Can You Use 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps Circuits?

By: John Shepler

The move to business software in the cloud increased the demand for high speed, low latency bandwidth. The introduction of AI ups the ante even more. What used to be considered high bandwidth may now be an impediment to getting work done. Fortunately, higher bandwidth circuits in the range of 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps are now readily available and at reasonable prices.

What Higher Bandwidth Offers
Why increase your bandwidth to 10 Gbps or above? Because you need it. Or, if you don’t absolutely need it, the improvement in performance and productivity justify the additional cost.

The amount of bandwidth you need is driven by the traffic on your WAN or point to point networks. As long as there is enough and the quality is high enough, the lines are essentially invisible. As soon as there are more packets ready to transfer than there is capacity to transfer them, trouble begins. Your circuit becomes congested. It shows up as increased latency, as packets must be buffered to wait their turn.

Response from the Internet and cloud slows down. Telephone calls have delays even to the point of sounding like you are on a two-way radio. Some packets might get lost creating garbled audio. Same for video. Two way conferencing gets jerky or frozen and may have missing pieces. Anything in real time suffers. Frustration by users increases. Workflow slows.

What Drives the Need for Higher Bandwidth?
Text messaging and email are now the least of the bandwidth drivers. Telephone audio might be if you have a large operation or a call center. Video for conferencing and watching online streaming is definitely a bandwidth driver. Don’t forget that more and more business processes are now being conducted in the cloud or at colocation data centers. The days of everything running on a server and some disk drives in the same building are gone for most everyone. At least some of what you do is processed remotely. That could be ordering, inventory, accounting, simulation and so on.

Replacing a sea of stand-alone PCs with a LAN was the first step. Now the LAN connects to a WAN and Dedicated Internet Access. The amount of traffic leaving the building is often more than what is handled strictly inside.

Don’t Forget About Big Data and AI
Data sets are becoming huge as more and more business and customer data is electronic. You don’t need more file cabinets, but you do need more disk space, including remote backup for safety.

AI is something new that consumes data and bandwidth like never before. As staffs are being encouraged to up their inference level and use as many tokens as they can to gain skill with AI models, the load on the connection circuits increases. Training can be even more of a overwhelming load as data bases have to be uploaded to the model. All of this is a demand on your network you probably didn’t see coming. But it’s here and it is only going to increase.

What Bandwidth is Available?
Most everyone needs Internet access and the best type for most business is DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. That is essentially a private line between your office and your service provider. Most of the congestion comes in the first mile when circuits are shared among many companies and residential users to save cost. Casual and undemanding users may not even notice the difference, but highly demanding businesses can easily see variations in performance throughout the day that are largely unpredictable.

Another form of private connection is direct cloud access, which connects you to your data center or cloud provider without going through the Internet. No sharing means faster and more consistent performance.

Dedicated private lines may also be leased to interconnect your facilities directly. This is like extending your LAN to cover multiple locations. Once again, no traffic sharing with other businesses and definitely no traffic sharing with the general public. Better performance and better security.

Is your network not keeping up with today’s needs? Increase productivity and future proof your connections with Dedicated Internet Access, direct cloud access, dedicated private lines, wavelengths and even dark fiber with bandwidth from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps and above.

Redundant Internet Connections Keep You Online

By: John Shepler

The Internet has become so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. It’s a utility, like gas, water and electricity. It’s always there quietly and efficiently running in the background… until it isn’t.

The Danger of Single Point Failure
Any time we’re dependent on one key element, we’re subject to what is called “single point failure.” Your entire business could be running like a well oiled machine, with orders being fulfilled and customers pouring in. It’s high efficiency and high profits. Then, the connection goes down and stays down. Computers do nothing. Point of sale terminals are frozen. Business grinds to a halt.

Somewhere, somehow the Internet has stopped cold. But it’s designed not to do that, right? Indeed it is. The technology behind the Internet was designed by the military to keep functioning during a nuclear attack when whole areas were vaporized. No one cable or router can stop the data flow. It simply re-routes to paths that are still functional. Well, except for that last connection. You, know. The one that hooks your business to your Internet service provider. How many lines is that? That’s right… ONE. What happens when that gets cut? Right again. Service to and from the Internet stops cold.

The Value of Redundancy
Redundancy is what protects you from single point failure. For things that are so critical you can can’t do business without them, you need a backup. When you have a primary connection and a backup you have redundancy

A simple example of redundant connections is found with many home based businesses. As a solopreneur, you probably can’t justify having a second fiber optic or cable service just in case one goes down. But you likely do have redundancy. Your desktop computer is connected through the router and modem to the ISP. Rarely do you lose service, but it does happen. What then? No need to call up and order another service, you already have one on your phone. Simply use the personal hotspot feature with your phone to supply cellular broadband to your computer and you’re back in business.

There are a couple of fine points here. First, you wan’t to get back to your primary service as quickly and you can or you may get overage charges on your cell phone bill. You typically get only so may GBs per month before they start tacking on extra fees. Second, is your primary Internet service a Fixed Wireless Access from the same provider as your phone service. That might be a great money saver but likely not a redundant connection. If the tower you are accessing is off the air, your phone goes dead and your FWA goes dead at the same time. What’s left to do? Pack up the laptop and head for a hotspot. Hopefully that coffee shop has a different ISP and is still Internet ready. Best to check before you settle in and order.

Robust Business Redundancy
Most businesses don’t have the option to flee the office or store and head out for a break to get reconnected at the nearest hotspot. It makes a lot more sense to have redundant service connections with enough speed to keep running no matter what. Also in most offices it isn’t practical to have everyone pair their PC with their smartphone, although that can work for a short period in some cases. It’s better to have a second redundant service available for the network you already use.

What are some things to think about when setting up this redundant connection? Ideally, you want at least automatic failover. That means when one line goes down, the other picks up the load automatically. This is similar to the way a battery backup power supply works. When the line drops, the battery powers an inverter and the computer doesn’t even blink.

Even better than automatic failover is having a dual or multi-port router that can automatically share the load or pick and choose what route to send each packet for best performance. That’s SDN (Software Defined Networking) or SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network). The beauty of this approach is that instead of one line sitting idle until it is needed, you can make use of all the available bandwidth all the time. Only when one connection goes down does the total bandwidth available get reduced for the duration of the outage.

A good SDN supplier will ensure that you have truly redundant services, but here are a few guidelines if you are going to set this up yourself. First, don’t just have a pair of lines going from your location to your iSP using the same route. Chances are they run in the same bundle. If a backhoe cuts the bundle, you lose all your connectivity at once. Instead, use diverse pathways so that no one disaster can take out all your lines.

