Bandwidth Without Usage Metering

By: John Shepler

Perhaps the most unpleasant experience of broadband is hitting your data cap. You may have forgotten it was even there. But, like the cop hiding behind the highway billboard, it pops out at the most inconvenient times and, boy, are you in trouble. Let’s have a look at what data limits are all about and what you can do to avoid hitting them.

Where Did Usage Metering Come From?
The big problem is scarcity. Bandwidth is like electricity. If we had unlimited amounts at minimal costs, there would be no need to meter it or even limit your line speed. Such is not the case.

Take 5G cellular for instance. The demand for Internet broadband has always been way ahead of capacity buildout for the cellular networks. 2G was pitiful. 3G was still bandwidth starved. 4G LTE greatly improved on cellular capacity to the point that most people didn’t run out before the end of the month.

5G offers the promise of billions of “things” all communicating autonomously and people using fixed wireless from their cellular provider to replace services like DSL, cable and T1 lines.

Have you been watching what is happing with 5G? There is a mad scramble to build towers, feed them with fiber optic cables or microwave backhaul, and lobby the government to assign more and more of the limited radio spectrum to high speed Internet. It’s cellular vs satellite vs independent WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) vs television vs government vs everybody else to grab as much bandwidth as possible.

Why? The amount of spectrum you can press into service determines the speed of your connection and the amount of data to divvy up among users. Thus the feeding frenzy among service providers.

Even wireline and fiber optic services have their limits. Twisted pair landlines are pretty pokey by today’s standards and fiber optic requires a huge capital investment. A fiber bundle has enormous capacity, but only where the fiber has been run. It doesn’t blanket an area like wireless does. Each location needs its own fiber connection.

How Carriers Allot Their Capacity
All bandwidth services have limited capacity. Wireless has the most constraints because the electromagnetic spectrum has only so much available in the popular frequencies that travel reasonable distances and penetrate walls. Fiber and HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) is less constrained but has high costs to build out.

Carriers divvy up their capacity and sell it to users by slicing and dicing what they have. The two limitations that they put on users are speed in Mbps or Gbps and usage in total Gigabytes. Speed determines how much of the total bandwidth you can use at any given moment. Total capacity limits keep a few high data users from uploading and downloading continuously so that other’s can’t get online.

You see, the price you pay for Internet access is much less if the carrier can assume that you aren’t sending or receiving all the time. Much of the time you may not even be accessing remote servers. When you do, you’ll send or receive a certain bundle of data and then pause before doing more. By allowing many customers to share one big line, providers can give everyone reliable access at greatly reduced cost. That’s the principle behind cable broadband, satellite services, and cellular broadband.

In practice, this works well for consumers and many smaller businesses. They just don’t need to be sending enormous files one right after the other. On cable, you may never hit your allotted limit or even know what it is. With cellular and satellite, you may have and “unlimited” plan, but just try continuously streaming video or doing massive data transfers and you’ll run into what the carriers call “fair use” provisions. Yes, there are limits to unlimited plans.

What happens if you consume more that your “fair share”? Your service provider may choose to simply issue a warning, or may slow your speed so you can’t hog so much of their capacity. Or they may charge you for extra GBs of usage. Worst case, they’ll simply cut off your service until the next month’s billing cycle begins.

How to Avoid Usage Metering
Medium and larger businesses and heavy Internet using companies with cloud services and remote backup storage may well exceed even the most generous fair use quotas. The best option then is to order services that aren’t metered at all. Those tend to be private lines and dedicated Internet access.

Dedicated lines without usage metering give you two advantages. First, you are not sharing with other companies or residential users. The capacity of the channel is yours and yours alone. If you order a Gigabit Dedicated Internet Access fiber service, you can feed it traffic continuously and nobody is going to complain. Plus the speed of your service won’t vary with competing traffic, because you have sole usage. This is particularly valuable with business critical applications and real-time services like video conferencing that run in the cloud.

A private line is like dedicated access except that the Internet is never involved. You connect point to point or in a private mesh network where others cannot interfere. Even the core Internet gets congested from time to time. Your private lines are like private superhighways. Your traffic, and yours alone, is what is carried. If you are using cloud services extensively, consider a direct line from your business to your cloud provider for the highest performance.

Have you been hitting the limits of your Internet service or being warned by your provider that they may heavily up-charge you or cut off access? Consider the advantages of ordering dedicated private lines and dedicated Internet access without usage limits to keep your business running smoothly.

Data Caps: What They Are and How to Avoid Them

By: John Shepler

If you are a moderate or heavy online user, you have probably bumped up against data caps at some point. Just what's the story behind these seemingly arbitrary usage limits and how do you work around them?

OK, What IS a Data Cap?
A data cap is nothing more than a limit to the amount of data you can transfer through a communications channel over some period of time. While providers could set limits per hour or day, data caps are almost always defined now as so many MB or GB of usage per month. Your allocation is reset at the beginning of each month or 30 day period. You draw down your allocation over the time period as you surf the web, transfer photos, videos or data files, or backup your computer to the cloud. If you run out of data before you run out of month, there are consequences.

