Triple Play For Business

One of the hottest trends in consumer telecom services is called the “residential triple play.” This is a bundling that combines three electronic services that nearly every home subscribes to. They are television, telephone and broadband.

The bundling is made possible because one provider can deliver all three at a combined price that is lower than buying the same services from three separate providers. Cable companies are in the best position to deliver the triple play, but the package is also offered by telephone companies and wireless service providers. The advantage for cable is due to the very high bandwidth capability of their HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) facilities.

That’s great for consumers, but what about business? Is there such a thing as triple play for business? You bet. It’s available for businesses with their own business locations.

Not surprisingly, a huge provider of triple play is Comcast. You may know that Comcast is the largest Cable TV provider in the US. Comcast broadband is hugely popular with both consumers and small businesses. But did you also know that Comcast is the 3rd largest phone company in America?

The idea that the coaxial cable from a Cable company is pretty much the same as the one that connects the TV antenna on the roof is way out of date. Today’s cable is a sophisticated collection of multiplexed channels that carry voice, video and data equally well.

Multiplexing is the technique that divides the 1,000 MHz bandwidth capacity of the coaxial combined fiber and copper transmission facility into neatly spaced 6 MHz channels. Those channels are exactly the same size as over the air TV channels so it’s easy to fit one TV station per channel. However, those channels can be used for other purposes as well.

The two most popular non-TV services on Cable are broadband and telephone. You have your choice of one or more standard business phone lines or an ISDN PRI trunk line that is bundles up to 23 lines for connection to an in-house PBX telephone system.

You probably are using DSL, satellite or T1 lines now for your business broadband service. It’s likely that you’re getting something like 1 to 2 Mbps download bandwidth. DSL can go higher, but your bandwidth decreases the further you get from the telephone company central office. Cable has such high bandwidth capacity, that it delivers business broadband at 50 to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. Comcast’s smallest service starts at 12 Mbps/2Mbps.

You’re probably wondering if you can afford a triple play package? It’s likely you can’t afford not to go this way if you have the type of business where your customers wait on-site, like a doctor’s office or auto service center. That's where the TV service of triple play has its value. There are also packages for businesses like bars and restaurants that serve a walk-in clientele. How much are we talking? About the price of that T1 line will get you faster broadband plus telephone service with basic TV channels included.

What if you don’t need television in your business? Is there such a thing as double play?

Of course. Many, many professional offices, retail stores and quick service restaurants need a combination of reliable phone service and high speed broadband to meet their needs. Get these two services cheaper than buying separately from a telephone company and an Internet service provider.

Can you cut costs while getting the same or better voice, data and video services for your company? It’s well worth your time to find out. Check availability and pricing for bundled business broadband, telephone and TV services now.

DS3 Router Included With Service

Are you thinking about upgrading your voice or data bandwidth? DS3 service will give you 45 Mbps for both upload and download. That's enough for bandwidth intensive uses such as video transfer, medical imaging or call center operations. But what do you have to do about getting a DS3 router to make the connection to your network?

Relax. DS3 is a mature technology and equipment is readily available. Prices for DS3 service are coming down, too. With more and more companies making the jump from T1 lines to DS3 bandwidth, you should find implementation fairly straightforward. In fact, there's a new DS3 option available that you might want to consider. It's line service with a managed router.

Why a managed router? For one thing, it gets you out of the business of having to manage DS3 connectivity yourself. If high bandwidth telecom circuits are your expertise, then by all means order the cheapest DS3 circuits you can get and handle the interface and service issues yourself. But if you'd rather not be in the middle of a finger pointing exchange between the telecom carrier and the router manufacturer, consider staying well out of that loop.

A managed router is one that is provided by the carrier who transports your DS3 signal. The router is installed on your premises and connects to your network through your own switching and routing. The port to your network is demarcation point where you take responsibility. On the other side, including the DS3 router itself, the service provider takes responsibility for the equipment and line operation.

