Are Your WAN Circuits Monitored For Quality?

By: John Shepler

As we transition from circuit switched telephony and make the move from in-house data centers to the cloud, our WAN (Wide Area Network) circuits become more critical than ever before. A misbehaving network connection that might once have been a mere inconvenience is now a productivity killer at best and a business shutdown at worst. It is essential that every copper and fiber optic line that leaves the building be running at peak performance all the time. But… how do you make sure that is the case?

Do You Know What is Going On Behind Your Back?
Technology has a sneaky side. When your outside network circuits are installed and checked out, the lines are verified to make sure they meet specs for latency, packet loss, jitter and bandwidth. Everything is running great. Tomorrow it’s still running great. But the next day, next week or next month something goes wrong. it might be a subtle change that degrades performance rather than knocking the line out completely.

Where do you point the finger?
The problem could be anywhere in the system. Is your LAN congested or are you dealing with a failing switch? Is it just your computer or telephone set that is having problems? Perhaps it is one of several network circuits that connect you to the outside world. How do you find out for sure?

Circuit Monitoring Is Your Eye on the Network
You can’t just blindly trust that everything is running smoothly. You need a way to look into the system. Likely, you already have that capability. You can run Ping and Traceroute diagnostic tests from your computer whenever you want. That’s great for troubleshooting if you know there is a problem and have time to sit down and run the tests. But what happens when no one is running diagnostics? Hard to say.

That’s where continuous circuit monitoring shines. You don’t have to jump in and run some tests. They are running all the time. Better yet, a monitoring program gives you a chart of how the circuit has been performing over time. Run a diagnostic yourself and you have only a single data point.

Get Automatic Heads-Up Messages
The other beauty of automating the performance monitoring of your WAN circuits is that the monitor can let you know when something goes out of whack. You can get an email when something goes wrong. That way, you don’t have to sit there and watch the screen continuously just in case there is an anomaly. You’ll get notified 24/7. The monitor never sleeps.

Best Deal Ever: Free Circuit Monitoring
The best way to get your WAN circuits monitored is to have it done for free. Ever hear of this? Probably not. This is a fairly new service powered by VXSuite and offered by Telarus on Internet and coax circuits with static IP addresses that they provide. MPLS and other monitoring is available. Telarus is well known for the extensive suite of carriers that they partner with and the best prices on WAN circuits. Now you get this bonus of free circuit monitoring included on both domestic and international circuits.

This circuit monitoring includes a ping and traceroute to that circuit. Packet loss and latency are also measured. If the circuit goes down, you get an email. You also have access to a web-based dashboard to view your current circuit status and performance graphics. A monthly email report is available if you wish.

Do you need WAN circuits you can depend on? Would you like those circuits to be monitored with the powerful VXSuite tools at no extra cost? If so, it is time to get the latest competitive pricing and availability of monitored WAN network circuits for your business.

MPLS Networks vs The Internet

By: John Shepler

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


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

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

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

Why Fiber Optic Metro Ethernet Makes So Much Sense

By: John Shepler

You know that there are multiple options for connecting your headquarters, branch offices, warehouses, factories, stores, schools or medical centers. Are you sure that you have an optimum solution for the network performance you need? Let’s take a closer look at at Metro Ethernet networks and see why they might be exactly what you need.

Metro Ethernet or Metro E networks are a special implementation of Metro Area Networks (MAN). MEN instead of MAN give you two big advantages or other networking options. First is that your network protocol remains as Ethernet from end to end. Second is the pricing advantage that optical Metro Ethernet networks have over other solutions.

The Ethernet in Metro Ethernet is also called Carrier Ethernet. It’s the same switched Ethernet protocol that you have running on your local area networks, but extended for transport over longer distances. The big difference between LANs and MANs or WANs is that once the traffic leaves the network you own, it needs a telecom carrier to get it across town or across the country. You can’t provide this transport on your own. You need to contract with a carrier or service provider that has the long distance connectivity.

If you have been using T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth or SONET/SDH fiber optic services to carry your traffic, you know that a protocol conversion is involved. These telecom services are based on circuit switched technology rather than the packet switched technology running on your network.

