VXSuite Takes the Scary Out of VoIP

By: John Shepler

You know that Unified Communications based on VoIP telephony is the future of business communications. You also know that it is likely a good UC solution can improve the productivity of your business. You’ve been hesitating, though, because ripping everything out and moving to the new technology is downright scary. The phones work fine on their old twisted pair wiring. Well, if by fine you mean you can make and receive calls on your desk phones. That’s pretty much the end of the road for analog and TDM technology. If you want more, you’ll have to make the leap to IP networking all the way around.

Not So Fast...
Oh, but you’ve heard horror stories about companies merging their phones onto the computer network. All of sudden, voices get distorted, calls get dropped. Who wants that? Perhaps it’s better just to stay old school and let somebody else take on the new technology.

Can You Afford Not To?
OK, but you are also letting them take the profits that come with the increased efficiency of having your business apps, desk phones, smartphones, video conferencing, and call center all on one integrated system. Wait long enough and your competitors responsiveness will improve so much that they’ll run circles around your company and start siphoning off customers, then employees.

Looking Under the Hood
What if there were tools that could take the guesswork out of implementing VoIP and UC on your network? Most of the issues you’ll encounter arise from the fact that a network set up for computers can work just fine for file transfers but be a disaster when it comes to handling real-time apps like voice and video. You need to protect those interactive streams from getting crushed by mountains of data moving around. To do that you need to look inside the network and see what is happening.


VXSuite is a toolset ideally qualified to analyze your currenct legacy network and report if you have bandwidth, latency, jitter or congestion issues that will make a mess out of VoIP. You’ll need to implement class of service on your network so that each type of packet stream has the priority and other characteristics it needs to perform optimally.

Before the Move
First, use VXSuite to analyze your system before your make any changes. VXSuite will report on your current voice call volume and usage. It uses that data to calculated min, max and average bandwidth requirements that will support VoIP when you switch. Find and fix problems here and you’ll have a much smoother transition.

A Quality of Experience Assessment is an automated test that deploys software agents on your network to create VoIP test calls to see what bottlenecks arise. Each test call is analyzed for delay, jitter & packet loss and then assigned an MOS score that indicates the quality of the voice communications.

After the Move
Once you deploy your new VoIP and/or UC system, you are not left in the dark. VXSuite monitors call quality and network issues during the rollout phase that can include both VoIP and legacy PBX systems simultaneously. You’ll get reports on how things are working and alarms if there is trouble.

Continuing Support
As ongoing support, the VXSuite cloud-based analytics toolkit continues to monitor your network environment to ensure that voice quality is maintained and issues diagnosed and resolved. You can set threshold levels for delay, jitter, packet loss, MOS, CPU utilization, memory utilization and so on to enable your IT staff to know instantly when problems develop. No more worrying that trouble is sneaking up behind you.

The Toolset You Really Need
Have you been putting off making the technology changes you should because you are worried that things will get worse, not better, when you make the move to VoIP and Unified Communications? If so, now’s the time to get more information about how VXSuite tools and cloud based communications
can improve your productivity and likely reduce cost at the same time.

Internet SDN Mimics MPLS At Much Lower Cost

By: John Shepler

High performance, high cost. Low performance, low cost. This has been the story of WAN bandwidth connections for business. You can save a bundle with Cable or DSL Internet broadband, but the reliability and performance variations may drive you nuts. Or, you can pay up for a proprietary private line solution or MPLS network and enjoy high reliability, low latency and consistent line speed… if you can afford the price. If there was only a way to make the Internet perform like an MPLS network, that would be a huge cost saver. Well, thanks to SDN, now there is.

What SDN is All About
SDN is the latest buzzword for the cutting edge of telecommunications connections. Sometimes you’ll see it described as Hybrid SDN or SDN-WAN. Here’s what those acronyms mean and how they can work to your advantage.

SDN simply means Software Defined Network. That’s to distinguish it from the traditional hardware-based networks that were pioneered by the telephone companies and later used to create digital private lines and the backbone of the Internet. Today’s IP networks are chock full of individual routers and switches that set the architecture of the network. MPLS networks have an even more rigid topology created from specialized label switches that do the traffic routing.

A software defined network moves the intelligence of how the network makes decisions away from the pre-determined and hard to change path and routing assignments to a software program that orchestrates how the hardware elements behave at any given time. SDN-WAN is a Wide Area Network running under SDN control. This may be a hybrid of Internet, private line and MPLS networks all connected together to make one virtual WAN network.

What’s Holding Back The Internet?
The lure of the Internet is a siren song that has been easy to embrace, but, sometimes, with dire consequences. The reason is that the Internet was never designed to be a replacement for the hardware defined circuit switched telecom networks. It was meant to be a shared pool of resources that moves packets of data from one place to another accurately, no matter what goes wrong on the network. TCP/IP ensures intact files. It doesn’t offer any guarantees as to when those files will get to their destination. Your files aren’t any more or less important than anyone else’s.

Consequently, today’s Internet users experience variations in performance that might be annoying to a home user trying to watch a movie, but a productivity killer to a business running software as a service in the cloud. Voice and video two-way communication is dicey because network neutrality means there is no way to prioritize traffic. The streams of VoIP packets take their turns with huge file transfers. When the paths get congested, conversations become garbled and calls sometimes drop.

Making The Internet Great For Business
Take a closer look at what’s going on in the Internet and you’ll see that most of the problems are concentrated in “the last mile” connections and not the core network. The reasons that compromises are made to keep the cost of connecting low. For instance, DSL and Cable, the two lowest cost wireline broadband access technologies, include shared and asymmetrical bandwidth with no service level agreements. You take what you get in the way of instantaneous bandwidth, network congestion, latency, packet loss and reliability.

You can improve on this by moving to Dedicated Internet Access or DIA. That includes T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, OCx SONET, Ethernet over Copper, and Fiber Optic Carrier Ethernet. All of these “carrier grade” solutions provide a more solid connection to the Internet, but at a price. That price is anywhere from 2 or 3x the cost on up to 10x or more.

Where Do Private Lines and MPLS Fit In?
You can get the highest performance network in terms of high bandwidth, low latency, jitter and packet loss, and availability by building your own private Internet. A classic way to do this is to run dedicated private lines between every location you wish to connect. That gets very pricey very fast. MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks improve on cost by essentially giving you a private Internet among all your desired locations for a price that’s better than dedicated private lines but still much higher than the Internet.

Companies have embraced MPLS for their internal communications among headquarters, branch offices and data centers when performance is paramount.

How SDN Mimics MPLS at Lower Cost
Truth be told, the performance of Cable Broadband solutions is far superior to what you could get a decade ago. You can get bandwidth levels of 100 Mbps or even 1 Gbps at bargain rates. It’s the variability that’s the bugaboo of Cable, DSL, 4G Wireless and the Internet itself.

What SDN controllers do is manage your connectivity resources on a continuous basis. You’ll need more than one connection for the SDN to have something to manage. These might include Cable broadband, DSL, 4G, Dedicated Internet access, private lines and even satellite in remote areas. The SDN will decide what traffic goes over what circuit depending on the characteristics of each network moment by moment. If no circuit is perfect, it might send the same traffic over multiple paths. More critical applications, such as VoIP and video conferencing, will get priority on the higher performance paths.

In essence, you are creating classes of service to prioritize your traffic even though the Internet itself does no such thing. Your costs will be lower than an all-private solution and you have the added advantage of being able to connect anywhere on Earth, including to your customers and suppliers, via the Internet. The world-wide core infrastructure is already in place and the cost is being amortized over many millions of users.

Do you suspect that you are paying much more that you could be for your wide area network connections? Find out now if there is a readily available lower cost SDN-based bandwidth solution that meets your requirements.

