OC3 Bandwidth Costs Just A Fraction Of What It Did

If you are a use of high bandwidth fiber optic connections, you know that these line services don’t come cheap. Well, actually, they do come cheaper these days. But you have to know what to look for and where to look.

Take OC3 bandwidth, for instance. Optical Carrier level 3 is one of a family of fiber optic carrier services using the SONET (Synchronous Optic NETwork) protocol developed for the major telephone carriers and later offered to large business organizations. OC-3 is actually the lowest commonly available SONET service and runs a at a transmission speed of 155.52 Mbps. Of that, 148.608 Mbps is dedicated to payload, with 6.912 Mbps needed to support the overhead of transmission.

Time was, just a few years ago, that OC3 was considered an enormous amount of bandwidth. It was only ordered by major Internet service providers, colocation hosting facilities, television distribution companies and other large corporations. Medium size companies got by with DS3 at 45 Mbps, roughly 1/3 the capacity of OC3. Smaller companies had their needs met by T1 lines running 1.5 Mbps.

Today, OC3 bandwidth is no longer consider as the ultimate business telecom service. Leading edge companies have moved on to Gigabit bandwidth levels and even 10 Gbps is not out of the question. Two factors have been driving that change. One is expansion of the carrier market with many new competitive carriers running their own fiber optic networks. The other is the demand for higher bandwidths by such needs as cloud computing services, HDTV video, CAD/CAM design and manufacturing, scientific supercomputer simulations, and electronic medical records transmission.

While OC3 offers about 155 Mbps, the next level, OC12, offers 622 Mbps, OC48 steps that up to 2.5 Gbps and OC192 provides 10 Gbps performance. These are all SONET switched circuit TDM technologies. Their competitors are IP packet switched networks offering 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10,000 Mbps 10GigE.

With so much competition in the fiber optic arena, prices have come down dramatically over the last decade. In fact, if you haven’t checked competitive pricing in a few years, you may be shocked at how many options you have and at the low lease prices available. But... you may not find these low prices at all unless you check with a bandwidth broker who has access to dozens of competitive service providers. We work with Telarus, Inc., arguably the most innovative and fastest growing telecom services broker today. Their dedication to customer service and extensive automation tools make it easy for you to inquire as to services and pricing and get an answer quickly. Go ahead and simply state your business bandwidth needs now and see how glad you are that you invested the 30 seconds or so that it took to submit that online inquiry.

Metro Ethernet over Copper

You’ve heard that Metro Ethernet service offers exceptionally good pricing and higher bandwidths than you can get from your copper-based T1 lines. But those huge savings can vaporize once you get the estimates for fiber optic construction. Is there any way you can participate in the cost advantages of Ethernet service without having to come up with a large amount of capital funding?

You bet there is. It’s a technology that combines the advantages of Ethernet connection services with the availability of twisted pair copper cabling. The service you want to ask for is “Metro Ethernet over Copper”.

Just what is Metro Ethernet over Copper and how does it differ from what’s generically called Metro Ethernet?

Actually, the similarities are many and the differences are few. Metro Ethernet over Copper, also called Ethernet over Copper or EoC, is more about the delivery mechanism or physical network than the service itself. Ethernet for the Wide Area Network (WAN) is Ethernet regardless of how it is provisioned. Metro Ethernet refers to Ethernet services that connect your business location to a carrier’s point of presence or an extension of your Local Area Network (LAN) to other locations within a city or suburban area. The copper reference means that multiple twisted pair copper is used to connect your building instead of brining in a fiber optic cable.

Where does this copper come from and why is it cheaper than fiber? The copper is already there. It’s the same multiple pair binder cable that the telephone company installed when the building was constructed. These cables generally have many small gauge copper wires twisted together in pairs. Each pair can carry one analog telephone conversation or be used to transport a digital signal. Metro Ethernet service providers install a special piece of termination equipment at your site to connect the copper pairs they’ll be using. The more pairs they an employ, the higher the bandwidth they can provide.