The protocol conversion is done inside an appliance or, more often, a plug-in module for your network edge router. This makes the MAN setup unique to the service and bandwidth level that’s engineered for your specific needs. Anytime you need to change something, like make a bandwidth increase, equipment and perhaps network design needs to change. This takes a lot of time and sometimes a bundle of money to implement.

Metro Ethernet networks take a different approach. The core network is IP or MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) so that it can easily transport Ethernet packets without having to convert to and from one of the TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) protocols. This opens up the opportunity to connect your networks at the layer 2 switching rather than the layer 3 routing level.

The three layer 2 Ethernet services you should be aware of are Ethernet Line (E-Line), Ethernet LAN (E-LAN) and Ethernet Tree (E-Tree). Ethernet Line is a private line connection from point A to point B. This can directly replace older technology T1, DS3 or OCx connections.

E-LAN is a meshed multipoint to multipoint service that is often the best answer for how to easily and securely connect multiple business locations on a single private network. All locations can talk to each other but each location only needs a last mile connection to the Metro Ethernet network.

E-Tree is a special service of interest to service or content providers. It is a one to many network topology that transfers files form your root out to dozens or hundreds or thousands of “leaves” that can communicate with you but not each other.

Metro Ethernet networks have a cost advantage over dedicated point to point services when you need more than a single line. You pay for use of the multi-tenant metro network plus the last mile connectivity for each location. There is another valuable cost and performance savings that comes from all-fiber solutions.

Remember that traditional Metropolitan Area Network connections are set up specifically for a certain bandwidth level. It’s hard to scale much because of equipment changes that are needed when you jump from one standard bandwidth to another. Carrier Ethernet works differently. An Ethernet connection can handle any bandwidth up to the maximum speed of the installed port. If you have a 10 Mbps port, you can have any bandwidth up to and including 10 Mbps. A 100 Mbps port will handle all bandwidth levels up to 100 Mbps. The service levels are easily scalable, often in increments as small as 1 Mbps.

What this means is that you don’t have to order all the bandwidth you think you’ll ever need just to be sure that you can quickly accommodate increases in business levels. You simply order ports (10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10,000 Mbps) to support your expected requirements. Then order the bandwidth you need now with the knowledge that your ports have the reserve to quickly scale up later.

Why do all-optical Metro Ethernet solutions make sense? One advantage is that fiber can easily handle any bandwidth you require now or in the future. Another, more subtle, reason is that many service providers can connect you on fiber they own rather than something they have to lease from the local phone companies. This one-provider solution offers a significant cost savings as well as a single responsible service provider for all issues.

Do you need connectivity to multiple locations within one or more metropolitan areas? Learn more about your available Metro Ethernet options and pricing now.


Note: Photo of city lights courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

High Reliability VoIP Phone Service Providers

It is pretty clear now that the days of analog wireline and even ISDN PRI connections are numbered. Clouds and computer networks offer more flexibility, a richer feature set and lower cost of ownership for voice communications. If you want to start enjoying these benefits, you need to embrace packet based phone service. That’s another way of saying VoIP.

The range of emotions on VoIP as a telephone service replacement varies from “wouldn’t have anything else” down to “never will I put that in my business.” Why such a diversity of opinions? It all comes down to your experience with the technology and when you got into it.

Today’s top VoIP providers for business are a far cry from the early days when VoIP was looked at strictly as a way to avoid long distance charges. Sure, putting a CODEC (coder/decoder) on your broadband service converts an analog phone into a IP phone. The conversion process turns a telephone set into a computer peripheral so that it can share the network with PCs, printers, routers and the like. Unfortunately, just getting a telephone to talk over the Internet leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to call quality.

What’s wrecking the voice quality? Most computer equipment on the network was designed with the TCP/IP protocol in mind. This protocol is perfect for the Internet in that it expects errors to occur and patiently resends lost data until there is a perfect set at the far end. You can’t predict exactly how long it will take to transmit a file and you have no idea how it got from point A to point B, but who cares? Your document, photo or database is exactly duplicated at the far end.

