Dark and Lit Private Lines

By: John Shepler

The Internet is a marvelous network. It enables all of us to connect to any of us anywhere in the world and at a very reasonable cost. Why wouldn’t you use the Internet for all your communications? Much of the time we do, both for personal and business needs. It works great… well, it works just fine a lot of the time. There are a few snags, though.

Network Priority
One is priority for highly sensitive applications like interactive voice and video. Say, telephone calls. There is no priority. Your voice packets get the same treatment as your next door neighbors video stream or someone backup up files to the cloud. Get in line and take your turn. When things get too busy, called network congestion, your real-time stream may break up or stop completely for a short time.

Cloud Critical Applications
The same is true for business critical applications running in the cloud. If you are taking orders, interacting with a customer or needing fast answers to deal with rapidly moving situations you may be drumming your fingers as you wait for the system to respond. Trying to make a quick financial trade in the market? Maybe it executes immediately. Maybe not. You may or may not get the price you had in mind.

Network Security
Another issue is security on the Internet. There is none. If you want security, you need to add it yourself. That means encryption. A popular way to encrypt your traffic when out of the office is by using a VPN or virtual private network. This is end to end encryption that makes it safer to use public access points like WiFi in coffee shops or send sensitive documents across the Internet. SSL or, now, TLS encryption has made possible online shopping and banking with confidence using web browers over the Internet with or without a VPN.

Improving Performance with Private Lines
You can get better network performance with private lines. Think private road versus crowded superhighway. The idea is to limit the competition from other people’s traffic.

You can still use the Internet but make it run better with a private line called DIA or dedicated Internet access. This gives you a private, not shared, connection between your location and your Internet service provider. Of course the Internet core itself is still a shared resource, but most of the congestion is in the last mile where you and hundreds or thousands of other users share the same connection to the service provider.

Direct to the Cloud
A direct cloud connection is a private line between you and your cloud service provider. Since you are the only user on that line, your cloud services should run much more like they would if the servers were right down the hall in your building. This type of connection avoids the Internet and its vagaries completely.

Why not expand that concept to your own private WAN or wide area network? This means private lines to connect your offices, factories, data centers and branch locations or retail outlets. Think of it like having your LAN expand to include all of your other business locations. You have control of the traffic and no interference from other outside users. Both privacy and performance are improved.

Dark and Lit Fiber
So far we are talking about fiber optic services, likely Ethernet over Fiber, which is the most popular connection method today. These are “lit” fiber connections where the laser equipment that maintains the signal is owned and operated by a service provider. The ultimate in performance and privacy over metropolitan and wider areas is using “dark” fiber. Dark means the fiber strands that you lease have no termination equipment at either end. You are responsible for providing the equipment that “lights” the fiber and sets the protocol. Since the glass fiber strands have nearly unlimited bandwidth, you have tremendous ability to send traffic from point to point dependent only on your budget and technical staff.

Wireless Private Lines
Finally, there is a new type of wireless service called 5G private networking or 5G network slice that lets you have the advantage of private lines while portable or mobile. It’s something like your own private corporate WiFi, but over much wider distances. Coupled with fiber optic private lines for most of your traffic, private wireless can give you a comprehensive business network wherever you are.

Is private networking right for your business? Find out what private network and security options are available now.

How to Get Stable Upload and Download Speeds

By: John Shepler

A solid connection is a wonderful thing to have. Have you been scratching your head, wondering why your upload and download speeds vary all over the place? It’s likely the nature of the bandwidth connection you’ve chosen.

Why Can’t It Be Like a LAN?
Most of us are spoiled when it comes to local area network connections. Our computing equipment comes with Gigabit or at least Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) network interfaces right out of the box. Cat5E and Cat6 cables are common now, as are gigabit routers and switches. Even WiFi runs fast, especially on the 5 GHz band. Unless your network is overloaded, it’s transparent to you.

So why is communications so sluggish and unreliable on Internet broadband or other long distance connections?

We forget. In the early days of setting up local computer networks, they were sluggish too. Even then, it didn’t seem too bad compared to dial-up modems or X.25 links at 64 Kbps. What’s happened is that LAN networking technology has sped up by leaps and bounds and equipment prices have plunged dramatically. You have to make a real effort just to buy the slow stuff anymore.

The same technological advancements have also applied to Internet and private line connections. The cost savings haven’t been quite as dramatic and there still is a wide range of connectivity in use.

What Makes Line Speeds Vary
General sluggishness is usually due to congestion caused by low bandwidth or a shared link that is over-subscribed. Speeds that vary all over the place are usually due to shared bandwidth with periods of heavy usage that come and go. You might run a speed test and get 100 Mbps. A few minutes later you run the same test and get 10 Mbps for worse. That congestion will eventually let up, but you have no idea how soon.

Any system with multiple users that can’t support full speed simultaneous connections is going to have variations. Those cable broadband options that have such great pricing are subscribed to the point that they keep most users happy most of the time. But they are a shared resource and you can’t be sure how many of your fellow users are on at the same time or what they’ll be doing.

The same is true of 4G LTE wireless and will be true of 5G once there are enough devices deployed to sop up the bandwidth. Radio frequencies used in cellular and satellite have limited capacity, which is why they have data caps and also why too many users will drag the speed down.

In general, any bandwidth service with pricing attractive to consumers is going to be a shared service and also likely to be asymmetrical. In other words, the download speed will be much faster than the upload speed.

Dedicated Connections for Solid Bandwidth

You’ll get far more consistent performance from dedicated bandwidth. Do you remember T1 lines? Perhaps you still have one. The 1.5 Mbps speed is no longer accepted as broadband, but the performance is rock solid. That’s because you are the only user on the line. Whatever bandwidth you aren’t consuming just idles.

For point to point phone and data connections or interconnecting LAN networks at two different locations, dedicated private line bandwidth can’t be beat. Yes, it will cost a bit more than the commodity shared bandwidth services, but the performance will be rock solid. You’ll also see an improvement on the Internet with dedicated Internet access, but once you’re into the actual Internet, you can still get variability and latency issues.