You may also want to have different providers for each service. They can be fiber, cable, wireline, fixed wireless, or satellite. At least use two different providers and you may want to consider two different technologies that are unlikely to be affected by a particular outage… be that wire cut, storm, or power loss. It’s valuable to have battery, generator, or solar power backup for your own equipment as well as redundant Internet.

Have you experienced Internet outages or concerned that a sudden loss of service could damage your business? If so, speak with a technology expert and see what redundant Internet options are available for your situation.

Why Symmetric Bandwidth?

By: John Shepler

Bandwidth is bandwidth and the more the better, right? Well, not so fast. There is bandwidth and then there is bandwidth. All connectivity solutions are not the same. Let’s see why.

Sharing Isn’t Always Caring
Some connections are dedicated. Some are shared. You need to know which you are ordering.

A dedicated connection means a fixed amount of bandwidth that you are contracted for and are guaranteed to have all the time. The classic T1 line, SONET fiber optic, and many Ethernet over Fiber and private wireless solutions are dedicated. They may be set up as point to point private lines , cloud connections or last mile Internet access.

The advantage of dedicated lines is that your network capacity is always there even when you are not loading it up to the max. This improves latency and congestion compared to your other choice, shared bandwidth.

Shared bandwidth connections have other company’s traffic on the same line as yours. You have no idea how many there are or what they are doing. You may well feel their presence, however, as your WAN connection speeds up and slows down for unknown reasons.

So, why on Earth would you share bandwidth? Simply to save cost. Shared lines are dedicated lines that the carrier has sliced and diced to support many users instead of just one. If there is enough bandwidth and not so many users, you may not have a problem and can save considerably on monthly rates. Typical shared bandwidth services include cable broadband, wireless 4G LTE and 5G, and some passive optical fiber optic services that are available at bargain rates.

Symmetric vs Asymmetric Bandwidth
Symmetric bandwidth is when you upload and download speeds are the same. Asymmetric bandwidth means that one direction has much more capacity than the other. The high speed link is almost always the download path. Download speeds may be 10x faster than upload speeds.

Why? Asymmetric setups were designed to mimic the way people actually use the Internet. For the most part you download videos much more often than upload them. You enter short addresses in your browser and download web pages and content far more than you upload them. Or… Do you?

Business users may use their networks much more symmetrically than typical residential users. Business users likely transfer large files back and forth. Many of their applications reside in the cloud with data flowing up and down. VoIP phone and video conferencing are inherently symmetrical. Voice and images go both ways. Remote back-up is asymmetric for the most part… but the other way. Most data is being uploaded to the remote storage.

Traditional telecom networks are designed with symmetric bandwidth in mind. Consumer solutions, which are also typically shared bandwidth, are asymmetric in nature. For casual users and small businesses this may not be an issue. However if you are a heavy bandwidth user, depend on software as a service, do extensive video conferences or back-up your data to remote storage, you will likely be better served with symmetric and dedicated solutions.

Is your business running out of bandwidth or are you just frustrated with the solution you have now? Discuss your real needs with a technology expert and get quotes for multiple options that will work for you. There’s more available and at better prices than you think.

The Cable vs Fiber Broadband War

By: John Shepler

There’s a broadband battle underway right now. It pits cable business broadband against Ethernet fiber optic bandwidth. These are the two leading technologies that will dominate business Internet now and for the foreseeable future. There is also a third contender warming up that we’ll discuss a bit later. Let’s see what the two big players have to offer.

Fiber Takes Over From Copper
The first century of telecommunications was dominated by twisted pair copper wires that provided the last mile for landline telephones, multi-line business phones, point to point computer connections and, when it started developing, the nascent Internet. The ground is chock-full of multi-pair cables. Some will be pulled out and recycled. Others will be left to slowly disintegrate.

Their technological replacement is fiber optic cables. Glass fibers take the place of plastic coated copper strands. Optical fibers have tremendously more bandwidth carrying capacity. A copper T1 line can deliver 1.5 Mbps. A fiber can deliver a Gigabit per second up to at least 10 Gbps. It’s no longer uncommon to have 100 Gbps fiber optic service available for business use.

Fiber itself has undergone a technical evolution in protocol from the early SONET telecom standard to Carrier Ethernet, otherwise known as Ethernet over Fiber. This upgrade made sense as telecom traffic changed from largely audio phone calls to digital computer packets.

What Fiber Optic Service Can Provide
Fiber broadband is readily available and can offer 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps bandwidth. This bandwidth is usually symmetrical, meaning the same speed for upload and download. It is also generally dedicated. That means you don’t share your fiber capacity with any other businesses. It’s all your traffic from your building to where it joins the Internet. This makes for much more consistent Internet performance.

Many companies have been moving from having their own in-house data centers to hosting that equipment at a co-location facility or leasing the same capability from a cloud provider. If your business software is running remotely, it often makes sense to have a direct connection from your offices, factories and warehouses to the cloud provider and avoid any potential congestion from the Internet.

Direct connections are also useful between company facilities, such as branch offices and any owned data center facilities. Essentially, you are extending your LAN out to include all your locations.

How Can Cable Compete with Fiber?
Cable got its start as a community antenna that fed a small town or city. Like fiber, cable has come a long way technically. Analog has transformed into digital. Still, isn’t cable a bandwidth limited copper connection?

Less than you might think. The drop or final connection to your business is still the familiar coaxial copper cable. The innards of the system have long ago upgraded to fiber, just like the telecom industry. That means most of the distance travelled is over fiber optic cables, some with as many as 100 fibers. The TV and Internet signal is converted to drive a copper drop cable just before it reaches your building. This system is referred to as HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax.

The other big advance in Cable broadband has been the upgrading of cable modems using the DOCSIS standard. Most modems are now DOCSIS 3.1 that has the ability to support downstream data speeds of up to 10 Gbps and upstream speeds of 1 Gbps.

DOCSIS 4.0 is in the process of being deployed. This equipment upgrade will support downstream speeds of 10 Gbps plus upstream speeds of 6 Gbps.

Clearly, today’s cable broadband is easily a match for all but the most demanding fiber speeds. One difference between Ethernet fiber and cable broadband is that cable is usually asymmetrical to match the typical usage of retail customers on the Internet. In other words, the demand for download speed is usually more than the demand for upload speed. Often download is 10 times as fast as upload.

Another difference is that cable broadband is a shared access service in the last mile. This means that some heavy users may impact the performance of other users from time to time. For consumers, this is usually not a problem. For a business that depends of steady high performance for employee productivity using cloud services, it could present an issue.

Why Pick One Service Over the Other?
For consumers and many smaller businesses, cost is tie-breaker. Cable business broadband is generally less costly than Ethernet over Fiber for similar bandwidths. However, if you need symmetrical bandwidth, dedicated Internet access, dedicated point to point connections, or a dedicated line to your cloud provider, fiber optic connections can be well worth the added monthly cost. It should also be mentioned that some Cable companies are now offering access to their internal fiber optic networks as a premium bandwidth service.

