Dedicated Symmetric Internet Connections

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with the performance of the Internet for business use? Are you inclined to think that the entire thing is really more intended for entertainment and casual browsing that actually getting work done in a timely fashion? Yet, there’s really no alternative. Your customers and suppliers and all the information you need is online. Even your software packages and communications may be on the cloud now. Perhaps all you really need is a higher performance broadband connection that is more suited to the workplace.

What’s Wrong With My Internet Service?
Chances are that your Internet Service Provider is delivering the service you ordered exactly as advertised.There is nothing really wrong with it. It’s just that the particular connection you are using is not up to the job. That’s especially true if you are making demands beyond what the typical Internet user expects. Some of the key parameters you need to be aware of include bandwidth, symmetry, dedication, latency, jitter, and packet loss. Let’s take those one at a time and see why they make a difference.

Bandwidth
Do fire fighters try to put out a blazing building with a garden hose? Of course not. A small pipe can’t deliver the huge volume of water needed. Same with bandwidth. A small or low bandwidth connection might keep up with emails, credit card verification, casual browsing and some video streaming. it can’t keep a dozen, a hundred or a thousand employees working efficiently. Once the “pipe” (yes, it’s actually called that) is at capacity you experience congestion. Too many packets per unit of time. Somebody has to wait their turn… and wait, and wait and wait.

You need bandwidth appropriate to the job. That means you’ll have to kiss DSL goodbye. T1 lines are reliable but way too slow these days. Same for budget cable broadband, 3G or even 4G wireless. Move up to fiber optic service if you can possibly get it without too much construction cost. Otherwise, Ethernet over Copper may work. Depending on the application, you might get by with 100 Mbps to 1000 Gbps DOCSIS cable.

Symmetry
Not all broadband is the same by a long shot. One big difference is symmetry of upload and download bandwidth. Symmetry means how much alike they are. Cable, satellite, DSL and similar connections that primarily serve the consumer market are not symmetrical. They are called asymmetrical. You may get 100 Mbps in the download direction but only 10 Mbps in the upload direction.

What difference does it make? Consumers don’t care. They mostly download. Businesses transfer large files between locations and upload them to remote web servers. Enterprise software packages transfer data in both directions. Offsite backups are primarily in the upload direction. If you can watch videos easily but can’t backup your files, you’ve got a symmetry problem.

Dedication
We’re all dedicated to the job, right? That’s not what this is about. The two choices in bandwidth are dedicated and shared. Once again, those low cost broadband services are actually shared bandwidth. You and a dozen or a hundred other customers are all drinking from the same pipe. When everybody wants service at the same time, there isn’t enough to go around and things slow down. It’s really bad when they slow down during business hours and worse when you are working to a deadline.

Dedicated bandwidth services are yours and yours alone. Don’t get me wrong. The Internet backbones themselves are always shared. That’s not where the problem usually is. The real pinch point is that last mile between you and your service provider. You want that to be a dedicated connection if you expect consistency high performance.

Latency
Latency is a time delay. It’s a pause. Every circuit has latency. Even your local area network has some. The trick is to keep the latency so low you don’t notice it. What adds latency? Long distance connections with lots of equipment on the line. The worst is geostationary satellites. No matter what you do, there’s a half-second or more of time delay between action and response. Ten milliseconds of latency likely won’t hurt anybody. A hundred milliseconds will probably be noticeable. Half a second to a second? Maddening. Real time services such as VoIP telephone and video conferencing will be the most affected. If you need to use a satellite, be prepared to pause to let the other person speak or you’ll talk all over each other.

Jitter and Packet Loss
Jitter is a variation in arrival between packets. It’s another congestion problem. Jitter distorts conversations. Worse is packet loss. That means some packets get sent and never received. Data transfer protocols will simply request a resend. Voice and video will have holes in the stream that add more distortion. If packet loss is too bad due to a nearly unusable connection, even website performance and data backups will slow to a crawl.

Dedicated Symmetric Internet Connections
The gold standard in professional grade business Internet service is dedicated symmetric lines. Even better are dedicated symmetric lines that go directly from location to location, like branch offices or to a cloud service, and avoid the Internet altogether. If you are going to use the Internet, though, give yourself the best performance possible. Insist on a dedicated symmetric Internet access, preferably with a service level agreement. Plan on paying considerably more than you will for a budget connection, but consider it worth the price in productivity and better customer relations.

WANs That Act Like LANs

We take our Local Area Networks (LANs) for granted. Every business has them, but they are seldom seen except for that network connector on the wall. You plug-in your computer, printer, phone, etc. and it just works.

Networks vs Utilities
In a way, LANs are now the data equivalent of AC power. You don’t think about it. You just use it. Connections and operations were long ago standardized. You don’t worry about different flavors of Ethernet any more than you stop and think what voltage is coming out of that wall socket.

Now, how about those Wide Area Networks (WANs)? It’s the WAN that gets you out of the building and connected to your other business locations, your cloud services and everyone else in the world. We don’t think about the fact that electrical power is transformed to higher voltages and that there are switching centers between your location and the power generation. It’s just as invisible as the wires running through the walls. If only Wide Area Networks worked the same way (sigh!)

