The Cable vs Fiber Broadband War

By: John Shepler

There’s a broadband battle underway right now. It pits cable business broadband against Ethernet fiber optic bandwidth. These are the two leading technologies that will dominate business Internet now and for the foreseeable future. There is also a third contender warming up that we’ll discuss a bit later. Let’s see what the two big players have to offer.

Fiber Takes Over From Copper
The first century of telecommunications was dominated by twisted pair copper wires that provided the last mile for landline telephones, multi-line business phones, point to point computer connections and, when it started developing, the nascent Internet. The ground is chock-full of multi-pair cables. Some will be pulled out and recycled. Others will be left to slowly disintegrate.

Their technological replacement is fiber optic cables. Glass fibers take the place of plastic coated copper strands. Optical fibers have tremendously more bandwidth carrying capacity. A copper T1 line can deliver 1.5 Mbps. A fiber can deliver a Gigabit per second up to at least 10 Gbps. It’s no longer uncommon to have 100 Gbps fiber optic service available for business use.

Fiber itself has undergone a technical evolution in protocol from the early SONET telecom standard to Carrier Ethernet, otherwise known as Ethernet over Fiber. This upgrade made sense as telecom traffic changed from largely audio phone calls to digital computer packets.

What Fiber Optic Service Can Provide
Fiber broadband is readily available and can offer 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps bandwidth. This bandwidth is usually symmetrical, meaning the same speed for upload and download. It is also generally dedicated. That means you don’t share your fiber capacity with any other businesses. It’s all your traffic from your building to where it joins the Internet. This makes for much more consistent Internet performance.

Many companies have been moving from having their own in-house data centers to hosting that equipment at a co-location facility or leasing the same capability from a cloud provider. If your business software is running remotely, it often makes sense to have a direct connection from your offices, factories and warehouses to the cloud provider and avoid any potential congestion from the Internet.

Direct connections are also useful between company facilities, such as branch offices and any owned data center facilities. Essentially, you are extending your LAN out to include all your locations.

How Can Cable Compete with Fiber?
Cable got its start as a community antenna that fed a small town or city. Like fiber, cable has come a long way technically. Analog has transformed into digital. Still, isn’t cable a bandwidth limited copper connection?

Less than you might think. The drop or final connection to your business is still the familiar coaxial copper cable. The innards of the system have long ago upgraded to fiber, just like the telecom industry. That means most of the distance travelled is over fiber optic cables, some with as many as 100 fibers. The TV and Internet signal is converted to drive a copper drop cable just before it reaches your building. This system is referred to as HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax.

The other big advance in Cable broadband has been the upgrading of cable modems using the DOCSIS standard. Most modems are now DOCSIS 3.1 that has the ability to support downstream data speeds of up to 10 Gbps and upstream speeds of 1 Gbps.

DOCSIS 4.0 is in the process of being deployed. This equipment upgrade will support downstream speeds of 10 Gbps plus upstream speeds of 6 Gbps.

Clearly, today’s cable broadband is easily a match for all but the most demanding fiber speeds. One difference between Ethernet fiber and cable broadband is that cable is usually asymmetrical to match the typical usage of retail customers on the Internet. In other words, the demand for download speed is usually more than the demand for upload speed. Often download is 10 times as fast as upload.

Another difference is that cable broadband is a shared access service in the last mile. This means that some heavy users may impact the performance of other users from time to time. For consumers, this is usually not a problem. For a business that depends of steady high performance for employee productivity using cloud services, it could present an issue.

Why Pick One Service Over the Other?
For consumers and many smaller businesses, cost is tie-breaker. Cable business broadband is generally less costly than Ethernet over Fiber for similar bandwidths. However, if you need symmetrical bandwidth, dedicated Internet access, dedicated point to point connections, or a dedicated line to your cloud provider, fiber optic connections can be well worth the added monthly cost. It should also be mentioned that some Cable companies are now offering access to their internal fiber optic networks as a premium bandwidth service.

Wireless is the Next Competitor
There is a new entry to the broadband wars that is also worthy of consideration. That is fixed wireless broadband. Once a niche service over very small areas, fixed wireless is now being offered by the major cellular carriers. What has made this possible is the advancement to 4G LTE and 5G. Mobile phones with 300 Mbps or more Internet service are now common. By providing a high performance modem without the telephone features but including Wi-Fi or LAN connection, carriers can deliver high speed broadband over their wireless networks already in place. Advantages include very reasonable pricing and little or no construction cost. You pick up the modem at the cellular store or have it shipped to you and install it yourself right away. It’s also perfect for pop-up stores and construction sites that are only temporary locations.