This means your best connection to your cloud service provider is to bypass the Internet completely and install a dedicated private line from your location to the cloud center. Once you have that with enough bandwidth to support your peak activities, the cloud will seem like it is right next door.

Those T1 lines? Probably not going to cut it anymore, unless you are doing such simple tasks as email, casual web browsing and point of sale credit card verification. You’ll want to upgrade to at least Ethernet over Copper at 10 or 20 Mbps. A even better option is Fiber Optic Ethernet at 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps and any speed in-between. Fiber bandwidth prices have dropped significantly in the last few years and availability has dramatically increased. You can thank 4G LTE and 5G cell towers for that, as well as competitive fiber optic service providers.

Are you frustrated by slow and highly varying bandwidth? How about VoIP phone service that is good one call and garbled the next? You should really look into dedicated bandwidth solutions including private lines and dedicated Internet access to improve your metropolitan and wide area network performance.

Can Satellite Be Part of Your SD-WAN?

By: John Shepler

Software Defined Networks (SDN) or Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) are being implemented more and more to provide high quality business bandwidth at lower costs. In some cases, SD-WAN is the only way to get decent bandwidth levels in rural and remote areas. You might think of these software defined networks as a potpourri of different connection technologies, but it’s more than that. it’s an intelligent approach to making the most of every connection available, including satellite.

Why The Need For SD Networks
Say you want to connect to the Internet or to your cloud service provider. Traditionally, you’ve done that by ordering up a “last mile” connection from your business location to the Internet or a private point to point line between two locations, such as your office and your cloud provider.

That’s great as long as there are providers who can give you all the bandwidth you need and at a price that won’t choke your business. The problem is that you often overpay for premium bandwidth that goes unused or settle for what the budget can handle and regret the performance limitations every day.

In reality, different tasks have different connection requirements. Telephone lines for a call center or even ordinary office use don’t need tremendous amounts of bandwidth but are highly sensitive to latency, jitter and packet loss. Backing up files to a remote data center or storage in the cloud is fairly insensitive to the latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics but needs lots of bandwidth to get done in a reasonable time.

This is where SDN / SD-WAN work their magic. An intelligent processor acts as a traffic manager for each and every packet entering the network. Those voice packets get routed to a dedicated high performance but limited bandwidth circuit like like a T1 or ISDN PRI. File backups can go via cable broadband or as lower priority on the T1 or fiber optic line. Business applications in the cloud need reliability and quick response. They’ll go over a high performance connection.

How SD Networks Optimize Cost
The processing power within the SDN controller makes note of what each type of traffic needs. You’ve told it that. The processor is also constantly monitoring the status of each connection that you’ve provided it. It can truly be a potpourri of T1, DS3, cable broadband, 4G and 5G wireless, Point to Point Microwave, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber, SONET, MPLS networks, DSL, and two-way Satellite.

What’s key is that the controller knows at each instant how each connection is performing. Low cost connections aren’t always low performing. That DSL or cable link might be zooming along right now. The low cost usually comes from these being shared rather than dedicated connections. Other users, not in your company, can be hogging bandwidth and creating congestion to slow you down.

Satellite may well have excellent speed and low packet loss. The geosynchronous satellites now in service do have long latency times that can’t be avoided. That can be an issue with voice and video conversations, but makes little difference for file transfers or downloaded video.

Wireless connections in general have usage limits simply because wireless bandwidth is a scarce resource. SDN needs to be mindful of that in assigning the connections to avoid bandwidth slowdowns or additional charges.

The point is that you don’t need to buy the most expensive bandwidth solution in many cases. You won’t be able to load up that line 100% of the time with traffic that absolutely needs it. SDN / SD-WAN can ensure that your costly connections get used to the max but offload traffic that doesn’t need such high performance to a lower cost link. You also gain the advantage of automatic failover in case one of your links fails.

When Availability Is Most Important
There are many locations in rural America where you can stand outside and waive a fist full of money to buy connectivity and have no takers. This is where an SD network solution can really help. The newer high bandwidth satellites offer fast speeds and quality connections. You can include a dedicated SIP trunk based on a T1 line for your VoIP phone calls to get around the latency issue. it is likely that cellular broadband is also available in most areas. Combine these and you may well get all the bandwidth you need with the performance you also need without having to pay a fortune to bring in a fiber cable… if anyone will even do it.

Are you frustrated with either the cost of connectivity or its availability? This would be a good time to look into SDN / SD-WAN solutions that can give you the performance you need at a cost you can afford.

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.

Metro Fiber Ethernet Gets You The Bandwidth You Need

By: John Shepler

Back when your company was smaller and business was slow, the old DSL or T1 line offered plenty of bandwidth to get the job done. Not so much anymore. Things have picked up and more of the content you need involves higher resolution graphics and video. Network congestion has your business throttled and that’s a bad situation.

Metro Fiber Ethernet Means Bandwidth
There is a clear trend in the telecom and network connection field. It is a gaining momentum toward everything fiber. That’s right, the fiber optic connections you used to take a pass on because of high cost or lack of availability are now ready for your business and at much better prices.

Fiber has the advantage over traditional twisted pair copper and wireless distribution because there is just about no limit to how fast those glass strands will run. Technology advances take the same glass fibers and increase the carrying capacity every few years. Too much data in the fiber bundle is a problem for the distant future, if ever.

What level of bandwidth is available now? Business users can generally get anything from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps in selected areas. Once your have the fiber installed, it’s your choice how much capacity to order. Same line, multiple bandwidth options.

Pay For Just What You Need
As fiber optic installations are multiplying, another technology is also taking over. That is, Carrier Ethernet. Yes, this is a compatible protocol with the Ethernet you already use on your Local Area Network. You simply plug into the Carrier’s termination, often a managed edge router, and you are connected to the Internet or via a private line across town or some other business location in the world.