How much Ethernet bandwidth can you expect with copper-based service? It depends a lot on how close you are to an on-network fiber lit building or a carrier office. The digital signal degrades with distance. Generally, you can get anywhere from 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps Ethernet service over copper. That’s a lot more than T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps and as much bandwidth as most small and medium size businesses need.

Are you interested in finding out if you can get high bandwidth, low cost Ethernet service? If so, check Metro Ethernet over Copper prices and availability for your location now. You may be surprised by how much you can get for your telecom dollar.

Five Years Of The Explainer

T1 Rex’s Business Telecom Explainer celebrated it’s 5th anniversary this month, with well over 800 posts since 2004. We started off with a mission to explain the intricacies of telecommunications services and offer competitive service options to businesses. This mission has expanded to include a host of products, services and issues of interest to our readers. As we get ready to enter the second decade of the century, let’s see if we can make sense of what happened in the “aught” years of the Millennium and where we might be going next.

As the name implies, this explainer blog was launched in conjunction with T1Rex.com. T1 Rex came to be because of a new invention in the world of telecommunications. A company called Telarus developed a software process called GeoQuote (now patented) that automates the pricing of commonly used business telecom services. The focus was T1 lines, which are the most common professional grade voice and data connection for most businesses.

Prior to GeoQuote, the way you got a quote for a T1 line was to submit an inquiry form or answer questions over the phone and then wait a week or two while your request was passed through channels and your quote was manually calculated. With the GeoQuote automated quote form on T1Rex.com, a curious business manager or network engineer could enter some basic information online and get a quote that was better than 90% accurate in less than a minute. It’s even more accurate today and there are many more options than just T1 lines.

GeoQuote upended the marketing of telecommunications services the same way that the IBM computer changed accounting, numerical control changed manufacturing, and computer aided design changed engineering. Once automation gets into a process, everything happens faster and with fewer errors. The productivity increases can be orders of magnitude above what they were with the old manual processes. There’s no going back.

We’re all getting a taste of this in our private and well as business lives. Social Networking has emerged in the last few years to revolutionize how we communicate. Remember when everyone wanted to make a website? Hardly anyone builds sites anymore unless they have a very specific business or special interest need. Websites were replaced by blogs. Blogs are being replaced by social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn. Do you still email? Twitter is the new email. It nicely complements and integrates with cell phone text messaging.

Even Twitter may seem like yesterday’s news later this decade. Most cell phones now have cameras with fairly good resolution and the ability to take short video clips. Picture and video messaging are gaining popularity. How soon before there’s a video screen on a service like Twitter so you just click for a short video message? Video and audio won’t replace text, of course. There are too many situations where you need to communicate briefly and with stealth. They’ll simply add another dimension.

Video is the long heralded “killer app” for the Internet. You know what a phenomenon YouTube has been. Now TVs and Blu-ray players come Internet-ready so they can play those YouTube clips on the big screen and also access full length network programs on the Web. You can catch up on many TV shows you missed by watching them on your computer. But you know that you really want to lay back in the recliner and watch them on the TV. That’s going to be common very, very soon.

Video conferencing is breaking out of the corporate conference room and onto the desktop right now. My iMac came ready to video chat with a built-in camera and microphone. Many other computers, including laptops and netbooks, are similarly equipped. As I write this, the airlines are busy tightening security because of terrorist attack that almost succeeded. Some of the new rules are going to make an annoying travel experience nearly insufferable. That, combined with the Great Recession that may linger for years, is going to get a lot of business people and casual travelers thinking about alternatives. In many cases, a convenient video conference can do the job of a personal visit. As this catches on, you can expect a push to improve quality and ease of sharing photos and videos similar to what Cisco calls Telepresence.