The Difference Between LANs and WANs
The big difference between local and metro or wide area networks is that the local nets tend to be invisible and the longer haul connections may not be. You probably don’t have to be concerned about bandwidth, jitter, latency or packet loss on an in-house network. Wired LANs, especially, do a good job of keeping these issues out of your way. As you leave the premises, those characteristics degrade. Ideally it is not enough to get in your way, but sometimes it’s a major stumbling block.

Where WANs Go Bad
Take the most common WAN we use: The Internet. The Internet is an amazing infrastructure that connects nearly everyone to everyone else. It was designed from the beginning to be extremely robust, so that line cuts and equipment outages are automatically worked around. Its design philosophy and popularity are its limitations. The speed and quality of your connection can vary from minute to minute depending on traffic levels. The least costly connections, like cable and cellular, are shared, increasing the variability even more.

Invisible WANs
If you want the same performance over long distances that you have in-house, you need to order dedicated symmetrical wired, wireless and fiber point-to-point or multipoint services. Yes, a dedicated connection will help Internet performance greatly because most of the issues are in the “last mile” connection to your facility. Dedicated direct lines may make a huge difference in how business critical systems like VoIP telephone and software as a service in the cloud perform. MPLS networks provide similar high performance among multiple business locations, including remote data centers and cloud service providers.

The Almost Invisible WAN
The one sore point with dedicated lines is that can be a bit pricey, especially if you need a lot of bandwidth over very long distances. It’s a cost/benefit tradeoff. Dedicated wins for most medium and larger size businesses, where productivity losses and poor quality voice services are intolerable.

For smaller businesses and less critical applications, however, there is a fairly new alternative that makes the Internet perform more like a direct connection. This is called SDN or Software Defined Network, sometimes also referred to as a SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Network. What the software does is combine multiple lower performing connections to produce a composite service that works much better. The SD-WAN monitors each WAN connection packet-by-packet and routes the most critical packets over the best performing links at that instant. It goes a long way toward making very noticeable Internet services more like invisible direct connections.

Are you frustrated by unacceptably poor Internet or other WAN services or have just hit the limit of your current bandwidth? Discover the range of competitive Wide Are Network connections that are now available for your business locations.

Big Data Needs Big Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Bandwidth levels are growing almost exponentially. One of the major infrastructure build-outs underway is a move to 100 Gbps or 100 GigE wavelength service on cross-country and international routes. It seems that Gigabit Ethernet was introduced only a few years ago and thought impractical for all but the most demanding business applications. Now GigE is almost considered entry level in some quarters. What could possibly be behind this massive increase in bandwidth demand?

It All Started With Video
It is said that most of the world’s Internet traffic is now video. That’s right, not telephone calls, not file transfers, not even big graphics. Video alone is sucking up as much bandwidth as it can get. That’s not likely to change, either. SD video has migrated to HD video and 4K video is well on the way. How soon will the marketplace demand 8K video across the board?

Every increase in pixel density cranks up the bandwidth requirement to transport high quality images. Compression can help a great deal, but there’s a tradeoff between picture quality and depth of compression. Broadcasters and video producers really want to transport uncompressed video and leave the compression artifacts to be dealt with in the final link to the consumer.

Send In The Clouds
When cloud services meant taking all night to back up the day's files as a contingency to local storage, bandwidth levels weren’t too demanding. That’s all changed. The cloud is no longer just a non-critical backup service. It’s the main data center for many companies.

What’s sometimes forgotten is that your WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth becomes far more critical when key processes move to the cloud. Networking is much easier and cheaper when you’re talking about hundreds of feet within your own facilities. When you have to take that same flood of traffic and send it over a common carrier to get to your remote data center or cloud provider, line demands go way up. Remember, the WAN used to be just to link facilities and for communication with the outside world. Now it’s the main artery for everything you do.

What that means is that WAN bandwidth demands jump by 10, 100 or 1000 times. Other characteristics, like jitter, latency and packet loss, become huge factors in how well your cloud processes perform. If you scrimp in any of these areas, you may find yourself frustrated by underperforming processes and even losing productivity instead of gaining efficiency.

You Think the Internet of People Is Demanding?
Online business applications are generating more and more interesting and potentially useful data. Mobile apps with location services fall into this category. Pretty much anything that you do online has some potential value in customizing services or creating statistical data to improve marketing. That’s a flood of data that has to be handled by wireless and fiber connections.

Human generated big data is nothing compared to what we’ll be dealing with when the Internet of Things (IoT) gets rolling. For every person online, there will be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of “things” chatting wildly and generating volumes of data that would be useful if it could only get where it can be analyzed and put to use. That’s going to multiply the load on every communications channel.

Will they be able to handle it? Not with yesterday’s creaky links. Everything will need an upgrade. It’s in process now. Wireless channels are being expanded as fast as they can be rounded up and auctioned. Current 4G standards will become 5G and then 6G before you know it. But, what about terrestrial lines?

Fortunately, the bandwidth of fiber optic cables is nearly limitless from our current point of view. The 1 to 10 Gbps or so capacity of each strand can be multiplied by multiplexing dozens to hundreds of wavelengths. Wavelengths can be aggregated to create larger services of 100 Gbps and beyond. The build buildout now is 100 Gbps. Soon that will be 400 Gbps and then 1 Tbps, and it will happen sooner that we think.

