Outsource Your Network Headaches

By: John Shepler

Back when all the network equipment fit into a literal broom closet and Cat5 cables hooked it all together, running a LAN with a connection to the Internet was an all in a day’s work. Now you’re dealing with multiple clouds, multiple locations, bad actors constantly trying to intrude, and equipment going obsolete almost before you can even power it up. The level of complexity is growing exponentially, but your staff and resources aren’t. Is there any way to simplify all of this?

Make Network Woes Someone Else’s Problem
You can keep doing it all yourself. That means hiring more and more staff, constantly refreshing hardware, troubleshooting outages and dealing with outside attacks on a daily basis. Or, you can let someone else take care of it.

The first approach to outsourcing network grief is to contract with a Manage Service Provider or MSP. This is an outside company that acts as your IT department. You still own all the equipment and services, but someone else provides the staff to manage it for you.

A newer approach is Network as a Service or NaaS. It’s a logical extension of Software as a Service. You stopped buying boxes with CD-ROMs to update your systems years ago. Most software is now offered on a subscription basis. Computing hardware has gone the same way with cloud-based services. Why not take the same approach to networks?

How NaaS Works
When you employ NaaS, you are essentially turning your network into a subscription. Just like SaaS you pay as you go and you pay for what you use. You dump capital expenditures and trade them for operational expenses.

NaaS can be implemented on a WAN or LAN basis. WAN networks include whatever it takes to interconnect various business locations, cloud providers and general Internet service. You can also outsource your LAN so that NaaS provides all the in-house routers, switches and security appliances needed to run the network.

What about SD-WAN?
Software Defined Wide Area Networking is a flavor of NaaS that can improve WAN performance, especially in accessing the Internet. SW-WAN combines multiple lines, such as fiber optic, Fixed Wireless Access, cable broadband, and satellite to get the highest performance for your most critical functions. It automatically monitors each line and selects which path each packet should take. Higher priority packets get faster and lower latency paths, while lower priority tasks get what’s left. NaaS may incorporate SD-WAN to improve network performance.

The NaaS Advantage
There’s a certain efficiency in not being short of resources when you desperately need them to conduct business, or getting stuck with a back room full of hardware you’ll have to keep until things pick up or unload at fire sale prices. Worse yet, who wants to be laying off valuable tech employees during a downturn only to have to recruit and on-board new ones when business increases?

NaaS can also introduce some new features, such as constant AI monitoring and self-healing networks. Your network becomes another type of cloud that just gets a job done without you having to fight fires or worry about how to add this or that capability.

When NaaS Doesn’t Make Sense
As attractive as outsourcing your network woes sounds to many companies, it’s not for everyone. Companies that have large expert teams with deep knowledge of the network infrastructure and business operations may be able to provide an operational ability and efficiency beyond what an outside company can. This is especially true in heavily regulated industries or those with unique requirements.

How about your business? Does your network run like a well oiled machine with a staff that has knowledge not easily replaced? Or, are you struggling to deal with growth, a changing environment, difficulty in finding the right staff, constant problems that are hurting productivity or facing an equipment refresh that is going to be a strain on the finances?

Before you spend a fortune, you might want to consider the alternative of Network as a Service. Get expert consulting and proposals that meet your particular needs now with compelling NaaS solutions.

Ethernet Better Than a T3 Line

By: John Shepler

Not long ago, T3 voice and data lines were a mainstay of medium and larger size businesses. Today, that once impressive 45 Mbps doesn’t seem all that fast. Our business applications demand more like 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps. Medical campuses, design firms and video production houses are more interested in 10 Gbps and looking beyond even that. If you still have a T3 line contract, you may well find that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less cost right now.

What is a T3 Line?
The T3 designation is part of the T-Carrier system developed by Bell Labs in the post-war tech boom. It was originally designed to transport large numbers of simultaneous telephone conversations and still fills that role for some larger businesses and call centers. Prior to T-Carrier, telecom was based on analog technology. T1 and T3 changed that to digital and started us down the path to the Internet we have today.

T3 is specified at 45 Mbps, enough to transport 672 digitized phone calls. That makes it a lot more efficient than creating a bundle of 672 separate twisted pair copper wires as telephone lines. T3 was once transported through large coaxial cables or microwave relay stations. More recently, it has been bundled on SONET fiber optic cables and called DS3. DS3 is the data format that runs on the physical T3 line, so DS3 and T3 pretty much mean the same thing.

The channelized version of T3 is used to carry those 672 phone calls, each in a separate channel or time slot in the data stream. For data transmission, the unchannelized version of T3 carries 45 Mbps worth of data, including the familiar packet switched networks.

Ethernet Replaces T3
Most all communications these days done over digital networks and originates in the most popular protocol, Ethernet. Even telephones have switched to an Ethernet interface so they can hook to the same network as computers instead of having separate wiring. This is called VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. With computers and phones on the same network, it makes sense to transport everything over Ethernet on both the local and wide area networks.

This is exactly what is happening. Carrier Ethernet, the long haul version, is replacing other telecom protocols such as T-Carrier for copper line and SONET for fiber optic. It’s pretty much going all Fiber optic Ethernet now. This is often referred to as Ethernet WAN for Wide Area Network.

Cost and Performance Advantages of Ethernet
The first advantage of long haul Ethernet transmission is that it is directly compatible with most all company networks. You simply plug the Carrier’s Ethernet into your router. There is no need for separate protocol conversion boxes or modules as required to support T1 and T3 lines.

A second advantage is that Ethernet is easily scalable. You can run at any speed up to the limit of the physical port from the Carrier. T-Carrier and SONET protocols were designed for specific speeds and needed to have hardware replaced to upgrade. The bandwidth of your line is set by the Carrier based on your contract. You can easily increase or decrease that as your needs change and it will be reflected in your billing.

Perhaps the biggest incentive to switch to Ethernet WAN service is pricing. You may be shocked at how much your can save by switching from an older telecom service to Ethernet WAN. Ethernet is almost always lower in cost on a per-Mbps basis. Sometimes the difference can be a factor of two or more.

Much of the cost savings comes from a more competitive environment for fiber optic Ethernet versus the old telco services with one provider. There may be several companies offering Ethernet bandwidth for your business at competitive rates.

Fiber is also more available than ever before. The upgrade of cellphone towers to 4G LTE and 5G has demanded a rapid expansion of fiber optic networks. Copper is yesterday’s news and, more and more, it is being left to rust in the ground. Fiber and wireless are the future for networking.

Do you have legacy T3 or DS3 service and want to see if you can get a better deal? That’s easy. Just check prices and availability of Ethernet WAN service for your business address. Chances are good that you can get more bandwidth for the same or less cost than what you pay now.

Lower Cost Last Mile Fiber

By: John Shepler

What is the most critical part of the Internet? To you, the user, it’s that last mile connection to your place of business. That’s usually the limiting factor and where most of the problems are. What you need is a better connection, and fiber is the gold standard.