Video conferencing is also going to be big on cell phones. If people can walk down the street working their thumbs while staring at text on a screen, they can certainly watch the person they are communicating with in real time. To think that they laughed at Dick Tracy’s wrist TV in the 60’s. We wouldn’t even settle for a screen that small anymore.

Video is what has gotten the telecom carriers scared stiff, and for good reason. Just like the move from email to interactive Web sites forced the upgrade from dial-up to broadband, the move to video and high definition everything is forcing carriers into a bandwidth upgrade. Verizon has wisely started deploying fiber optic to the premises before demand makes it mandatory. The cable companies are deploying DOCSIS 3.0 for the same reason. There will soon be no such thing as too much bandwidth. For business locations, the best answer seems to be Ethernet over copper or fiber. When multiple business locations outside of a metro area are involved, MPLS networks are the emerging leader for high bandwidths at reasonable prices.

It’s the cellular carriers that feel faint at the thought of everyone having a smartphone. Their thousands of towers were equipped to efficiently handle telephone conversations and text messaging. Light duty Web surfing and limited multimedia is being accommodated with 2.5 and 3G upgrades. But they will need 4G and a lot of it to handle the load of HD video streaming on a near-continuous basis. Even the FCC is already wondering if there are more over-the-air TV channels it can repurpose for cellular broadband. There’s a real danger that there just isn’t going to be enough spectrum to go around. At sometime during the next decade you can expect a major fight to ensue over what is the “best” use of the choice VHF and UHF frequencies.

A new technology we’ve just started following is called Poken. It’s wireless, but what’s called near-field wireless. Using low frequencies that won’t be part of the TV/Cellular/Microwaves slugfest, Poken devices exchange information when they touch each other. The idea is to replace business cards and social business cards with an electronic data transfer and a portal to manage the contact information. It nicely supports hot links to your current social networking and business sites, for instant access by those you contact. Poken is already hugely popular in Europe.

Well, this is almost certainly the tip of the technology iceberg. Many exciting developments in the coming “teens” decade haven’t even emerged yet. It’s our plan to be writing about them as they do, and I hope that you’ll be with us for what is bound to be an exciting time.

Why Bandwidth is Cheap Downtown

Are you looking to expand your business bandwidth at bargain prices? Then go downtown. You'll find more competition and lower prices in the heart of the city than anywhere else. Well, if you can't afford to move there for the outstanding bandwidth pricing, I do have an alternative that's just as good for many companies.

The price of good real estate downtown is astronomical. Why should bandwidth be cheap? It's for the same reason that real estate is expensive: density.

Think of real estate as being a pie. There's only so much of it and the choice pieces command a premium. The more people that want to grab a slice, the higher the price goes.

Now consider bandwidth. The more people who want a slice of bandwidth, the cheaper it gets. That's because the high cost of business bandwidth lies in the capital expense (capex) that it takes to dig tranches, pull wires and fiber optic bundles, and install electronic racks to manage the signals at both ends. With fiber optic, especially, it costs little more to pull a hundred fibers at once as it does to install a single strand.

Once the capital investment has been made, the incremental cost of electronically transferring data from point to point or to the Internet is relatively small. With lots and lots of clients to amortize the buildout costs, providers can afford to offer reduced prices in areas of high business population density.

A related reason for better bandwidth prices downtown is competition. If you want to catch fish, you go where you know there are lots of fish. If you want to provide voice and data services to business, you go where the businesses are. That's not down the country lane where establishments are few and far between. It's downtown where they are literally stacked on top of each other. What once was the exclusive domain of the telephone companies is now home to dozens of competitive carriers, each hungry to expand their service footprint and client list. Competition leads to lower prices, as providers vie to capture the lion's share of the business.

A third factor is technology. There's a newer last mile delivery technology called Ethernet over Copper or EoC that can provide your business with up to 45 Mbps of Metro Ethernet connectivity at bargain rates. The hitch is that you need to be located within a few miles of a carrier point of presence to qualify. Such high bandwidth signals don't travel far over twisted pair copper wiring. But where they do, you'll get an excellent price per Mbps compared to other service options.

