Replace T1 Line With 10 Mbps Fiber at Same Cost

Is copper sunsetting by the telcos forcing you to look for T1 line replacement service? Consider it a blessing in disguise. You may well be able to upgrade your 1.5 Mbps T1 line to 10 Mbps fiber optic service for roughly the same price. What’s more, that fiber will allow you to easily add even more bandwidth as you need it.

What’s Happening to Legacy Landlines?
T1 lines were the first digital telecom services created by Bell Labs and put into service to transport multiple telephone calls. They started being used for business, first for PBX telephone lines and then for digital private lines and dedicated Internet access. The oldest have been around more than 50 years. In the meantime, technology has advanced, most notably with the introduction of fiber optic cables, hybrid fiber coax, and microwave fixed wireless.

While millions of analog phone lines, T1 lines & ISDN PRI, and DS3 services have been successfully employed over the last half century, service providers are now beginning to “sunset” these technologies in favor fiber and wireless. Sunsetting involves no longer offering new connections, raising prices on existing services to cover increased maintenance costs, and eventually refusing to renew contracts when they expire. The copper lines and their associated central office equipment are effectively retired, even though it may be some time before they are removed and recycled.

Part of the problem is that the copper cables have been in the ground for so long that they are deteriorating. When there aren’t enough extra pairs to replace corroded wires or bad connections, new cables must be pulled or buried and that is very expensive. What makes it less attractive is that so many business customers are migrating to fiber anyway for increased bandwidth and connections to the cloud infrastructure. At some point it is no longer worth maintaining these legacy services.

Fiber Steps In to Replace Copper
When you first ordered your T1 or T3 (DS3) line, fiber optic service may not have been available. What was available cost a pretty penny. You needed to be a very large organization with a large need and even larger budget to have OC3, OC12 or OC48 SONET fiber installed. Two developments have changed all that.

First is the invention of Ethernet over Fiber as an alternative to the telephone-centric SONET. EoF easily connects to Ethernet LANs and is readily scalable to whatever bandwidth you need. Competitive service providers who entered the market following deregulation of the telecom industry adapted Ethernet over Fiber for their regional and national networks. This allowed them to offer much lower cost options to business customers.

The second development was the advancement of cellular broadband from 2G to 3G to 4G and now 5G. Phone companies got away with using their T1 lines to feed the cell towers until 4G LTE became the standard. Then even multiple T1 lines couldn’t provide enough bandwidth to support the faster broadband. Fiber optic or point to point microwave is needed to support today’s cell towers. Fiber has been installed far and wide just to have enough bandwidth for smartphones. A side benefit is that fiber is readily available for other connections in areas far beyond the metro business district.

Fiber Now Priced Similar to Copper
The cost of T1 lines declined for decades but now looks to increase again as time goes on. With fewer customers and a desire to sunset the service, expect that your T1 line will cost more in the future, if you can even continue the service. Meanwhile, fiber optic service has rapidly declined in price due to expanded deployment and competitive pressures. So much so that the cost of 10 Mbps fiber service is now roughly the same as a single T1 line. If you are bonding two T1 lines to get 3 Mbps bandwidth, you’ll triple your bandwidth and actually pay less by switching over to fiber.

Are you faced with increased T1 costs and service disconnects or simply want to get more bandwidth for the same budget? If so, then get competitive quotes on Ethernet over Fiber bandwidth services available for your business location.

What Does “Five Nines” Mean to You?

By: John Shepler

Five nines reliability. It's the standard often quoted for traditional telephone service and top network equipment vendors. But what does it really mean? Just how close to perfect is five nines anyway? Let’s take a look.


Reliability or Availability
The spoken term five-nines refers to the number 99.999%. This number is generally referred to as a reliability figure. Actually, what people call reliability is more correctly called "availability." It's not just how often a piece of equipment has a software crash or a power supply bursts into flames that is really important. It's how much of the time you actually get to use it. In other words, how much of the time is this particular device available. Availability includes how often it breaks and then how fast it gets put back into service. You also have to include how often it is out of service or unavailable due to routine maintenance.

An Example
Say your softswitch has a software glitch that only shows up under obscure combinations of events. When the glitch occurs once every six months, the software crashes and automatically reboots. That takes a minute. Does this switch have five nines uptime? Yes. Now if a power supply smokes once a year and it takes 20 minutes to fix it, that's not good enough for five nines even though the power supply failure occurs less frequently.

By the Numbers
Here are some handy numbers to give you perspective on the whole nines issue:

Five nines or 99.999% availability means 5 minutes, 15 seconds or less of downtime in a year.

Or, if you are really ambitious, shoot for six nines or 99.9999% availability, which allows 32 seconds or less downtime per year.

Otherwise, four nines or 99.99% availability allows 52 minutes, 36 seconds downtime per year.

Three nines or 99.9% availability allows 8 hours, 46 minutes downtime per year. This is often acceptable for many non-critical applications.

Two nines or 99% availability allows 3 days, 15 hours and 40 minutes downtime per year. That’s somewhat marginal for business.

One nine or 9% availability allows over 332 days of downtime per year. That's right. You're only up and running about a month out of the year on average.

Zero nines, of course, is totally useless. It's 100% downtime per year.

How do you get more nines?
Buy the best equipment that's the easiest to repair. Then add redundancy. Highly reliable systems often include multiple power supplies & processors, plus battery backup, diesel or natural gas generators for longer power outages than batteries can handle, multiple diverse communication lines and extras of whatever else is likely to fail. Buggy software that crashes all the time is going to hurt your reliability. If it goes down a lot and takes a long time to get back online your availability also be hurt.

Include Everything
One thing to be aware of is that the five nines criteria tends to apply to whatever the person quoting it says it applies to. PBX systems that meet five nines availability may only do so for the core system and might not include individual line cards and certainly not the phones themselves and their wiring. If it's REALLY important that you minimize downtime, you need to consider EVERYTHING that can fail and make sure it is backed up and/or very easy to fix.

On Cloud 9’s
Another option to consider seriously is to move all those hardware availability issues to the cloud. Cloud services aren’t perfect, either, but they often can provide higher service availability than you can afford locally. That’s because the cloud architecture is designed for considerable redundancy and fast failover when problems occur. If you do opt for the cloud, though, be sure you have highly reliable bandwidth connections to your provider. A 5 nines hosted PBX system isn’t all that available if you have a flakey internet connection from your facility to the cloud. A dedicated SIP Trunk or a set of redundant trunks is a much better solution.

