Can You Use 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps Circuits?

By: John Shepler

The move to business software in the cloud increased the demand for high speed, low latency bandwidth. The introduction of AI ups the ante even more. What used to be considered high bandwidth may now be an impediment to getting work done. Fortunately, higher bandwidth circuits in the range of 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps are now readily available and at reasonable prices.

What Higher Bandwidth Offers
Why increase your bandwidth to 10 Gbps or above? Because you need it. Or, if you don’t absolutely need it, the improvement in performance and productivity justify the additional cost.

The amount of bandwidth you need is driven by the traffic on your WAN or point to point networks. As long as there is enough and the quality is high enough, the lines are essentially invisible. As soon as there are more packets ready to transfer than there is capacity to transfer them, trouble begins. Your circuit becomes congested. It shows up as increased latency, as packets must be buffered to wait their turn.

Response from the Internet and cloud slows down. Telephone calls have delays even to the point of sounding like you are on a two-way radio. Some packets might get lost creating garbled audio. Same for video. Two way conferencing gets jerky or frozen and may have missing pieces. Anything in real time suffers. Frustration by users increases. Workflow slows.

What Drives the Need for Higher Bandwidth?
Text messaging and email are now the least of the bandwidth drivers. Telephone audio might be if you have a large operation or a call center. Video for conferencing and watching online streaming is definitely a bandwidth driver. Don’t forget that more and more business processes are now being conducted in the cloud or at colocation data centers. The days of everything running on a server and some disk drives in the same building are gone for most everyone. At least some of what you do is processed remotely. That could be ordering, inventory, accounting, simulation and so on.

Replacing a sea of stand-alone PCs with a LAN was the first step. Now the LAN connects to a WAN and Dedicated Internet Access. The amount of traffic leaving the building is often more than what is handled strictly inside.

Don’t Forget About Big Data and AI
Data sets are becoming huge as more and more business and customer data is electronic. You don’t need more file cabinets, but you do need more disk space, including remote backup for safety.

AI is something new that consumes data and bandwidth like never before. As staffs are being encouraged to up their inference level and use as many tokens as they can to gain skill with AI models, the load on the connection circuits increases. Training can be even more of a overwhelming load as data bases have to be uploaded to the model. All of this is a demand on your network you probably didn’t see coming. But it’s here and it is only going to increase.

What Bandwidth is Available?
Most everyone needs Internet access and the best type for most business is DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. That is essentially a private line between your office and your service provider. Most of the congestion comes in the first mile when circuits are shared among many companies and residential users to save cost. Casual and undemanding users may not even notice the difference, but highly demanding businesses can easily see variations in performance throughout the day that are largely unpredictable.

Another form of private connection is direct cloud access, which connects you to your data center or cloud provider without going through the Internet. No sharing means faster and more consistent performance.

Dedicated private lines may also be leased to interconnect your facilities directly. This is like extending your LAN to cover multiple locations. Once again, no traffic sharing with other businesses and definitely no traffic sharing with the general public. Better performance and better security.

Is your network not keeping up with today’s needs? Increase productivity and future proof your connections with Dedicated Internet Access, direct cloud access, dedicated private lines, wavelengths and even dark fiber with bandwidth from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps and above.

Internet SDN Mimics MPLS At Much Lower Cost

By: John Shepler

High performance, high cost. Low performance, low cost. This has been the story of WAN bandwidth connections for business. You can save a bundle with Cable or DSL Internet broadband, but the reliability and performance variations may drive you nuts. Or, you can pay up for a proprietary private line solution or MPLS network and enjoy high reliability, low latency and consistent line speed… if you can afford the price. If there was only a way to make the Internet perform like an MPLS network, that would be a huge cost saver. Well, thanks to SDN, now there is.

What SDN is All About
SDN is the latest buzzword for the cutting edge of telecommunications connections. Sometimes you’ll see it described as Hybrid SDN or SDN-WAN. Here’s what those acronyms mean and how they can work to your advantage.