Last Mile Limitations
Don’t get me wrong. There are no guarantees on the Internet. Your priority is the same as everyone else’s. When nodes get congested or name servers go down, the people connecting on a shoestring and the well-healed are both affected. That said, the Internet has matured to the point where the backbone networks are highly reliable and have plenty of bandwidth.

If you need the ultimate in connection quality between multiple business locations, you need to look to private solutions, such as point to point dedicated connections and MPLS networks. These have much stricter control of bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. They are pricey and they don’t connect to the general public. That’s why the Internet is indispensable for nearly all businesses for sales and customer service.

The last mile connection is where pricing and quality vary all over the place. The biggest differentiator is shared vs dedicated bandwidth. Dedicated bandwidth means that you have exclusive use of the line capacity. What you don’t use simply idles until it is needed.

Seems like that’s the way it should always be, but the Internet wouldn’t have expanded geometrically the way it has if everyone had to pay for a dedicated line. Instead, carriers such as cable and wireless companies, buy high capacity dedicated lines and then multiplex them to share among many users. The idea is that not everyone is online at the same time and even if they are, most are not uploading or downloading at a given moment.

Prior to so many people working at home, most of the heavy consumer activity took place in the evening and business use was limited to daytime. Now, daytime demand is heavy for everyone using shared bandwidth. When it gets too heavy, line speed for everyone is reduced until the load lightens.

Dedicated High Speed Connections
Your best performance will come through a dedicated, symmetrical high speed link. Symmetrical means that upload and download speeds are the same. That tends to be case with dedicated lines. Shared bandwidth tends to be asymmetrical with much higher download than upload speeds.

You also want to connect through a top tier Internet Service Provider. These are larger companies that pay to connect directly to the Internet backbone. Smaller ISPs pay transport fees to the larger companies to connect through them to the Internet. It’s one more link in the chain.

You can get dedicated lines in both copper and fiber technologies. There are some microwave service providers who can deliver an equivalent connection wirelessly. These tend to be short range line-of-sight connections in major metro areas.

Copper solutions include the traditional T1 and DS3 (also called T3) lines. Newer technology is Ethernet over Copper which uses the same twisted pair cabling as T1 lines, but can support much higher speeds, although bandwidth tends to decrease with distance to the central office.

Fiber used to be a rare and expensive proposition, but that has all changed in recent years. Even cable companies have deployed fiber as their main transport network and some will sell you dedicated fiber optic Internet connections in addition to their more typical coaxial copper shared bandwidth services.

Fiber solutions include traditional telco Optical Carrier services such as OC3, OC12 and OC 48. The newer technology is Ethernet over Fiber. it’s generally much less expensive and highly scalable. That means you aren’t stuck with the bandwidth you first installed. You can start off with 10 or 100 Mbps and easily scale up to 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps as the need arises. That alone is a great cost saver. The competitive nature of today’s fiber marketplace has greatly reduced the price of bandwidth far below what you might expect.

The buildout of cellular towers for 4G LTE and 5G has created a fiber construction boom. Many buildings have also been connected by fiber for business use. These are great places to have an office because the heavy construction costs of bringing in fiber have already been paid. If you don’t have fiber in your office yet, it may still cost little or nothing to bring a fiber bundle in. That’s because there is likely a point of presence fairly close and carriers each want to be first to “light” a building and garner the business of the tenants.

Do you need a reasonably priced highly reliable last mile connection to the Internet? Get multiple competitive quotes now and see how much bandwidth you can really afford.

10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access Has the Speed You Need

By John Shepler

Gigabit Internet is something of a gold standard for high speed business connections. Sometimes, though, even 1 Gbps doesn’t get the job done. At that point you need to consider a move up… to 10 Gigabit Internet.

Who Needs 10 Gbps Bandwidth?
Most small businesses and probably all residential Internet users have no real need for this performance. The bragging rights are far offset by significant monthly lease fees. This is serious bandwidth for demanding applications that make having it more than worth the cost.

Not long ago the only place you’d find 10 Gbps pipes were in the backbones of carrier networks, including the Internet itself. Time marches on and what was adequate a decade ago is marginal performance today. Those 10 Gbps lines have gone from rare and hard to get to fairly common and readily available to business.

Cloud services and colocation centers certainly need access to gigabit, 10 gigabit and even higher connection speeds. Large corporations with thousands of employees, all connected, can also justify this speed. High tech firms and those using high tech tools may also require higher speeds. Content providers? Absolutely. Hospital and medical centers with large imaging requirements certainly can’t be waiting around for file transfers.

What’s Involved In Acquiring 10 Gigabit Service?
Speeds this high are almost always going to be delivered on fiber optic cable. The interesting thing about fiber is that once you have it installed it is as easy to get high speeds as it is to get much more modest service. That’s because the fiber itself is capable of tremendous throughput. The limiting factors are the number of strands in the fiber bundle and the termination equipment on both ends.

The first standard for high speed fiber transmission was developed by the telephone companies and called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. You may have heard of OC-192, which is the 10 Gbps SONET Optical Carrier level. Nowadays, most competitive networks and even the telcos are moving to Carrier Ethernet. Ethernet is directly compatible with nearly all local area networks. It is also easily scalable from typically 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and even higher speeds. What’s even more important for most business users is that Carrier Ethernet, also called Ethernet over Fiber, is generally far more available and far less costly than the older SONET technology.

Many competitive regional, national and international carriers now offer 10 Gig Ethernet access as well as point to point private lines. That means you may have several competitive offers to consider.

Why 10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access?
Think of the Internet as the proverbial electronic superhighway with a backbone of major interstate and international roadways and millions of on-ramps. Unless you are part of the Internet itself, you will be connecting through one of these on-ramps. They vary greatly in performance.

The best performance you can expect on the Internet is to connect to the network backbone through a high tier provider using a dedicated connection. Dedicated means that you and you alone have use of the bandwidth you have leased. That sounds like the way it should be, but most Internet connections designed for consumers and smaller businesses are shared, not dedicated. By multiplexing many customers on the same line, cable, satellite and cellular wireless companies can offer low cost reasonable speed connections to their customers.

The other characteristic to look for is symmetric bandwidth. That means 10 Gbps in both the upstream and downstream connections. Those low cost options are usually asymmetrical, with download speed high and upload speed low.

Bandwidth to Grow With Your Needs
Since Carrier Ethernet is so scalable, you can often order the bandwidth you need today with the option of upgrading incrementally as your needs grow. With a 10 Gbps port, you can order 1 Gbps, 5 Gbps or some other speed and pay for the performance you are actually using. As long as you have enough port speed, you can often upgrade with just a phone call to your supplier or even through your online account.

Are you cramped for bandwidth but concerned that what you really need is not available or too expensive? You’re likely in for a pleasant surprise, so go ahead and request competitive quotes from Dedicated Internet Access providers serving your business address.

