The Sun is Setting on Copper Telecom Lines

By: John Shepler

It has been rumored for a long time and now it’s really underway. The end of over a century of copper wire based phone and network lines is here, with a key event on June 30. That’s the start of AT&T’s first major wave of wire center decommissioning. Over 277 of these facilities will go dark when completed, with more waves of decommissioning to follow. In the end, we’ll have completely moved on from Alexander Graham Bell’s original network.

What The Loss of Wire Centers Really Means
In simple terms, a wire center is where all the wires connect. It’s the building that connects the central office switching with all the local loops. That’s often thousands and thousands of individual twisted copper pairs that are bundled into larger cables. Your analog phone line, the “landline” or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line, is one of these loops. You can trace the wire pair directly from the phone jack on your wall all the way to the line card at the central office that provides power and signaling to run the phone handset.

Those twisted pairs can carry a lot more than individual phone calls. They can be set up with digital termination equipment to provide DSL and T1 broadband or PRI digital multi-line phone service. They may also be used in special applications such as fire alarms, elevator phones, gate entry systems, security systems, and fax machines.

Decommissioning means taking these lines out of service. No more wire center. No more copper line service.

In actuality, the phone companies that own these lines have already been discouraging their use through higher service prices and refusal to add more customers. Another group, copper wire thieves, have been doing their own decommissioning by cutting and stealing cables and then burning off the plastic insulation so they can sell the copper at recyclers. Copper prices are way up due to the expansion of data centers, electric vehicles, and solar power, to name a few.

What Replaces Copper Telecom Lines?
Like the incandescent light bulb, it’s time to move on from 19th century technologies. The new options are primarily fiber optic and wireless.

Fiber voice and broadband started with phone company Optical Carrier standards but has migrated to Carrier Ethernet standards to be compatible with the vast majority of company networks. Ethernet over Fiber service ranges from 10 Mbps up to 100 Gbps, with Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE becoming popular standards.

You need what is called an Ethernet Port at your end. That connects via fiber to your service provider, often an Independent network operator but perhaps a traditional telco. The speed of the Ethernet port limits the amount of bandwidth you can have. A Gigabit port lets you order up to 1,000 Mbps. A 10 Gigabit port supports anything up to 10,000 Mbps.

There are different flavors of fiber optic service. Your Internet access can be on a fiber line that is shared among many businesses and residential users to save cost. You may prefer to order Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) so that your connection to the Internet itself in essentially on a private line.

Direct Cloud Access is a similar service without the Internet being involved at all. You have a private fiber service from your facility to your cloud service provider. This gives you the best low latency and low congestion for higher productivity and smoother voice calls and video conferences.

You might also want to consider dedicated point to point fiber to interconnect your facilities across town or around the world. These private lines offer high performance and better security than what you could hope for on the Internet.

Wireless Options
Of course you have mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers that connect to the Internet using 5G cellular broadband. Another flavor of that services is Fixed Wireless Access. It comes in a box with higher gain antennas and Ethernet connection. It’s the 5G broadband without the phone features. There are also options to add outside antennae for better coverage and some controllers offer multiple providers for service continuity if one company goes offline temporarily. FWA can be as speedy as fiber, but without having to run the fiber line itself.

Some Wireless Internet Service Providers do not use cellular networks. Instead, they have their own towers and beam and point to point signal to a small dish antenna on your roof. These are very private lines and can have Gigabit or higher speeds.

Satellite broadband and satellite phone have been around for years. The broadband using geostationary satellites can be very reliable and speeds have been improving with newer generations of satellites. The half second or more of latency due to the distance to geosynchronous orbit is one sticking point. LEO or Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations, primarily SpaceX Starlink, reduces the latency to something similar to terrestrial broadband. Bandwidths are also competitive for many applications. Just stating now is direct to handset service that turns satellites into alternative cell towers. Soon there will be no dead spots, even in the most remote areas.

What to Do About Specialty Services?
Those fire alarms, fax machines and elevator phones that were designed for twisted pair copper and nothing else still have hope. AT&T, among others, is offering a “POTS Replacement” service that consists of 4G LTE cellular wired to support these services along with built-in battery backup. Why 4G LTE? This standard can mimic the old phone lines and is still readily available.

The One Remaining Copper Service
There is still one very popular copper broadband service, but it is not from any phone company. This is Cable Broadband that is brought in on coaxial copper wiring. In reality, the cable companies have converted to fiber optic transmission, but the latest DOCSIS standards let them keep their existing copper coax into your building and still achieve speeds of 1,000 Mbps or even 10 Gbps… competitive with fiber.

Is your company experiencing an upcoming loss of service due to copper decommissioning? No time to wait. Find out what copper replacement services are available for your business needs. You may be surprised to find you can actually get more capability at a lower cost.

Goodbye Employees, Hello Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Office employment has been undergoing a major shift since the rise of the Covid Pandemic in 2020 and it’s likely to accelerate rather than return to “normal.” Office buildings nationwide have been emptying out, some being converted to residential units or commercial malls. Even with employees being ordered to return to the office or be replaced, things aren’t really going to go back to mass commutes five days a week, as we’ll soon see. This also has major ramifications for the bandwidth you’ll need and where you’ll need it.

Reluctant Office Workers Offer Opportunities
How do you get ‘em back in the office after they’ve seen work from home?

That might be the title of a song for the 2020’s. The abrupt culture shock from everyone being sent home, with most expected to keep on working, did indeed break the expected paradigm of where you are supposed to be all day. Once appropriate computers and Internet connections got settled, quite a few customer service reps, programmers, and other information workers found they could work just as well from a spare bedroom or dining room table as in the corporate cubicle. Their productivity even improved without the distractions of office chatter or pro-forma meetings.

Employees might have picked up an hour or two of extra personal time not spent commuting and some could drop the expense of outside daycare for children. Meanwhile, companies that continued this arrangement after the pandemic threat had passed found they could reduce office space expense, including real estate and utilities.

One demand that might have increased is the need for fast highly reliable bandwidth to connect now far-flung individuals. Residential Internet connections have improved greatly during this millennium. High speed cable broadband, fiber to the home and 5G fixed wireless access have made most connections nearly transparent. For more demanding applications, SD-WAN and dedicated point to point private lines can reduce latency and congestion.

Not All of Us Are Coming Back to the Office
Remote work may be a boon for some employees and their employers, but many other companies, including some of the largest ones, want the old culture of co-located teams back for camaraderie and supervision. In fact the managers are insisting on it. To some extent this coalescence will occur, but there is another force at work that is going to disrupt it again.

Artificial Intelligence is heralded to be the next dramatic productivity improvement. There is a mad scramble on to build data centers and secure baseload power to support the coming tsunami of AI applications. These promise to be far more sophisticated than the inane chatbots on many sites that can’t seem to answer the simplest questions. Expect these to get a lot smarter. A lot of the coming AI will not be customer facing. It will handle back office paperwork, data entry, report writing, proposal generation, language translation, code generation, graphic arts, network monitoring & troubleshooting, quality control, financial analysis, legal research and medical image diagnosis just to name a few.

In other words, the century long migration from farm to factory to office is about to hit a brick wall of automation. There is already concern that new hires in white collar professions will be facing an increasingly tough job market, followed by job eliminations right up the ladder.

What Network Technology Will You Need?
If office automation is soon taking over, what do you need to plan for to support this transition? In addition to remote worker systems and bandwidth, you’ll need robust connectivity to the AI data centers where many of these applications will reside. Any apps that deal with the customer directly will require substantial Internet connections, likely right from the data center. Your office team will also need solid connections to those same data centers. The Internet may not be adequate for high bandwidth, low latency, jitter, packet loss and general congestion. A dedicated fiber optic private line, also called a cloud on-ramp, can make this connection transparent and help maximize productivity.

A lot of your communications may be in the form of video conferences, including a mobile workforce and well as the office staff. Don’t forget to include enough mobile bandwidth so that the people in the field are as well connected as those in the office.

Finally, you may be looking at whole new systems of computers, phones, pads and other devices that integrate your staff, management, suppliers and customers along with the AI applications that make it all work seamlessly.