SDN simply means Software Defined Network. That’s to distinguish it from the traditional hardware-based networks that were pioneered by the telephone companies and later used to create digital private lines and the backbone of the Internet. Today’s IP networks are chock full of individual routers and switches that set the architecture of the network. MPLS networks have an even more rigid topology created from specialized label switches that do the traffic routing.

A software defined network moves the intelligence of how the network makes decisions away from the pre-determined and hard to change path and routing assignments to a software program that orchestrates how the hardware elements behave at any given time. SDN-WAN is a Wide Area Network running under SDN control. This may be a hybrid of Internet, private line and MPLS networks all connected together to make one virtual WAN network.

What’s Holding Back The Internet?
The lure of the Internet is a siren song that has been easy to embrace, but, sometimes, with dire consequences. The reason is that the Internet was never designed to be a replacement for the hardware defined circuit switched telecom networks. It was meant to be a shared pool of resources that moves packets of data from one place to another accurately, no matter what goes wrong on the network. TCP/IP ensures intact files. It doesn’t offer any guarantees as to when those files will get to their destination. Your files aren’t any more or less important than anyone else’s.

Consequently, today’s Internet users experience variations in performance that might be annoying to a home user trying to watch a movie, but a productivity killer to a business running software as a service in the cloud. Voice and video two-way communication is dicey because network neutrality means there is no way to prioritize traffic. The streams of VoIP packets take their turns with huge file transfers. When the paths get congested, conversations become garbled and calls sometimes drop.

Making The Internet Great For Business
Take a closer look at what’s going on in the Internet and you’ll see that most of the problems are concentrated in “the last mile” connections and not the core network. The reasons that compromises are made to keep the cost of connecting low. For instance, DSL and Cable, the two lowest cost wireline broadband access technologies, include shared and asymmetrical bandwidth with no service level agreements. You take what you get in the way of instantaneous bandwidth, network congestion, latency, packet loss and reliability.

You can improve on this by moving to Dedicated Internet Access or DIA. That includes T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, OCx SONET, Ethernet over Copper, and Fiber Optic Carrier Ethernet. All of these “carrier grade” solutions provide a more solid connection to the Internet, but at a price. That price is anywhere from 2 or 3x the cost on up to 10x or more.

Where Do Private Lines and MPLS Fit In?
You can get the highest performance network in terms of high bandwidth, low latency, jitter and packet loss, and availability by building your own private Internet. A classic way to do this is to run dedicated private lines between every location you wish to connect. That gets very pricey very fast. MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks improve on cost by essentially giving you a private Internet among all your desired locations for a price that’s better than dedicated private lines but still much higher than the Internet.

Companies have embraced MPLS for their internal communications among headquarters, branch offices and data centers when performance is paramount.

How SDN Mimics MPLS at Lower Cost
Truth be told, the performance of Cable Broadband solutions is far superior to what you could get a decade ago. You can get bandwidth levels of 100 Mbps or even 1 Gbps at bargain rates. It’s the variability that’s the bugaboo of Cable, DSL, 4G Wireless and the Internet itself.

What SDN controllers do is manage your connectivity resources on a continuous basis. You’ll need more than one connection for the SDN to have something to manage. These might include Cable broadband, DSL, 4G, Dedicated Internet access, private lines and even satellite in remote areas. The SDN will decide what traffic goes over what circuit depending on the characteristics of each network moment by moment. If no circuit is perfect, it might send the same traffic over multiple paths. More critical applications, such as VoIP and video conferencing, will get priority on the higher performance paths.

In essence, you are creating classes of service to prioritize your traffic even though the Internet itself does no such thing. Your costs will be lower than an all-private solution and you have the added advantage of being able to connect anywhere on Earth, including to your customers and suppliers, via the Internet. The world-wide core infrastructure is already in place and the cost is being amortized over many millions of users.