Another beauty of Ethernet service is that there are no fixed bandwidth levels as there were with the older SONET fiber service. If you want 400 Mbps, you can get that. If you’d prefer 100 Mbps or 1,500 Mbps you can order those levels too. As long as the Ethernet Port installed at your location can handle the bandwidth, you can run at just about any speed.

This suggests a major cost savings for you. If your business level only requires 100 Mbps today, then order that. You may soon need 1000 Mbps, also called Gigabit Ethernet. No problem, call up your carrier and tell them to increase the speed of your line. They likely do that without any hardware changes and simply adjust your bill to reflect the increase in service level. You know that you have the flexibility to incrementally increase bandwidth as you really need the capacity.

More Availability, Less Money
You are no doubt aware that smartphones are getting faster and faster. 3G broadband is pretty much on the way out. Now it’s 4G everywhere, with 5G trials underway. One effect of this is that the old T1 lines that powered cell towers through 2G and 3G don’t have the capacity to support 4G and certainly not 5G. Support of high speed wireless has ironically caused fiber optic installations to boom. Fiber used to be rare and extremely pricey. Not so anymore. Pretty much all communication infrastructure being installed right now is fiber or wireless towers… or both.

All this fiber means capacity galore and lots of competition between a myriad of providers, all vying for businesses of all sizes. Even the Cable companies have gotten into the act recently. They’re offering access to their fiber optic networks that have the same quality of service as other business fiber services.

Why Metro Fiber Ethernet?
As the name suggests, metro fiber is more for locations within populated areas than out in the boonies. Metro also includes smaller cities, suburbs and business parks, not just major downtown areas.

What you want is competitive pricing on fiber based Ethernet bandwidth in a given metro area. Fortunately, that’s easy to find if you have the right tools. Want to see just how much bandwidth you can get for much lower prices than you’d expect? See how many Metro Fiber Ethernet Services are available for your business (not residential) location in a matter of a couple minutes.

Connectivity Should Be Invisible

By: John Shepler

Buffering videos, garbled VoIP phone calls, slow loading web pages, interminable waits for files to download, jerky video conferencing, hesitation in response from the cloud. They’re all symptoms of connectivity that makes us painfully aware of its presence.

That’s not what you want. You want connectivity to be invisible, like other utilities. Flip a switch and the lights come on. Turn the faucet handle and out comes the water. Unless something goes horribly wrong, this is how it works every time. So, why do we have lower expectations of our bandwidth connections?

Not So Great Expectations
Perhaps its because so many of us who are in a position to do something about it were around to watch the blossoming of the Internet from a backwater mail service for academics to the primary way we do business and communicate. Perhaps it’s because the technology is still evolving. This is especially true in mobile applications and remote locations, where bandwidth is still a precious commodity and limited in both speed and availability.

Otherwise, it is quite possible to achieve that goal of making network operations a background activity for business users. You can then treat your connected devices as appliances. You turn then on and every function works the same way, all the time. Nothing happens to break your stream of consciousness or give the impression that something is “broken.”

What to Know
You need to be aware of the some key performance characteristics of your network. No, not your LAN. I assume that you’ve already optimized your in-house network. The real Achilles heel is those outside connection, the MAN and the WAN.

The first parameter of importance is bandwidth. The idea behind having “big pipes” is that the conduits are always larger than the quantity of bits per second that you are sending through them. When the circuits can’t handle the volume of traffic, they become congested. It’s like too many cars trying to enter a superhighway. At some point it all clogs up and things slow to a crawl.

Networks, including the Internet, are good at preserving the integrity of the traffic but not so good at keeping the flow moving at top speed when congested. Buffers fill up as each node waits its turn. At some point, packets can no longer be accepted until those in process move on. Does this sound like a busy airport during a snowstorm? The analogy is close.

How Much BW is Enough?
What this all means is that you need to order the level of bandwidth consistent with your current and near-term needs. “Of course,” you say. “That’s obvious.”

Well, it is an it isn’t. There are a numerous ways you can get caught without the bandwidth you need. One is application demand that is creeping up. Those T1 lines you ordered a decade ago have been working reliably until recently. The carrier says they still are. What’s happened is that you’ve added employees, moved applications to the cloud and depend on the Internet for more of your communications. The lines are still working fine. They’re just overloaded. You need more bandwidth.

So, you go out and order a high speed satellite link that has 10x your old bandwidth. File transfers seem to be working fine, but you can’t carry on a telephone conversation because you have to pause for a second between talking and listening. Your cloud business applications also seem to run a lot slower than they did when you ran your own data center. How much bandwidth does it take to fix this situation?

The Latency Speed Bump
No amount will be enough. That’s because your problem is latency, not bandwidth. Latency is a time delay between source and destination. In-house the speed of electrons through wires and photons through fiber is so fast that you’ll be hard pressed to detect it. But, when those locations are connected by a radio wave path that goes up over 22,000 miles to a satellite and back down 22,000+ miles, the delay is noticeable, if not downright annoying. A round trip takes something like half a second… even at the speed of light.

Network congestion can contribute to latency, but an uncontested network can still have latency issues depending on path length and any buffering delays introduced by equipment in the path.

Other Sources of Network Congestion
Congestion can also be caused by contention between your needs and those of other companies sharing the MAN or WAN network. You may have installed more than enough bandwidth for your needs, but the network doesn’t have enough for yours plus everyone else’s. This is a classic issue with the Internet and mobile cell towers. Too many users at once can overwhelm the system and force everyone to take turns using the limited resources.

What can you do about that? First, keep your in-house communications on dedicated private lines or through an MPLS network that guarantees performance. Choose symmetric services with the same bandwidth in the upload and download directions unless your are sure your needs are asymmetrical.

For Internet connections, which we all need, you can bypass most of the “information slow lane” problems with a dedicated Internet connection. This gives you the best performance in terms of bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. The actual core of the Internet is really pretty good. It’s the last mile connections, especially those shared with other users on “best effort” services like DSL, Cable and cellular, that get easily overloaded.