Are your business needs in a state of change? Yesterday’s solutions might not support your future. Let an experienced technology advisor help you acquire the networking services you need to stay at the top of your markets.

Today’s Best Business Broadband Options

By: John Shepler

If you are still using a copper wireline service, such as DSL or T1, for your business Internet connection, it’s time to upgrade your service… before you are forced to.

Forced to? Why would that be? Fact is, the major telecom companies are all in the process of decommissioning their copper wire assets. Basically anything that uses century-old twisted pair wiring is on the way out.

Technology marches on. T1 lines were once considered broadband. They don’t even qualify with today’s standard. DSL? Pretty much an obsolete system that was once a good way to re-purpose standard telephone lines for fast Internet access.

AT&T and others have made it clear that they are either pulling up old copper lines or abandoning them to rust in place. The wire centers or central offices that connect to these lines are being repurposed as data centers for the insatiable needs of AI.

So what are better options? Surprisingly, one of the best is also an older technology that has continuously upgraded to keep it competitive with the times.

Cable Broadband Is a Great Deal for Small Business
That coaxial cable that plugs into the back of a set-top box or cable modem has been a familiar tech standard for many decades. Physically, it’s the same. What’s changed is the signal that comes out that center wire.

Cable was originally analog, just like TV signals back in the day. When the Internet came along, some of the unused TV channels were set aside for digital transmission using a standard called DOCSIS or Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an invention of the industry’s R&D organization CableLabs. The current standard is DOCSIS 3.1 with a migration underway to DOCSIS 4.0.

Today’s cable modems are cable of gigabit speeds, with common service levels of 300 Mbps downstream, 30 Mbps upstream. That’s fast enough for pretty much all web browsing, video streaming and data transfer. What’s hard to beat at those speeds is the price. Cable is easily affordable by both consumers and smaller businesses, often with telephone service included.

Wireless Broadband is Now Both Mobile and Fixed
Like cable, cellular wireless had humble beginnings as a mobile telephone service, but has kept up with the times through multiple technology advancements. The first standard that really supported broadband as well as telephone was called 3G. That’s evolved to the current standards of 4G LTE and 5G. With 300 Mbps or so, an iPhone has all the bandwidth it can really make use of.

That high bandwidth, which can reach a Gigabit per second near some of the 5G towers, is easily competitive with fixed broadband services. The capacity limits have been largely eliminated with 5G buildouts and the extra spectrum acquired from government auctions of unused television bandwidth. Now the wireless companies are in a competitive battle to roll out cellular modems that work like cable modems but without the wires. You can put one at a construction site or a pop-up store in minutes. If you move soon, take it with you and have connectivity at your next location.

Cable broadband is being built into laptop computers and tablets and other devices, called the Internet of Things. Remote data acquisition and control are now possible in remote areas that have cell towers but no other connectivity.

Fiber, The Gold Standard and Secret Backbone
The magic that makes cable and cellular broadband so fast is the fiber optic lines that feed these services. It’s all behind the scenes, of course. Even so, you may want to connect directly to fiber yourself.

What’s the fiber advantage? Nearly unlimited bandwidth for one thing. Today’s service levels run from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps just about everywhere, with 100 Gbps service available in some metro locations. That’s important for medium and larger enterprises with many employees who need simultaneous Internet access.

Another big advantage is symmetrical bandwidth That means if you have 1 Gbps downstream, you also have 1 Gbps upstream. Contrast that with most cable and wireless services that offer much higher download than upload speeds. If you need to transfer files up and down regularly or have demanding video conferencing requirements, this can be important.

A third advantage is very low latency and jitter with minimal congestion. This is because fiber is usually a dedicated service, not shared like cable and cellular. For even higher performance, consider a dedicated line between your company and your cloud service that bypasses the Internet completely.

Need the ultimate in performance? Dark Fiber that you “light” with your own equipment gives you complete control of protocols and bandwidth allocation. It’s like having your own network extended across town or across the country.

Do you need a replacement Internet connection or are ready for a bandwidth upgrade or perhaps even a cost saving? Check out the Business Broadband Options available right now.

Is Cellular the New ISP?

By: John Shepler

Internet Service Provider technology has evolved dramatically in the last few decades. It stated out as audio modems over classic landline phones. Then came broadband with DSL and Cable. Business broadband started with ADSL, T1 lines & DS3, upgraded to SONET fiber and then Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Now we may be headed back to telephone technology, as 5G cellular make a move to become an accepted Internet Service Provider.

What’s 5G Got to Offer?
5G is the latest in a long line of technology evolution for wireless mobile phone service. The earliest cellular 0 and 0.5G emerged in the 1970’s, followed by 1G and 2G technologies in the 1980’s. These were voice technologies designed to make the traditional telephone set wireless and mobile. SMS messaging appeared in 2G with e-mail and simple Web browsing added with 2.5G and 2.75G.

The first mobile service that really could be called broadband Internet access was 3G, 3.5G and 3.75G. This is what supported the rise of smartphones. The next generation (G stands for generation level of technology) 4G and 4G LTE (long term evolution) made cellular broadband a real contender as an Internet Service Provider.

The latest phones with 5G are seeing Internet speeds in the dozens to hundreds of Mbps with low latency, jitter and packet loss. The millimeter wave bands support Gigabit per second service and that may be upgraded to 10 Gbps downlink and 1 Gbps uplink with 5G-Advanced upgrades.

5G vs Cable and Fiber
More and more business is being conducted on smartphones and tablets vs desktop computers and even laptops. WiFi is useful indoors to avoid burning cell usage quotas, but while mobile and at customer locations you’ll likely be connecting via 5G from your service provider. Since that applies to all of your mobile devices, the value of an Ethernet connection is limited to desktops and wired phones, with WiFi helpful in moving about in the office or at select locations, such as restaurants.

With so much computing being done via 5G, is it possible to replace everything with a 5G account that supports all your devices?

For an increasing number of consumers and small business users, the answer is yes. Replace your cable modem or fiber termination equipment with a 5G hotspot and continue using the Internet as you always have. You may not even notice a difference in performance. Let’s face it. Once you’ve got all the bandwidth you can reasonably use at one time, doubling or tripling it doesn’t make things go any faster. The limit will likely be the server at the other end that you are connecting to.

Since 5G speeds are often a couple of hundred Mbps or more, the difference between wireless, DOCSIS 3.1 cable and Ethernet over Fiber might not even be noticeable. Where the difference does show up is in your usage limit. That’s only important if you are a heavy user or a corporate operation with dozens or hundreds of users online at the same time. It’s especially true if your business applications are being run from the cloud and accessed via the Internet.

Limitations of 5G Broadband
Yes even with “unlimited” plans, you can’t hog all the bandwidth of the cellular provider all the time. The system isn’t designed for continuous uploads or download from a single customer. Bandwidth is scarce and must be shared with a multitude of users on each tower. Your provider may not drop your connection, but you might find it slowing down severely, especially during busy times, when you are using more that your fair share of capacity.

Another issue to consider is upload vs download performance.Casual web browsing and media streaming is demanding on the download side and not so much for upload. Business applications that transfer large files to and from remote servers or the cloud may well need upload bandwidth that rivals download performance. Video conferencing and telephone call centers also need both upload and download capability about equally. This is where fiber shines. Business fiber is typically symmetrical with upload and download speeds the same. This is also usually provided with no usage restrictions, something you are unlikely to find with cable and 5G.

Selecting a Service
What service works best for your business? It depends on what you are doing and how intensely you are doing it. Some companies will find that only high speed fiber optic service will meet their needs. Others will be fine with cable or 5G wireless service at a lower cost.

Another consideration is ability to connect. While fiber may offer the best performance, there may be no fiber near your rural location or you may be in a dense metro location that hasn’t been “lit” yet. Some companies have found it best to quickly connect with a 5G hotspot and use that service while waiting for fiber to be brought in over a period of weeks or longer.

If you have a need for new or expanded broadband Internet service or are simply curious if you can make a better deal, learn what business broadband options are available and suitable for your business.

