Ethernet Replacements For SONET

By: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiber WAN is Closer Than You Think

By: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Way to Manage Your Phone System: Get Rid of It

By: John Shepler

What is a common denominator for all businesses? Telephones. What’s a common denominator among business phone systems? They need to be managed. Well, what if they didn’t? Would that be a load off your mind and a competitive edge for your business? It certainly could be. Let’s see why. Even more importantly, let’s see how.

The Trouble With Desk Sets
The legacy business phone is a heavy black box full of analog circuitry and connected to the phone company its own telephone “line”. Today, the phones are lighter, some have digital circuitry, others are cordless with multiple handsets. They still have their own unique “telephone” network wiring.

When you have a single phone or a cordless set with several handsets, managing the phone system is no big deal. There’s really nothing to manage. If you’ve got a dial tone, you’re good to make and receive calls. The one thing you might add is a backup battery if the phone has an AC power adaptor. Legacy analog sets get their power right from the phone line. Newer electronic phones, especially the cordless variety, have DC power supplies that plug into the wall.

Management headaches begin when you get a number of phones sharing outside lines. Sure, each phone can have its own outside line, but that gets real expensive real fast. Plus, not everybody is making outside calls at the same time. Some are calling within the company. Many are not on the phone at all.

Types of Business Phone Systems
The two most popular types of business phone systems are Key Telephone Systems (KTS) and Private Branch Exchange (PBX).

Key systems let you call between phones inside the company using only your internal telephone wiring. That’s a big advantage over independent phones because the telephone company will charge you for every call that has to go through their network. The limitation of KTS is that each line has its own button on every phone and has to be manually selected to make or receive calls. That limits the practical number of outside lines to typically 4 or 6.

Private Branch Exchanges are little phone company switches within your business. You can still make internal calls through the PBX without using an outside line. The PBX system manages a pool of outside lines that are shared among all the phones in the system. The number of lines you need depends on what percentage of employees are making or taking calls from outside the company at the same time. A dozen lines can often serve dozens of users.

Why Get Rid of Your Phone System
Someone in the company, and it may be you, is responsible for telephone expenses. These include local and long distance charges, the cost of purchasing and maintaining the phone system, plus moves, adds and changes to your telephone assets.

The cost of “moves, adds and changes” comes from the fact that each phone has a dedicated line that goes to the KTS or PBX. The connection tells the system which phone is picked up or needs to ring. If you want to move a phone to another desk, you have to also move the connection in the phone wiring or reprogram the system so that it knows the new location. Otherwise employees have to change phone numbers every time they are relocated. Add a phone? You’ll need to add a phone jack at that location and a line back to the system.

The larger the company, the more phones there are, the more phone wiring there is to wrangle and the more expensive the phone system becomes. Worse, if your company grows beyond the capacity of your system, you’ll have to upgrade it if possible or rip it out and put in a new one if not. At some point the technology will become obsolete and it will get really pricey or impossible to keep the beast running. Then you are looking at a major capital investment.

How to Get Out of the Phone Business
Whatever business you are in, it is probably not the telephone business. You simply need those phones to get your job done. Even call centers are focused on the services being provided and not the telephone equipment itself.

What if you could just buy or rent the telephone sets as you need them, plug them into your existing computer network and let somebody else worry about buying and maintaining all that expensive switching equipment?

You can with a service called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. Both mean the same thing. VoIP is the technology that turns telephone sets into network peripherals. Like all computers, the phones have their own internal address on the network. They can be plugged into any network jack and will work just fine. No need to change any wiring.

There is no KTS or PBX on your premises. A much larger “Cloud” system is located at the service provider’s data center. All you have on-site are telephone sets called SIP Phones and a special router or call controller to direct phone calls to the provider. You no longer need outside lines to the phone company. Instead, you have a digital SIP Trunk that connects your location to the provider.

The Pay as You Go Advantage
What’s happened is that you have traded a large initial investment in a phone system and the ongoing costs to maintain it and make changes for a simple “cost per seat” for each phone. Some providers include all new SIP phones when you sign up for service. They’ll send more when you expand the business. No need to pay up-front for phones and lines that will sit unused until you need them. If you need to downsize at some point, you return the phones and stop paying for the ones you no longer need.

Advanced Features
Chances are that your existing business phone system doesn’t have the ability to include smartphones or integrate with computers for efficient call center operations. You many not even have the functionality to support auto attendants or hunt groups for multiple agents for your call center. The hosted system will not only have many more advanced features that what you probably have now, but will be kept up to date as new features are offered. You never have to upgrade your phone “system” because the system is provided for you in the cloud.

Are you feeling limited by the functionality, inflexibility or high costs of your current phone system. Before paying a small fortune to upgrade your in-house equipment, take a closer look at Cloud Hosted PBX Business Telephone Service.

Non-PBX Telephone Solutions

By: John Shepler

We all know what business telephone systems look like. The very smallest consist of a single desk set or a cordless system with multiple handsets but still one line. Next up are key telephone systems where each phone has buttons to access 2 to 6 outside lines. Beyond that is the realm of the Private Branch Exchange or PBX. This is the standard for most business office applications… or at least it was.

Why PBX?
What made PBX systems popular was the opportunity to get away from having to pay the telephone company for internal calls and lines that mostly sat idle. Yes, there was a time when every phone had its own line to the telco and its own incoming phone number. If you wanted to call someone down the hall, you had to place a local phone call just like if you called someone across town. Each of those calls rang the register at the local phone company.

Direct Connections
It seems obvious today that calls from desk to desk inside your own building should be direct connections. There’s no need to use an outside line to go down to the telco switch and another line to come right back. A simple connection between the two local phones works just fine. What’s needed is a switch like the one at the telephone company office, but for inside the business only. That’s what a PBX is. It’s a miniature telephone exchange switch. That’s the “private” in Private Branch Exchange.

