How Fiber Future-Proofs Your Business

By: John Shepler

Chances are that connectivity is not just another expense item in your business. It is critical to your being in business and for your employee productivity. What you need is solid, reliable, fast, low latency and uncongested network connections to the Internet, cloud services, and your other business locations. This is the time to ensure you have it now and in the future.

What You Are Looking For Is Fiber
Telecommunications, the genesis of computer to computer connections, was historically built on twisted pair copper wiring. That era is essentially over. The remaining T1 lines and DS3 coax are relics of an earlier day and will soon be moved to the recycling bin. Not only have they been eclipsed in bandwidth, but the infrastructure buildouts now are based on multi-strand fiber optic cables.

Fiber historically has been expensive and rare. That changed with the introduction of Ethernet over Fiber or EOF services directly compatible with today’s most popular computer networks. Fiber optic Ethernet has the widest availability of bandwidths and the lowest cost per Mbps or Gbps. In many areas, fiber is available to just about every business location and in others it soon will be. As you drive down the road you can see crews installing underground fiber conduits in both business and residential areas.

Where Do You Want to Connect?
The most popular connections are to the public Internet. This is a must if you are going to communicate with customers and suppliers. You can also use the Internet to connect to cloud services and link multiple business locations. The beauty of the Internet is that it is already built-out to connect just about everyone, everywhere. This makes worldwide connections fast and inexpensive.

While the Internet itself is a shared network that doesn’t favor one user over another, you can improve your company’s connection by using dedicated instead of shared access. A DIA or Dedicated Internet Access line is a private connection between your business and your Internet Service Provider. It lets you avoid the congestion that can occur when you are sharing access locally with many other business and consumer users.

Dedicated Cloud On-Ramps
Productivity is key to any business. If a key element to your productivity is provided by cloud services, you may be plagued with varying slowdowns and even dropouts caused by a congested Internet not able to keep up with the massive flow of data between you and your cloud provider. The solution is a direct line between your network and your cloud service provider. This is called a cloud connection or cloud on-ramp. It shields you from competition for bandwidth from other users. Such a dedicated leased line can make the cloud server perform like it is right down the hall.

Multiple Locations on the Same Network
Within your building, you have complete control of your LAN that connects terminals, PCs, printers, storage and so on. With multiple locations, you need some way to connect their networks, since they can’t all be on the same LAN… or can they? Dedicated fiber optic bandwidth can go a long way to creating the perception that all of your users, and perhaps some customers and suppliers, are on the same network with the same performance. This is usually done with a central hub and separate links to each location. For vastly separated locations, you can also achieve similar performance with a dedicated link to a MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network that provides regional, national or international coverage.

How Fast is Fast?
While single Megabits per second was once considered speedy, It doesn’t cut it for most uses today. Even consumers are demanding 300 Mbps, 600 Mbps or even 1 Gbps or more for their Web access and video streaming. Businesses, especially those with cloud services, must have at least this much. Entry level connections of 1 Gbps are now common. As demands increase or business size expands, 10 Gbps is a readily available and affordable service level. Once core network speeds of 100 Gbps are now being offered to businesses in metro areas and will soon be universally available.

How is this possible? Fiber optic strands have nearly unlimited bandwidth capacity. The limitation is often defined by the equipment powering, switching and terminating the strands. Wavelength division multiplexing divides one strand into a dozen or a hundred separate high bandwidth connections. Each cable may have a dozen to a hundred separate fiber strands.

How much low latency high performance bandwidth do you need? You may be surprised to find how much costs have come down the last few years. See now the availability and pricing for fiber optic connections that can grow with your business.

Filling Coverage Gaps With High Quality Business Satellite

By: John Shepler

Businesses located in major metro areas really have it made when it comes to voice and data network connections. Multiple service providers are often anxious to vie for your business. What if you are located even a little bit beyond the reach of fiber, cable and wireless? Are you stuck with POTS landlines and maybe T1 at best? Not anymore.

Your Options are UP
Stop looking in the ground or on the utility poles. You should be looking at the clear sky for your telephone and broadband service. Satellite service is well entrenched for both broadcast TV delivery and small business point of purchase sales. Now, one satellite service has really raised the bar on what they can offer to business users in the way of primary or redundant backup connectivity.