Is yesterday’s bandwidth keeping you from becoming tomorrow’s high performance company? You should know that bandwidth prices have been falling almost as fast as demand has been increasing. The bandwidth upgrade you need may fit well within your budget. Want to find out? Get prices and availability on high performance fiber optic bandwidth services now.



Note: Products with the humorous theme "Big Data On Board" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

The Cloud Needs Low Latency

By: John Shepler

It makes so much economic sense. Instead of getting a bank loan and making a major capital investment in your own server farm and data center, you simply contract with a cloud service provider and pay only for what you use when you use it. No more having to predict how business will be next year or even next quarter. You can roll with the punches with on-demand cloud services.

It Seems So Easy
The solution is deceptively simple. Clean out your current data center or don’t build one in the first place. Rent what you need from one of a myriad of cloud service providers. All you need is a simple link from your facilities to theirs and nobody on the network will know the difference. After all, how can they tell whether the servers are down the hall or across the country? Few users do anything but run the applications anyway.

The Hesitating Network
There’s an old saying that goes something like this: “On the network, the printer on the other side of the country is as close as the one in the next office.”

That’s an ideal. In reality it can either seem just that close or really a thousand miles away. The server three states over works the same as the one in the basement used to. Somehow, though, it’s developed a hesitation. You have to wait for the system to respond now. Worse, yet, that hesitation seems to vary. You really don’t know how the system is going to perform from one day to the next.

The Infinite Cloud That Isn’t
One used to be able to blame system performance lags on lack of resources. When everyone is running big jobs at the same time things slow down a bit. If you were clever, you tried to get your work done at odd hours before the thundering herd got to work or when they went to lunch. Let somebody else deal with the congestion. It’s the equivalent of drive-time traffic and no more fun.

That was one thing the cloud was supposed to fix. A major benefit of cloud data centers is that they have massive resources. Any given tenant can expand or contract the number of servers and the amount of storage they are using in real time. You aren’t supposed to run out of capacity ever. Yet, it seems like the cloud has less capability than you had before. How can that be possible?

The WAN Gotcha
One big thing that is often forgotten is that the printer in the next office and the one across the country have to be connected by something. That something is your WAN network connection. When all of your network resources were sitting on the LAN, the point was moot. There was plenty of capacity and the links were short enough that network performance just wasn’t an issue. You might say that the network became “transparent.”

Now, your network includes both the sporty LAN and metro and wide area connections that can be anything but sporty. In fact, they can be downright sluggish. That’s because there’s a difference between your local networks and the ones that run by telecom carriers. Local networks can be fairly easily engineered to have enough performance to appear transparent. That’s both harder and more expensive to do over long distances.

What’s Holding Back the WAN?
There are a few technical characteristics that spell the difference between transparent and not so transparent connections. These include bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. You want to maximize the first and minimize the other three.

It’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that sluggish network performance is a result of too little capacity. When you start to use most of the available bandwidth most of the time, you can have periods of congestion where there are just too many packets to send down the line at the same time. Easy solution? Increase bandwidth. A double, triple or 10x bandwidth increase should solve the problem immediately… or will it?

One issue that no bandwidth increase can fix is latency. This is a time delay for packets to traverse the network. We think of electrical transmission being instantaneous from source to destination. At the local level, that’s a really good assumption. Once you leave the premises, though, even the speed of light may not be fast enough.

Minimizing Latency
Clearly, one way to minimize the time delay of transmission is to minimize the distance involved. Even at light speed, you can only go 186 miles in a millisecond. That’s 10 mSec for 1,860 miles. In fact, even that isn’t really possible. In real world glass fiber, you may be looking at more like 15 to 20 milliseconds one way or at least 40 milliseconds round trip. If you happen to be using a geosynchronous satellite link for part of the trip, that expands to a quarter to half a second.

Most applications aren’t going to be impacted by a 40+ millisecond delay, although half a second is definitely going to be noticeable and perhaps difficult to live with. This argues for using a terrestrial fiber link to the cloud (which is actually on the ground) and using the shortest path possible. A point to point dedicated private line is most likely the highest performance you can achieve. You may be able to get equivalent or nearly equivalent performance through a privately run MPLS network at a lower cost.

How About The Internet
Oh, yes, the Internet. It sounds like the ideal resource. It goes everywhere and connects everyone. The cost is amortized over so many users that the Internet is going to be your low cost solution. Security is certainly an issue, but encryption can create tunnels that give you a virtually private network that emulates a truly private network.

That emulation may fall short, not for security reasons, but in performance. The Internet is not engineered to minimize latency or jitter. It’s architecture is designed for resilience. If you lose a connection between servers, the network will automatically reconfigure to heal itself and keep the traffic moving. Unfortunately, that means your packets may take different paths on different trips. They may also encounter bottlenecks if particular nodes get overloaded.

Does this mean you can’t use the Internet to connect to the cloud? For maximum performance or highly sensitive interactive and real-time applications, you’ll do better with private lines. Otherwise, you might be satisfied with a private/public hybrid called DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. You still share the high performance backbone of the Internet core, but you connect via a private line that minimizes latency, jitter and packet loss during that critical first mile.

