Comcast’s 100 Gbps Core Network Supports Business

Major telecom carriers have been in the process of upgrading their core networks from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps over the last year. Comcast is the latest to make the move, fitting Ciena’s Wave Logic 3 interfaces to their current Ciena 6500 packet optical platforms. Why would a cable company do this and how can it benefit your business?

Comcast is best known as a Cable TV company or MSO (Multi-System Operator). They serve over 20 million residential and commercial customers in 40 states and the District of Columbia with video television, high speed Internet and telephone services. You may already know that Comcast broadband service is highly popular for home, home office and small business use. It comes in on a coaxial cable and is highly affordable. But did you also know that Comcast operates one of the largest fiber optic networks in the United States behind the scenes?

Many people think that cable companies still connect everything from their head-end towers and satellite dishes to locations around town using various size coax. That was true in the early days of analog TV cable systems and master antennas for large apartment buildings. The technology has long since moved on. Now everything is digital and the signals ride fiber optic cables most of the distance to your location. It’s that connection from the curb to your building that is still RG-6 coaxial copper wire.

Why? Because it works just fine and the cost of installation has already been paid. DOCSIS 3.0 modems offer broadband Internet in excess of 100 Mbps. That’s is well within the needs of most users. What’s really important to residential, home office and very small business users is low monthly cost combined with adequate performance. The shared asymmetrical bandwidth (higher download than upload speeds) and “best effort” performance is more than adequate for accessing the Internet and downloading documents, pictures and video.

Where HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) services run out of gas is when the need for bandwidth is high, dedicated low latency service is needed, symmetrical upload and download speeds are required, and an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is desired. These characteristics are common for traditional telecom services such as T1, DS3 and SONET fiber and the newer Ethernet services such as FastE at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps and 10 GigE at 10 Gbps.

What isn’t as well known is that Comcast operates an enterprise grade fiber optic core network to interconnect their many offices and provide high bandwidth connectivity to businesses. Would you be surprised to learn that Comcast operates a network that covers 147,000 fiber route miles? How about that business class services are available from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps? Their business class services include dedicated Internet access, point to point Ethernet private lines, Ethernet LAN service to interconnect multiple business locations and converged layer 2 centric VPLS to support voice, video and data.

Comcast, like other major fiber optic carriers, recognizes the increasing demand for higher and higher bandwidth services. What’s driving these speed increases is more use of HD video, big data files and a rapid move to cloud computing services. The cloud, especially, present new challenges for businesses used to having all their processing in-house and connected over the corporate LAN. Cloud service providers offer the opportunity to rapidly scale resources up and down, pay only for what you use during the month, and avoid both capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs. The tradeoff is that you now need much higher and very reliable bandwidth to connect your employees to the cloud.

Comcast’s upgrade to 100 Gbps fiber optic bandwidth meets today’s perhaps tomorrow’s needs for their own use and in support of small, medium and large companies. When even this massive capability fills up, the Ciena system they’ve chosen has an upgrade path to 400 Gbps. It’s likely that we’ll see even higher speeds at 1 Tbps and beyond sooner than anyone expects.

Are you running short on bandwidth and wondering how much you can afford as an upgrade? Get multiple competitive fiber optic service quotes for Comcast Business and other high performance fiber optic carriers now. It’s likely that you can turn up your WAN bandwidth at little or no increase over your current monthly least cost.

How MPLS Network Bursting Provides Flexibility

The usual way to order bandwidth for last mile connections or MPLS networks is to commit to a given rate or line speed. You may order a T1 line and you’ll get 1.5 Mbps continuously. Order a 10 Mbps Ethernet service and you get 10 Mbps. On multi-tenant networks, like MPLS VPN, you pay for a committed information rate that sets the highest speed that your connection will run. But what happens if business conditions change or you simply guess wrong? Are you stuck paying for the wrong bandwidth for the life of the contract?

Not necessarily. In these volatile times service providers recognize that many companies need some flexibility in their bandwidth commitments. This is where the idea of bursting becomes attractive. Bursting basically allows you to exceed your committed bandwidth rate for short periods of time. This can happen during seasonal peaks like additional shoppers you didn’t plan on or a sudden increase in traffic due to having your company mentioned in the media. Bursting is also useful when you are adding additional locations for your business and haven’t factored the additional traffic into your bandwidth budget.

