Are Your T1 Lines Saturated?

By: John Shepler

The ideal network connection is transparent. Regardless of whether the link is twisted pair copper, coaxial cable, fiber optic or wireless, if it does anything to affect your network traffic, it is clearly not transparent. The more you notice link limitations, the more your productivity will suffer and the more you need to do something about it.

Artificial Limitations
Best effort shared broadband services, like Cable BB, DSL, 4G Cellular or two-way satellite are limited by both technology and policy. Each type of service has its own capacity for traffic. That capacity is generally available 24/7, aside from occasional outages. Even so, you have access only to a portion of that capacity.

The first limitation is bandwidth. You are entitled to the level of service you order, as a maximum and not a guaranteed throughput. Providers manage this by rate limiting your connection to the service. The line might be capable of 1000 Mbps, but you get 10, 30 or 100 Mbps. Thats the highest bandwidth you can achieve even if there are no other users.

The second limitation is usage limits. These are particularly severe on wireless & satellite links where bandwidth is expensive. Limits of 5 or 10 GB per month severely limit what you can do with the service. Even higher limits of 20 or 50 GB may not be enough for normal business activities. If you go over your limit, you’ll either be charged more, have your connection dropped or have your bandwidth throttled for the rest of the month.

Actual Limitations
Private lines and dedicated Internet access connections usually don’t have artificial limitations. You pay more for these services because you are the only user. There is no need to create policies to ensure fair usage.

Technical limitations remain. Each technology has it’s inherent limitations. There’s no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, even on your own LAN network. What you want is enough bandwidth available that you never run out of capacity.

T1 Line Saturation
T1 lines have been the gold standard of business connectivity since they were introduced decades ago. T1 lines are dedicated connections between two locations or between your location and the Internet. You are the only user and there are no usage limits. The line is constantly running and available to transfer data. You can use as little or much of the available capacity each month. The lease price is fixed.

T1 lines have a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. Actually, the exact line speed is 1.544 Mbps. However, 8 Kbps is needed as overhead to synchronize the line, so the payload rate is 1.536 Mbps. That’s what’s available for your bits of data.

The absolute maximum amount of data you can shove through the line can be figured at 1.536 Mbps x 60 seconds/minute x 60 minutes/hour x 24 hours/day = 132,710 Mbits or 16,589 MB per day, at 8 bits per byte. That’s 16.59 GB of data each day. In a typical 30 day month, that’s just shy of 500 GB.

Line Saturation Problems
Your T1 line becomes distinctly non-transparent when you have big files to transfer and you want to transfer them fast, or you have many users wanting to transfer their files at the same time. The entire line is only capable of transporting less than 17 GB every day, not even 1 GB per hour.

What happens when you try to shove more data down the line than it can carry? Everybody’s traffic slows down… sometimes to a crawl. That’s frustrating and can lead to real productivity issues, especially when need the information to proceed with your next task.

It gets worse when your telephone system is cloud hosted VoIP. Those voice packets get jammed up with all the data packets and don’t get from phone to phone as quickly as needed. The result is garbled voices, pauses in the conversation and perhaps even dropped calls.

Solutions
If you only occasionally reach line saturation, prioritizing traffic can help. Real time services, such as telephone calls and video conferences get highest priority. Whatever they don’t need can be used for interactive business applications, and whatever is left over is available for background activities like file backups.

At some point, you just need to pony up for more bandwidth. Fortunately, this is a lot less expensive to do than ever before. If doubling bandwidth will hold you for awhile, you can go from one to two T1 lines. By bonding those lines, you can double your bandwidth while the two lines act as one larger pipe.

Ethernet over Copper technology uses the same twisted pair copper lines that transport T1, but supports higher bandwidths of 10 Mbps or more. Ethernet over Fiber starts to become cost competitive at that level and can take you from 10 to 100 to 1000 Mbps, and even up to 10 Gbps if you ever need that much. Best of all, copper and fiber Carrier Ethernet services are scalable. That means you can have the line rate limited and pay less until you need the full capacity of the fiber.

Do you find yourself running out of bandwidth on your venerable T1 lines or other WAN connections? If so, check out prices and availability of higher level bandwidth services available for your business location.

End of the Premises Contact Center

By: John Shepler

Business telephone operations have changed a bit over the years. Single line phones soon gave way to the switchboard with live operators to direct calls. Automation replaced the switchboard with the receptionist backed up by a key telephone PBX (Private Branch Exchange) phone system. Call centers with dozens or hundreds of agents performing customer service developed specialized version of PBX systems with integration of computers and telephones. Still, one thing remained constant over the decades of technology evolution. The facilities all remained on-premises.

What’s Wrong With Premises Equipment?
The idea of keeping everything in-house has a appeal to it. After all, if you have the equipment right under your nose, you have complete control of how it works, who gets to use it and what services are available. You might even get lulled into the notion that in-house means much higher reliability than facilities located somewhere out there.

With premises based facilities you do have the ability to take a look at the system whenever you like. You can even give it a love pat from time to time just for good luck.