The Cable vs Fiber Broadband War

By: John Shepler

There’s a broadband battle underway right now. It pits cable business broadband against Ethernet fiber optic bandwidth. These are the two leading technologies that will dominate business Internet now and for the foreseeable future. There is also a third contender warming up that we’ll discuss a bit later. Let’s see what the two big players have to offer.

Fiber Takes Over From Copper
The first century of telecommunications was dominated by twisted pair copper wires that provided the last mile for landline telephones, multi-line business phones, point to point computer connections and, when it started developing, the nascent Internet. The ground is chock-full of multi-pair cables. Some will be pulled out and recycled. Others will be left to slowly disintegrate.

Their technological replacement is fiber optic cables. Glass fibers take the place of plastic coated copper strands. Optical fibers have tremendously more bandwidth carrying capacity. A copper T1 line can deliver 1.5 Mbps. A fiber can deliver a Gigabit per second up to at least 10 Gbps. It’s no longer uncommon to have 100 Gbps fiber optic service available for business use.

Fiber itself has undergone a technical evolution in protocol from the early SONET telecom standard to Carrier Ethernet, otherwise known as Ethernet over Fiber. This upgrade made sense as telecom traffic changed from largely audio phone calls to digital computer packets.

What Fiber Optic Service Can Provide
Fiber broadband is readily available and can offer 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps bandwidth. This bandwidth is usually symmetrical, meaning the same speed for upload and download. It is also generally dedicated. That means you don’t share your fiber capacity with any other businesses. It’s all your traffic from your building to where it joins the Internet. This makes for much more consistent Internet performance.

Many companies have been moving from having their own in-house data centers to hosting that equipment at a co-location facility or leasing the same capability from a cloud provider. If your business software is running remotely, it often makes sense to have a direct connection from your offices, factories and warehouses to the cloud provider and avoid any potential congestion from the Internet.

Direct connections are also useful between company facilities, such as branch offices and any owned data center facilities. Essentially, you are extending your LAN out to include all your locations.

How Can Cable Compete with Fiber?
Cable got its start as a community antenna that fed a small town or city. Like fiber, cable has come a long way technically. Analog has transformed into digital. Still, isn’t cable a bandwidth limited copper connection?

Less than you might think. The drop or final connection to your business is still the familiar coaxial copper cable. The innards of the system have long ago upgraded to fiber, just like the telecom industry. That means most of the distance travelled is over fiber optic cables, some with as many as 100 fibers. The TV and Internet signal is converted to drive a copper drop cable just before it reaches your building. This system is referred to as HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax.

The other big advance in Cable broadband has been the upgrading of cable modems using the DOCSIS standard. Most modems are now DOCSIS 3.1 that has the ability to support downstream data speeds of up to 10 Gbps and upstream speeds of 1 Gbps.

DOCSIS 4.0 is in the process of being deployed. This equipment upgrade will support downstream speeds of 10 Gbps plus upstream speeds of 6 Gbps.

Clearly, today’s cable broadband is easily a match for all but the most demanding fiber speeds. One difference between Ethernet fiber and cable broadband is that cable is usually asymmetrical to match the typical usage of retail customers on the Internet. In other words, the demand for download speed is usually more than the demand for upload speed. Often download is 10 times as fast as upload.

Another difference is that cable broadband is a shared access service in the last mile. This means that some heavy users may impact the performance of other users from time to time. For consumers, this is usually not a problem. For a business that depends of steady high performance for employee productivity using cloud services, it could present an issue.

Why Pick One Service Over the Other?
For consumers and many smaller businesses, cost is tie-breaker. Cable business broadband is generally less costly than Ethernet over Fiber for similar bandwidths. However, if you need symmetrical bandwidth, dedicated Internet access, dedicated point to point connections, or a dedicated line to your cloud provider, fiber optic connections can be well worth the added monthly cost. It should also be mentioned that some Cable companies are now offering access to their internal fiber optic networks as a premium bandwidth service.

Wireless is the Next Competitor
There is a new entry to the broadband wars that is also worthy of consideration. That is fixed wireless broadband. Once a niche service over very small areas, fixed wireless is now being offered by the major cellular carriers. What has made this possible is the advancement to 4G LTE and 5G. Mobile phones with 300 Mbps or more Internet service are now common. By providing a high performance modem without the telephone features but including Wi-Fi or LAN connection, carriers can deliver high speed broadband over their wireless networks already in place. Advantages include very reasonable pricing and little or no construction cost. You pick up the modem at the cellular store or have it shipped to you and install it yourself right away. It’s also perfect for pop-up stores and construction sites that are only temporary locations.

Which is best for your business? Cable broadband? Ethernet over Fiber? Fixed Wireless? Get pricing and availability for each of these bandwidth options and then choose the right solution for you.

So Long T1 and POTS, Hello AI

By: John Shepler

Have you gotten the word from your telecom service provider that your T1 lines and POTS telephone lines are scheduled for decommissioning? Perhaps you’ve seen news items to this effect. It’s true. The major landline telephone companies are determined to replace their more than a century old copper cables with the newer technologies of fiber and wireless. It’s happening faster in some parts of the country than others. Like the incandescent light bulbs of the same era, copper telco connections are being relegated to history.

Why Do They Hate Copper?
Copper has served us well from the gilded age to this millennium. Copper POTS phone lines are highly reliable and are powered by the phone company. If you lose power, the phone still works because the equipment has battery backup at the central office. If you want the same functionality with your VoIP phones on the Internet, you’ll need add that battery backup at your end.

Copper T1 lines have been the mainstay of both business Internet connections and PBX phone systems for decades. Some companies use them for direct connection from one business location to another. As private lines, they are more secure than the Internet and you avoid the congestion when everyone in the area is trying to work online at the same time.

Like all legacy technology, T1 and POTS lines are getting a little long in the tooth. A T1 bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps was once considered broadband. Now 1.5 Gbps has the same respect. Analog POTS lines and their own unique telephone network are being replaced by LAN and WAN network connected phone systems, often with switching systems in the cloud. As a result, there are fewer and fewer users of these older circuits. Most consumers are primarily dependent on their cell phones and have dropped landline phone. Businesses are heading more and more to the cloud and using fiber optic direct connections to get there.

This is creating quite a dilemma for the phone companies. The incumbent local carriers own all that copper and it is not getting any younger. Fewer customers means less revenue. Corroding wires and insulation result in more any more repair calls. The cost of maintaining that copper plant keeps going up and up.

Copper’s Replacements Are Mostly In-Place
The replacement for all that copper interconnection is fiber and wireless. Fiber has the advantage of nearly unlimited bandwidth. With wavelengths and multiple strands per cable, there is lots of unused capacity that can be pressed into service as data demands increase. The limitation to date has been too few routes installed and lit for service. That’s changing fast. Many cities have seen the future and are contracting for municipal fiber that runs past every home and business. Cellular 5G and eventually 6G require fiber to get the required bandwidths.

The other replacement technology is wireless. The same 5G towers used for phone calls also support fast broadband in the dozens or hundreds of Mbps. Mobile Internet nearly everywhere is already in place. A newer wrinkle is a 5G access point, essentially a phone without the user interface, that installs in a home or business. You have broadband Internet service that is always-on and you don’t need to worry about connecting to a fiber or cable.

There are still dead spots. Sparsely connected areas may not have fiber, cable or cellular coverage. They mostly did have landline phones, though. The replacement for these areas may be GEO or LEO satellite, as they may never get cell towers or fiber lines.

What Becomes of The Copper Facilities?
Oddly enough, the latest technology may provide a new lease on life for the oldest. One proposal is to gut those telco central offices and points of presence and install high powered servers to support the demand for Artificial Intelligence.

The facilities with utility power, battery and generator backup, HVAC, and weatherproof buildings are already in place. By upscaling them to be small data centers located near potential customers, the growing demand for AI services can be supported faster than with all new construction. Another major benefit is the lower latency that comes with having computing at the network edge rather than centralized thousands of miles away.

The copper itself may well be mined to support the need for electrical transmission, electric vehicle propulsion, power generation and more. Some copper cables are pulled out of their conduits as fiber is installed to make room for the new fiber. Copper in the ground and central office wiring may become a welcome source of recycling, much as scrap aluminum is melted down and repurposed. No point in letting it corrode to dust if it costs less to reuse than smelt new ore.