Why PBX Seemed Ideal
All internal calls are managed by the PBX on its own wiring. There are no per-call charges. The PBX also manages outside lines that are used for calls that come in to or leave the premises. There are almost always fewer outside lines than phones because many calls are internal and most phone sit idle while other work is being done. This optimizes the cost of telephone service for the business, right?

Escalating Costs
That was true when PBX was the only game in town. The one fly in the ointment is the cost of the PBX system including maintenance and repairs, and the everyday effort needed for moves, adds and changes. That PBX is just a machine. It doesn’t know that you moved your phone to another location until you tell it to use a different set of wires.

Flexibility Issues
PBX systems aren’t all that flexible, either. Each machine has a capacity. Sure, you can upgrade to add more phones… up to a point. Then you have to install a much larger system when your business grows beyond what your current equipment will support. That’s a major capital investment.

What’s a Better AlternativeToday?
Like many innovations in information technology, moving your phone system to the cloud offers a number of advantages. Yes, there is still something that provides the same function as your old PBX. But, it is a largely software driven system that is located remotely, has nearly unlimited expansion capacity and, best of all, you don’t have to pay for it. You only pay to use the system.. and that’s pay as you go.

How Cloud Communications Works
Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP, is a virtual PBX system offered as a service. What you have in-house are telephones that plug into your local area network instead of standard telephone jacks. The connection from the network to the service provider is called a SIP trunk. It serves the same function as the analog or digital lines to the phone company that you have now.

What You Gain With a Hosted Solution
The beauty of a hosted PBX solution is that you can move phones around at will without any wiring changes. Just plug the phone into another network jack and the system will recognize it and know who it is assigned to. Adding or removing phones from the system is done through a simple browser interface. Some cloud suppliers will even provide you with business phone sets as you need them. It’s included in the “per seat” cost of your service.

Day to Day Operations
How does this work on a day to day basis? Your phones still act like normal telephones. You can make internal calls with no per-minute charges, often even if the other phone is at a branch office on the other side of the country. Only calls that have to go over the public telephone system will still have per-minute charges, like you pay today.

Advanced Calling Features
Hosted PBX systems are always up to date and have advanced calling features you may not enjoy today, such as the ability to include mobile phones within the system. They have a dedicated staff to keep the switching equipment working 24/7. In the rare event that tornado or flood destroys your office, your phone system will still work. You just need some working phones and a network connection to the cloud to be back in business.

Check Out The Value of Non-PBX Solutions
Are you looking at a new business phone system or facing a costly upgrade cycle? Before you go the PBX route, take a look at what a hosted PBX solution offers in the way of performance and cost control for your organization.

Achieving Call Quality Momentum With Cloud Communications

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with your decades old in-house phone system that is getting more obsolete by the minute? Or, do you have a horror story that revolves around moving to VoIP only to find the reliability bad and the call quality worse? It’s time you gained some momentum with a superior cloud communications solution… like one from Momentum. Have a look….


If you are new to IP based voice communication, you may not be aware of the pitfalls that can ruin a good network voice system or the solutions that are just bad to begin with. This is where you need a “best of breed” vendor to ensure your success.

There are a couple of competing approaches to enterprise level VoIP. The first is to have the system located and operated in-house. You treat it as part of the IT infrastructure. That’s different from traditional approaches that have kept the telephone network and IT network forever separate.

Some companies only go so far as to replace their T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI trunks with SIP trunks in order to get a better deal from a competitive service provider. Nothing changes in-house other than a new way to connecting to the phone company.

While this is the least amount of upset to the status quo, it does nothing to modernize your phone system. You gain none of the advanced calling features that VoIP systems have to offer. For that, you need to combine voice and data.

Enterprise VoIP, as opposed to a home office or small office with one or two phones, involves making the IT network also your phone network. You can add adaptors to your current analog phones so they connect to Ethernet, but you’re probably better off upgrading to IP telephones that have the network interface built-in plus all sorts of other capabilities.

Once you get all the phones on your LAN and off the phone wiring, you reach another fork in the road. Do you buy an in-house IP PBX system and continue to run everything yourself, or do you offload the switching system and connections to the public phone system to a cloud vendor?

Cloud communication is becoming a very attractive option. You avoid the capital investment of upgrading your in-house system and the ongoing maintenance costs. You also gain the ability to include remote workers in the system so you can communicate the same way no matter where you happen to be. Being tied to a desk, especially by a phone cord, can damage both your flexibility and productivity.

Momentum, the service provider, has some very attractive pluses in cloud communications. For one thing, they offer measurable call quality. Getting network voice right can be a tricky prospect and your customers will know if your phone system degrades. You also gain mobility, cloud disaster recovery and call center features. Best of all, you may find that your next phone system upgrade can save rather than cost you money.

Is your business ready to tap the advantages of cloud hosted communications? If so, find out what Momentum and other top tier providers have to offer. You may be surprised at what you can get for the same or less than you spend now.

Fractional and Full Gigabit Ethernet Options

By: John Shepler

Today’s demanding application push for higher and higher bandwidths. Right now 10 Mbps is considered entry level and most businesses need at least 100 Mbps WAN bandwidth to ensure that real-time (VoIP, videoconferencing) and latency sensitive (cloud connections) applications won’t succumb to degradation from network congestion at peak load times. Technology intensive businesses and medium to large scale operations can easily require Gigabit connections. Fortunately, they are easy to come by and relatively inexpensive compared to times past.

