Options For Network Connectivity

Rare is the company that doesn’t need outside connections to its network. The issue is what type of connection will give you the most bang for your buck. Let’s have a look at the latest options that are attractive for small, medium and large enterprises.

Outside network connections break down into categories. Are you looking for something to get you across town? Those are the Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN). How about something that will take you to another state, across the country or overseas? Those are the Wide Area Networks (WAN). Perhaps all you want is a broadband connection to the Internet. No problem. Internet access is readily available for business users. There’s much more to choose from than in the consumer marketplace. The tradeoff is that you'll be paying something more than consumer prices.

Many metro and wide area network services are more alike than different. What you are probably seeking is a dedicated point to point service or a multipoint mesh network. Point to point private lines have been the domain of the telecom industry using standards developed for digital telephony. T1 lines are classic. They give you dedicated bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. When T1 is not enough, you can bond T1 lines together to incrementally increase bandwidth up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. At that point most companies jump to T3 (DS3) service at 45 Mbps and then SONET fiber services, starting with OC-3 at 155 Mbps.

There’s a new service widely available today that fills in the gap between T1 & T3 and costs less as well. This is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet over Copper actually starts at 2 or 3 Mbps and has become a strong competitor to T1 lines. You can get twice the bandwidth with EoC for the same price as T1. The other advantage of EoC is that bandwidth levels increment smoothly past 10 Mbps. You can easily get 15, 20, 25, 30 or up to 45 Mbps. That lets EoC take on T3 / DS3 services with better pricing. In some areas, EoC goes right up to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and beyond. Those levels aren’t so widely available as of yet.

Another advantage of what’s called Carrier Ethernet is that you can get multipoint service as well as point to point. This is great for interconnecting multiple business locations in town or around the country. Each location needs an Ethernet over Copper connection. The service provider sets up the mesh network per standards of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), an industry standards group.

There is also a competitor to SONET fiber optic services called Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). It works the same as EoC, but runs on fiber rather than twisted pair copper. The advantages are high bandwidth levels up to 10 Gbps and better pricing than traditional SONET telecom services.

When it comes to interconnecting multiple locations, especially foreign sites, MPLS networks have become the network connectivity option of choice. Why? Because these networks are already installed and running to many locations you want to go. What you need are on-ramps in the form of last mile connections. They can be as simple as T1 lines or EoC links. You can also install fiber optic lines to get higher bandwidth levels. MPLS can give you point to point, point to multi-point, or meshed network connections. Because the core network is already in place, pricing is very attractive compared to dedicated private lines that require engineering time and effort.

In addition to copper and fiber, fixed wireless connectivity is more available than ever. That’s thanks to the buildout of 3G and 4G networks by the cellular carriers. You can get business grade fixed wireless on these networks with bandwidth similar to T1 lines for such activities as credit card verification and network backup. Prices are very attractive, since the cellular carriers bore the cost of construction and paid for it from consumer smartphone data and voice contracts.

What sort of connection or connections do you need to connect your company network to suppliers, customers and your own operations? Compare network connectivity options and pricing for copper, fiber and wireless services to see what has become available recently.

What’s Wrong With Bring Your Own Bandwidth?

When you go out to contract new IT services, you are often faced with a choice. You can start fresh with both services and connectivity from your new provider. Otherwise you can layer the new IT services on the network setup you have now. Seems that if your MAN and WAN connections are working to your satisfaction, it would be smart to leave well enough alone. But, what other considerations should play into this decision?

Not every service provider deals in bandwidth. Many VoIP, cloud computing and other service providers specialize in the specific service they offer. They may make recommendations, but getting connected from your facility to theirs is your responsibility.

Other companies have a far larger array of services to offer. Some started off as competitive telecom carriers and later added other services such as colocation, cloud infrastructure, hosted PBX, Software as a Service and so on. Talk to these companies and they’ll express a definite preference for providing both the IT or telecom service plus the connectivity. Is this simply being offered as a convenience to the customer, a desire to get as much of the client’s business as possible, or are there other reasons? If so, what would they be?

A common industry term for using the network connections you have now is “bring your own bandwidth.” You’ll hear this term used most often by VoIP, hosted PBX and cloud computing providers. There’s a reason that this expression keeps coming up in provider literature and consulting discussions. It’s far more than just industry jargon.

