Can CPaaS Make Your Job Easier?

Are you getting a bit overwhelmed with a myriad of business applications that kinda, sorta work together but just don’t seem to give you the seamless communications that you really wish you had? Perhaps something new could help. It’s called CPaaS or Communications Platform as a Service.

What is CPaaS and Why Should I Want It?
CPaaS doesn’t replace what you have now. It extends your capabilities without having to rip out your current systems or buy new expensive hardware. CPaaS is focused on communications. It a suite of tools that plug into your existing systems to add capabilities you don’t have now or find awkward to use. Best of all, you don’t need extensive technical support to make CPaaS work. These are developer friendly APIs hosted in the cloud and available as needed.

What Can CPaaS Do?
Which API’s you elect to use may depend on the industry you are in. For instance, in healthcare you may want the ability to have video consultations for Telehealth, send appointment reminders and have secure HIPAA-compliant messaging. Financial businesses may desire 2FA authentication for secure login and chatbots to handle FAQs. Other businesses may want interactive telephone response, email updates, SMS alerts, virtual meetings and contact analytics.

Note that all of these applications are related to enchanting communications with customers, clients, supplies or team members. They are designed to fit into what you are using now without a lot of muss and fuss. You can customize your workflows and automate interactions without having to purchase, install and train on whole new systems.

The Cloud Makes It Painless
The mere thought of having to take the time and effort to dig into the systems you use every day or hire the expertise needed to do this is cringeworthy. It’s way more complexity than most companies want to deal with. Plus, once you start creating ad-hoc custom solutions, you are stuck with ongoing maintenance and upgrades and tracking who has what throughout the company.

The cloud aspect of CPaaS greatly simplifies things. All the hardware and software that makes the internals of these application interfaces function is handled by the CPaaS vendor. You are just dealing with inserting the APIs and easily customizing the user features as you desire. There are low code and no code solutions including pre-built templates to make it easy on your tech team.

What’s the Cost of CPaaS?
As a service, CPaaS is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. You decide what apps you want to deploy and to what extent. You only pay for what you use. As business conditions change, you can increase or decrease your usage as needed. There is no need for an upfront capital outlay in hardware or software.

Does Communications Platform as a Service sound like it might be something that would make your business more productive? If so, you are invited to talk with a technical expert and see what CPaaS offerings make the most sense for your situation.

The Software Defined Network Comes to Austin

By: John Shepler

The Software Defined Network (SDN) has been one of those nebulous concepts that is coming someday to do something better than current IT technology. Well, that day has arrived and here’s what SDN is going to do for your company.

Why Software?
Like software everything, the software defined network is intended to replace fixed hardware functions with reprogrammable software. It’s not really a simplification process. The hardware may be more generic, like microprocessors and digital signal processors, but if you include the lines of code, the component count shoots through the roof. The beauty of software is that all those “soft” parts can be replicated instantly at little or no cost. Even more importantly, software can be changed from afar as needed.

The Idea of Virtualization
You’ve probably run into virtualization in the IT racks. Not that long ago, a server was a stand-alone computer with its own operating system and software load. Each server had a designated function. If it was overloaded, you needed to buy a more powerful computer and swap out the boxes. If the application wasn’t that demanding, the server would loaf along most of the time.

In this type of environment everything needs to be planned up-front and changes are time consuming and sometimes expensive. There’s also a poor utilization of resources. You may need a lot of lightly loaded servers all cooking in the racks in order to run your myriad of business applications.

Virtualization changes all that. The server is no longer a hardware appliance but a software function running on one or more processors. The computer hardware might not look much different, but what used to be one server may now be a dozen running on the same box. Huge applications might span several boxes to get the job done. It’s just a matter of how much in the way of resources an application needs.

Some of what virtualization has accomplished is to reduce the number of physical computers needed since each box is running at a higher capacity. Even more important, a new virtualized server can be installed in minutes since it is simply a software “instance” running on the hardware already in the racks. Don’t need a server anymore? Simply have the software release the resources back into the pool. You don’t even have to set foot in the data center to make this all happen.

Does this sound like “The Cloud”? Virtualization on a huge scale is the magic behind cloud data centers and cloud services.