One major technology upgrade in the last decade is the standardization and deployment of Carrier Ethernet. This represents a major change in MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth. The legacy services are SONET/SDH, a TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) switched circuit technology originally developed for massive telephone trunking between central offices. Carrier Ethernet acknowledges the fact that packet switched traffic is dominant on networks worldwide. With Ethernet on the local networks, it seems logical to keep everything in the Ethernet protocol from end to end.

Carrier Ethernet can be transported on both copper and fiber lines. The lower bandwidth offerings are found on EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This is a twisted pair technology that uses the same installed cabling that supports T1 and analog phone lines. EoC typically starts at 1 to 3 Mbps and goes up to 10 or 20 Mbps, although there are special situations that will support 50 and even 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. These tend to be locations very close to the telco CO where the termination equipment is installed. Copper based Ethernet loses bandwidth capacity rapidly with distance.

Ethernet over Fiber is the logical solution for many, if not most, high performance applications. Bandwidth typically starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps. Popular service levels are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. These mirror the LAN speeds of standard, fast and gigabit Ethernet.

There are factors that make Carrier Ethernet more affordable and more flexible than the longstanding SONET services. Numerous competitive carriers have deployed their own regional and national fiber networks independent of the public telephone system. They own the fiber and terminal equipment, including last mile drops to your building. This is a very competitive field right now and lease prices per Mbps have plummeted in recent years.

Another real cost savings opportunity arises from the easy scalability designed into Carrier Ethernet services. TDM based bandwidth is technically unique at each service level. T1, DS3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and other installations require specific terminal equipment. If you wish to upgrade to a faster service, you need different equipment installed. That helps drive costs and leads to long installation times.

Carrier Ethernet bandwidths are somewhat arbitrary. Everything works the same regardless of how much traffic is being transported. In other words, Ethernet is Ethernet. What’s important is the speed of the installed port at your location. It is the maximum capacity of the port that sets a limit on the bandwidth you can order. A Fast Ethernet port is good up to 100 Mbps. A Gigabit Ethernet port raises that ceiling to 1000 Mbps.

There is nothing that prevents you from operating your network connection at a speed less than the maximum port capacity. Fractional line speeds that are rate limited by the service provider have been available for other services, such as DS3 or OC3. There are cost savings available with these, but they are not nearly as dramatic as what you’ll find with Ethernet.

In fact, scalability is a big selling point with Carrier Ethernet. Many carriers offer bandwidth upgrades with only a phone call required. The additional capacity can be online in a matter of hours or days. That compares with weeks or months for equipment changes on older services.

This is where Gigabit Ethernet makes sense even if you don’t need that much capacity today. The idea is to install a Gigabit Ethernet port, which is commonly available with a managed router provided by the carrier. The output is a standard copper or fiber Ethernet jack. You can then place your initial bandwidth order at 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps or some other level that represents your current need. When you need more bandwidth, that phone call will get you 500 Mbps, 750 Mbps or one of many other increments. These fractional Gigabit speeds can be increased until you are at the full Gigabit capacity of the port.

Is Gigabit Ethernet still too restrictive? The answer, as you may suspect, is to order a 10 GigE or even 100 GigE port. That’s the practical limit today. As bandwidth demands continue to increase, carriers will upgrade their core networks to Terabit per second and higher speeds. Soon afterwards these speeds will be available to business or organization customers with highly demanding applications.

Are you being squeezed for metro and long haul bandwidth to support your organization? If so, it is well worth your while to look into the availability and cost of fractional and full Gigabit Ethernet services, and higher if needed.

Contact Center On Demand in the Cloud

Cloud communications services are becoming more sophisticated by the day. It’s a natural extension of the cloud computing revolution. Having successfully moved the data servers to the cloud, many companies have eyed the telecom room and wondered why they still need to support that large, expensive and soon to run out of capacity PBX telephone system.

More and more, it makes sense to move business phone operations to the cloud. It all started with Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX and has expanded from there. The idea behind hosted PBX is that the telephone switching function can be accomplished just as easily from a cloud data center as it can from a back room in your office. The “big iron” hardware goes away, as do the analog, T1 and ISDN PRI telephone trunks. What you keep are handsets now connected to your corporate network and a high bandwidth WAN connection to your service provider.

What do you gain? No more capital investments for one thing. You move to a pricing model of so much per user per month. You also gain a myriad of additional features such as unified communications that include your smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs into the communications system. Do you have HD voice? Probably not. HD voice is a VoIP technology that expands the transmitted audio band to increase the clarity of your “phone” calls.

Now that Hosted VoIP is a standard practice, the next step is to move the entire contact center to the cloud. XO Communications, a major player in cloud networking services, calls their system “Contact Center On Demand.” Have a look at this short video to see what it’s all about…


What XO will do for you is provide a single integrated solution that includes Hosted PBX and Contact Center on Demand. This is a comprehensive approach to your enterprise communications that gives you the quality and performance you need to support employees and customers with advanced features and a more attractive cost model. The system easily expands to include all of your business locations, along with mobile and remote workers.

What don’t you worry about any more? Equipment obsolescence, planning for large capital investments, limited feature sets, lack of mobile integration, on-going maintenance, inability to ramp up and down to accommodate seasonal spikes in call activity, and managing disaster backup and recovery.

Is your business ready to for more efficient and featured voice communications? Do the comparison between premises based business phone systems and Hosted PBX / Contact Center on Demand services. See what makes the most sense for your operations.

Fiber Optic Service FAQ, Part 3

Here are more frequently asked questions and answers about fiber optic service for your business You may also be interested in the first and second lists of fiber FAQs.

Q: What is a lit building?

A: This is a building that already has fiber installed and “lit” for service. Usually only a single carrier lights each building. If your building is lit, you can easily get bandwidth services from that carrier.