Build Your Own World Wide Web

By: John Shepler

You love the World Wide Web… kind of. It’s a thing of beauty when you want to get information anywhere, anytime. It’s gets a lot less pretty when you are trying to share large files between offices, have high quality teleconferences, or interact with your applications as fast as you can. It gets down right ugly when your ISP crashes or gets so congested by people streaming high def video that you can barely get anything done. And then there are the security problems. You either have been hacked, are being hacked or will be hacked soon. Is this really the best one can hope for?

The Connectivity Conundrum
What would be ideal is to have the Internet all to yourself. Think of it. Only you, your valued customers and suppliers, and all of your business locations could use the network. Think of the performance! All that bandwidth and no competition. The network really would achieve that ideal of being transparent.

Of course, there is this little matter of not being able to access anything outside of your domain if you are the sole owner and user of the web. That’s not going to work. How will you do your banking, get to Wikipedia or buy and sell anything online?

No, you still need the Internet for connectivity to all the content out there and connections with other people. It would just be nice if you could split the Web in two. One side would be general public access. The other would be internal private communications only.

My Private Internet
Want the network all to yourself? Build your own! That may sound a bit nuts, but it’s how performance demanding companies have been doing it for decades. They sure don’t call it the Internet. That term refers to the Public Internet designed by the government and later made available to everyone. Instead, these “private Internets” are constructed using dedicated private lines.

A private line is just that. You order a point to point line service that connects directly from one location to another via a telecom service provider’s office. The only traffic on that line is what you put on it. The rest of the time it sits idle.

For point to point connections, a dedicated private line can’t be beat. You order all the bandwidth you need. There is minimal latency, jitter and packet loss because these are high performance copper and fiber telecom lines. You’ll recognize them as T1, DS3, OC3 to OC48, Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. In some locations private microwave or even laser line of sight wireless service is available.

Adding More Sites
What if you have more than two locations to connect? Simple. You order more private lines. You could have every location connect to every other location, but the cost of this goes up exponentially as you add sites. A more practical solution is to have each remote location connect to a central headquarters data center. That is where the switching and routing takes place to ensure that all locations can communicate.

Voila! You've just built your own private Internet, also called an Intranet. You now have the high performance, high security… and high cost of going it alone. It may well be worth it. With a Wide Area Network (WAN) under your control, you’ll be able to bypass the public switched telephone network for long distance calls between facilities and create your own private cloud that will be as response as if it was right down the hall.

Hackers getting into your servers? How are they going to do that when there is no outside connection? If your data is really, really sensitive, you can encrypt the transmissions between facilities to completely frustrate anyone who might “tap” the line.

Reducing Costs Without Losing Performance
Owning and managing a fleet of dedicated private lines and the infrastructure needed to route the packets gives you the ultimate in control, but it costs a pretty penny. Is there a way to get the same result cheaper without giving up the superior performance of this arrangement?

There is and it is a public/private hybrid called the Multi-Protocol Label Switching Network or MPLS Network. An MPLS network is a private “Internet” that someone has built with fiber optic connections to many cities and countries. The largest ones can connect hundreds or thousands of business sites worldwide. That’s just like the Public Internet, except that this one is privately run and serves only a limited number of paying customers. There is no access to the general public.

MPLS uses a proprietary protocol to route the data through the network. This makes it hard to hack because the usual IP snooping tools won’t work, especially if you encrypt your "last mile" connections. Any intruders looking to gain access to the core of the network will find that quite challenging compared to the Public Internet. For these reasons, MPLS Networks are called “virtually private” by the nature of their design.

No, this isn’t your own private network. There are many companies using the MPLS network at any given time. Unlike the Internet, the MPLS network is run with sufficient resources to offer each client as much bandwidth as they need with low latency, jitter and packet loss. You also have the option to create classes of service for your own data streams so that VoIP phone calls aren’t disrupted by large file transfers that aren’t so time critical.

You’ll Need Internet For a Complete Solution
MPLS networks sure sound like the closest approximation you can have to the Public Internet without all the limitations. Even with complete high performance connectivity among all your business locations, you are still missing a way to communicate with the general public and use all the resources of the World Wide Web. The answer? Take both.

You can set up two networks within your organization. MPLS for internal communications. Public Internet for going outside. You can manage the merger of this arrangement yourself, or turn it over to the MPLS operator. You still have private connectivity between locations, but you also have the Internet available as a separate data stream in its own class.

Have It Both Ways
That’s right. When you build your own World Wide Web you can have the best of both worlds. You have multiple classes of service that prioritize packets based on their criticality. Real time audio and video streams get the highest priority with critical business applications a close second. Your Internet access is lower on the list, with background activities like data backups to the cloud on the bottom rung.

All of this will be invisible to your employees. They’ll simply experience a high performance network that works extremely well for every application. They might even wonder what their peers at other companies are complaining about.

Would you like to investigate an improvement to your current Internet performance or a cost reduction to a privately run suite of dedicated private lines? Get expert recommendations and competitive cost quotes now. This may be more affordable than you think and well worth making the move.

Business Phone Line Options

By: John Shepler

One thing every business, large or small, needs is at least one telephone line. Phone lines may seem pretty mundane, but you may have more options than you think. Are you sure that you have the right phone line for your business?

Plain Old Telephone Service
The historical phone line that we’re all familiar with is the analog phone line, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. It’s that vanilla.

POTS lines are as simple as they come. They consist of a single twisted copper pair that runs from a standard RJ-11 phone jack on your wall all the way back to the telephone company central office. The phone conversation is carried by a varying current in the wires.

What you may not realize is that POTS is a self-contained phone system. Phones were traditionally made of passive electrical components. They got their power right off the phone line… and still can. The value of this is that even if the electrical power goes off at your location, you still have phone service.

What’s happened lately, however, is that even single line phones have gone electronic and require AC power supplies and/or batteries to power the circuitry. This is especially true of cordless phone systems with multiple handsets. You can still get dial tone during a power outage, but you need to have a backup battery supply to operate the phone, not the line.

Multiple LInes
You are not stuck with just a single POTS line. You can have as many as you want. Mind you, there is no economy of scale. There is a fixed price for each line whether you have one phone per line or share the outside lines using a Key Telephone System or PBX.

Wireless as an Option
Can you get rid of the telephone line completely? That’s what cellular phone service is all about. No more “landline”. Everything is done with cell towers instead of wires. Wireless can work just fine for independent professionals who are always out of the office anyway. With a data plan you can have both Internet and voice telephony on the same device. You can enhance your mobile setup with an incoming toll free number, fax transmission and reception, and international dial-around calling. Shared plans can support a small office as well as a single user. Operations larger than that will still need wired landlines.

Moving up to Trunks
A telephone trunk is multiple phone lines coming in on a single cable. There used to be analog trunks, but that technology has all gone digital. The most popular trunks are T1, ISDN PRI and SIP.

T1 lines were devised as replacements for multiple analog POTS lines. Instead of separate wires, T1 lines are multiplexed to divvy up the available bandwidth into 24 independent channels. Each channel can be thought of as a separate phone line.

What if you already have a dozen phones and want to replace all those separate phone lines with a single T1 line? Chances are that you’ll get the same or better service at a lower monthly cost. A box called a “channel bank” handles the conversion between T1 channels and analog lines. Just plug your phones in like you always have.

T1 vs ISDN PRI
ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface is a variation on the T1 line. It uses the same channelization scheme, but dedicates one channel to dialing and switching for all the others. That means you have a maximum of 23 outside lines available on a PRI trunk. The tradeoff is that your phone calls will switch faster on ISDN PRI. That’s important for call centers and others who need highly efficient telephone operations.