Virtualization for the WAN
Now consider your telecommunications network connections. Like all hardware based approaches, there are many specialized functions implemented by very specific equipment cards and boxes. Some are in the central office, some in the network path and some at the customers premises. It takes a long time to provision a new service and get everything wired up correctly so that you get the service you pay for and don’t interfere with others or have them interfere with you. The term “nailed up” goes back to the days when physical copper wires were literally nailed up on a board while they were assigned to a particular customer.

If you’ve ever tried to upgrade service, you know what a pain it can be. You need to submit a new order that needs to be processed. The changes to the network for your extra bandwidth have to be engineered. Then a truck has to roll to your location delivering a CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) box with the proper interface for the new service. Bandwidth is typically available in major increments and you better get your order placed well in advance of running out of current capacity.

Now, what if the network could be virtualized like the servers? The hardware becomes more of a life support system for the software. That software can be changed, upgraded or supplemented at will. All of a sudden, network changes become fast and easy. That’s the software defined network.

What AT&T is Doing in Austin
AT&T is launching its software defined network in Austin, Texas with the moniker AT&T Network on Demand. That’s pretty much what it’s all about. Businesses will be able to increase or decrease the bandwidth of their broadband speeds in near real time. In olden days (before SDN) this could take hours maybe days in the case of Ethernet services or weeks or longer for legacy SONET and T-Carrier.

The Carrier Ethernet services over copper and fiber that have appeared on the scene recently were engineered with more of the software defined network idea in place. One of their bragging points is that you can usually get a bandwidth increase by simply calling your service provider and making the request over the phone. No need to keep watching out the window for the service truck to roll in. As long as you have enough port capacity, the carrier will make the changes “invisibly” while you are doing other things.

In fact AT&T’s SDN will let them provision new communication ports in days compared to weeks. That’s an extension of the software-defined philosophy that separates physical hardware from software. Once again, as long as the installed hardware has the capability of handling the demands placed on it, what it does is really a function of software parameters and apps. Look for this approach to expand rapidly throughout the industry. It will be a matter of competitiveness among the communication carriers and other service providers.

Are you limited by your current MAN or WAN network capability? The service offerings are changing fast. Chances are that you can get more capacity and flexibility without a cost increase with MAN and WAN Network Services available now.


Note: Photo of Austin, Texas at night courtesy of Daniel Mayer on Wikimedia Commons.

Fractional and Full Gigabit Ethernet Options

By: John Shepler

Today’s demanding application push for higher and higher bandwidths. Right now 10 Mbps is considered entry level and most businesses need at least 100 Mbps WAN bandwidth to ensure that real-time (VoIP, videoconferencing) and latency sensitive (cloud connections) applications won’t succumb to degradation from network congestion at peak load times. Technology intensive businesses and medium to large scale operations can easily require Gigabit connections. Fortunately, they are easy to come by and relatively inexpensive compared to times past.

One major technology upgrade in the last decade is the standardization and deployment of Carrier Ethernet. This represents a major change in MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth. The legacy services are SONET/SDH, a TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) switched circuit technology originally developed for massive telephone trunking between central offices. Carrier Ethernet acknowledges the fact that packet switched traffic is dominant on networks worldwide. With Ethernet on the local networks, it seems logical to keep everything in the Ethernet protocol from end to end.

Carrier Ethernet can be transported on both copper and fiber lines. The lower bandwidth offerings are found on EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This is a twisted pair technology that uses the same installed cabling that supports T1 and analog phone lines. EoC typically starts at 1 to 3 Mbps and goes up to 10 or 20 Mbps, although there are special situations that will support 50 and even 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. These tend to be locations very close to the telco CO where the termination equipment is installed. Copper based Ethernet loses bandwidth capacity rapidly with distance.

Ethernet over Fiber is the logical solution for many, if not most, high performance applications. Bandwidth typically starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps. Popular service levels are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. These mirror the LAN speeds of standard, fast and gigabit Ethernet.

There are factors that make Carrier Ethernet more affordable and more flexible than the longstanding SONET services. Numerous competitive carriers have deployed their own regional and national fiber networks independent of the public telephone system. They own the fiber and terminal equipment, including last mile drops to your building. This is a very competitive field right now and lease prices per Mbps have plummeted in recent years.