Finding a Better Cloud Connection
There is a range of cloud connectivity options available for most business locations. You should look at the cost/performance tradeoffs involved with each of these and then choose the link you need to make your connection to the cloud as transparent as you need.

The Value of Low Latency Fiber Optic Connections

By: John Shepler

If you are frustrated with your network performance, especially those connections going to the Internet or other business locations, you may be suffering from a latency related problem. Let’s take a quick look at achieving lower latency network connections for businesses and organizations:


When you are involved in very demanding applications where maximizing network performance is critical to success, such as high frequency financial trading, it’s clear that you need to focus on minimizing latency. Some companies have gone so far as to co-locate in the same facility as the stock exchanges to be a matter of feet rather than miles from the servers.

Most applications are nowhere near that demanding, but do require some attention to bandwidth, latency, packet loss and jitter. These are areas where private lines and MPLS networks shine and the Internet doesn’t do so well. Revisions to the network neutrality doctrine might, and I emphasize might, offer some performance increase for the Internet. That will be done by giving some traffic priority over other traffic.

Still, if you want to take control of your destiny, you need control of all of your network connections and you’ll only get that with services that you own or can lease with strict performance guarantees.

What common applications are highly sensitive to latency issues? Anything real time certainly is. That includes VoIP telephone systems, any network voice services, teleconferencing and telepresence.

Slightly more tolerant are interactive services that are not strictly real time. Think cloud servers. You issue commands or requests and the server sends back responses. Delays in cloud server response have come as a shock to some companies that thought they would get more performance, not less, when they moved from local data centers to the cloud. After all, cloud resources are virtually infinite, aren’t they? Even if they are, you’ve got to take the link between you and the cloud into consideration. Any latency caused by limited bandwidth, network congestion or equipment induced time delays are going to show up as an unexpected pause in data going up and down between you and the cloud.

If you upgrade to higher performance network connections, will your latency problems go away? Not unless you also manage your local network to minimize latency on critical applications. You’ll need multiple classes of service so that voice packets get priority and interactive cloud packets are next in line. Big data transfers, email, downloading videos and even casual Web browsing have to take a lower priority and they generally can. Companies that are just implementing enterprise VoIP to replace old-school analog phones are more likely to run into these issues than those who have worked the bugs out of their networks over the years.

What class of network connection service is optimum for your needs? There are a wide variety of private and public connections, each with a particular performance and price tag. Why not get a fresh set of low latency bandwidth quotes available at your business locations. This service is fast and the cost can be lower than you expect.

On The First Class of Service the Network Gave to Me…

By: John Shepler

One of the big impediments in getting networks to work well for all types of traffic is that different types of traffic have different needs. Treat all packets the same and you’ll enjoy excellent results in some cases and unacceptable results in others. What’s the solution? You need to add a touch of class to your network.

The idea behind class of service or CoS is that different types of traffic get different priorities on the network. For instance, do you really think that data backups are as sensitive to network characteristics such as latency and jitter as VoIP telephone conservations? Of course not. If your network has the capacity it may not matter. With infinite bandwidth all traffic will flow smoothly from source to destination. The problem is that we don’t have infinite bandwidth or infinitely large anything else.

This really shows up in MAN and WAN connections. These telecom links are almost always more limited than your LAN resources simply because of the cost involved. How many companies can afford 10 or 100 Gbps private lines cross-country? In fact, even 1 Gbps is a stretch for many IT departments. Many companies will have to get everything done with 10 Mbps Ethernet or 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet MAN and WAN service.

Can this work? It likely can if you carefully manage your traffic and don’t have so much that you saturate the network. The trick is in establishing multiple classes of service and assigning each type of traffic to one of those classes. Do it right and everything on the network will run smoothly.

The simplest example is to establish two classes of service. One is for latency sensitive applications. The other is for everything else. A good example is a SIP trunk that provides you with both VoIP business phone service and Internet access. This is becoming a popular setup for smaller business locations because of the cost savings involved in having only one outside trunk line. The VoIP traffic is extremely sensitive to latency and jitter so it goes into the class that has priority. Most of what you do on the Internet isn’t that sensitive, so it goes into the non-priority class.

You need this type of division because voice traffic is typically low bandwidth per conversation and will break up if there is any network congestion. Data transfers and web page downloads aren’t so sensitive to congestion and will take all the bandwidth they can get. If there isn't enough, they may slow down a bit but you won’t lose any data.

Class of Service keeps the big data and video downloads from pushing the more sensitive voice and two-way video conferences to the side. This can make your network perform much better overall without increasing bandwidth. Even so, there’s no free lunch. When the network gets congested enough, you are going to notice the slowdown on non-critical traffic and will have to increase bandwidth to make everything run as fast as it can.

Class of Service is one of the big differentiators between the Internet and private networks. There is no CoS on the Internet. In fact, it is a matter of pride that all packets are treated equally. This principle is called network neutrality. It makes the public Internet fair for all users, but inhibits performance on latency and bandwidth sensitive applications.

Is there a reason to create more than two classes of service? There is for more sophisticated operations. XO Communications is offering what they call Premium CoS with six different classes.