Q: What are wavelength services?

A: A wavelength or Lambda is a particular color of laser light that carries the signal through the optical fiber. Early fiber systems used only a single light beam. Today, multiple beams travel the same fiber strand using a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. You can lease an entire wavelength for your exclusive use if you wish.

Q: Why would you lease a wavelength rather than just buying bandwidth?

A: Leasing a wavelength gives you high bandwidth dedicated to your use. Typically each wavelength supports 10 Gbps. You can decide whether to use SONET, Ethernet or some other protocol over the wavelength because the service does not share traffic with other users.

Q: What is dark fiber?

A: This refers to fiber strands that have been installed but not lit for service. Most fiber optic cable has dozens or hundreds of fiber strands all bundled together. Carriers that have extra strands they aren’t using will often lease them to other carriers or businesses that need the capacity.

Q: What’s the advantage of dark fiber?

A: Bandwidth is nearly unlimited and security is high because there is no traffic on the fiber strand other that what you provide.

Q: What protocols does dark fiber support?

A: Anything you can generate, including SONET, Ethernet, Fibre Channel and others. By using Wavelength Division Multiplexing, you can assign a different protocol to each wavelength and they won’t interact.

Q: Why wouldn’t you select dark fiber?

A: You’ll need to provide the termination equipment at each end, which can be rather expensive. On wavelength and other bandwidth services the carrier does this. Also, there may not be any dark fiber available on the route you have in mind.

Q: How does fiber support cloud services?

A: Cloud communications are bandwidth intensive. All the traffic that used to run to your in-house data center now goes over a WAN (Wide Area Network) connection to the cloud. You need high bandwidth and low latency connections for this to work properly, just what fiber is good at.

Is fiber bandwidth service the right solution to your business needs? Compare costs and service options for the fiber optic service options available for your business locations.


You may also be interested in reading Fiber Optic Service FAQs, Part 1 and Part 2.

What Makes Low Latency Bandwidth Important

Bandwidth is bandwidth, right? What’s really important is how many bits per second you can squeeze down the line, isn’t it? Or is it?

The speed of your connection is one important specification in a bandwidth solution that will meets the needs of your company. Others include availability, packet loss, jitter and latency. Don’t understate the importance of latency in providing a satisfactory WAN service.

What is latency and isn’t it related to bandwidth? In some cases, yes. Bandwidth increases latency when you don’t have enough for the job. If you have a huge file, say a radiology image, that you need to transfer to another location in 10 minutes and it takes 10 hours, you’ll feel the pain. If your VoIP calls are getting derailed by employee internet browsing, you’ll hear the pain. If your video conferencing breaks up so badly that it is unusable, your employee productivity can really be a source of pain.

Latency is the delay between sender and receiver. If you have all the bandwidth your equipment can possibly use, that delay is a function of how fast the packets can get through the line unimpeded. What slows them down is the speed of light in wire and fiber and any delays introduced by routers, switches and amplifiers along the way.

So, how is it possible to have plenty of bandwidth but too much latency? The perfect example is two-way satellite transmissions. You’ve no doubt noticed that on-location live TV reports seem to have a delay that prevents normal two-way conversations. The anchor and the reporter have to each pause before talking or they’ll talk over each other. That’s latency. Most of it is caused by the simple fact that the geostationary satellite relaying the signal is located about 22,000 miles overhead. Even in a vacuum it takes light and radio waves a millisecond for each 186 miles of distance or a full second for each 186,000 miles. This results in a minimum delay of a quarter-second for a one-way transmission or half a second for a round trip.

Is there a technical way to reduce this latency? Nope. As long as we use electromagnetic waves we’re stuck with Einstein’s speed limit. If you want lower latency, you need to use shorter paths.

One way that carriers are reducing latency is by establishing point to point connections that run in as straight a line as possible. This can mean new fiber installations with minimal length between cities. It also means removing as much electronics from the path as possible. Each box adds a little latency as the signals are converted from light to voltage to light again. Of course, bandwidth has to be high enough that it appears to be transparent to the application.

An extreme example of lower latency requirements is high speed financial trading. It’s computers making trade decisions and placing the orders far faster than a human broker possibly could. Half a second delay is eternity to such systems. Every millisecond counts when you are issuing hundreds or thousands of buy/sell orders every second. Even an optimized fiber optic link from out of state or across national borders may have too much latency. The optimized solution is to move your computers into the same data center as the trading floors. This gets the delay problem from milliseconds down to microseconds and nanoseconds.

You may not need such highly optimized latency reduction solutions for your business. However, you should be aware that cloud services can become latency limited. Any signal delay through your own company LAN is likely unnoticeable. Stretch that connection out a thousand miles or two over the Internet and you may experience noticeable response delays in interacting with your applications. If you can’t live with the performance of the public Internet, you need a latency optimized bandwidth solution.

Big fiber optic carriers like Zayo, MegaPath and XO communications offer high bandwidth low latency private line connections that can improve the performance of your cloud based applications. You’ll also need this for high quality VoIP telephony and video conferencing. Be sure to investigate the impact of latency on your SIP Trunks and multi-location networking through MPLS. Low latency solutions are available for just about every need.

Do you need lower latency as well as higher bandwidth? Get competitive pricing on low latency high speed bandwidth solutions for local, interstate and international connections.

Hosted PBX Adds Video Services

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP, is becoming popular with large, medium and small businesses as a way to get the latest phone features without the big investment. Now that capability is being expanded to include video services as well.

MegaPath, a major competitive network carrier and cloud service provider, is adding cloud-delivered unified communications video services to its hosted PBX portfolio.