Most PBX systems now have the interface circuitry for T1 and ISDN PRI already built-in. You simply plug in the trunk line and the system handles all of the necessary conversions.

SIP Trunks
Many, many companies are considering switching to VoIP technology or have already made the move. SIP trunks are the natural complement to VoIP phone systems. Their advantage is that they use the same protocol, SIP, as the phone themselves. Remember that VoIP or SIP phones connect directly to an Ethernet LAN, usually shared with computers, printers and other network devices. The SIP trunk extends the network so that it also connects to the VoIP service provider.

Like T1 and ISDN PRI, SIP trunks support multiple simultaneous telephone conversations. The difference is that these conversations consist of packet streams all combined on one line instead of breaking the line into separate channels.

Another advantage of SIP trunks is that they can carry Internet traffic as well as phone calls. After all, everything is in packet format. What’s important is that the trunk be setup to prioritize telephone traffic over data traffic to ensure voice quality. This is called Class of Service or Quality of Service.

What phone line is best for your business? One way to find out quickly is to get multiple competitive quotes for everything from POTS through SIP Trunking as business phone line options.

What Dynamic CoS Means to You

By: John Shepler

Most of today’s networks are converged networks. In other words, they carry a variety of traffic from disk backups, file transfers, cloud access, VoIP telephony, audio streaming, video conferencing & streaming and web services. With all of that going on, how do you ensure that your networks maintain the integrity of every process?

The Need for QoS
A network is more than a “dumb pipe” when Quality of Service (QoS) controls are implemented. What do you need that for? Can’t you just provide enough bandwidth so that every packet can traverse the network without limitation?

You certainly can if your pockets are deep enough. 10 Gbps? 100 Gbps? 1 Tbs? There is some bandwidth level short of infinite that will carry any traffic you throw at it with ease. Unfortunately, such capacity gets very expensive very fast. On a local network, you may find that even the fiber you have isn’t enough. When ordering MAN and WAN bandwidth, the cost can make your eyes bug out.

Different Applications, Different Requirements
This is where quality of service controls come into play. Not every file transfer needs to take place in a fraction of a second. Nobody expects those overnight backups to get done in minutes. Your emails need to get to their destinations, but not instantly. Even video downloads are expected to take some amount of time, considering their size.

What we do insist on is telephone conversations that don’t break up or make each party wait a second before responding. We wan’t video conferencing that doesn’t look jerky and responses from cloud software that don’t hesitate, especially long and random pauses.

The truth is that not all packets need equal treatment. Some need to get right through the network as quickly as possible. Others can wait a second. Still others can get through when they get through… within reason.

CoS to Implement QoS
What’s needed is traffic control that decides how your network capacity is allocated among all the packets that want it at any given time. Implementing this process is called Quality of Service. The mechanism that does that is called Class of Service (CoS).

Class of Service is a numerical tag that is inserted in the Ethernet header. There are three bits assigned for this, giving 8 possible classes from 0 to 7. Most of the time you won’t need this many. A few different classes will keep the insensitive traffic from damaging the highly time sensitive traffic.

Chances are that you have CoS tags implemented on your local network now. This is especially true if you’ve made the transition from analog telephones to SIP phones for VoIP. Phone conversations and huge file transfers don’t play well together… unless they’re kept separate.

Think of CoS as lane assignments on a superhighway. Voice packets go on the high occupancy lane. Cloud traffic gets the fast lane and data backups go in the slow lane on the right. CoS tags determine which lane a packet gets to use.

The Next Step: Dynamic CoS
As conditions change, you may wish to alter the class assignments. Local IT people can implement these changes on your network. The WAN is another matter. Legacy procedures for making changes tend to involve paperwork and delays of even weeks for implementations.

tw telecom has implemented something called Dynamic CoS that allows you as the customer to prioritize your applications dynamically and in real-time. Along with dynamic bandwidth control, it gives you, the user, wide ranging control of WAN network resources, as if they were your own.

Are you in need of more flexible bandwidth services that can respond to rapid changes in business requirements? You may well benefit from newer intelligent and dynamic network services. Find out what MAN and WAN network services are available that meet your requirements.

On The First Class of Service the Network Gave to Me…

By: John Shepler

One of the big impediments in getting networks to work well for all types of traffic is that different types of traffic have different needs. Treat all packets the same and you’ll enjoy excellent results in some cases and unacceptable results in others. What’s the solution? You need to add a touch of class to your network.

The idea behind class of service or CoS is that different types of traffic get different priorities on the network. For instance, do you really think that data backups are as sensitive to network characteristics such as latency and jitter as VoIP telephone conservations? Of course not. If your network has the capacity it may not matter. With infinite bandwidth all traffic will flow smoothly from source to destination. The problem is that we don’t have infinite bandwidth or infinitely large anything else.

This really shows up in MAN and WAN connections. These telecom links are almost always more limited than your LAN resources simply because of the cost involved. How many companies can afford 10 or 100 Gbps private lines cross-country? In fact, even 1 Gbps is a stretch for many IT departments. Many companies will have to get everything done with 10 Mbps Ethernet or 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet MAN and WAN service.

Can this work? It likely can if you carefully manage your traffic and don’t have so much that you saturate the network. The trick is in establishing multiple classes of service and assigning each type of traffic to one of those classes. Do it right and everything on the network will run smoothly.

The simplest example is to establish two classes of service. One is for latency sensitive applications. The other is for everything else. A good example is a SIP trunk that provides you with both VoIP business phone service and Internet access. This is becoming a popular setup for smaller business locations because of the cost savings involved in having only one outside trunk line. The VoIP traffic is extremely sensitive to latency and jitter so it goes into the class that has priority. Most of what you do on the Internet isn’t that sensitive, so it goes into the non-priority class.

You need this type of division because voice traffic is typically low bandwidth per conversation and will break up if there is any network congestion. Data transfers and web page downloads aren’t so sensitive to congestion and will take all the bandwidth they can get. If there isn't enough, they may slow down a bit but you won’t lose any data.

Class of Service keeps the big data and video downloads from pushing the more sensitive voice and two-way video conferences to the side. This can make your network perform much better overall without increasing bandwidth. Even so, there’s no free lunch. When the network gets congested enough, you are going to notice the slowdown on non-critical traffic and will have to increase bandwidth to make everything run as fast as it can.

Class of Service is one of the big differentiators between the Internet and private networks. There is no CoS on the Internet. In fact, it is a matter of pride that all packets are treated equally. This principle is called network neutrality. It makes the public Internet fair for all users, but inhibits performance on latency and bandwidth sensitive applications.

Is there a reason to create more than two classes of service? There is for more sophisticated operations. XO Communications is offering what they call Premium CoS with six different classes.

At the lowest level is standard class service for data and Internet traffic. The next step up is Priority class for data and Internet traffic that has a more urgent need to get through quickly, such as email messaging. Up from that is Priority Plus for traffic that has some sensitivity to delay and jitter such as FTP transfers.

Critical, the next class up, is for business applications such as SAP that will affect productivity if they are delayed. Critical Plus goes a step higher for applications such as Telnet Routing Protocols. The real time applications are at the top of the heap for priority. These include voice and two-way video. One way video can take a lower class because it is easily buffered to compensate for most jitter and latency issues.

Are you frustrated by the problems that have arisen as you’ve expanded the expectations of what types of traffic your network is expected to handle, especially for MAN and WAN connections? If so, a private network with two or more classes of service may get everything running smoothly again at a reasonable cost. Get more information about MAN and WAN class of service network solutions, along with pricing and availability.


Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

SIP Trunks vs EoC vs T1

Time was, not so long ago, that your choices for a dedicated symmetrical bandwidth business line were anything you want... as long as it is a T1. That’s all changed the last few years. Now you shop around to compare T1 with newer Ethernet over Copper and Sip Trunks.

What about DSL, Cable, satellite and 3G wireless? They don’t fall into this category because they are based on shared rather than dedicated bandwidth and asymmetrical rather than symmetrical bandwidth. Likewise, DS3, SONET and Ethernet over Fiber aren’t in the same league because they offer much higher bandwidths at proportionally higher prices.

Still, If you like Ethernet over Copper you’ll like Ethernet over Fiber as you move up in bandwidth. DS3 and SONET are higher bandwidth versions of T1 lines. SIP trunks can be any bandwidth over fiber as well as copper. Let’s take a closer look at the similarities and differences among SIP Trunks, EoC and T1 lines.

T1 lines are the granddaddy of business telecom digital lines. They run at a fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. Fractional T1 lines have been sold, but you don’t see these as much any more. In fact, 1.5 Mbps is considered entry level for most businesses. If you need or want more bandwidth, you can bond multiple T1 lines together to get bandwidths from 3 to 12 Mbps.

T1 lines also come in different flavors. T1 point to point service connects two business locations with a private line. Some companies set up their own multi-location networks by connecting each branch location to headquarters with one or more T1 lines. A router at HQ then directs communications among all the sites.

T1 dedicated Internet service is a T1 line that connects to the Internet at 1.5 Mbps. Lots of companies got their first Internet service via a single T1 line. The advantage of using T1 for this is that your upload and download bandwidths are the same and the bandwidth never varies. You may still experience congestion on the Internet itself.

T1 telephone service uses a single T1 line channelized into 24 separate phone lines. It replaces multiple analog lines for key telephone and PBX phone systems. Each line is responsible for signaling and two-way audio. A newer variation on T1 telephone is ISDN PRI. This is a T1 line that offers 23 channels plus a separate control and signaling channel that handles these jobs for the other 23. The result is faster call setup and tear down plus the inclusion of data like Caller ID.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is similar to T1 in that it uses ordinary copper pairs that may previously carried analog business phone service. The differences are that EoC can carry much higher bandwidths than T1 or bonded T1 from 3 Mbps on up to 45 Mbps or higher. The tradeoff is that you need to be close to the telco office to get the higher speeds. If you can, EoC will give you at least twice the bandwidth for the same money as T1 and bonded T1. You can order it as a private point to point connection or a dedicated Internet service.

SIP Trunking is a slight different animal. The primary purpose of a SIP Trunk is to transport VoIP phone calls between your location and your service provider’s. Most often, lower speed SIP Trunks are partitioned to carry both phone conversations and broadband Internet. Class of Service (CoS) is tagged to telephone and data packets so that they don’t interfere. SIP Trunking can be a cost saver over separate data and telephone services.

Which digital line service is right for your company? Compare bandwidth, features and prices on SIP Trunks, Ethernet over Copper and T1 lines available for your business location.

MPLS Networks Simplified

Have you been hearing a lot of buzz about MPLS networks lately but not exactly sure just what is a MPLS network and how it differs from other networks? Here’s the really simplified lowdown on MPLS technology in less than 3 minutes...


So, why go to all the trouble to set up a “bar coding technology” when IP networks are so prolific? IP works great within your organization where you have complete control of the network. You can manage the traffic, add and subtract resources, and set-up class of service mechanisms to ensure that time sensitive traffic like VoIP or video conferencing isn’t crushed by big data file transfers or backup and restore processes.

Not so on the Internet. Every packet gets the same handling as every other packet. The fault tolerant features of Internet technology pretty much ensure that if packets can’t take one particular path, they can find another more round about way to get to their destination. This is great for TCP/IP applications like file transfers, but deadly for two-way voice and video. No class of service distinctions combined with indeterminate routing wreak havoc in the form of latency and jitter.

This is where MPLS shines. There are no public MPLS networks like the public Internet. They are all owned and operated by particular service providers on a fee basis. You sign up for the MPLS network that you want to use and the provider makes sure that you get first class service.

How is that done? Remember those “bar code” tags? The tags have the extra information about class of service and routing that tell the network how to handle each packet. There is no need for equipment on the network to examine IP or other protocol headers. The tag is all the tag switches or routers need to handle the traffic.

The result of this tagging process is that packets are handled differently depending on their needs. Voice and video conferencing traffic gets priority. Non-critical file transfers get a lower priority. Most of the time, congestion, latency and jitter are not a problem. Since the service provider knows everyone using the network, adequate resources can be provisioned to ensure that traffic from one customer doesn’t interfere with traffic from any other.

There’s another benefit to this tagging technology. It completely frustrates anyone trying to spy on the network traffic using IP tools. They won’t work because the network isn’t running the Internet Protocol. It just transports IP packets from point A to point B. Non-IP traffic gets the same treatment. That’s why MPLS means multi-protocol label switching. Any protocol can be accommodated and all have enhanced security from label switching technology and no public access. MPLS networks are often referred to as MPLS VPN or virtually private network.

Today’s MPLS networks have regional, national and international service footprints. They are easily accessed from just about anywhere using copper wireline or fiber optic connections. Pricing is very attractive, even when you only want to connect two far-flung locations. For multiple sites that need to communicate, MPLS is the go-to technology today.

Does an MPLS network service make sense for your WAN communication needs? Get competitive pricing and features for MPLS networks that support your business needs.

Why Cloud Data Centers Are Multiplying

You’ve probably noticed that there are a lot more offers for cloud based services than there were even a year ago. It seems like nearly everyone in the telecom and IT services space has a new cloud offering. Some offers are only new for a few days or weeks before being replaced with an even better offer. Have you wondered what’s driving this frenzy and how it’s all being implemented behind the scenes?

There are two big pieces to implementing cloud computing services. The first is a robust data center that is sized to hold all of the equipment anticipated, and supported by an ecosystem of cooling, backup power and security. The second is connectivity. If you don’t have a reliable way to deliver your cloud services, it doesn’t matter how groundbreaking they are. Enterprise customers need to know that they can count of the system being available and functioning at all times without slowdowns or dropouts.

This gives the network bandwidth providers a leg up in making their case for high performance cloud solutions. A good example is EarthLink Business. They were in the metro and long haul network business long before clouds started to appear. EarthLink operates a high speed nationwide network that spans 28,00 fiber route miles with 90 metro fiber rings. This network supports six classes of service for MPLS over Ethernet, T-1 and DSL connections. Class of Service (CoS) is honored from edge to edge over the entire network.

Why is that important? Today’s converged networks are only effective if they can handle data, voice and video seamlessly. Voice over network communications, like VoIP telephony, is especially sensitive to latency, jitter and dropped packets. You need CoS to provide a fast lane for real-time two-way services like VoIP so they aren’t destroyed by mundane file transfers and backups hogging all the bandwidth.

This argues for a high performance privately operated network over taking your chances on the public Internet. A private network operator can carefully allocate resources to ensure that every packet stream is supported to ensure high quality operations. On the Internet, there are no such guarantees. You launch your packets and you take your chances. For one way video, email and Web browsing this is perfectly adequate most of the time. It tends to fall short for enterprise VoIP, video conferencing and cloud access.

Why is connectivity with the cloud so fussy? If all you are doing is backing up files in a background process, you may never notice any issues. However, if you have moved from your own data center to the cloud and are your applications are now running as SaaS (Software as a Service), any delays in response through the network will be frustrating at least and a detriment to productivity at worst. You moved to the cloud to save money. It’s a shame if poor network performance eats up those cost savings with reduced employee productivity.