Nines for Your Needs
How many nines do you need and what’s the cost for WAN or cloud availability? Get the best price vs performance options for your particular requirements now.

Fractional and Full Gigabit Ethernet Options

By: John Shepler

Today’s demanding application push for higher and higher bandwidths. Right now 10 Mbps is considered entry level and most businesses need at least 100 Mbps WAN bandwidth to ensure that real-time (VoIP, videoconferencing) and latency sensitive (cloud connections) applications won’t succumb to degradation from network congestion at peak load times. Technology intensive businesses and medium to large scale operations can easily require Gigabit connections. Fortunately, they are easy to come by and relatively inexpensive compared to times past.

One major technology upgrade in the last decade is the standardization and deployment of Carrier Ethernet. This represents a major change in MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth. The legacy services are SONET/SDH, a TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) switched circuit technology originally developed for massive telephone trunking between central offices. Carrier Ethernet acknowledges the fact that packet switched traffic is dominant on networks worldwide. With Ethernet on the local networks, it seems logical to keep everything in the Ethernet protocol from end to end.

Carrier Ethernet can be transported on both copper and fiber lines. The lower bandwidth offerings are found on EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This is a twisted pair technology that uses the same installed cabling that supports T1 and analog phone lines. EoC typically starts at 1 to 3 Mbps and goes up to 10 or 20 Mbps, although there are special situations that will support 50 and even 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. These tend to be locations very close to the telco CO where the termination equipment is installed. Copper based Ethernet loses bandwidth capacity rapidly with distance.

Ethernet over Fiber is the logical solution for many, if not most, high performance applications. Bandwidth typically starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps. Popular service levels are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. These mirror the LAN speeds of standard, fast and gigabit Ethernet.

There are factors that make Carrier Ethernet more affordable and more flexible than the longstanding SONET services. Numerous competitive carriers have deployed their own regional and national fiber networks independent of the public telephone system. They own the fiber and terminal equipment, including last mile drops to your building. This is a very competitive field right now and lease prices per Mbps have plummeted in recent years.

Another real cost savings opportunity arises from the easy scalability designed into Carrier Ethernet services. TDM based bandwidth is technically unique at each service level. T1, DS3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and other installations require specific terminal equipment. If you wish to upgrade to a faster service, you need different equipment installed. That helps drive costs and leads to long installation times.

Carrier Ethernet bandwidths are somewhat arbitrary. Everything works the same regardless of how much traffic is being transported. In other words, Ethernet is Ethernet. What’s important is the speed of the installed port at your location. It is the maximum capacity of the port that sets a limit on the bandwidth you can order. A Fast Ethernet port is good up to 100 Mbps. A Gigabit Ethernet port raises that ceiling to 1000 Mbps.

There is nothing that prevents you from operating your network connection at a speed less than the maximum port capacity. Fractional line speeds that are rate limited by the service provider have been available for other services, such as DS3 or OC3. There are cost savings available with these, but they are not nearly as dramatic as what you’ll find with Ethernet.

In fact, scalability is a big selling point with Carrier Ethernet. Many carriers offer bandwidth upgrades with only a phone call required. The additional capacity can be online in a matter of hours or days. That compares with weeks or months for equipment changes on older services.

This is where Gigabit Ethernet makes sense even if you don’t need that much capacity today. The idea is to install a Gigabit Ethernet port, which is commonly available with a managed router provided by the carrier. The output is a standard copper or fiber Ethernet jack. You can then place your initial bandwidth order at 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps or some other level that represents your current need. When you need more bandwidth, that phone call will get you 500 Mbps, 750 Mbps or one of many other increments. These fractional Gigabit speeds can be increased until you are at the full Gigabit capacity of the port.

Is Gigabit Ethernet still too restrictive? The answer, as you may suspect, is to order a 10 GigE or even 100 GigE port. That’s the practical limit today. As bandwidth demands continue to increase, carriers will upgrade their core networks to Terabit per second and higher speeds. Soon afterwards these speeds will be available to business or organization customers with highly demanding applications.

Are you being squeezed for metro and long haul bandwidth to support your organization? If so, it is well worth your while to look into the availability and cost of fractional and full Gigabit Ethernet services, and higher if needed.

MPLS Networks vs The Internet

By: John Shepler

Businesses with multiple locations have a requirement that single location companies don’t. They need to reliably connect their various offices, factories, warehouses, medical centers or school campuses at a reasonable cost. Let’s take a look at how MPLS networks, private lines, and the Internet can be deployed to do just that:


What it really comes down to is how much network performance is required to support your business activities and what you are willing to pay. If you have stringent demands for high voice quality on outside calls, such as customer service lines, or expect high productivity from your critical cloud services, you need to seriously consider private line or MPLS network solutions. You won’t be happy with what you get from the Internet and it may wind up costing you way more than you save on monthly telecom costs.

On the other hand, if you are a small operation that primarily communicates via email and websites, perhaps with cloud data backup, you may well get by with Internet VPN services. This is especially true if you have more patience than money and need a low cost solution no matter what. You’ll greatly improve your satisfaction level if you employ a dedicated private line as your last mile connection to the Internet. Most Internet issues are caused end user connections that just aren’t designed for demanding needs.

Why not take a few minutes and investigate what’s available in network bandwidth connections for your particular business locations.

Will 2013 Be Your Year of the Cloud?

Cloud computing has been the hot topic of 2012. There are more vendors with more solutions than ever before. You no longer need the power of a super computer to justify using cloud services. The evolution of the cloud has progressed to the point where even commonly used resources may make more sense hosted remotely than in-house. So, is 2013 the year that you make the move to the cloud?

For many companies, that answer will be a resounding “Yes.” It’s a matter of economics, support and access. Doing everything yourself has the lure of being totally in control of your destiny. In return, you have to come up with the capital investment in new equipment, the staff to run everything and the ongoing cost of maintenance. Often, that means giving up the ability to respond quickly to a changing business environment. It’s just too expensive to have personnel and equipment on standby, “just in case.”

Another strong selling point of many cloud providers is that they can afford to keep with the very latest technology trends. You may have to wait until your equipment is fully depreciated or until you can come up with the funding in order to get all the latest features available on the newest models of equipment. Hotly competing cloud companies have no choice but to stay at the cutting edge of technology or risk being put out of business by other more nimble providers.