Tips To Reduce Your Telecom Costs

By: John Shepler

Business is open. Business is closed. Business is open again. Most businesses are suffering from whiplash as they navigate the Covid-19 crisis. When times were good, growth was king. Now survival is key and a major element of business survival is cost control. Here are some things you can do immediately to curb expenditures while still being operational.

Are You Paying For Things You Aren’t Using?
it seems obvious that nobody would pay for something they don’t use, yet both consumers and businesses are guilty of just that.

Get your phone bill and some pens and highlighters. Now go through it line by line. Consider yourself an old time prospector looking for gold. That gold is in the form of expenses that don’t provide value.

Are you currently using every line that comes into your business? How about lines to buildings that were offices and are now storage? Fax lines not connected to fax machines anymore? Old burglar alarm lines or extension phones? Old data lines that aren’t being fed by anything anymore?

What about mobile phones? Each phone should be currently used by an employee. Are there leftovers from departed employees that haven’t been reassigned? What about features that nobody is using?

Every line, every feature, every device should be assigned and preferably be in-use. Now, get on the phone with your carrier and delete everything not being used.

The same goes for equipment rentals. If you are not using it, send it back and stop the bleeding. When things pick up, reacquire the resources you need then.

While you were doing your survey, I’ll bet you found a bunch of equipment squirreled here and there. Routers, switches, PCs, phones, adaptors, and even boxes full of software. Have someone who is not otherwise engaged look into selling this stuff on e-bay. True, some has little value and should be just recycled. Sell anything that is worth the time and shipping cost to unload. This could turn into a cash cow and justify an ongoing job assignment.

Pay Less For The Same Value
I feel pretty safe in saying that you are paying more than you have to for your telecom lines. That’s because deregulation and new competition have driven down the cost of bandwidth year over year. You may be finishing a 3 year contract or be paying month to month on an expired contract. There’s high value-added in figuring out how many lines of what performance you need and getting a new competitive price quote .

T1 lines are still popular, but they cost a fraction of what they did a decade ago. Same lines, much lower prices. The fiber optic services from DS3 (45 Mbps) and OCx to 10 Gbps and more are largely being replaced with Carrier Ethernet. It’s more compatible with today’s equipment, bandwidth is scalable, and costs are much, much lower. Fiber is king these days, but there is also Ethernet over Copper and wireless services. MPLS networks are a better deal than multiple point to point lines. SD-WAN is replacing MPLS for even greater savings.

How do you sort all of this out? You need to work with a good master agency like Telarus that has relationships with dozens and dozens of suppliers. A knowledgeable agent will get you multiple quotes and help you decide on the best options for your situation.

Don’t Invest, Pay As You Go
You’ve heard that the cloud is taking over everything. Well, there’s a good reason for that. We’re past the time when every company needs to maintain telecom rooms and server rooms. All of that goes bye-bye to the cloud, which is nothing more than one giant data center with full time staff to maintain everything. You concentrate on your business and they take care of the constantly changing infrastructure. Cloud centers can also provide cybersecurity and stay on top of evolving threats? Do you really want to be saddled with that?

Moving to the cloud does two things for you. It avoids capital expense (capex) and allows you to pay as you go (opex). Paying as you go these days can be really helpful because you can scale both up and down rapidly as business goes on a rollercoaster.

Don’t forget to consider bandwidth that can also be easily scaled both up and down. If you get a fiber optic service with a GigE or 10GigE port, you can run any bandwidth level you like and pay for just that. Some services even let you upgrade and downgrade online instantly. It’s a far cry from the old days of nailed-up telco circuits.

Are you busy adjusting to the new normal and concerned that you may not be able to afford your ongoing business costs? Don’t let networking and telecom drag you down. Get competitive quotes and expert advice now and reduce your costs ASAP.

Increase Your Bandwidth Beyond T1

By: John Shepler

You’e had your faithful T1 line service for years, maybe even decades. You love the reliability, solid bandwidth, low latency and the fact that prices have even declined from contract to contract. The one limitation that’s becoming a real bottleneck is the bandwidth. While 1.5 Mbps was plenty a decade ago, it’s not keeping up anymore. Is there any way to keep the performance of T1 but goose up the speed? Most definitely!

What Makes a Good T1 line Replacement
When you first took out your T1 contract, you chose this technology for good reasons. DSL was popular for business at the time, but notoriously unreliable. T1 had the advantage of being a service that was developed by the telephone companies for the telephone companies. That meant it was professional grade from the beginning and not a “consumer” service being offered for business as a cheap option.

T1’s fixed 1.5 Mbps bandwidth was dictated by the need to multiplex or combine 24 individual analog phone lines into a single digital equivalent that maintained all the voice quality, including minimal latency. T1 also had to run on existing twisted pair telco lines no matter how far they stretched. That’s why T1 is available far out into rural areas beyond the reach of other options.

T1 is still used to provide multiple phone lines for key telephone and PBX systems. It has been expanded to support packet-based digital networks including point to point dedicated lines and dedicated Internet access. Many T1 lines come with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that provides a guarantee of availability and performance from the service provider.

Bonded T1
One way to increase the bandwidth of T1 lines is to simply add more of them. Most companies want that bandwidth combined, which is easily done by carriers using a process called bonding. All of the T1s you want bonded must be from the same provider. Two T1 lines gives you 3 Mbps, 4 lines give 6 Mbps and so on. You can go up to 10 or 12 bonded T1 lines, but the cost gets prohibitive unless this is your only option.

Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper uses the same twisted pair infrastructure as T1, but a newer modulation technology. You lose the unlimited distance advantage but gain much higher bandwidths, generally up to 10 or 20 Mbps, at more reasonable prices. If you are located in a populated area, EoC can give you the service you want at a fraction of the cost of bonded T1 lines.

DS3 Bandwidth
DS3 is part of the T-Carrier specification that also defines T1. DS3 offers 45 Mbps, enough for many businesses. Low latency, dedicated lines and reliable service are similar to T1 lines. The only wrinkle is that the higher bandwidth of DS3 isn’t supported over twisted pair copper. Instead, DS3 rides a fiber optic backbone to the curb and then a pair of small diameter coaxial copper lines to your router DS3 interface card.

Fiber Optic Service
Fiber service used to be well beyond the financial reach of most companies even if it was available… and it often wasn’t. That’s all changed. SONET technology, which transports DS3 and the higher bandwidth services like OC3, OC 12, and OC48, has become more available and less expensive. Ethernet over Fiber is the newer technology and it is much less expensive for the same high quality service. Many, many companies order 10 Mbps Ethernet over Fiber service and then easily upgrade to 50 or 100 Mbps as they need it. Bandwidths are readily available to 1 Gbps and even 10 Gbps in many areas.