VoIP is sensitive to anomalies in network performance that aren’t even noticeable when uploading or download data files. That’s because VoIP is a real-time protocol. When you are talking, there is a steady stream of audio that must be converted into packets, sent through the network, and reconverted back into audio at exact time it is generated.

Consider what happens if there is even a half-second delay through the network. That small amount may not even be noticed on file transfers. With a VoIP phone call, that half-second is an eternity. The delay in itself doesn’t affect voice quality, but it does stymie conversations. You find that you and the other party can’t talk at the same time. You have to let the other person talk, then pause a half-second, and then start talking yourself. Essentially, the phone has been turned into a two-way radio.

That’s not the worst of it. If packets are lost in file transfers, TCP/IP will detect that the data wasn’t received properly and resend it. You can’t do that on a VoIP call. If you did, your words would arrive out of order and make no sense at all. So, the real time protocol simply ignores missing packets and keep on going. The effect of lost packets is missing information in the voice stream that shows up as voice distortion. It may be slight or the whole conversation may sound garbled.

Sometimes the packets are preserved just fine, but they take different paths from sender to receiver. This causes a variation in transport time called jitter. You can compensate for this somewhat by buffering the incoming packet stream to smooth it out. More than a little of this will cause the latency issue of needing long pauses before the other party can talk. Some jitter can cause packets to arrive out of order which distorts the voice as bad or worse than dropping the late arrivers completely.

The fact is that voice calls are fragile compared to one-way communications like file transfers or even streaming video. What does it take to ensure high reliability and high quality VoIP telephony?

High performance VoIP service providers avoid many potential issues by keeping the calls on their own networks and avoiding the Internet completely. These networks are often called SIP trunks after the Session Initiation Protocol that is at the heart of VoIP signaling. Essentially, the network operator becomes your phone service provider and uses a dedicated network connection to connect from the phones in your business to the switching equipment at their end. Since they own the network, they can carefully control it for latency, jitter and packet loss.

The type of CODEC you use also affects voice quality. A wideband CODEC can sound as good as any other phone call. There are even HD or HIgh Definition CODECs that expand the voice range so that the audio is more natural sounding and easier to understand. If you elect to go with a narrow band CODEC to cram more calls on the same SIP trunk, you may find that voice quality is marginal to unacceptable. It all depends on what your and your customer’s expectations are when it comes to call quality.

Are you interested in the benefits of VoIP solutions to replace your aging analog phones or in-house PBX system, but worried about degrading the quality of your calls? If so, learn more about the features and benefits offered by high reliability VoIP phone service providers.

How Bandwidth Can Affect Productivity

Many companies are finding themselves in a decision process about how much bandwidth to order. For the most part, it’s so many dollars per Megabit per second throughput. There are ways to actually get more Mbps for your bandwidth dollar, and I’ll tell you about that in a second. First, though, let’s see if there is a relationship between your network bandwidth and employee productivity.

If your only bandwidth connection is a broadband Internet service that employees use to sell personal items on eBay or play Farmville when the boss isn’t looking, you might argue that less bandwidth would be a productivity enhancer. In fact, you’d be better off disconnecting from the Internet completely. But most companies can’t do that anymore. They are completely dependent on both internal data transfers and connections to the Internet in order to conduct business. Still, what is the right level of bandwidth to install?

Let’s use an analogy to see if we can figure this out. Suppose you have a office full of sales agents. This is certainly true of insurance firms and real estate brokers. It’s also the case with many other types of business. Now, let's install one wall telephone for every two dozen agents. How much sales volume would you expect to be generated?

In such a case, you’d probably find that the telephone set would never get cold. There’d be a line of agents urging whoever was on the phone to wrap up the conversation and give others a chance. If these were salaried sales people, you’d be losing money in buckets. If they were commissioned sales people, the ranks would soon thin out from a steady stream of resignations.

Obviously you want to manage the productivity of your scarce resource, which is the skilled sales agent. You’d give them each a phone and perhaps both a desk phone and a cell phone. How about the number of outgoing phone lines? You’d install enough lines that there would rarely, if ever, be a busy signal.