At the lowest level is standard class service for data and Internet traffic. The next step up is Priority class for data and Internet traffic that has a more urgent need to get through quickly, such as email messaging. Up from that is Priority Plus for traffic that has some sensitivity to delay and jitter such as FTP transfers.

Critical, the next class up, is for business applications such as SAP that will affect productivity if they are delayed. Critical Plus goes a step higher for applications such as Telnet Routing Protocols. The real time applications are at the top of the heap for priority. These include voice and two-way video. One way video can take a lower class because it is easily buffered to compensate for most jitter and latency issues.

Are you frustrated by the problems that have arisen as you’ve expanded the expectations of what types of traffic your network is expected to handle, especially for MAN and WAN connections? If so, a private network with two or more classes of service may get everything running smoothly again at a reasonable cost. Get more information about MAN and WAN class of service network solutions, along with pricing and availability.


Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

High Reliability VoIP Phone Service Providers

It is pretty clear now that the days of analog wireline and even ISDN PRI connections are numbered. Clouds and computer networks offer more flexibility, a richer feature set and lower cost of ownership for voice communications. If you want to start enjoying these benefits, you need to embrace packet based phone service. That’s another way of saying VoIP.

The range of emotions on VoIP as a telephone service replacement varies from “wouldn’t have anything else” down to “never will I put that in my business.” Why such a diversity of opinions? It all comes down to your experience with the technology and when you got into it.

Today’s top VoIP providers for business are a far cry from the early days when VoIP was looked at strictly as a way to avoid long distance charges. Sure, putting a CODEC (coder/decoder) on your broadband service converts an analog phone into a IP phone. The conversion process turns a telephone set into a computer peripheral so that it can share the network with PCs, printers, routers and the like. Unfortunately, just getting a telephone to talk over the Internet leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to call quality.

What’s wrecking the voice quality? Most computer equipment on the network was designed with the TCP/IP protocol in mind. This protocol is perfect for the Internet in that it expects errors to occur and patiently resends lost data until there is a perfect set at the far end. You can’t predict exactly how long it will take to transmit a file and you have no idea how it got from point A to point B, but who cares? Your document, photo or database is exactly duplicated at the far end.

VoIP is sensitive to anomalies in network performance that aren’t even noticeable when uploading or download data files. That’s because VoIP is a real-time protocol. When you are talking, there is a steady stream of audio that must be converted into packets, sent through the network, and reconverted back into audio at exact time it is generated.

Consider what happens if there is even a half-second delay through the network. That small amount may not even be noticed on file transfers. With a VoIP phone call, that half-second is an eternity. The delay in itself doesn’t affect voice quality, but it does stymie conversations. You find that you and the other party can’t talk at the same time. You have to let the other person talk, then pause a half-second, and then start talking yourself. Essentially, the phone has been turned into a two-way radio.

That’s not the worst of it. If packets are lost in file transfers, TCP/IP will detect that the data wasn’t received properly and resend it. You can’t do that on a VoIP call. If you did, your words would arrive out of order and make no sense at all. So, the real time protocol simply ignores missing packets and keep on going. The effect of lost packets is missing information in the voice stream that shows up as voice distortion. It may be slight or the whole conversation may sound garbled.

Sometimes the packets are preserved just fine, but they take different paths from sender to receiver. This causes a variation in transport time called jitter. You can compensate for this somewhat by buffering the incoming packet stream to smooth it out. More than a little of this will cause the latency issue of needing long pauses before the other party can talk. Some jitter can cause packets to arrive out of order which distorts the voice as bad or worse than dropping the late arrivers completely.

The fact is that voice calls are fragile compared to one-way communications like file transfers or even streaming video. What does it take to ensure high reliability and high quality VoIP telephony?

High performance VoIP service providers avoid many potential issues by keeping the calls on their own networks and avoiding the Internet completely. These networks are often called SIP trunks after the Session Initiation Protocol that is at the heart of VoIP signaling. Essentially, the network operator becomes your phone service provider and uses a dedicated network connection to connect from the phones in your business to the switching equipment at their end. Since they own the network, they can carefully control it for latency, jitter and packet loss.

The type of CODEC you use also affects voice quality. A wideband CODEC can sound as good as any other phone call. There are even HD or HIgh Definition CODECs that expand the voice range so that the audio is more natural sounding and easier to understand. If you elect to go with a narrow band CODEC to cram more calls on the same SIP trunk, you may find that voice quality is marginal to unacceptable. It all depends on what your and your customer’s expectations are when it comes to call quality.

Are you interested in the benefits of VoIP solutions to replace your aging analog phones or in-house PBX system, but worried about degrading the quality of your calls? If so, learn more about the features and benefits offered by high reliability VoIP phone service providers.

MPLS Networks Simplified

Have you been hearing a lot of buzz about MPLS networks lately but not exactly sure just what is a MPLS network and how it differs from other networks? Here’s the really simplified lowdown on MPLS technology in less than 3 minutes...


So, why go to all the trouble to set up a “bar coding technology” when IP networks are so prolific? IP works great within your organization where you have complete control of the network. You can manage the traffic, add and subtract resources, and set-up class of service mechanisms to ensure that time sensitive traffic like VoIP or video conferencing isn’t crushed by big data file transfers or backup and restore processes.