So, is your business located downtown? If so, find the best deals on business bandwidth services through a simple online query.

Are you farther out in the burbs or in a small town or rural location? One way you can also get excellent rates on bandwidth services is to colocate your equipment, not your entire business. A T1 line or bonded T1 lines will get you connected from you place of business to the colocation center. Install your servers in the center and you'll have easy access to multiple competitive carriers located in the same facility. Find the best deals on colocation bandwidth and decide for yourself if the cost savings justify a move to where the cheap bandwidth is.

T1 vs SIP For Business Telephone

Businesses that have multiple incoming and outgoing telephone lines, especially lots of lines to support call centers, customer service, phone ordering, technical support or large business offices, need different telecom solutions than small office users. Traditionally, this has been T1 telephone service. But enterprise VoIP initiatives are encouraging businesses to take a look at SIP Trunking as an alternative. What are the merits of each technology and how do you choose the best telephony solution?

T1 telephone lines trace their development to the telephone companies who needed an efficient way to interconnect central offices for transporting dozens or hundreds of simultaneous phone calls. The resulting T-carrier standard created the T1 and T3 line services and paved the way for higher level optical carrier services capable of transporting thousands of calls. Decades later, this technology was made available directly to businesses as a way to connect their internal telephone systems, called PBX, to the public switched telephone network.

Any PBX system that you buy today either comes standard with or has an option for a T1 line card. T1 has become the standard for digital telephone trunks, the way to combine multiple standard analog phone lines into a larger trunk line for a cost savings. When used this way, T1 lines are configured into 24 channels. Each channel can carry one telephone conversation. With 24 channels available, up to 24 separate phone lines can be accommodated. The PBX (Private Branch eXchange) system manages those 24 lines to make them available to potentially hundreds of individual desk phones.

Of course, you don't need to use all 24 channels to have T1 telephone lines make economic sense. The more you use, the cheaper per line it gets. Usually the break even point is somewhere around replacing 6 to 10 conventional analog phone lines.

A very popular variation of the T1 phone line is T1 PRI or ISDN PRI service. The PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. It is a standard that keeps 23 of the 24 T1 channels available to carry individual phone calls. The remaining channel is used for signaling, control and data to support the other 23. By doing this, T1 PRI offers very fast call switching and data services such as Caller ID and ANI.

T1 PRI has become the service of choice for PBX telephone systems and call centers. If 23 incoming/outgoing phone lines are not enough for a large corporation or call center, you can add more T1 lines. Many large phone systems easily accommodate 2 to 4 T1 lines and can be upgraded for more as needed. Need a hundred or more phone lines? DS3 telephone service gives you the equivalent of 28 T1 lines, which is well over 600 simultaneous telephone conversations.

T1 and DS3 are both channelized services that split the total bandwidth of the line into multiple independent channels on a time sharing basis. This technology is often referred to as TDM or Time Division Multiplexing. It has been the standard for digital telephony in the public phone network for over 50 years.

A newer service, designed to specifically to support VoIP phone systems, is called SIP Trunking. SIP refers to Session Initiation Protocol, the control and switching scheme used in VoIP. SIP Trunks are based on transporting packets instead of channels. They use IP networking technology instead of TDM. SIP trunks run directly from your location to your VoIP service provider, who provides the means to interconnect with the public telephone network. Because it's a managed service there can be considerable cost savings.

Interestingly, either T1 PRI or SIP Trunking can be used with both standard analog or digital PBX systems or the newer IP PBX phone systems. So the question becomes, "what is the best choice for a particular business?"

The right answer is whichever service offers the lowest costs for high voice quality and high reliability when connected to your phone system. You need to take into consideration the monthly recurring line costs, per minute long distance charges, and any capital expense for interface equipment. There may be other considerations, too, such as toll free numbers, local dial tone, and DID or direct inward dialing, among others.

