Ethernet WAN to Complement Your LAN

By: John Shepler

Traffic on your company’s Local Area Network (LAN) zips along at 1 Gbps or more. In most cases that’s so fast it seems like the network is transparent. Yet, access a resource outside your building and things just seem to creep along. Wouldn’t it be nice to just stretch that LAN across town or to one of your remote locations? Well, maybe you can.

Yes, The WAN is Ethernet
Networks can be divided into two categories: The ones you own and the one’s you lease. You typically install and administrate your company network, called the LAN. When you leave the premises, you connect to another network that operates as a utility. That's the WAN or Wide Area Network. Originally, this WAN was owned and operated by the telephone companies and implemented their proprietary standards. That includes your phone voice lines, ISDN dial-up, T1, DS3, and SONET fiber optic. Connecting to any of these standards requires specialized equipment to do the protocol conversion to and from the Ethernet that runs on the LAN.

These days, most outside lines connect directly to Ethernet without any protocol conversions. The suppliers can be telephone companies or competitive carriers who run their own fiber optic networks. Interoperability is made easy by Carrier Ethernet Standards established the MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) industry consortium.

Ethernet WAN Services
There are three services typically offered by Ethernet service providers that you’ll want to know about.

E-Line or Ethernet Virtual Private Line is a point to point service that connects two locations as if there was a really, really long Ethernet cable in-between.

E-LAN or Ethernet Virtual Private LAN is for multiple locations that want to communicate as if they are on a private bridged Ethernet network.

E-Tree or Ethernet Virtual Private Tree is also a multipoint service, but used more for broadcasting, streaming or content distribution. It is a one-to-many service with a single root and multiple leaves.

Getting Ethernet WAN Service
Within a metropolitan area, the service is called Ethernet MAN or Metropolitan Area Network. Over longer distances that leave the area, Ethernet WAN or Wide Area Network is the term used.

You’ll contract with a service provider or carrier that has points of presence in the locations you want to connect. You may have several to choose from.

The equipment installed at your location consists of terminal equipment with an Ethernet port that supports the network speed you desire. Unlike older systems that require equipment changes for every change in service level, you can order Ethernet service at many different speeds up to the limit of the installed port. This has the advantage of letting you pay for the service level you need now and then upgrade easily as you need more capacity. Often that’s as easy as making a change via your online service portal or with a simple phone call.

Ethernet to the Internet
The Internet is the ultimate Wide Area Network, connecting just about everybody, everywhere. You can order an Ethernet Dedicated Internet Access to connect your company to the Internet at whatever bandwidth you desire. The advantage of a dedicated connection is that the full bandwidth of the line is at your disposal and not affected by the carrier’s other customers. These lines are also typically symmetrical, meaning that upload and download speeds are identical.

Why not just use the Internet to connect your far flung locations as well as connecting to customers? Many companies do. it’s likely your lowest cost option. What you give up is the ability to establish Class of Service so that sensitive applications like VoIP phone calls and video conferences have priority over less critical applications such as file transfers and backups. Internet performance is also somewhat unpredictable because of unexpected congestion, indeterminate packet routing, jitter, latency and packet loss.

For companies with multiple locations, a hybrid arrangement may work best. Use dedicated Ethernet services to interconnect business locations and the Internet to communicate with supplier and customers.

Does Ethernet WAN sound right for your business? Get a suite of competitive quotes for Ethernet WAN or MAN services now with a single inquiry.

Ethernet Everywhere? We’re Almost There!

By John Shepler

It’s been brewing for a long time, now. The prediction is that all of those networking standards will finally settle on just one. No more T1, DS3, OCx and whatever. It’s all going to be just Ethernet one day. How close are we to that day? Why, we’re almost there!

Network Standards Have Already Embraced Ethernet
Telcos are doing something once thought heresy. They’re abandoning their proprietary standards in favor of Ethernet services.

Why? Because that’s what the market wants. Once upon a time, there were all sorts of Local Area Network standards. Can you remember when Token Ring was the coming thing? How about AppleTalk?

Today, virtually all network equipment has one connector and it is for Ethernet. There are really only two flavors: copper and fiber. Virtually all office equipment is either 10/100 or Gigabit Ethernet over twisted pair copper. Networking equipment may have fiber connections for GigE, 10 GigE or 100 GigE.