Wireless is the Next Competitor
There is a new entry to the broadband wars that is also worthy of consideration. That is fixed wireless broadband. Once a niche service over very small areas, fixed wireless is now being offered by the major cellular carriers. What has made this possible is the advancement to 4G LTE and 5G. Mobile phones with 300 Mbps or more Internet service are now common. By providing a high performance modem without the telephone features but including Wi-Fi or LAN connection, carriers can deliver high speed broadband over their wireless networks already in place. Advantages include very reasonable pricing and little or no construction cost. You pick up the modem at the cellular store or have it shipped to you and install it yourself right away. It’s also perfect for pop-up stores and construction sites that are only temporary locations.

Which is best for your business? Cable broadband? Ethernet over Fiber? Fixed Wireless? Get pricing and availability for each of these bandwidth options and then choose the right solution for you.

So Long T1 and POTS, Hello AI

By: John Shepler

Have you gotten the word from your telecom service provider that your T1 lines and POTS telephone lines are scheduled for decommissioning? Perhaps you’ve seen news items to this effect. It’s true. The major landline telephone companies are determined to replace their more than a century old copper cables with the newer technologies of fiber and wireless. It’s happening faster in some parts of the country than others. Like the incandescent light bulbs of the same era, copper telco connections are being relegated to history.

Why Do They Hate Copper?
Copper has served us well from the gilded age to this millennium. Copper POTS phone lines are highly reliable and are powered by the phone company. If you lose power, the phone still works because the equipment has battery backup at the central office. If you want the same functionality with your VoIP phones on the Internet, you’ll need add that battery backup at your end.

Copper T1 lines have been the mainstay of both business Internet connections and PBX phone systems for decades. Some companies use them for direct connection from one business location to another. As private lines, they are more secure than the Internet and you avoid the congestion when everyone in the area is trying to work online at the same time.

Like all legacy technology, T1 and POTS lines are getting a little long in the tooth. A T1 bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps was once considered broadband. Now 1.5 Gbps has the same respect. Analog POTS lines and their own unique telephone network are being replaced by LAN and WAN network connected phone systems, often with switching systems in the cloud. As a result, there are fewer and fewer users of these older circuits. Most consumers are primarily dependent on their cell phones and have dropped landline phone. Businesses are heading more and more to the cloud and using fiber optic direct connections to get there.

This is creating quite a dilemma for the phone companies. The incumbent local carriers own all that copper and it is not getting any younger. Fewer customers means less revenue. Corroding wires and insulation result in more any more repair calls. The cost of maintaining that copper plant keeps going up and up.

Copper’s Replacements Are Mostly In-Place
The replacement for all that copper interconnection is fiber and wireless. Fiber has the advantage of nearly unlimited bandwidth. With wavelengths and multiple strands per cable, there is lots of unused capacity that can be pressed into service as data demands increase. The limitation to date has been too few routes installed and lit for service. That’s changing fast. Many cities have seen the future and are contracting for municipal fiber that runs past every home and business. Cellular 5G and eventually 6G require fiber to get the required bandwidths.

The other replacement technology is wireless. The same 5G towers used for phone calls also support fast broadband in the dozens or hundreds of Mbps. Mobile Internet nearly everywhere is already in place. A newer wrinkle is a 5G access point, essentially a phone without the user interface, that installs in a home or business. You have broadband Internet service that is always-on and you don’t need to worry about connecting to a fiber or cable.

There are still dead spots. Sparsely connected areas may not have fiber, cable or cellular coverage. They mostly did have landline phones, though. The replacement for these areas may be GEO or LEO satellite, as they may never get cell towers or fiber lines.

What Becomes of The Copper Facilities?
Oddly enough, the latest technology may provide a new lease on life for the oldest. One proposal is to gut those telco central offices and points of presence and install high powered servers to support the demand for Artificial Intelligence.

The facilities with utility power, battery and generator backup, HVAC, and weatherproof buildings are already in place. By upscaling them to be small data centers located near potential customers, the growing demand for AI services can be supported faster than with all new construction. Another major benefit is the lower latency that comes with having computing at the network edge rather than centralized thousands of miles away.

The copper itself may well be mined to support the need for electrical transmission, electric vehicle propulsion, power generation and more. Some copper cables are pulled out of their conduits as fiber is installed to make room for the new fiber. Copper in the ground and central office wiring may become a welcome source of recycling, much as scrap aluminum is melted down and repurposed. No point in letting it corrode to dust if it costs less to reuse than smelt new ore.

Do You Need Copper Replacement Services?
Have you been notified that your copper telecom services are going to be discontinued or are you just interested in how much more bandwidth you can get for the same or less cost each month? See what fiber and wireless services are available for your business now.

Hotspots for Fixed and Mobile Business

By: John Shepler

You need connectivity and you need it wherever you are. In the office, no problem. But what if you need to pick up your office and take it to another location at a moment's notice? What if you need to conduct business on the road or on the waves. Yes, that’s right. What if you need to connect from your boat? Are you set for that? OK, how about overseas?

Your Smartphone as a Hotspot
There’s a lot of business we can do right from our cellphones. Certainly, voice conversations. Text and short email messaging work great. You can access sites on the Internet using a browser or apps. Maps are great for find your way around.

When it gets a little more complicated you want to use your tablet or laptop. Then you have a decent size screen and you can upload or down load files or easily work on documents and images. Oh, no. The other devices you want to use don’t have any connectivity except WiFi. There’s no WiFi nearby.

Actually, there is. You just need to turn on the hotspot feature in your phone. You log-in using the passcode your phone provides and your other device now shares the broadband on your phone.

Business Grade Portable and Mobile Hotspots
A smartphone hotspot can be a lifesaver in a pinch. But it has limitations. A dedicated portable or mobile hotspot designed for business has a lot more capability. A good example is the Surf & Turf Router from Infinite Wireless. This device is equipped with two external antenna rods and can pull in 4G LTE from over 20 miles away. That’s important when you’re on the boat well away from shore. It supports up to 16 simultaneous devices on WiFi. Instead of a SIM card this one uses vSIM to support multiple carriers and will select the carrier with the strongest signal. It also works in 135 countries.

Other business oriented hotspots are may support one or more carriers and are designed to let you get connected quickly for pop-up stores or on-site business, such as construction work. When your work is only scheduled for the short term, there is no reason to pay for and wait for a fixed line installation. You can choose to access via WiFi or set up a wired Ethernet network on-site.

Wireless is the New Wired Internet
It may not be long before you access the Internet in one of two ways: Fiber optic broadband or wireless broadband. Cable is still a hybrid fiber/copper system, but will likely move more and more to fiber, especially as other fiber network competitors build-out in cable areas. The cellular wireless companies, such as T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T are now pushing hard for fixed location broadband service using hotspot boxes that are easily installed and moved by customers, as needed. Service gaps are being filled-in by geosynchronous or LEO satellite constellations.