Who lets you burst? Some providers offer this feature on their line or network services, some don’t. A traditional T1 line, for instance, runs at a constant 1.5 Mbps. You have exclusive use of all 1.5 Mbps whether you have traffic on the line or not. Whatever isn’t being used at a particular time sits idle. The same is true for DS3 at 45 Mbps or private line Ethernet services at, say, 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps. You can’t make a bandwidth service run any faster than its technical limitation, but you may be able to buy fractional bandwidth service with bursting capability up to the full limit.

Why would you do this? Perhaps you need about 20 Mbps on a rather steady basis, but occasionally that jumps up to 30 or 40 Mbps. You could simply order a 45 Mbps DS3 service and be covered for any contingency. Or, you could order a fractional DS3 at 25 Mbps with the ability to burst up to the entire 45 Mbps capability. The advantage of this approach is that you may pay less per month for the fractional service plus the excess bandwidth used when bursting that if you leased the entire 45 Mbps line.

This works especially well with Ethernet connections. The maximum Ethernet bandwidth is set by the port that is installed in your facility. If a Fast Ethernet port is installed, you can get any bandwidth increment up to 100 Mbps. If a Gigabit Ethernet port is installed, you can order any bandwidth increment offered up to 1 Gbps. Most carriers give you a wide range of bandwidths to pick from. Some even offer bursting options that present significant cost savings. If you find that your needs have increased so that you are always bursting, you can change your line service to a higher bandwidth. That may be much less expensive since the committed rate is cheaper than the bursting charges. Think of overage charges on smartphone data use. That’s very similar to how bursting works.

XO Communications has taken the concept of bursting to their MPLS IP VPN networks. As you know, MPLS is now the preferred way to connect multiple business sites together. There are big cost advantages over simply installing dedicated lines to each location. By using the multi-tenant MPLS network for most of the distance and only installing short last mile connects to each location, you have the advantages of high bandwidth connections at a considerable cost savings. You also have the option to tie all of your locations together in a many-to-many mesh network so that any location can easily communicate with any other. The network takes care of setting this up, you don’t need to make those connections at headquarters.

The core MPLS network has tremendous capacity. It is designed to support many simultaneous users at various classes of service without one user impacting another. You have the feeling that you are the only one on the network, even though there may be thousands of others. The network operator has to provide enough bandwidth to meet the committed rates offered to all it’s clients, even if they all decide to communicate at the same time. Excess capacity can be used to offer bursting to those clients who need it. With XO, you can commit to 100 Mbps but burst up to 1 Gbps. They discard the top 5% of traffic samples as anomalies and only charge you for the committed rate plus the excess rate that you have used during the month.

How about your business requirements? Are they rock solid or do you need the ability to rapidly and automatically respond to spikes in demand? There are great solutions available for both cases. Get competitive MPLS network and line prices now to compare with your current telecom costs.


Note: Image of Gamma Ray burst courtesy of NASA on Wikimedia Commons.

Business Internet Connection Service

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Cloud Hosting vs VPS

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are a hosting solution for web sites that have grown beyond shared hosting service but don’t quite require the expense and support that comes with running a completely private server. Now there is another choice that lets you scale up and down rapidly and lets you pay only for what you use.

That answer is cloud server hosting. We’re hearing a lot of buzz about cloud computing versus running your own data center. Many companies never got to the point of investing in an full-fledged in-house data center. They don’t even get to the point of installing a rack in the back room with a few servers for web hosting, email and the like. Why? Because outsourcing all that to hosting services has become too attractive.

The smallest companies, like those run by independent professionals, small retailers, design firms and others, most likely begin with a customized template site offered by a local web services company that also provides the hosting. As they grow beyond the “brochure” site stage or want to get into their own design and hosting, they sign up with one of the low cost hosting services you find online, such as HostGator. When you’re paying less than $4 a month for a hosting plan, there’s not much incentive to do it all yourself

How can companies offer hosting for so little and still make money? The low cost hosting plans are all in the category of shared hosting. The control panel gives you the illusion that you have a server all to yourself. Not by a long shot. There can be dozens or even hundreds of other websites that you are unaware of all on that same server. Your only indication that others are using resources is that the site may run slower at times. If you use too many resources, you hosting company may contact you to say you’ve outgrown the shared hosting plan and need to move up to a virtual private server.