Disaster recovery can be much easier with a cloud-based system. The cloud operator builds in the necessary redundancies, including geographical diversity so that no single event can knock out the whole system. All you need is access. That’s a lot easier to come by than having to reorder an entire data center’s worth of equipment and software and getting it up and running. Even with remote or cloud backup, it can take days or weeks to fully download and restore your business database. With everything in the cloud, the data is online at all times and unaffected by situations that cut off your connectivity or destroy your local offices.

Some companies have unusually high bandwidth requirements. Content providers who stream video over the Internet or provide programming to Internet Service Providers require massive amounts of bandwidth. It’s not uncommon to need 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or even 40 Gbps to support live streaming of multiple HD video programs. That kind of bandwidth is readily available in cloud data centers, but might not be available locally. You may be faced with moving your operation in order to get the fiber optic connections you need to conduct business. If your servers are in the cloud with high speed connections it takes the pressure off the line speed requirements from your office to the cloud.

What’s available now in the cloud? It’s pretty much everything you need to run a small, medium or large scale business. Virtual servers with virtual storage give you all the computing power and disk space that you’ll ever need. You can ramp these resources up and down using a desktop control panel in real time. This is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Along with the infrastructure, you are going to need software. Software as a Service (SaaS) complements IaaS so that you pay by the month by usage for all your software and hardware. A related component, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the cloud version of a development system where you get things customized and working. You only buy this as you need to do development. Security as a Service is a add-on feature that protects your network from intrusion. Once again, it is running from within the cloud.

Even the telephone system has a cloud equivalent. This is called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. The switching system and connection to the public telephone network is all done by the cloud service provider. You install SIP telephones that connect to your network and use a special line called a SIP trunk to connect with the provider. You no longer need to buy and maintain an in-house PBX. Some vendors will even include free SIP phones with your service.

Have you been watching cloud developments but hesitant to get involved? This is a great time to get competitive prices and features on cloud computing and communications appropriate for your size business. If you like the answers, you can easily sign up for service and enjoy the new features and cost savings for all of 2013.

Why Cloud Data Centers Are Multiplying

You’ve probably noticed that there are a lot more offers for cloud based services than there were even a year ago. It seems like nearly everyone in the telecom and IT services space has a new cloud offering. Some offers are only new for a few days or weeks before being replaced with an even better offer. Have you wondered what’s driving this frenzy and how it’s all being implemented behind the scenes?

There are two big pieces to implementing cloud computing services. The first is a robust data center that is sized to hold all of the equipment anticipated, and supported by an ecosystem of cooling, backup power and security. The second is connectivity. If you don’t have a reliable way to deliver your cloud services, it doesn’t matter how groundbreaking they are. Enterprise customers need to know that they can count of the system being available and functioning at all times without slowdowns or dropouts.

This gives the network bandwidth providers a leg up in making their case for high performance cloud solutions. A good example is EarthLink Business. They were in the metro and long haul network business long before clouds started to appear. EarthLink operates a high speed nationwide network that spans 28,00 fiber route miles with 90 metro fiber rings. This network supports six classes of service for MPLS over Ethernet, T-1 and DSL connections. Class of Service (CoS) is honored from edge to edge over the entire network.

Why is that important? Today’s converged networks are only effective if they can handle data, voice and video seamlessly. Voice over network communications, like VoIP telephony, is especially sensitive to latency, jitter and dropped packets. You need CoS to provide a fast lane for real-time two-way services like VoIP so they aren’t destroyed by mundane file transfers and backups hogging all the bandwidth.

This argues for a high performance privately operated network over taking your chances on the public Internet. A private network operator can carefully allocate resources to ensure that every packet stream is supported to ensure high quality operations. On the Internet, there are no such guarantees. You launch your packets and you take your chances. For one way video, email and Web browsing this is perfectly adequate most of the time. It tends to fall short for enterprise VoIP, video conferencing and cloud access.

Why is connectivity with the cloud so fussy? If all you are doing is backing up files in a background process, you may never notice any issues. However, if you have moved from your own data center to the cloud and are your applications are now running as SaaS (Software as a Service), any delays in response through the network will be frustrating at least and a detriment to productivity at worst. You moved to the cloud to save money. It’s a shame if poor network performance eats up those cost savings with reduced employee productivity.

EarthLink Business and other fiber optic network owners see the competitive advantage they have by providing both the cloud resources and connectivity as a single vendor. That’s why you’re seeing them expand into the cloud space as fast as they can. EarthLink is building four more data centers to support its next generation cloud hosting platform. These will be located in San Jose, Chicago, Dallas and South Florida. An existing data center in Rochester, NY will be updated early next year.

The fiber network is also being expanded to accommodate higher traffic levels anticipated by cloud users. These include key East Coast markets such as Ashburn, Atlanta, Charlotte and Orlando plus new capacity for the Texas cities of Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. The entire network is being beefed up to support the new native benchmark of 100 Gbps. Businesses today can typically get fiber optic service up to 10 Gbps in major metro areas.

Do you see the advantages of moving your IT operations to the cloud, but worry that you’ll lose performance in the process? Take a closer look at enterprise grade cloud computing and networking services and see how they have raised the bar on cloud performance.

Electronic Medical Records and Connectivity Boost Healthcare Efficiency

One key to stemming the rise of health care costs and improving patient care is the move away from paper-based systems toward automation and electronic medical records. The beauty of electronic records is that once they are created, they can be stored, duplicated and transmitted far faster and less expensively than paper forms. Physicians and other health care providers also have the opportunity to get far more comprehensive information on a patient than what is provided by typical paper records.

Electronic medical records, also called electronic health records, include such things as prescriptions, diagnoses, and patient data. They also include electronic imaging files such as X-ray, CT, PET, MRI and ultrasound results. This dramatically increases the size of the files compared to what you’d expect from simply digitizing written forms.

The irony of moving to electronic medial records is that the ability to transfer files from location to location, a major advantage of keeping everything in electronic form, can actually get bogged down to the point where you miss the old paper forms. This is due to both the volume of traffic increasing due to more records moving through the system and the sheer size of records with images attached.

The solution is to increase network bandwidth. Your internal LAN may have been upgraded already to handle massive file transfers efficiently. The big bottleneck is generally the WAN links. These connections go to insurance companies, physicians offices, therapy facilities, and other health care locations. If they are off-campus, you’ll almost certainly be dealing with metro or long haul network connections.