What are your business needs? Do you require extreme bandwidth for a fixed location network? Do you need quick connectivity for mobile or temporary locations? How about Internet of Things applications that may be installed anywhere but need to attach to the Internet? There are great solutions to all of these situations, and more. Find out what bandwidth solutions are available for your size business and budget.

How Fiber Future-Proofs Your Business

By: John Shepler

Chances are that connectivity is not just another expense item in your business. It is critical to your being in business and for your employee productivity. What you need is solid, reliable, fast, low latency and uncongested network connections to the Internet, cloud services, and your other business locations. This is the time to ensure you have it now and in the future.

What You Are Looking For Is Fiber
Telecommunications, the genesis of computer to computer connections, was historically built on twisted pair copper wiring. That era is essentially over. The remaining T1 lines and DS3 coax are relics of an earlier day and will soon be moved to the recycling bin. Not only have they been eclipsed in bandwidth, but the infrastructure buildouts now are based on multi-strand fiber optic cables.

Fiber historically has been expensive and rare. That changed with the introduction of Ethernet over Fiber or EOF services directly compatible with today’s most popular computer networks. Fiber optic Ethernet has the widest availability of bandwidths and the lowest cost per Mbps or Gbps. In many areas, fiber is available to just about every business location and in others it soon will be. As you drive down the road you can see crews installing underground fiber conduits in both business and residential areas.

Where Do You Want to Connect?
The most popular connections are to the public Internet. This is a must if you are going to communicate with customers and suppliers. You can also use the Internet to connect to cloud services and link multiple business locations. The beauty of the Internet is that it is already built-out to connect just about everyone, everywhere. This makes worldwide connections fast and inexpensive.

While the Internet itself is a shared network that doesn’t favor one user over another, you can improve your company’s connection by using dedicated instead of shared access. A DIA or Dedicated Internet Access line is a private connection between your business and your Internet Service Provider. It lets you avoid the congestion that can occur when you are sharing access locally with many other business and consumer users.

Dedicated Cloud On-Ramps
Productivity is key to any business. If a key element to your productivity is provided by cloud services, you may be plagued with varying slowdowns and even dropouts caused by a congested Internet not able to keep up with the massive flow of data between you and your cloud provider. The solution is a direct line between your network and your cloud service provider. This is called a cloud connection or cloud on-ramp. It shields you from competition for bandwidth from other users. Such a dedicated leased line can make the cloud server perform like it is right down the hall.

Multiple Locations on the Same Network
Within your building, you have complete control of your LAN that connects terminals, PCs, printers, storage and so on. With multiple locations, you need some way to connect their networks, since they can’t all be on the same LAN… or can they? Dedicated fiber optic bandwidth can go a long way to creating the perception that all of your users, and perhaps some customers and suppliers, are on the same network with the same performance. This is usually done with a central hub and separate links to each location. For vastly separated locations, you can also achieve similar performance with a dedicated link to a MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network that provides regional, national or international coverage.

How Fast is Fast?
While single Megabits per second was once considered speedy, It doesn’t cut it for most uses today. Even consumers are demanding 300 Mbps, 600 Mbps or even 1 Gbps or more for their Web access and video streaming. Businesses, especially those with cloud services, must have at least this much. Entry level connections of 1 Gbps are now common. As demands increase or business size expands, 10 Gbps is a readily available and affordable service level. Once core network speeds of 100 Gbps are now being offered to businesses in metro areas and will soon be universally available.

How is this possible? Fiber optic strands have nearly unlimited bandwidth capacity. The limitation is often defined by the equipment powering, switching and terminating the strands. Wavelength division multiplexing divides one strand into a dozen or a hundred separate high bandwidth connections. Each cable may have a dozen to a hundred separate fiber strands.

How much low latency high performance bandwidth do you need? You may be surprised to find how much costs have come down the last few years. See now the availability and pricing for fiber optic connections that can grow with your business.

AI Is Going to Eat Your Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

We may be nearing the end of the age of person to person communications, or at least human communication dominating the use of telecom resources. The decline began when computers started using our phone lines to exchange data. It’s only accelerated since nearly all computers are now connected to the Internet at broadband speeds. Even so, much of that computer activity is in the service of people accessing websites, messaging and sending email, posting on social media, watching videos, backing up their files and doing their jobs. Not for long. Pretty soon machines will cut us out of the loop and simply talk among themselves.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
The scary thing about artificial intelligence, or AI, is how insidious it is. It’s actually been creeping in for decades, probably since the start of the computer age. There’s a lot of AI in search engines, although we may not think of it that way. Most software, in fact, has been adding analytical and decision making capability deep under the hood. You may not be specifically asked your preferences, but that doesn’t mean the program isn’t figuring things out or selecting what information to display and how.

More recently we’ve seen an explosion of “chat bots”, intelligent assistants such as Siri and Alexa, and some quirky writing and photo capabilities in ChatGPT. In fact, it’s the last one that has fueled an explosion of interest and investment in what is called Generative AI, the tech that “creates” all that new content at the push of a button.

NVIDIA can’t make big enough processors on a large enough scale to sate the demand. Data centers are expanding to host more and more servers and new centers are rapidly under construction. One big worry is where all the energy is going to come from to feed the exponentially demanding power-hungry AI processes. Some data centers are being built right next to power plants to grab and many megawatts as they can.

How Nuts is This Going to Get?
One might suspect that we’re in an AI mania combined with a speculative bubble in anticipation that artificial intelligence will render pitiful human capabilities and their jobs obsolete in the matter of a few years… or less. The computer age has certainly eliminated or greatly reduced some roles, like telephone operators and adding machine clerks (human computers), but added new ones as fast or faster. The new AI fever sees the elimination of writers, graphic artists, analysts, software coders, customer service representatives and even law clerks as imminent.

Not so fast. The chat bots I’ve dealt with are complete simpletons that can’t solve much of any real problem. The writing is tedious. The artwork is artificial at best, and inane at worst (how many extra fingers can you add to a person’s hand?). Self driving trucks? Look out when they come barreling around a curve during an ice storm.

I suspect the AI crazy has hyped up expectations far beyond what is really going to work anytime soon. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real germ of innovation underway. One example is the “Internet of Things” that is being touted as the real driver of 5G wireless. Better, faster, cheaper and smaller electronics makes it possible to add both processing and communications to any device. That can be any tool, any monitor, any control system, and most products. It is only logical that these “things” will communicate with other “things”, including computer systems, without our constant knowledge or intervention. The more of these “robots” that are deployed, the more sophisticated the software needed to keep them employed efficiently.