What about Cable, Satellite, Wireless, Etc?
These less expensive services are shared, not dedicated bandwidth. That’s a major reason they are less expensive. Most are asymmetrical, meaning that upload speed is only a fraction of download speed. Satellite has tremendous latency effects and both satellite and wireless tend to have data caps. That said, a lot of businesses are saving a lot of money each month, especially if they combine a couple of low cost broadband services in a SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Network. It all depends on how demanding your applications are and whether you prefer to avoid the Internet to connect locations. Get some expert advice and then pick the best bandwidth option appropriate for your business needs.

So Many Locations, So Little Budget

By: John Shepler

Your company has lots of locations and guess what? They all need to be connected. That has traditionally meant big bucks and some pretty heavy IT staffing to make sure that all the phone calls, file transfers and applications run transparently for your employees and customers. It’s more than possible that you’ve long settled for less capability than you really need just because of the sheer cost involved. Does it still need to be that expensive to get connected? Perhaps not so much anymore.

Why Connecting Business Locations Cost a Fortune
The traditional business connection has been the telecom private line. These started out as T1 lines when 1.5 Mbps was big bandwidth and moved up to DS3 and then OC3 and higher bandwidth SONET fiber as capacity needs increased. All of these were sold as point to point dedicated private lines. One line from headquarters to each remote site. The more sites, the more lines.

Dedicated private lines weren’t cheap to begin with. There is also no economy of scale. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. Lines in rural areas cost more, perhaps a lot more, than the same line downtown in a big city.

How do you interconnect a dozen sites so that they can all talk and exchange data? You set up routers and PBX or IPBX systems at HQ and have your IT team operate a fully meshed network.

Let Someone Else Run the Network to Save Money
MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks were designed to let you outsource the big multi-site network. A private operator runs a multi-tenant network using a proprietary protocol that routes traffic only on this dedicated network. It’s reasonably secure and has all the bandwidth you need.

Best of all, you are only using part of the network’s capacity so you only have to pay a fee for the portion you need. You also don’t have the network management headaches. The MPLS operator handles everything. You still have the cost of private lines from each location to the net, but not the expense of private interstate or international long lines.

The Cheapest Network of All
The big, beautiful public Internet connects just about everyone, everywhere. There’s more capacity than all of us will ever need. Plus, it’s cheap. Your small fraction of the cost of running the Internet is built into your connection charge. It’s inherently a mesh network, so all you need to do is get a broadband connection at each of your locations and whatever servers you need back at the home office. You might even rent servers in the cloud and offload that responsibility.

Now, the downside. Cheap doesn’t mean cheap and perfect. You and everyone else in the world are on this network and your critical business apps have no more priority than than binge watchers in a video feeding frenzy. Security is a joke. Every scam artist has tools to hack the web or make your life miserable by jamming your servers if they can’t rob you blind. Is this Internet really worth the trouble?

Mix and Match to Optimize Cost / Performance
A plain vanilla Internet connection may not be all you need for your business. It depends. SSL security makes it possible for millions of people to use their browsers to bank and buy things with confidence every day. You can install security appliances in line with your servers to mitigate denial of service attacks and intrusions. You can even outsource this complication by ordering managed security in the cloud.

How about priority service for sensitive applications like VoIP telephone calls and business critical cloud services? You may or may not find Internet performance good enough. One tradeoff is to use dedicated last mile connections versus shared low cost broadband. The core of the Internet runs pretty fast. It’s that local connection, especially the lowest cost ones, that get oversubscribed and bog down.

Why not get the best compromise by using both? Your really, really sensitive packets may not be all that bandwidth demanding but are highly latency dependent. Meanwhile, the bulk of file transfer activity, video streams, email, and page views work just fine over low-end broadband connections and are good with typical broadband latency. A newer technology called SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Networking employs a smarter router connected to two or more Internet connections to pick and choose what packet goes down what path. Dedicated T1 lines or a low capacity MPLS network service can handle phone calls while a higher speed cable broadband line takes care of general web access.

If you have been frustrated by the high cost of connecting your multiple business locations, it’s time to take another look as line prices have plummeted and new technology offers higher performance from cheaper connections. See what’s available in the way of cloud communications, SD-WAN, MPLS networks and dedicated and shared broadband lines that can give you a lot more capacity for your limited budget now.

Internet and Ethernet, The Perfect Broadband Match

By John Shepler

Broadband Internet connections come in many flavors. These include DSL, 3G & 4G cellular, PTP microwave wireless, cable DOCSIS, two-way satellite, T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, SONET fiber optic, and both Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Each of these has cost and performance advantages and disadvantages. One technology, however, offers the best match for most business applications. It’s the combination of Internet and Ethernet.

Why Ethernet?
What makes Ethernet so attractive is the fact that it has almost completely taken over wired networks large and small. Do you have a LAN? What protocol are you running? Unless it’s something specialized for storage or industrial control, the answer is almost certainly Ethernet.

Being dominant has it’s advantages. From a technical standpoint, dominance means that nearly every piece of network equipment comes with Ethernet connectors built-in. In most cases, these are 10/100/1000 Mbps RJ-45 jacks. At higher speeds, 10 GigE and higher for sure, fiber optic connectors will be included.

It’s also not just that Ethernet standards permeate every network such that you have a hard time building one to some other protocol. How much do those alternative networks cost? The dominance of Ethernet has led to economics of scale. Ethernet is now the low cost solution by far. It’s also the solution that is sourced everywhere. You have no trouble picking up cable, connectors, switches, routers, and everything that plays on a network.

The One Laggard… The WAN
Local Area Networks are firmly ensconced with Ethernet technology. Outside the plant, however, it’s not so clear-cut. Wide Area Networks evolved from different standards pioneered by the telephone companies and were not originally intended for computers. Telephone networks were invented first and they were all analog, both wired and wireless. Then, starting mid-20th century, the T1 digital standard was introduced for multiplexing phone lines and long distance transmission. T1 expanded into T3/DS3 for higher speed, followed by fiber optic standards based on the same TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) protocol.

Since the phone companies pretty much owned all telecommunications networks, Ethernet packets had to learn to ride on what was available. That meant protocol conversion from Ethernet to T1, and so on. This is still the case for traditional telecom networks, although that’s changing fast.

Carrier Ethernet Moves to the Front
The old collision domains are long gone for the most part. Networks now are switched Ethernet. It turns out that the switched Ethernet protocol are quite compatible with long distance networks with a few additions to the standard for operations and maintenance. Those standards have been created and go by the name of Carrier Ethernet.

As you might suspect, Carrier Ethernet is merely an extension of LAN Ethernet. There really is no protocol-conversion speed bump traversing from one to the other. You plug your network into the carrier’s premises equipment and your packets travel seamlessly for hundreds or thousands of miles.

Ethernet and the Internet
The Internet was designed as a computer to computer network from the get-go. When we talk about IP networks, the IP means Internet Protocol. When we talk about Ethernet protocol, we are generally referring to IP and perhaps the file transfer standard, TCP/IP.