EarthLink Business and other fiber optic network owners see the competitive advantage they have by providing both the cloud resources and connectivity as a single vendor. That’s why you’re seeing them expand into the cloud space as fast as they can. EarthLink is building four more data centers to support its next generation cloud hosting platform. These will be located in San Jose, Chicago, Dallas and South Florida. An existing data center in Rochester, NY will be updated early next year.

The fiber network is also being expanded to accommodate higher traffic levels anticipated by cloud users. These include key East Coast markets such as Ashburn, Atlanta, Charlotte and Orlando plus new capacity for the Texas cities of Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. The entire network is being beefed up to support the new native benchmark of 100 Gbps. Businesses today can typically get fiber optic service up to 10 Gbps in major metro areas.

Do you see the advantages of moving your IT operations to the cloud, but worry that you’ll lose performance in the process? Take a closer look at enterprise grade cloud computing and networking services and see how they have raised the bar on cloud performance.

MPLS Network Design Supports Global Business

Many companies now have a business presence outside of the United States. This creates a need to connect these facilities back to headquarters and to other regional headquarters or satellite offices. What’s proving to be the best solution for enterprise-grade connectivity is international MPLS networks. Let’s take a look at why.

The low end approach to worldwide communications is the Internet. It already goes everywhere and connects just about everyone. All you need are a broadband connection at each location and you are good to go... or are you?

The problem with the Public Internet is that it serves anyone and everyone with the price of admission, which can even be a free WiFi hotspot. This includes lots of casual users updating their Facebook pages and downloading movies, businesses selling to the general public, and a significant number of bad actors. Malicious attacks on corporate data centers and personal computers continue to grow because it is a lucrative endeavor. This means you don’t dare transmit sensitive data or allow access to your corporate servers without some type of encryption to create a VPN or Virtual Private Network tunneling through the insecure Public Internet.

The other issue is performance. Everybody’s packets are treated exactly alike on the Internet. There’s no such thing as Class of Service (CoS) to put time sensitive packets such as VoIP telephony or video conferencing in a “fast lane.” If you want preferential treatment, you need to move to a private network.

Private point-to-point line services have been the traditional mainstay of private digital business communications. If you only need to connect two locations, then it seems logical to order a dedicated line between those locations. If you need to add more locations, then you are in the Wide Area Network (WAN) business. Typically you create a star network with corporate headquarters at the center and links to each remote location. You then decide the routing to determine how locations communicate to each other.

The private network is highly secure and performs very well because you have total control of all resources. Unfortunately, you have to run the network yourself, solve any connectivity issues that arise, and pay for all those expensive lines.

A more practical approach is to use a privately operated MPLS network to connect from 2 to any number of locations. These can all be within U.S. borders or they can be located in just about any country overseas. All you need is a last-mile connection from each location to the MPLS network. The network operator will manage bandwidth, latency, packet integrity and class of service. That’s right, MPLS networks are designed to support multiple classes of service to support even the most sensitive data streams.

MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. This isn’t an IP network, although it can transport IP data. It can also transport just about any other protocol needed. The core of the network is based on label switching routers using a proprietary protocol. That makes it inherently more secure than the Internet or other IP based networks. MPLS service is often touted as a VPN or Virtual Private Network, even though encryption is not required.

What’s available today that may not have been previously is a number of MPLS networks with worldwide reach. They have POPs (Points of Presence) in dozens or more countries and contract with local service providers for the last mile connection. This can be anything from DSL to T1/E1 to SONET fiber or Ethernet. Each location can have the connection that supports its needs. All connect to the core of the MPLS network, which is high speed fiber with massive bandwidth. You have a sense that you are the only one of the network, even though there are many simultaneous users transmitting important data. The fact that the core infrastructure is shared greatly reduces costs compared with an all private line solution.

Do you have a need to connect multiple business locations in a small geographical area, nationwide, or across international borders? If so, get quick pricing quotes for International MPLS Networks and compare cost and quality with your other connectivity options.

Should You Buy VoIP as a Service?

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been around longer than people have been talking about “the cloud.” Frankly, so has VoIP. What’s gaining steam now is a move by larger businesses to tie their multiple locations together via SIP Trunks and outsourcing the PBX function by businesses of all sizes. You might consider this approach VoIP as a Service.

Many residential and small business users embraced VoIP in the cloud as a way to save money by dropping their analog line in favor of letting their broadband Internet connection do double duty as both a high speed Internet connection and a phone line. A device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor turns regular telephones into IP telephones so they can work on a computer network. This approach works, but the voice quality is highly variable. That’s because the Internet is mandated to treat all traffic equally. Unfortunately, this means that large data file or video downloads can congest the network and cause telephone calls to distort or drop.

There are a couple of ways to have both telephone and Internet service brought in on the same line. Cable companies do this by giving each service its own channel, along with the TV channels on the cable. TV channels don’t interfere with each other, so there is no reason that voice and data can’t also coexist as long as you keep them separated. To make this work, you need to get your business phone service from the cable company so they can manage the traffic.

Another method for delivering telephone and broadband service on the same line is the SIP Trunk. This is most often a T1 telecom line or Ethernet over Copper service running over twisted pair telco wiring. What makes it a SIP Trunk is Class of Service (CoS) enabled routers at both ends of the line. Voice packets automatically get priority with all other traffic using the remaining bandwidth. SIP Trunks are available where cable doesn’t go. You also get dedicated rather than shared Internet access for bandwidth that doesn’t vary depending on other users.

Larger SIP Trunks can be set up to interconnect multiple business locations for both voice and data traffic. If you have several branch offices, you probably already have private lines connecting them. Why not include your in-house telephone traffic and avoid paying telephone toll charges for calls to remote offices? The SIP Trunk will do that. It can be set up for multiple CoS levels so that voice and video get highest priority, mission critical data is next in line, Internet access is lower still and background activities like remote backup get whatever is leftover.

Some medium and large companies can benefit from SIP session consolidation. The way this works is that all the branch offices are connected via headquarters to the service provider using a large SIP trunk. The company pays for each channel or session that supports one call. Since the sessions are shared among all users in the company, there is no need to have dedicated separate trunks at each location with excess capacity going to waste.

The question that remains is whether you should continue to operate your own in-house PBX switching system or opt for a hosted PBX. The hosted option moves the PBX into the cloud, where it handles all of your internal and outside traffic. This is the ultimate in VoIP as a Service. You typically pay so much per seat per month. You can add more seats when you need them, as the cloud PBX has all the capacity you’ll ever use. No need to add extra capacity now. You simply pay for what you actually use. Some hosted VoIP providers will even include new IP phones in your monthly service fee so you don’t have to make any capital investment at all.

Does VoIP as a Service make sense for your company? Find out by getting competitive pricing and features for SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX telephone services for business.

Your Own Private Information Superhighway

We’re all familiar with the metaphor of the Internet as the Information Superhighway. It’s an apt description. Like a national road system, the Internet will take you anywhere. It’s even better than the Interstate highway system. The Internet goes worldwide with no worries about how you get across oceans and mountains. You can depart from any destination and reach any other destination in a reasonably efficient way.

Just like any superhighway, the Internet has it snags. First are traffic jams. You know how you’re cruising along on a interstate road trip and, all of a sudden, stop lights appear on the cars ahead. Traffic slows to a crawl for inexplicable reasons. Eventually you discover that the cause was an accident blocking the roadway or construction you didn’t know about. At certain times, the carrying capacity of arterial roads branching out from big cities is exceeded and traffic is bumper to bumper for miles and perhaps an hour or more.

Not much is different on the Internet. Traffic may zip along unimpeded on the fiber backbones, but slows to a crawl at choke points. Last mile access networks are particularly limited. Shared bandwidth means everybody pokes along when too many people want too many packets at the same time. The limited capacity of wireless broadband networks often stretches the definition of “broadband.”