Not so on the Internet. Every packet gets the same handling as every other packet. The fault tolerant features of Internet technology pretty much ensure that if packets can’t take one particular path, they can find another more round about way to get to their destination. This is great for TCP/IP applications like file transfers, but deadly for two-way voice and video. No class of service distinctions combined with indeterminate routing wreak havoc in the form of latency and jitter.

This is where MPLS shines. There are no public MPLS networks like the public Internet. They are all owned and operated by particular service providers on a fee basis. You sign up for the MPLS network that you want to use and the provider makes sure that you get first class service.

How is that done? Remember those “bar code” tags? The tags have the extra information about class of service and routing that tell the network how to handle each packet. There is no need for equipment on the network to examine IP or other protocol headers. The tag is all the tag switches or routers need to handle the traffic.

The result of this tagging process is that packets are handled differently depending on their needs. Voice and video conferencing traffic gets priority. Non-critical file transfers get a lower priority. Most of the time, congestion, latency and jitter are not a problem. Since the service provider knows everyone using the network, adequate resources can be provisioned to ensure that traffic from one customer doesn’t interfere with traffic from any other.

There’s another benefit to this tagging technology. It completely frustrates anyone trying to spy on the network traffic using IP tools. They won’t work because the network isn’t running the Internet Protocol. It just transports IP packets from point A to point B. Non-IP traffic gets the same treatment. That’s why MPLS means multi-protocol label switching. Any protocol can be accommodated and all have enhanced security from label switching technology and no public access. MPLS networks are often referred to as MPLS VPN or virtually private network.

Today’s MPLS networks have regional, national and international service footprints. They are easily accessed from just about anywhere using copper wireline or fiber optic connections. Pricing is very attractive, even when you only want to connect two far-flung locations. For multiple sites that need to communicate, MPLS is the go-to technology today.

Does an MPLS network service make sense for your WAN communication needs? Get competitive pricing and features for MPLS networks that support your business needs.

Why T1 Is Available Where Other Line Services Aren’t

If your businesses is located off the beaten path, you may have experienced the frustration of not being able to get the same network services offered to companies downtown. You might even have come to the conclusion that there’s really nothing available to you. Oh, but there one highly reliable and reasonably priced digital telecom service that you can get almost anywhere. What is it? It’s T1.

There are a couple of misconceptions about T1 that go back to when this was something of an exclusive service. They are that T1 lines are very expensive and only available in certain areas. Neither of those is true any longer. T1 lines are available for most every business location. T1 lines are also quite reasonably priced for businesses, although not competitive with or available as residential services.

The fact that you can get T1 and not some of the “bargain” services like DSL and Cable broadband may actually be to your advantage. Those lower cost services have lower prices not because of any special technology, but because they are shared rather than dedicated bandwidth and because they are offered as “information services” with no particular guarantees of availability. Your bandwidth can vary all over the place and if the line goes down, it will get fixed when it gets fixed. T1 lines come with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees such things as bandwidth, jitter, latency and mean time to repair.

Why would anyone buy a low budget information service instead of a professional grade telecom service? In some cases, it’s because the person placing the order isn’t all that familiar with the differences between bandwidth services and goes for the lowest price option available. In other cases, it’s because the service is being used to power a free WiFi hotspot as a service to visiting customers or for casual Internet activities that aren’t all that critical to the daily operation of the business.

T1 is so universally available because it is a highly mature technology, originally developed by the phone companies to transport two dozen phone calls at a time between switching offices. As such, it was designed to use two pair of twisted copper wires as part of a multi-pair bundle installed into nearly every business. Some of the wires in the bundle are used for phone service essential to any business. Others can be used to provide T1 line service.

T1 was also engineered with optional regenerator boxes that could be installed every mile or so to clean up and boost the signal to extend its range. This way, T1 lines can be run far out into the countryside with the same performance as those in town. That’s not so for DSL and Cable, which are pretty much constrained within the city limits and not much further.

T1 is a highly versatile line service. You can use it for dedicated Internet access, multiple telephone line trunks or as a point to point dedicated private line. It’s possible to get T1 private lines that span the nation. In this case, the are multiplexed onto long haul fiber optic circuits for most of that distance and only delivered as copper at both ends of the run.

T1 lines give you 1.5 Mbps of rock-solid exclusive bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. You don’t have to contend with any other users when you want access to the line. Prices start at under $300 a month in many locations nationwide. In lesser populated areas, the prices will be higher due to the extra effort install all the needed equipment, including regenerators, to your location.

What if 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough? You have to option to bond multiple T1 lines together to get a single larger bandwidth service. If you double bond, that is use 2 T1 lines, your bandwidth will be 3 Mbps. The number of lines you can bond together varies with location, but 10 to 12 Mbps is a practical limit in most locations. That’s plenty for most business needs.

Now that you know that T1 lines are very likely available to you at reasonable cost, how about getting T1 line service pricing and options for your business location? It sure beats having to move just because you didn’t think you could get connected.

IP WAN over MPLS Advantages

When we think of IP wide area networks, the first thing that comes to mind is the Internet. While the Internet does have almost universal connectivity and modest cost to access, there are some serious issues when it comes to business applications. Bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss have no guarantees and few expectations. Security is a joke. But aren’t other methods to interconnect business locations costly and hard to manage?