The beauty of this arrangement become apparent even before a piece of gear in the carrier's network fails or some ham fist chops through an underground cable. The managed DS3 service provider monitors the circuit to and including the DS3 router on your premises. If something goes wrong in the middle of the night, they'll find out about it right away and perhaps have service restored before you know it ever went out.

Managed router service is growing in popularity as companies are forced to run with thinner IT staffs at a time when they are getting involved with higher bandwidth line services as technology advances. You can often get a router included with both T1 and DS3 services, if you wish. In many cases, the competitive environment will hold the cost down so that you'll pay little if any premium for this extra service.

If managed router service is of interest or you just want to see if you can save money before you renew your existing line contract, check DS3 service prices quickly and easily now.

Are Your Pipes Fat Enough?

As the resolution of data increases, WAN bandwidth can quickly become a choke point. Think of what happens when you get a kink in your garden hose. The data is the water and the pressure is the bandwidth demand. Any kink causes flow to decrease to a trickle, while the pressure or demand remains. A data link is like a water pipe in this way. Even when the kinks are removed through diligent network engineering, you can only move so much data though the pipe. If you want to move data more quickly, you need a fatter pipe.

Fat data pipes are becoming a necessity as electronic business data increases in quantity and resolution. An example of resolution is medical imaging files. They can easily be many Megabits, even Gigabits, per image. Try transmitting those through a 64 Kbps ISDN BRI channel and you'll feel like you're trying to fill a swimming pool with a kinked garden hose. Engineering firms are also switching from sending large drawings through the mail to transmitting them electronically to branch offices or customer locations. FAX transmissions need only small pipes, like telephone lines. Detailed blueprints and 3-D models that can be printed or modified remotely need fat pipes to transmit them in any reasonable time frame.

Video post production is another field where the medium has gone from film to video tape to digital data on disk. Sure, you can load the production onto video disks, hard disks, or magnetic tape and physically transport them from location to location. But that burns precious time. If you are on a tight production schedule or need to support live programming, a courier service isn't going to cut it. You need to be able to press the send button and have the file transfer in seconds or minutes to another location.

So what is a fatter pipe in the telecommunications vernacular? Serious bandwidth starts at the T1 level with 1.5 Mbps bidirectionally. A T1 line will send files of a few Megabytes in seconds. Often this is fine for text based contracts and specifications, low to medium resolution photographs, smaller CAD files general accounting and inventory updates, and many real-time IP security cameras. If you want to transmit more files in the same time, transmit larger files without having to wait hours or longer, or speed up the transfer of what you are doing now, you'll need a fatter pipe.

You can fatten a T1 pipe by bonding in more T1 lines. Bond a second line and you double your bandwidth from 1.5 to 3 Mbps. Bonding works up to 10 or 12 Mbps in many locations before it gets more expensive than moving up to a single fatter pipe.

The next fatter pipe is the T3 line at 45 Mbps. That's a substantial jump of 28x the capacity of a T1 line (the bandwidths mentioned are rounded figures). T3 lines are often used for real time video transport, high resolution images, large engineering files, and data backups to remote data centers. You can get this same bandwidth on a fiber optic carrier, where it is called DS3 service. In fact, DS3 over SONET fiber is more commonly found now than coaxial T3 lines.

If your facilities are wired for fiber, there is practically no limit to the available bandwidth. It's primarily a matter of budget, as fiber optic services start in the thousands of dollars per month and go up from there. But, when time is of the essence or team collaboration can multiply efficiency, even massively fat pipes may well justify their cost. With fiber optic services, you can get OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps, or OC48 at 2.5 Gbps. In many metropolitan areas you can also find native Ethernet services at 10 Mbps, Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps and GigE at 1,000 Mbps or 1 Gbps. At these line speeds, the WAN bottleneck can disappear as the speed of the entire network becomes equal.

So, are your data pipes fat enough or are you feeling the "pinch" of data slowing down as it leaves your LAN network for transmission to other facilities? The good news is that WAN bandwidth prices have come down greatly in the last few years. The cost of an upgrade to meet the transmission speeds you need now may be much less than you suspect. Why now let our team of bandwidth professionals take a look at your application needs and offer you a suite of competitive options?