This standardization has make connectivity extremely easy. The standardization on switched Ethernet versus the original collision domains makes networking a fairly easy plug-and-play.

The same thing has happened to networking software. The Internet standard, TCP/IP has become the THE standard, further enhancing the ease of setting up and running networks.

Getting LANs to Talk Telco
When you own the network, you get to decide how it works. There’s nobody to tell you otherwise when you come up with a design that’s based on off-the-shelf massed produced switches, routers and cabling. The big problem comes when you try to connect to the outside world.

The Internet may have been based on TCP/IP, but the wide area networks that carried it were not. Telephone company standards evolved from the world of voice only channels for telephone calls. What T1, T3 (DS3) and OCx did was simply bundle the smallest channels, 64 Kbps PCM coded telephone calls.

Digital being digital, the solution was to perform a protocol conversion at each end so that Ethernet LAN would be converted to, say, T1 for transmission over some distance and then back to Ethernet at the other end. That process still works great and many T1 lines remain in use because they are sometimes all that is available in rural areas.

What’s Going Bye-Bye?
The major telecom companies have been quietly converting their networks to Ethernet for years. In many cases, this can be simply running Ethernet over some underlying fiber protocol like SONET. Competitive carriers have built out their facilities using Ethernet in the network core and never going through the TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) evolution.

What’s going on now is that telcos are asking the FCC for permission to sunset some of their older services, especially those that run on copper and don’t have many customers anymore. The standard POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is an endangered species. Fewer and fewer residential users have the traditional “home phone.” They either get their phone service bundled with TV and Internet or simply depend on cellular for voice communications.

Businesses are following suit. Smaller companies may get voice and data bundles from cable companies or incumbent telcos that are acting like cable companies. Larger companies are moving rapidly to enterprise VoIP and Unified Communications. These don’t need traditional telephone wiring inside or outside the facility. Everything runs on the network. Outside connectivity is by SIP trunking, dedicated private line, MPLS networks or Dedicated Internet Access.

Is Copper a Goner?
Copper is still going, but who knows for how long. The telcos want to rid their plants of those thick copper bundles, especially the individual POTS lines.

T1 lines are still popular, but the 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is becoming more and more of a limitation. A newer standard, Ethernet over Copper, is highly competitive and offers an order of magnitude or more higher bandwidth at lower cost per Mbps.

Even so, fiber optic connections are reaching more and more business buildings as well as cellular towers. 4G and 5G wireless needs bandwidth beyond what is practical with twisted pair copper. It’s likely that all twisted pair copper may be abandoned to corrode in the ground or pulled out of conduits and sold for scrap. That’s not today in most areas, but it’s not that far away.

So, Where Can I Get Ethernet?
You can order Ethernet over Copper or Ethernet over Fiber in most populous areas right now. In rural locations, Ethernet over DS1 uses a T1 line to deliver Ethernet.

Don’t forget that Cable broadband is delivered to you as an Ethernet connection and FTTP (Fiber to the Premises) is also Ethernet at typically 1 Gbps.

Satellite and wireless Internet services are also delivered as Ethernet. That includes 3G and 4G cellular services designed for business use.

If you’ve been living with a legacy Internet or telecom connection and wondering if there is something better to choose from, there probably is now. Find out with a quick check of Ethernet services in your area and complementary consultation to help you choose the best solution for your business.

Your Ethernet Connection To The World

It’s a given that you need to connect your business location to the outside world to reach your own geographically separated business locations and to reach anyone, anywhere, on Earth. There are various protocols that will get you this connectivity. The most popular is quickly becoming Carrier Ethernet service. Let’s see why.

Carrier Ethernet is an extension to the switched circuit Ethernet protocol that is nearly the universal for Local Area Networks (LANs). You know that there is a distance limitation to LAN Ethernet networks, especially for those running on Cat 5e/6 twisted pair copper wiring. How is it that Ethernet can now reach across town, to the other side of the country and around the world?

You can thank the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) for setting the standards that make long distance Ethernet possible. The MEF is an industry alliance of over 175 organizations who have a vested interest in Carrier Ethernet. Because carriers and manufacturers have agreed to work within these standards, it is possible to have interoperability among Carrier Ethernet systems worldwide.