Along with this ability, you also pick up some responsibilities. You have to provide space, reliable power, connections to each and every phone and on-going maintenance. You didn’t think that these things ran themselves, did you? You also didn’t think that they came free of charge? No, sir. There are some major bucks involved with setting up a call center or contact center phone system and keeping it up to date.

Moving on Up to the Cloud
Unlike the last century or so, today you have the option of being able to run an efficient contact center while unloading the equipment burden. Where does it all go? To the cloud, of course.

Not everything, mind you, but the core system relocates to a remote data center. What you are left with are the actual telephones and computers that you can’t do without. But with a cloud based system, those phones and computers can be scattered around the globe and even at home for some agents, yet all connected as if they were in the same building.

More that Cost Savings
Cloud based contact centers have the obvious advantage of eliminating a major money pit in the form of PBX equipment, software and on-going maintenance. That means less tech support needed at your end. The service provider takes over the support function and handles tech issues 24/7. You may not have been able to even afford this level of scrutiny in-house.

The cloud also has its own benefits. What’s different about a cloud-based system is that a dedicated service prover builds a massive technical plant way beyond what any single company could justify. The benefit to you is that you can likely expand or contract your use of the system at will. If business grows you add more seats and pay for them one by one. If business goes into a tailspin, you eliminate the seats you don’t need.

Another cloud benefit is that you get the latest technology, including features that your in-house system probably can’t provide. That includes individual user features but also major infrastructure like redundant data centers. With duplicated facilities running in parallel, if one center goes down for any reason, the other picks up the load invisibly to you. That translates to higher availability. One vendor, inContact, boasts 99.99% availability.

Tools for Higher Productivity
The inContact suite of tools includes ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) with skills-based routing, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) with speech recognition, CTI (Computer Telephone Integration), predictive , progressive and preview dialers, call recording, extensive reporting, quality monitoring and Workforce Optimization tools.

Sure, you might develop an ad-hoc solution in-house that could provide similar functions, but you’re looking at a substantial development process that sucks up time and money and then YOU have to keep it all running and make improvements over the years. Why re-invent the wheel when the latest in call center efficiency is available for your use right now and can grow with your needs?

Do you have a stand alone call center or a contact center as part of your core business that includes 15 or more “agents” on the phones? If so, cloud based communications
may be exactly what you need right now.


Note: Original photo of telephone operators courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives on Wikimedia Commons.

Unified Communications for the SMB

By: John Shepler

Large companies long ago latched onto the concept of unified communications to improve the efficiency of their business telephone systems and the productivity of their employees. UC, as it is called, may have started out in major enterprises, but it is working its way into the small and medium size businesses. Why? For the same benefits the big companies achieve.

Just what is unified communications? The idea behind UC is that electronic business communications has spread way beyond the corded desk phone. Oh, desk phones are still a staple of any office. But now we have cell phones, smart phones, tablets, laptops, notebooks and the desktop PC. You can treat these as complete separate devices or unify them so that they work as a single system.

Why not stick with separate devices for different uses? One big problem is that we don’t sit at our desks all day. We may be moving around in the office, taking meetings, making sales calls to clients, visiting job sites and collaborating with peers outside the company.

We always did those things, right? True. But how did you stay in touch? Decades ago, pay phones were an important business tool. If you had the option, you left a forwarding number with the secretary when you left the premises. Important clients had your home phone number as well as the office number printed on your business card. If nothing else worked, you could always depend on the answering machine or, later, voice mail.

Sure, this approach works even today. But why are you doing it the old school way when your competitors are embracing the latest technology. While a sales prospect or customer with a big problem sits frustrated after leaving you a voice message, the competition is taking their call while walking down the street. The five members of your committee grind to a halt because you had to leave the office and can’t vote on the issue needing resolution. That company across the street keeps humming along because every member of their team is always connected.

What unified communications does is tie together different communications devices so they work together. No need to list a half dozen phone numbers on your business card and hope a caller has the patience to call each number in order to see if you happen to answer. UC gives you a single phone number and your calls will always get to you no matter where you are.

Cbeyond, a major telecommunications and cloud services provider, is moving unified communications from major enterprises to small and mid-sized businesses. They’re doing this with a new suite of services called “Communications on the Go.” The emphasis is on including smartphones as part of the business communications system. Within that realm, Cbeyond is offering cloud based communications, managed network services, and integration of smartphones, desk phones and computing devices. What this means is that you have access to the same calling features regardless of where you are or what device you are using. You have one phone number and one business phone system to learn.

Cloud communications, also called hosted VoIP, is a real enabler for unified communications. Yes, you can accomplish many of the same things with your own in-house PBX. However, you have the grief of having to cough up a major capital investment to get the equipment and the ongoing maintenance expenses of keeping everything up to data and secure. By moving your communications to the cloud, you move to a cost model of paying for the features you need when you need them. It’s easy to add and subtract users or make changes when people move around. The service provider has ownership of the infrastructure and network connections needed to deliver all the capacity and functionality you need. From your perspective, your unified communications services are infinitely large and always up to date.

Are you looking for a more effective and less costly way to communicate within your business and to your customers? This is a good time to find out what cloud hosted unified communications has to offer for your business, large, medium or small.