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.

Do You Still Have Broadband?

By: John Shepler

If you’ve had the feeling that Internet broadband speeds have been accelerating lately, you’d be right. Broadband service was an amazing improvement on dial-up access when it was first introduced and then quickly took over. For a lot of years a few Mbps seemed plenty fast enough. Then 10 Mbps became the benchmark to shoot for. Now businesses are moving quickly to 100 Mbps and beyond, while the FCC is codifying 25 Mbps as the threshold where broadband begins. What does this really mean and what does it portend for the future?

What Does The New Standard Represent?
Official broadband standards have never been a leading indicator. They are set after a technology is well proven and the need clearly demonstrated. The move from 4 Mbps to 25 Mbps is quite a jump and it tells you something important about where bandwidth requirements are going. Is 25 Mbps the end of the road for awhile? Not likely and here’s why.

Few individuals and fewer businesses are going to pay up for higher line speeds for simple bragging rights. Something is driving the need to upgrade and then upgrade some more. The big factors are the move from local to remote resources and the nature of content itself.

The Rapid Growth of Computing Requirements
Remember message boards? Digital communications used to mean ASCII text transmissions. No need to press up against the speed of light just to get a few KB of characters to a distant server. It was the text-based model of computing that prompted Bill Gates to declare that 640K of RAM was plenty for the original PC, because who could possibly need more? Well, nobody did when the migration was starting from 64KB 8-bit processors. In just a few years, 640 KB was a joke. How long before 640 GB becomes a limitation? Probably sooner that any of us think possible.

Processor speeds have bumped up against some practical manufacturing limits, but the way around that is multiple processors. Memory, both RAM and Disk (now solid state), are sill growing. Bandwidth? Why is anybody surprised that WAN bandwidth requirements are going up when processing capability and memory are steadily increasing?

What's Next?
Computers always seem on the verge of not being able to keep up with us because of the functions we ask them to do. Text? That’s kids stuff. Photos? Easy. HD and 4K video? That’s more of a challenge. Will 4K be fully deployed before 8K starts to take over? What then?

You might think that software is getting less sophisticated because of the relatively small size of downloaded apps compared with some of the huge software packages that used to come in fancy cardboard boxes. That’s an illusion. The real power of of the apps we use is in all of the back-end processing that is going on at some remote server. Now everything is being tied to locality (with GPS) and highly personalized. A lot of this personalization is subtle and automatic. The system watches your behavior instead of you having to manually input a bunch of parameters.

Big data was a big bottleneck when it had to be handled locally. Just how much of a database can you put on a PC and how much grief is it going to be to keep up to date and accurate? Enormous data bases in equally enormous data centers can present a wealth of opportunity. The way the investment in gathering and managing all this data makes sense is to keep it simple for the end user. That doesn’t mean the system is simple. It just means that you and I are only dealing with the tip of the iceberg when we access these systems.

Big Data, Big Support Required
Big Data and sophisticated business applications have driven IT to a new architecture: The Cloud. The cloud pools all the processing and memory you can possibly use in a system that allows individual tenants to scale resources up and down at will. What you don’t need right now can be used by someone else. The resources they release can be put to work on your growing applications. As long as there are sufficient resources above and beyond what everybody needs at the moment, the system appears to be infinitely expandable.

What often isn’t infinitely expandable or even seems that way is bandwidth. The WAN connection, be it a dedicated line or Internet connection, has become the new bottleneck. Think of those clouds as enormous lakes full of data and you are getting your share through an old garden hose.

The way businesses are going to continue accelerating productivity is to let the machines do more and more of the work. Paper pushing is already a thing of the past in most clerical operations. Manually filling out forms is as obsolete as standing at a drill press or using a scythe to cut grain. Make no mistake that performance will continue to increase and probably accelerate. If you don’t make it happen, competitors will. That means more and more sophisticated processing, more mobility, and more data to present in simple, usable formats, more flexibility in manufacturing (think 3D printing) and larger data communication channels.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough
In the long run, we have no idea how many Gbps or Tbps or Pbps will be needed. Right now, we can make some good estimates on what’s needed immediately and what that will grow to over the next few years.

Single digit Mbps connectivity has had its day. The only place T1 lines are still appropriate is for simple point of sale terminals and remote locations where there really isn’t any better solution. Bonding T1 lines can take you to 10 or 12 Mbps, but that’s just a stopgap. You’ll be needing more in the future.

If the consumer threshold for broadband is 25 Mbps, then that seems like a reasonable amount for businesses too. Granted, most business users aren’t creating or consuming a stream of HD movies all day. But they are accessing cloud applications, doing desktop or conference room video conferencing, sharing large files among business locations and running the phone system in the cloud. Remember that one consumer or a family is using that 25 Mbps. Your business demands per person may not be as consistently high, but you have lots of them on the same line. Productivity is also more of an issue when you are paying people. You don’t really want them sitting around waiting for the computers.