Which is best for your business? Cable broadband? Ethernet over Fiber? Fixed Wireless? Get pricing and availability for each of these bandwidth options and then choose the right solution for you.

What is VPLS Bringing to MPLS Networks?

Companies with multiple business locations have adopted MPLS networks as the low cost high performance way to get the connectivity they need. They may be missing out on a service that can offer them an even better way to connect. It’s VPLS or Virtual Private LAN Service.

What is VPLS? It’s basically an Ethernet transport service that runs on MPLS networks. It doesn’t replace the MPLS network. It enhances it.

What does VPLS do that MPLS alone can’t do? The big advantage to VPLS technology is that it bridges all of your individual LANs into a single companywide LAN. That LAN isn’t limited to a single building, campus, metro area or even country. You can have international VPLS connections if your business spans the globe.

VPLS works its magic by keeping everything in the Ethernet protocol. That’s the natural state of affairs on your local networks. Traditionally, there has been a need to do a protocol conversion to transfer data over telecom networks. That’s because telecom protocols were developed by the telephone companies for their own needs. The lowest common denominator isn’t the packet, it’s the telephone channel. Today’s circuitry can make the transfer to and from telecom protocols like T1, DS3 or SONET OCx. What gets lost in translation is that seamless connection between locations.

The other thing to realize is that telecom lines are inherently point to point connections. If you are interested in connecting dozens or hundreds of locations you are going to need a lot of point to point connections. That’s a lot of traffic to manage and a lot of monthly expense. Essentially, you are running your own telecom company to create a WAN or Wide Area Network service.

Fortunately, someone else is willing to do all the hard work for you. That someone is the MPLS network operator. MPLS means Multi Protocol Label Switching. What MPLS providers do is construct their own regional, national or international fiber optic networks. They connect all those fiber runs using label switching routers. These aren’t IP routers like you would implement on your own network. What they do is take whatever packet is received at the edge of the network and wrap it with a proprietary label. That label is used to forward the packets at each router. When the packet reaches its destination, the label is removed and the packet goes on its way intact.

The label system has a couple of big of advantages. First, the network doesn’t care what is in the packet. The label contains source & destination addresses and class of service. That means the packet can be anything. It can be data, voice, video or something proprietary. Also, using the label system makes MPLS networks hard to crack for intruders. Normal IP tools won’t work. Access is limited to customers of the network, not the general public, which increases security further.

Your connections over an MPLS network are virtual as opposed to the dedicated hardwired connections of a point to point telecom line. You are sharing the network with other clients, although you have absolutely no access to any packets that are not your own. This reduces the cost for everyone sharing the network. As a privately run operation, the provider ensures that there are adequate resources so that nothing one client is doing will affect the traffic of another.

Running virtual connections on a very large network offers more than cost savings. You can specify which nodes can talk to other nodes to create everything from a point to point connection right on up to a fully meshed network interconnecting all your locations.

VPLS adds capability to the fully meshed MPLS network setup. It gives you a layer 2 switched Ethernet meshed network. This is how you get that large bridged network covering all your locations. Well, almost. You need one more thing. That’s Ethernet protocol last mile connections. If you switch to a T1 line or OC3 fiber to get you to the MPLS network, you’ll lose the Ethernet advantages. Instead, make each last mile connection using Ethernet over Copper (EoC), Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) or something like EoDS1 or EoDS3 that transport Ethernet over traditional telecom lines.

Would you learn more about the advantages of VPLS for interconnecting your company LANs? Get the latest cost savings and features for VPLS over MPLS network services.

T1 Line Cost At A New Low

Over the years, most companies have come to own T1 lines either sooner or later. Larger companies got them for dedicated Internet connections back when business was just getting acquainted with the Internet. Small operations often get into T1 lines after becoming frustrated with shared bandwidth information services, such as DSL and Cable. There’s only one thing not to like about T1 lines and that’s the cost... or is it?

If you think that T1 lines cost a small fortune, you probably remember getting a quote some time ago. Yes, less than a decade ago it wasn’t uncommon to pay $1,000 a month for a typical T1 line. I say typical because there are different flavors of T1 service and pricing has been very location dependent. Today, you might pay about a third of that in most locations nationwide.