Do you suspect that you are paying much more that you could be for your wide area network connections? Find out now if there is a readily available lower cost SDN-based bandwidth solution that meets your requirements.

Long Haul Voice, Video and Data via MPLS Networks

By: John Shepler

Many companies need to transport voice, video and data over long distances, between cities, coast to coast or even internationally. Both the Internet and dedicated private lines are ways to effectively do this. But there is another option that you may not be aware of. That’s using MPLS networks for the majority of the distance involved. Why does this make sense? How do you choose among the options?

Internet Transport
The big advantage of the Internet is that it is already in place. You can get from just about anywhere on Earth to anywhere else with a simple broadband connection at each end. If your location and your destination are already Internet connected, there is no need to do anything special even if your two locations have never communicated before. Just send your packets from the source address to the destination address and they’ll get there.

This system works great for email, Web pages and non-time critical file transfers. It starts to fall down on real time interactive communications, such as VoIP telephone calls and video conferences. The quality of transmission can vary all over the place from minute to minute. Security is nonexistent for anything sensitive unless you add your own encryption. That’s called creating a VPN tunnel.

The reason that the Internet works great for certain applications and not others lies in its design. The Internet grew out of a government research project for creating a robust computer network that could withstand all sorts of natural and manmade disasters. The Internet automatically does its best to get your packets where they are intended regardless of network congestion or line cuts and equipment failures.

The Internet will almost always get your files transferred… eventually. If the packet loss is high, multiple retransmissions may be needed to get a perfect copy at the far end. If some or all of the network is congested, your files will get through when they get their turn. Most of the time this is no problem, but on occasion there will be delays.

For voice and video, congestion, jitter and packet loss are disasters. If the content is sent as a complete file, it can be treated like data and transmitted without error. But, if the content is streaming or two-way, resending lost packets doesn’t much help. By the time they get there, the stream has moved on.

One way streaming voice and video works much better is when you use a buffer to load in the packets as they arrive and then feed them out to the application at the desired rate. The worse the network conditions, the bigger the buffer you need to ensure your stream won’t stop or break up.

Two-way real time streams are much more sensitive. Buffering doesn’t help because it only adds time delay or latency. You say something and the party at the far end hears it a second or two later. If you’ve ever tried to communicate via a geosynchronous satellite you know how annoying this can be, and that is only a half second to a second of latency.

Dedicated Private LInes
The consumer world is tied to the Internet and its vagaries. Businesses with quality, timeliness and security concerns have long used dedicated private lines to handle their traffic. The beauty of a private line is that it only goes from point to point and doesn’t need to be routed. Since these lines are dedicated to your exclusive use, you don’t get contentions with other traffic on the network. As long as you have sufficient bandwidth and a high quality connection, the line will be transparent to your packets.

Another important characteristic of private lines is security. It’s pretty difficult for anyone but the most dedicated and skilled snoops to “tap” your line and read your traffic. There is no public access because it’s your private line. These lines are highly secure but can be made more impenetrable by using encryption between end points.

Private lines beat the Internet in all but a couple of areas. One is cost and the other is connectivity. Using the Internet is cheap because the cost of all that network infrastructure is spread of millions and millions of users. Consumer and low cost business connections are bargain priced because they are shared bandwidth that is offered on a “best effort” basis without any performance guarantees.

Private lines are at the other end of the cost spectrum. The cost of the line and necessary support equipment is spread over one user… you. You have to pay the full cost of the line but you do have exclusive use and the security and high performance that comes with it. This can get pricy when you need a line that goes for thousands for many thousands of miles.

The other issue is that not all locations can be connected with many private lines. It’s true that T1 lines (1.5 Mbps) are pretty much universal, although they need to be specifically installed at each end before you can send any traffic. Higher bandwidth solutions, such as Ethernet over Copper, SONET fiber, and Ethernet over Fiber may not be available where you want to go.

Why MPLS Networks Make Sense
It seems like the perfect solution is a network that is widely available, like the Internet, but performs like private lines without the high costs. Perhaps surprisingly, there are such networks. They are called MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching.