What’s a virtual private server? It’s the intermediate step between shared hosting and having a dedicated server all to yourself. A dedicated server gives you a complete machine with processor, memory and disk storage all under your control. It also means you have to pay for and manage an expensive resource. If you don’t need all those those resources, they just go to waste. If you need more, you have to contract for a larger dedicated server or a cluster of servers. That gets very pricey very fast.

VPS hosting takes advantage of virtualization software. A physical server is logically partitioned into a number of virtual servers. Each one looks and acts like a stand-alone physical server. Only you and your hosting service know that you are running a virtual server rather than a private one. The cost is much less because the physical hardware is being shared among multiple virtual private servers.

Virtual private servers not only give you more resources, but you’ll also get full root access so you can install whatever software you want and customize it to your heart’s content. You still have the limitation of sharing a physical machine and the difficulty of scaling up or down if your requirements change.

Enter cloud hosting. The idea behind cloud computing is that someone else has created a gigantic pool of resources that includes processors, RAM memory, hard drives and bandwidth. Rather than sell you a fixed chunk of this pool, they rent access to it. The same virtualization principles that you have with virtual private hosting apply, but the resource pool is nearly infinitely deep. That means you can easily scale to meet your current needs and ramp up or down later on if things change.

Cloud hosting servers are available with your choice of Linux or Windows operating systems, guaranteed commitment of CPU cycles, RAM and hard disk space, hardware redundancy for high reliability, full root/administrative access, dedicated IP address, automatic nightly data backups, and the ability to add familiar control panels such as cPanel and WHM. For all this you pay by the hour for what you use and there is no commitment, contracts or setup fees. If you don’t need one or more servers, just cancel them without penalty.

What type of hosting works best for your company? Most organizations will do well to compare VPS, collocated private servers and cloud hosting options. Get prices and features to decide the best solution for your business.

The Stunning Truth About Metro Ethernet Prices

Over the last couple of years, a new type of network connection has become available. It’s the Metro Ethernet Network also called MetroE. Metro Ethernet services have defied conventional telecom pricing models by offering more bandwidth for less money. That’s right, MORE bandwidth for LESS cost.

Really? Is this true? If so, how can it be that way?

The answer breaks down into two primary drivers. The first is technology. The second is aggressive service providers. This double-barreled business advantage gives you something that you may desperately want in this depressed business climate. It’s an opportunity to get more for less. Alternatively, keep the bandwidth that works for you now and really pay less. By shaving your monthly telecom service expense without requiring any counterbalancing expense or capital investment, this savings is pure profit. It's just what the beaten-up bottom line has been waiting for.

Let’s take a closer look at the forces that result in lower Metro Ethernet prices. If you have a outside data connection, such as a dedicated broadband Internet service or a point to point data line that connects two business locations, you are most likely using a traditional telecom service such as a T1 line, DS3 bandwidth, or fiber optic SONET service. These are telephone company inventions that have been gradually offered to businesses as well as telco offices.

There’s nothing wrong with digital telco services. They’ve matured over the decades into reasonably priced and highly reliable connectivity. They’ve also been deployed far and wide so that today you can get a T1 line just about anywhere you can get phone service.

But there are two limiting factors related to telco services. The first is that they are deployed using local telephone company owned copper and fiber cables. Part of the cost of every T1 line, and the other mentioned services, is the last mile connection known as the local loop. The cost of this connection will only be as inexpensive as it is available from the incumbent local telephone company.

The other limitation lies with the technology. Telco services are based on a standard called TDM or Time Division Multiplexing. It partitions the bandwidth of a digital line into small channels capable of supporting one phone conversation each. For instance, a T1 line consists of 24 of these channels. This is an ideal arrangement when you are transporting telephone calls, but it introduces some inefficiencies when you want to bundle a lot of these channels together to make a big data pipe.

Computer networks are not TDM. They have standardized on a packet switching technology, which is Ethernet. Every LAN runs Ethernet. So does every switch and router. If you need to interconnect far-flung equipment using TDM communication lines, then all this equipment needs to covert between TDM and Ethernet at every node.

