Fiber Optic vs Ethernet over Copper Connections

The most popular business bandwidth connections are now Ethernet over Copper and Fiber Optic connections, including Ethernet over Fiber. The commonly assumed tradeoff is copper for best price and wide availability, versus fiber for high bandwidth and ease of scaling up as business demands increase. That picture is changing, though. What’s happening is that fiber is becoming more available and lower in cost, challenging copper solutions even at lower bandwidths.

Copper has enjoyed the advantages of being first to market and near universal availability. Thanks to the FCC’s policy of Universal Service, copper pair go anywhere and everywhere. Granted, this was intended to be for analog telephone service. However, the same copper pair than can transport phone conversations can also be used for DSL, T1, and Ethernet over Copper.

T1 was the original digital line service, developed after WWII for telephone company trunking and designed to be directly compatible with copper lines already installed. Even the repeater design was set to match the manhole access every 6,000 ft. Today, T1 line service is available everywhere nationwide. Costs have dropped dramatically over the last decade so that even smaller companies can afford the service. The major limitation of T1 is that its once-blazing 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is no longer adequate for many applications.

You can order T1 bonded service in many markets. This combines the bandwidth of two or more T1 lines to create one faster line service. Unfortunately, there is no economy of scale. Two lines cost twice as much as one. In other words 3 Mbps is 2x the cost of 1.5 Mbps. The most you can get is 10 to 12 Mbps with this technology, and the higher bandwidths aren’t often available.

Ethernet over Copper has stepped into this void using the same twisted copper pair as T1 lines. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) uses a more sophisticated modulation scheme to get more bandwidth from the same number of copper pair. Entry level is typically 3 Mbps, which is available for the same price as 1.5 Mbps T1. Unlike T1, the upper bandwidth level goes to 20, 30 or even 50 Mbps. The tradeoff is that EoC is distance limited. The farther you are from the central office, the less bandwidth you can get.

Fiber optic service is the bandwidth king, of course. There are no distance limitations. You can get 10, 100, or 1,000 Mbps without regard to how long the fiber link is. You can order the telecom traditional SONET telecom fiber services that start at OC-3 (155 Mbps) or get Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) starting typically at 10 Mbps and scaling easily to 1 Gbps and even 10 Gbps. The size of the port you install determines your maximum bandwidth. Most providers install either a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet port or a 1,000 Gigabit Ethernet port.

Fiber has many advantages but has rolled out slowly for small and medium size companies due to limited availability and high costs. Both of these limitations have been evaporating as of late. The demand for fiber has multiplied with office automation and the migration to cloud based services. Mobile broadband has been supported by T1 lines, but they don’t cut it for LTE. The cellular companies are installing fiber to their towers as fast as they can.

Another factor is the rise of competitive network bandwidth providers. These companies have no relationship to the legacy telcos and no copper infrastructure. They build regional and national fiber optic networks, often with MPLS or IP technology at the core. They’ve all got one thing is common: They’re hungry for business.

The result of this new fiber land-rush is that availability is dramatically increasing and prices are plunging. You can now get 10 x 10 Mbps symmetrical fiber optic service for maybe two or three times the cost of a T1 line. What’s more, the price doesn’t go up that dramatically as you increase bandwidth. You can get 50 or 100 Mbps fiber for less than twice the cost of 10 Mbps service in many areas.

Have you ruled out highly stable, fast and reliable fiber optic service because of sticker shock the last time you checked prices? Don’t miss out on the tremendous deals you can get on fiber optic bandwidth services right now. Get pricing and availability and see for yourself.

Out Of The Recession, Into The Cloud

In the midst of the Great Recession, a huge business transformation has been underway. The way companies do business in the next decade will be far different from the processes they employed in the decades up till now. The new normal will be far more agile and driven by everything in the cloud.

Why the cloud? Think of the cloud as the new data center, the new machine shop, the new steam engine, the new printing press. It will be the heart of heart of many businesses and an essential process tool for others.

There are two prime needs that are driving this shift to cloud solutions. One is the desire to reduce costs, both capital expenses and operation expenses, and tie the level of expenditures more closely with the level of business. The other need is closely related. It is the need for agility to survive and prosper within any business climate.

Both of these needs have risen to prominence in this protracted downturn. Business cycles are normal. Companies are accustomed to going with the flow. You expand when things are booming and contract or at least hold your own when things slow. In a few months or a year business picks up again.

Well, that’s how it was for decades. What’s different this time is both the depth and the duration of the pull back. Companies that found themselves locked into expenses based on normal business levels are in a pickle. Some have been unable to weather the storm and have had to fold their tents. Others, in better shape, have taken notice and are making moves to prevent getting caught in an untenable situation themselves.

This is where the cloud is starting to look attractive. Cloud services that were once only available to large companies with massive processing needs have been scaled down to suit smaller and medium size businesses. The more important computers and/or the Internet are to running your business, the more useful the cloud can be. If you use PCs, tablets, smartphones, or business telephones, there are cloud solutions that are right for you.

What moves to the cloud? Servers, of course. You replace racks full of servers in the back room or a environmentally controlled data center with virtual servers that you run remotely. Those servers run your business applications, often in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS). Accounting, marketing, customer service, sales, inventory control, team collaboration, project management, billing and invoicing, ecommerce, human resources, and transaction processing are examples of what can be done in the cloud. Specialized servers power your business phones from the cloud.

Your cloud servers, storage and public facing bandwidth replace similar IT resources within your company. There difference is that you are now renting these resources rather than owning and operating them. You no longer have to make the equipment investment or perform the maintenance, upgrades and repairs. You don’t have to be concerned about data backups because these can be setup to run automatically within the cloud.

The other thing that you have with cloud solutions is the agility to scale your operations up or down at will. The physical cloud has more resources than you can ever use yourself. You can add and subtract servers and drives, often immediately with online control. You pay only for what you use while you are using it. When business slows, you back off to meet your new needs. When things pick up, you add resources as you need to and can afford to pay for from an increasing revenue stream.

Do you feel that your company would be better able to deal with uncertain business conditions if you could easily adjust technical resources and expenses? If so, you should consider taking advantage of cloud computing and communications services on a scale that makes sense for your business.