The key to video with voice is a new generation of business phones that replaces traditional analog desk phones and even VoIP digital phones. Polycom, one of the leaders in IP telephony, calls these media phones. These are telephones with video screens. Think of them as tablets that look like telephones. Some have cameras built-in. Others use a plug-in webcam.

Unified Communications (UC) is the process of combining voice, data and video on a single network. UC in the cloud is the next step. All you need are your company LAN and the network attached equipment that meets your business needs. In many cases, this is desktop computers and telephones. Everything else can go to the cloud. Add video capability and you have desktop conferencing without buying any new servers or making big changes to your network. All the complexity involved in making this work is handled out there in the cloud.

What are the advantages of adding video to your voice communications? You instantly have video conferencing without the infrastructure and inconvenience of setting up special video conference rooms and having people convene there at a particular time. Video conferencing has long been used as a substitute for expensive and time consuming travel. Desktop video conferencing takes that to the next level. Now you can have spontaneous or scheduled video conferences without having to uproot otherwise productive employees just to waste time gathering at the other end of the office.

Where else do you see this type of personalized video communications? Smartphones, of course. Also tablets, Ultrabooks and laptop computers. All of these have one thing in common: mobility.

The fact is that people don’t work in one particular location anymore. You may have your first conversations before you leave home in the morning or on the way to work. Then you spend some time at your desk along with moving around in the office. Many employees will leave the office building at some point to meet with clients or other business and personal related activities. In the old days that means having an operator take your incoming messages or letting callers record voicemail. You’d find out who was calling and why when you got back to your desk.

At the speed of business now, you can’t afford to be incommunicado for hours or even minutes. A missing employee can put an entire team project on hold. A sales prospect may well move on to the next vendor if they don’t get through to a person immediately. You need all of your communications integrated into one unified system.

This is where cloud-based PBX services shine. They support integrating desk phones and mobile phones in a process called Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). With the addition of video and single number calling, you are now connected at all times with the same feature set no matter where you happen to be.

Another feature of many hosted VoIP systems is HD audio. We’re used to the sound of standard “toll grade” voice quality. This has somewhat degraded with the introduction of mobile phones and some inadequate VoIP systems. HD audio reverses the trend to make VoIP a higher voice quality service than traditional analog and digital TDM arrangements.

Are you feeling that your current business phone system is hurting rather than enhancing your productivity. Are you having maintenance headaches or face a major capital investment in new equipment? Don’t commit yourself to any particular solution until you’ve had the chance to evaluate Hosted PBX Cloud Services for audio and video communications.

How to Get Your Business Phones For Free

You’d like to update your phone system, but the cost is hard to justify. After all, you can still receive and make calls just fine. What you are missing out on are all the cool features that the more advanced phones have to offer. You may also be stuck with a phone system that doesn’t work with your wireless phones and other mobile device. What do you do? Sit and watch as your competitors gain productivity advantages?

Would you be surprised to learn that you can easily afford all those up to date phone features and put new high tech phones on every desk? Would you be more surprised to find out that you won’t have to invest a penny of your own money to make this upgrade?

It’s hard to believe, but true. The secret is a change in business model from owning everything to paying for what you actually use by the month. This is the power of cloud based communications.

The big technical advance that makes telephony in the cloud a winner is getting the telephones on the data network and off their own proprietary network. There are a couple of key reasons this better both technically and financially.

The technical reason is that LAN and WAN networks have far more bandwidth available than common telco channels. These include traditional analog business lines and multiplexed calls over ISDN PRI digital trunks. Both are good for something like 64 Kbps or less. No problem for voice conversations that are limited to less than 4 KHz. Also no problem for low speed data like Caller ID or dial-up modem service. Now compare this to network connections that start at 1.5 Mbps (T1) and go up to 1,000 Mbps (GigE) and beyond. This opens the door to transport dozens or hundreds of simultaneous calls on one trunk and enabling other features like HD voice for higher call quality.

In fact, there is so much bandwidth available that you can use the same WAN network connection to transport both telephone and Internet data over a single trunk line.

But, wait, aren’t there call quality issues when you send phone calls over the Internet? The trick is not to let the phone calls themselves touch the Internet. Broadband Internet and telephone calls are combined at the provider and then separated at the user location. The combination process uses the same line, but keeps voice and data from interfering. This is done by giving voice packets priority status, something you can’t do on the Internet.

You get higher bandwidth for more call capacity and both broadband and telephone service on a single network line. This is part of the cost savings. More comes from being able to select your provider from many competing cloud communications providers. What a lot of people don’t realize is that analog copper telephone lines are owned by the local phone company. Network connections can go anywhere and aren’t owned by the local telcos.

The last piece of the puzzle is moving the call switching system from the telephone company or a back room in your building to the cloud. Cloud hosted PBX systems have the economy of scale and spread the cost over many customers. Since the hosted PBX provider specializes in this service, these systems are kept up to date with the latest feature sets.

So how do you get free phones? Some, but not all, cloud communications providers include new IP desk telephones as part of your monthly service fee. This allows them to optimize their systems for particular phone models, buy in quantity, and ship you brand new telephones to replace the old ones you have now. If staff up and need more phones, they care shipped to you ready to plug into your network.

Would you like to upgrade your current business phone system without having to make a capital investment? Are providers offering free phones more cost effective than those that don’t? The way to find out is to get competitive quotes for a variety of hosted PBX service providers and see what best meets your needs.

Best VoIP Providers For Business

VoIP has been transforming the telecom industry for years now. As a business owner or manager you may be wondering if you are missing out on something important by sticking with your tried and true analog telephone service. Does VoIP really work? Can it really save a business money?

