensure that you have reliable bandwidth service, but there are no guarantees of performance.

Typical services that fall into this category are DSL, Cable broadband, WiFi hot spots, 3G and 4G wireless and consumer oriented satellite service. Beyond the best effort delivery, what helps to hold the cost down is the use of shared asymmetrical bandwidth.

Shared means just that. There is a pool of bandwidth to connect to the Internet that is shared among dozens or hundreds of simultaneous users. How much you get at any given moment is determined by how many other users are online to divide up that bandwidth pool.

Asymmetrical means that your download and upload speeds are different. Typically, you get several to a order of magnitude (10x) faster speed on download that upload. Why? It’s because most Internet users are accessing web pages or streaming video. These are primarily one way activities. You need the extra bandwidth for those large file transfers from the server on the Internet to your PC.

There are some factors that muddy the waters. The consumer oriented services have business equivalents that are basically the same service but installed at commercial than residential addresses. They are often 2x to 3x the cost for business users. You do get better customer service and, often, the option for static IP addresses if you need them to run a server. Most consumer services prohibit running servers or sharing the bandwidth, such as offering a free WiFi hotspot.

So are these lower cost services something to avoid? Not at all, if they meet your needs. Even home broadband can be highly reliable and quickly repaired if the line is cut or equipment fails. It’s not unusual to get higher bandwidths, as high as 50 or 100 Mbps download and 5 to 10 Mbps upload, for roughly the same cost as a 1.5 Mbps T1 or 3 Mbps EoC line. If most of what your employees do is use email and web browsers or view video clips, you’ll likely get faster speeds for everyone with cable broadband than even bonded T1 lines. Sometimes wireless is all that will work at your location. In that case, a 3G or 4G cellular broadband can save the day when there are no wireline services available.

On the other hand, if you are running enterprise applications, especially in the cloud, or have converted your entire telephone system to VoIP, you’re not going to be very happy with the lower end services. The variability in bandwidth, latency and jitter will drive you crazy and drive your customers crazy as well. You’ll be much better off with dedicated symmetrical bandwidth. In fact, you may well want a direct connection to your cloud service provider or between business locations rather than deal with the vagaries and security issues of the Internet. Many companies need both: dedicated private line service for internal operations and an Internet connection to reach customers and access data.

How do you sort through the myriad of options for business Internet and private line option? Get help from a bandwidth brokerage service that can give you a range of options and the consulting support to make the most effective choices for your business. Find business bandwidth options and prices instantly online now.

Business Internet Connection Service

As a business, you need to connect to the Internet to communicate with your customers and to run your own operation. A business Internet connection is more demanding than a consumer Internet service. When your business connection goes down, you can be losing money. If you are an Internet based operation, a dead connection is like a closed store. Reliability as well as cost are key.

A fairly new connection technology called Ethernet Internet offers both cost and reliability advantages. In addition, you may be able to get bandwidth that has been unobtainable at your particular business location. How can you know what’s available? Use this quick Ethernet Internet Finder and see...



Why Ethernet? It’s the most direct connection to your own network. Whether you are running a wired or wireless LAN, chances are that you are using the Ethernet protocol. Most computers and peripherals come with Network Interface Cards that support 10/100 or 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet. That’s the standard RJ-45 network connector. Your router, wired or wireless, no doubt has an RJ-45 input connection. With Ethernet Internet service, you simply connect an Ethernet patch cord from the provider’s port to your router or switch.

Two popular types of Business Ethernet Internet connections are Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Both are highly reliable and have easily scaled bandwidth. Also, the bandwidth is symmetrical. For instance, 10x10 Mbps Ethernet gives you 10 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. You’ll have the full 10 Mbps at your disposal. This is dedicated bandwidth, rather than the shared bandwidth you get with DSL, Cable or 3G wireless services.

The bandwidths of copper and fiber Ethernet services somewhat overlap. For instance Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is available from 2 Mbps on up to 200 Mbps. Ethernet over Fiber typically starts at 50 Mbps and goes up to 1 Gigabit or even 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

The cost of Ethernet Internet connections is lower than what you’ll find with T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth or SONET fiber optic services. You can typically get twice as much bandwidth for the same money as a T1 line and the difference is even more dramatic at higher bandwidth levels.

Does your business need a higher speed or more reliable Internet connection? If so, check out Ethernet Internet connection services for your location. Note that this service is available for business locations only. Sorry, no residential service available.