How do you sort it out and come to a simple purchasing decision? The best way is to compare your T1 and SIP telephone options and get complementary consulting help for your particular circumstances. There's no cost for this service, and the savings that come from picking the right solution can be substantial.

Yes, There IS Rural Broadband For Businesses

One of the most anticipated provisions in the economic stimulus plan has been funding to build-out rural broadband solutions. But did you know that you can already get the bandwidth you likely need for your rural business location?

Rural areas have long been ignored by most broadband Internet service providers. It's not that a rural office, factory, warehouse or farm is any less important than businesses in the city. It's that the cost of running new coaxial cables or fiber optic bundles can't be amortized over very many users. When providers run the numbers, they wince and then set aside the whole idea of expanding their service footprints. That's why you don't see Cable TV or DSL services promoted out in the countryside. But that doesn't mean there isn't broadband service.

Does your business qualify? Do you have telephone service? It's really that simple. Thanks to 100 and some years of standardized phone lines and a mandate for universal telephone service, most every business location you can imagine can get dial tone over ordinary copper pair wiring. Those same copper pair can be pressed into service to carry digitized T1 line service instead of analog phone service. It's takes two pair per T1 line, but you get either 24 digital phone lines or 1.5 Mbps of Internet access.

In fact, most businesses have "binders" with many pair of copper wires brought in so that they can have multiple phone lines. Every two pair can support a T1 line. Those don't have to be completely separate lines, either. They can be combined or "bonded" to create high bandwidth services. A 2x T1 bonded service gives you 3 Mbps, 4x is good for 6 Mbps and so on, up to a practical limit of 10 or 12 Mbps. Honestly, do you really need more bandwidth than that? If so, you'll probably have to wait for fiber optic service to come your way.

Another way to drop-in broadband Internet to even the most remote of locations is to use two-way satellite broadband. Speeds are similar to T1 and bonded T1 lines, although there is a limit on how much bandwidth you can use in any given period of time. That's due to capacity limitations of the satellites. However, if satellite broadband works for you it can be less expensive than wireline solutions in rural areas.

Wireless line of sight broadband service have also been popping up in rural areas, mostly to serve new subdivisions where there are enough houses and businesses to justify the cost of erecting a tower and feeding it with, you guessed it, bonded T1 line service. There's no national network of these there way there is with wireline and satellite, so it really depends on exactly where you are located as to what service is available.

Do you have a rural or remote business location? Do you have a need for broadband Internet service? Then find out which rural broadband solutions are already available for you.

XO Offering Ethernet to the World

Step right up, telecommunications carriers worldwide. Here's your chance to access 4 million commercial buildings in the United States to offer your services via Ethernet. All this is available to you thanks to the new Ethernet Hub service from XO communications.

"Yaaawwwwn," you say? As a business telecom services user, what do you care what one carrier offers another? Well, there's good reason for you to care. But if, and only if, you are interested in saving money on your voice and data service leases.

I thought that might get your attention. To understand how you may benefit, you need to see what's hidden within the recent XO Ethernet Hub press release. The devilish savings, if I may coin a phrase, are in the details.

XO Communications is what is called a competitive carrier. That means that they were never part of the incumbent local exchange carriers, what's become of the old Bell Telephone system. This is a relatively new telecom carrier, but it's still a billion dollar company with over 4,000 employees. What's more impressive is that their nationwide network is all new technology, with about a million miles of metro fiber, 18,000 miles of fiber between cities, and 75 markets with wireless services available.

That's not the profile of your stodgy old telecom, and it is why XO has something to offer other carriers who look wistfully at the massive Carrier Ethernet presence that XO has established for itself. That presence includes those 4 million commercial buildings, each reachable for Ethernet service.