Do You Need Copper Replacement Services?
Have you been notified that your copper telecom services are going to be discontinued or are you just interested in how much more bandwidth you can get for the same or less cost each month? See what fiber and wireless services are available for your business now.

10 Mbps Ethernet T1 Line Replacement

By: John Shepler

Early in your business, you needed a robust connection as things were just ramping up on the Internet. Dial-up was too annoying. DSL was too flakey. SONET fiber was just way too expensive and had bandwidth you’d never need. T1 was the right solution at the right time. Always on. Always reliable. Low latency, low jitter and low packet loss. That 1.5 Mbps bandwidth may or may not still be getting the job done, but like all good things, T1 is coming to an end. What to do now?

It Still Works. Why Get Rid of It?
T1 lines were based on telephone lines. That is, twisted pair copper wires. That was the genius of the design. The phone companies could install T1 service using the same wiring they already had in place for multi-line business phones. Just about any business could get T1 and many, many did over the decades.

So, why not stick with a winner? Two reasons, really. First, the Internet today isn’t the nascent Internet of the ’90s. E-commerce is pretty much universal. Nearly every business has a website and most take online orders. A lot of businesses are online only. Those that aren’t still need to be connected for credit card verification, inventory control, supplies ordering and customer interaction. High definition graphics and video have supplemented email and text files that dominated early Internet use. A T1 line’s 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is getting to be a limitation for even small business operations.

The other reason is that copper telco lines are something like incandescent light bulbs. They’ve served us well for more than a century, but it’s time for new technology to take over. Phone companies own the copper lines in the ground and on poles. The costs of maintenance are getting too high considering the dwindling number of users. More and more areas of the country are seeing phone company notices that copper service is being discontinued. The replacement is generally fiber optic or, in some cases, wireless broadband.

A Sensible Replacement for T1 Internet
If you need a bandwidth upgrade or find yourself being cut-off from T1 service, you might be interested in an entry-level fiber optic bandwidth service called 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. What you get is 10 Mbps always on bandwidth versus the T1 line limit of 1.5 Mbps. It is also dedicated to your business only, so that you are not sharing this capacity with other companies. That means your speed won’t be varying depending on what others are doing. This is Carrier Ethernet service that is directly compatible with your Local Area Network. Just plug it into your router and go.

Oh, but how much more will you pay for this faster service? Thanks to extensive buildouts and more competition in fiber networks you may not pay any more for 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA than the old T1 contract you’ve kept renewing. Maybe even less.

Fiber Optic Ethernet is Easily Upgradeable
Once you have fiber installed, you should be good to go for the foreseeable future. That’s because the fiber itself has nearly unlimited bandwidth. What you are using is determined by the terminal equipment installed in your business and how much you want to pay each month. You may start off with 10 Mbps but then find you really need 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps to support your expanding business. These days Gigabit Ethernet is standard for many companies and more are bringing in 10 Gigabit service. In rare instances with unusually high Internet demand even 100 Gbps makes sense.

Typically the provider will install a GigE or 10 GigE port for your service. You can then order up to 1 Gigabit with the GigE port or 10 Gigabits with the 10 GigE port. Many providers will give you an online account that lets you change your bandwidth at will. You’ll automatically get billed for the higher rate when you upgrade. Unlike the old SONET days, upgrading bandwidth won’t generally require a truck roll and change of terminal equipment at your site. You can make the speed increase yourself almost instantly.

Private Lines Also
Ethernet over Fiber offers private lines as well as Internet access. A private line connects two locations directly and does not use the Internet. That means you are unaffected by Internet congestion or other Internet problems. Many businesses are choosing to host their business software in the cloud rather than run their own data centers on-site. A dedicated private line from your location to your cloud service provider, called a direct connection, helps to make the system run smoothly without lags and cutouts.

Are you ready for or in-need of a replacement for your aging T1 Internet line? If so, check competitive pricing on 10 Mbps and higher Ethernet over Fiber service now.

Advantages of Dedicated Point to Point Fiber

By: John Shepler

If you are running a business and your broadband connections are driving you crazy, you may want to take a look at an alternate solution called dedicated point to point lines. Let’s have a look at what they are and what they can do for you.

What Does Dedicated Mean?
Dedicated means that the bandwidth you are paying for is dedicated to your operations only.

But isn’t all bandwidth dedicated if you pay for it?

This is where it gets a little tricky. If you look closely at what broadband providers offer, they say something like “bandwidth up to 300 Mbps” or a similar disclaimer. Yes, the service you bought is capable of running at 300 Mbps. When you run a speed test, you may well see it clock-in at 300 Mbps… but not necessarily every time you test.

Why is that? It is because the bandwidth you got for such a bargain price is shared, not dedicated. You and multiple other users, including other businesses and consumers, are all connected to the same access line. When demand is low, you get screaming speeds. When everybody wants to download or upload files at the same time, that available bandwidth will be divvied up fairly so that everybody gets a share but nobody gets the line all to themselves. You might be waiting a bit.

If you want the line all to yourself and your business, you need to order a dedicated service. With dedicated bandwidth there won’t be other users outside of your organization competing for your line bandwidth. Whatever you aren’t using at the moment simply sits there idle for the time being.

You can greatly improve the stability of your Internet service with what is called DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. That’s a dedicated line from your company to your Internet Service Provider, where it connects to the Internet itself.

Will that guarantee smooth performance? Not really. Remember that the Internet is a shared service by its nature. There will be congestion and failure points from time to time no matter how you connect. The next step up is dedicated point to point fiber service.

Dedicated Point to Point Fiber
Dedicated lines have been available for decades using copper pairs and legacy telecom fiber called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. Nowadays the best value is Ethernet over Fiber or EOF.

Fiber optic Ethernet services, sometimes called Metro Ethernet Fiber, are directly compatible with your servers using standard Ethernet interfaces. Unlike the Internet, you specify what two locations you want connected. The provider installs ports at each location and you have an always-on dedicated point to point fiber connection between them. You can order service starting at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps and go up to 10 Gbps easily. In metro areas 100 Gbps bandwidth is available if you need it.

Advantages of dedicated point to point or P2P lines include solid bandwidth that is not affected by what other customers are doing. The link is inherently more secure than the Internet because there is no public access. Your bandwidth is usually symmetrical, meaning that it is the same for upload and download. That’s important if you are accessing remote servers to upload and download large files. Most shared bandwidth services are asymmetrical with download speeds typically 10x what you get for upload.

What are good uses for dedicated P2P fiber? The traditional application is linking multiple business locations. You may want to connect your headquarters and branch offices on the same private network so that someone across the country seems like they are just down the hall. Remote servers in colocation facilities or your own remote data center can also benefit from “extending the LAN” using dedicated P2P. Today that’s extended to the cloud, be it public, private or hybrid cloud services.

Do you need the stability and performance that dedicated point to point fiber line services can provide? If so, find out what fiber optic services are available for your business locations.

Cost Saving Shared Fiber, Wireless and Coax

By: John Shepler

You need connectivity but are feeling the pinch of inflation. Is there any way to get a business online and not break the bank? Sure there is. If they work for you, shared bandwidth wireless, cable coax and fiber optic connections are available at bargain prices. Let’s have a look at these.

What is Shared Bandwidth?
You are probably too young to remember telephone party lines, but how about roommates at school? That’s the sharing economy. It’s based on the idea that if something is expensive you can still have it as long as you join with others to foot the bill.

Internet connections can be had the same way. A fully dedicated high speed symmetrical fiber optic link can run into the big bucks every month. If that’s what you must have, then you’ll just have to come up with the lease fee. But, if your usage isn’t all that demanding, you can probably share the line with others, not limited to users within your company, to split the cost.

Now, this is where shared bandwidth services differ from the old party lines. Back in the day, a single analog phone line would serve multiple households in the same area. When you picked up the handset, you might hear a dial tone or you might hear someone else’s conversation already in progress.

The polite thing to do was hang up and wait awhile before you tried again. More often that not, curious individuals would simply cover the mouthpiece and eavesdrop on the call.