What to Likely Expect
Yes, technology marches on in the name of progress. We’re not going back to living in mud huts or slaving in dingy factories, and the nature of what we do at work will continue to evolve. The increase in productivity should improve our standard of living if we’re smart about it as a society. At any rate, the demands on technical infrastructure are surely going to accelerate.

You can expect more devices on every network, talking faster and demanding faster results. The “cloud” may become an “overcast.” Both fiber optic and wireless bandwidth requirements will move up another order of magnitude or more. A 100 Mbps connection may have been plenty not long ago. Now we clamor for a Gigabit line, with 10 Gbps an emerging business standard. How long before 100 Gbps is routine and 1 Tbps starts looking like a requirement? Within the data center, this could be tomorrow. For access, maybe the day after tomorrow.

How about your business? Are new tools, processes and devices straining the capability of your data center or WAN network? We can help. Get pricing and support on bandwidth and hosting for your current and future needs right now, before those needs become a crisis.







Note: This article was not generated by any AI. It was written by one human (myself) who only worries about the machines scraping the Internet and regurgitating copyrighted material far and wide without any thought of compensation to the author, a real and present danger.

Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Metro Fiber Ethernet

By: John Shepler

Have you ever wished that you could stretch your LAN to cover other locations around the block or around an entire city and suburbs? You can. Best of all, you don’t have to do it personally. A Metro Fiber Ethernet connection will plug into your LAN at one location and plug into your LAN at another location.

The Problem Connecting Multiple LANs
Most all private networks are now Ethernet LANs or Local Area Networks. Within your realm, you have complete control. You string the cabling. You provide the switches and routers. You hook up the user equipment. You manage the entire network operations.

It doesn’t matter what the company next door or across town is doing. They won’t be bothering your network. They have their own to serve their employees.

This is all well and good until you get another location that is not on your campus. What are you going to do to tie them together? You could go into the business of pulling a fiber bundle across town. Just get the rights of way, bring in the trenching equipment and get to work. It keeps you in control, but it gets really expensive really fast. It also takes forever and may be blocked by city organizations that just don’t want you doing it.

The Internet Will Interconnect Your Locations… Sort of
Hey, the Internet is available. It goes everywhere. You probably have service at each of your locations already. Why not simply exchange files and route phone calls over the Internet?

Actually, this works after a fashion. You can connect anything to anything over the Internet. However, you need to be mindful about how you do this or you’ll find out it is nowhere near the expectation of a transparent line connection.

The Internet is so available and so cheap because of scale. It does connect everybody to everybody else, and they are all on one big party line. No way do you have any say over priority of traffic or who is accessing that traffic. It’s a big happy family and everybody potentially has their nose in everybody’s business.

There are ways to make this work better. First, get dedicated access. No, you won’t have a private connection through the Internet, but you can order a private line to the Internet. That helps greatly with keeping your service consistent.

Also, make sure you encrypt the daylights out of anything you send through a public network. If not, you are just asking for eavesdroppers to lick their chops as they read through all your sensitive documents or tap into your phone calls and video conferences.

To really make the Internet seem like your private lane, take a look into SD-WAN, or Software Defined Wide Area Networking. This is a technique of combining multiple internet connections of different types, such as wireless, fiber, copper, and cable, using software to pick the best path for each packet despite constantly changing network conditions. It sets priorities and knows that data backups take a back seat to interactive cloud services.

Better Yet, Go Private
Now we’re getting to Metro Fiber Ethernet. It’s a service provided by a commercial carrier but not part of the Internet. You get a LAN to LAN connection between your locations. You can set it up as point to point, like a direct line. You can also set it up as multipoint to multipoint for any number of locations in the area. They’ll all be on that one big LAN. Another flavor of this service is a direct to cloud connection that connects you to your cloud service provider through a local data center.

Sometimes the Metro designation is a bit limiting. You need to connect to cloud services or branch offices in another city, state or even country. Many fiber optic network providers have connections that go far beyond your city and may have interconnections with other networks to extend the reach across International borders.

You can also contract with a private service provider called an MPLS or Multi Protocol Label Switching network. These are wide area service providers that are privately owned and not accessible by the general public. They will guarantee performance and connect your far flung empire with low latency and high bandwidth. Security is enchanted because this type of network has its own protocol that differs from what runs on the Internet.

Do you have a need to interconnect business locations with speed, reliability and privacy? Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Metro Fiber Ethernet might be just what you need at a reasonable cost. For even higher performance 100 Gbps bandwidth are also supported in key metro areas.

Are T1 Lines Obsolete?

By: John Shepler

Have you been using a T1 line for years, perhaps decades? Yes, they’ve been around that long. At the dawn of the Internet, a T1 line offered business a solid, reliable, high bandwidth connection that made dial-up phone line modems look glacially slow. Nowadays similarly priced bandwidth options make those venerable T1 lines seem equally pokey. So, are T1 lines still a good business solution or in their twilight years?

The T1 Story
T1 lines are a product of Bell Labs, which created them to serve the telephone industry. The idea was to replace 24 analog phone lines with two pair that carried a digital multiplex of all the phone calls. There were two advantages, It saved copper wiring and reduced background noise. That was especially true for long distance calls that used analog multiplexing to send multiple calls over a single line. If you remember the switchover from analog to digital toll calls, it seemed almost eerie to no longer hear hiss and garbled conversations during your phone conversations.

T1 lines got a an additional use when they were released to business for Internet access. A protocol conversion interface on each end took care of the translation between synchronized phone channels and Ethernet packets. Businesses only knew they had a highly reliable 1.5 Mbps always-on Internet connection. In the late 1990’s and into the first decade of the 2000’s, that 1.5 Mbps was speedy bandwidth.

A variation of T1 lines, called ISDN PRI, still used T1 for multiple phone lines to corporate PBX phone systems. T1 has been a mainstay of phone and FAX communications for businesses since.

The T1 Twilight Years
Two factors are driving T1 lines into retirement. The first is the need for much higher bandwidths. You might have increased your bandwidth in 1.5 Mbps increments by bonding additional T1 lines to make one larger pipe. There is no economy of scale. Three T1s cost three times the price of one line. It's also hard to get above 10 Mbps with this approach.

Today, we think in terms of hundreds of Mbps and 1 to 100 Gbps as the right level of broadband to support cloud services. That means fiber optic rather than copper based line services. T1 is relegated to smaller business applications such as credit card verification, security alarms, multi-line phone systems and email service. Even so, with the increasing availability of fixed wireless access and fiber optic service, prices on the newer technologies are coming down and T1 isn’t becoming more affordable.

The second factor is the local telephone companies that own the twisted pair copper connections needed to bring in T1 lines. The telcos themselves are switching out copper in favor of fiber and chosing to abandon their copper assets. In some larger cities, copper lines are pulled out of conduits so that fiber cables can take their place.