High Bandwidth, VoIP Telephone, FaceTime
Two-way satellite service has a reputation for low bandwidth, low data caps, high latency and iffy service. That’s the old paradigm. Viasat has brought satellite up to a standard that can truly be called “business grade.” Telarus co-founder Patrick Oborn recently visited the Viasat campus for a demo. Pay close attention to the quality and usability of the VoIP telephone and FaceTime calls.


Has this changed your option of how well satellite could work for your business?

Plenty of Bandwidth, More Coming
T1 and fractional T1 bandwidths were good enough when all you needed to do was run credit card purchases and exchange Email. Today’s business is data heavy, video rich and primarily located in the cloud. You need significantly higher bandwidth, robust service, and support for interactive services, including telephone and video conferencing.

You should be looking at ViaSat. Their current satellites blanket the USA mainland and Hawaii, with some coverage in Alaska. The West Coast and the eastern half of the country can get 15/4 Mbps service with persistent IP addresses and unlimited data plans. You’ll be able to implement VoIP telephone, high speed file transfer, email, web browsing, streaming HD video and point of sale. A lower speed 5/1 Mbps redundancy service is available for most of West or if you just need independent backup of your existing copper or wire lines.

Here’s something really exciting! The advanced Viasat-2 satellite was launched in June and will be turned up in early 2018 with a throughput capacity of 300 Gbps. You’ll be able to get download speeds up to 100 Mbps. That’s as good as fiber and just about anywhere you want it in the lower 48 states, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central Americas and even the air routes to Europe. The Viasat-3 satellites launching in the next couple of years will feature downloads up to 1,000 Mbps.

Have you been discounting business satellite service because of their historically low-end performance? It’s definitely time to take another look… at Viasat via Telarus. Get your competitive copper, fiber and business satellite options now.

Why Your Next Wire Should Be Glass

By: John Shepler

The telecommunications industry was build on copper wire. So was the computer networking industry. You’re well versed in the installation and maintenance of metal wire technology. Cat5e or Cat6 cabling gets the job done for most of your networking needs. So, why should you be looking at fiber optic exclusively for your next connection?

The WAN vs the LAN
Ethernet over copper works great over short distances. That’s why it is so popular for in-house network wiring. Most users don’t have NICs that run faster than 1000 Mbps and seldom really need even that much bandwidth. Running fiber to the desktop seems like an expensive and unnecessary project.

Where fiber shines in-plant is long stretches between floors or other buildings. It’s also important between some networking equipment that really can benefit from 10 to 100 Gbps or higher bandwidths.

The WAN is another matter. Ethernet was originally designed with short interconnections in mind. The specs for Carrier Ethernet added provisions that let common carriers extend your LAN anywhere in-town, between cities or around the world. There’s even a product called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. It uses multiple pairs of existing twisted pair wiring between your location and the telco office.

That gets Ethernet from in the building to several miles away. But that’s the rub. EoC bandwidth falls off with distance. It is intended to be an upgrade from copper-based T1 lines to increase bandwidth from T1’s 1.5 Mbps on up to 10 or 15 Mbps. In some short run situations, that can be increased to 20, 30, 50Mbps or even higher.

Glass Is The Future
You might be surprised to learn that there is almost a stampeded among businesses from their old copper WAN connections to fiber optic service. Most new installations should really take a look at fiber options first. Only if fiber isn’t really needed because of low bandwidth requirements or unavailability in rural areas, do you want to settle for copper services like T1 or EoC.

The first reason, as you probably suspect, is bandwidth. Business bandwidth needs have multiplied recently. The reason is that more and more business processes are being automated for gains productivity. Software is far more sophisticated than is was a short while ago. Multimedia, especially video content, sucks up bandwidth orders of magnitude faster than text based messaging and reports. More jobs that depend on computers or network connected machines combined with more sophisticated processing means much faster connections are needed for communications.