How to Choose
Ultimately, it’s a cost vs performance tradeoff. Cable broadband works great for residential and home office users and can work just fine for businesses that don’t have critical requirements. Most medium and larger businesses, however, need to move up to private lines and dedicated Internet connections if they want their connectivity to become invisible to users.

Do you wish your connectivity was more invisible that it is now? Look into high performance MAN and WAN bandwidth options that are available for your business location.

Dedicated vs Shared Internet

By: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Bandwidth on Demand Complements Cloud Services

By: John Shepler

A big advantage that cloud services have over running your own IT infrastructure is agility. A deep well of virtualized servers and disk drives combined with the ability to scale resources up or down on the fly gives businesses an unprecedented ability to match resources with need. The result? Greater productivity through higher resource utilization.

One part of the solution that hasn’t kept up with the move to virtualized resources is connectivity. The connection between your facility and the cloud is still treated as a large dedicated pipe of a fixed size. You can likely upgrade to a larger pipe when needed, but it is a major undertaking.

The WAN has to be reconfigured and equipment has to be replaced on-site. Just getting your order scheduled can involve serious time delays. The result is weeks or months needed to respond to a change in demand that the cloud handles almost instantaneously. Will bandwidth be the Achilles’ Heel of commerce?

Not for long. A major change already underway is the move from traditional TDM telecom services to Carrier Ethernet. What Carrier Ethernet offers, aside from a lower cost structure, is rapid scalability. The network is designed for quick changes and no premises equipment work is required so long as you have a large enough port installed. These days, that’s at least 100 Mbps and generally 1000 Mbps. Ports up to 10 Gbps are available.

Just because you have a larger Ethernet Port than you can use right now, doesn’t mean you have to pay for the full capability. You pick the bandwidth level that you need to support your operations and pay by the Mbps for that. The day will come when your current service gets maxed out, perhaps only at peak utilization times immediately and then most of the time. When you detect a bottleneck developing, you call your service provider and request an incremental upgrade. Your bandwidth will be increased in anywhere from a few hours to a few days.

What’s even better? Automatic bandwidth on demand. Why wait until network congestion starts to impact sales or employee productivity before you take action? Why not let the system monitor your activity and automatically increase your line speed when needed?

That’s the idea behind tw telecom’s new “Alerts Driven Dynamic Capacity” service. The idea is that you pre-set bandwidth utilization thresholds and the system automatically adds capacity when traffic rises above that threshold. You can double or triple your business Ethernet bandwidth up to 6 Gbps on a 10 Gbps port right on the fly. If the need is only to cover a short term peak demand, you can return to the originally committed network bandwidth when things slow down again.

What applications can make good use of this bandwidth on demand? tw telecom suggests that it is a good match for fluctuating demands on the network due to data backup & replication, seasonal traffic increases, limited time projects or campaigns, video conferencing, telepresence & streaming video, new software updates & deployment, variable cloud computing resource consumption and unforeseen events in general.

Where is this service available? It’s being offered to companies that have access available to tw telecom’s intelligent network services in any of the 18,500 fiber-connected buildings in 75 major metro areas.

Bandwidth on demand is clearly an idea who’s time has come. Agility is now part of efficient business structure, even being able to respond to changes in hours, minutes or even seconds. Look for these services to expand rapidly, perhaps as a part of a comprehensive cloud solution that increases the competitiveness of your business.

Are you in need of a better bandwidth or cloud solution? There is a lot to choose from compared to even a few years ago. Capabilities have increased while prices have been reduced. See what cloud and bandwidth services are available for your business locations from tw telecom and other major service providers.

Bandwidth Management Gets Easier With Ethernet

Bandwidth demand can be all over the map. It goes up, it comes down. It’s fine now but could go parabolic in 6 months to a year. Or not. How can an IT manager ensure that adequate resources are in place when needed without paying through the nose for idle resources?

Exacerbating this problem is the procurement and provisioning process that worked better in less volatile times. Typically a need is identified, a budget is created, approved and released, requests for quotes go out, vendors are narrowed down, a purchase order is cut, it winds its way through the carrier’s front office, eventually resulting in an installation, turn-up and the start of billing. If something happens and you need more, the whole process starts all over.

In a way, the whole system is tuned to match the technical characteristics of circuit switched line services. Take a T1 line, for instance. You order the line and you get 1.5 Mbps. No more, no less. If you only need 500 Kbps right now, the other 1000 Kbps goes to waste. You have to pay for the entire 1,500 Kbps because the day is coming soon when you’ll fill that pipe and you need to be ready.

The same is true for DS3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and other traditional telecom services. Moving from one of these to the other, up or down, is a major deal. DS3 is nothing like T1. If you need DS3, you’ll have a completely different demarcation connection from the carrier and you’ll need a completely different interface card for your edge router. It’s a major bandwidth jump, too. You’re moving from 1.5 Mbps up to 45 Mbps.

Not enough? The next jump is to OC3 SONET fiber at 155 Mbps. Once again, there is a long procurement and installation process with unique equipment for a particular service level. If you failed to order enough bandwidth, you’ll be dealing with network congestion for some time. If you way over-order, you’ll be paying a pretty price for a largely empty pipe.

Is there anything that can take some of the risk out of bandwidth management? You bet there is. It’s called Carrier Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet services are fairly new compared to T-Carrier or SONET. They are available for metro, long haul and access networks. Carrier Ethernet is often touted as a technology that can link company LANs at two or more locations. It has an easy interface which is the same Ethernet connection used on your LAN, copper or fiber.

If that wasn’t enough, Carrier Ethernet costs are generally less than equivalent bandwidth levels for T-Carrier or SONET. It is not unusual to get twice the Mbps for the same money as you are currently paying for legacy telecom services. This cost savings is compelling, but may not even be THE important reason to embrace Ethernet in the MAN and WAN.