What’s different about the MAN and WAN versions of Ethernet is that they are transported rather than running natively on the copper or fiber cabling. Technologies that enable this are Provider Backbone Bridges (PBB), Provider Backbone Bridge Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) and Carrier-Ethernet Transport (CET). Connectivity-Fault Management (CFM-OAM) technology adds operations, administration and management features needed to operate metro and long haul communications networks.

Note that the term Carrier Ethernet applies to Metropolitan Ethernet, also called Metro Ethernet, as well as longer haul networks that go beyond the immediate metropolitan area that is the domain of Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN). That’s because metro and wide area networks are more alike than different. They all involve use of a common carrier to transport the signal rather than private ownership of an in-house local area network.

The MEF has standardized Carrier Ethernet services regardless of the transport mechanism. E-Line is the familiar private point to point line service that is popular with T1, DS3 and SONET telecom services. E-Line gives you a direct ethernet connection between two Ethernet ports located across town or at any distance. E-LAN, or Ethernet LAN Service, is a multipoint to multipoint mesh network that covers multiple locations. These could be branch offices or franchise locations. E-LAN can bridge your multiple site LANs so that they act like one larger network.

Another service is E-Tree which is a point to multi-point service, not meshed. The center or root locations can communicate with any of the remote or leaf locations, but those leaf locations cannot directly communicate. They have to route all traffic through the roots that may or may not pass it on. This is similar to the proprietary star networks that companies have deployed to create their own private wide area networks.

Ethernet can be carried over twisted pair copper as EoC or Ethernet over Copper. It can also be transported over T1 (EoDS1) or DS3 (EoDS3) to take advantage of existing infrastructure. Ethernet can also be provided over fiber optic networks including legacy SONET/SDH and the newer Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) running on native IP networks. MPLS networks can easily transport Ethernet services as pseudowires using MPLS label switched paths. This expands the offerings to include Virtual Private Wire Service (VPWS) and Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS).

In addition to the availability of standardized Ethernet services over MAN and WAN distances, Carrier Ethernet also offers the advantages of easy interfacing, granular scalability with nearly any bandwidth level available, and considerably lower cost than traditional telecom services. It is not unusual to get twice the bandwidth for the same price or cut your bandwidth costs in half by switching to Carrier Ethernet services.

Is your company looking for a bandwidth upgrade or to expand connectivity beyond your current network? Perhaps you’re curious to see if you could realize a considerable cost savings? If so, get pricing and options for Carrier Ethernet solutions now.

VPLS Connects Your Many LANs

Does your company have multiple locations? I’ll bet each one has its own LAN for computing and perhaps VoIP telephony, doesn’t it? So, how do you connect them all together?

The answer is probably, “With some difficulty.”

Well, how would you like to be able to do that with very little difficulty, and perhaps at a considerable cost savings over your present point to point communications links?

The network service you’ll be interested in is called VPLS or Virtual Private LAN Service. It’s offered by Layer2 Communications and other highly competitive network service providers.

VPLS is a class of VPN or Virtual Private Network that connects multiple sites to form a single bridged domain. It is implemented using a MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching Network. That makes it protocol-transparent so that all services, regardless of which location the are physically located at, appear to be on the larger LAN that serves all locations.

VPLS is sometimes called Transparent LAN service. That’s because WAN communications moves from level 3 to level 2. Your connection to the network is via a managed edge switch that is provided by the network operator. The inherent broadcast nature of Ethernet is preserved, creating a “plug and play” environment as new services are added to the network and discovered by other members connected to the VPLS.

VPLS might be the right service for your company or organization if you need to connect anywhere from a few to a few dozen locations as if they were on a single Local Area Network. Advantages of this approach, compared to a private network arrangement with individual point to point connections back to headquarters, include lower latency, higher efficiency, and lower cost... perhaps much lower cost.

Will VPLS save you money and make your network more versatile and easier to operate? Why not discuss your needs with one of our expert consultants and get a complementary quote that meets your business needs? Our telecom brokerage service represents Layer2 Communications and other high value network service providers. Request a VPLS service quote online right now.