This is an easy example because there is a clear connection between sales agents being able to make phone calls and the amount of revenue the company generates. It’s also generally acknowledged that high producing agents are far more expensive than telephones and phone lines. But what about other employees? Does this analogy translate to other activities?

Of course it does. It’s just when you have dozens or hundreds of employees doing all sorts of tasks, it’s harder to nail down the cost of lost productivity. You should try, though, because the loss is there just the same. Any time someone has to wait for a file transfer or access to a Web site they need to do their job, you have minutes of productivity vaporizing.

Multitask, you say? Sure, people do that all the time. If they know that it takes 15 minutes to download a particularly large image file, they might do something else while they wait. But what if it takes 15 seconds? Chances are they’ll sit back and relax or converse with someone at the next desk. Worst of all, what if your network performance is so variable that you have no idea if you’ll get that file in 15 seconds or 15 minutes? Do you start another task only to be immediately interrupted or cool your heels only to find that you’re doing nothing for the better part of most hours?

The problem is probably more insidious because these are extreme examples. In most cases, the wasted time is probably more like seconds than minutes per task. But multiply that lost time by the number of employees every day for a month and you might be surprised by how much it costs. Now, compare that cost to what you are spending on bandwidth per month and see if your telecom bill still looks outrageous.

To go a step further, consider how much more you might accomplish as an organization with more sophisticated tools that are also more dependent on Internet or cloud network connectivity. It’s a tradeoff between the cost of automation plus ongoing bandwidth & maintenance charges versus the cost of bodies in seats to accomplish the same thing. It makes no difference if your bandwidth costs are a few hundred dollars a month, a few thousand or tens of thousands. It’s what you are accomplishing for the money spent that counts.

Now, as promised, I’ll let you in on a little secret about the cost of bandwidth. It’s not the same for everyone. Pick out 10 companies, each with a T1 line or an OC3 fiber optic service, and you’ll find they’re paying 10 different lease prices. Why? Partly this due to the fact that the price of bandwidth is always changing but line leases are for a fixed time period. You also pay less if you sign a 3 year lease than if you hedge your bets and only commit to a 1 year lease. But the biggest cost differences come from what type of bandwidth service you order and who you buy it from. This can result in a factor of 2x or more in the cost of the same Mbps from one company to another.

How can you be sure you are getting the best rate on your voice or data bandwidth services? More competition is better, so using a broker who has relationships with dozens of service providers helps insure that you didn’t miss a big price break because you only got quotes from one or two carriers.

Also be sure that you compare all means of connectivity appropriate to your business. Did you know that you can get twice the bandwidth for the same money if you order Ethernet over Copper versus T1? They’re both professional grade telecom services, but one is cheaper than the other if it’s available for your location. There are copper, fiber and wireless options available for most businesses. Some services offer broadband and telephone on the same connection for a cost savings.

If you are losing money because your systems are bandwidth limited or you suspect you are paying more that you should for a particular level of service, then by all means get current competitive bandwidth quotes and see what’s available. You can do this quickly and easily through the Telarus telecom brokerage service and get complementary consulting help as well.

The Need for Low Latency Networks

When we think of network performance, we tend to think of bandwidth. After all, bandwidth equals speed. The faster your network runs, the faster your can transfer files from place to place. The faster those data transfers go, the more work can be done. That can also translate into bandwidth equals productivity. But there is another characteristic of network performance that is getting attention as of late. That is the matter of latency.

What is latency? It’s the time delay in the network. In other words, how long it takes to get a packet from node to node. You might be inclined to think that latency has something to do with bandwidth, but they are quite different characteristics.

Here’s an example. Suppose we are transmitting a data stream up to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. One application is video feeds from the other side of the world. You see them on the TV news every night. Have you noticed that there is a slight delay in the connection? The TV anchor has to wait a second for the reporter to reply or they’ll talk over the top of each other. That pause is latency. It has to do with how long it takes for the signal to go up to the satellite and back down to the far location.

Now, how much do you suppose that it would speed up the television feed if we doubled the bandwidth? The answer: Not at all. As long as you don’t have packets waiting in a queue because of insufficient bandwidth, doubling, tripling or making the bandwidth 100x won’t speed up the circuit at all.