What Ethernet offers that other protocols don’t is easy scalability. Ethernet MAN and WAN networks are being designed for rapid remote management so that no truck rolls are needed when a customer wants more or less bandwidth. It’s all done at a computer screen so that you can pick up a phone can request a move from, say, 10 to 15 Mbps or 100 to 150 Mbps and you’ll have the extra resources available in as little as a few hours.

Carrier Ethernet is set up something like your LAN in that there are standard port speeds. You know that your switches, routers and PCs all have NICs (Network Interface Cards) with specs of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10 Gbps. Usually, its some combination like 10/100/1000. The Ethernet port that you order installed will generally be 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps, although it could be 10 Gbps if you really need that much. As long as you stay below the maximum capacity of the port, you can have just about any bandwidth level you want.

Very low bandwidths may have increments of 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps. Higher bandwidths might go up in jumps of 100 Mbps. Carrier Ethernet gives you a lot more choices so that you can more closely match the bandwidth you are paying for to the bandwidth you need. The ability to rapidly scale up that bandwidth means that you don’t have to order too much in anticipation of need. Get a port that will handle what you can reasonably expect to require but only order the bandwidth level you need to handle current business activity. If you suddenly enjoy a flood of customers or need to support a new video distribution, you can make that call and get the extra resources when you need them.

The result, clearly, is a major cost savings in not be over-provisioned for bandwidth plus less stress in worrying about what you have to do to be ready for tomorrow’s needs. Could your operation benefit from having this capability? If so, get prices, features and availability of Carrier Ethernet bandwidth services for your business locations.

Low Latency WAN Options

Many companies have added low latency to their list of requirements for WAN (Wide Area Network) connections. Why has latency suddenly gained such importance and how do you get low latency?

Latency is the time it takes for packets to get from one place to another. The latency on your LAN probably isn’t a worry. The latency on your long haul WAN connections may well cause you big problems. For some specific applications, minimizing latency is the holy grail of networking.

Latency and bandwidth aren’t directly related. You can have low speed connections with very minor latency. You can also have screaming Gbps connections with horrible latency. What drives latency is distance, network architecture, and equipment design.

Here’s an example of a network setup where you can’t do much about latency. Consider television remote broadcasts. These are the ones where a van with a satellite dish on top parks at the scene of a news event. It really doesn’t matter where in the world the van and the studio are located. The TV signal is going to have a considerable latency or time delay. You see the effect all the time. If the anchor and the field reporter don’t wait a second before they respond to the conversation, they’ll talk right over the top of each other.

Why is this? It’s because the signal is being sent from the truck dish to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit at 22,236 miles above the Earth (mean sea level) and back down to another dish at the studio or network headquarters. That means the electromagnetic waves have to travel a minimum of 44,472 miles up and then back down. In practice, the distance is longer because the signal isn’t going straight up and down. Now, consider that the speed of all signals in space is 186,000 miles per second and you have at least a quarter second delay one way or a half second round trip. Any equipment in the path or additional landline connections only makes it worse.

This is why satellite broadband works great for one way TV broadcasts but terrible for VoIP conversations. One way streaming is unaffected by latency. Two way anything is definitely affected. Data file transfers aren’t terribly bothered by going through a satellite because the latency is often small compared to the transfer time. But video conferences can be awkward and real time gaming is an exercise in frustration.

The point is that if you worry about latency, stay off geosynchronous satellite connections. Even your landline and undersea connections are affected to the tune of at least a millisecond per 186 miles simply due to the speed of light. Actually, you’d never even get that minimum latency value because light slows down in copper wires and fiber optic cores. The electronics that switch and route your path will also each add a small amount of latency to the total.

So, what differentiates a low latency connection from one that doesn’t concern itself much with latency? What you want is short paths between locations and a minimum of equipment in between. That suggests private networks, not the Internet. The Internet is designed for universal access and self-healing in the event of problems. Latency is an afterthought at best.

Many of today’s top MPLS networks are engineered to minimize latency. There are relatively few label switches to route the traffic and the networks have sufficient bandwidth to prevent congestion that backs up data flow and makes latency worse. You’ll want a network that has fiber runs as direct to your locations as possible to minimize path length. If MPLS will do the job, it has definite cost advantages and can give you mesh network connections so that all sites can easily communicate.

If latency is your number one priority, you’ll do even better with direct private line connections especially designed to minimize latency. These fiber paths are as close to a straight line as you can get and there is little in the way of electronics to slow things down. The one hitch is that these connections are primarily found between major international destinations, especially those like London, Frankfurt, New York and Chicago that are financial trading centers. High speed financial trading is the number one application driving the deployment of ultra low latency fiber optic services.

Do you have a business need for lower latency connections or even a critical need to minimize latency on long haul links? If so, get availability and pricing on Low Latency Fiber Optic Networks to check your domestic and international options.

Maxed Out On Bandwidth?

Are you close to maxing out your WAN bandwidth? Has it gotten so bad that you occasionally experience network congestion at the worst time of all... during peak business hours? Well, don’t panic. Here are some ideas that can improve that situation.

First of all, are you using your network in the most efficient manner? In other words, do you just let every device launch its packets and hope for the best, or do you manage quality of service. If the problem is VoIP telephone conversations breaking up but everything else seems fine, then giving voice packets the priority they need will probably improve that situation without bringing every other process to its knees.

Similarly, if you’re trying to do backups over the network to a remote site during working hours you could be hurting employee productivity. Make the backup process low priority or try to run those processes overnight when they’ll have the network all to themselves.

Oh, you’ve done all that? You’ve fine tuned both the LAN and WAN as much as you can and you’re still running out of bandwidth. OK. That’s going to happen to everyone sooner or later. There are a couple of ways to go next.