The days when a T1 connection seemed as fast as you’d ever need are pretty much over in the health care industry. A minimum entry point is now typically 10 Mbps for a smaller organization. You may not be sending and receiving that many records, but you don’t want to wait all day for them to transfer. Hospitals and other larger facilities really need fiber optic connections. Gigabit Ethernet is not at all unreasonable or uncommon these days. The prices for this bandwidth level have dropped more than an order of magnitude over what you had to pay a few years ago. There is are more providers competing for your business and technologies such as Ethernet over Fiber that challenge traditional SONET fiber optic services.

Another major concern is security. While paper files can be put behind locked doors and very carefully distributed, electronic files can be accessed via network weaknesses by those who have no right to the information. This means that network security is paramount for any organization handling sensitive patient information. One new approach to protecting data is the Cloud Firewall Service offered by Integra Telecom. This is a perimeter based system that carefully regulates what can enter the network via Internet connections such as log-ins from remote users. Inter-office connections are secured through the Integra MPLS network or your own VPN.

In fact, many medical organizations are moving or at least considering a move to cloud based computing, storage and communications to reduce costs and provide the rapidly scaleable performance needed to handle varying workloads. This puts additional demands on your metro and wide area network connections plus the need for robust security in the cloud. It is projected that healthcare organizations could account for over 20% of the cloud computing market within 5 years.

Is your healthcare organization bogged down by slow network connections or looking to expand to meet rising demand? A number of major network service providers have packaged specifically tailored to meet the needs of healthcare organizations from physicians offices on up to the largest hospitals. Get features and prices on bandwidth and cloud services that are right for the size of your organization.

10 Mbps Is The New T1

T1 service has long been the gold standard for business connectivity. They’re deployed as point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access, and PBX telephone trunks. T1’s are readily available, reasonably priced and highly reliable. Their one limitation was once their prime selling point. It’s the fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps.

Now it’s true that 1.5 Mbps still meets the needs of many small retailers and companies that aren’t technology driven, although even that is starting to change fast. Everyone from insurance professionals, physicians, video producers and engineers is now highly connected. Some of those connections are private lines or virtual private lines. Others are dedicated access to the Internet. What they have in common is a need for far more than yesterday’s bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps.

What’s more appropriate for today’s needs? It’s looking like 10 Mbps is becoming the new gold standard. Why is that? First, let’s look at what’s happened to bandwidth requirements. Nearly everyone connected to the Internet now has broadband rather than dial-up access. The wireless industry is under tremendous pressure to move from 3G speeds of around 1 Mbps, not that much different from T1, to 4G speeds of 3, 6, 10 and higher Mbps downloads and at least 1 Mbps upload.

Broadband speeds are under the gun because they are now the limiting factor to the success of computing. The PCs themselves, including Macs, have gone to multi-gigabyte memories, terabyte storage and multi-core processors. They’ve got the horsepower to create whatever user experience is required. Even tablets are now multi-core and connected to WiFi, 3G or 4G broadband. The WAN is the limiting factor in getting information into and out of the computing platform.

This wasn’t the big deal a few years ago because most all computing was done locally. You either had a software package on your PC or accessed a corporate server over a Local Area Network. Web pages were small, static and mostly text and low resolution graphics. Email is an undemanding text-based service. Ecommerce solutions may have sophisticated processing on the back-end, but don’t necessarily need to transmit that much data back and forth during a transaction.

What’s happened now is that graphics are going high resolution to match higher resolution screens and the natural output of higher resolution still cameras and HD video cameras. Video content is a greater portion of the traffic on any WAN connection. Even more importantly, everything is moving off to the cloud. The cloud is your data center, somewhere, out there, and everything flows to and from the cloud over your WAN connection. This might be a private line or an Internet access service. Either way, it better be a fairly large pipe or you will be feeling constrained in everything you try to do on your computer.

TelePacific is one carrier that is embracing the demand for higher business bandwidth levels and deploying what they call EoX or Ethernet over Anything. That’s Ethernet over copper, TDM, fixed wireless or fiber optic cabling. Why Ethernet? It has the cost advantage over traditional telecom services, an easy interface to corporate LANs, and rapid bandwidth scalability. Most popular is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. What EoC offers is provisioning over the same type of twisted pair copper telco wiring that transports T1 lines, but with higher bandwidths and lower prices per Mbps than T1.

For instance, to get 10 Mbps over T1 lines you need to bond 7 T1 lines together at a cost of 7 times the price of a single T1 line. For half that cost or less, you can get 10 x 10 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. If need be, you can easily ramp that up to 15, 20 or 25 Mbps or more when the need arises. As a reference point, the price you were paying for a single T1 line a few years ago will get you 10 Mbps EoC service today.

Are you feeling constrained by your WAN bandwidth, especially that aging T1 line? If so, it’s time for an upgrade that is likely less expensive than you think. You can probably afford 10 Mbps or more right now. Find out by getting prices and availability for Ethernet bandwidth services suitable for your business location.



Note: Ethernet patch cords photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

AboveNet Offers Gigabit Ethernet For Enterprises

Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) has pretty much taken over the LAN in large and even medium size enterprises. But what about the WAN? Are you still hobbled by the slowdown that occurs when you are sending files beyond your network edge? Isn’t it time to consider Gigabit Ethernet for the WAN as well as the LAN?

Running a Gigabit LAN and using something like DS3 bandwidth or even OC3 fiber optic service for your MAN or WAN service is like connecting a drinking straw to a fire hose. The flow can’t help but slow to a trickle when it goes through that edge router. There once were good reasons why very modest WAN connection speeds were just fine. Today, there’s much less of a case to be made for order of magnitude or larger differences in LAN and WAN speeds.

What’s happened to demand higher connection speeds today? Computer networks were once strictly internal to a company. In fact, anything connected to the network from the outside aroused suspicion. If you wanted to transfer data somewhere, you used a reel of tape or a cassette. Slowly, data communication networks arose starting with dial-up modems and Frame Relay networks. Then came the Internet. It been a speed race ever since.

Now nearly every company has a dedicated broadband connection to the Internet and perhaps one or more VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to connect with employees working for home or on the go. Companies with more than one site often have private line or MPLS network connections to tie everyone together. With the amount of data flying around, tapes and removable disk packs are yesterday’s means of data transfer. Today it is high speed network links.

Not only has computer technology changed, but so have business practices. Now nearly everything has some form of automation involved. Business productivity is leveraged upon real-time computer systems and electronic storage. Nobody at headquarters wants you to create a report and send it overnight mail anymore. They want a video conference presentation featuring you delivering the report live. Oh, and they want it right after lunch.