Yes, indeed, VoIP technology is for real. It is sometimes called “network voice,” a term that describes what the technology is all about. The idea is that your company computer network can carry telephone conversations as an application if they are compatible with other network equipment. This is possible when telephones are turned into network peripherals called IP telephones or SIP telephones.

This sounds like a clever tech trick, but just where does the cost savings come in? For VoIP to make any difference, you need to be able to get rid of your old telephone wiring, PBX system and analog lines. Then the phones and the computers share the remaining company LAN and broadband connection to the outside world.

Here’s where it gets tricky. All VoIP isn’t the same. Voice and data packets might look similar, but they have very different needs. Voice is a real time streaming service. Anything that interferes with the smooth and continuous transfer of packets from one phone to another without delay is going to make the conversation sound crummy. Network congestion, latency and packet loss that doesn’t faze data transfers will destroy phone calls. There is no plug-and-play for VoIP. The network, including any outside telecom lines, have to be specially set up to support voice services or they won’t work very well.

The best VoIP providers take measures to insure that your phone service works as well as it does now or even better. In general, this means that you need a private line connecting you to your service provider. That line must be specially conditioned so that voice packets have priority over data packets. You won’t notice fractions of a second delays in data downloads, but you sure will if they affect the phone calls. Voice needs a guarantee of bandwidth, latency, jitter and congestion so it can work perfectly.

For most companies, the ideal approach is to let your VoIP service provider also be your bandwidth provider... at least for any lines transporting VoIP phone calls. This way you can be sure that those lines will be optimized for best VoIP performance. This is especially important for smaller companies that will save money by using a single integrated T1 line or SIP trunk to provide both dedicated Internet access and VoIP telephone service.

Larger companies may have dedicated SIP trunks that transport only phone conversations. Like ISDN PRI, each SIP trunk can transport a certain number of calls within its bandwidth capacity. How many simultaneous calls depend on the CODEC (Coder/Decoder) that does the conversion between analog and digital. The universal standard is G.711 which is the same standard used in T1 telephone and ISDN PRI. Other codecs offer HD voice that is more understandable than standard telephone audio or they use less bandwidth to cram more conversations per trunk. Be careful here, though, the lowest bandwidth CODECS gain their efficiency at the expense of voice quality.

Perhaps the most popular business VoIP service right now is called hosted VoIP, hosted PBX or telephony in the cloud. You have only SIP telephones in-house. All switching and connections to outside lines is done at the service provider. Cost savings of 60% or more are being promoted for this type of service.

There are other arrangements you may also be interested in. Some VoIP companies offer an “analog handoff” so you can use regular telephone sets with VoIP service. You don’t get as many features with this hybrid arrangement, but you may save the cost of upgrading all your phones and wiring. Note: Some VoIP providers may include new SIP phones with your service agreement to sweeten the deal. That can make the upgrade well worth your while.

Still other VoIP providers work with your in-house PBX telephone system and only replace the trunk lines that would otherwise go to the local telephone company or competitive carrier. If you are happy with your current phone system but just want the opportunity to save on your monthly phone bill, this can be a good solution. When it comes time to replace or upgrade your PBX, you can review the situation and see if going with a hosted PBX makes more sense than paying for a new system.

Even if you only have a single telephone or a few desk phones in your company, you may be able to save substantially with service from one of the best VoIP providers for business. Get competitive quotes and features now.

Ethernet Over Copper Companies Expand Services

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has been the David to the T1 Goliath. That’s changing fast. While T1 lines won’t be knocked out anytime soon, the expansion of EoC by Ethernet over Copper companies is bringing more options to more service areas every day.

An example is the aggressive buildout by Integra Telecom into 120 telephone company central offices (COs) serving more than 400,000 businesses. Why colocate in telco offices instead of just building your own points of presence?

The answer has to do with the copper. Copper is gold in the telecom world. He who has the gold, and to some extent makes the rules, is by law the Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs), also known as the local telephone companies. All that twisted pair copper in the ground and flying overhead was put there by the ILECs for their own use. Under deregulation, they lease it out to competing carriers, like Integra, who install their own equipment to access that copper within the ILEC COs.

It’s only the last mile that Integra and other carriers lease. The rest of the signal path is through their own proprietary networks. By using that last mile of twisted pair copper wires, EoC providers can provision anywhere from 2 to 45 Mbps of Carrier Ethernet bandwidth and services. That’s faster than even bonded T1 lines can go and competes with low end fiber optic services. That makes connectivity available in the two-thirds of business buildings that aren’t yet lit for fiber.

So, what can you expect from Ethernet over Copper? First of all, it’s Ethernet. This is the same protocol that runs on your network. When adapted to run on telecom services, it’s called Carrier Ethernet. This makes the interface to your network as simple as plugging into a standard RJ-45 Ethernet connector installed by the carrier.

Even more important, your traffic stays on Ethernet as it traverses the path between company locations. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), an industry standards group, has created several Carrier Ethernet services that support business connections. The first is Ethernet Private Line (EPL). This is similar to the point to point T1 service you may have now. It connects two locations with a Ethernet Virtual Circuit (EVC) for the exclusive use of your traffic.

One difference is that you have a wider range of bandwidth choices available. The other very noticeable difference is that Ethernet services tends to be considerably more cost effective than T1. You can typically get 3 Mbps EoC for the same price as 1.5 Mbps T1. As you increase bandwidth, the cost savings get even more attractive.

A related service is Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL). This is a point to multipoint connection. You could use EVPL to establish a star network with your headquarters location in the center, connecting many other business locations.

Another service gaining popularity is E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. This is an Ethernet based cloud networking service that connects multiple locations in a meshed arrangement. Because it is Ethernet, you can use it as a bridged network connection to join the LANs at all of your diverse business locations so that they operate as one very large company network.