Costs have plunged due to maturity of the service, deregulation that has opened the market to many more competitive carriers, and new technologies that now compete directly for your bandwidth dollar.

It’s never been a better time to get into T1 line service if it will meet your needs. Let’s take a look at how T1 lines work, what you can use them for, and how to decide if T1 or something else is the right service for your company.

T1 is one of the most mature telco technologies, developed by the Bell System for telephone trunking. T1 formed the basis of digital telephone service and later was pressed into service to transport data also. A half-century of experience means that T1 is well understood, almost universally available and well supported. As a tariffed telecom service, carriers take T1 seriously. Most are sold with an SLA or Service Level Agreement that spells out what you can expect in the way of availability, time to respond to an outage and mean time to repair.

T1 lines were designed to be provisioned on two pair of ordinary telephone wire. One pair is for transmit or upload. The other is for receive or download. This is a symmetrical bandwidth service. You get the same bandwidth in both directions and it is full duplex. You can transmit and receive at the same time. That was designed-in to support telephone conversations that are also full duplex.

The original use for T1 lines was telephone trunking. A trunk line supports multiple phone conversations. A T1 telephone line supports up to 24 separate conversations, each with its own synchronized channel. Think of these as individual business phone lines. A device called a channel bank can convert the 24 channels back and forth to 24 analog phone lines.

A more popular configuration of T1 telephone line is called ISDN PRI or T1 PRI. This also divides the T1 line into 24 channels but only 23 of them are used as phone lines. The last one is reserved for switching signals and data, such as Caller ID. ISDN PRI is very popular as a telephone trunk line that plugs directly into many PBX phone systems.

When used to transport data, the idea of channels is dispensed with and the entire payload of the line service is used to carry data packets. T1 has a payload of 1.536 Mbps. The actual line speed itself is 1.544 Mbps. The difference of 8 Kbps is overhead used to keep the line synchronized and for maintenance. A T1 line is typically said to provide 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth.

That bandwidth can be used to connect to the Internet in what is called DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. Dedicated means that you have exclusive use of the bandwidth at all times. Use as little or as much of it as you need. The remainder will still be available and not shared by other users.

T1 lines are also popular as point to point connections to link two business locations. A specialized use is to transmit digitized audio from radio station studios to rurally located transmitter sites. T1 is also the most popular backhaul technology that connects cellular wireless towers to telephone switching systems.

Has the cost of a T1 line come down enough to make it attractive for your business use? If so, you may also want to compare T1 against the newer Ethernet over Copper that typically offers twice the bandwidth for the same money. If EoC is available, it's an even better bargain. Get quotes now for EoC and T1 line services at your business locations.

D3 vs DS3 Bandwidth Choices

Medium and larger size companies have long chosen DS3 services to obtain the bandwidth they need for broadband Internet access. Now there’s a new player in the marketplace that is looking to complement if not displace the venerable DS3 connection.

If you need business bandwidth higher than you can get by bonding T1 lines, you already know about DS3. But how much do you know about D3?

D3 is short for DOCSIS 3.0, a cable broadband standard that gives HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) systems a capability that rivals fiber to the premises. It is now possible to get 50 Mbps for business use from cable systems in many cities. Some have 100 Mbps available and more will have that service offering soon. DOCSIS 3.0 can provide 152 Mbps, with even higher speeds possible. Compare that with DS3 at 45 Mbps and you can see why there is a natural competition between the services.

The raw bandwidth specs don’t tell the whole story, however. D3 and DS3 are different technologies with different characteristics. You may find that one or both of these services make sense for your business.

DS3 stands for Digital Signal, level 3. It was developed as part of the T-Carrier specification by Bell Labs for use by the telephone companies to transport up to 672 simultaneous telephone calls between phone company switching centers. When provisioned over coaxial copper lines, it is called T3 line service. If you suspect that T3 is related to T1, you are right. A T3 line can transport the equivalent of 28 T1 lines on its higher bandwidth.

DOCSIS 3.0 has a Cable TV rather than a telephone company heritage. The DOCSIS standard was developed by CableLabs (Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.) with contributions from other companies serving the cable industry. If you have Cable broadband, you are using a DOCSIS modem. It’s only a question of which version you are using. The original was DOCSIS 1.0, which has been supplanted by DOCSIS 1.1, DOCSIS 2.0 and now DOCSIS 3.0.