The “Cloud” is another driver. Behind all the magic, the cloud is really just a big, big data center located too far for a LAN connection. The cloud is sold as a way to transform capital investments into monthly expenses and reduce the cost of local maintenance and support staff. Economy of scale and the ability to scale resources for any given user in near real-time are attractive benefits. The one fly in the ointment is network bandwidth.

Cloud-based computing and telecommunications demands a lot more performance from your wide area connections than simple telephone lines or Internet service used primarily for email and casual web browsing. Productivity, along with voice and video performance, depend on high bandwidth, low latency connections.

Not Yesterday’s Fiber
Fiber optic bandwidth service has a history of being expensive and hard to get. That has changed dramatically in recent years. What started off as a niche technology for the telephone companies to transport huge bundles of phone calls between switching centers has morphed into routine connectivity for private line and Internet service. Buildings are being “lit” at a rapid rate to supply fiber optic bandwidth as a utility, something like electricity and water. In today’s information age, digital connectivity really needs to be considered a utility.

Another big driver is the cell phone industry. In the decades since cellular service was introduced, its use has shifted from simple mobile phone calls to full-blown computer applications running on smartphones, tablets and laptop computers. Carriers can’t build out 4G wireless fast enough to meet the demand. The work on 5G is well underway.

T1 lines were perfect for cell towers handling voice traffic and performed well until 3G start to be replaced by 4G. Even bonded T1 lines can’t keep up with 20 or 30 Mbps, much less higher speeds. That means it has become imperative to get fiber to every cell tower. Fiber is no longer rare. It’s being installed in underground conduit and flying on utility poles everywhere you look.

Fiber That Makes Sense For Your Company
The best deals in fiber optic bandwidth right now are for Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) service rather than the traditional SONET telco standards. EoF has the advantages of being highly competitive among multiple carriers, easy to scale up and down in bandwidth, low in latency, packet loss and jitter and a lot lower priced than you may think.

The most popular Ethernet over Fiber services right now are 10 Mbps as an entry level for smaller businesses, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet for most established companies, and 1000 Mbps GigE for medium and larger operations and companies with high bandwidth demands, such as video production or computer aided design and manufacturing. School districts also find Gigabit Ethernet attractive to serve their many facilities.

Are you acquiring bandwidth for a new location or looking to upgrade the copper service you already have? Now is the perfect time to take a look at what’s available in fiber optic bandwidth service for business.


Note: Products with the humorous theme "A Wire Made of Glass" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

WAN Network Connections From Copper to Fiber

By: John Shepler

LAN, MAN and WAN speeds continue to rise as content demands more and more bandwidth. This is increasing pressure on both copper and fiber based telecommunication networks for more frequent speed upgrades. Let’s take a look at what the options are for both traditional TDM (Time division Multiplexing) and IP (Internet Protocol) networks.

The Legacy of Copper Telecom Lines
Copper has been the mainstay of electronic communications, starting with the telegraph and then the telephone networks. The telegraph, of course, is long gone. The telephone is undergoing a technology shift where voice is becoming a converged network service. With the implementation of 4G LTE wireless, even cellular phone will soon move away from voice only channels to integration with data.

Clearly, analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is in its twilight years. What will remain for decades to come is its installed base of twisted pair copper lines that connect to nearly every building, commercial and residential. That copper still has value because it can transport digital signals as well as analog.

Digital T1 Lines
The oldest digital protocol for data transmission on twisted pair copper (not including telegraph) is still going strong. It’s the T1 line used for telephone trunking, point to point data, and dedicated Internet connections. T1’s history is that it was developed to transport multiple phone conversations digitally using existing telephone cabling. T1 can transport service over wide areas using signal regenerators to clean up the signal every 6,000 ft. You can get T1 nearly anywhere you can get landline phone service. The one limitation is its 1.5 Mbps bandwidth.

While 1.5 Mbps used to be considered broadband, it’s no longer adequate except for PBX telephony, casual Web access, email and point of sale credit card verification. This bandwidth is similar to 3G wireless. Wireless is rapidly moving to 4G wireless, with speeds an order of magnitude higher. Wired services are also moving to 10 or 15 Mbps as a minimal requirement.

