Increase Bandwidth Without Increasing Costs

Bandwidth, especially WAN bandwidth, is in demand. Some companies treat it like a scarce resource. Why? Because bandwidth costs are expensive. While 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps might be considered modest bandwidth levels on a company LAN and readily affordable, as soon as you need to connect beyond your network edge the costs jump dramatically.

Here’s why that’s the case. Communications beyond the LAN have been traditionally handled by telecom service providers. In fact, these connections employ telco developed technology deployed originally for use exclusively by the telephone companies. Later, these line services were offered to businesses as computer networking and communication became popular.

In recent years, more companies have gotten into the metropolitan and wide area networking business. Most of the newest entrants have designed their core networks around the latest technologies to transport voice, video and data packets with quality of service controls. That’s not a knock on legacy suppliers, who have been transforming their networks from switched circuit to packing switching in line with the changing needs of the marketplace. However, it’s important to recognize that there is much more competition in this field than in decades past and much of it is coming from companies that don’t have huge legacy physical plants to support.

This gives you an idea on where to find immediate cost savings that you can pocket or use to upgrade your current bandwidth. If you bought your circuits years ago and simply renewed contracts as they came up or have been paying on a month to month basis, there’s a pretty good chance that you can get a better offer. How do you go about doing that? The hard way is to do a lot of looking for alternative providers and then put in lots more time making phone calls and negotiating various offers.

The easier way is to let a telecom broker, like Telarus, Inc., pull together a set of competitive quotes tailored to your business location or locations. That’s right, each location that needs service will require a separate quote process. It’s because most bandwidth services are location dependent based on facilities in place at or near that location. You may get one price, while another site across the highway may have a significantly different quote.

What ensures that you are getting the best deals you can is to have multiple carriers vying for your business and going through a large brokerage that can command the best rates from those carriers. You actually have more leverage going through a broker than winging it on your own. The broker’s commission comes out of the carrier’s sales budget, not added to your bill. If this makes sense to you, get a set of bandwidth quotes for your business needs and see what the potential savings are.

The other way to gain bandwidth at the same or lower cost than you are paying now is to switch technologies. A very popular migration right now is from traditional T1 lines to Ethernet over Copper. Both services are highly reliable, have symmetrical bandwidth that is the same for both upload and download, and are provisioned over ordinary twisted pair telco wiring that is usually already installed. The differences are available bandwidth and cost.

T1 lines run at 1.5 Mbps. You can double that to 3 Mbps by bonding two T1 lines together, but your costs double right along with the bandwidth. Ethernet over Copper offers 2 Mbps and 3 Mbps bandwidth service for about the same price as a single T1 line. This makes it easy for a company to double WAN bandwidth or dedicated Internet access without having to raise the telecom budget. In addition, EoC offers bandwidth levels of 10, 15, 20, 30 and even 50 Mbps in some areas. Bonded T1 tops out at around 10 to 12 Mbps with multiple T1 lines.

You can see that there are at least two good strategies to gaining more bandwidth without a corresponding cost increase. The first is to get competitive bids through a large telecom broker representing dozens of service providers. The second is to switch to a newer technology that offers lower costs for equivalent bandwidths. You can take advantage of both these strategies by requesting competitive quotes for available bandwidth services for one or more business locations.

Insatiable Demand For Ethernet Bandwidth

Not so long ago, 10 Gbps was considered an enormous amount of bandwidth. So enormous that it only made sense for carrier backbone networks. Not anymore. Now enterprises are gobbling up that much WAN bandwidth and looking for more.

Who could possibly require 10 Gbps, short of an Internet service provider or MPLS network operator? Financial services, streaming entertainment media and medical campus connectivity are three applications on the cutting edge of high bandwidth demand, as reported in Carrier Ethernet News. How much more would they like? Some are licking their chops at 40 Gbps and even 100 Gbps.

How can a carrier keep up? Make no mistake about it, competitive service providers are in a scramble to make sure they have enough capacity to supply this burgeoning demand for higher and higher bandwidths. The once impressive T1 line is now considered a small business service. DS3 still hangs on for medium size business applications. OCx SONET, recently the darling of large enterprises, is starting to see its flame flicker on the way out. What’s happening is more than a simple escalation of bandwidth requirements. It’s a wholesale move from legacy telecom services to Ethernet connectivity.

Why Ethernet? There are a couple of strong forces at work nudging WAN bandwidth suppliers in the direction of offering Ethernet rather than some other type of connection. The first is a realization that analog telephony, the impetus behind the buildout of the massive PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), is now the smallest piece of the bandwidth pie. It’s the PSTN standards of T-Carrier & SONET that created the digital WAN services that have been pressed into service for data packet transport. The big piece of the pie is digital data and biggest piece of that pie is video.

No only are data packets the predominant information that needs to be moved from one place to another, but the networks generating those data packets are nearly all based on Ethernet. Why switch to something else just to get from one Ethernet network to another?

That’s what many carriers have concluded. Their new state of the art national and international networks are all designed to transport Ethernet packets. Those packets may represent voice from enterprise VoIP telephone systems, video conferencing or video streaming, medical images, or data file transfers. Interfacing and management of Ethernet bandwidth is more compatible with local area networks running Ethernet, but that’s not all. In most cases, Ethernet bandwidth is cheaper on a Mbps or Gbps basis than any other service.

How much cheaper? That depends on what facilities are available in your location more than anything. If you have competitive Ethernet services available, it’s not uncommon to get twice the bandwidth for the same money or keep the bandwidth you have now and get a big cost savings.

Can you ignore the Ethernet revolution? Only at the peril of your budget! It’s quick and easy to see what Ethernet bandwidth services are available for your business location. Why not take just a minute and put in a request for services and pricing now?