Another “feature” of the Internet is that there are no fast and slow lanes. All the lanes treat all traffic equally. That’s great for big data files, the semi-trucks of the Internet, or video downloads, the equivalent of passenger cars. There are millions of them and they pretty much dominate the road. How about the ambulance that has to get to the hospital without interference? Emergency traffic has preference on the physical highway. On the information highway, it gets in line with everything else. You might say that our real superhighways have some class of service (CoS) controls. None of that is available on the Internet. If you have sensitive traffic, like real time voice or video that needs preference, it won’t get preferential treatment and will wind up as damaged goods.

Are there the equivalent of commuter lanes on the Internet? Nope. All lanes are the same. What some high volume content producers do is augment the capacity of the Internet with private roads that parallel the Internet and connect to it near the off ramps to their customers. These private carriers are called content delivery networks (CDNs). Without them, the internet would be even more swamped than it already is and video streaming would be impacted to the point where it just wouldn’t be worthwhile.

This is one example of a private information superhighway. Content delivery networks pick up traffic at your location and deliver it to distributors such as satellite and cable companies, who then merge it onto their broadband networks along with other Internet traffic. You have to pay for this convenience, but it can be well worth it to ensure that your high value content streams and downloads smoothly.

Another example of a private information superhighway connects only paying customers and doesn’t connect to the Internet at all. This is the MPLS network. It is a B2B or business to business connection service that has no general consumer access. Who wants such a system if you can’t reach the general public? Companies that want to connect their multiple business locations to exchange sensitive proprietary data and in-house telephone traffic want exactly this type of arrangement. They also have separate access connections to the Internet to interact with customers through websites, e-mail, social media and the like.

Compared to the vagaries of the Internet, MPLS networks run like a dream. They are engineered to have enough bandwidth to meet all commitments at all times. Traffic is prioritized so that VoIP telephone and video conferencing get the priority they need to run smoothly. Latency, jitter and packet loss are minimized by design. Security is made much easier because of the proprietary nature of the network technology and lack of public access.

Are you finding that you really need a private network for your internal business operations to complement the public network that connects you to your customers? If so, learn more about MPLS and Content Delivery Networks to optimize your business communications.



Note: Photo of traffic jam courtesy of Tage Olsin on Wikimedia Commons.

5 Ways to Access An MPLS Network

MPLS networks have become a highly desirable option to expensive proprietary WAN networks or the public Internet with its performance and security issues. Let’s take a look at what MPLS networks have to offer and the variety of options that you can use to gain access.

You might think of an MPLS network as something of a private Internet for business. MPLS networks are privately owned and operated and don’t offer resources or connectivity for residential users. MPLS is a B2B or Business to Business service. There are numerous service providers, each with their own MPLS networks having regional, national or international service footprints. In addition, there are service providers who specialize in interconnecting MPLS networks to create an even larger reach. The result is a multiple-MPLS or MPLS Mesh network.

MPLS is often the core network of a major service provider. The reason is the versatility offered by this technology. The underlying network is either IP native or SONET/SDH fiber optic service at 10 Gbps or higher. Many networks are now migrating from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps, which is considered state of the art. What makes the network MPLS is a unique switching and routing scheme that is protocol-agnostic.

The name MPLS is an acronym for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. Multi-Protocol means that the network will accept Voice, Data or Video IP, SONET, T-Carrier or other traffic types. At any given time, the network may be transporting a wide variety of protocols without corruption or interference. Label Switching is the technique that wraps each packet that enters the network with a tag that is used only to forward that packet to the correct destination with an appropriate class of service. Those labels are removed as the packets exit the network in exactly the same state as they arrived.

Think of MPLS networks as private superhighway systems and access as the on and off ramps. A major advantage of procuring MPLS network service for long haul transport is that you only need to worry about getting your traffic to and from the network. The network operator optimizes performance of the MPLS network to ensure adequate bandwidth with low latency, jitter and packet loss. You need the means to get to and from that network with your traffic intact.

EarthLink Business offers a nationwide access-agnostic MPLS network with Service Level Agreements (SLA) based on Class of Service (CoS). They offer 5 different access technologies based on what makes sense at each business location. Note that you can easily mix and match access methods and still maintain complete CoS right up to your own network edge. Here’s what you have to pick from.

The classic and still most popular access method is T1 lines. They are almost universally available over common twisted pair telco wiring that is already installed to most business locations. T1 lines offer 1.5 Mbps symmetrical bandwidth that can be increased by bonding more T1 lines together. EarthLink boasts 4 hour mean time to repair (MTTR) private T1 lines if there is ever a link problem.

Many companies have looked to DSL as a lower cost alternative to T1. ADSL is an asymmetrical bandwidth service with higher download than upload speeds. Earthlink is the first provider to offer CoS traffic management over DSL, making this access method viable for serious business use.

Ethernet over copper (EoC) and fiber (EoF) is a strong competitor to T1, DS3 and higher speed SONET fiber services. Ethernet is a better match to IP traffic than switched-circuit oriented TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) technologies. Ethernet is highly scalable and lower in cost on an Mbps basis, where available.

Wireless access works for companies with new location that need rapid provisioning and for low cost access where DSL is unavailable. 3G and 4G cellular-based bandwidth is often available in rural areas and offers T1 and better speeds without the landline. Fixed wireless microwave transmission offers higher speeds that can be an effective alternative to fiber.

Another unique service from EarthLink is MPLS IPsec. You may recognize IPsec or IP SECurity as a VPN technology used to make connections over the Internet secure. The security comes from using the 3DES encryption algorithm (168 bit). That’s the finance industry standard for network layer encryption. IPsec allows businesses to procure Internet access from a local provider in outlying areas and connect securely to the corporate MPLS network.

Is MPLS a good fit for your business networking needs? Which access methods are right for your various locations? You can easily find this out with a complementary set of MPLS network and access service quotes to compare with your current WAN solution. You may be surprised by the savings possible.

Transforming the WAN Into The Smart WAN

We often think of WAN connections as dumb pipes. Perhaps even the “series of tubes” that Senator Ted Stevens envisioned as a model for the Internet. Data goes in one end and comes out the other. Does it need to be any more sophisticated than that?

These days it truly does. The move from predominately in-house data centers and simple file transfers over the LAN to cloud hosted systems, VoIP telephony and video content has changed what we need from the WAN. Level 3 calls this the Smart WAN. This short animated video illustrates the difference...



Clearly, if you’re sitting in line at the bank drive-through, watching people load their transactions into those plastic carriers and shooting them through the vacuum tubes to the tellers, and start thinking, “Hmmm. That’s not a bad model for my WAN network,” you could be in serious need of a Smart WAN upgrade.

It all starts with a smart pipe to replace dumb pipe technology. Instead of just cramming everything down the same conduit without regard to content, you need put some method into the madness. That means CoS or Class of Service. CoS recognizes that some packets are more sensitive than others to vagaries of the network. Most sensitive is anything operating two-way in real time. VoIP telephony will fail when it encounters the least blockage or delay in the WAN. Video conferencing has a similar sensitivity to network characteristics.

What CoS does is assign different classes or priorities to different packet streams. Brute force file transfers go to the bottom of the list. It is important that the files get from point A to point B intact, but a little delay here and there won’t make any difference. The same is true for email and most messaging. Interactive business applications are a step higher. If you are interacting with SaaS in the cloud and expect it be as responsive as if it were running on the servers down the hall, your network has to make these interactions transparent. Bandwidth constrictions and latency can raise employee frustrations to a fever pitch, if not kill productivity completely.

