Are Your T1 Lines Saturated?

By: John Shepler

The ideal network connection is transparent. Regardless of whether the link is twisted pair copper, coaxial cable, fiber optic or wireless, if it does anything to affect your network traffic, it is clearly not transparent. The more you notice link limitations, the more your productivity will suffer and the more you need to do something about it.

Artificial Limitations
Best effort shared broadband services, like Cable BB, DSL, 4G Cellular or two-way satellite are limited by both technology and policy. Each type of service has its own capacity for traffic. That capacity is generally available 24/7, aside from occasional outages. Even so, you have access only to a portion of that capacity.

The first limitation is bandwidth. You are entitled to the level of service you order, as a maximum and not a guaranteed throughput. Providers manage this by rate limiting your connection to the service. The line might be capable of 1000 Mbps, but you get 10, 30 or 100 Mbps. Thats the highest bandwidth you can achieve even if there are no other users.

The second limitation is usage limits. These are particularly severe on wireless & satellite links where bandwidth is expensive. Limits of 5 or 10 GB per month severely limit what you can do with the service. Even higher limits of 20 or 50 GB may not be enough for normal business activities. If you go over your limit, you’ll either be charged more, have your connection dropped or have your bandwidth throttled for the rest of the month.

Actual Limitations
Private lines and dedicated Internet access connections usually don’t have artificial limitations. You pay more for these services because you are the only user. There is no need to create policies to ensure fair usage.

Technical limitations remain. Each technology has it’s inherent limitations. There’s no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, even on your own LAN network. What you want is enough bandwidth available that you never run out of capacity.

T1 Line Saturation
T1 lines have been the gold standard of business connectivity since they were introduced decades ago. T1 lines are dedicated connections between two locations or between your location and the Internet. You are the only user and there are no usage limits. The line is constantly running and available to transfer data. You can use as little or much of the available capacity each month. The lease price is fixed.

T1 lines have a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. Actually, the exact line speed is 1.544 Mbps. However, 8 Kbps is needed as overhead to synchronize the line, so the payload rate is 1.536 Mbps. That’s what’s available for your bits of data.

The absolute maximum amount of data you can shove through the line can be figured at 1.536 Mbps x 60 seconds/minute x 60 minutes/hour x 24 hours/day = 132,710 Mbits or 16,589 MB per day, at 8 bits per byte. That’s 16.59 GB of data each day. In a typical 30 day month, that’s just shy of 500 GB.

Line Saturation Problems
Your T1 line becomes distinctly non-transparent when you have big files to transfer and you want to transfer them fast, or you have many users wanting to transfer their files at the same time. The entire line is only capable of transporting less than 17 GB every day, not even 1 GB per hour.

What happens when you try to shove more data down the line than it can carry? Everybody’s traffic slows down… sometimes to a crawl. That’s frustrating and can lead to real productivity issues, especially when need the information to proceed with your next task.

It gets worse when your telephone system is cloud hosted VoIP. Those voice packets get jammed up with all the data packets and don’t get from phone to phone as quickly as needed. The result is garbled voices, pauses in the conversation and perhaps even dropped calls.

Solutions
If you only occasionally reach line saturation, prioritizing traffic can help. Real time services, such as telephone calls and video conferences get highest priority. Whatever they don’t need can be used for interactive business applications, and whatever is left over is available for background activities like file backups.

At some point, you just need to pony up for more bandwidth. Fortunately, this is a lot less expensive to do than ever before. If doubling bandwidth will hold you for awhile, you can go from one to two T1 lines. By bonding those lines, you can double your bandwidth while the two lines act as one larger pipe.

Ethernet over Copper technology uses the same twisted pair copper lines that transport T1, but supports higher bandwidths of 10 Mbps or more. Ethernet over Fiber starts to become cost competitive at that level and can take you from 10 to 100 to 1000 Mbps, and even up to 10 Gbps if you ever need that much. Best of all, copper and fiber Carrier Ethernet services are scalable. That means you can have the line rate limited and pay less until you need the full capacity of the fiber.

Do you find yourself running out of bandwidth on your venerable T1 lines or other WAN connections? If so, check out prices and availability of higher level bandwidth services available for your business location.