Why Caps Are Imposed
Data caps, especially tight ones, tend to be imposed on channels where capacity is limited. There are so many users and they each would like to have the link to themselves. If there isn't enough bandwidth to go around, the capacity that is available has to be rationed among the pool of users. This can be done by apportioning the bandwidth in Mbps among the pool of users. The other option is to let each user have the max bandwidth they are paying for but limit how much they can use the channel. That keeps heavy users from "hogging" the resources 24/7 so that lighter users never get much in the way of access.

Where do you find these data caps? Wireless services have had them from the get-go. Satellite is really another form of wireless and has similar usage limits. Wireline and fiber optic services have much more capacity than wireless channels, so the data caps are set much higher. While you might be limited to 20 GB per month on a LTE cellular wireless plan, that limit is more like 500 GB on a cable broadband plan. Only the heaviest Internet users will likely hit the cable usage limit so most people think there really is no limit.

It's important to note that data caps are really there to police fair usage of a limited resource that is shared among many users. All consumer broadband services and their equivalents sold to businesses are shared bandwidth services. The service provider buys an unlimited usage telecommunications line and then divvies it up to serve its paying customers. Each customer is assigned a bandwidth limit of "up to" so many Mbps and a usage limit of so many MB or GB per month. This arrangement keeps the most customers happy most of the time.

What Happens If You Go Over the Limit?
There are various ways of enforcing fair use of an Internet channel. Cellular plans started out setting a fixed usage limit and then automatically charging for every MB or GB you went over the limit. The danger of a plan like this is that you may not know how much you've exceeded your allocation until you get an astronomical bill. Most providers will give you the courtesy of a notification when you approach or exceed your limit to avoid the sticker shock.

A more draconian method of dealing with overages is to simply cut off service once the limit is reached. At that point you have to manually contact the provider and buy some extra capacity to get through the month or cease usage.

Neither of these usage limit methods goes over well with broadband customers. A kinder, gentler arrangement is to forget about cutting off service, but limit your access speed once you hit the limit. You might get throttled back to 10 percent or so of normal service bandwidth until your account resets at the start of the next billing period. This is unpleasant, but at least you can always get online to some extent.

What About Unlimited Usage Plans?
Check the fine print on your contract. You're likely to find something that specifies a "fair usage" limitation. Sometime they don't specify a hard limit but say that the provider has the right to impose fair usage restrictions. In fact, you may have all the capacity you want... at least for awhile. The fair usage clause tends to be imposed if you are someone who is using the service far and beyond what the bulk of other users are doing, or if the provider lands a lot of customers and doesn't have the ability anymore to give them all they want.

Services like satellite and cellular wireless have definite limitations due to the number of radio channels they are licensed to use and the carrying capacity of the particular technology they are using. Higher speed doesn't automatically get you higher data caps. If you aren't careful, that higher bandwidth will simply allow you to use up your allocation quicker.

Is There Any Way Around Data Caps?
You might not know this, but there are dedicated private lines and Internet connections that don't have any data limitations at all. These are the professional grade copper and fiber lines that the service providers themselves order and partition to sell to you and a hundred or a thousand other customers. Businesses, but not residential customers usually, can also order these telecom services and have all the capacity to themselves.

Typical line services are T1 at 1.5 Mbps, the classic standard, T3 or DS3 at 45 Mbps, OC3 SONET at 155 Mbps, Ethernet over Copper at 10 to 50 Mbps, and Ethernet over Fiber at 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps. These are called "dedicated" line services because all of the resources are dedicated to YOUR business. That means you get 100% of the line speed all the time. It also means that you get all of the line capacity. You can load up a 100 Mbps Ethernet line to full capacity for the entire month and not pay a penny extra. Your monthly lease cost is fixed.

How About Costs?
Well, that's the rub. You will pay more for a dedicated line service than you will for a shared bandwidth service, as you'd expect. Even so, there's little value is paying a low ball price for a service that doesn't give you the capacity you need. If you wind up paying overages every month, it might make a lot more sense to simply pay up for a line that doesn't have overages. You can then forget about having to watch your usage all the time or limit the activities of your employees.

When Does Dedicated Line Service Make Sense?
If your application naturally taxes the capacity of a communications line, such as a service or content provider or a company that has critical business applications in the cloud, you may be happier with dedicated line services beyond the unlimited usage. Dedicated lines have constant rather than varying bandwidth, plus low latency, jitter and packet loss.

What type of bandwidth service is best for your company and your applications? Check dedicated and shared bandwidth service options and get free consulting help now to help you sort through the options available for your business location.

Dedicated vs Shared Internet

By: John Shepler

Business Internet service options can be defined by bandwidth level, but it may be more important to distinguish between dedicated and shared service types.