DS3 is based on multiplexing 672 channels of 64 Kbps each to create total bandwidth of 43 Mbps. Add the necessary synchronization and control bits and you have a bandwidth of 44.736 Mbps. Why so many channels? Each of those 64K channels is just the right size to carry one telephone call. That’s the telco heritage of DS3. Combine all the channels into one large pipe and you have nearly 45 Mbps of digital bandwidth.

D3 is also based on channels. In this case, each channel is 6 MHz wide. That’s the width of one television channel. Everything on a cable system is treated as a TV channel, so broadband services have to fit into those channels to get through the amplifiers and wiring on the system without interfering with any other channels. A 6 MHz channel can transport a 38 Mbps broadband signal in one direction. Cable operators bond channels together to get higher bandwidths. With 4 bonded channels, DOCSIS 3.0 can deliver a download speed of 152 Mbps.

So, are D3 and DS3 the same beyond their different technology heritages? Not really. The telco heritage of DS3 means that it is a dedicated symmetrical bandwidth service. You get 45 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. That bandwidth never varies. It is called dedicated because it is completely dedicated to your needs. Anytime you don’t use the full 45 Mbps, it just sits there and idles while waiting for more data.

D3 is an asymmetrical shared bandwidth service. You get different speeds in the upload and download directions. Download is faster to reflect the fact that most users download more content from the Internet than they upload. Typical business bandwidth services are 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload or 100 Mbps download with 10 Mbps upload. This bandwidth is shared among many users on the system. Thus, you may experience your access speed varying all over the place depending on what other users are doing. If a lot of them are downloading movies or big software updates, everyone’s speed will be slowed.

DS3 service is generally sold with an SLA or Service Level Agreement that describes the expected performance and availability of the service, plus remedies if the provider doesn’t deliver as promised. D3 is a “best effort” service with no specific performance guarantees. Even so, it is in the provider’s best interest to provide adequate resources and service availability to keep the customers happy.

The difference in services are most dramatic when you look at the pricing. You might pay several thousand dollars a month for DS3 service with an SLA. D3 will probably cost you a tenth of that, with no guarantees. Which will work for your needs depends on if the cable system passes your business and if you can live with the variations in performance and lack of guarantees. Some companies have DS3 or even T1 lines installed for their mission critical or performance sensitive applications and D3 for general Internet access and low cost backup to their telecom services.

Are DS3, D3 or both bandwidth services right for your company? Why not talk to an expert consultant that can provide you with prices and availability of DS3, D3, and other broadband options for your business needs? There is no charge for this helpful service and you may be able to realize a considerable cost savings while achieving the same or better network performance as you have now.

Is DS-3 Bandwidth An Endangered Species?

DS-3 has long been the go-to telecom service for companies needing moderate amounts of bandwidth for dedicated Internet access, file transfers and video transport. It’s been steadily coming down in price as more providers compete in the network bandwidth space. But even if costs are a fraction of what they were a decade ago, DS-3 may be in its twilight years. What could be causing that?

The seeds of change were sown when data packets replaced digitized voice as the primary traffic on the world’s networks. Now video is arguably demanding the lion’s share of available bandwidth. What’s true for data and video, and increasingly voice, is that packet switched IP networks are the new bandwidth services of choice.

DS-3 connections offer a symmetrical bandwidth of 45 Mbps. Delivery is most often over a fiber optic cable, although there are short range fixed wireless solutions that are popular in densely populated business districts. The user handoff is via a pair of coaxial cables, one for transmit and the other for receive. This hints at the copper legacy of DS-3.

There’s a lot you can do with 45 Mbps, especially in medium size companies. It’s a big step up from the closest related technology of T1 lines that run at 1.5 Mbps each. These can be bonded together to give you 10 to 12 Mbps, but that’s about it. From there you move up to DS-3 at 45 Mbps. The next step is to OC-3 SONET fiber optic service running about 156 Mbps. As you can imagine, there are big pricing level jumps that accompany the bandwidth jumps in these legacy telecom services.

What can possibly threaten the dominance of an entrenched technology like DS-3? It’s the rise of Carrier Ethernet service in recent years. It’s actually been more like a tsunami lately. The popularity of 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps and higher Ethernet bandwidth has been surging for two important reasons. First is availability, second is price.

