Ethernet vs T1 in Under 3 Minutes

By: John Shepler

Have you been hearing a lot of buzz about Ethernet bandwidth services and wonder what all the fuss is about? Is Ethernet really a better deal than the T1 lines you’ve used for years? What about making the move off copper an on to fiber? How do the economics work? Let’s take a look at this short explainer on Ethernet vs T1 service…


Are you sufficiently intrigued to learn more about which connectivity and hosted services make the most sense for your business situation? Get prices and availability now for Ethernet, T1 and other connectivity options.

DS3 Bandwidth Alternatives

DS3 WAN connections are popular with companies needing more bandwidth than they can get from T1 lines but less than moving up to a full OC-3 fiber optic SONET service. So, why would you bee looking for other options? It generally comes down to either cost or performance. Most often, cost.

Yes, there are other bandwidth options available that can do the job that your current DS3 is doing. Let’s take a look at options available today that maybe didn’t exist when you signed your DS3 lease.

DS3 straddles the telecom border between copper wireline and fiber optic bandwidth services. It was originally part of the T-Carrier specifications developed by the Bell System for telephone trunking between switching centers. T-Carrier options include T1 and T3. DS3 is the service that rides on the T3 physical circuit.

Today the terms DS3 and T3 are used interchangeably. In practice, you’ll be hard pressed to find a T3 physical circuit. At one time they were available over microwave relay or waveguide pipes. The actual interface to your router is two coaxial cables with BNC connectors that plug into a DS3 interface module. Those cables have a distance limitation of 450 feet. So, how does DS3 service get from the Central Office (CO) to your location?

Most of the distance is covered by fiber optic cabling that doesn’t have this distance restriction. The DS3 signal is often multiplexed onto a higher bandwidth OC-3 SONET circuit. There may be other DS3 services sharing the same OC-3. Yours is dropped off at your building where it is converted to the industry standard coaxial connections.

This suggests a couple of alternatives to DS3. Before you jump into anything new, though, consider that you may not be getting the best price on your current DS3 service. Prices on telecom services in general have plunged in recent years owing to deregulation and considerable new competition. Perhaps the local telephone company was your only provider choice when you had the service installed. Now there may be several competing providers that are ready, willing and able to do the same job. Get multiple price quotes, preferable from a major bandwidth broker like Telarus, Inc., before you conclude that you need to dump your DS3 only for cost reasons.

Something else to consider is how much bandwidth you really need. Did you contract for DS3 because your T1 line was out of capacity? There’s a big gap between T1 at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. Do you really need the full 45 Mbps or is that simply all that was available at the time?

If you really need, say, 10 Mbps, you can achieve it by scaling up from T1 or down from DS3. T1 lines are now readily bonded together to increase bandwidth. The practical limit is 10 or 12 Mbps without distance limitations. DS3 service can be rate limited to create what’s known as fractional DS3. In other words, you still have a DS3 interface installed but the actual line speed you pay for is 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 30 Mbps or some other option.

Both these approaches may save you money compared to what you pay now. An even more attractive option is Ethernet. With Ethernet over Copper you can get bandwidths ranging from 3 Mbps on the low end up to 45 Mbps and sometimes higher on the high end. Prices per Mbps are generally lower, sometimes even half the cost, than the older T1 and T3 technologies. The hitch with Ethernet over Copper is that it is distance sensitive. The farther you are from the CO, the lower the line speed you can achieve.

Ethernet over Fiber picks up where Ethernet over Copper leaves off. Fiber optic Ethernet service is often available from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Popular options are 10 Mbps standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. The speed of the port installed at your facility sets the maximum, not minimum, speed you can achieve. Common practice is to install a 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet port.

Fiber connections aren’t available for every building, but carriers have been so competitive in building out their networks that more locations that ever before are “lit” for fiber and others can be easily connected. Ethernet over FIber is easily scaled so that you can increase your bandwidth quickly by making a simple call to your provider. This means that you only need to order the bandwidth you need today along with a port speed capable of handling whatever speed you expect to need in the foreseeable future.

Ethernet over Fiber is a bargain compared to other telecom arrangements, if you can get it. If not, you might be able to get SONET fiber optic service to your premises. The lowest speed service is OC-3 at 155 Mbps, but in some cases this can be rate limited to provide fractional OC-3 service.