It is possible to set up a private IP network that lets you use your familiar IP addressing schemes and avoid encryption, firewalls, tunnels, and additional hardware. You’ll gain a performance advantage compared to using VPN techniques over the Internet and save yourself the administrative headaches of trying to manage a WAN with inherently indeterminate characteristics. Who offers something like this? It’s TelePacific, one of the nation’s largest competitive carriers.

TelePacific’s 1Net is an IP VPN running on a private MPLS network, not the Internet. Since MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching can transport almost any protocol, it can be set up to mimic the Internet while keeping your data private. Only the locations that you set up can exchange traffic. No one outside of your user group can capture or view your data. You’ll have any to any connectivity within the group with security sufficient to address HIPPA or similar government regulations.

In fact, TelePacific set up just such a private IP Network for a medical imaging organization with 6 locations. They use it to transport patients’ private medical records among their location. Referring physicians can access patient imaging results within hours at their own computers. The system is also used for claims processing, patient scheduling and registration. Interestingly, this system also allows dedicated Internet access through a single firewall at corporate headquarters.

The TelePacific 1Net IP VPN has both cost and performance advantages over other secure networking solutions, including private line, ATM and Frame Relay. You can specify up to six different Classes of Service (CoS) to support sensitive real-time services such as VoIP telephone and teleconferencing. On Net, latency for all CoS is specified at 50 msec. That rises to just 100 msec for extended reach locations off the TelePacific network but still within the US. Network availability is 99.999% (5 nines) both on and off network locations.

The Classes of Service are CoS 1 for VoIP real time traffic, CoS2 for video conferencing and real time data traffic, CoS3 for high priority, delay sensitive business data like Ecommerce and Citrix, CoS4 for medium priority delay-sensisitive business data such as CRM and WebEx, CoS5 for general less delay sensitive business data like ERP, and CoS6 for best effort traffic with no prioritization. That’s typically Email and FTP.

Are you cringing at the cost and effort involved in linking your business locations by private lines or frustrated by the highly variable performance and difficulty in securing the Internet? Perhaps the best solution for your business needs is a private IP VPN based on MPLS networking. Check prices and features to compare with your other choices.



Note: MPLS network diagram courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Advantage of Dedicated Cloud Connections

The capital investment and staff cost savings offered by cloud services are encouraging small, medium and large companies alike to move their telephone and IT resources to the cloud. It’s been assumed that a simple broadband Internet connection will suffice for access. That’s turning out to be a disappointment in some cases.

The notion that bandwidth is bandwidth is how we get in trouble specifying metro and wide area network connections. What makes the Internet attractive as a WAN service is that it is almost universally available and the cost is spread over millions, even billions of users. Savvy companies discovered long ago that you could get around the security issues by encrypting your data to create a VPN or Virtual Private Network. The VPN gives you a private tunnel through a public network.

VPNs work great to support remote workers and traveling employees who’s only way to connect with corporate headquarters is through a wired or wireless Internet service. They’re also good for linking multiple business locations, such as branch offices or franchises. With a VPN you can transfer sensitive financial and inventory files among dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations.

Note that we are talking about file transfers. The TCP/IP network protocol was made for this application. All you do is launch the transfer and TCP will ensure that all the packets that make up the file will get from point A to point B intact. If something goes awry and a packet is corrupted, it is automatically resent.

Remember that the Internet was designed for universal access and to be self-healing in the face of equipment failure or line breaks. While TCP/IP is making sure that files are being accurately transfered, the Internet itself is making sure that there is a path available from point A to point B no matter what. While you can expect to transfer data, voice or video files over the Internet, you can’t really expect that this is going to happen without hiccups or in any minimal amount of time. Packets may or may not be lost and require a resend. The path may change from packet to packet. The latency or time delay from source to destination can vary all over the place, or jitter.

The result of this is that real time performance of Internet connections is highly variable. This is no big deal for data file transfers. The time to transfer may vary by milliseconds or seconds for each file. Time sensitive data streams like audio and video need some extra help in the form of buffering. You compensate for unknowable transmission rate variations by filling up a buffer with packets and then clocking them out at a constant rate.

Buffering works great for one-way downloads, but creates havoc for real-time video or audio streams. That includes telephone calls and video conferencing. You can’t have much of a buffer or the latency increases to the point where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. There is a noticeable delay, fractions of a second or longer, that make two-way communication painful at best. Lost packets from iffy Internet connections add distortion that blurs your video and garbles your audio.

The same Internet that seems fast and responsive when searching for information on Google can be maddening when trying to calm down an angry customer on a VoIP phone call that is breaking up. Automated business processes that worked fine over the LAN when the data center was in-house all of a sudden become sluggish in the cloud. It’s not that the cloud isn’t just as good or better than local resources, it’s that you need a better connection.

What you want is a dedicated connection between you and your cloud provider. Level 3 Communications is now offering dedicated connections to Amazon Web Services (AWS) running in Equinix data centers to meet the demand from larger corporations. Dedicated connections include Ethernet Private Line, Ethernet MPLS and Wavelength services. T1 lines are also suitable for smaller companies, although Ethernet over Copper may be a lower cost option and offer more bandwidth for the money.