The term Carrier Ethernet is used to describe a range of services from local Metro Ethernet to long haul networks with national and international footprints. All of these services are extensions of the familiar switched Ethernet protocol that runs on nearly every business LAN. In fact the handoff is a simple Ethernet connector, such as the ubiquitous RJ-45.

Why Ethernet? It just makes sense to use the same technology that is running on the majority of networks today. Interfacing is easy. There are no protocol conversions involved. Network services such as level 2 LAN extensions are readily available. Both point to point and multipoint options are standardized service offerings.

Ethernet is more scalable and more quickly scaled than competing telecom services, like DS-3. You can get lower bandwidth Ethernet service in levels such as 2 Mbps, 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps and 20 Mbps delivered over twisted pair copper. These can replace higher priced fractional DS-3 services delivered over fiber.

Higher speed Carrier Ethernet services, including the popular 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps , 250 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1,000 Mbps and 10 Gbps levels are delivered using fiber. The equipment tends to be more automated than legacy telco gear, allowing rapid changes to customer bandwidth without having to change equipment or wiring.

More than anything else, though, what’s endangering DS-3 bandwidth is the lower cost of Carrier Ethernet. How would you like to get 50 Mbps Ethernet at a lower cost than 45 Mbps DS3? Would you be impressed if you found out you could get 50 Mbps Ethernet for half the price of your old DS-3 connection? What if you could get 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service for less than the cost of that DS-3 connection? How long would it take for you to make the switch for more bandwidth at lower prices?

The price you pay has a lot to do with availability of services for your particular business location. The only way to know for sure is to get the latest competitive quotes for both DS-3 and Ethernet. Then make your decision. You may be surprised by how much WAN bandwidth has changed recently.

Telexplainer Expectations For 2011

Here we are at the start of new and hopeful year for both business and technology. Let’s see if we can divine some of the important trends for 2011 and how we can take advantage of them.

Bandwidth needs are going to grow this year. They do every year. The increase in business activity coming out of the Great Recession will almost certainly see more people generating more traffic in the process of doing their jobs. Look for BW demand to more than increase linearly with employment. In the process of dealing with the protracted downturn, companies have found that they really can get more done per person by investing scarce resources in computerized productivity tools. Many of these now require connectivity with the public Internet and private connections to other company facilities, suppliers and customers.

As more people come back to work, they’ll find that their jobs and tools have changed. While the connectivity has increased, there are new aspects to business such as social networking and increased use of video. Paper may not be disappearing, but it certainly isn’t increasing at the same rate as new data is generated. In fact, the need to print something can be seen as both inconvenient and quaint when your main business tool in the field is an iPad.

Clouds were a hot topic in 2010. The move to everything in the cloud is still in the early part of the learning curve. I think we’ll see more and more orientation toward cloud based services that include cloud computing and cloud-based storage. Just as the client-server model made dealing with hundreds or thousands of desktop computers and their associated software a manageable task, the cloud services model will eliminate purchased software packages and their updates completely. Also swept away will be many private data centers with their associated power consumption and HVAC requirements. Everything will be out there, somewhere.

Of course, just closing your eyes and trusting implicitly in the always-available cloud has its risks. What happens when the cloud is running just fine but you can’t get to it? It’s a little like locking your keys in a running car. For that reason, WAN connectivity will take on a new importance. Not only will you need more bandwidth as employees access cloud services rather that servers on your own LAN, but redundancy is going to be essential to ensuring connectivity. Not just bringing in a second line, mind you. You’ll need diverse connections that can’t be easily taken down by natural disaster or careless backhoe operation.

Mobile connectivity requirements are also on the rise. We’ve gotten so comfortable with 3G that there’s no going back to less than broadband wireless connections. In fact, the push for 4G will increase right along with the adoption of cloud services and tablet computers. Carriers are already sweating the lack of available backhaul bandwidth and both carriers and the FCC are sweating the limited amount of suitable wireless bandwidth. Look for a virtual treasure hunt to ensue, as everything that now uses spectrum will be scrutinized to see if it has more of a claim than the 4G juggernaut that needs all the BW it can get.

Telexplainer is primarily focused on telecom and networking, so it stands to reason that we have a keen eye on the bandwidth markets. Many businesses may be surprised to discover that they both need and can afford fiber optic connectivity this year. Chances are that this will be Carrier Ethernet from a competitive provider rather that traditional SONET/SDH services. For multi-site and international connectivity, MPLS networks have an extensive reach and prices lower than ever before.