When the Internet started, there were only the telephone company networks available, so the Internet began running on legacy telco standards, particularly SONET fiber optic. That’s changing now. More and more networks are Ethernet at their core. Most newer networking providers design their networks as IP from the start and don’t go depend on handoffs to the telephone company central offices.

Either way, as long as you have Ethernet to your premises, you can ignore what’s going on at the core of the network.

Ethernet’s Big Advantages
Carrier Ethernet services come in a wide variety of speeds, but they all stick to the same Ethernet standard. You simply specify the maximum speed of the port that is installed at your location. That’s generally 1 Gbps these days, although you can also opt for 10 Gbps and, in some cases, 100 Gbps. The port sets the maximum, not the minimum, broadband speed you can order. In fact, many companies start at 10 or 100 Mbps and then upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet or beyond when they need to. That means they only pay for the bandwidth they need.

Ethernet services also tend to be less expensive than traditional telco services for the same bandwidth. It’s fairly common to get 3 Mbps for the same or less cost than a single 1.5 Mbps T1 line. You might even get 10 Mbps for the budget you originally set for T1 Internet service.

That last mile connection to the Internet via dedicate Ethernet Internet access means that your bandwidth is symmetrical, or the same in the upload and download directions. It is also dedicated to your use 100% of the time. With other services, such as cable or cellular broadband, the bandwidth is shared among customers. That makes it cheaper, but also means that your share will vary depending on how many others are using the service at the same time.

Ordering Ethernet Internet Service
The best place to get your business broadband service is from a bandwidth broker, like Telarus, who has relationships with many carriers. You’ll likely have multiple options to choose from. The two flavors you’ll most likely encounter are Ethernet over Copper for lower speed options and Ethernet over Fiber for 50 Mbps and up. Fiber is highly desirable if your building is already lit or construction costs are low. Otherwise, you can almost always get some type of copper based delivery.

Interested in finding out what options you have and what they cost? Run a quick search for fiber optic Ethernet service here and see what pops up.

Comcast’s 100 Gbps Core Network Supports Business

Major telecom carriers have been in the process of upgrading their core networks from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps over the last year. Comcast is the latest to make the move, fitting Ciena’s Wave Logic 3 interfaces to their current Ciena 6500 packet optical platforms. Why would a cable company do this and how can it benefit your business?

Comcast is best known as a Cable TV company or MSO (Multi-System Operator). They serve over 20 million residential and commercial customers in 40 states and the District of Columbia with video television, high speed Internet and telephone services. You may already know that Comcast broadband service is highly popular for home, home office and small business use. It comes in on a coaxial cable and is highly affordable. But did you also know that Comcast operates one of the largest fiber optic networks in the United States behind the scenes?

Many people think that cable companies still connect everything from their head-end towers and satellite dishes to locations around town using various size coax. That was true in the early days of analog TV cable systems and master antennas for large apartment buildings. The technology has long since moved on. Now everything is digital and the signals ride fiber optic cables most of the distance to your location. It’s that connection from the curb to your building that is still RG-6 coaxial copper wire.

Why? Because it works just fine and the cost of installation has already been paid. DOCSIS 3.0 modems offer broadband Internet in excess of 100 Mbps. That’s is well within the needs of most users. What’s really important to residential, home office and very small business users is low monthly cost combined with adequate performance. The shared asymmetrical bandwidth (higher download than upload speeds) and “best effort” performance is more than adequate for accessing the Internet and downloading documents, pictures and video.

Where HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) services run out of gas is when the need for bandwidth is high, dedicated low latency service is needed, symmetrical upload and download speeds are required, and an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is desired. These characteristics are common for traditional telecom services such as T1, DS3 and SONET fiber and the newer Ethernet services such as FastE at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps and 10 GigE at 10 Gbps.

What isn’t as well known is that Comcast operates an enterprise grade fiber optic core network to interconnect their many offices and provide high bandwidth connectivity to businesses. Would you be surprised to learn that Comcast operates a network that covers 147,000 fiber route miles? How about that business class services are available from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps? Their business class services include dedicated Internet access, point to point Ethernet private lines, Ethernet LAN service to interconnect multiple business locations and converged layer 2 centric VPLS to support voice, video and data.

Comcast, like other major fiber optic carriers, recognizes the increasing demand for higher and higher bandwidth services. What’s driving these speed increases is more use of HD video, big data files and a rapid move to cloud computing services. The cloud, especially, present new challenges for businesses used to having all their processing in-house and connected over the corporate LAN. Cloud service providers offer the opportunity to rapidly scale resources up and down, pay only for what you use during the month, and avoid both capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs. The tradeoff is that you now need much higher and very reliable bandwidth to connect your employees to the cloud.

Comcast’s upgrade to 100 Gbps fiber optic bandwidth meets today’s perhaps tomorrow’s needs for their own use and in support of small, medium and large companies. When even this massive capability fills up, the Ciena system they’ve chosen has an upgrade path to 400 Gbps. It’s likely that we’ll see even higher speeds at 1 Tbps and beyond sooner than anyone expects.

Are you running short on bandwidth and wondering how much you can afford as an upgrade? Get multiple competitive fiber optic service quotes for Comcast Business and other high performance fiber optic carriers now. It’s likely that you can turn up your WAN bandwidth at little or no increase over your current monthly least cost.

T1 Lines For MPLS Access

Businesses that need to connect multiple locations together are turning more and more to MPLS networks. To get access to the network, they are finding that T1 lines are often the best solution. Here’s why.

An MPLS network, which stands for Multi Protocol Label Switching network, can be thought of as a private version of the Internet. As a privately owned network, the MPLS operator can ensure that your applications will have the bandwidth and quality of service to run reliably. Security is also easier to achieve, since the MPLS network is available only to serious businesses that buy the service.

An MPLS network is designed to be a cloud that is configured to connect only those locations that you specify. Your service is generally set up to be any-to-any connectivity. But you also have the option to limit which locations can directly connect to the others in your operation. This is handled completely by the MPLS provider. What each location needs is a solid and secure connection to the network.

That’s where T1 lines come in. A T1 line is basically a point to point connection. Many business use these to connect two offices together. The T1 bandwidth is available for your exclusive use. It is not shared with anyone else.

True, one end of a T1 line can terminate at an Internet Service Provider to give your organization dedicated access to the public Internet. But that far end of the line can also be connected to an MPLS network. That will give you direct access with reliable bandwidth to the MPLS network cloud.

Each of your business locations needs its own T1 line to connect to the MPLS network. This is often a fairly limited distance and most MPLS networks have POPs or Points of Presence in many major metropolitan areas. The network itself will often span a regional area or the entire country. Some MPLS networks now connect internationally to serve businesses with foreign offices.

You could create your own private network by setting up a router at your main office and running point to point T1 lines from there to each of your remote locations. But you’ll probably find that it is less expensive to make use of an MPLS network with T1 lines for access to the network. Check T1 and MPLS prices and availability to see what is most cost effective for your needs.