Bonding T1 Lines & Ethernet over Copper
T1 is enjoying continued usefulness by bonding the bandwidth of multiple T1 lines to make one larger service level. This is practical up to 10 or 12 Mbps, but gets too expensive and hard to find available bundles of unused copper pair above that. What’s needed is a different technology that gets more bandwidth out of the same copper.

That technology is now available and called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet is a departure from T1 in the way the bits are organized on the line, but serves the same purpose. It uses exactly the same copper pair cabling with multiple pairs bonded to increase bandwidth. The differences are that EoC is available in increments from about 3 to 45 Mbps and it is distance limited. Near the central offices, high speeds are available. A few miles away there may be no EoC service at all. In between, there are different service levels possible.

There have been some major advances in transmission of data over copper pair wiring, with some installations supporting bandwidths as high as 100 or 200 Mbps. These are uncommon. Another copper technology, Cable broadband using coaxial copper cables and a modulation scheme called DOCSIS 3, can reliably deliver 100 Mbps or more bandwidth. Even 1 Gbps is not unheard of, although not that widely available. Another service called DS3 or T3 offers 45 Mbps over a pair of coaxial lines where available.

Fiber Optic Services for Unlimited Bandwidth
What really gets the job done at higher bandwidths is fiber optic cabling. Fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited, especially when wavelengths are bonded to create very large services. Like, copper, fiber also has a legacy history and a newer technical approach.

Traditional fiber optic service is based on a telephony standard called SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork). Familiar service levels are OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps and OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps. Higher levels include 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps.

Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) is a Carrier Ethernet service like EoC, but using fiber rather than copper transmission. Fiber Ethernet is highly cost competitive and readily available from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Today’s most popular service levels are 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). In some areas, 100 Gbps service is available to businesses.

Wavelengths Options
Fiber enjoys another advantage over copper in that it supports multiple 10 Gbps wavelengths through a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. This means you can run different protocols on completely separate wavelengths within the same fiber strand. This provides a high degree of flexibility for financial institutions and others with demanding applications.

As you can see, there are a wide variety of options on both copper and fiber transmissionall currently available. What works best for your organization is a function of application requirements, scale and budget. You’ll likely have multiple technologies and multiple vendors to choose from.

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.

100 Business Locations and 1 Bandwidth Bill

By: John Shepler

If your business has grown from a single small operation to a nationwide or international enterprise, chances are that your network connections have grown in a piecemeal fashion over the years. Now you’ve got a major management problem handling dozens, hundreds or even thousands of individual contracts. Moreover, there’s that nagging feeling that you may be paying a lot more that you could be with an optimized solution. You’re probably right.

So, what can you do to get your arms around all this complexity? First of all, don’t try doing it all yourself. You are ill equipped to search out that optimum solution of providers and service levels. Chances are that you’ll sill wind up with too many bills from too many providers and not the best bandwidth connections. Instead, get support from a company that specializes in consolidating all your business bandwidth services.

UNSi (United Network Services, Inc.), formerly American Broadband, Inc. , is just such a company. Their specialty is managing broadband connectivity for companies with 100 or more locations. They can give you multiple types of connectivity matched to your location needs and consolidated in a single broadband bill. They specialize in optimizing bandwidth solutions, taking that monkey off YOUR back. You’ll wind up with more and better connectivity at a lower cost that what you’re paying now… and without the management headaches.

How does UNSI do this? It starts with their nationwide MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) network. MPLS provides the reliable high bandwidth core that can cost effectively carry network traffic of nearly any protocol with high security. Beyond their own network, UNSi and unique NNI (Network to Network Interface) capabilities that allow them to mesh with more than 150 other carrier networks to create a single expansive network. No matter where your business locations are, you’ll find a suitable connection via DSL, Cable Broadband, Ethernet over Copper, Carrier TDM or Metro Ethernet. A recent merger with Airband adds fixed wireless connectivity to the mix of options.

Other network assets include 18 strategic regionally located points of presence (POPs) serving over 155,000 lit buildings. Network operation centers (NOCs) are geographically dispersed to survive any foreseeable disaster.