What’s unique about cloud services of all sorts is that the performance of the cloud service is highly dependent on the performance of the connection between your facility and your provider's. Issues with customer provided bandwidth pop up so often that providers have become wary.

A common application is hosted VoIP. Unless you have an IP PBX switching system in-house, any VoIP service you are using is probably hosted VoIP. Hosted means that the service provider owns and operates the switching system and the trunk lines to the public telephone system. You only need to have IP phones and perhaps a gateway device in-house.

Hosted VoIP can best the best thing that ever happened to your company or an unmitigated nightmare. In fact, the very same service that works beautifully for one company can be a disaster for another. Why? It’s because voice services, particularly network voice services like VoIP, are highly sensitive to the characteristics of the long haul network connections to them.

Voice is a touchy application because it is real-time and easily corrupted. Any network congestion that holds up packets, drops them or brings them in at a variable rate will be reflected in the call quality. Many network anomalies show up as audio distortion that garbles conversations. Other problems are delays that chop off the beginning of sentences and intermittent outages that drop calls.

This is why major business providers with reputations to protect cringe at the thought of their clients bringing their own bandwidth when it is a shared bandwidth DSL or Cable Internet connection. Those low end services work just fine for e-mail and general website access. Add a third party broadband phone services and you are really taking your chances. Why? Your network may not be set up to give voice packets priority, the bandwidth on your broadband Internet service may vary all over the place, and even when those things are working well, the Internet itself has all sorts of vagaries.

Even the Cable companies themselves are aware of this situation and don't run their bundled telephone services over the Internet. What they sell you is a VoIP phone service that uses their Cable network to connect to their own VoIP switching center. Your telephone calls never touch the Internet itself. Call quality is just too dicey and hard to predict when you are dealing with a public network where no packet has an advantage, by design.

What major VoIP service providers really prefer is that you get a dedicated SIP trunk from them to provide your voice and Internet service. This way they can control the WAN connection and keep the voice and data packets from tripping all over each other. With the right bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics, you can have excellent voice quality and all the advantages of hosted PBX telephone services.

The same discussion applies to high bandwidth cloud connections. What some companies are finding is that the WAN connection to their new cloud provider isn’t nearly as capable as the LAN connection they had to their in-house data center. The big issues are bandwidth and latency. You need sufficient bandwidth so that users don’t have to queue up when they access the cloud. Latency introduces a delay that makes the cloud applications seem sluggish. In some instances this has become such a problem that Amazon has make arrangements with Level 3 Communications and AboveNet for special AWS Direct Connect service at 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps for its high performance cloud computing services.

Is bring your own bandwidth a good idea or a bad idea? It depends on how robust your current metro and long haul network connections are and what services you intend to add. A good approach is to discuss connectivity at the same time you are evaluating new IT services to make sure you have what you need to get optimum performance. You can get expert consultation and a wide variety of telephone, cloud and bandwidth services through our telecom broker, Telarus, Inc. A simple online inquiry will get the process started immediately.

Get Your Building Fiber Lit For Free

There are some tremendous deals on fiber optic bandwidth these days. Many companies would dearly love to move up to Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps or even 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The one problem is that their building isn’t lit for fiber optic service yet. When they see the construction cost quote to bring in the fiber, the up-front cost is just too high in this economic environment. But, what if you could get your building fiber lit for free? Would that change your bandwidth plans?

It’s absolutely possible that you can upgrade to high speed fiber services without having to pay construction costs. The little known secret is that some competitive carriers see such an opportunity in the demand for higher bandwidth services that they are willing to put up money for construction costs themselves. One carrier is willing to build up to 1,500 feet of fiber if that’s what it takes to get you on their network.

Oh, but do you have to pay extra in monthly lease fees to get the free hookup? No way. In fact, you may be surprised at how much fiber lease costs have come down lately. If you haven’t gone out for quotes in a few years, you are dealing with pricing so obsolete that it’s a joke. You need to get a new set of competitive quotes right now.

Everything is pulling in the same direction now for fiber optic bandwidth. First, demand is increasing by leaps and bounds due to the increased use of video in business, including video conferencing. Business automation is making employees more productive than ever, but it comes with an increased need for bandwidth to connect to providers. Cloud services are adding additional pressure on WAN connections to provide response times similar to what you experience with a local data center.