One technical solution is to accelerate your WAN, usually the weak link in the system, with a hardware appliance. Riverbed is an acknowledged leader in this technology. Basically, you add a piece of equipment to each end of the line that manages the packets. One thing it does is look for repeating patterns and only sends the changes, not the entire data stream. It also makes cached copies of data frequently accessed, so you aren’t constantly uploading or downloading the same information over a limited bandwidth line.

WAN acceleration is particularly valuable when bandwidth is very expensive and hard to come by. But the acceleration hardware isn’t cheap either. So, before you shell out for any solution, it makes sense to compare all your options. Don’t just assume that you’ll pay through the nose for a bandwidth upgrade. Many, if not most, companies are probably paying more for both voice and data bandwidth than they would have to. How can that be? Bandwidth solutions have become more competitive than ever over the last few years. If your contract ran out years ago but you’ve just kept paying by the month for the same line service, you can almost certainly see a cost savings by checking the latest WAN bandwidth options for your business location.

You may have installed a T1 line at a time when that seemed like all the bandwidth you’d ever need. Now you’re maxing out the line. But, do you know that you can get additional T1 lines added to your service so that they act as one larger conduit? There are also newer options, such as Ethernet over DS1 and Ethernet over Copper, that give you lots of bandwidth at very reasonable prices. In some areas, wireless solutions are the best option. In others, fiber optic offers all the bandwidth you could want but lets you pay for only the amount you need currently.

What you need right now is a plan. You can start laying out ideas on paper yourself, but why not get some free consulting help at least to bounce ideas off? A Shop For T1 consultant is waiting to talk to you now. Call the toll free number or enter an online quote request now at T1 Rex to get the ball rolling.

Will Ethernet Crush DS3?

Larger bandwidth users have traditionally moved from T1 lines to DS3 bandwidth as their needs exceed the modest T1 line speed of 1.5 Mbps. Often, DS3 was overkill for their applications. The bandwidth jumps 30x from T1 levels, where 5x to 10x would be more than enough avoid network congestion. Now a newcomer called Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet offers scalable bandwidth at often lower costs than DS3 connections. What’s to become of DS3?

In some markets where Ethernet carriers are particularly aggressive, DS3 services are getting beaten up badly. The cost per Mbps can be half as much for an Ethernet solution compared to an equivalent DS3 service. In other places where Ethernet hasn’t penetrated as deeply, prices can be equivalent. What bandwidth prices are available for your location? You’ll have to run a business bandwidth comparison check to find out. Even across town, the answer can be different.

That’s the story at this snapshot in time. Next year and in coming years, the tide is expected to turn significantly in favor of Ethernet. Even traditional carriers have seen the handwriting on the wall and are busy converting their networks from the telephone-oriented TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) architecture to MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks that can easily provide packet switched services such as Ethernet. Newer networks are being designed from the ground up as IP core networks. There’s little interest in expanding the fading circuit switched architecture that has dominated telecommunications for over a century.

What are the advantages of Ethernet WAN (Wide Area Network) services? Network interfacing is a breeze, as the handoff is the familiar RJ-45 Ethernet connector found on just about every piece of networking equipment. It is possible to set up a level 2 Ethernet connection between two or more business locations so that they can all be on one large company LAN. Ethernet can be configured as a line service for point to point connections between two locations or as a LAN service for multipoint to multipoint service.

Scalability is more common for Ethernet services than it is for TDM services. With a scalable service, you can start out with a modest bandwidth of 1 to 5 Mbps and then request an increase with just a simple phone call to your carrier. Bandwidth increments vary by provider, but can be 1, 2.5, 5, or 10 Mbps. Ethernet scales nicely right on up to Gigabit levels and beyond.

For the higher bandwidth levels you’ll need fiber optic connections, of course. But in many metropolitan areas, you may also be able to get Ethernet over Copper or EoC. It is provisioned over multiple twisted pair telco line that you already have installed. That makes installation fast and avoids construction costs. Bandwidths up to 45 Mbps may be available, depending on your distance from the nearest carrier office.

Are you interested in exploring Ethernet bandwidth as an option for your business location? Find Ethernet prices and availability through Ethernet Today and see if it’s to your advantage to switch soon.

Why The WAN Lags The LAN

Networks are often thought of as nearly transparent to the flow of data between nodes. Corporate LANs are managed to ensure there is enough bandwidth to prevent productivity killing network congestion within the organization. But it doesn’t take long to find the real choke point in most networks. It’s the connection with the outside world, called the WAN.

The WAN or Wide Area Network differs from the LAN or Local Area Network in more than name. They traditionally use completely different technologies.

LANs are based on the Ethernet standard. Devices that connect to the LAN have standardized NICs or Network Interface Cards. That includes PCs, servers, printers and other peripherals. The most popular interface is 10/100 Mbps. That means the device will operate on Ethernet LANs running at the standard 10 or 100 Mbps speeds. The 10/100/1000 Mbps interface is becoming more popular and increasingly seen in new devices. It maintains compatibility with 10 Mbps Ethernet and 100 Mbps, also called Fast Ethernet, and adds a new speed of 1000 Mbps, also called Gigabit Ethernet or GigE.

Now, compare these network speeds with typical WAN connections. The most popular WAN service is the T1 line running at 1.5 Mbps. Larger businesses often have DS3 connections that run at 45 Mbps. Only the largest or most bandwidth-dependent organizations have higher speed fiber optic WAN connections. These range from OC3 at 155 Mbps to OC48 at 2.5 Gbps. The largest ISPs and telecom carriers may have backbones at OC-192 or 10 Gbps. Nationwide fiber optic network backbones run at OC-768 or 40 Gbps.

Chances are your business is likely running a LAN network at 100 Mbps. When you access the Internet or connect to another of your company’s facilities via dedicated point to point data line, you may be connecting over a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps. That’s almost two orders of magnitude difference. You’ll notice the difference in file transfer times. Within the walls of your building file transfers might be measured in seconds. Go outside and the same size files will require minutes.