What type of services are available? In addition to the core MPLS network that ties everything together and connections for each of your location, UNSi offers dedicated Internet access (DIA), cloud connectivity, managed services that include routers, firewalls, colocation, hosted monitoring and even managed LAN. A special service is called SIF or Same IP Failover. This is a disaster recovery and business continuity solution that provides automated failover between the primary MPLS/DIA circuits and a broadband backup circuit. The automated system ensures that the same customer IP range will operate over both the on-net primary circuit and the backup circuit. If the primary goes down, the system will switch seamlessly to the backup to ensure continuous operation.

Are you managing a single business location or hundreds to thousands located domestically or internationally? See if you can reduce your telecom management workload and save money in the process with network and bandwidth service consolidation.

Pair Bonding and Distance Determine Ethernet Speed

Ethernet over Copper is coming on strong as a competitor to T1, satellite and fractional T3 (DS3) services. It has considerable advantages, such as lower cost and ease of interface. So, just how much EoC bandwidth can you get and where can you get it?

The magic behind Ethernet over Copper is in re-purposing the same twisted pair copper wires that are used to bring in analog business phone lines and T1 lines. There is a huge advantage in making good use of copper that is already in the ground. The installation of that copper has already been paid for. Companies looking to bring in fiber optic service sometimes get a nasty shock when they see what the construction costs are going to be. The technical capability of that copper is also much higher than many assume.

Believe it or not, some carriers are offering 50 Mbps and even 100 Mbps bandwidth over ordinary twisted pair copper. That is enough to forestall fiber installation until even higher bandwidths are required years from now. Typical EoC offerings range from 2 & 3 Mbps on up to 30 Mbps, with steps of 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps, 20 Mbps and 30 Mbps in-between. The bandwidth is highly scalable, but there are tricks in getting it to work.

Many carriers are using terminal equipment provided by Overture Networks, formerly Hatteras Networks. What this equipment does is generate a highly efficient modulation scheme over multiple copper pair. There are variants for 2, 4 and 8 pair setups. One box is at the telephone company office. The other is installed in your building. The hand-off to your network equipment is a standard RJ-45 Ethernet connection. With this arrangement, the telecom circuit looks just like another network link.

What makes this work is the ability of competitive carriers to rent unbundled local loops from the local phone company, also called the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier or ILEC. Why the ILEC? It’s because by tradition and by law, the ILECs are the owners of all that telephone wire strung on poles and buried in the ground over the last century or so. Since deregulation, competing companies called CLECs or Competitive Local Exchange Carriers have been able to lease just the wires between the phone company office and the service location. That pair of wires is called the local loop.

For EoC to work, multiple pairs of local loop wiring must be available to the business location in question. What’s really desired is just the plain wires between the switching office and the service location with no signals on the line and no equipment installed in-between. Some lines have what is called pair gain equipment in place. This is analog or digital multiplexing circuitry that allows multiple phone conversations to share one physical phone line. Such circuitry is incompatible with the Ethernet over Copper digital signals.

Fortunately most business locations do have 2, 4, 6 or 8 suitable copper pair available. Now it comes down to distance. EoC offers higher bandwidth than bonded T1 lines, but unlike T1 its technology is distance sensitive. If you are more than 15,000 feet or about 3 miles from the telco office serving your location you are probably out of luck for EoC, although T1 is an option. The closer you are to the office and the more pairs of wires employed, the higher your Ethernet bandwidth.

At about a mile, you can probably get whatever maximum service is available. Between 1 and 3 miles, using 2, 4, 6 or 8 pair, you’ll likely get somewhere between 5 and 30 Mbps maximum bandwidth. Bonded T1 lines can reach further but top out at about 12 Mbps using 8 pair.

Obviously, there is no stock answer to exactly how much Ethernet bandwidth you can get at any particular location. It all depends on what facilities have already been installed by the local phone company and which competitive carriers serve your city. You can find out, though, with little effort on your part. Simply request availability and pricing of Ethernet over Copper services for your business location or locations.

What Type of Data Center Connectivity Do You Need?

If you are considering a move to a colo center or setting up an off-site data center or private cloud for your company, you’ll have some challenges and opportunities for connectivity arrangements. Let’s see what to consider and where those cost savings opportunities are.