Even smaller businesses are shunning older telco tech such as DSL and T1 in favor of very low cost broadband and telephone from their Cable providers. The newer DOCSIS modems can support gigabit level broadband delivered over traditional coaxial cable.

Are T1 Lines Still Used?
In some areas T1 lines are still being sold and provisioned. They can be especially valuable in rural areas where fiber, cellular and cable services haven’t yet reached. Some businesses may choose to keep their existing phone systems and FAX machines which are supported by the T1 protocol. A T1 line for these applications and fiber or cable for broadband can make a nice combined solution.

The issue is how long T1 service will still be offered. It’s really a question of time. At some point you may find that new T1 lines can’t be ordered and eventually you may get a letter saying that your T1 service will not be renewed. At that point there is no choice but to move on. Cellular 4G LTE modems designed for business can take over many T1 functions where available. Most companies will be switching to fiber optic connections and cloud based phone and FAX solutions.

What is Best For Your Company?
Business grade fiber optic services are now priced much lower on a per Mbps basis than T1, DS3 and other legacy telco services. Fixed wireless using 4G LTE or 5G can be installed quickly and offer higher bandwidths. Gigabit cable broadband is also a great option for many applications. Find out now what bandwidth services are available for your business location so you can make the best decision for your needs.

How Managed SD-WAN Can Help Your Business

By: John Shepler

Digital transformation is a wonderful thing for business… until you run into snags trying to implement it. One of those unanticipated snags is the need for WAN bandwidth connections far beyond what you ever thought you’d need. You can slug it out trying to make everything work and not break the bank. Or, you can enlist the help of managed SD-WAN to make your connectivity something you don’t even think about anymore.

How Did Connectivity Get to Be Such a Big Deal?
Chances are that when your business was primarily bricks and mortar, you installed a broadband connection for when you needed to access the Internet and that was plenty good enough. It works for point of sale. It works for online ordering. It’s even good enough for a brochure-style web site so that potential customers can easily find you.

Then the transformation began. First it was VoIP phone to replace the old analog landlines. Then came online ordering for both you and your customers, followed by automatic restocking, customer relationship management, financial and tax accounting in the cloud, lead generation, online advertising management, factory planning and on, and on and on. Under the weight of too many software packages to keep track of, eventually some these processes relocated to cloud servers, with some still in your local data center.

That good old broadband service that got you started with the Internet is no longer satisfactory. Even upping the speed as much as you can still doesn’t make it work right. Phone calls get garbled, but not all the time. Workflow slows to a crawl, but not all the time. This inconsistency is driving everybody crazy. You never know when things will zip along seamlessly or when it will all slow to a crawl for a few seconds or a few minutes or the entire afternoon. You need better and you can get it.

The Expensive Solution: Build Your Own WAN Network
You can avoid many of the vagaries of the Internet, especially on shared broadband connections, by building a private network for your operations. This means getting everything off the Internet that you can. All connections to branch offices, warehouses, factories, and any cloud providers can be made with dedicated private lines. As you might expect, each line costs plenty and you’ll need lots of them.

MPLS networks with guaranteed performance levels can reduce the cost when operations are spread over long distances. MPLS is a privately run Wide Area Network with a special protocol that makes it more secure than the Internet. The general public also has no access. It’s business subscribers only and they are only admitted if the network can handle the traffic. For multiple locations, MPLS is less expensive than private lines, but still pricey.

Managed SD-WAN Is More Cost Efficient
SD-WAN stands for Software Defined Wide Area Networking. The software defined aspect is where the savings come from. The managed aspect takes the burden of running all of it off your back. If done correctly, Managed SD-WAN makes your connectivity invisible. You don’t have to worry about it. It just works.

Here’s briefly how SD-WAN does its magic. The trick is to use the least cost connections that will get the job done, but make sure that quality doesn’t suffer. Take the Internet. The least costly connections are shared bandwidth, like cable broadband and wireless, but these are also the most likely to get congested and vary in performance. The most costly are dedicated private lines, but these may be wasted on low priority traffic that doesn’t need low latency and jitter and isn’t bothered by a bit of congestion. If you aren’t using a private line, it’s just idling and you are paying for it anyway.

SD-WAN needs at least two connections in order to make traffic decisions. These can be a mix of cable broadband, Ethernet fiber optic WAN, fixed wireless access, satellite broadband, LTE or 5G cellular, MPLS network and even older wireline services such as T1, PRI or DS3.

What SD-WAN does is continuously monitor each connection’s performance so that it knows the available bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss on a moment by moment basis. When you have traffic in the form of packets, it notes the quality of service you require and then picks the best connection for those packets. Phone conversations and video conferences need very stable connections to work well, so they get a higher priority and QOS requirement. Backups to off-side storage aren’t so demanding and can live with a lower quality link. Other processes are assigned to the right connections for their needs.

Better Performance, Less Cost, Fewer Headaches
Managed SD-WAN is handled by your provider so that you don’t have to worry about day to day connectivity issues. You add locations or policies as you need to. The supplier figures out how to program the system to make everything work. It’s all transparent to you and the cost is considerably lower than trying to optimize a morass of connections yourself.

Are you frustrated with your current connections enough to want an easier and more reliable solution? If so, get a competitive quote for your needs by one or more SD-WAN providers and see if they can save you money and improve performance at the same time.

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.

5G Fixed Wireless Fills the Copper Gap

By: John Shepler

For almost a century and a half, twisted pair copper wiring has been the way telecom services were delivered. This ranges from classic plain old telephone service, to T1 digital lines for Internet access and point to point private connections. Copper, however, is on the way out. If you haven’t run up against its bandwidth limitations yet, you may still have a problem if your local telephone company (who owns all the copper lines) decides to discontinue service. Then what?

What Replaces Copper Lines?
When it comes to bandwidth, fiber optic cables can’t be beat. You can order any bandwidth from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps, and even 100 Gbps in many locations. Hybrid Fiber Cable, commonly known as cable broadband, can now deliver multi-gigabit speeds through the classic coaxial cable.

Sounds great, but what if you are in an area that is not served by Cable and has no fiber infrastructure nearby? Are you simply stuck with no service at all?

5G Wireless To the Rescue
Fifth generation or 5G smartphones have pretty much taken over the market from the 4G LTE standard that served us for years. With 5G comes new bands that offer expanded bandwidth and low latency for smart autonomous devices that are called the Internet of Things.

There is another application that 5G is pursuing aggressively. That is fixed wireless access or FWA. The “fixed” part of FWA means situations that are not mobile. Think of your desktop PC, point of sale terminals, or even your entire Local Area Network.

Internet service providers called WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers have been around to serve homes and businesses that can’t get wired or fiber Internet. They tend to be very local and independent and use systems that are not affiliated with cellular providers. If you have a WISP nearby, they can often step in and give you the service you need to stay online.