What is Dedicated?
Dedicated bandwidth means what it sounds like. This bandwidth is dedicated to your use and no one else’s. That may seem obvious, but the rise of shared bandwidth in recent years has muddied the waters. Why would you share bandwidth if you could have it all to yourself?

The reason is cost
Shared bandwidth options are available at just a fraction of the cost you’d pay for similar speed dedicated options. That makes some business users think twice about how much they really need exclusive use of the line. You should make this choice after careful consideration, though, and not just as a knee jerk reaction to the sticker prices. If you make the wrong decision you could suffer with a connection that frustrates employees and kills productivity.

T1 and DS3
Dedicated bandwidth was long the standard for business. Once companies migrated from low speed dial-up or 64Kbps lines to broadband, the popular telecom standard services became T1 at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. These are repurposed telephone trunks and offer both dedicated and symmetrical bandwidth. Both T1 and DS3 have been popular for decades are still available at very reasonable prices for both point to point and Internet access.

Unlimited Usage
A characteristic of dedicated line services is that there are no usage limits. You can load up the line with continuous file transfers, like for remote data center backups, or use it lightly for email and Web access or occasional communications with remote offices. Either way, the maximum amount of data you can transfer in a month is the line rate in Mbps time the number of seconds in the month. Whatever isn’t used just sits idle because no one else can make use of it.

About Symmetry
The symmetry of the bandwidth is also important. Symmetrical means that you get the same amount of bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. This is typical for commercial telecom services. It is essential for PBX telephone trunks, but also valuable if your traffic is heavily bi-directional. Branch office to headquarters connections, video conferencing and cloud access tend to be bi-directional.

Asymmetrical / Shared
The other types of bandwidth are asymmetrical and shared. These tend to go together. Shared bandwidth became popular when residential broadband was established. Home users couldn’t afford commercial telecom lines and rarely needed that level of performance. Most Internet access is skewed in the download direction. This includes Web pages and, especially, streaming and downloaded multimedia. Email tends to be bi-directional, but the files are generally fairly small and infrequent.

Cable & DSL
The Cable and Telephone companies took advantage of the fact that few users are online all day every day to divvy up a large dedicated telecommunications service among dozens or hundreds of individual users. Each user pays a modest fee. All the fees collected go to pay the much larger cost of the dedicated high speed line that feeds all users.

Cost of Bandwidth
It is not uncommon for shared bandwidth services to offer 10 times or more download bandwidth for the same price as a dedicated line service. The upload speed of the shared service is only a tenth to a fifth of the download speed but that doesn’t generally matter if what you need is basic Internet access. The catch is that this shared bandwidth is a maximum figure. At any given time the bandwidth you measure can be all over the place. You may get 10 or 100 Mbps one minute and 1 or 10 Mbps the next. It’s impossible to predict your actual line speed because how much you get is dependent on how many other users are online and how heavily they are accessing the Internet.

Network Issues
There are a few other issues with shared bandwidth. One is network congestion. The Internet itself can become congested with too much traffic from time to time. Most often, though, it’s the access network that clogs up with too many simultaneous users. The other issue is latency and jitter. These are unimportant for file transfers, but will wreak havoc on VoIP telephony and two-way video. Geosynchronous satellite links suffer particularly high latency.

Fair Usage Limits
Also, bandwidth sharing leads to bandwidth rationing. If you look closely at the contract, even “unlimited” services have a “fair usage” limitation. If you hog so much bandwidth that it impacts other users, you may have your bandwidth throttled to a lower speed, get cut off or be charged overage fees. Cellular broadband is famous for overage charges. Satellite services tend to throttle bandwidth. DSL and Cable have much higher usage limits but may cut back or cut off your service above certain levels. None of this is experienced with dedicated line services.

Current Dedicated Services
Today, T1 and DS3 are being replaced by Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. These are both dedicated symmetrical bandwidth services. MPLS networks are multi-tenant wide area networks that offer better pricing for long haul connections with committed information rates and symmetrical bandwidth.

SOHO Needs
How do you choose between dedicated and shared Internet connections? It depends on how sensitive and critical your needs are. Small retail operations that only need Web access, email and credit card verification, and perhaps want to offer their customers a free WiFi hotspot can benefit from the cost savings of shared bandwidth services. So, too, independent professionals in small or home offices who choke at the prices of dedicated lines.

Enterprise Needs
Medium and larger size organizations generally go for dedicated line services. This is especially true if varying network performance affects productivity or if you use enterprise VoIP phone service, HD video conferencing, remote data center connections or cloud hosted services. In fact, for the highest performance, dedicated point to point lines and MPLS networks can ensure bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss and quality of service beyond what the Internet can offer.

How to Decide
How do you choose the right bandwidth option for your operation? Consider your requirements and compare a range of competitive services for cost and performance. It’s easy to do that with an automated online bandwidth finder, but be sure to get recommendations from a expert consultant also.