A larger corporation might have a LAN backbone running 1000 Mbps between switches and perhaps even to the desktop. If your WAN connection is DS3 at 45 Mbps, you still have a substantial choke point for data entering and leaving the organization. It can be a significant bottleneck when running overnight file backups to a remote data center or transferring important files to a client. If your desktop computer is connected at 100 Mbps, the slowdown might be a little more than double. But if you are transferring between two servers that have 1000 Mbps connections, the slowdown to 45 Mbps is more like 20x.

So, why don’t companies just increase their WAN bandwidth to match their LAN bandwidth? The reason is cost. WAN connections have traditionally been very expensive. Management can rationalize that the company generates far more traffic across its LAN than goes out on the WAN, so that a slower WAN isn’t that much of an impediment. Well, that depends on what is entering and leaving the building. If customers can’t access your servers in a reasonable time, they’ll think your website is broken and go elsewhere. If your medical organization can’t transfer medical images in a reasonable time, staff might be tempted to shy away from electronic medical records.

Is there anything that can help this situation? Probably the most promising technology is Carrier Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet. Prices for Ethernet WAN connections are significantly lower in general than traditional telecom service pricing. Bandwidths that match LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10 Gbps are readily available at quite reasonable pricing.

With a better WAN to LAN bandwidth parity, network performance will be much more consistent, regardless of file source and destination. That can really help productivity and encourage staff to make better use of electronic file transfers and paperless office techniques.

What will it cost to improve your network’s WAN connection performance? Probably less than you might think. Even if you don’t match your LAN speed completely, you can likely get more bandwidth for your current budget. To find out how much, check Ethernet WAN bandwidth service pricing now.

So Much Network Congestion You Could Just Burst

Just because the economy is down that doesn't mean the workload is any lighter. In fact, you and your people may well be scrambling more than ever to retain current customers and try to bring in what new business you can. As a result, your WAN network may be getting congested. Just when you need things to run faster and smoother, they run slower and spottier. A big bandwidth increase isn't in the budget. Is there anything that can be done?

First of all, don't assume that you can't get any more bandwidth for what you are currently paying. It all depends on who your vendor is and how good a deal you got. Just out of curiosity, why don't you try an instant online search for bandwidth pricing specific to your location. If you are already paying less, then move on to other options. If not, you may have found the solution. Just get a more competitive offer and pay less.

If you are already paying competitive rates for your dedicated Internet connection, MPLS network or point to point private line and can't afford an upgrade, then you need to more effectively use what you have or go with a different type of bandwidth. By more effectively using what you have, I'm suggesting WAN optimization appliances that use various compression and caching techniques to use connectivity more efficiently. These devices also require a capital expense, but may be able to pay for themselves quickly depending on your network situation.

Another approach that may not cost much, if anything, is to consider burstable bandwidth. No, that doesn't mean your connection blows up when you try to cram too much data through it too fast. Burstable bandwidth sets a price for usage up to a certain number of Mbps. But if you exceed that the network doesn't just clog up. It uses more bandwidth for the time it needs to. Your bill for service will be a combination of the flat lease rate plus the overage costs for using the extra bandwidth. You won't necessarily get dinged if your instantaneous need is short enough. But if you use significant amounts of additional bandwidth, you'll get charged accordingly.

Is burstable bandwidth right for your organization? That depends on your network traffic patterns. If you have constant heavy usage above 80 or 90% of your maximum WAN bandwidth limit, you really need to scale something back or pony up for a bandwidth increase. Depending on what is hogging all the bandwidth, you might be able to throttle back a particular low priority application to free up additional bandwidth for more critical needs. But if your needs run at a steady level with plenty of bandwidth margin but occasionally soar for short periods, you are a good candidate for burstable bandwidth solutions. An example might be a ecommerce website that normally has a modest amount of traffic but sees a lot of activity for particular events, holidays, etc.

How can you best judge whether burstable bandwidth offers a savings over fixed bandwidth options? Best to have an expert consultant help you with that. We have a number of them who will be happy to discuss your situation and show you the range of options available. Simply call the toll free number or put in a quick online request available at the MegaTrunks bandwidth service.

Unlimited Internet's Days are Numbered

Remember the days when you could saunter into an airport, buy a ticket to anywhere, and be treated like a king on your flight? Nowadays you better get there a couple of hours early to hurry up and stand in line, only to sit and wait on the plane, packed in with the other sardines. The royal treatment? You'll get the royal something else if you don't go along with whatever they care to dish out. Well, guess what? That same wonderful experience is coming soon to the Internet.

Perhaps this seems a little far fetched. After all, we've been dining at the all-you-can-eat Internet buffet for over a decade. You can go anywhere, anytime, download as much as you want and there's always more. Even better, the ISPs keep increasing their connection speeds so you can do more and more, faster and faster. What parallel does this have with big jets morphing into flying cattle cars?

The deregulated nirvana that was the airline industry also sowed the seeds of its demise. Cheap readily available air travel got us to fly more often. It was so easy and so inexpensive that we shunned automobiles, trains and ocean liners in favor "hopping on a plane." Decades later we wonder why airplanes are so full and the runways so congested. What happened was that demand caught up to supply. The hubs in the system that make it possible to go anywhere are enormous investments that are hard to site and take years to expand or construct. The recent run-up in fuel prices cut the profit right out of the business, resulting in fewer, not more, planes available to sate the demand of more people who want to go more places but not pay any more.

Still, what's that got to do with the virtual world of the Internet? Behind the scenes it's not all that virtual. There's a physical Internet out there consisting of fiber optic cables, routers, telephone lines and TV cable drops. Anything physical has limitations and the Internet is getting crammed full. Full of what? Video mostly. Traffic growth was easy to manage as long as there was a steady stream of new adopters moving first into dial-up and then broadband access. Prices of the services and the business case for the build-outs were based on oversubscription formulas that assumed casual browsing and email. In these modes, there are bursts of traffic followed by long periods of inactivity while users compose their messages or read the content of Web sites. Video throws everything into chaos.