T1 Line as an On Ramp

You may be familiar with T1 lines as point to point connections for digital data or PBX telephone tie lines. But T1 lines also make great on-ramps for other services. Let's see why.

Nearly every business has a LAN or Local Area Network. Most also have a WAN or Wide Area Network connection. That's what lets you connect to the outside world. Your WAN connection is often an on-ramp to a larger public or private network.

A perfect example is what's called T1 dedicated Internet. Dedicated means that this T1 line is a direct connection from your business to your Internet service provider that is not shared with other users and not used for other purposes. The bandwidth of this line is 1.5 Mbps in both directions, upload and download, at all times. It gives you a responsive, reliable and predictable Internet connection.

In this case, the T1 line is acting as an on ramp to the huge public network that is the Internet. Many business find this arrangement perfectly meets their needs for Web browsing, email, and server connections. If they need more bandwidth, additional T1 lines can be bonded together to create a faster on-ramp.

T1 lines are also ideal on-ramps to private networks such as MPLS networks. An MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network is a privately run regional or national packet switched network that ties together businesses with multiple locations. Each location has a T1 line for an on ramp that's also an off-ramp, of course. The MPLS network makes sure that every location can connect to every other location with a high quality of service and a high degree of security. MPLS networks are often the most cost effective solution for multi-location businesses.

Another on ramp is the one to the public switched telephone network. T1 PRI lines are used to provide up to 23 separate outside telephone lines to a business PBX telephone system. A T1 line configured as a SIP Trunk does the same thing for enterprise VoIP phone systems. SIP trunks can also be used as on-ramps to both the public telephone network and the Internet with a single line.

What condition is your on ramp in? Does it act like one of those beat up freeway ramps that is in serious need of rebuilding? If so, you should consider new or replacement T1 line service for the qualify and reliability of service your business needs. Prices have never been better than they are right now.

Iomega Zips Into Network Storage

Remember the Zip drive? Back in the days when everybody used floppy disks for backup, the Zip drive offered about 100x the capacity in a removable cartridge. With hard drive storage now typically in the hundreds of MB, we've moved on from floppies and even the larger Zips. But Iomega, the company that pioneered this technology, has continued to innovate new products. Now they're not just on the desktop, but in the server room as well.

Iomega is now a part of EMC, a Fortune 500 corporation that provides enterprise storage solutions to other Fortune 500 companies. But Iomega is still focused on individual and small office users, with some products designed for small to medium size businesses. If you need hundreds of terabytes to a petabyte of storage, you should probably stick with the  EMC Symmetrix DMX series. But if your needs are in the hundreds of gigabytes to a terabyte of storage, Iomega may have your most cost effective solution.

The Prestige Desktop is Iomega's basic desktop external hard drive. It comes in 500 GB and 1 TB capacities and uses USB 2.0 connectivity to your PC or Mac. If you don't need even this much storage, there are lower capacity, and lower cost, desktop drives available. But if you want more, consider a double drive. It has two hard drives in a single case that appear as a single volume to your computer. Storage capacity goes up to 1.5 TB.

For something more stylish, the eGo line of external drives come in jet black, midnight blue and ruby red colors. All are USB 2.0 with 1 TB drives inside.

There are a couple of products designed for Macintosh support. The MiniMax desktop hard drive looks like a doppelganger of Apple's Mac Mini computer. It comes in 500 GB and 750 GB versions with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 connectivity. The UltraMax is available in a sleek case that also looks very Mac-like. It has eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 connectivity options. eSATA will give you transfer rates up to 3 Gigabits/sec.

The UltraMax double expands the UltraMax capability with two drives and RAID 0 and RAID 1 capability. RAID is used for higher performance. RAID 1 is selected for data security. It also comes with EMC Retrospect software for full-system disaster recovery and ease of data backups. The UltraMax Pro Desktop hard drive offers 1.5 TB of storage with your choice of RAID 0, RAID 1 or non-RAID configurations. Drives can be hot swapped for easy replacement.

One of these drives could work well with your system. Have a look at the Desktop Hard Drives by Iomega

Iomega has also moved on from mere desktop storage products and now offers network storage with capacities from 360 GB up to 3 GB. Most of these use Gigabit Ethernet connections to your network.

The StorCenter Pro 150 is designed specifically for small office networks. It supports Supports SMB/CIFS (Windows), AFP (Macintosh), NFS, and FTP Network Protocols. There are 4 hot-swappable SATA drives inside. They can be set up for RAID protection if desired. Other StorCenter configurations offer built-in print servers.

For larger operations, StorCenter Pro move into a rack configuration with storage configurations of 1, 2, 3 and 4 TB. Gigabit Ethernet connectivity is standard for this NAS (Network Attached Storage).

Interested in getting into network attached storage for your office? Check out Iomega's Network storage made easy.

Oh, yes, one more thing. You can still get ZIP drives and media from Iomega.

MPLS Just Got Easier

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is fast becoming the core transport technology of choice for point to point and point to multipoint networks. If MPLS is gaining acceptance, what is on the wane? It's Frame Relay networks for sure, and perhaps legacy TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) networking in general. If you're still on one of those legacy networking technologies but wondering if a move to MPLS would be advantageous, you're in luck. A new service is here to make your life easy.

The newest service of Telarus, Inc., the creator of the GeoQuote (tm) instant online pricing service for T1 and DS3 line services, is called Shop For MPLS. It's exactly what it sounds like and then some. This is an online tool that lets you enter information about your business locations and how you are going to use the network. That gives the automated search system and the Telarus consultants the data needed to calculate the best options for your situation.

You'll notice that the Shop For MPLS query form is more detailed than the simple GeoQuote quote request form found on Shop For T1. The reason for this lies in the inherent nature of MPLS networking.

If MPLS were a wireless technology, it might be called 4G. The impetus for a new core network technology comes from the need to transport a variety of protocols from point to point or as a mesh network. Plus today's need to provide a QoS or quality of service control to ensure that real time services, such as VoIP or live video, are protected from degradation by network congestion.

Without MPLS, you have a potpourri of network technologies and pick the one that most closely matches your application requirements. Frame Relay has been a popular service for connecting multiple locations. It uses a private network with virtual circuits that are set-up between locations. Multiple users share the network and the cost, but your data has a committed information rate that is protected.

MPLS does something similar by employing an extensive private network to connect among multiple locations. Instead of virtual circuits, MPLS routers employ labels or tags that define source, destination, and quality of service. The quality of service part of the tag is what makes MPLS able to reliably transport voice and video and well as data.

MPLS networks are based on IP rather than legacy TDM protocol, although they can transport TDM services such as T-carrier or SONET. Many large scale carriers are building new MPLS networks or converting their TDM networks to MPLS. This make the MPLS marketplace very competitive and offers considerable cost savings for network service users.