Beyond mere connectivity for transmitting files electronically instead of faxing or mailing paper, companies and their computing systems are becoming estranged. The data center used to be right down the hall or in the basement. Now it’s on the other side of the country and is owned by somebody else. More and more companies are buying their computing and even their telephone service through a cloud service provider. The LAN no longer connects you to the server racks. Now you have to go through a WAN connection. Does it make sense that the bandwidth that used to be good enough for a few overnight file transfers can’t begin to support real time business applications running in the cloud?

The idea of Gigabit Ethernet connections used to be a fantasy. Now it’s becoming a given. You need the high bandwidth connections to support the amount of data moving between organizational locations and back and forth with the cloud. If you are supporting financial trading, high performance SaaS, video conferencing or enterprise VoIP, you need not just high bandwidth but also low latency and jitter with minimal packet loss. In some cases, you may also require links to overseas locations with the same network characteristics.

Where do you go to get Gigabit level connectivity? AboveNet is a premier supplier of domestic and international fiber optic services. They are recommending moving to Ethernet rather than the legacy SONET fiber services. Why? SONET/SDH services are a legacy telephone company technology. They were designed to support trunking massive numbers of telephone conversations from office to office. These protocols can be made to work with computer networks but they are not directly compatible.

What is? Ethernet! The Ethernet that runs on your LAN can now traverse your WAN to the Internet or to another LAN on the other side of the country or across the Atlantic. This makes for a simpler and more efficient overall network setup. It also enables services such as layer 2 Ethernet LAN Service that bridges two distant LANs as if they were in the same building. Ethernet scales much faster and more granularly than SONET, allowing you to buy just the bandwidth you need now with the option to quickly scale up when the need arises. Best of all, Ethernet has a cost advantage over SONET/SDH. You get more bandwidth for the same money or pay less for the same service level.

If you are feeling the pinch from too small WAN connections, this would be an excellent time to check your current options for Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet services from AboveNet and other fiber optic carriers. You can get instant pricing for bandwidths up to 1 Gbps and rapid quotes with helpful consultation for all other services you may be interested in for your company.

Find Fiber On-Net Buildings

Say that you are looking to move your offices to a new location. Assuming that you don’t build, you’ll be looking to buy or rent an existing suite of offices. Everybody compares rents, taxes, floor space, neighborhood, proximity to transportation, parking and so on. What they often forget to consider is where they are going to get their network connections.

It’s trendy to say that bandwidth is a utility, just like gas, electric and water. It should be that way and someday it will. Unfortunately, that day is not today. You can be pretty sure that any office building you’ll consider will have hookups for electricity, water, sewer and likely natural gas. It will also be wired for multi-line telephone service. This is the reason bandwidth is so easily forgotten. Telephone service is a given. Shouldn’t other telecom services be assumed available?

Fiber optic connections are definitely not a given. You’ll be lucky to find one in four buildings on-net with a fiber carrier. On-net means that a particular carrier has already brought fiber into the building and activated it on their network. Far more likely that the building you are looking at will be off-net, especially for your favorite service provider.

It’s not necessarily the end of the world if your building is off-net. In many cases, fiber optic service is nearby and it’s only a short construction run to bring it in. Who is going to pay for that? If you are a big enough user and willing to commit to a long term contract, one or more carriers might just eat the construction costs themselves to get your business. If you are a small operator, you’ll be presented with the option of paying for the construction yourself or going with another option.

What other options are available? Copper-based services are getting faster and faster. Bonded T1 lines can take you to 12 Mbps or so. Ethernet over Copper can extend that to 15, 20 or 30 Mbps. You may be close enough to a provider’s facilities that you can get even higher speeds of 50 or 100 Mbps. The nice thing about copper is that it is already installed. Yes, that multi-line telephone cable contains extra twisted copper pairs that can be used for bonded T1 or Ethernet over Copper service.

A copper service not normally considered is HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax. This is a bandwidth service provided over the infrastructure of the Cable TV companies. Cable operators have extensive fiber optic backbones and the ability to deliver bandwidth up to 100 Mbps or so over coaxial drops from their fiber runs. This is often fairly inexpensive compared to other solutions, so long as you can use asymmetrical shared bandwidth that fluctuates in speed. For general web access, email, and the like, HFC bandwidth is a great solution for many businesses.

Another option is fixed wireless. Your building needs to be within line of site of your service provider. They install an antenna and radio set on your roof and run that to your offices. It’s possible to get up to 1 Gbps using fixed wireless, if that service is available for your location.

If you are anticipating needing bandwidths of 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or higher, it is far better to make sure that your building is on-net or can be made so at a reasonable cost before you sign any leases. You can do that by running a search for fiber lit buildings using the GeoQuote online tool. Just enter the address of the building you have in mind and you’ll get a map showing fiber availability and the distances to buildings where fiber optic service is present. From there, it is an easy matter to request competitive price quotes that include construction costs, if any. Copper, HFC and fixed wireless quotes will also be provided upon request.

SIP Trunking Providers Want Your Bandwidth

The telephone industry is changing. Not long ago, the standard setup for most companies was an in-house PBX system managing dozens, hundreds or thousands of phones. For outside calls, the most cost effective approach has been to bring in ISDN PRI trunk lines with 23 local and/or long distance lines each. Even small companies chose key telephone systems that can handle two to six outside lines. Those setups are changing fast.

There are two strong trends in the industry right now. One is cloud based hosted PBX telephone and the other is SIP trunking. They work perfectly together, but you can also have SIP trunking without cloud services.

A telephone trunk is a number of telephone lines all bundled together. This can be a wire bundle, such as a multi-line copper cable. It can also be an electrical bundle on a single line. ISDN PRI trunks, for instance, bundle 23 separate phone lines plus Caller ID and switching on a single T1 line. A SIP trunk is a telephone trunk line designed specifically to work with IP phones in VoIP telephone systems. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching technology used in VoIP in lieu of SS7, which is used in traditional switched circuit telephony.

So, why are SIP trunks such a hot item right now? It’s because a SIP trunk can be connected directly to your network or IP PBX to bring in multiple lines from your VoIP carrier. On a converged local area network, you are already running SIP. Why go to the trouble to converting to another protocol just to gain access to the public telephone network?

SIP trunks are also how you connect to a hosted PBX system as a cloud service. Companies are rapidly discovering that the per-seat cost of a cloud based telephone service is less than they pay now when you count the personnel, operating and maintenance costs of an in-house phone system. With hosted PBX, you no longer have to invest in new hardware every few years and your system is always being maintained and upgraded by the service provider.