We normally think that when something is in high demand, the price goes up not down. Just the opposite is happening in the network bandwidth market. Why? Increased demand has encouraged competitive carriers to build-out their regional, national and international fiber networks. Many have embraced new service options, such as MPLS networks and Carrier Ethernet. What every competitive carrier wants is more customers to connect to their massive core networks. That means getting more buildings on-net.

What on-net means is that your particular building is on the network of a particular fiber optic carrier. If you are on-net, that carrier has fiber strands coming into your building and terminating in equipment that the carrier provides. From there, they can connect you and other tenants in the building, if there are any, to whatever speed and format service you require.

Many carriers don’t want the aggravation of butting heads with competitors in the same building. Instead, they’ll try to find nearby buildings that aren’t already lit and get in there first. Once established, it’s easy for them to sell and keep customers. Fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited, so scaling services up and down is no trouble at all. Do you need to move up from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps? You might be able to make that happen in a matter of hours if you already have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed. Just call the carrier and tell them you want a speed increase. They can likely do that without having to change out any equipment at all.

It’s a real land-rush situation for competitive carriers, since something like 12% of business locations are already lit for fiber service. You are in the majority if you don’t already have fiber optic bandwidth. But if you are close enough to a carrier point of presence, you may be able to get those fiber services cheaper than you ever thought possible. Why not see what opportunities are available and then decide how much you can upgrade and still stay within your budget? Get instant online fiber optic prices for Carrier Ethernet from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps now. Other services will be quoted promptly, including construction costs if any. You may be in a better spot to get affordable fiber service than you ever thought possible.

A Myriad of Business Broadband Options

Business class broadband comes in more flavors that ever before. Your options include DSL, 3G & 4G Wireless, Cable broadband, Satellite, T1 lines, and Ethernet over Copper. Those are just for small business locations. Fiber optic services expand the menu for medium and large scale business users. What is it that distinguishes these broadband options and how do you choose?

You should know that there are two different types of Internet broadband access regardless of the medium used. The medium might be wireless, twisted pair copper, coaxial cable, or fiber optic strand. That’s just the physical layer. What makes even more difference is whether you are on a dedicated or shared broadband connection.

Your lowest cost options fall into the shared bandwidth category. These include DSL, Cable, 3G & 4G Wireless and Satellite. What these all have in common is that the bandwidth is shared among multiple users. A tip-off to shared bandwidth is a statement that your service speed is “up to” so many Mbps. The upper limit, be it 2 or 20 Mbps, is the maximum you’ll experience. How much you get in practice depends on how many other people are trying to use the connection at the same time.

Shared bandwidth services don’t have to be asymmetrical, but they often are. What that means is that the upload and download speed differ, often by a large amount. You might get 5 Mbps in the download direction, but only 1 Mbps in the upload direction. Why is it done this way? It’s because these services are most often used for email and Web access. When using a Web browser, you typically type in an address and then download a page of text and graphics. The upload to request the page is a very few packets. The download of everything from the page is a much larger collection of packets.

The same is true of accessing audio and video content or downloading software. It’s primarily a one-way transmission with the speed of the download much more important than the speed of the uploaded requests.

Another characteristic of shared bandwidth services is that they are promoted as “information” rather than “telecom” services. By using the information category, these services avoid regulatory constraints. What you get for your money in the way of bandwidth levels, availability, time to repair, latency, jitter, packet loss is completely up to the service provider.

Dedicated Internet Access or DIA services allocate the full bandwidth of the connection for your usage. A T1 line, for instance, has a speed of 1.5 Mbps at all times. If you aren’t using it, the line simply idles until needed. You can elect to access the Internet via your T1 line as needed, or you can keep the line busy uploading and downloading data files 100% of the time. There’s no such thing as user limits. You’ve got a pipe with a capacity of 1.5 Mbps and you can transport as many packets through it as it will carry.

T1 lines are symmetrical, also called full duplex. The bandwidth is the same in both the upload and download directions. In this case, it’s 1.5 Mbps. Ethernet over Copper, a newer competing service to T1 lines, is similar but offers more bandwidth options. You can often get 2, 3, 5, 10 and even 20 Mbps EoC service. It’s often stated in the form 10 x 10 Mbps Ethernet to show that you get 10 Mbps in the upload and 10 Mbps in the download direction.