The new Shop For MPLS online service recognizes that many ideal candidates for MPLS networking are companies with many locations. These can be branch offices, retail outlets, franchises, warehouses and factories. You have the ability to upload a site list rather than having to individually enter a dozen, a hundred or a thousand locations, or mail-in a list or electronic file. That alone can shave days off the quote process and improve accuracy.

The automated analytical tools available to Telarus consultants further improves the opportunity to find the lowest cost solutions from among a large suite of competitive carriers, making it easy to get a good deal on MPLS services.

First in Windmills, First in WiMAX

When it comes to the important technologies for the 21st century, where in the world do you look? Is it the United States where the Internet was born? Perhaps China or Japan where just about everything is manufactured? How about India where design expertise is concentrating? No, none of these. Would you believe Holland?

The Dutch have been leaders in business and technology for hundreds of years. Now they're the first in Europe to implement mobile WiMAX as a wireless broadband standard.

Mobile WiMAX, defined by the IEEE 802.16e standard, is an extension of the original fixed wireless 802.16d being promoted as a humongous Wi-Fi hotspot or the answer to 3G cellular backhaul woes. What mobile WiMAX brings to table is the ability to move around with automatic hand-offs between base stations. If this sounds like the way cellular networks work, it is. But instead of CDMA or GSM transmission technology, WiMAX is designed to support IP networking rather than traditional telephone voice channels.

Not that WiMAX can't be used for telephony. In fact, it may be WiMAX that gives mobile VoIP the platform it needs to take off. But voice is seen as the small piece of the pie. What mobile broadband with significant user bandwidth can really do is transport live video feeds and all those video downloads that are clogging-up the Internet delivery networks. WiMAX providers may find themselves as dazed and confused as the cable and telco operators if video goes mobile in a big way.

Who better to solve this dilemma than the Dutch? They were the first to come up with solutions to the rising tide of global warming before anybody paid attention to carbon dioxide. Dutch windmills reclaimed land from the sea for habitation and agriculture using a nationwide system of windmills to pump the lowlands dry.

We used to think that windmills were quaint in the United States. Now we can't put them up fast enough to generate clean power. We're not at the point of having to hold back the ocean yet. But as sea levels rise and beaches start to disappear, we may very well take a serious look at the Zuiderzee and Delta works in the Netherlands.

WiMAX is also coming here in the fall, courtesy of Sprint and Clearwire. As WiMAX builds-out, it will face stiff competition from LTE, a competing technology being deployed by AT&T and Verizon. Whether the competition for users will slow down 4G wireless or only serve to speed up availability of desperately needed bandwidth remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Worldmax will be expanding on its Amsterdam mobile WiMAX network that has already started operation. They eventually expect to deploy about 3,000 sites to cover all of the Netherlands, financial resources permitting. Watching how the service plays out will be a good leading indicator of how mobile WiMAX networks will actually be used once they are universally available.

Goodbye Frame Relay, Hello MPLS

When you have multiple business locations and they all need to communicate, what do you do? You can set up private lines to make the connections, but that gets expensive as the number of locations increases. A private network solution called Frame Relay has been popular for its reliability, security and cost savings. But now MPLS networks are the new technology you should consider for higher bandwidths and lower costs.

Frame relay emerged as a cross between the public switched telephone network and point to point dedicated private lines. The idea was to replace the concept of hard wires in "nailed up" circuits with virtual circuits that accomplish the same objective. Circuit switching originated with the telephone companies. It means just what it says. Every time you want a connection, you connect one set of available wires to another until both end locations are hooked together. The circuit stays that way for the length of a phone call or the length of the private line lease. Either way, a dedicated circuit costs you whether you are using it or not.

Virtual circuits are a packet switching idea. Instead of actual wires from point to point, virtual circuits use routers and switches to make sure that information that enters at one port gets to its intended destination without delay or interference. The actual physical paths in the network may be used by many customers during a given time period. However, there is always enough bandwidth in the network to ensure that every virtual circuit acts like it is the only one connected.

The advantage of virtual circuits over physical circuits is the efficiency that comes from greater utilization of the physical paths in the network. These are fiber optic or wireline connections in a metropolitan area or cross-country. The higher the utilization, the lower the cost per user. In other words, you save money using virtual circuits in a private network.

Frame Relay is based on the PVC or Permanent Virtual Circuit. You access the network using a specialized piece of customer premises equipment called a FRAD or Frame Relay Access Device. Within the network frame routers are configured by the network operator to create your PVCs from a list of sources and destinations and your desired bandwidth or Committed Information Rate (CIR).

MPLS or Multi Protocol Label Switching is also a private network arrangement. It's designed to run on the newer IP based networks that are replacing traditional circuit switched or TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) networks. The multi-protocol aspect allows all sorts of traffic to be carried on the network simultaneously. What MPLS layers over the core IP network is a specialized label system. Each label specifies source and destination and quality of service. The labels work something like the virtual circuits of Frame Relay in that they identify where packets are coming from and where they are intended to go. Tag switches also called label switch routers use this information to direct traffic on the network. Like Frame Relay, you use a special device called a ingress or egress router to connect to the MPLS network.

MPLS networks are offered by competitive carriers for transporting voice, data and video from point to point or among multiple locations. The network operator will set up your connections to ensure that you have high enough bandwidth and low enough latency to meet your needs. This level of traffic engineering isn't currently available on public networks, such as the Internet.

Should you stick with your current Frame Relay service or make the move to a MPLS network? Our team of experts can help you compare the options and pick the best one for your applications. You never know. You might just be able to save a bundle of money and get as good or better service as you have now.

What Can GigE Bandwidth Do For You?

Gigabit Ethernet has been steadily making its way into local area network connections. NIC (Network Interface Cards) that were standardized as 10/100 Mbps are now more and more becoming 10/100/1000 Mbps. LAN backbones have been moving to 1 Gbps and even 10 Gbps. If your company is a heavy user of high technology digital processes, you're likely in the Gigabit Ethernet or GigE category right now. What you really need is a way to extend your high bandwidth data transfers out or your local network and across town or across the country at some reasonable cost. Now you can.

What type of companies can benefit from GigE WAN (Wide Area Network) connections? Those with large number of employees, huge customer bases, or applications that generate massive amounts of data. An obvious example is corporate information systems that handle accounting data, documentation, email and human resources for thousands of employees. Even when data was primarily text and numbers, these systems had to process, store and transfer enormous amounts of data. Now that pictures and graphics are more prevalent in the corporate databases, storage and bandwidth demands have multiplied.

Your need for connectivity with the outside world may include ways to interconnect multiple locations within a metropolitan area into a "virtual" corporate campus. Or, you may have a primarily location but a remote data center that handles overnight backups. In these cases, a Gigabit Ethernet MAN or Metropolitan Area Network connection could fit the bill.

It isn't always the largest companies that have the highest bandwidth demands. Hospitals and Medical Centers may be large or modest in size. But if they are generating radiological images and need to transfer them instantly or as close to instantly as possible, a GigE WAN connection is no extravagance.