Ethernet over Copper offers you an expanded range of services than what you have now with an expanded bandwidth selection that is easily scalable and less costly than traditional telecom services. The one question is whether you can get EoC yet? With the rapid deployment by many carriers, the answer is probably YES. Want to find out? Get availability and pricing for Ethernet over Copper services suitable for your business locations.

Business Telephone Systems Hosted VoIP Advantages

Companies looking to replace or install new business telephone systems have more options today than in recent years. Small companies can pick up a system that supports only a few outside lines from their local office supply store. Medium size companies typically bring in a contractor or VAR (Value Added Reseller) to install a key telephone system or small PBX. Large companies needing hundreds or thousands of handsets often have their own telecom organizations that build sophisticated in-house telephone companies. All of these companies, from small to large, should now be looking at hosted VoIP as a cost savings alternative.

How is it possible that one solution can handle the needs of the smallest to the largest operations and still be cost effective? It’s not a single one-size-fits-all solution. It’s a technology that readily scales to handle whatever demand is thrown at it. That’s hosted VoIP, also called hosted PBX or telephone in the cloud.

The cloud metaphor gives it away. What you are really dealing with is large data center set up to specifically handle business telephony for many clients. The characteristics that make this a cloud service are enormous scalable capacity and virtualization that keeps various clients isolated from each other. Billing follows the cloud model of pay-as-you-go. The service provider makes all capital investments in infrastructure plus the operational expenses in operating and maintaining the service. Clients pay by the seat by the month for the service they use.

Typically what you get with hosted VoIP is a suite of telephone services very similar to the most advanced PBX systems you could buy and install yourself. You pay a single price for your call switching. That includes in-house, local outside calls and domestic long distance. Overseas calling is extra, like it is with any calling plan.

One thing you get easily with a hosted solution is the ability to tie together multiple business locations. You can do this in-house to avoid paying toll charges to the phone companies for calls that go between your branch offices or back to headquarters. However, the solution involves you converging your network and running your own SIP trunks between PBX systems. If you want to avoid the telephone companies, you have to become the telephone company. Your service area is the various locations owned by your company.

Hosted VoIP providers maintain a cloud that contains the virtual PBX. You connect to that cloud from each of your locations, or back to HQ on your own network and then off to the cloud for call switching. Either way, the cloud doesn’t care where the handsets are located. They are simply network devices that can be connected at will. Connect a bunch of them together and you have a conference call.

What hosted VoIP providers are offering now is a way to share outside lines among all your remote locations. Remember that in-house calls don’t touch the public phone system. They are all “on-net,” so to speak. It’s only when you have to call outside the company that you need the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). In the past, each of your locations would have its own PBX with its own outside lines. Some locations could have people waiting to use a line. Others could have a dozen lines vacant. With a hosted solution, all PSTN trunks come into the cloud and can be used by whoever needs them. It doesn’t matter which “branch” you happen to be at. Not all providers do this, so if it is an important feature for you then be sure to specify that you need this as a cost saver.

So far we’ve seen that hosted VoIP has the advantages of offering nearly limitless capacity on a pay as you go basis, with no capital investment and no need to maintain equipment yourself. It also easily connects multiple business locations with a complete set of the latest PBX features. Many providers can now integrate mobile phones so that your smartphone has access to the system as easily as your desk phone. Some providers even go so far as to provide you with new desk phones with the cost rolled into your service plan.

Can hosted VoIP make sense as your next phone system. Get prices and features for competing business telephone systems with hosted VoIP and see what makes the most sense for the size of your company.

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.

Many Ways To Connect To MPLS Networks

MPLS networks are becoming very popular for connecting multiple business locations. Let’s take a look at what MPLS networks are all about and the many ways you can get connected to them.

The simplest situation is when you have two locations and want to tie them together. The logical thing to do is order a point to point private line. These lines come in all sizes, bandwidths actually, to meet your needs. They are exactly what they sound like. One end of the line connects to location #1. The other end of the line connects to location #2. It’s like there really is a long piece of wire that extends across town or across the country.

There is one difference between a private line and a piece of wire. Private lines are actually telecom services deployed on those wires or fiber optic strands. There is a certain protocol and speed for each type of line. A T1 private line, for instance, gives you 1.5 Mbps bidirectionally to interfaces meeting the T-carrier specification. You’ll need T1 cards for your routers at each end. Nothing else will work. They have to be exactly the same for the T1 line to function.

You could build a larger network with 3 or more locations the same way. It will cost the least if you set up a star network configuration and do the routing at headquarters with lines running to each business location. Then HQ can decide who can communicate to who. You might set it up so that any location can send files to any other, having them routed through headquarters. Or, you may set it up so that each location can communicate with HQ only and then headquarters will decide where, if anywhere else, the data goes.

Like the two site private line arrangement, if all your lines are T1s, then every port will be a T1 interface. In this case, though, you have gained a bit of flexibility. You can use T1 lines for the smaller operations and install T3 lines for the larger ones. The setup at HQ will require a mix of T1 and T3 interfaces to handle various size remote locations.

Here’s where MPLS networks come in. The MPLS network is a cloud as far as its users are concerned. If you peek inside, you’ll see that it is a fairly large scale fiber optic network. Many MPLS networks have regional or national service footprints. Some even span the globe. What’s special about MPLS is the protocol used. It’s not T-carrier, SONET, IP or anything else. It’s a proprietary technology called label switching that wraps each packet in a special label that is used to manage traffic. The label gets attached when entering the network and removed upon exit.