Why? Because the radio signal traveling thorough space is already at the speed of light. The Einsteinian limit of 186,000 miles per second sets the threshold on how low latency can be between point A and point B. You can’t make the signal go faster, but you can sure make it go slower.

Signals traveling to satellites in space go slowly enough. If you have a satellite Internet connection, you know that quite well. VoIP is impossible unless you want to use your connection like a walkie-talkie. Only one person can talk at a time and then wait for the other to reply. That’s called half-duplex. We’re used to full duplex, where two people can talk at the same time and still hear each other without interruption.

Low latency was inherent in the analog telephone system. There was very little but wire connecting two telephone sets. It takes maybe a millisecond to go a hundred miles. The same is true for TDM (Time Division Multiplexed) circuits such as T1 lines. You lose a little in the conversion process, but the synchronized channel propagates as fast as the signal can travel in copper wires or glass fibers.

So, what slows things down on the Internet? It’s all those routers between source and destination. Each one adds some milliseconds or fraction thereof to the process. Get a dozen or more routers between you and the other end of the transmission, and you’ll notice the latency building up.

Sometimes latency is important and sometimes it isn’t. The Internet was designed for things like scientific data file transfers and email. Neither of these applications is going to be much affected by a few dozen or hundred milliseconds of latency. It wasn’t until real-time interactive applications came along that anyone really took note of the latency issue.

What is latency sensitive? VoIP telephony for sure. Even so, 100 ms is considered quite workable for phone conversations. That same 100 ms can be a real annoyance to real-time gamers who might find the small but noticeable lag between action and reaction to be annoying. But 100 ms can be the difference between profit and loss in high speed financial trading. With new financial centers being built and traders increasingly using computers to automatically place their trades, the subject of networking latency has become a hot topic for very high speed networks.

So how do you decrease the latency on your network? First, forget the Internet or anything modeled after it. The Internet was designed to be self-healing, so it will route your packets any which way it can to get them to their destination. The lowest latency networks have high speed fiber in as straight a line as possible between locations. There is also as little equipment as possible between end points. Signal regenerators may be needed, but switches and routers need to be minimized. Whatever switching and routing equipment does exist has to be designed to minimize latency by running as fast as possible internally and doing a few functions as absolutely necessary. The more you process a signal, the longer it takes.

If low latency it essential to your operation, you need to specify that. Just saying that you want a 10 Gbps connection will guarantee you bandwidth, but not necessarily the lowest latency possible. Many major carriers are sensitive to the needs of financial trading and other businesses where network latency makes a difference. They offer special low latency network connections designed specifically for those needs.

Do you have a low latency requirement for your business? If so, be sure your say so when you check high bandwidth network service prices and availability for your locations.

FastE and GigE WAN Connections

The need for business bandwidth is growing, but corporate budgets are not. So, does that mean that businesses will be stifled for throughput and perhaps lose customers to slow performing ecommerce websites?

No. There’s a telecom bandwidth solution available that can give you the extra network performance you need to keep up with productivity and customer satisfaction demands. That solution is Ethernet.

Standard Ethernet connections at 10 Mbps are readily available over both copper and fiber optic cable. But higher speeds are also available. These are Fast Ethernet or FastE at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE at 1000 Mbps. You’ll notice that these line speeds exactly match the common LAN speeds of 10/100/1000 Mbps. Yes, you can get WAN connections to match your LAN speed so that your network performance is consistent regardless of whether packets are traveling in-house or across the country.

In rare cases, it may be possible to provision FastE service over bonded copper pair. But that only works if you happen to be very close to the carrier POP or Point of Presence. The usual way that FastE and GigE service are brought into the building is by fiber cable. If you already have a fiber connection, you may find that you’ll save considerable cost by switching your WAN service over to Ethernet.