The difference between on-campus and remote data centers, including colocation facilities, is the contrast between local wiring where you have complete control of the network versus leasing network connections through service providers. Chances are that you have a relationship with a bandwidth provider now for dedicated Internet access and private lines to other company facilities. You’ll simply be expanding that relationship with your current or other competitive service providers.

There are two types of connectivity to be concerned about for data center bandwidth, not counting the local wiring interconnecting your equipment in the racks. That local wiring is the same as you would have if the servers, disks and network appliances were located down the hall instead of across town or in another state. The other connections you need are from your equipment racks to the outside world and from your existing facilities to the colo center.

The largest bandwidth consumption will likely be WAN bandwidth connected to your servers at the data center. This is one of the biggest advantages to relocating off-site. Colocation facilities are attractive to carriers, who establish network points of presence within the facility to serve all of the businesses collocating there. Not just one carrier, either. There’s just too much business to be had concentrated within the walls of the colo. Several, if not many, carriers will set up shop in the colo and try to garner as much WAN bandwidth business as they can. That’s why colocation centers are often called “carrier hotels.”

The advantage to you is that there are multiple providers all vying for your business. Since you are typically all located within a single building, there are no issues regarding construction of lines. The lines are a few hundred meters at most running from a carrier’s equipment to yours through colo provided conduit. Both copper and fiber are readily available. In fact, the colo center may provide the connections themselves to keep everything standardized.

As you might suspect, the ease of connection and competing carriers makes for excellent prices on bandwidth. You’ll likely find better prices per Mbps or Gbps in the colo center than you will for the lines connecting your current facility. That’s a major strategic advantage for colo providers. You want to move your high traffic equipment, especially any services provided via the Internet, to the colo.

There is a bandwidth tradeoff involved. Since your servers are now located remotely, you’ll need bandwidth to communicate with them. The trade generally works out that the bandwidth needed to connect employees to operate the collocated equipment is less than the bandwidth needed to connect all users, including customers, to that same equipment. If colocation makes sense for your operation, there should be a net savings on your telecom services expenses overall. If not, that savings needs to come from reduced capital expenditures, facilities operation and maintenance, power and HVAC, and staffing. Sometimes you can save in all these areas through colocation.

Are you ready to consider a move to an off-site data center or colocation facility? Be sure to factor in your bandwidth needs and potential savings now available. Check availability and pricing for data center connectivity now.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

Ethernet over Copper Rising Rapidly

A combination of improved business conditions and productivity enhancements from automation are nudging, even pulling, companies toward higher bandwidth network connections. Rather than just order more of the same T1 or other line services, savvy managers are taking a fresh look at new technology that offers more bandwidth for less money. What’s the hottest WAN network service of them all? It’s Ethernet over Copper.

Ethernet over Copper, or EoC as it’s called for short, is pretty much what it sounds like. It is an Ethernet line service delivered over ordinary twisted pair copper wiring. That’s the same twisted pair copper that is now bundled into a multi-pair cable and already installed in nearly every business location. Some of those wires are used for multi-line telephone service. Others for T1 or other broadband line service.

What an EoC provider does is lease some of the copper pairs from the incumbent local telephone company that owns them. Just the bare wires are needed without signals of any kind. Then the provider installs special terminal equipment at each end of the circuit. This terminal equipment uses efficient modulation techniques along with interference cancellation technology to get the highest bandwidth possible consistent with maximum reliability.

So what can Ethernet over Copper give you that T1 lines can’t? For one thing, the interface between LAN and WAN is trivial. Since you already have Ethernet running on your local area network, it is directly compatible with an Ethernet service connecting you to the outside world. Just plug the WAN Ethernet service into your edge router and you are connected. There is no need for special CSU/DSU interface cards or other equipment to translate between dissimilar protocols. It’s Ethernet all the way.

T1 lines tend to be provisioned in units of 1.5 Mbps. If you want more bandwidth, you need to install another line. Still need more bandwidth? Then order another line to be bonded-in and wait for it to be installed.