Shared bandwidth isn’t really like that… for the most part. You and another customer aren’t going to see each other’s traffic on your screen. The routing in the system keeps your data streams separate. However, all your bits are intermingled on the same line. A clever hacker can figure out how to monitor whatever traffic they can access.

The way around that limitation is encryption. Encrypt all your traffic and you’ve created a secure tunnel through the public Internet. That’s critical for using WiFi hotspots, but important for any shared access or easily tapped-into connection. Most websites and email services have gone to secure connections that are encrypted, but all your file transfers should also have this layer of security.

Shared Bandwidth Via Coax
Cable broadband is the originator of the coaxial copper connection. This standard was originally designed for analog cable TV and community antennas. Eventually a cable connector came standard on the back of TV sets. Later, Cable providers became Internet Service Providers by developing a modem that could connect to their coaxial line and share the bandwidth between TV and Internet.

The modem technology that does this is called DOCSIS for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. The most common version is 3.1, which is capable of multiple Gigabits on the downline side. The newest is 4.0, which can support 10 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream.

Shared Bandwidth Via Wireless
Smartphones have had excellent Internet service starting with 3G and 4G LTE. The small screen requirements are easily supported and were quite useful even with the old 2G standard. The standards also serve tablet computers, laptops and in some cases desktop computers, especially when other ISPs are offline. The bandwidth is often enough from a shared smartphone connection. The one limitation for desktop usage is that you might run up against monthly data limits.

With 5G service, cellular providers have begun promoting the use of their Internet service at fixed locations. They even have a name for this: Fixed Wireless Access. Instead of sharing your phone with your desktop, you buy a 5G gateway that may offer an Ethernet port for your network or WiFi hotspot. It connects to the provider like a phone, but without the mobility or voice service. There is simply an incremental charge to your cellphone bill each month. If you have good signal strength, you may get bandwidth of a hundred or two hundred Mbps without a wired connection.

Shared Bandwidth Via Fiber
Fiber optic service used to be only for major corporations and priced accordingly. Now fiber is so widespread that you can get Ethernet over Fiber Dedicated Internet Access in most reasonably populated areas. Bandwidths are available from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps and even 100 Gbps in major metro locations.

Fiber Internet is highly desirable and prices have dropped dramatically over the years. Even so, you may still want a lower cost option. Did you know that you can still have fiber for a bargain price? The technology involved is called PON or Passive Optical Networking. The provider takes that high bandwidth dedicated fiber line and divvies it up among 32 users using a passive splitter. Each customer still gets a fiber line, but the bandwidth on that line is being shared among multiple users just like cable broadband. In fact, cable companies are pioneers in building out this technology. You get fiber bandwidths, but with pricing that is more similar to cable services.

Limitations of Shared Bandwidth
While you won’t be seeing your neighbors messages popping up on your screen, you will likely still feel the effects of sharing. During periods of heavy usage, the service slows down. You might even detect congestion that brings everything to a crawl and then, just like with traffic jams, magically disappears. VoIP phone calls can break up. Video conferences can stutter or freeze. Cloud applications can become sluggish.

Another characteristic of shared bandwidth connections is that they are usually asymmetrical. That means that the download speed is much higher than the upload speed. Typically, a factor of ten or so. For Internet browsing or email, this may make no difference. It could impact video conferences and large file transfers up to cloud storage.

You can improve on this with a dedicated Internet access or with a software defined wide area network or SD-WAN. This is a technique for combining multiple Internet connections. The SD-WAN controller assigns traffic to the most appropriate link, with sensitive applications like phone calls getting the highest priority on the fastest paths. SD-WAN can let you combine a fast shared and low cost line with a small dedicated line. The result can be a service that gives you all the performance you need at a lower cost than a high speed dedicated fiber line.

What bandwidth service is most appropriate for your business? Find out what shared and dedicated Internet and private line services are available at better prices for your particular location.

10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access Availability

By: John Shepler

Once considered a massive bandwidth suitable only for carriers, 10 Gbps is rapidly becoming the in-demand connectivity for businesses, municipalities, medical centers, content providers, and e-commerce. But is this bandwidth level readily available at a reasonable price? Indeed, it is.

Where is 10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Available?
Most municipalities have 10 Gig Ethernet readily available because of the rapid deployment of fiber optic infrastructure. Fiber is necessary to provide the bandwidth to support 4G LTE and 5G cell towers, replacing legacy T1 copper lines. Fiber is also at the heart of cable systems even though the connection to the cable modem is still coaxial copper. Cities are now installing fiber infrastructure as a utility to serve all homes and businesses.

Once you have fiber optic cables, getting Gigabit and 10 Gigabit broadband is a piece of cake. Each strand can transport 10 Gbps with only one channel. Those same strands can be set up to use multiple wavelengths to carry numerous Gigabit and 10 Gigabit services. A fiber cable can bundle a few to over a hundred fiber strands. Rest assured, there is plenty of 10 Gbps capacity to go around.

What 10 Gbps Options Are Available?
The universal service in demand is Dedicated Internet Access. Dedicated means that your connection to the Internet carries only your traffic. Any capacity that you aren’t using at the moment is idle and available. There is no competition with other companies sharing your line.

Dedicated Internet Access gives you the best consistency and lowest latency way to access the core of the Internet. This is important if your company has remote servers in the cloud or colocation hosting. It’s also key if you are doing business over the Internet and want your customers to have the best online experience.

There are also 10 Gbps private lines that connect point to point between your business locations or from your company to your cloud service provider. This is a step above using the Internet for access. Private lines give you the lowest latency and least congestion. Having a dedicated private line makes your servers seem like they are right down the hall even if they are on the other side of the country.

Cable broadband is now offering a shared bandwidth service that enables 10 Gbps in the download direction using DOCSIS 3.1 and will offer 10 Gbps symmetrical service with DOCSIS 4.0. By sharing Internet access with other users, you can save a significant amount of money, but with the vagaries of varying bandwidth and congestion.

How about wireless? In some metro areas, microwave wireless broadband can give you bandwidths as high as 10 Gbps with no wired connections. Service can be installed rapidly, sometimes within a matter of days or a week.

What About Pricing?
Fiber optic service prices used to be sky high, but that has changed in recent years due to intense competition among service providers and the economies of scale that come from having so many more customers using high bandwidths. If you haven’t checked 10 Gbps prices lately, you owe it to yourself to get a set of current quotes from multiple providers. Yes, there are likely several carriers that can meet your needs right now.

Fiber - Dark, Lit and Wavelength

By: John Shepler

You’ve made up your mind that a fiber optic connection to your business is no longer a luxury. It is essential to productivity. Now the question is which type of fiber to order. What? There is more than one type of fiber?

One Strand, Multiple Options
All fiber optic connections are based on the principle that modulated light waves carry information guided through a glass strand. The fiber cable coming into your building will look the same. What changes is how you terminate it.

Basically, there are three fiber options. You can order lit fiber service, dark fiber, and wavelength service. Which you pick depends on your bandwidth, security, and control requirements. Let’s see how the three compare.

Lit Fiber Bandwidth
Lit fiber bandwidth is what we normally think of when we’re talking about fiber optic service. You are leasing a service that provides a certain amount of bandwidth, usually with guarantees as to the latency, jitter, packet loss and availability.

How this is done is handled by the service provider. They will terminate a fiber strand into customer premises equipment at your location. You connect your network via fiber or copper connection, depending on the bandwidth level.

Early fiber optic implementations were based on the SONET optical carrier system and needed a specially designed interface for each service level. Today, most fiber service uses Carrier Ethernet and is good for any bandwidth up to the speed of the port that you have installed. Most companies opt for Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet, although you can often specify up to 100 Gbps in major metro areas.

You pay based on the speed of service you request. One nice feature of Carrier Ethernet or Ethernet over Fiber, as it is also called, is that the bandwidth is easily adjusted. You can install a Gigabit port and order and pay for 100 Mbps service if that’s all you need. When activity picks up, you can easily increase the bandwidth with a phone call or even online portal. Your service bandwidth will change, as will your monthly bill.