That argues for at least 10 Mbps for really small operations and 25 to 50 Mbps more commonly. Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps used to be expensive and hard to come by. Now it’s reasonably priced and readily available. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for a medium size office to have 100 Mbps broadband… especially when that 100 Mbps may not cost much more than the 1.5 Mbps T1 line you budgeted for when you first got broadband many years ago.

Larger companies or sophisticated operations creating video content or doing 3D printing on an industrial scale can easily justify Gigabit Ethernet. So can school districts and anybody else with hundreds of simultaneous users.

How about really big companies? The new threshold may well be 10 Gbps Ethernet or 10 GigE. That service is readily available in metro areas and 100 GigE is starting to deploy nationwide on some carriers. This is where the upper end will be soon. Can Tbps service be far behind? It’s in development now.

Ethernet is the Way to Go Now
Note that all of these recommended services are Carrier Ethernet based. That’s where the industry is going for ease of interfacing and rapidly scalability. Like cloud resources, connectivity changes will be on-demand as well.

How is your company doing for broadband? Feeling the squeeze as you try to get more packets through the old lines? Feeling put upon now that the FCC has declared your connection as below broadband standards? Not to worry. Faster fiber optic bandwidth connections are plentiful and now cost much less than you might think. This is a good day to make a broadband upgrade.

Advantages of a Wireless Business Continuity Plan

Is it true for your business that all that stands between being up and running and dead in the water is one thin line? That line is your vital bandwidth connection. You may be one equipment failure or backhoe accident away from being unable to conduct business.

In the days of paper order pads and medical records, your telecom connections were important, but not necessarily critical. The telephone lines were probably more valuable than the broadband connection. That’s all flipped upside down now. Yes, telephone service is vital to most businesses, but so is that all-important connection to the cloud. Lose it and you’ve lost most of your office functions. After all, everything is in the cloud now. That includes your vital business data and the cloud-based apps that make your office run.

We know that wireline bandwidth connections are highly reliable... but not perfect. What do you do in those rare instances when your line goes dead? Wait it out? For simple equipment outages and line breaks, that might be the logical approach. Chances are that you’ll only lose half to one business day. How much is that worth to you?

If your losses from being down for 4 to 8 hours are minimal because the Internet or private line connection are more of a tool for your business rather than essential to keeping things running, then perhaps you’re fine. In the new model of cloud services, you’ll have more than the mere inconvenience of not being able to update inventory right away. Your entire operation will be dead in the water. For a high volume retail or distribution operation, the losses can mount up quickly. Hundreds? Thousands? How much per day will you lose?

Now, what if you could have an entire year’s worth of backup protection for less than one day’s losses without such protection? Would that be worth it?

Many businesses have multiple wireline services to protect against just such a disaster scenario. With bonded T1 or EoC (Ethernet over Copper), the loss of a single copper pair reduces the available bandwidth, but the connection keeps running. That offers some protection but doesn’t help if the situation was caused by the entire wire bundle being cut by a backhoe digging too near the cable right of way. It also doesn’t save you if the problem is an equipment failure on either end of the line.

This argues for dissimilar connections. One approach is to get your business up and running with copper wireline solutions while you are waiting for a much larger capacity fiber line to be installed. Once the fiber is provisioned, you keep the less expensive copper connection as a backup. There’s a good chance that the fiber and copper don’t share any common terminal equipment or run in the same conduits, preventing a single point failure of both. That’s not always the case, but it does offer some protection compared to having two of the exact same line services.

Another approach is to have a wireless bandwidth service for business continuity. The proliferation of cellular towers with high speed bandwidth channels now means that virtually every business location is in range of at least one and probably several tower sites.

Bandwidths have also greatly increased. Nearly universal 3G service offers speeds similar to T1 lines at 1 Mbps download. The more advanced 4G service is good for 5 to 12 Mbps download and 1 to 5 Mbps upload. That’s fast enough for most small to medium businesses, especially as a backup solution.

The beauty of commercial cellular-based wireless backup is that it is very affordable, with a cost less than half what you pay for a T1 line and installation measured in days rather than weeks or months. The equipment comes already set up to work with the strongest signal at your location. Most companies can install what looks like a WiFi router themselves and be running the same day the gear arrives. The router includes a port for your existing wireline service, T1 or EoC, and offers automatic failover in the event of a wire outage.

Another use for rapidly installed wireless bandwidth is to support newly opened or temporary business sites. This includes new store openings, temporary holiday store locations and construction sites. You can lease the service by the month without a long term commitment.

Do you have a situation where you need connectivity right now and can’t wait for the usual installation times? Are you feeling a bit insecure that you can lose substantial business if your connection fails for even a day? Are you digging out from a recent disaster and need private line or Internet service immediately? If so, you are an excellent candidate for wireless business continuity service. Get pricing and details to see how well this will work for your situation.