Enterprise VoIP on converged IP networks offers major cost reductions and added productivity features for businesses that can make it work. The Hosted PBX model adds another layer of sensitivity because the WAN gets involved in handling voice traffic as well as data. Latency, jitter and packet loss wreak havoc with voice communications. Just because convergence works on your LAN doesn’t mean that sending the same traffic down a dumb pipe will give an equally good result.

Now consider having the same set of services expecting the same quality for multiple business locations, including headquarters, branch offices, retail locations, warehouses and factories. Clearly, some intelligence needs to be injected to the WAN network to ensure that every location has the same connectivity and quality of service as every other.

Has your company grown beyond the capability of simple, dumb WAN connections to ensure quality and reliability of service? If so, it’s time to consider a Smart WAN upgrade for your network operations. You may even find that this improved performance comes at equal or less cost that what you have now.

Why International MPLS Connections Make Sense

Companies with multiple business locations have been discovering the advantage of MPLS network services for both domestic and international connections. In some cases, an MPLS network solution makes sense even with only two points to be connected. Let’s take a look at what MPLS have to offer, especially for cross-border connections, and when they make sense even for point to point service.

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is a type of network set up to transport traffic for multiple subscribers in a way that preserves security, class of service, and important network characteristics such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss. It is the closest thing to a universal network protocol that we have.

True, the Internet offers far wider connectivity than any other network. But the Internet is a public access facility based on network neutrality. There’s no such thing as class of service on the Internet. Indeed, it is a source of pride for Internet managers that all packets receive equal treatment.

That’s fine for a general purpose public resource that is primarily a transporter of non-time sensitive data and one-way media streaming. It’s completely unacceptable as a high performance transparent connectivity medium designed to support enterprise level computing and communications. MPLS networks are designed specifically to offer the class and quality of service you can’t get on a public network but also can’t afford to build yourself.

MPLS is known as an inherently VPN technology. While the service has multiple tenants to amortize the construction and operating costs of the network, the unique routing technology provides a level of security in itself. MPLS is based on label switching, once known as tag switching. It’s a packet switched network, but the packets can represent any protocol. The network doesn’t care what’s in the packet. It just needs to know where that packet needs to go and what class of service it should have. That’s defined upon ingress to the network, where the packet is assigned a label wrapper to encapsulate the original packet. The label stays on the packet until egress from the network when it is removed.

How does this create a virtually private network? First, IP routing is not used on an MPLS network. Anyone trying to snoop on the network will find that their IP-based tools are worthless. Second, access is strictly controlled. Unless you are a subscriber, you probably can’t even find a place to penetrate the network. The network operator sets up the accounts and only provides switched paths that are defined by the subscribers. Unless you are on the “list,” no data comes your way.

Even though other users have traffic on the same physical paths as you do, you are unaware of each other’s presence on an MPLS network. The network operator knows what services have been subscribed and maintains sufficient bandwidth to meet all guarantees without congestion. The switched paths are primarily determinate and don’t change unless there is a need to work around a temporary network outage. That greatly improves latency and jitter characteristics.

The end result is that you gain the performance of dedicated point to point private lines at a much lower cost that creating your own private WAN network. This is especially true when there are many locations to connect or when you need undersea fiber connections to Europe or Asia. With MPLS networks, you only need “last mile” connections for each location. The rest of the network is already in-place to transport your traffic. The cost advantages are such that for distances in the thousands of miles, it can be less expensive to order two local loops, one at each end, to access a MPLS network and then let the network handle the long haul portion of the path.

Who provides these International MPLS networks? Major carriers such as Level 3 Communications, AboveNet, XO Communications and Global Telecom and Technology have the fiber optic infrastructure in place to connect your facilities regardless of where they are located around the world.

Do you have a need to reach long distances for voice, data, or video, especially when multiple locations need to be tied together? If so, get prices and features for international MPLS network services specially tailored to meet your needs.



Note: World Map graphic courtesy of David Monniaux Wikimedia Commons.

One SIP Trunk Beats Two T1 Lines

In traditional thinking, you have your business telephone service and you have your business broadband service. One tends to have nothing to do with the other. In fact, you probably buy them from different providers. There’s a good reason to reconsider that approach now. You can get the same or better results for less money. How? With a service called SIP Trunking.

SIP Trunking has nothing to do with luggage or elephants. It’s all about delivering modern telecom services. Trunking is a technical term that means using a single line or other communications path to transport many different transmissions simultaneously. The telephone industry had a pressing need for trunks to handle the explosive growth of telegraph and, later, telephone lines. Both wired and wireless analog carrier systems were developed to consolidate many telephone lines into a few trunks. This was especially critical for connecting telephone switching systems in different towns or states.

The trunk lines that we are most familiar with today are T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI. These are two slightly different standards for a digital telephone line that carries as many as two dozen simultaneous phone calls. T1 or ISDN PRI trunks are very popular for corporate PBX phone systems or call centers. Both need large numbers of outside phone lines to communicate.

In actuality, ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface uses a T1 line to deliver 23 phone lines in individual digital channels plus one specialized channel used for switching, signaling and data such as Caller ID. The T1 voice or T1 telephone lines uses all 24 available channels for phone calls, but doesn’t offer Caller ID and has slower call setup times.

T1 lines are pretty versatile. A lot of companies have two T1 lines coming into the building. One carries IDSN PRI with anywhere between 10 and 23 outside phone lines. The other T1 line provides dedicated broadband Internet access for the computer network. The bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download. Even though there are two T1 lines installed, one has nothing to do with the other. They are electrically separate and may have been ordered from two different service providers.

The cost of two separate T1 lines is more than many smaller businesses can justify. They don’t need anywhere close to 23 outside lines, often less than half that, and 1.5 Mbps Internet access is plenty for credit card verification, online ordering, file transfers, email, and casual Web access. They could probably get by with half an ISDN PRI and half a T1 Internet line if they could buy half a service for each.

SIP Trunking gives you that half-a-service option by combining voice and data onto a single converged trunk line. That could be a T1 line or an Ethernet over Copper connection that uses the same twisted pair telco wiring but offers high bandwidth options. Actually, a single SIP trunk is better than two half-T1 lines. It also costs less than those two T1s you may have now.

The SIP in SIP Trunking stands for Session Initiation Protocol. That’s the switching technology used in VoIP telephone systems. A SIP phone is a VoIP telephone that can plug right into your network. Older analog phones can be turned into SIP phones by using Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATA).

Now, here’s what SIP Trunking does to consolidate lines. A SIP Trunk carries both voice and data simultaneously. It can do that because both are in the same packet network protocol. The broadband Internet data is already packetized. By using adaptors or SIP phones, the telephones are made to look like other network devices. Once everything is communicating in packets, a single line can transport both.

One question you probably have immediately is about how the SIP trunk prevents telephone conversations from being garbled when computers are sending data. Companies that have tried to use broadband phone services to share their Internet service find that performance is iffy. Sometimes the conversations sound good. Other times, not so good. That’s because the Internet doesn’t treat sensitive voice conversations any differently than file transfers or video downloads. One packet is just like the next on the internet.

A SIP trunk uses Internet technology, but it doesn’t use the Internet itself. The SIP trunk is a private line between your company and your service provider. Once your packets get to the service provider they are switched onto the Internet or onto the public phone system, depending on where they are supposed to go. The SIP trunk is engineered to ensure that telephone calls do not contend with data packets for use of the trunk line.

Here’s how that works. The interface equipment, managed routers, at each end of the SIP trunk are set up to establish Class of Service (CoS) for each of the many simultaneous signals that travel over the trunk. Telephone calls have priority in this system. Whenever a call is in progress, it takes the bandwidth needed to ensure high voice quality. Only the bandwidth not used for telephone calls is available to transport broadband Internet service. When a call hangs up, data packets can now use the additional bandwidth no longer commandeered by the phone call.