Another real cost savings opportunity arises from the easy scalability designed into Carrier Ethernet services. TDM based bandwidth is technically unique at each service level. T1, DS3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and other installations require specific terminal equipment. If you wish to upgrade to a faster service, you need different equipment installed. That helps drive costs and leads to long installation times.

Carrier Ethernet bandwidths are somewhat arbitrary. Everything works the same regardless of how much traffic is being transported. In other words, Ethernet is Ethernet. What’s important is the speed of the installed port at your location. It is the maximum capacity of the port that sets a limit on the bandwidth you can order. A Fast Ethernet port is good up to 100 Mbps. A Gigabit Ethernet port raises that ceiling to 1000 Mbps.

There is nothing that prevents you from operating your network connection at a speed less than the maximum port capacity. Fractional line speeds that are rate limited by the service provider have been available for other services, such as DS3 or OC3. There are cost savings available with these, but they are not nearly as dramatic as what you’ll find with Ethernet.

In fact, scalability is a big selling point with Carrier Ethernet. Many carriers offer bandwidth upgrades with only a phone call required. The additional capacity can be online in a matter of hours or days. That compares with weeks or months for equipment changes on older services.

This is where Gigabit Ethernet makes sense even if you don’t need that much capacity today. The idea is to install a Gigabit Ethernet port, which is commonly available with a managed router provided by the carrier. The output is a standard copper or fiber Ethernet jack. You can then place your initial bandwidth order at 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps or some other level that represents your current need. When you need more bandwidth, that phone call will get you 500 Mbps, 750 Mbps or one of many other increments. These fractional Gigabit speeds can be increased until you are at the full Gigabit capacity of the port.

Is Gigabit Ethernet still too restrictive? The answer, as you may suspect, is to order a 10 GigE or even 100 GigE port. That’s the practical limit today. As bandwidth demands continue to increase, carriers will upgrade their core networks to Terabit per second and higher speeds. Soon afterwards these speeds will be available to business or organization customers with highly demanding applications.

Are you being squeezed for metro and long haul bandwidth to support your organization? If so, it is well worth your while to look into the availability and cost of fractional and full Gigabit Ethernet services, and higher if needed.

Backup Your Gmail and Google Apps While You Can

More and more of us are using Gmail and other Google applications for business. It’s an easy entree into the cloud and the price is right. But what happens when something goes horribly, horribly wrong? Oops! You’re out of luck.

Oh, what can go wrong? I’ll tell you what can go wrong real easy. You’re cleaning up your email and just start deleting them as fast as you can. Oh, no, there was some valuable contact information in some of those. Now they’re gone for good, aren’t they?

Not necessarily. Not if you have your Gmail backed up. You do know how to backup your Gmail, don’t you? You just... Oh, wait. Google doesn’t give you that feature. You need a special service like Backupify to backup your Google Mail data.

What services are backed up? They include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Contacts and Google Sites. What this service does is create automated daily backups with one-click restore. The account administrator can also initiate a backup at any time. What’s more, an admin can also export all the data in a user’s account. That’s handy when employees are leaving and you want to keep the data but not the Google Apps account itself. You may also just want to bring your cloud data in locally to work on it or have a “belt and suspenders” approach to maintaining backup copies.

How long is your data retained? Indefinitely, by default. You do have the option to set a retention period to match company policy.

You’re probably wondering just how secure this third-party backup system really is. All communications are over encrypted channels, typically 256 bit SSL. The data in the archives is encrypted at AES-256 or higher using a randomly generated AES256 bit key unique to each user. All the user AES keys are also encrypted with a master RSA-2048 private key.

Your data isn’t just being backed up to any old data center, either. This service uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon offers an enormous and proven set of cloud computing services. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Amazon S3 is used as a cloud to backup the cloud. Amazon S3 is ISO 27001 and PCI DSS Level 1 certified.

Do you really like the way Google applications work but are a bit uncomfortable not having an independent backup for your business needs? Now you can have just that with ample storage and a very modest monthly cost per user per month. Best of all, there’s a 15 day free trial available so you can see if this service is right for you before you make it a part of your business routine.