It stands to reason that SIP trunking providers want your telephone business, but why do they want your bandwidth?

The reason that your carrier wants to provide you with both telephone lines and Internet bandwidth is so they can guarantee the quality of your phone calls. With traditional telephony, the telephone and computer networks are kept completely separate and cannot possibly interfere with each other. One of the cost saving advantages of enterprise VoIP solutions is that they use the corporate data network for everything. To make that work, you need to prioritize voice packets so that your phone conversations don’t distort or break up no matter what the computers are doing.

When your SIP trunking provider delivers both telephone and Internet service on your trunk line, they prioritize packets using CoS or Class of Service tags. These tags tell all equipment that recognizes them how to handle different types of traffic to ensure service quality. Not all bandwidth providers do this, so if you mix various line services you can wind up undoing your carefully engineered network quality.

There’s also a cost advantage, especially for small businesses who get both telephone and broadband on one line instead of two. You don’t even need IP phones to take advantage of this service. The provider will install an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that can connect to conventional analog phones and your broadband router.

Now that you know why SIP Trunking providers want your bandwidth, why not find out what sort of deal they’ll make to get it? Request competitive quotes for telephone trunking, dedicated Internet access and cloud hosted PBX services now.

Fast Ethernet over Copper

Fast Ethernet has been a networking standard for many years. You may know it as 100 Mbps Ethernet speed. Nearly every computer, router and switch now has a Network Interface Card (NIC) rated at 10/100 Mbps or 10/100/1000 Mbps. Many smaller networks find 100 Mbps more than adequate. Larger networks use 1000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). The largest corporate and other high performance networks have at least part of their infrastructure running at 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE). Its when you leave the LAN and connect to metro or long distance networks that things slow to a crawl.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same network speed regardless of distance? That way it wouldn’t matter where you were transferring files to or from. The time to transfer would be independent of distance. This is especially important to companies with multiple business locations. The illusion of everyone being on the same network is shattered when it takes ten or a hundred times as long to get information from the remote site as it does within your own building.

What has stood in the way of upgrading network connections to a common speed is cost and availability. Fast Ethernet for MAN and WAN connections have been cost prohibitive for smaller companies. If your location isn’t on a fiber path, getting bandwidth above 10 Mbps or so has been out of the question. Well, not any more.

PAETEC, a major network services provider, is blazing new ground by deploying Fast Ethernet connections over copper as well as fiber. If your buildings are within the service footprint of this new technology you can avoid the budget breaking costs of fiber construction completely. PAETEC uses multiple bonded copper pairs within the same telco conduit to provide bandwidths as high as 200 Mbps.

Chances are that the multi-pair copper conduit is already installed in your building for multi-line telephone and lower speed services like T1. The beauty of T1 lines are that they use standard twisted pair copper telco wire. The major limitation is that the bandwidth is fixed at 1.5 Mbps. You can bond T1s together to get higher bandwidths, up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Technically this works just fine, but it gets pricey because the cost is the price of a T1 line times the number of lines needed.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is much more cost effective. First, the advanced modulation techniques support higher bandwidths per pair of wire used. Second, the cost does not multiply as fast at bonding T1 lines. Third, you can now get Fast Ethernet bandwidth using EoC.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper technology is distance. The higher bandwidths require you to be near the central office that connects to your copper bundle. That’s perfect for businesses with metropolitan locations, especially in major business districts. If you are located out in the boonies, you’ll have fewer options.

Do you need cost effective Fast Ethernet connections to support your business processes? Check Fast Ethernet over Copper availability and pricing now. Fiber and wireless may also be available at lower prices than you imagine. Sorry, no residential service available.

3x3 Mbps Ethernet Doubles Your Bandwidth

Who couldn’t use a little extra bandwidth these days? The size of files, applications and web pages has been steadily increasing. Unfortunately, IT budgets haven’t. What would you say if I told you that you could double your bandwidth and not have to pay any more than you do now? Would you go for a deal like that?

It may seem odd to think that you can get twice the bandwidth for the same line cost that you are paying now. After all, network service providers aren’t in the business of giving away something for nothing. Of course not. The cost savings doesn’t come from simply replacing what you have with an identical service from another vendor. It comes from switching to a newer technology that has lower costs.

You could double your bandwidth with your current vendor or a competitive one if you want to stay with T1 line service. What you do is call up and order another T1 line to be bonded with the one you are running now. Bonding is a process of making two lines work as if they were one larger line. A T1 line has a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. Bond in a second T1 line and you have 3 Mbps. 

There are a few limitations to this process. First, you need to get both of your T1 lines from the same vendor. That’s either the carrier you have now or a new one for both lines. Second, your monthly bill is going to double. After all, two lines equals 2x the cost. You may well be able to pay less than twice your current line charges by going with another vendor that charges less for the same service. But this alone it isn’t likely to get you 3 Mbps for the price of 1.5 Mbps. 

Instead, consider changing from T1 line service to Ethernet over Copper. Both are highly reliable WAN services with dedicated bandwidth for business applications. Both services are available as managed services with the service provider taking care of any customer premises equipment needed to interface to the lines and to your network. 

The other similarity between bonded T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper is that they are both delivered over multiple twisted pair copper wires. These are the same copper wires that already come into your facility to provide multi-line telephone service. There is a technology difference between the signals on a T1 line and those on an Ethernet line, but from a users perspective they operate the same. 

What isn’t the same is the cost. Ethernet over Copper is a newer technology that makes more efficient use of the potential bandwidth available from copper landlines. Ethernet over Copper or EoC pricing is very aggressive and is currently running at about half the cost of double bonded T1 lines. In other words, you pay the same for a 3 Mbps EoC service as your pay for a 1.5 Mbps T1 service. 

There are a couple of other differences, too. T1 only scales up by increments of 1.5 Mbps. Every time you bond another T1 line you add 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. Ethernet is far more granular. You can find Ethernet bandwidth services from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps, although the higher line speeds require fiber optic cabling. But unlike T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper has a limited service footprint. You are most likely to find it in major cities and suburbs, not out in rural areas.

Would you like to double your bandwidth for the same money you spend now? Get pricing and availability for 3 x 3 Mbps Ethernet over Copper or other Ethernet bandwidth services to see how much savings is available at your location.