What's so different about video? Be it streaming or downloaded, video files are huge packet collections that take minutes and hours, not seconds, to traverse the Internet. Audio has the same problem, but it's a lower rate bitstream and the files are smaller. Music and high resolution images brought dial-up access to its knees. Video put the nail in the coffin and is now chewing up the available capacity on broadband.

The Internet is getting congested, but less at its very core than at the edges. Tier 1 carriers have been lighting up formerly dark fiber and installing faster switches and routers. There's even new undersea cable being installed to Europe and Asia. The providers really in a pickle are the Cable MSOs. Cable TV and Internet service shares a common line that feeds multiple drops to individual households and some businesses. The telcos have it a bit easier in that each location has a unique copper pair that goes all the way back to the central office. Both types of providers have expensive backbone connections that have to be amortized over many users. If some users are pushing the limits with heavy video activity and others are typical Internet surfers, the few will limit the bandwidth to the many. Time Warner Cable believes its just 5% of the users that are causing the majority of the congestion.

The first idea about how to deal with this dilemma was to identify the traffic burdening the networks and either block it or slow it down. In corporate networks, it is common to give preferential treatment to time sensitive or high priority data packets at the expense of other packets in order to keep the network from overloading. ISPs, especially the beleaguered Cable companies, would love to put the squeeze on pervasive BitTorrent streams. But that flies in the face of net neutrality. Net neutrality, the principle that all traffic on the Internet must receive fair and equal treatment with no discrimination, is sacred among watchdog groups looking out for the public interest. Violate it and you may find yourself in front of a Congressional hearing.

If all data must be treated the same but your network is about to buckle under the weight, then your only choices are to increase backbone and last mile bandwidth to such a level that there can be no congestion, an expensive and long term proposition, or throttle the users themselves. The principle of unlimited bandwidth for all is not nearly as sacrosanct as network neutrality. Better to have a few disgruntled users who probably have nowhere else to go than thousands of unhappy campers who can barely run Google searches.

This is exactly what Time Warner Cable and Comcast are experimenting with. In select markets they are setting monthly bandwidth limits, such as 5 to 40 GB, with extra charges if you go over. Sound similar to most cell phone plans? In this case it's gigabytes, not minutes, but the principle is the same. Just like cellular, the idea is to keep a few people from hogging the network and limiting the access of others.

This isn't a unique idea. Web hosting companies routinely impose monthly download limits on their service packages. But those are professional users. How the general public will react to limited access remains to be seen. Right now it may be just a relative handful of video aficionados who are affected. But what happens when YouTube clips become passe and we're all engaged in getting our full length TV shows and new release Blu-ray movies online?

In fairness, ISPs are working with private content delivery networks to have video streams hosted as near to the end users as possible. Build-outs of FTTP (Fiber to the Premises), such as Verizon's FiOS, will relieve that last mile congestion in a least some areas. But the fact remains that we are a bandwidth limited nation. Technology advances such as Internet-based video on demand may well be thwarted until network capacity catches up.

In the short term, bandwidth demand may well outstrip supply. A quick solution is to reduce demand by imposing a cost penalty for exceeding average usage. How successful this will be is likely dependent on where the limits are set and how much extra it will cost to get the content you can't live without. It could be that many users will be delighted by faster downloads while only a few will be stifled by limits on their consumption. But there is also the possibility that tiered service will result in more Internet haves and have nots, as only the well-heeled will be able to enjoy the benefits of high demand technology services.

Cure The Bulging T1 Line

It wasn't that long ago you leased your first T1 line. It was pretty amazing. A full 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download. Excellent reliability and a service level agreement to make sure you got fast attention if there ever was a problem. It seemed a bit expensive, but well worth it. You thought that you were set indefinitely. But lately that super fast data connection is just poking along. Now what will you do?

You're not the first business to experience a bulging T1 line. It's becoming more and more common these days. Why? Business processes have changed. Broadband Internet access was once a casual activity. You might use it for email, occasional research, and placing small orders for specialty items. Now your business activity depends on being connected. Your online presence may even be bringing in more revenue than your bricks and mortar operation. Software as a Service frees you from the expense and time consuming maintenance needed for purchased software packages. But now all your inquiries and transactions traverse the Internet to your SaaS provider. Purchasing, inventory management, and video conferencing all need reliable Internet access. Sadly, they all seem to want it at the same time.

This is how you can have all the bandwidth in the world one year and be chocking on packet congestion the next. The faster that business activities become, the more that interaction with customers and vendors gets to be in real time, the more you load up your bandwidth pipe. At some point, things slow down so much that productivity tanks and tempers flare. At that point you are long past the need for an upgrade.

No need to wince. As your need for bandwidth has been increasing, the marketplace has been active in increasing the availability of that bandwidth. Prices have come down due to increased competition and more efficient ways to find the best prices from available service providers. So much so that you might be able to double your current bandwidth for the same lease price you committed to several years ago.

Bandwidth increases are easier than you think. Sure, you might have been told at the time that T1 service was the fastest link you could get at your business location. For years it was. But now it's common to bond T1 lines together so you can have 3 Mbps, 6 Mbps, or even 9 Mbps without major construction costs. An even newer approach is Ethernet over Copper. You keep the copper telecom lines you are currently using. The Ethernet service provider swaps out the termination equipment with newer technology that can support higher bandwidths. You might be able to get a 10 Mbps standard Ethernet service or even 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, depending on how close you are to the carrier's facilities.

If fiber optic service is an option, the sky is the limit. Once again, don't be put off by the pricing you remember when you first considered this option. DS3 (45 Mbps) and OC3 (155 Mbps) service have also dropped in price considerably. Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) and Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps) are actually very viable for companies that need high bandwidth connections to the Internet or as a private network among multiple facilities.

The cure for the bulging T1 line? It starts with a quick GeoQuote (tm) service pricing and availability check. Don't be surprised if you find that you can get more bandwidth for less money right now.