A dedicated connection ensures that you have steady guaranteed bandwidth plus low latency, jitter and packet loss. Security is also improved because access is limited, not publicly available. A well engineered dedicated connection is just like a very long LAN that includes your locations and your service provider.

Are you disappointed with the performance of your cloud services or concerned that quality will suffer if you move from a local data center to the cloud? All you may need to get things working to your satisfaction is a high quality dedicated cloud connection. Why put up with all that aggravation when dedicated connection prices are lower than they’ve ever been? Check prices and availability of dedicated cloud connection bandwidth you need to support your critical applications.

MPLS Service Providers Link Your Business Locations

It’s common for businesses to have multiple locations that need to be tied together with voice, data and sometimes video services. These can be branch offices, remote data centers, warehouses, franchises, factories and other business locations. What’s needed is a simple, cost effective way to link geographically diverse locations. MPLS service providers are ready to do just that.

Why MPLS? After all, there have been telecommunications services available for decades that can link one site to another. T1 point to point lines are readily available just about anywhere you need service. The public telephone network connects any phone to any other phone in the world. So what is it that MPLS networks have to offer that is new and different?

What MPLS is all about is privately owned and operated networks that serve large regions of the United States, some with national and even international footprints. These are what are also called “cloud networks.” The beauty of the cloud is that you don’t personally have to worry about the intricacies of wiring up and operating the many, many connections linking sites within the cloud. That’s all taken care of by the MPLS service providers. All you need is a link to the MPLS network from each of your locations. The network operator takes care of setting up the connections among your sites per your specification.

You might think that MPLS networks sound a bit like the Internet, and you’d be right. The similarity is in the way they make connections from anywhere to anywhere else. But that’s where the similarity ends. The Internet is a public resource with no quality of service mechanisms. If particular nodes get congested, packets wait or get lost. The Internet automatically sets up routing on the fly, so you never really know how your packets are getting from point A to point B. They just do somehow.

MPLS networks are engineered around predictable and dependable performance. Routing is done by a proprietary tagging protocol unique to MPLS networks. That makes them far more secure to outside intruders than the Internet. The tag switches have determinate paths that don’t change unless there is an equipment failure that needs to be worked around. Bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss are carefully controlled for each customer of the network.

What this all means is that MPLS networks work well for business users that set high standards for the quality, reliability and security of their telephone conversations and data transfers between locations. What MPLS providers can do is offer you a substantial cost savings over building your own private network to link multiple business locations. This is especially true if you have many locations scattered across a wide geographical area, including international offices.

How much of a cost difference is there between an MPLS network solution and what you are doing now for connectivity or have under consideration? Find out quickly and easily with a short inquiry to our knowledgeable Telarus consultants. They’ll get you competitive quotes from MPLS service providers that will clearly show how much you can save.

Wireless SIP Trunking

One thing we know about business telephone and dedicated broadband access is that they are wireline services. Well, that’s what we used to know. There’s a new player in the marketplace and it is wireless SIP trunking.

A pioneer in this field is Airband Communications. They offer enterprise-class IP-based voice services bundled with wireless Internet access. In wireline parlance, this could be called a SIP trunk or Integrated voice and data service. But Airband VoIP trunking service has some unique advantages.

Like other integrated services, there is only one WAN connection providing both telephone and broadband Internet access. This one just happens to be wireless. Also like the better integrated services, bandwidth is dynamically allocated between voice and data to make efficient use of the connection. Voice packets get priority to maintain quality of service. The bandwidth sharing of voice and data also only exists between your facility and Airband. Your telephone calls never travel on the Internet and aren’t subject to the disruptive effects of congestion, jitter and latency on the public network. In fact, you get a unified service level agreement from Airband that covers availability, packet loss, latency and jitter for your peace of mind.

Standard telephone trunking using ISDN PRI generally comes in blocks of 23 channel with a maximum carrying capacity of 23 separate phone lines. Airband’s VoIP trunks can be added in single increments. Buy these outside phone line connections as business picks up and you need them rather than paying for excess resources up front.

A standard package starts at 5 VoIP trunks minimum bundled with 2 Mbps of Internet access. This is perfect for smaller businesses, with unlimited local calling and 200 minutes of domestic long distance per trunk. 911 support is included. So is local number portability so you can keep the phone numbers you have now. You’ll also get both inbound and outbound caller name and ID. If you want, you can add-on DIDs (Direct Inward Dialing), toll free numbers and directory listing, and analog/Fax/security lines. The interface of this system will support either PRI or SIP to your in-house telephone system.

Don’t confuse this fixed wireless service with either cellular or WiFi services. This is professional grade private fixed wireless network with 128 bit data encryption and quality of service (QoS) controls. The radios at each end automatically adjust 8 levels of signal modulation to ensure reliable transmission in all types of weather. In fact Airband offers Dual Path Service Delivery (DPSD) that automatically fails over to the backup service should the main path ever fail. With wireline services, you have to do this yourself by ordering separate diverse line services from different carriers or take your chances on line breaks.

Could your business or organization benefit from a high quality fixed wireless solution with bandwidth up to Gigabit Ethernet? If so, get service availability and pricing on fixed wireless for voice and data now.