Obviously, you can’t have dozens of phone calls on a T1 line being used as a SIP trunk or your Internet access will slow to a crawl. Most small companies don’t have that problem. They may need only 6 to 12 outside lines at the most. Even those lines aren’t engaged 100%. The result is that there is plenty of bandwidth for both telephone calls and broadband access at the same time.

Efficiency is what makes SIP trunks a better value than separate T1 lines for voice and data. By actively managing the available bandwidth, a SIP trunk makes unused bandwidth available for Internet service while ensuring that every telephone call has the resources it needs for a high quality conversation.

Are you in the market for both telephone and business broadband service or concerned that you are paying more than you should for these two services? If so, get SIP trunking pricing and options to see if this service is right for your business.

IP WAN over MPLS Advantages

When we think of IP wide area networks, the first thing that comes to mind is the Internet. While the Internet does have almost universal connectivity and modest cost to access, there are some serious issues when it comes to business applications. Bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss have no guarantees and few expectations. Security is a joke. But aren’t other methods to interconnect business locations costly and hard to manage?

It is possible to set up a private IP network that lets you use your familiar IP addressing schemes and avoid encryption, firewalls, tunnels, and additional hardware. You’ll gain a performance advantage compared to using VPN techniques over the Internet and save yourself the administrative headaches of trying to manage a WAN with inherently indeterminate characteristics. Who offers something like this? It’s TelePacific, one of the nation’s largest competitive carriers.

TelePacific’s 1Net is an IP VPN running on a private MPLS network, not the Internet. Since MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching can transport almost any protocol, it can be set up to mimic the Internet while keeping your data private. Only the locations that you set up can exchange traffic. No one outside of your user group can capture or view your data. You’ll have any to any connectivity within the group with security sufficient to address HIPPA or similar government regulations.

In fact, TelePacific set up just such a private IP Network for a medical imaging organization with 6 locations. They use it to transport patients’ private medical records among their location. Referring physicians can access patient imaging results within hours at their own computers. The system is also used for claims processing, patient scheduling and registration. Interestingly, this system also allows dedicated Internet access through a single firewall at corporate headquarters.

The TelePacific 1Net IP VPN has both cost and performance advantages over other secure networking solutions, including private line, ATM and Frame Relay. You can specify up to six different Classes of Service (CoS) to support sensitive real-time services such as VoIP telephone and teleconferencing. On Net, latency for all CoS is specified at 50 msec. That rises to just 100 msec for extended reach locations off the TelePacific network but still within the US. Network availability is 99.999% (5 nines) both on and off network locations.

The Classes of Service are CoS 1 for VoIP real time traffic, CoS2 for video conferencing and real time data traffic, CoS3 for high priority, delay sensitive business data like Ecommerce and Citrix, CoS4 for medium priority delay-sensisitive business data such as CRM and WebEx, CoS5 for general less delay sensitive business data like ERP, and CoS6 for best effort traffic with no prioritization. That’s typically Email and FTP.

Are you cringing at the cost and effort involved in linking your business locations by private lines or frustrated by the highly variable performance and difficulty in securing the Internet? Perhaps the best solution for your business needs is a private IP VPN based on MPLS networking. Check prices and features to compare with your other choices.



Note: MPLS network diagram courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When More Bandwidth Doesn’t Help

You’re probably familiar with this scenario. You’ve had a T1 line or DS3 bandwidth circuit for years. Everything ran just fine until recently. Now, all of a sudden, the Internet just crawls and your new VoIP telephone system sounds like calls from the far side of the moon. Employees are peeved because they can’t get anything done. Customers are livid because they can’t even carry on a civil conversation over the phone. Management is getting hot under the collar. Better get more bandwidth on order, right?

Maybe. It’s entirely possible that you’ll call up your provider and double your dedicated Internet bandwidth only to find out that you still have the same problems and now you’re paying twice as much. Talk about adding insult to injury! What’s gone wrong here and what can you do to really fix it?

The problem is that we visualize broadband connections like water pipes. You can just see that traffic flowing smoothly through the pipe. Applications demand more capacity and the flow increases, just like opening a faucet wider. Obviously, the only way you’ll hit the limit on capacity is when you fully open all the faucets at once. Then each application, the lawn sprinkler, the shower, the dishwasher and the wash basin each get less than they would like.

The fix seems equally obvious. Just put in bigger pipes with higher capacity. The water meter will spin a lot faster, but now you can support a lot more users full-on and nobody will suffer a reduction in flow. The telecom equivalent of a bigger pipe is what is called in the industry a “bigger pipe.” That means a line with more Mbps or Gbps. The analogy is clear. Just order a bigger pipe and your troubles will be over. Or will they?

The snag in all of this is that network traffic isn’t homogenous like water. One water droplet may be just like the next. One Ethernet packet may be not at all like the next. Some applications, like file transfers, just brute force move packets from one place to another. Others, like video conferencing or VoIP telephony are highly sensitive to latency, jitter, lost packets and packets arriving out of sequence. If your network gets congested, the file transfer will work fine. It will just take a little longer. Get in the same situation with real-time applications and they’ll crumble in the battle for packet transfers.

So why not just increase bandwidth when business grows to the point where more users are trying to do more things simultaneously? It’s likely that at some point you’ll have to do just that. But also know that simply adding more capacity may not make a big difference. Why? It’s because some applications will take as much bandwidth as you give them regardless of what they really need. If you simply double the bandwidth, Web pages may load a little faster, files might move a little faster, but the telephone and video may still break up mid-conversation.

There probably is some line speed that is so fast that everything will work at the same time with no problems. That might be 10x or even 100x what you have now. You’ll pay a fortune just to have enough capacity at hand to support rare moments when everyone is on the phone and watching YouTube videos at the same time the system is doing full backups. Is that really necessary?

No. Not at all. What you really need is a way to prioritize traffic so that preference is given to real-time two-way streams that are extremely sensitive to network congestion. You need to establish CoS or Class of Service controls that carve out a certain capacity to meet the needs of your VoIP phone system and video conferencing system and then divvy up the rest among lower priority processes. You can go further to push time insensitive file transfers and backups into the background so that they won’t interfere with anyone working online.

That solution is called the converged network. It’s more than just plugging everything into the same LAN and WAN. You need Class of Service both on your LAN and on the WAN. Techniques for the LAN are well established. The WAN is another matter if you are using the Internet for access to your VoIP provider. The Internet strips off those CoS tags in the name of network neutrality. One solution is to use a SIP Trunk to connect to a single provider for VoIP and Internet broadband so that CoS can be maintained on that link. Another is to keep the broadband you have, but use a separate point to point connection to your VoIP provider.

MPLS networks can maintain CoS among multiple business locations. You may be using Internet VPN connections to make those multiple connections, but with limited success if voice or video are involved.

Another interesting option is the “intelligent bandwidth” approach being offered by Telnes, a major competitive carrier. They’ve developed a technique called IP Priority Class of Service to maintain CoS on an Internet circuit using managed routers. This recognizes that most of the congestion issues occur on the link between you and the core of the Internet. By cleaning up that connection, real time applications, such as hosted VoIP, can run much more smoothly that they will on uncontrolled Internet broadband services.

Are you suffering slowdowns, application breakage and poor telephone voice quality? You may need more bandwidth or you may just need better bandwidth management. Before you go out and spend a bundle to no avail, get a complementary telecom engineering consultation from Telnes and other competitive service providers and review your options. You may be able to get results for a fraction of what you thought you had to spend.