Ethernet bandwidth tends to be highly scalable. Ethernet over Copper service typically starts at 1 to 3 Mbps and goes up to a maximum of 45 Mbps in just about any increment you want. The sweet spot is around 10 Mbps. That’s the bandwidth that many companies desire and it is easily delivered over copper. How much bandwidth you can get at any location depends on how close you are to the provider’s POP or Point of Presence. Nearby, it’s easy to get high bandwidths. A few miles away, you may have limited choices.

Just how hot is Ethernet over Copper. TelePacific, a major competitive service provider, is adding dozens of new Ethernet over copper wire centers by the end of 2011 just to meet the rising demands in its service footprint. High bandwidths up to 1 Gbps will be provided over fiber optic connections.

The rush to EoC is about more than bandwidth. It’s highly influenced by the lower costs that Ethernet services offer. Nationwide, you can typically get 3 Mbps Ethernet for the cost of a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Cost savings at higher bandwidths are as good or better. The only thing limiting the meteoric rise of Ethernet right now is how fast carriers can deploy the service to every business location.

Could you benefit from the EoC revolution? Find out quickly and easily with a quick cost and availability quote for Ethernet over Copper service.

Middle Mile Bandwidth Solutions

Most businesses are concerned with last mile network connections. That’s the access bandwidth that connects their local network to their service provider. But what does the service provider connect to?

If you are buying your voice and data services from a larger carrier, they may own an entire network that spans the nation or a large regional area. Smaller service providers have what is called a middle mile connection to a wholesale bandwidth supplier that connects them to the Internet or a major carrier’s telephone switching network.

If your business is running a small metropolitan or rural Internet service provider or an independent telephone company, you’ve probably got an interest in middle mile bandwidth solutions. In rural areas, especially, it’s often expensive and sometimes difficult to get the middle mile connectivity you need. Any competitive service offerings are a welcome sight, even if it is only to validate the cost and performance of your current leased services.

What types of middle mile technologies are there? Fiber optic service comes first to mind. Fiber optic cables crisscross the country and are present not far from most locations. The irony is that you may be standing right on top of a fiber conduit and not be able to get service.

Fiber bundles are much like the interstate highway system. They transport massive amounts of traffic, but access points are limited. To get on the network you need the equivalent of a highway on-ramp. That’s the service middle mile connections perform.

There are three middle mile connection technologies to consider. Fiber optics certainly provides the highest bandwidths. Each strand of glass fiber can transport packets at a data rate of at least 10 Gbps. By using wavelength division multiplexing, basically using multiple non-interfering colors of light beams, you might have 128 or even 256 different 10 Gbps data streams in each strand. A fiber bundle might have dozens, even hundreds of glass fiber strands in one ruggedized trunk cable. That’s a LOT of bandwidth capacity.

The problem with fiber optic connections is that there aren’t a lot of places to plug-in for service. Carriers have POPs or Points of Presence in major metropolitan areas. But between these termination points there are miles and sometimes hundreds of miles of installed fiber cable running point to point. Some carriers are pursuing government financing under the rural broadband improvement project to build-out more middle mile fiber lines in rural areas. This will make it easier for ISPs and telcos in sparsely populated areas to get high bandwidth connections at lower prices.

Another connection technology is wireless. Point to point microwave transmission is cheaper and quicker to install than fiber optic cabling. The newest technology is WiMAX, which can be used as a middle mile backhaul service as well as a public access wireless broadband transmission service. WiMAX has a range of up to 30 miles, making it a good solution to feed remotely located transmission towers.

A technology you might not think of for middle mile services is bundled T1 lines. A T1 line has a bandwidth of only 1.5 Mbps, making it more suitable as a last mile connection for business locations. But multiple T1 lines can be connected essentially in parallel to create larger bandwidths up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That may be all a cellular tower or WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) needs for middle mile connectivity. The advantage of T1 is that it runs on twisted pair copper and can be easily boosted or regenerated over long distances. That means that bundled T1 service can reach out into rural areas where other services aren’t available.

Newer modulation techniques let multiple copper pair also transport Ethernet in a technology known as EoC or Ethernet over Copper. EoC bandwidths are often similar to bundled T1 lines, but may be as high as 45 Mbps in metropolitan areas.

Are you in need of connectivity for your independent telephone company or Internet service? If so, see what middle mile bandwidth solutions are available for your location.