Metro Ethernet may use fiber optic or copper based connections, but the network is running an Ethernet protocol known as Carrier Ethernet. This is a standardized protocol that is rapidly expanding in metropolitan areas. One reason that it is called “Metro” Ethernet is that you’ll only find it areas where there are lots of business users.

Connecting everything with Ethernet offers a number of advantages for network managers. You have the choice of using either switches or routers connect separate site networks. Ethernet services also tend to be scalable. That means you can order bandwidth incrementally, sometimes in 1 Mbps steps. Traditional telecom services require a major provisioning effort to change bandwidth. With Ethernet, a simple call to your provider may be all you need to add bandwidth to your service.

The other piece in the puzzle of plummeting bandwidth prices for Metro Ethernet is the emergence of new competitive carriers with their own networks using the latest technology equipment. With no tie to traditional telephone company operations, these providers aren’t burdened with legacy costs or equipment that is too entrenched and expensive to update at this time. They can focus their efforts on offering a suite of high bandwidth Ethernet services for businesses that need just this type of connectivity.

Is Metro Ethernet the right network service for your business operation? Find out by checking availability and pricing of Metro Ethernet services in your area.

Comprehensive Network Services From Telarus

Building and managing a network for your business can be problematic. For smaller businesses, it’s a distraction from the main focus of the company. For medium and larger operations, it can be a money pit and either a boost or a hinderance to productivity. What can really get painful is integrating your LAN and WAN networks to create one smooth running entity. Is there anything that can help?

You bet there is. There’s a service that can help regardless of whether you are a small office with no tech support to a major corporation with international operations. Imagine getting the hardware, software, installation, maintenance, operation, upgrades, plus connectivity from switched circuit analog telephone right on up to gigabit Ethernet, all from one source. Now, THAT’s comprehensive service!

The service I’m referring to is actually a family of services under one umbrella called Telarus. I first became associated with this company when they launched their groundbreaking “Shop for T1” service over 6 years ago. The revolutionary idea was that you could get T1 line pricing for your business location in under a minute on your Web browser. You still can. Just use the Shop for T1 real-time quote engine on our T1 Rex site.

Competitive T1 line pricing soon expanded to a wide variety of telecom bandwidth services that now encompass DS3, SONET fiber optic connections, Metro Ethernet, MPLS networks, wireless point to point and Dedicated Internet service, colocation servers, ISDN PRI, SIP trunking, and managed routers for everything.

When it comes to WAN services, Telarus offers one-stop shopping for nearly every business bandwidth service you can get. What’s more, being a telecom brokerage service means they can often offer you multiple competitive quotes for the service you need. The Telarus bandwidth consultants can help you weigh the tradeoffs among an often staggering amount of options so you can get the service that meets your business needs at the best price. The cost of all this to you? Zip. It’s free to any organization with serious professional requirements.

But you know that bandwidth is only one piece of the puzzle. How about all that internal infrastructure that keep the packets flowing?

This is where the complementary Telarus VAR Network service comes into play. What’s a VAR? That means Value Added Reseller. It’s an industry term for independent business telephone and computer network companies that specialize in sales and service. VARs will take your business requirements and offer you a package deal for PBX phone systems, routers, network switches, fiber optic cabling, copper wiring, connections and whatever else it takes to build your telephone, data or converged network.

VARs often offer turnkey solutions that include both the equipment and installation. Since the VAR Network is part of the Telarus family, participating VARs also have access to the complete range of bandwidth solutions that Telarus offers. This gives you the advantage of one-stop shopping and a single point of contact for any issues that arise. Accessing the VAR Network is as simple as entering a quick summary of your business needs using the VAR Network online request. That triggers the automated database to alert qualified VARs in your area to contact you for complete details.

Can you do any better than this? I doubt it. If you are not familiar with these Telarus services, go ahead and give them a try. The cost to you is zero, the time required is minimal, and the cost savings can be way more than you might think.

Welcome To The Big Bandwidth Era

You remember the big band era? Tommy Dorsey? Glenn Miller?

No, I didn’t think so. It was a bit before my time, too, although I do enjoy the music of that era. Back then technology was radio and bandwidth was measured in cycles per second and kilocycles. Today, technology is digital and bandwidth is measured in Mbps and Gbps. Welcome to the big bandwidth era.