That mouthful of a name means a couple of important things. First of all, MPLS can transport a variety of protocols, including voice, video and data in most any format you need. Second, the label switching technology is unlike that of Internet routers, so MPLS networks are much harder to “hack.” Since there is no public access, the chances of some rogue troublemaker gaining access to the network are slim. For this reason, they are often called MPLS VPN networks because the technology of the network makes it virtually private without encryption. Of course, you can always add your own encryption to make your traffic even more impenetrable.

Yes, when you are using an MPLS network you are using a shared resource with many other customers of the network. However, it isn’t the free-for-all of the Internet. There’s no such thing as network neutrality on MPLS. Each customer pays for the bandwidth it needs (commonly called the CIR or committed information rate) and is guaranteed similar to private line performance with a service level agreement (SLA).

How about cost? Since the cost of the MPLS network infrastructure and operating expenses are spread over many clients, your cost of using the network is considerably less than leasing your own private lines. This is especially true if you are connecting internationally or need multiple private lines between different destinations. Think of the MPLS network as a cloud that is connected to each of your locations by a much shorter private line. The network cloud takes care of routing the traffic among your last mile connections.

Which is the best solution your long haul voice, video and data transport needs? Get comparative pricing and features for dedicated Internet access, point to point private lines and MPLS networks now.

Private Cloud In a Kit

The benefits of cloud computing are being widely touted as the next generation of Information Technology. You’ve read a lot about this, but are still somewhat apprehensive about moving your valuable proprietary applications into a public multi-tenant cloud. With security somewhat unproven, you’d really like to keep everything privately under your control. Does this mean abandoning the competitive advantages offered by the cloud?

Not at all. Remember that there are actually 3 types of clouds readily available. The public cloud is the most talked about and the pioneer in popularizing cloud computing. The other clouds are the private cloud and the hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private, with some applications running in a private cloud and other, less sensitive, applications running in the public cloud.

Even if you are cloud savvy, there is still the question of cost. Public cloud cost savings are well documented and promoted. They’re based on premise that a large special purpose data center operator serving thousands of simultaneous clients can offer IT services at lower cost that each of those clients running their own data centers. But what about the private clouds? Can they really save you anything?

You can build your own private cloud right in your data center. It’s a matter of virtualizing all those servers and disk drives so that act as a pooled resource. This prevents the utilization problems of many low demand applications owning expensive hardware resources while high demand applications run out of capacity under peak loads.

Now you can also rent private clouds offered by major cloud service providers. These providers have acknowledged that the public cloud isn’t for everyone and that it makes sense to include private clouds within their data centers. The private cloud consists of a set of servers, disks, racks and so on for the exclusive use of a single client. Whatever capacity you aren’t using at the moment idles. In a way, this is very similar to using dedicated private lines for communication instead of shared bandwidth consumer-oriented connections.

What’s the advantage of renting private cloud services over building and running your own facilities? It comes down to capital and operating expenses. Renting instead of buying lets you avoid the capital investment needed to acquire expensive servers and peripherals. Operational costs may also be lower because the technical staff at the cloud provider can support your equipment as well as many others. Small companies might not even be able to justify 24/7 technical staffing for their data centers. The cloud service provider has multiple experts on duty at all times.

Another advantage common to all cloud services is that you pay as you go for only the resources you actually use. The size of the cloud data center guarantees that there are more resources than you can possibly use yourself. Contrast this to running out of processing power and having to wait for more equipment to be delivered or over-provisioning and paying way too much for the capacity that is in daily use.

CenturyLink, a major telecom and cloud services provider, has created an affordable and easy to use private cloud environment that is suitable for small as well as large businesses. Smaller companies may have avoided the migration to the cloud simply because they lack the understanding and expertise to make it all run effectively. Century’s savvisdirect AppGrid is the answer to this dilemma. It lets you get up and running in less than two business days, select the CPU, RAM , storage space, management & reporting tools, firewalls, load balancers, switches and databases you need. You configure all of this with an online graphical interface to make cloud setup almost trivially easy.