Wavelength Fiber Service
While in-house fiber optic networks might use a single laser beam to transmit data, outside carriers that run large networks use a combination of multiple strands of fiber within a single bundle and multiple wavelengths within each strand. This is a more efficient use of expensive fiber cabling and the only real way to accommodate all the traffic on the regional, national or international network.

The process of using multiple lasers, each tuned to a different frequency or wavelength is called multiplexing. All the beams exist at the same time but since they are different colors, they don’t interfere. You can imagine it something like a rainbow, although the frequencies tend to be in the infrared rather than visible band. Each separate wavelength, also called a lambda, can act like an independent fiber optic strand, although virtually. The physical strand carries them all.

There may be dozens or hundreds of different wavelengths on the same fiber strand depending on whether Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM) or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is used. Each of these wavelengths can carry lit fiber optic service or it can be leased to one customer.

When you order a wavelength, you do so because you need high bandwidth such as 10 Gbps. You also want the ability to use whatever protocol you like or multiple protocols over the same wavelength using your own multiplexing. You’ll typically provide the termination equipment that determines all this, although you might be able to lease it from the service provider. Another advantage of wavelength service is that security is improved because only your traffic uses that particular wavelength and there is no sharing of traffic between wavelengths.

Dark Fiber Service
The ultimate in control comes from having your own fiber optic network or the next best thing, a private fiber strand on your service provider’s network. This private strand is called dark fiber.

Most every Wide Area Network contains unlit fiber strands that are intended for future service expansion as traffic levels increase. It is very expensive to install fiber in trenches or on poles over long distances. The incremental cost of have more strands in the fiber bundle is usually well worth the extra expense compared to having to add more fiber cable later. Some cables have 100 or more fiber strands.

Many fiber network carriers are quite willing to lease out some of these unlit strands as long as there is plenty of capacity left for them to expand. The advantage to you is that dark fiber gives you control of the amount of bandwidth you send down the fiber, the protocols you use, and the best security you can have over long distances unless you install your own fiber cable from point to point. Once again, you provide the termination equipment at each end of the fiber run. In some cases, you can lease this from the service provider.

So, which type of fiber optic service is right for your business? Most of the time regular lit fiber bandwidth will get the job done. In special cases, wavelength service or dark fiber may be the solution. Compare options and see how much bandwidth is readily available at affordable prices for your business location.

Fiber Without The Fiber

By: John Shepler

You’re stretched for bandwidth. Perhaps the telco is telling you that they won’t renew your T1 or ISDN lines, as they are dropping their support for copper telecom services. You know the solution to either of these dilemmas is an upgrade to fiber optic bandwidth. Once it is installed, you can get all the bandwidth you need now and upgrade easily in the future. One problem. There are no fiber buildouts near you.

That leaves you with two unpleasant possibilities. Either pay a small fortune in construction costs to have fiber pulled-in, or forget fiber because there is none to be had for your location. Not so fast. There is another possibility. Get fiber performance without the actual fiber.

What Acts Like Fiber But Isn’t Fiber?

It isn’t those little glass strands that are so valuable to your business. It’s the bandwidth they carry. Your network doesn’t need to know or care how the traffic is carried in the metropolitan or wide area networks. There just needs to be enough bandwidth with low enough latency, jitter and packet loss. Anything that does that is virtually fiber.

Let’s take a look at two good options for high speed business Internet connectivity that can give you fiber optic performance but without the issue of having to install fiber where there isn’t any.

No fiber, No Wires At All
The first possibility is Fixed Wireless Access or FWA. Back in the day, this was known as microwave relay. Telephone companies put up massive towers with equally massive horn antennas to beam microwave signals from point to point. The traffic was bundles of telephone calls or television transmissions.

Today there are thousands of towers dotting the landscape in town and throughout rural areas. These were erected to support cell phone service. After several generations of technical advancement, we arrive at the newest standard: 5G or fifth generation. The 5G system uses a variety of bands in the megahertz and gigahertz range. The highest frequency or shortest wavelength equipment runs well into the microwave part of the spectrum and has massive bandwidth capability.

The higher the population density, the more 5G capability you’ll find. For smaller businesses, a fixed location cellular modem that plugs into your network can give you the reliable connection you need with lots of bandwidth available at reasonable prices. In other areas 4G LTE is a reasonable alternative and a very mature technology. If you need dozens of Mbps rather than hundreds or thousands, a 4G LTE modem with specially designed antennas for better signal capture can get the job done.

Not all fixed wireless is dedicated to the cellular phone industry. Some use licensed and unlicensed bands to deliver wireless Internet access over a limited area. You may have a small dish or other antenna installed on your building and aimed at the provider’s antenna. That gives you a strong signal regardless of weather conditions. Some private FWA providers can offer gigabit and higher bandwidths that feature low latency, jitter and packet loss just like fiber. Very high usage or even unlimited usage plans are available. Unlike new fiber installations, you can get service up and running in days rather than months or longer. Installation fees range from nothing to a reasonable one time fee.

It’s a Cable, But No Fiber Inside
The second good option to fiber optic service is cable broadband. Yes, this is the most recent incarnation of the Cable TV revolution. What’s new is that cable has gone far beyond its community antenna roots. Most of cable's infrastructure is now fiber. Surprised? Fiber is the only way these companies can transport all those TV channels and all the data.

So, if the cable companies use fiber why not just get them to connect you to their fiber network. They will, if you are close enough to a fiber access point and the construction issues aren’t too great. Otherwise, they’ll simply run the last few hundred feet or so with the familiar coaxial copper cable.

Can cable service on that coax really replace fiber? In a lot of cases, yes. The reason is that the cable modem standards have been massively upgraded over the years. Today’s DOCSIS 3.0, 3.1 and 4.0 modems deliver hundreds of Mbps up to 10 Gbps. That’s right. You can get some of the highest fiber optic speeds delivered via a DOCSIS 4.0 modem connected to a coax cable.

Will Non-Fiber Work For You?
In many, many cases, Fixed Wireless Access and cable broadband can make good substitutes for Ethernet over Fiber optic bandwidth. There are a couple of caveats, however. Wireless bandwidth isn’t as unlimited as what you can put through one or more fiber strands. As such, you may find that there are limits to your speed or usage, depending on what services are available for your location. Cable broadband is an inherently shared service, meaning that bandwidth may vary somewhat depending on how many users are on the cable and how much bandwidth they are using at any given time.

Even so, many businesses don’t need or need to pay for dedicated bandwidth of 1 to 100 Gbps. You may find that wireless and cable offer tremendous cost savings and can deliver all the performance you really need. Why not check out the range of bandwidth options available for your business now?

Ethernet Replacements For SONET

By: John Shepler

High bandwidth fiber optic Wide Area Networks have their basis in a decades old telephone company standard called SONET. Highly reliable, but highly expensive, SONET is giving way to the newer technology of Ethernet WAN. As demand for business bandwidth keeps increasing, so does the attractiveness of Ethernet for long distance connections.

Why SONET Ruled For So Long
SONET or Synchronous Optical Network was born out of a burgeoning demand for higher and higher levels of traffic. In this case, the traffic was long distance telephone calls. In the early days of telephony, this demand was met with dense webs of overhead copper lines.

Multi-channel analog technology made it possible for each copper pair to carry many phone conservations on a carrier-based system, much like many radio stations in a single band.

Digital technology eliminated the noise and crosstalk of carrier telephony by converting the analog conversations to pulse coded digital streams and multiplexing many together on a single pair. The transmission medium was still copper wire.

One thing about phone company standards is that they are all backwards compatible down to a single phone line. After all, that’s the telco business. So, the digital T1 lines were actually carrying 24 separate phone calls. A T3 line was 28 T1 lines or 672 phone calls.

When the fiber optic standard was developed, it picked up where copper left off. The OC3 SONET line is 155 Mbps and is equivalent to three T3 lines. Within all those multiplexed channels is the same 64 Kbps voice channel to support one phone call.

How did we get from really big phone lines to data transmission? Basically, SONET was the only game in town if you needed large amounts of bandwidth. So, all those voice channels in the line were combined to create one large data channel to carry packets of information. That requires protocol conversion circuitry to go from Ethernet network protocol to SONET telephone line protocol.