One final option is fixed wireless. This is unlike the lower speed 3G or 4G cellular wireless that is now available to business. Fixed wireless at 50 Mbps or more is a line of sight microwave service only available in major metro areas in the business districts. If your location qualifies, you can get fast and inexpensive installation compared to constructing a new fiber optic run.

So, how do you decide on the optimum solution for your company? Doing the research yourself can be time consuming and you may miss out on some opportunities that aren’t well advertised. Instead, run a quick online business bandwidth availability check for the options you want to consider and compare competitive pricing. You may be surprised by what has become available recently.


Note: Photo of BNC connector courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Long Range Ethernet Goes Beyond The LAN

Ethernet has grown from its inception in the 1980s to become the dominant Local Area Network (LAN) protocol. The big technical advance in this decade is the rise of Ethernet as a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) protocol of choice. It’s likely that when this process is complete it will be Ethernet as far as the eye can see. What is it that is driving this move to Ethernet everywhere and what advantages does it offer for your business?

What’s solidified Ethernet in the LAN for now and the foreseeable future is economy of scale. Nearly every piece of networking gear you can buy has standard copper or fiber Ethernet connectors. The most popular of these, of course, is the RJ-45 connector. You recognize it immediately without even having to look at the legends near the connector or any equipment manuals. Within the organization, everything plugs into Ethernet sockets to connect to the network.

The big disconnect occurs when you want your traffic to leave the confines of your building or campus. You might find a contractor who will interconnect businesses within an office or industrial park, but that’s about as far as you can install private network cable. You might get a little farther with optical line of sight or microwave wireless transmissions. However, if you want to be able to connect to the Internet or establish a private network around town or across the country, you need to use a telecom carrier.

The first carriers were local telephone companies. Today’s ILECs or Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers offer far more than telephone service. They have twisted pair copper bundles running to every home and business. They also generally have fiber optic cabling for their own use and to lease to major businesses. These services have their own unique protocols invented by the telephone industry to transport phone calls. Copper data transmissions use T-Carrier, such as T1 or T3. Fiber optic transmissions use SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standards, such as OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48.

How do you connect an Ethernet protocol network to a T-Carrier or SONET protocol carrier? Very carefully! You need what’s called a protocol converter. This is generally in the form of a plug-in module for your router. The conversion process changes the signals and timing of one protocol to another so that they can exchange digital data.

This conversion process has worked well for decades, so why change it? The reasons are efficiency, new services and cost.

What’s happened is that new competitive carriers have emerged. These carriers don’t have the legacy of telephone company standards to support and have embraced IP networking for their regional and nationwide fiber optic networks. Since your network runs Ethernet and their network runs Ethernet, it seems logical to interconnect them via Ethernet.

The standardization of what’s called Carrier Ethernet by the industry standards group, Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), has opened the door to handing off network traffic from business to carrier and between carriers within the Ethernet protocol. Getting rid of the conversions makes the process more efficient. More importantly, it has made possible services that you can’t get on the old telco networks. Notably, these are E-Line or Ethernet Line service and E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. The difference is that E-Line connects two locations and E-LAN can connect multiple locations in a mesh network.

By keeping everything as Ethernet, it is now possible to bridge LANs at two or more locations at the layer 2 level using Ethernet switches. Essentially, you take all these individual LANs and join them to form one much larger corporate LAN.

Another advantage of using Carrier Ethernet to transport your traffic is that it was designed from the beginning to be easily scalable in much finer increments than the telco protocols. You install a port, say 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10 GigE, that sets the maximum bandwidth of your connection. However, you don’t need to order the highest speed that the circuit will support you can start off at a quarter or half of that and then increase your bandwidth when needed. Often, all that is needed is a call to your Ethernet service provider. The change can be implemented in hours or days because there are no equipment swaps that need to be made.

Finally, Carrier Ethernet has a significant cost advantage compared to bonded T1, T3 (DS3) bandwidth and SONET services. On a per-Mbps basis, Ethernet often costs just half of what you pay for the older technologies. That mean you can save money for the company on your next telecom contract or double your bandwidth for the same budget.

Does long range Ethernet meet your needs? A good way to find out is to get competitive quotes for both traditional bandwidth and Carrier Ethernetservices and compare cost and features.

Advantages of a Wireless Business Continuity Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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