Content Delivery Networks Transformed

It’s no secret that bandwidth requirements are increasing across the board. Much of this has resulted from the move to IP video streaming and downloads. It’s also a function of more sophisticated websites than what were envisioned in the early days of HTML. Now graphics are huge and sites are interactive, with all sorts of browser and server based application code. The issue has been how to deal with network bandwidth requirements that are accelerating with no end in site. One answer is to transform the network and the sites that use it.

Why isn’t simply increasing WAN bandwidth sufficient? Indeed, WAN bandwidth is increasing by leaps and bounds. In fact, the flood of packets on the Internet has resulted in such traffic jams that CDNs or Content Delivery Networks have arisen to create fast bypass lanes around the Internet superhighway.

Bandwidth is expensive. Both copper and fiber based network bandwidth prices have plunged in recent years. Even so, the demand to transport more and more data per user is causing many companies to increase their telecom services budgets to keep up. The end user has also increased their DSL, Cable and wireless broadband service speeds, but there is a limit to what they will pay and what is even available in many areas.

Two companies have teamed up to deal with this dilemma head-on. Level 3 is a global connectivity and content delivery network services provider. Strangeloop is a company that specializes in network and website acceleration. Combine a CDN with advanced acceleration techniques and you create a much faster network. How much faster? Up to a 30% performance improvement compared with what’s been available previously.

Note that this 30% performance boost is not a simple cranking up of network bandwidth. What these techniques do is actively manage three aspects of the process: network, delivery and code. Both Level 3 and Strangeloop actively manage how Web content is delivered to an end user without that user being aware that anything other than a simple file transfer is going on.

For instance, multiple copies of website files are hosted on Level 3’s Content Delivery Network and sent to the user from the most optimal cache server for that user location. Level 3 has 35 strategically placed caching locations. They also offer a streaming service for real-time content such as video.

Strangeloop goes further by actively managing how each page is rendered. They do things like compressing images for mobile viewers, increasing parallel data download from server to browser, reducing roundtrips by consolidating similar resources into single files, and delaying execution of non-critical scripts until the rest of the page has loaded and been rendered on the browser. Their process also lets the browser start downloading page resources while the server is busy generating the HTML page. Normally this is a serial process that takes longer than necessary.

Human nature dictates that the longer it takes for a page to load, the more people bail out due to impatience or mistakenly thinking that the site is broken and will never load. By speeding up the site rendering process so that users see the result in a second or two can dramatically improve the stickiness of the site and desired actions they take while visiting.

Are you frustrated with the sluggish performance of your site or streaming content because of too much information taking too long to reach your users? Perhaps you can benefit from the Level 3 CDN Site Transformer for enterprise users or other network improvements. Explain your need and get pricing and availability on high performance bandwidth services now.

Metro Fiber Network Bandwidth For Denver

Bandwidth is booming in the Mile High City, or soon will be. AboveNet is installing nearly 100 route miles of dark and lit fiber to meet the mile-high bandwidth needs of Denver’s telecommunications, media, financial services, health care, retail and government users.

This could be a sign of things to come for nearly all metropolitan areas. The fact is that our productivity and economic growth is becoming more and more dependent on high levels of bandwidth to connect businesses, supplier, customers and remotely located employees. Copper can take us just so far. Then it’s time to connect with the nearly unlimited resources of glass fiber cables.

How much bandwidth are we talking about? AboveNet has fiber optic networks in cities nationwide that offer single wavelength service of 40 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps or 1 Gbps to extend a corporate LAN/WAN to multiple, metro area locations. You can have 40 Gbps fiber connectivity via an OC-768 handoff at your premises. That’s a level of bandwidth that was available only to carriers themselves not so long ago.

It should also be noted that each fiber strand can support more than one wavelength using a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Each wavelength, or Lambda, is a slightly different color of laser light. Dozens or hundreds of wavelengths can travel through the same fiber without interfering. Each of those wavelengths can support up to 40 Gbps of bandwidth.

But is even this enough for the demands of major corporate or government users in a city the size of Denver? Well, those fiber cables that AboveNet is installing don’t just have one strand of fiber inside. These cables bundle 432 or 216 separate fibers within a large cable assembly. Multiply all those fiber strands times the number of wavelengths each fiber can support times the Gbps that each wavelength can carry and you’ve got some serious bandwidth. It’s more than is needed right now, so some fibers won’t be activated. These are the dark fiber that’s held in reserve for future needs or sold to organizations that want to have complete control over their communication resources by lighting their own fiber.

Do you have a need for metro or long haul fiber optic services from 40 Mbps to 40 Gbps? There are dark fiber and lit fiber optic services available now in most metropolitan areas from AboveNet and other high bandwidth competitive carriers. Prices are lower than they’ve ever been, thanks to improved technology and increased competition. You may be able to afford more bandwidth than you imagine. Find out with a competitive pricing quote and complementary consulting support from our Telarus bandwidth experts.

The LAN WAN Connection Made Easy

The local area network has a standardization and continuity that makes sense. We know what Ethernet is. We know what an RJ-45 connection looks like. Nearly every piece of equipment has the ubiquitous 10/100/1000 Mbps network interface. It’s all so predictable until you try to leave the building. Then you’re up against a whole new set of telephone company standards that you don’t deal with in-plant. Is there any way to make the LAN and WAN worlds come together sensibly?

Not so long ago, you had no choice but to educate yourself in the unfamiliar and perhaps confusing technology invented and institutionalized by AT&T and the telco equipment manufacturers. It’s not a trivial task for network engineers and managers who spend their days talking packets and TCP/IP. You need to make a mental shift to DS channels, T-carriers, SONET multiplexing, channel banks, TDM synchronization, channel service units and data service units. Just figuring out how to efficiently match disparate networks could take some doing.

That was then, this is now. If you have the expertise and enjoy interconnecting dissimilar networks, you can do that and simply order the WAN connections that you need. But if you don’t have that level of expertise or just want to avoid straightening out the incompatibilities, you have more options available now.

One approach is to go with a managed network provider who takes care of the WAN link and the interface to your network. You plug into a managed router provided by the carrier and located on your premises. The routers at both ends and the network connections between them are monitored and controlled by the carrier. You don’t have to worry about what color alarm is going off or if the equipment is properly set to the line specs if you make any changes to your service. You simply plug in to the WAN port and use the service.

Managed router services are available for dedicated broadband Internet service, point to point data connections, MPLS networks for interconnecting multiple business locations, and ISDN PRI to provide telephone lines to in-house PBX phone systems.