This works beautifully, but there are a few issues. For one thing, SONET levels are very specific and not scalable. If you want to move up from, say, a 155 Mbps OC3 to a 622 Mbps OC-12, you’ll at least need to swap out the termination controller or interface card in your router. Also, since analog phone traffic is now trivial compared to packet based data traffic, wouldn’t it be more efficient to just keep everything Ethernet from end to end? Indeed, it would.

Ethernet Replacements For SONET
Most competitive carriers and even many of the traditional telecom companies have adopted Ethernet as their network standard, as that’s where the traffic is. As a result, you can find much better pricing for Ethernet circuits than for traditional SONET. Ethernet WAN is also highly scalable. If you install a Gigabit Ethernet port, you can order service at any bandwidth level up to 1 Gbps. That covers OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps and pretty much OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps.

No hardware changes are needed until you require more 1 Gbps. At that point you may install a 10 Gbps port which will cover OC-24, plus OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps. Today, 100 Gbps is becoming more and more available to take the place of OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

If you are looking to upgrade your fiber optic WAN connections or are just curious about how much you might save by switching from SONET to Ethernet WAN service, you can easily get a set of competitive quotes from multiple service providers with no obligation. That applies to private line services, including cloud communications, as well as dedicated Internet access. Now would be a good time to make that inquiry.

The Connectivity You Need For Digital Transformation

By: John Shepler

Most every business is now in some phase of digital transformation. It’s the process of moving from analog mechanical and paper based operations to digital and online processes. The promise of this transformation is faster and more efficient business methods that save cost and expand your customer base. But, what do you need to put in place to support this digital transformation?

Plan on Doing Most Everything Online
While most products and services are not digital, the tools to support them now are. Everything from finding prospects to converting prospects to customers, servicing those customers and keeping the products flowing has a digital element to it. The Internet is now the hub of operation for many businesses. Others may be local and walk-in for the most part, but may have an online presence and accounting or other processes in the cloud.

What makes the Internet so compelling is that after a decades of development, it is largely in-place, paid for, and ubiquitous. People who don’t even have bank accounts do have smartphones with Internet apps that allow them to buy, sell and get paid. While there are challenges, especially in the area of security, the Internet is a must for most companies.

Start With High Speed Reliable Internet Access
You’ll need a solid connection to the online world. It will have to be fast enough to be transparent to you and your customers, always available, and have a minimum of latency, jitter and packet loss. The best connections are the ones you never have to think about. That customer on the other side of town or the other side of the world will seem as close as someone in the next office.

There are basically two types of broadband connections. One is called Dedicated Internet Access. The other is Shared Internet access.

Dedicated Internet Access, particularly with symmetrical bandwidth that gives you the same speed uploading as downloading is the gold standard. While the Internet is certainly a shared resource, most of the congestion and outages occur in that “last mile” between you and your service provider. Dedicated connections give you a private road to the Internet. You always have the bandwidth you are paying for, whether you are using it every second or not.

Shared Internet Access is just that. A service provider leases a dedicated access line and then divides it up among many users. If the speed is high enough and there aren’t so many users demanding the same bandwidth simultaneously, you may not even know you are sharing. Sometimes, though, everybody wants to download videos or large files and things slow down. Then, like every traffic jam, they just as mysteriously dissipate and everything is back to normal.

The advantage of dedicated access is performance. The advantage of shared access is cost. Shared services such as cellular and cable broadband can cost a fraction of what a similar speed dedicated fiber or fixed wireless access service costs.

A Hybrid Approach to Increase Reliability and Lower Cost
There is also a third option that has been recently developed. That is the Software Defined Network (SDN) or Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN). What these systems do is take multiple Internet connections and bond them together so that you get one higher capacity, lower latency and more reliable connection. A SD-WAN box can combine a cable broadband line, a cellular broadband modem, and a small fiber optic service. Even satellite and landlines can be included. The software in the controller monitors each line constantly and selects the most appropriate for every packet.

With SD-WAN, your most sensitive applications, such as telephone and conference calling, get the highest priority for speed, latency and jitter. Business process are next in line. Less sensitive needs, like remote backups, get the lowest priority because a few seconds here and there probably won’t make any difference. SD-WAN can save you money compared to one very large fiber line that you can’t keep busy or perhaps can’t even get installed. It is also a lifesaver when one line is accidentally cut or has an equipment failure. SD-WAN will simply use the other connections to keep things running seamlessly.

Don’t Forget Your Cloud Connections
Your main office, store or factory connection to the Internet is critical, but so are the connections for your cloud based operations. Once those servers and applications leave the premises to be co-located elsewhere or run in a public or hybrid cloud, they need the same reliable and transparent connectivity you had in-house.

There are two connections to be concerned with. The first is the connection between you and the cloud. This may be the same Internet access you use for everything else, but for business critical operations you may want to consider a dedicated private line between your office and the colocation center or cloud service provider. This bypasses the Internet completely and gives you much greater control of your traffic since nothing is shared outside of your business.

The other connection of importance is the connection between the remote servers in the colo center or cloud and the outside world. For this you want the same high performance Internet access with enough bandwidth, low latency and minimal jitter and packet loss. Fortunately, this quality of service is easy to find for colo and cloud, as they deal in massive amounts of bandwidth on a regular basis.

Are you properly connected for digital transformation? That old DSL line or bandwidth limited T1 probably won’t get the job done anymore. Consider an upgrade to highly reliable fiber or wireless broadband for your business. Recent buildouts have made this much more affordable than you might expect.

Metro and Long Haul Dark Fiber

By: John Shepler

High performance companies with diverse locations and significant staffing may get to the point where the usual Internet access and private line offerings just won’t get the job done anymore. At that point, you may wish to take total control of your network so that you can set the standard for performance and make upgrades as quickly as they are needed.

Sounds good, but how are you going to exercise the same control over a network that leaves your premises as you do within your facilities? Get into the network provider business yourself and install fiber to each of your facilities? Hardly. That would be cost prohibitive and way too time consuming. There’s a more reasonable approach, and that is to lease dark fiber.

What is Dark Fiber?
We’re all familiar with fiber optic cables and the reliable high speed connectivity they provide. Most incumbent and competitive telecom companies now offer a wide range of bandwidth options within their service areas. Even traditional Cable companies are offering connections to their core network as an alternative to the coaxial copper drops. What is less known is that nearly all of these companies have extra fibers available within their bundles for spares, expansion and leasing. These fibers sit unlit, not installed to any network equipment.

Think about it. If you can lease a strand of dark fiber that runs very near to your business locations, it’s almost like you installed the fiber cable yourself. You pay a provider who has already gone to the trouble of installing this fiber and it is already in place. It was likely much less costly for them to do this than it would be for you, because they install many other fiber strands in the same conduit at the same time. Those strands won’t have any effect on your usage.

With dark fiber, you get access to the unlit fiber strand. You’ll need the expertise to select and install the termination equipment, but that is much easier than having to hire or contract with crews to trench the fiber conduits and negotiate the right of ways.

There Are Two Types of Dark Fiber
Dark fiber comes in two varieties, although they are closely related. The first is Metro dark fiber that is installed in cities and their related suburbs. It may be installed on poles above ground or in underground conduit. Metro fiber tends to be installed in large bundles, as there is a lot of demand for fiber optic connectivity within metropolitan areas.

The other variety of dark fiber is called long haul dark fiber. This is the fiber that runs between cities to designated points of presence. With long haul fiber, you can span the country to connect your regional offices and factories. Long haul fiber tends to use smaller glass core single mode fiber which can limit the transmission rate. It’s a tradeoff of capacity for distance.

If all of your connection requirements are within a single city, Metro dark fiber will likely get the job done. If you need to connect between cities you’ll probably need a combination of Metro and long haul dark fiber.

Dark Fiber Alternative
Dark fiber requires a budget and level of expertise that not every company can commit to, even though the control, scalability, and security are very attractive features. A related service is called dark wavelength. It is commonplace to “light” a fiber strand with a spectrum of discrete frequency lasers to create independent wavelengths or lambdas. In effect, the fiber strand becomes a set of non-interfering sub-fibers all multiplexed on the same physical strand. It is possible to lease a wavelength instead of a whole fiber at a lower cost. You still have control of the protocols used on that wavelength and it is solely dedicated to your use. If this will work for you, a dark wavelength can both save money and give you the connectivity you desire in areas when an entire strand might not be available.