How Fiber Optic Metro Ethernet Works

By: John Shepler

Are you paying a small fortune for all the lines you need to connect your multiple business locations? Would you like more flexibility in scaling bandwidth when needed along with guaranteed dedicated bandwidth that is low in latency, jitter and packet loss? You may be missing out by not using this important network connection service. Let’s have a look at a what fiber optic Metro Ethernet connections can do for your business:


Did you notice the big cost advantage in having one service provider in charge of the core network and the last mile connections to each location? Major Metro Ethernet providers have this capability and can offer you a cost savings by using their facilities rather than having to lease portions of the links from the local telephone company.

There are also network services available that aren’t offered by legacy SONET/SDH connections. Most useful is probably Ethernet LAN service. This standardized Carrier Ethernet service creates a fully meshed layer 2 bridge LAN that ties together the in-house networks at each location. Employees perceive that they are all on the same network regardless of where they are located.

This would be a good time to learn more about Ethernet bandwidth options for your business with free consultation, solutions tailored to your particular needs and rapid price quotes that you’ll find very attractive for your IT budget.

Benefits of a Gigabit Ethernet Network Connection

The need for high bandwidth connectivity has sneaked up on some companies. That T1 line they ordered years ago turned into a DS3 connection and perhaps a move to OC3 fiber optic service. But it still seems like there is a bottleneck. Perhaps it is time to consider a move to GigE or Gigabit Ethernet.

One thing you should know about the other telecom services you’ve ordered over the years is that they are derived from telephone company technology. Yes, they’re reliable. Yes, they work just fine. But they weren’t designed from the ground up to mirror what you are running on your network today. As a consequence, you may have interface issues and you are probably paying a lot more than you would have to for the same connection speed.

The beauty of having Ethernet as your standard protocol both inside and outside of your facility is that there are no connectivity issues. It’s Ethernet all the way. You can use it like you use any other high bandwidth connection to transport voice, video or data packets from point to point. You also have the option to employ your Ethernet connection as a way to link multiple LANs together in one large bridged LAN. It’s a way to connect all your geographically diverse locations as if they were simply on different floors of the same building.

There was a time just a few years ago when Gigabit Ethernet running on a local area networks was as absurd an idea as ordering up a Gigabit Ethernet WAN connection. For one thing, Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet are relatively new services. For another, Gigabit Ethernet was considered a ridiculously large amount of bandwidth.

Nobody laughs at GigE anymore. They don’t even shake their head in disbelief. What they want to know is where they can get Gigabit Ethernet service and how much it will cost them.

The reason for this change of attitude is that computer applications are sucking up bandwidth like it is an infinite resource. It’s the way that microprocessor clock speed just couldn’t get high enough or that RAM memory was always about half what you really needed. Multiple core processors and lower RAM prices have allowed computers to keep up with demanding applications such as video processing. It’s networks that are now under pressure.

You may already be running Gigabit Ethernet on your LAN. Many PCs, peripherals, switches, routers and network appliances come with 10/100/1000 Mbps Network Interface Cards standard. GigE gives you the network throughput you need to efficiently transfer files and run real time simulations and processes without creating time wasting bottlenecks. Now, what about connections that leave your facility?

If you need to transfer medical images or do video production, a Gigabit Ethernet connection may at the low end of what you’ll be needing. If you’ve consolidated data centers and need to access files remotely from a large facility, GigE is no luxury.

Fortunately, Gigabit Ethernet WAN connections are readily available in metropolitan areas. Downtown in major cities you may even have two or more carriers bidding for your business. What’s important is that you have or can easily get a fiber optic connection to your building. GigE is way beyond the capability of copper-based facilities and most wireless services.

Can you get Gigabit Ethernet at a reasonable cost? It’s more affordable than ever and competitive carriers are more inclined to bring in fiber service by aerial line or underground. See if you have fiber facilities already in your area. Check now to find fiber optic services at or near your business location. If it’s on the map, you may be in luck.



Note: Photo of Gigabit Ethernet switch and cables courtesy of J. Smith on Wikimedia Commons.