What this does is make an MPLS network “protocol agnostic.” That means it doesn’t care what protocol you are transporting. It’s also speed agnostic. It doesn’t really care how fast your line is running as long as it connects via an appropriate interface port. Once on the network, all packets have the bandwidth needed to prevent congestion.

This really opens the window to connecting all locations, large and small, via the MPLS “cloud.” You simply need to get your voice, video or data to the network. From there on, the service provider is responsible for getting packets from one location to wherever you have specified that they go. Each location has a “last mile” connection that is the on and off ramp to the MPLS network. Those last mile connections can be just about anything.

Typical MPLS connections include T1, bonded T1, E1, T3 (DS3), E3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber, 3G and 4G fixed wireless and DSL.

You don’t have to use the same connection at every location. The network will handle the traffic regardless of how it connected. However, there can be an advantage to standardizing on Ethernet as you only protocol. That way you can make use of standard Ethernet services such as E-Line and E-LAN. Ethernet LAN service is especially valuable because it lets you tie all your LANs together in one large bridged LAN at layer 2.

Do you have two or more business locations that you would like to link together? Get expert advice and competitive pricing for MPLS network services and last mile connections that meet your requirements.

Can SIP Trunking Supplant ISDN PRI?

Companies large enough to use multiple business telephone lines are good candidates for digital trunk lines. It used to be that you needed a dozen or two outside lines before digital trunks made sense. Now just a few lines plus broadband Internet can make telephone trunks attractive.

Just what is a telephone trunk? It’s a collection of telephone lines, all bundled together. We tend to think of landlines as individual connections. One analog landline is a single pair of small plastic coated copper wires twisted together in a spiral. This isn’t just to keep related wires in pairs to form a complete circuit. The twisted form causes induced magnetic fields to cancel out over distance. This reduces the amount of hum, noise and crosstalk from other telephone lines.

Companies that have a few outside lines often have what’s called a key telephone system. The “key” refers to the line select buttons on the phones themselves. It’s up to the user to note which lines are being used by observing an indicator light for that line button. Unlit line button are free lines that you can use to call out. Each line is an individual analog phone line. They generally come-in through cables of 25 pairs or more called binder groups. You might think of this large cable as an analog trunk line.

The impetus for digital trunk lines is the opportunity to use less copper wiring to transport the same number of phone calls. Stretching miles of binder cable from your location to the telephone company central office (CO) costs a goodly sum. That’s nothing compared to the cost of running long distance lines dozens or hundreds of miles. The first digital trunk was the T1 line. It uses multiplexing to create a stream of 24 channels in 24 serial timeslots. Each channel represents one telephone line. The T1 trunk itself uses 1 or 2 pair of wires versus 24 pair for an equivalent analog trunk.

A T1 telephone trunk can be connected to a channel bank that converts between the digital line and analog telephones. This allows companies with key telephone systems to lease a T1 line at lower cost than 24 separate analog phone lines. A more popular use for this many lines is to connect to an in-house PBX or Private Branch Exchange. The PBX system automatically manages all the outside lines and offers 3 or 4 digit dialing for in-house calls.

An upgrade to the T1 telephone line is the ISDN PRI trunk. The two standards are very similar. ISDN PRI stands for Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate Interface. This is quite a mouthful, but is part of an industry standard that has become very popular for business telephony. The difference between T1 telephone and ISDN PRI trunks is that ISDN reserves one of the channels for switching and data. ISDN PRI offers 23 phone lines plus Caller ID, ANI, and much faster switching. Both T1 and PRI interfaces are common on modern PBX phone system designs. They are either a standard features or can be added with a plug-in card.

What’s the advantage of T1 telephone or ISDN PRI to the business user? They cost less than ordering 23 or 24 separate analog phone lines. The person in the office taking a call on their desk phone can’t tell how the phone lines come into the back room. The manager paying the monthly phone bill sure can.

There’s an even newer form of digital telephone trunk available now called the SIP Trunk. SIP refers to the signaling system used by VoIP telephones. It is computer network based rather than telephone industry based. This allows voice and data to be combined or “converged.” Once you have a converged network, you no longer need separate LAN and telephone wiring. Everything in on the LAN.

What the SIP Trunk does is connect your LAN to your phone service provider. This is a long haul private point to point connection so your “phone company” can be located anywhere. It doesn’t matter where those twisted pairs in the ground go. On the network, one location is as close as another.

The other advantage of SIP Trunking is that it can transport both telephone calls and broadband Internet service at the same time without one interfering with the other. Telephone calls have priority in this system so that voice quality is preserved regardless of what is happening on the Internet. Your calls never actually go on the Internet. The simply share a trunk that transports both.

This offers a terrific advantage for smaller companies. Most every business now uses both telephone and Internet service, so why not have them both provided on a single line instead of two? This maximizes the efficiently of the trunk line and saves money for the business user.

ISDN PRI is still wildly popular as a trunk line for PBX systems. Newer IP PBX systems will support both ISDN PRI and SIP Trunking. Why make the change? Compare prices and features to see if SIP Trunks can save you significant money. Smaller companies that can’t possibly imagine using 23 outside phone lines will likely find that SIP Trunking can be scaled down to the number of lines they really need and that’s all they have to pay for. The option of having broadband delivered on your SIP Trunk is also a plus for smaller companies that don’t need the whole trunk for telephone lines.

A potential game changer is the rise of hosted PBX systems or PBX in the cloud. Hosted services connect via SIP Trunk and there is no PBX equipment or phone lines at your location. You pay per user by the month. This offers tremendous flexibility, as you can always order up more “seats” when business increases and you need them.

Are you interested in new business telephone service or are at the point where your current phone system is out of capacity or too costly to maintain? Don’t lock in your decision on how to proceed until you check the latest prices and features of ISDN PRI, SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX services.