Bonded T1 Solution Increases Bandwidth

T1 bandwidth at 1.5 Mbps has been a staple for smaller business applications. For many businesses, a solid 1.5 Mbps download and 1.5 Mbps upload is more than adequate. Some businesses can even use an Integrated T1 solution to deliver both telephone and Internet service on the same line. But other businesses are finding that T1 bandwidth is becoming a bottleneck to productivity. They need and want more bandwidth.

So, what is the easiest and most cost effective solution? A straightforward approach is to add another T1 line. This doubles your bandwidth from 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps. But don’t just run out and order a second T1 line just anywhere. If you want to two T1 lines to work as if they were one larger line, then you’ll need to get them from the same supplier and request a bonded T1 solution. Bonding is a technical process that combines the bandwidth of the otherwise independent T1 lines.

Why would you not want your lines bonded? One reason is redundancy. If the two lines are bonded and from the same source, chances are that a fault that takes out one line might well take out the other as well. You’ll be left with no bandwidth at all until repairs are completed. Fortunately, this is usually a matter of hours at most for top tier T1 line service providers. Even so, by keeping the lines separate and from totally different carriers coming in on different wire bundles from different directions, you stand a good chance of an outage being limited to one line or the other.

Redundant lines are easiest to implement when they feed different networks. Say, half your users are on one line and half on the other. Or, you can use a device called a TRUFFLE from Mushroom Networks to combine two or more broadband lines to create one larger bandwidth. If you lose one input to the TRUFFLE, the others keep feeding the network.

Another situation where a bonded T1 solution makes sense is delivering larger amounts of bandwidth to locations where fiber optic service isn’t available or is way too expensive to bring in. You can bond 3 T1 lines to get 4.5 Mbps, 4 T1 lines to get 6 Mbps, 5 T1 lines for 7.5 Mbps, 6 lines get you 9 Mbps, and bonding 7 T1 lines will deliver 10.5 Mbps. That’s equivalent to basic Ethernet network speeds and is more than enough for applications like video conferencing and broadband Internet access for medium size companies.

Bonding this many lines often makes a lot of sense for companies located in rural areas or just far enough from Metro Ethernet service that fiber isn’t practical. That includes WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) and rural medical centers, as well as office buildings of all types. T1 line service is available just about anywhere you can get telephone service and is provisioned on the same type of twisted pair cable that brings in analog or digital phone lines.

Finally, a bonded T1 solution can provide short term connectivity while fiber optic service is under construction. In most cases, the copper wiring to support bonded T1 bandwidth is already in place. A service provider only needs to install customer premises termination equipment and provision the service. Once fiber has been brought in and turned up, you can discontinue the bonded T1 connection or keep it as a backup service that will be unaffected by faults in the fiber optic network.

Can you business benefit from a fast, reliable T1 based bandwidth service? Check prices and availability for a bonded T1 solution now. If you have an older T1 line contract, you may find that you can get more bandwidth for the same money today.

Ether Rabbit Finds Cheap Ethernet Fast

What's quick as a bunny and knows where the best deals on Metro Ethernet services are hiding? Why, the Ether Rabbit, of course!

Don’t you mean Easter Rabbit? Sure, for eggs both colored and chocolate. But to find cheap business Ethernet connections, you need a technology specialist. That’s the Ether Rabbit. Here’s a sneak peak at the newly updated site:



What sort of services do you require? Just use the handy inquiry form for service. If you know exactly what you are looking for, put that into the comments so that the expert consultant serving you can get prices and availability right away. If not, that's OK. Simply describe your application or business needs in general and we'll see what matches.

Go ahead and use this inquiry form now. The sooner your needs are known, the faster you can get service. Please note that this service is for businesses with their own business locations. Home office and residential users are encouraged to find appropriate services at Can I Get DSL?

What type of Ethernet services are available? There’s just about any bandwidth you could want available over fiber optic service, from standard 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Most of the time you can get scalable service, so you only have to buy what you need right now and have the ability to upgrade to a higher bandwidth later with only a phone call to your provider. In many cases you can get 10 Mbps and even higher Ethernet bandwidth delivered over twisted pair copper wiring. This means you save on fiber construction costs but still enjoy lower prices that typical telecom services for the same bandwidth.

So, are you interested in fast Ethernet service in all senses of the word? Then hop over and see what the Ether Rabbit can find for cheap Ethernet service near you.