Ethernet WAN service, also called Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet, offers a way to extend your corporate network across town or across the country with a minimum of technical fuss and bother. It uses the familiar Ethernet protocol that you're already proficient with. Ethernet service prices are exceptionally low because there are no legacy telcos providing the "last mile" access the way you expect when ordering SONET or T-Carrier voice and data services.

XO's Ethernet bandwidth options range from 5 Mbps all the way up to 10 Gbps. The higher bandwidth options require fiber optic terminations, but it's possible to get lower tier speeds delivered via EoC or Ethernet over Copper. If fiber construction costs are too high and you are located within a couple miles of a XO Point of Presence, EoC can connect you to their network using the already-installed copper pairs that terminate in your building.

Now you've got an idea why XO Communications is perfectly suited to be your next service provider. The next step is to check out typical Ethernet service pricing and find out what bandwidth and costs savings are available for your business.

VoIP Without The Internet

VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony made its name as an Internet based telephone service alternative. The idea was to use the broadband connection that most residential and business users had in place to also connect with their phone service provider. Competitive service providers could avoid paying the local telephone companies to lease the existing copper phone lines and offer a better bundled price to customers. In theory, it should be easy for the gigantic Internet pipe to transport low bandwidth voice streams.

Well, that's the theory. In practice, that big pipe isn't always so infinitely large. Like the super highway it emulates, Internet paths can become congested with packets just as easily as highways become congested with cars. Bandwidth congestion, transmission delays called latency, and dropped packets can easily tear up a phone conversation or any other type of real time data stream.

Most of the problem is in the infamous first-mile. That's the connection between your location and your service provider's point of presence or POP. Shared bandwidth arrangements such as DSL and Cable broadband make no guarantees as to availability or quality of service. One minute everything is working great. Next minute the line goes dead. Or at least the conversation gets garbled from time to time.

Consumers might put up with this level of performance if they can save enough money on their phone bill. But businesses really can't afford the customer annoyance and lost connections during important conversations. Having experienced problems with VoIP installations or hearing horror stories has convinced many businesses to hunker down and avoid the entire network voice issue. Others have worked out arrangements so that they can have the best of both worlds. They get the reliability and voice quality they've come to expect from the public switched telephone network. Plus the cost savings and added features that come from a converged voice and data network.

How do the successful businesses do it? For many the secret is as simple as avoiding the Internet for anything but Web and email access or electronic data interchange. But that doesn't have to mean maintaining a bank of analog phone lines and an ancient telephone system. There are at least two ways to have your VoIP without having to eat the problems too.

The first approach is to go with a hybrid PBX phone system. Within your plant, the phones and switch are IP based. SIP telephones and an IP PBX system allow you to use a single Ethernet LAN to connect both computers and phones. Yes, you'll need to carefully engineer your network to make sure that voice packets move unrestricted. But that may well be worth the effort to eliminate the separate telephone network and all its maintenance expense. With the hybrid approach, IP stops at the IP PBX. Plug-in interface cards for T1 PRI trunks or simple analog lines bring in conventional telephone service.

The second approach is to employ SIP trunking to connect your IP PBX to your competitive phone service provider. SIP trunking is a private line arrangement that maintains the integrity of the VoIP packets all the way from telephone set to service provider. The SIP trunk is usually shared with Internet data coming from the service provider to your network. However, your voice packets never traverse the public Internet. They stay on the SIP trunk until they are terminated to the public telephone network by your provider. You are never in contention with other users for the bandwidth that transmits your voice and data packets.

Both of these approaches give you control over Quality of Service for your telephone calls. Either you connect to the public phone network at your company location. Or your send your call streams to your service provider over a carefully engineered private line. It avoids the contention and variability that are inherent to that public facility that is the Internet.

Are you interested in improving your business telephone system but concerned about maintaining quality and reliability. Let our expert consultants recommend alternative approaches that address those concerns but also offer capital and operational cost savings. Tell us about your needs at EnterpriseVoIP.com.