So how much bandwidth is needed to qualify as big? NuVox, a major competitive carrier, defines big bandwidth as anything over 10 Mbps. That’s the level that consumer Internet service providers are targeting, now that video is becoming the true killer app of the Web. It’s also where businesses are headed... and fast.

What’s driving that need for speed? Video is certainly part of puzzle, with many companies being both producers and users of online video. Cloud services are also a big emerging driver. By moving the server infrastructure and storage network into the cloud, companies see a way to get out of the expensive upgrade and maintenance cycles while still having the IT services they need. Add to that the mad scramble to replace everything paper with everything electronic, especially in the medical field, and you’ve got WAN networks getting pretty congested.

So, what does it take to get 10 Mbps or more connected to your network? T1 lines (1.5 Mbps) are still a readily available and affordable to get reliable business bandwidth. A industry standard process called bonding allows multiple T1 lines to act as one larger pipe with higher bandwidth. Two bonded T1 lines gives you 3 Mbps, four provides 6 Mbps, 8 bonded T1 lines will deliver 12 Mbps, a “big bandwidth” solution.

Another form of twisted pair copper transport is EoC (Ethernet over Copper) It uses the familiar telco trunk lines that are installed at most business locations. But special equipment at each end creates an Ethernet transport service. NuVox is offering a variety called Etherloop that is a half-duplex transmission technology capable of providing bandwidths up to 30 Mbps up to 10,000 feet from the carrier POP or Point of Presence.

Moving up from copper to fiber optic services, a very popular traditional service is DS3 at 45 Mbps. Other fiber based services include Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbps. Now we’re really talking about BIG bandwidth.

Is your company needing to move into the big bandwidth era? You’ll find that the cost of these higher capacity services may be much lower than when you looked into them a few years ago, thanks to competitive carriers like Nuvox. How much lower? Find out now by getting a quote for big bandwidth services available at your business location.

Branching Out With MPLS and VPN

Does you business depend on communicating securely between multiple locations? As more business go to electronic forms and transactions, they are finding that they need more than a FAX machine, overnight mail, or a dial-up connection. A competitive position now requires knowing sales and inventory data in real time, transfer of medical images and CAD drawings in seconds not hours, and delivery of important business documents instantly rather than waiting for mail delivery. What you need is a broadband pipe that connects all your key locations.

The traditional broadband pipeline is the T1 point to point private line. This is a dedicated data connection between two locations that is always available for your exclusive use. When the line isn't transmitting data, it is idling with only enough data being exchanged to maintain line synchronization.

The point to point circuit has the advantages of being exclusive and secure. But these come at a price. Each line connects only two locations. There is no such thing as a mesh network. Companies that need communications among many branch offices have to set up a star network at headquarters to manage the data flow to and from each connected location.

This arrangement works best when all or most communications are between headquarters and each branch, or between a franchisor and multiple franchisees who do not need to talk among themselves.

An alternative arrangement is the MPLS or Multi Protocol Label Switching network. MPLS is an update to the earlier Frame Relay technology. Both types of networks can be set up to allow many to many communications. The network itself is owned by a private networking company that provides connections through it's network "cloud" to each desired location. Then allowed connections are mapped and a CIR or Committed Information Rate (bandwidth) is established. Each location accesses the MPLS network through a tag router and T1 line provided by the network.

For even greater flexibility, Carrier Ethernet can extend your corporate LAN across town or across the country. Ethernet has the advantages of being very familiar and easy to manage by IT departments. It also offers network compatible speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and even 1,000 Mbps GigE service. Fiber optic connections need to be in place at each location to achieve these higher bandwidths.

Where cost is a major consideration or there are dozens or hundreds of sites to connect, a VPN or Virtual Private Network may be your best solution. It's called virtual because it uses the public Internet instead of a private network. Privacy is provided through data encryption software in a process called "tunneling." A VPN can be relatively inexpensive because the major portion of the network is already in place and is deployed nearly everywhere, including overseas locations. Your connection to the Internet can be a T1 line, or DS3 for higher bandwidth.

Which communications network is best for your business? Our expert consultants can help you sort through the options and pick the optimum solution based on price and performance. Get started now with a quick online quote inquiry at T1 Rex.