How is your company set for doing business this year? Are you feeling a bit constrained by your network connections or concerned that you are still paying too much per Mbps? If so, now would be a perfect time to check prices and availability of WAN networks services. The sooner you get better service installed, the more capability you’ll have for the entire year.

Why Content Delivery Networks Need More Capacity

We’re in the midst of an enormous media shift. For those of us who grew up in the era of broadcast domination, this amounts to a revolution in technology. Nobody worries too much anymore about how to adjust the rabbit ears for best reception. Instead, they worry about 3G and 4G coverage so they can get their videos on the go. Cable and satellite TV, the successors to over the air delivery, now have to worry about the Internet as the connection of choice for both audio and video. If over-the-air delivery is waning, then what is taking its place? It’s the CDN or Content Delivery Network.

What’s a CDN and how does it relate to the Internet? A content delivery network works with the Internet, not as a replacement. The public does not connect directly to a CDN. These are privately run networks designed to provide high bandwidth combined with low latency, jitter and packet loss. They are designed for capacity and quality to support content producers and distributors. Thus, the name Content Delivery Network. They are designed to deliver content, most often in IP video format, from point to point or point to multipoint.

What CDNs do in take a load off the Internet and ensure quality of transmission for most of the distance traversed. Say a customer wants access to an HD video download or stream. You can try to jam that through the Internet and take your chances with traffic congestion and other quality degradations. Or, the provider can send the program over a CDN directly to the Internet Service Provider. The ISP, say a cable company, then gives access to the CDN delivered content to their customer. In this case, it could be through the Cable broadband service or the content could be used to feed a separate cable channel.

Sure, content can still be degraded between the ISP head end and the customer, but at least the service providers have control of that portion of the network. They can choose how to manage the bandwidth shared by their customers to ensure satisfactory video quality.

The media shift now in progress is gravitating toward most consumers getting their video services via cable or satellite rather than through over the air broadcast channels. That’s why you haven’t heard much screaming over the replacement of analog transmission by digital. It's not that those converter boxes are so wonderful. It's that the satellite and cable set top boxes that feed TV sets are capable of providing a variety of compatible analog, digital, SD and HD television signals. Old TVs as well as new are supported.

Digital HDTV was just one phase of the transformation. What’s happening now is that more and more set top boxes and television receivers themselves come with Ethernet ports for IP content. Plug these ports into an Internet router and the TV set becomes capable of displaying video content that never leaves the Net. Netflix is an example of a content provider that uses the Internet. So is YouTube. Even the broadcast networks are providing archives of already aired shows on their Internet sites.

This move from airwaves to broadband will likely result in more and more spectrum repurposed to wireless Internet service. At the same time, IP video content will increase and require a robust delivery mechanism. This is why CDNs are growing and will continue to for the foreseeable future. Level 3, one of the world’s largest IP backbones for content delivery, recently added 1.65 Tbps of global capacity and added Toronto, Montreal, Brussels, Munich and Hamburg to its CDN. Video content delivery is now worldwide.

Is your organization in the business of producing, distributing or delivering content to service providers or end users? If so, you have an opportunity to compare IP video transport services for regional, national or international connections. There is no charge for this complementary pricing and consulting service for serious business and organizational applications.

XO Communications Ups the Ante on Ethernet

One of the leading competitive service providers offering telecom services in the higher bandwidths for businesses and organizations is upping the ante on Metro Ethernet availability, with a wide range of new service options. XO Communications is leveraging its nationwide fiber optic network, extensive collection of POPs (points of presence) and advanced Ethernet over Copper technology to make Ethernet even more appealing for WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth.

What's the big deal about Ethernet? It's the logical extension of the network technology of choice for nearly all businesses, large and small. That means that Metro Ethernet is pretty much a plug-and-play solution for connecting locations near and far. All your sites can act like they are on the same network - because they are.

Beyond the ease of understanding and interconnection, Ethernet offers tremendous cost advantages over traditional telco solutions originally designed to transport telephone calls. By keeping all your networks on the same technology, you gain an efficiency improvement over the "slicing and dicing" required to load packets into TDM network channels and recover them. Some Ethernet speeds can be transported over copper pair rather than fiber optic cables, avoiding a massive capital investment in areas where not all buildings are lit for fiber.