If your building isn’t yet “lit” for fiber, it may still be possible to have fiber brought in at little or no construction cost. It all depends on the bandwidth demand. For instance, if you happen to be in a large office building with many business offices that could benefit from higher bandwidth options than the T1 lines that they typically have now, a carrier might be interested in lighting that building to get the ongoing bandwidth business. The same is true of industrial parks where modern manufacturing and warehousing businesses need high speed connectivity. Don’t automatically write off high bandwidth services just because you don’t have them now. Telecom carriers have gotten very competitive and may well want to enable you to get their higher performance services.

What can Ethernet connections do better than conventional telecom services? First, there is improved network performance because the protocol is Ethernet from end to end. There’s no need to convert between Ethernet and other protocols and suffer the inefficiencies that come from that process. The interface is trivially easy. It’s the same RJ-45 connector that you use for all your network connections now. You can get Ethernet for point to point connections or multi-point to multi-point to connection your far flung business sites. Dedicated Internet is also available.

By far, the most popular reason to switch to Carrier Ethernet services is the cost savings. You may find that you’ll spend half the cost or less per Mbps when you switch over to Ethernet. Sound interesting? Explore the FastE and GigE WAN connection options available for your location.

DOCSIS 3.0 Fiberizes Cable Broadband

Cable MSOs (Multiple System Operators) have been left grinding their teeth as Verizon's FiOS fiber to the home service blows away the broadband capabilities of coaxial TV cable. Well, perhaps not for long. A new upgrade to the DOCSIS cable broadband standard enhances digital download speeds right into fiber optic download territory - without the FTTH connection.

DOCSIS is the acronym for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, the standard for cable modems. In order for cable broadband to work on a systems designed for analog television signals, DOCSIS uses one or more standard TV channels on the download side. The upload channels have to do something different than normal TV reception requires. They have to send information in the reverse direction, from customer premises modem back to the cable head end. To avoid a collision with all those signals coming down, the upstream connection uses frequencies below the TV band.

Cable systems have been running DOCSIS version 1.0, 1.1 or 2.0. They are all based on using a single 6 MHz standard TV channel to carry about 40 Mbps in the downlink direction. Now, 40 Mbps sounds like pretty decent bandwidth if you could get it. But you can't. That 40 Mbps has to be shared between you and all your neighbors. Up to 1,000 of them all getting the same feed on the same channel. Across town, other users are sharing a different channel.

This level of oversubscription explains why your connection speed varies so much. What you experience at any moment in time depends on how many other users are online and whether they are casually surfing the web or downloading videos.

Network performance can be improved by increasing the number of channels available to serve cable modems and assigning fewer users per channel. But to really goose up the bandwidth, you need wider channels. Wider channels don't play with the TV system, but you can bond channels together to combine their bandwidths. It's philosophically similar to bonding channels to increase bandwidth on T1 business lines. That's what the DOCSIS 3.0 specification does. It provides for bonding up to 10 channels of 40 Mbps each for a total of around 400 Mbps. There is a possibility that this could be expanded to 1 Gbps or more in the future.

So, there's no fiber involved? This is done all over standard coax cable? Actually, there is fiber involved behind the scenes. Most cable systems are designed around a combination of fiber optic cable distribution to neighborhood nodes and then copper coaxial cable the premises. This is a HFC or Hybrid Fiber/Coax system. From the customer's point of view it doesn't matter. the customer connection is a F connector on a RG-6/U cable.

The network performance, however is very fiber-like. If your computer says you're connecting at 40 to 50 Mbps it's hard to tell without looking if there is a fiber optic cable plugged into the back of that modem or not. Some Comcast cable customers may have DOCSIS 3.0 by the end of this year.

There are now three competing systems designed to increase broadband Internet access speeds for residential users. FTTP or Fiber to the Premises is the system chosen by Verizon. It's a pure fiber optic network from central office to the user. AT&T is taking a different approach of FTTC or Fiber to the Curb. From there a high speed DSL connection carries the signal into the premises over telephone line. Cable operators use the HFC or Hybrid Fiber/Coax with fiber to neighborhood nodes and then conventional TV cable into the premises.

It seems logical that all-fiber networks are going to have the highest ultimate bandwidths eventually. But for now, the hybrid networks of fiber & telephone wiring or fiber & coaxial cable are doing a good job keeping up with the steady advance of premium service bandwidth.