AppGrid is Platform as a Service (PaaS) that lets you develop your cloud applications and then put them into production without having to move to a different infrastructure. If your needs change, you can easily reconfigure your private cloud to meet those new requirements.

Are you interested in learning more about the merits of cloud services and the tradeoffs among the various types of clouds? Get free consultation, features and pricing for cloud services that meet your business needs.

Dynamically Allocate T1 Service

T1 lines have been used for decades to carry both voice and data. It’s commonly assumed that you need to specify which you are going to transport prior to installing the line. If you want voice, a channelized T1 line or ISDN PRI configuration is ordered. Each of the 23 or 24 channels will handle one telephone conversation. On the other hand, if you want a point to point T1 data line or dedicated Internet access, then you order a clear channel T1 line so you can use the entire 1.5 Mbps as a single pipe.

Many companies have multiple T1 lines installed because they need both high volume telephone service and dedicated Internet access. They may also have T1s available as dedicated private lines to branch offices or other business locations. All of these lines are ordered and configured separately. Is there any possibility of combining functions?

Indeed, there is. Let’s consider the channelized T1 line. Each of the 24 channels is independent and can carry one digitized voice call or 64 Kbps of data. The line doesn’t know or care what those bits represent. At each end, you have to know which channels are voice and which are data. The voice calls are all separate, of course. The data channels can be combined into one larger stream.

Early implementations of combined voice and data or integrated T1 lines did exactly that. They set up a channelized T1 line so that some channels were used to support business telephone calls and some were used for broadband data. Let’s say we simply divide the line capacity in half. That way 12 channels are used for 12 business phone lines. The other 12 are used for dedicated Internet access. 12 channels times 64 Kbps per channel gives you 768 Kbps of broadband service.

Why go to this trouble? A considerable portion of the cost involved in provisioning a T1 line is the local loop. That’s the twisted pair copper wires that run from your building to the telephone company central office. From there they can go to a competitive service provider or the phone company can use them for its own services. If a competitor wants the line they have to pay the phone company a lease fee that is passed along to you as a loop charge. Every time you add a T1 line you add an additional loop charge. If you can get one T1 line to do two functions, you only pay that loop charge once.

Integrated T1 service works well for smaller businesses that don’t need more than 12 outside phone lines or high bandwidth Internet service. Many smaller retailers use the data capability for credit card verification and for inventory control and other back office functions with headquarters. That plus telephone service takes care of their needs.

One glaring inefficiency in using a T1 line this way is that allocations are fixed. Any of those phone channels not in use simply sit there idle. That seems like a waste, since that idle bandwidth could help speed up Internet traffic if it was available. This is why newer implementations of integrated T1 use a different technology. Instead of dealing with all those channels independently, they convert the phone calls to packets and merge them with the data packets from the computer network. The combined data stream fills the T1 capacity of 1.5 Mbps. There is no idle capacity. Everything that isn’t voice is used for data.

Of course, for this to work the latency and congestion sensitive voice packets must have priority over the less critical data packets. That’s exactly what is done using Class of Service tagging. Voice packets always get higher priority. Whatever capacity they don’t use is automatically available for broadband data. This process is called dynamic allocation of bandwidth.

If that sounds a lot like the way a SIP trunk works, it’s because that’s exactly the way it is organized. In fact, SIP trunking is the new Integrated T1. Small SIP trunks use T1 lines, but you can also get higher capacity trunks using bonded T1, Ethernet over Copper, DS3, OC-3 or Ethernet over Fiber. The line works the same way on all of these. It is only the bandwidth that is different.

Could your business benefit from the cost savings of using a single Integrated T1 or SIP Trunk to supply both telephone and broadband Internet service, while maintaining excellent voice quality? If so, get prices and availability of dynamic line services like SIP trunks and Integrated T1.