How 5G is different than the usual WISP is that it is true cellular broadband and serves both fixed and mobile users. The same broadband that you use on your phone can also be delivered directly to an office, store or residence wherever there is a cell tower nearby.

4G LTE service actually started the push for applications to use cellular broadband rather than depend on DSL, cable or other wired services. When 4G LTE became widely available it offered bandwidths that rivaled typical broadband services and had enough capacity to serve multitudes of customers rather than just a few at a time.

4G LTE is still a good option for many applications. What 5G does is offer bandwidths that can rival fiber at low latencies for sensitive applications. Major cellular carriers are promoting 5G wireless as a competitor to cable broadband in fixed locations. For business users, 5G can often substitute for unavailable T1 lines or even DS3 bandwidth.

How Do You Get 5G FWA?
You may have already paired your phone with your desktop PC or tablet using Bluetooth and setting up the phone as a personal Internet Hotspot. FWA expands upon this idea. Instead of a phone, you install a 5G or combination 5G / 4G LTE Gateway. This can be a simple box that sits on your desk in on a shelf near a window. It may have a wired Ethernet port to connect to your router or may even contain a router and WiFI hotspot. Some of these devices have special antennas that are more efficient in capturing the cellular tower signal for reliable operation.

A good way to research the availability of 5G and 4G LTE options for your business is to work with a bandwidth broker that represents a multitude of companies offering this type of service. You’ll want a solid connection with enough bandwidth to serve the size of your business and sufficient or no data limits. You may be surprised at the variety of offerings available, even in rural or otherwise underserved areas.

Ethernet Replacements For SONET

By: John Shepler

High bandwidth fiber optic Wide Area Networks have their basis in a decades old telephone company standard called SONET. Highly reliable, but highly expensive, SONET is giving way to the newer technology of Ethernet WAN. As demand for business bandwidth keeps increasing, so does the attractiveness of Ethernet for long distance connections.

Why SONET Ruled For So Long
SONET or Synchronous Optical Network was born out of a burgeoning demand for higher and higher levels of traffic. In this case, the traffic was long distance telephone calls. In the early days of telephony, this demand was met with dense webs of overhead copper lines.

Multi-channel analog technology made it possible for each copper pair to carry many phone conservations on a carrier-based system, much like many radio stations in a single band.

Digital technology eliminated the noise and crosstalk of carrier telephony by converting the analog conversations to pulse coded digital streams and multiplexing many together on a single pair. The transmission medium was still copper wire.

One thing about phone company standards is that they are all backwards compatible down to a single phone line. After all, that’s the telco business. So, the digital T1 lines were actually carrying 24 separate phone calls. A T3 line was 28 T1 lines or 672 phone calls.

When the fiber optic standard was developed, it picked up where copper left off. The OC3 SONET line is 155 Mbps and is equivalent to three T3 lines. Within all those multiplexed channels is the same 64 Kbps voice channel to support one phone call.

How did we get from really big phone lines to data transmission? Basically, SONET was the only game in town if you needed large amounts of bandwidth. So, all those voice channels in the line were combined to create one large data channel to carry packets of information. That requires protocol conversion circuitry to go from Ethernet network protocol to SONET telephone line protocol.

This works beautifully, but there are a few issues. For one thing, SONET levels are very specific and not scalable. If you want to move up from, say, a 155 Mbps OC3 to a 622 Mbps OC-12, you’ll at least need to swap out the termination controller or interface card in your router. Also, since analog phone traffic is now trivial compared to packet based data traffic, wouldn’t it be more efficient to just keep everything Ethernet from end to end? Indeed, it would.

Ethernet Replacements For SONET
Most competitive carriers and even many of the traditional telecom companies have adopted Ethernet as their network standard, as that’s where the traffic is. As a result, you can find much better pricing for Ethernet circuits than for traditional SONET. Ethernet WAN is also highly scalable. If you install a Gigabit Ethernet port, you can order service at any bandwidth level up to 1 Gbps. That covers OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps and pretty much OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps.

No hardware changes are needed until you require more 1 Gbps. At that point you may install a 10 Gbps port which will cover OC-24, plus OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps. Today, 100 Gbps is becoming more and more available to take the place of OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

If you are looking to upgrade your fiber optic WAN connections or are just curious about how much you might save by switching from SONET to Ethernet WAN service, you can easily get a set of competitive quotes from multiple service providers with no obligation. That applies to private line services, including cloud communications, as well as dedicated Internet access. Now would be a good time to make that inquiry.

Metro and Long Haul Dark Fiber

By: John Shepler

High performance companies with diverse locations and significant staffing may get to the point where the usual Internet access and private line offerings just won’t get the job done anymore. At that point, you may wish to take total control of your network so that you can set the standard for performance and make upgrades as quickly as they are needed.

Sounds good, but how are you going to exercise the same control over a network that leaves your premises as you do within your facilities? Get into the network provider business yourself and install fiber to each of your facilities? Hardly. That would be cost prohibitive and way too time consuming. There’s a more reasonable approach, and that is to lease dark fiber.

What is Dark Fiber?
We’re all familiar with fiber optic cables and the reliable high speed connectivity they provide. Most incumbent and competitive telecom companies now offer a wide range of bandwidth options within their service areas. Even traditional Cable companies are offering connections to their core network as an alternative to the coaxial copper drops. What is less known is that nearly all of these companies have extra fibers available within their bundles for spares, expansion and leasing. These fibers sit unlit, not installed to any network equipment.

Think about it. If you can lease a strand of dark fiber that runs very near to your business locations, it’s almost like you installed the fiber cable yourself. You pay a provider who has already gone to the trouble of installing this fiber and it is already in place. It was likely much less costly for them to do this than it would be for you, because they install many other fiber strands in the same conduit at the same time. Those strands won’t have any effect on your usage.

With dark fiber, you get access to the unlit fiber strand. You’ll need the expertise to select and install the termination equipment, but that is much easier than having to hire or contract with crews to trench the fiber conduits and negotiate the right of ways.

There Are Two Types of Dark Fiber
Dark fiber comes in two varieties, although they are closely related. The first is Metro dark fiber that is installed in cities and their related suburbs. It may be installed on poles above ground or in underground conduit. Metro fiber tends to be installed in large bundles, as there is a lot of demand for fiber optic connectivity within metropolitan areas.

The other variety of dark fiber is called long haul dark fiber. This is the fiber that runs between cities to designated points of presence. With long haul fiber, you can span the country to connect your regional offices and factories. Long haul fiber tends to use smaller glass core single mode fiber which can limit the transmission rate. It’s a tradeoff of capacity for distance.

If all of your connection requirements are within a single city, Metro dark fiber will likely get the job done. If you need to connect between cities you’ll probably need a combination of Metro and long haul dark fiber.