T1 and Ethernet services are not information services. They are network telecom services, often with SLAs or Service Level Agreements. These agreements spell out what you can expect in the way of availability, time to repair, bandwidth, jitter and latency. Because these services are more costly to engineer and provide, they have higher pricing than shared bandwidth information services.

So does that mean that you always need a T1 line or Ethernet connection? Not necessarily. If your primary reason to have an Internet connection is to access information on the Web or maintain a Website and email on a remote hosting service, you may find that DSL, Cable, Satellite or Wireless service works just fine and costs half as much. Satellite and Wireless are especially useful for remote locations that aren’t within the service areas of DSL or Cable. You can use 3G and 4G cellular wireless for point of sale terminals, even at temporary locations.

On the other hand, if you want to run your own servers in-house or connect multiple business locations with a converged voice and data network, you’ll probably find that you absolutely need the more robust bandwidth services. The same is true if you are providing rather than consuming content or can’t stand having employee productivity impacted by bandwidth that varies up and down throughout the day. Would a multi-day outage put you out of business? It probably makes sense to either have a backup bandwidth service or pay up for a Service Level Agreement.

What Internet access options make the most sense for your particular business situation? Why not have a bandwidth expert call you with prices and availability for a wide range of bandwidth solutions? Then you can weigh the costs and benefits and make an better informed decision.

Gigabit Wireless For TDM and IP Transport

What do you do when you need to get Gigabit bandwidth services into a building that has no fiber connection to your network? If you are XO Communications, you simply add a wireless hop using BridgeWave Communications FlexPort link. No stringing aerial wires on poles. No trenching fiber optic conduit. Just high bandwidth connectivity through the air.

We’re used to thinking of twisted pair copper and microwave wireless as the right solutions for moderate bandwidth needs. Gigabit bandwidth levels obviously require fiber optic strands, right? Not really. Point to point fixed wireless systems can give you fiber optic performance without the fiber or the optics.

I mention optics because there are laser based solutions designed to connect buildings at Gigabit levels. They are especially well suited for connecting networks between two tall office buildings separated by a freeway or river that makes installing fiber prohibitively expensive if even possible. But that’s maybe a thousand feet or so. How about when you need to link networks over a few miles line of sight?

This is the area where BridgeWave shines, so to speak. Actually, they’re using two-way millimeter wave transmissions in the 60 and 80 GHz radio bands. Those frequencies are high, but nowhere near the infrared or visible portion of the spectrum. Here’s something interesting, though. Oxygen attenuates signals in the 60 GHz band, a property unique to that portion of the spectrum. That limits transmission distance, but it also works to ensure that multiple users on the same frequency are unlikely to interfere with each other. The signal is simply absorbed by the air on either side of the narrow beam and past the receiving antenna.

If you’ve had a bad experience with RF links in the WiFi band or other microwave and UHF frequencies, you can appreciate both the interference avoidance and inherent security of the millimeter wave band. It’s likely that anyone trying to intercept a 60 GHz transmission would have to insert themselves in the path to such an extent that they would affect the strength of the signal at the intended receiver and give themselves away.

The 80 GHz band doesn’t have the oxygen absorption characteristics of the 60 GHz band, so it is better suited to medium haul rather than short haul links despite the higher frequencies. Still, the interference is minimized and security is enhanced due to the narrow beam width of the millimeter wavelength system.

The BridgeWave FlexPort80 link that XO is deploying is available in the 80 GHz millimeter wave band plus the licensed 18 and 23 GHz microwave bands for longer links. One of the attractive aspects of the BridgeWave equipment is that it is an all-outdoor solution. Some competing systems simply have an outdoor antenna with rack mounted transmission gear needed inside the building.

Another feature especially valuable for today’s corporate networks is the ability to transmit both TDM and IP traffic. The TDM capability is also being used by mobile carriers to backhaul their 3G and 4G networks from isolated base stations. It should be noted that FlexPort80 delivers simultaneous TDM + IP connectivity, making it truly a “flex port.”

Do you have a location that has been particularly difficult to supply with high bandwidth telecom services? Perhaps a combination of fiber optics and millimeter or microwave wireless transmission can get you the Gigabit connectivity you need at a cost you can afford. Discuss your situation now with one of our Telarus bandwidth consultants to get pricing and availability for high bandwidth business connectivity solutions.



Note: Graphic based on skyscraper image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.