XO is now offering a range of transport speeds that include 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 200, 300, 400, and 500 Mbps over fiber. You can also get 3, 5, 15 or 20 Mbps over last mile copper where EoC or Ethernet over Copper is available. That's typically within a few miles of the nearest carrier POP or point of presence. The 3 and 5 Mbps service levels are newly available for Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), reflecting the need that many businesses have for higher speed broadband service.

XO Communication has an extensive set of network access solutions that include Ethernet over fiber optic cable, Ethernet over Copper and fixed broadband wireless. Ethernet can be delivered by wireless in speeds from 10 Mbps to 80 Mbps in 36 major metropolitan areas within line of sight to an XO wireless transmitter.

If you are considering upgrading your bandwidth or simply want to see if there is a lower cost solution for your current bandwidth needs from XO or other competitive carriers, then learn what Ethernet services are available for your business location.

Other Flavors of Packet Voice

When we think of telephone service these days it's in terms of two battling technologies. There's circuit switched telephony that has been the standard for over a hundred years versus VoIP, the emerging standard. But, actually, VoIP is just the best known example of technologies to transmit voice by packet over networks.

The real technology battle is the shift from switched circuit networks to packet networks. But that's been going on forever. Aren't we there yet? No, not really. But that's the direction we're headed until something else is invented.

Circuit switched networks have their advantages. Once you establish a path or circuit between two points, you have exclusive use of that connection until you are done with it. The advantage is that a continuous connection usually has little latency since there are no routing decisions to be made once the circuit is set up. The same is true for jitter, although signal quality is only as good as the connection quality. Analog has crosstalk issues and noisy lines can drop out portions of a digital bitstream.

The big disadvantage with circuit switched networks is that they tie up an expensive resource whether it's being used or not. That's the efficiency improvement that packet switched networks offer. By breaking up data into bite size (or is that byte size?) packages, routers can act as traffic controllers to keep the network busy but not overloaded.

Packet switched networks are a natural for data communications. The Internet protocol, TCP/IP handles breaking large data files into packets and reassembling them on the other end. It also ensures accurate delivery by forcing a retransmission of damaged packets. What VoIP does is mimic computer data by breaking the continuous voice signal into IP compatible packets and sending them down the same network with data file packets. But the TCP or Transmission Control Protocol that ensures accurate delivery doesn't work so well with VoIP. Since a conversation is continuous, retransmitting a broken packet and delivering it later would only cause confusing interference.

VoIP's popularity can be traced to the fact that IP is so popular and nearly ubiquitous in corporate LANs as well as the Internet. But beyond the internal corporate network, there are other types of packet switched networks for WAN or Wide Area Network transmission.

VoATM or Voice over ATM networks also breaks a continuous speech signal into packets. But ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) breaks the signal into 53-byte packets known as cells. The small cells reduce the effect of jitter or variable time delay and one lost or damaged cell doesn't markedly degrade the quality of the voice stream.

VoFR or Voice over Frame Relay networks use frames that transmit large packets of data that vary in size but can be up to a 1,000 or more bytes in length. Frame Relay networks have been very popular for connecting multiple business locations together, but are giving way to the newer MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks that provide the same service and more.

Both Frame Relay and ATM networks are private network technologies. They pre-date the massive popularity of the Internet and don't use Internet Protocol. But they do support voice, data and video using their own proprietary protocols.

What about MPLS networks? Being multi-protocol, as the name says, a private MPLS network can easily support VoIP traffic. Since this is also a private networking arrangement, the service quality variabilties of the public Internet are avoided. When VoIP is transmitted on an MPLS network it is known as VoIPoMPLS. But there's a way to directly implement voice on an MPLS network that is known as VoMPLS. This is a fairly new technology that is designed to work in on converged network carrying voice, video and data simultaneously over the same paths. MegaPath, a leading competitive carrier, has just announced a VoMPLS service for its network that combines manged voice, data and security for business-grade users.

Even wireless is not immune to the move from circuit to packet switching. Right now cellular services offer switched voice connections on one set of channels and packet switched data on another. But this may be changing with the emergence of WiMAX and LTE as wireless broadband services. A new forum has started up to develop VoLGA or Voice over LTE via General Access.

Is your company looking at options to reduce telephony costs or make better use of the network resources you already have? A reduced cost digital trunking service or some form of packet voice service may be the answer.