Another service that offers ease of connection and use is Metro Ethernet. You can get mid-band Ethernet delivered on multiple twisted pair copper in many larger cities. Your connection is a managed router that has the special interface required to transport the signal. Ethernet is also available through fiber optic connections

One advantage of Ethernet services is that they tend to be less expensive, in some cases much less expensive, than other telecommunications services. Which type of bandwidth is right for your company? Find out with a quick business bandwidth price and availability check now.

Cisco's New Terabit Monster Router

Cisco's new edge router, the ASR 9000, is upping the ante on network bandwidth. This beast will deliver 6.4 Tbps when fully loaded at 400 Gbps per slot. Who needs a router this powerful? Probably not your mom and pop retail store. But they might be using services downstream from a carrier who has installed an ASR 9000. Why the need for even more speed? One word: Video.

Video not only killed the radio star, it's pretty much killing service providers too. The Internet was conceived and built in an era when text was king. As technology and applications evolved, it managed to scale up with the move to more visual Web pages. But video is taxing the ability of service providers to add bandwidth as fast as users glomp onto more and more video content. It's YouTube, certainly. But it's also Web pages that embed video reports instead of text, and TV producers that see the Internet as another medium for distributing their programs.

So bad has it gotten, that major ISPs have taken to impose download limits on what was once unlimited broadband. They're easing into this by setting the cutoff point high enough so that only rabid video downloaders are likely to get kicked off the network. But today's rabid downloaders are merely early adopters of the way we'll all want our content delivered eventually. It's going to be high definition large screen full length video at will. Once this genie gets completely out of the bottle, satellite and cable are going to have to scramble to avoid becoming as limited as over-the-air TV channels when it comes to program delivery. If we had the set top boxes, programming guides and motivated content producers today, the Internet would be brought to its knees overnight.

That's what Cisco is trying to address with the ASR 9000. What might appear to be overkill for many edge router applications is going to be a normal requirement sooner than we think. In fact, the ASR 9000 is targeted at video service providers, such as cable companies, and also at mobile providers. These include cell phone companies that are starting to push mobile video and likely WiMAX operators who will be dealing with video-craving users sooner than they may think.

The other trend that Cisco is positioning for is the move from legacy time division network technology to Ethernet and MPLS. The ASR9000 has built-in capabilities for IPoDWDM or IP over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing as a next-generation network core technology.

You don't really need Terabit transport requirements to take advantage of Ethernet and MPLS in your business. Metro Ethernet offers cost savings over traditional DS3 bandwidth and can often be provisioned over copper pair rather than fiber optic cable for bandwidths below 50 Mbps. MPLS networks are fast becoming the preferred method to interconnect multiple business locations.

Is your network ready for an upgrade? Take advantage of our VAR Network to find authorized dealers for Cisco routers and other professional grade network equipment and services.

Eliminating the WAN Choke Point

There is often a vast difference in LAN (Local Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) speeds. You notice it when you access the Internet or try to send an image or document to another location. Files that move almost instantly in-house seem to take forever to get anywhere outside of your building. This is the dreaded WAN choke point.

You're familiar with choke points in the physical world. Try exiting a superhighway onto a busy local street during rush hour. Try filling a swimming pool from the city water mains using a garden hose. Anytime a high capacity conduit is connected to a low capacity conduit things are going to slow down.

This isn't always a problem. You can get off the freeway onto a deserted country road with nothing to impede your progress. You water your plants with a garden hose and have to restrict the nozzle to prevent overwatering. As long as the lower capacity conduit has more capacity than you require, it's not a restriction.

That used to be the way business Internet connections worked. A company that wanted to initiate Internet service for its employees would install a dedicated T1 connection to its corporate network. When the Internet was new, most people weren't sure what to do with it. Then, gradually, traffic picked up from a growing number of email users and those who found it faster to do a Web search than go to the reference library. Sooner or later, demand exceeds supply and your Internet connection becomes a choke point.

What's so bad about letting supply and demand work themselves out? In the case of WAN choke points, there's potentially a big productivity loss involved as people wait for pages to load or files to transfer. If you have a group collaborating on a project and they need to all view and markup large CAD drawings, you can multiply the size of the group by the seconds or minutes lost times what you are paying them to see how much this costs.

You have the choice of either getting people to change their work habits to deal with bandwidth restrictions or simply increase the bandwidth. Yes, much of the time there is a cost increase involved. You may need to compare the cost of a faster line with the gain in productivity to justify this expense. If enough people are slowed down enough by the speed restriction, those losses add up faster than you might think.

So what can you do? An easy solution is to incrementally add more bandwidth. If one T1 line isn't enough anymore, bond in a second T1 line or a third. If you need a larger increase in bandwidth, consider a DS3 connection or perhaps one of the new Metro Ethernet services.

Don't automatically assume that you'll pay a lot more to ease that WAN choke point. Competitive line prices have come down dramatically in the last few years. If you have an older contract or haven't used a tool such as GeoQuote (tm) to find the best prices, you may be surprised to find that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less money than you are now paying.

Fiber Optic Cable Gets Limber

Fiber optic and copper cable are currently vying to be the communications wiring of choice for retrofits, upgrades and greenfield construction. Actually, the long term solution is already known. It's fiber. Copper hangs on because it is already widely deployed, as are the switches and routers that connect to it.

Fiber optic cabling might have taken over infrastructure installations sooner if it wasn't for an installation restriction. You can only bend the fibers so far. It's more than just not snapping the fiber strands when the stress gets too high. There's a functional limitation with sharp corner bends that lets some of the light escape the fiber core. Attenuation goes up and signal level goes down.

That limitation has been removed by new developments from Corning. Corning's bendable fiber optic cable introduces a layer of reflective nanostructures into the cladding directly surrounding the core. The nanostructures keep the light beam from shooting out through the cladding when it encounters a sharp directional change. If you tie normal fiber in a knot or bend it ninety degrees, you might lose all of your signal. With the nanostructures guiding the wavelengths around sharp bends, the signal can handle just about anything an installation can throw at it. That includes right angle turns and stapling cable to building studs.

Where is this new single mode bendable fiber optic cable most appropriate? it's a natural for FTTx installations, especially in older buildings not designed with ease of cable installation in mind. But its also likely that this new approach to cable construction will make it the defacto standard for both business and residential wiring.

Is your business ready for an upgrade to fiber optic cabling to support data, voice and video? Or, do you simply want to expand your networks for growth or additional applications? Our network of Value Added Resellers are independent providers of equipment, installation and service. Get competitive quotes now from VARs in your area. No cost or obligation for this online service.