Do you have a need that exceeds the typical ISP or dedicated fiber optic bandwidth service offerings? If so, explore the possibility of leasing a dark fiber or dark wavelength now.

Copper Decommissioning Expands Demand for Metro Ethernet

By: John Shepler

If you are still getting by with last mile Internet over DSL, T1 lines, or Ethernet over Copper, you should take a serious look at Metro Ethernet over Fiber. You’ll get more bandwidth, better pricing and… it will continue to be available.

Copper Decommissioning is Now
Copper based telecom services have been the go-to technology for the last century, but not this century. The ubiquitous twisted pair telephone line has supported our needs from the introduction of the telephone through the fevered growth of the commercial Internet. But, like cellphones the size of a brick, the technology has run its course. Copper just can’t keep up with today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

The phone companies know this. The network operators know this. They are well aware that we are way past “peak copper”. As you read this, copper lines nationwide are being retired or “decommissioned”. In some cases the copper is physically ripped out of conduits so that fiber optic cables can be pulled right back in. In other cases the copper bundles in the ground are simply disconnected and left to rust away on their own. In the coming years there will be fewer and fewer copper options available to order, until a copper wireline is as rare as a cranked telephone set.

Fiber is the Future AND the Present
The replacements for copper telco right now are Cable in the form of hybrid fiber/copper systems, Fixed Wireless Access, and Fiber Optic bandwidth. Fiber in cities is also called Metro Fiber or Metro Ethernet. Most urban, suburban and even small town businesses now have access to Metro Ethernet and its flexible options.

Fiber is your most flexible option for several reasons. First, fiber optic strands offer extremely high bandwidths, to 10 Gbps or more. With wavelength division multiplexing, you might get a dozen or more 10 Gbps lambdas, each a virtual fiber in itself. Now, consider that nearly all fiber cables have multiple strands, even dozens, and you can see how fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited. Once installed, that fiber will likely last as long as you need.

Second, fiber, unlike cable or most wireless, can provide exclusive dedicated line services. You can order private point to point connections and have all of the bandwidth available for your traffic. Compare that to the consumer-oriented broadband services that share bandwidth among many users to keep the cost down. With dedicated Internet access or private point to point lines, you won’t be competing with everybody else for limited resources at high traffic times. This can be especially valuable in connecting your network to a distant cloud provider that hosts business critical applications.

In addition to massive available bandwidth, fiber service is also very scalable. You can typically start off as low as 10 Mbps at pricing comparable with a current T1 line, but with over 6x the bandwidth. Many smaller businesses find that 100 Mbps is plenty, but Gigabit bandwidth is easy to come by and very affordable. If your applications demand it or your workforce is substantial, 10 Gbps is easily available on fiber. Even 100 Gbps is now being offered to larger companies and hospital complexes, content developers, etc.

Why Ethernet over Fiber
The earlier implementations of fiber optic service were based on a telephone company standard called SONET that offered fixed bandwidth levels and was designed for voice calls, not data. While protocol conversion circuitry made SONET the backbone of the Internet, Carrier Ethernet is now the standard to be embraced. This is the same switched Ethernet that runs on your local network, but extended to transport packets over hundreds or thousands of miles.

Metro Ethernet uses the Carrier Ethernet standard running over fiber optic cabling. This makes it virtually plug-and-play with your network. You can even set it up so that your business locations all over the state or country act like they are on one big network. Metro Fiber Ethernet is the new standard for business connections. Network connections within the metro area are often referred to as MAN or Metropolitan Area Network, while those more distant are referred to as WAN or Wide Area Network.

Are you ready to replace aging T1, DS3, DSL or other network services with something more modern that is future-proof and likely less expensive? Check your Metro Fiber Ethernet options for one or more business locations now.

Gigabit to 10 Gigabit to 100 Gigabit WAN

By: John Shepler

Business WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth needs have accelerated, as more operations are moved to the cloud and more employees are working remotely. Fortunately, there are very good provider solutions available to create high bandwidth links from point to point and to the Internet.

Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN
Fiber optic connectivity is now clearly the gold standard for business bandwidth. If you are still using legacy T1 lines, ISDN PRI, or DS3 bandwidth, you are probably running out of bandwidth and likely headed for obsolescense. Many carriers are starting to decommission their copper-based services due to high maintenance costs and declining customer interest. It’s time to upgrade.

All fiber is not created equal, however. The legacy SONET technology introduced decades ago by the telephone companies is also getting long in the tooth. What’s better? The new standard is called Carrier Ethernet or Ethernet WAN.

Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN is an extension of the switched Ethernet standard used on virtually every Local Area Network. The technical standards make it easy to connect the LAN to the WAN without going through any intermediate protocol conversions. It’s Ethernet from end to end. This is the standard that most every service provider is offering, including many of the legacy telephone companies that have adopted it for their own networks.

Advantages of Fiber Ethernet WAN include ease of scaling bandwidth without having to change interface hardware. Order 10 to 50 Mbps starter service and easily upgrade to 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps, usually by using an online portal or making a phone call. Truck rolls are seldom needed unless you are ordering service beyond what your terminal equipment can handle.

Pricing is very attractive. You can start with lower bandwidth services from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and likely pay the same or less than you pay now for your copper based services. You almost always get more bandwidth for the same cost or pay less for the replacement bandwidth at the same service level.

Cost savings are even more dramatic as you go up in bandwidth. The cost per Mbps or Gbps compared to legacy solutions gets lower and lower as you go up in speed. Costs have also been dropping over time as technology improves, carriers build-out fiber runs, and competition increases. If you have a contract that is more than a few years old, you can likely save money with a new service.

Multi-Gigabit Solutions
There was time, and it was only a few years ago, that 1 Gbps or 1,000 Mbps broadband or private line service was the holy grail of connectivity. Not anymore. Fiber isn’t rare the way it used to be. It’s very common, now, to have fiber running extensively in metro business areas. Often there are multiple competing providers that result in very attractive pricing.

Fiber build-outs are multiplying, as more and more businesses demand higher and higher bandwidths and cell towers are upgraded to support millimeter wave 5G cellular service.

1 Gigabit bandwidth is common for business, with more demanding applications upgrading to 10 Gigabit service. The next move is to 100 Gbps Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN. Although that may seem ridiculously high for smaller businesses, it is not unreasonable for large hospital campuses and medical centers with multiple imaging facilities. Other high users are universities, research laboratories, government entities, video production houses, architectural firms and manufacturers. With 5G wireless supporting bandwidths in excess of 1 Gbps and cable companies offering at least that much to consumers, 10 Gbps is quite reasonable for highly automated businesses that have made the transition to digital. 100 Gbps is simply the next logical increment.

Dark Fiber and Fixed Wireless Access
Lit fiber optic WAN is likely to remain the standard for business for the foreseeable future. However, there are special situations where related technical solutions make sense.

Dark Fiber is an option for businesses that want more control of their connections, almost as if they owned the link themselves. Many network providers have extra unlit fiber strands in their cables available for spares and future expansion. They may be willing to lease an entire fiber strand or a wavelength on one of the strands. What is available depends on the locations you wish to link. Advantages of dark fiber include being able to run any protocol you wish and the enhanced security of being the only user on a particular fiber or wavelength.

Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) uses microwave frequencies instead of fiber to carry the traffic. Many cellular companies use FWA to backhaul traffic to their remote towers instead of having long and isolated fiber runs. Bandwidths can be in the Gigabit to 10 Gigabit range and offer dedicated private line service or connections to the Internet. Think of FWA as fiber without the physical fiber. You have an antenna on your building instead. A major advantage of FWA is that installation can be done in days versus months to have fiber trenched in were none is currently available.

Are you ready for a bandwidth upgrade from older copper services or expensive SONET fiber? Fiber Optic Ethernet WAN, Dark Fiber and Fixed Wireless Access may offer exactly what you need at better prices than ever before.