MegaPath Beefs Up Last Mile Access

The big stumbling block for businesses wanting to increase their WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth is something called "last mile" access. Sadly, this is just what it sounds like. Network bandwidth is readily available and more cost effective than ever. That is, until you get to that last mile... the one between you and the carrier's network. So near and yet so far.

What's so special about the last mile? Aren't all miles basically the same? Not hardly. There may be a superhighway just a mile from your company. But if the only road to your plant is down a narrow gravel road full of big ruts, any trucks that move your product will be crawling that last mile. There may even be a weight limit on the old wooden bridge that limits the size of truck you can bring in. Puts a crimp in your style doesn't it?

This is the dilemma that many businesses find themselves in. The really need more bandwidth than you can get from a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps. But the high speed fiber optic networks, the information superhighways, are a mile or two away. The cost of building a fiber optic line to join the nationwide network is just too costly. So, are these businesses stuck with their narrow little pathways until they can relocate their entire operations?

Not anymore. MegaPath, a competitive carrier serving small, medium and large enterprises, has announced it is beefing up those last mile connectivity options that will increase your bandwidth without requiring construction capital. They have two attractive technical approaches, depending on where you are located.

The most available solution is called bonded T1 service. T1 lines are available for just about any business location and offer symmetrical bandwidth at 1.5 Mbps. Symmetrical means the same speed for upload and download. What you might not be aware of is that T1 lines can be bonded together to create a single larger bandwidth pipe. Dual T1 lines give you 3 Mbps. But MegaPath is now able to offer triple bonding at 4.5 Mbps and quadruple bonding at 6 Mbps. They have the equipment to do this available in around 3,000 central offices nationwide. Chances are that your business qualifies for up to 6 Mbps of dedicated data service.

Another technical approach also uses copper based wiring to avoid fiber construction costs. It is called EoC or Ethernet over Copper. MegaPath is using Hatteras Networks' EoC technology in more than 400 central offices to offer Ethernet over Copper service at 10 Mbps.

Is your company feeling pinched for bandwidth? You may be able to get the breathing room your network needs at very attractive rates. How attractive? The way to find out is to get a rapid bandwidth service quote including the new options from MegaPath and other competitive service providers.

XO Offering Ethernet to the World

Step right up, telecommunications carriers worldwide. Here's your chance to access 4 million commercial buildings in the United States to offer your services via Ethernet. All this is available to you thanks to the new Ethernet Hub service from XO communications.

"Yaaawwwwn," you say? As a business telecom services user, what do you care what one carrier offers another? Well, there's good reason for you to care. But if, and only if, you are interested in saving money on your voice and data service leases.

I thought that might get your attention. To understand how you may benefit, you need to see what's hidden within the recent XO Ethernet Hub press release. The devilish savings, if I may coin a phrase, are in the details.

XO Communications is what is called a competitive carrier. That means that they were never part of the incumbent local exchange carriers, what's become of the old Bell Telephone system. This is a relatively new telecom carrier, but it's still a billion dollar company with over 4,000 employees. What's more impressive is that their nationwide network is all new technology, with about a million miles of metro fiber, 18,000 miles of fiber between cities, and 75 markets with wireless services available.

That's not the profile of your stodgy old telecom, and it is why XO has something to offer other carriers who look wistfully at the massive Carrier Ethernet presence that XO has established for itself. That presence includes those 4 million commercial buildings, each reachable for Ethernet service.

Ethernet WAN service, also called Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet, offers a way to extend your corporate network across town or across the country with a minimum of technical fuss and bother. It uses the familiar Ethernet protocol that you're already proficient with. Ethernet service prices are exceptionally low because there are no legacy telcos providing the "last mile" access the way you expect when ordering SONET or T-Carrier voice and data services.

XO's Ethernet bandwidth options range from 5 Mbps all the way up to 10 Gbps. The higher bandwidth options require fiber optic terminations, but it's possible to get lower tier speeds delivered via EoC or Ethernet over Copper. If fiber construction costs are too high and you are located within a couple miles of a XO Point of Presence, EoC can connect you to their network using the already-installed copper pairs that terminate in your building.

Now you've got an idea why XO Communications is perfectly suited to be your next service provider. The next step is to check out typical Ethernet service pricing and find out what bandwidth and costs savings are available for your business.