Dark Fiber Alternative
Dark fiber requires a budget and level of expertise that not every company can commit to, even though the control, scalability, and security are very attractive features. A related service is called dark wavelength. It is commonplace to “light” a fiber strand with a spectrum of discrete frequency lasers to create independent wavelengths or lambdas. In effect, the fiber strand becomes a set of non-interfering sub-fibers all multiplexed on the same physical strand. It is possible to lease a wavelength instead of a whole fiber at a lower cost. You still have control of the protocols used on that wavelength and it is solely dedicated to your use. If this will work for you, a dark wavelength can both save money and give you the connectivity you desire in areas when an entire strand might not be available.

Do you have a need that exceeds the typical ISP or dedicated fiber optic bandwidth service offerings? If so, explore the possibility of leasing a dark fiber or dark wavelength now.

Copper Decommissioning Expands Demand for Metro Ethernet

By: John Shepler

If you are still getting by with last mile Internet over DSL, T1 lines, or Ethernet over Copper, you should take a serious look at Metro Ethernet over Fiber. You’ll get more bandwidth, better pricing and… it will continue to be available.

Copper Decommissioning is Now
Copper based telecom services have been the go-to technology for the last century, but not this century. The ubiquitous twisted pair telephone line has supported our needs from the introduction of the telephone through the fevered growth of the commercial Internet. But, like cellphones the size of a brick, the technology has run its course. Copper just can’t keep up with today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

The phone companies know this. The network operators know this. They are well aware that we are way past “peak copper”. As you read this, copper lines nationwide are being retired or “decommissioned”. In some cases the copper is physically ripped out of conduits so that fiber optic cables can be pulled right back in. In other cases the copper bundles in the ground are simply disconnected and left to rust away on their own. In the coming years there will be fewer and fewer copper options available to order, until a copper wireline is as rare as a cranked telephone set.

Fiber is the Future AND the Present
The replacements for copper telco right now are Cable in the form of hybrid fiber/copper systems, Fixed Wireless Access, and Fiber Optic bandwidth. Fiber in cities is also called Metro Fiber or Metro Ethernet. Most urban, suburban and even small town businesses now have access to Metro Ethernet and its flexible options.

Fiber is your most flexible option for several reasons. First, fiber optic strands offer extremely high bandwidths, to 10 Gbps or more. With wavelength division multiplexing, you might get a dozen or more 10 Gbps lambdas, each a virtual fiber in itself. Now, consider that nearly all fiber cables have multiple strands, even dozens, and you can see how fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited. Once installed, that fiber will likely last as long as you need.

Second, fiber, unlike cable or most wireless, can provide exclusive dedicated line services. You can order private point to point connections and have all of the bandwidth available for your traffic. Compare that to the consumer-oriented broadband services that share bandwidth among many users to keep the cost down. With dedicated Internet access or private point to point lines, you won’t be competing with everybody else for limited resources at high traffic times. This can be especially valuable in connecting your network to a distant cloud provider that hosts business critical applications.

In addition to massive available bandwidth, fiber service is also very scalable. You can typically start off as low as 10 Mbps at pricing comparable with a current T1 line, but with over 6x the bandwidth. Many smaller businesses find that 100 Mbps is plenty, but Gigabit bandwidth is easy to come by and very affordable. If your applications demand it or your workforce is substantial, 10 Gbps is easily available on fiber. Even 100 Gbps is now being offered to larger companies and hospital complexes, content developers, etc.

Why Ethernet over Fiber
The earlier implementations of fiber optic service were based on a telephone company standard called SONET that offered fixed bandwidth levels and was designed for voice calls, not data. While protocol conversion circuitry made SONET the backbone of the Internet, Carrier Ethernet is now the standard to be embraced. This is the same switched Ethernet that runs on your local network, but extended to transport packets over hundreds or thousands of miles.

Metro Ethernet uses the Carrier Ethernet standard running over fiber optic cabling. This makes it virtually plug-and-play with your network. You can even set it up so that your business locations all over the state or country act like they are on one big network. Metro Fiber Ethernet is the new standard for business connections. Network connections within the metro area are often referred to as MAN or Metropolitan Area Network, while those more distant are referred to as WAN or Wide Area Network.

Are you ready to replace aging T1, DS3, DSL or other network services with something more modern that is future-proof and likely less expensive? Check your Metro Fiber Ethernet options for one or more business locations now.

Fiber WAN is Closer Than You Think

By: John Shepler

You know you really need fiber optic WAN service to give you the speed to make cloud-based business application responsive and keep everyone at peak productivity. The problem has been lack of availability. If fact, you may have given up after an extensive search a few years ago. It’s time to take another look.

Why Should Fiber Be More Available Now?
Fiber optic connectivity used to be exotic. It was only available to the largest companies and was very expensive. The only way to get this service was to go through the telephone company and hope they had built out to near your location. Even then, the cost of getting hooked up could be significant.

Times have changed. Fiber is becoming the default telecommunications medium. Copper bundles, such as analog landlines, T1 lines and even ISDN PRI phone service are being abandoned as they corrode in the ground and are too expensive to replace with demand steadily dwindling.

A big onus for fiber is that the speed of business communications has multiplied. The apps we run today are far more sophisticated, use much more data and often include bandwidth demanding services such as video. Text based email and small file transfers may have worked fine with lower speeds decades ago. Today our tools and data sets slow to a crawl with anything less than fiber capacity.

Another driver in making fiber the default technology for any new construction is that at the data center is moving to the cloud. In-house, you can get Gigabit and even 10 Gigabit speeds with twisted pair copper Ethernet cable. Once you leave the building, that arrangement won’t work. Twisted pair speeds fall off rapidly with distance, which is why you don’t see it being installed in trenches or on utility poles.

To maintain the congestion free speeds you need to run entire offices via cloud based applications, you need a fiber optic WAN connection from your location to your cloud service provider. Fortunately, that’s easier to come by than ever before.

Finally, the fiber tipping point has really been reached with the deployment of 5G wireless to replace 3G and 4G on cell towers. Many of these towers are located far from business districts that were initial wired for fiber. They are in residential areas and even out in the countryside. Fiber runs now stretch further than anyone envisioned a decade ago.

Who Offers Fiber Connections and Where?
Yes, the big telco companies are also leaders in fiber optic services. However, there are many, many more competitive service providers that service both the telco footprints and far beyond. If you have looked and failed to find fiber service recently, you may just not have access to know newer providers who can hook up your location at little or no construction cost.

Telarus, a major technology solutions broker, has contractual arrangements with dozens upon dozens of tech providers, many who offer business grade fiber optic service. A quick inquiry will generate a comprehensive search of fiber optic service near you. There is no charge to see what is out there and how much it costs. So, why not get a complementary fiber list now?