Other organizations that are heavy data generators include video production houses, especially in high definition. HD television, movies, commercial advertising and the like can suck up as much bandwidth as you can provide. So too can engineering firms who are generating large architectural drawing packages or system simulations. It takes high performance computing equipment to generate the data in the first place. Transferring it in real-time requires bandwidth way beyond what normal business applications demand.

If your need to to share data between facilities in different cities or create an Extranet that includes key customers, you may find yourself bumping up against the limits that even a DS3 connection gives you. That's 45 Mbps, once considered a large amount of bandwidth. A logical upgrade is to move to SONET fiber optic carrier services. OC-3 offers 155 Mbps, OC-12 will give you 622 Mbps, OC-24 doubles that to 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 tops out at about 2.5 Gbps. These are classical fiber based telecommunications services, but they are definitely old school. Especially when it comes to pricing.

The new option is Carrier Ethernet. As the name implies, this is the same Ethernet as you deploy on your local networks. It's available now in speeds that range from classical Ethernet at 10 Mbps on the low end, Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE at 1,000 Mbps. Pricing from competitive carriers with regional and national footprints is a fraction of what you'll pay for the equivalent SONET or T-Carrier bandwidth.

What level of bandwidth makes economic sense for your company? Find Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and GigE services available near your location now.

Do You Build Wide Area Networks?

In your business installing corporate data networks, do you build networks that span multiple locations around town? How about coast to coast? Well, why not?

A quick answer might be: "We don't have a spool of wire big enough."

Well, I know where you can get one. You won't need a huge trailer to haul it around. You won't even need any trenching equipment. That's all taken care of for you. You won't have to work any harder but you will make more money.

What makes this possible are two recent developments. First is the availability of Metro and Carrier Ethernet services from competitive carriers. The second is a business arrangement whereby you can include Ethernet WAN services in your network planning and get monthly commissions based on the bandwidth usage of your clients.

Metro Ethernet is a WAN or Wide Area Network service that is available between business locations in a particular city. Carrier Ethernet extends the Ethernet connection between cities, even multiple locations nationwide.

What network bandwidths are available? They are the same as LAN speeds on wired networks. You can order 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, and even 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. The cost per Mbps goes down as the speed goes up and is considerably less than what your clients pay for telco data services such as DS3 or SONET.

Where is Ethernet service available? Right now it's in larger metropolitan areas, including downtown business districts and the suburbs. Higher speeds are available to buildings "lit" for fiber optic service. However, standard and even Fast Ethernet services are often available over copper wireline within a mile or two of the carriers POP (Point of Presence). This is known as EoC or Ethernet over Copper.

You can easily find where the lit locations are near your business interests by using the GeoQuote (tm) Ethernet Mapping Tool.

Go ahead and recommend this service to your clients if all you want to do is help them find Ethernet and other business voice and data connections. But if you'd like to profit by determining your client's requirements and entering the quote request in a special form that gives you credit for the sale and an ongoing commission for every service that you help your client lease, then learn more and join the VAR Partner Network now.

Tricks That T1 Lines Do

When someone says T1 line, what do you think of? I'll bet that most of the time it's a dedicated broadband Internet connection. But there are lots of other uses for T1 connections that might benefit your business.

The dedicated T1 Internet connection is an obvious answer because so many businesses now depend on their Internet connection as either their means of doing business or as a productivity booster. T1 lines have advantages over consumer oriented services such as DSL and Cable broadband. T1 is a regulated telecommunications service that gets top attention in the event there is line trouble. These lines are so dependable, and need to be, that they are usually offered with a service level agreement. T1 lines are symmetrical. You get the same 1.5 Mbps bandwidth both for both upload and download. Since T1 is a dedicated service, meaning available for your exclusive use, there is no bandwidth sharing with other customers to restrict your line speed.

Here's a trick T1 lines do that you may not be aware of. Where 1.5 Mbps was once considered a lot of bandwidth, many companies are finding they really need higher speeds these days. T1 lines can be bonded together to create larger bandwidths. You order a second T1 line to double your bandwidth to 3 Mbps, three lines give you 4.5 Mbps and four lines give you 6 Mbps. You don't have to worry about making these connections. Your service provider takes care of it without any changes to your company LAN.

You can also go the other way. Perhaps you don't need even 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth but you really do need the performance and availability of a T1 line. Fractional T1 service might be right for you. This service is just what you think. You get a fraction of the full bandwidth for a lower monthly leasing cost.

T1 lines don't have to connect to the Internet. A private line or point to point connection can be ordered to connect two business locations. Since the line is direct and private, you don't have security issues that come from using a public network like the Internet. Security can also be managed by running encryption software that creates a VPN or Virtual Private network using public Internet connections.

T1 can be used for voice as well as data. In fact, the first application for T1 lines was by the telephone companies. They used them, and still do, to transport multiple telephone calls between their switching offices. You can order a channelized T1 line, also called a T1 telephone line or telephone trunk. This arrangement aggregates up to 24 separate telephone lines onto one T1 line. T1 phone lines are popular for PBX phone systems and call centers. A special form of channelized T1 line, called ISDN PRI or T1 PRI gives you up to 23 outside phone lines plus a data channel that provides Caller ID information and very fast switching times.

T1 lines can also do double duty when they connect you to a specialized service provider. An Integrated T1 service offers up to a dozen telephone lines plus broadband Internet access over a single T1 line. Usually whatever bandwidth isn't being used for telephone calls is automatically assigned to Internet access.

SIP Trunking uses T1 lines to carry both telephone and Internet service for companies that have switched to VoIP telephone systems and have IP PBX systems instead of the traditional PBX telephone system. This service extends your converged voice and data network to a service provider who terminates the calls to the public telephone system and provides your broadband Internet access.

Which type of T1 line service is right for you? It's likely that one or more of these services is a good match for your business needs. Using our GeoQuote (tm) search engine, you can check T1 options and prices in seconds. Go ahead. You may be surprised by how little you'll pay for the service you really need.

Contract Expiration Means Opportunity

Business telecom services are usually sold on 1, 2 or 3 year contracts with monthly leasing fees for the service. While the contract is in force, the price you pay is locked in. You don't have to worry about your rate going up every month, but then you don't have an opportunity for cost savings either. It's when your contract expires that opportunity exists.

So isn't the potential for rising rates more of a threat than whatever cost savings you might negotiate? No, it's just the opposite for most businesses. Your fear of getting stuck with regular percentage increases is really a function of your service provider having you over a barrel. Or at least thinking they do. Once you have other options, you'll be counting the days until you can get out from under that oppressive contract.

How can it be that there are better service options out there, when you thought you negotiated your best price two or three years ago? There are a couple of good reasons. First, did you really negotiate the best possible deal? Or did you work your local ISP or telco for a package that represented a savings over what you paid on the last contract? You may or may not have gotten the best rates they had available. How much they'll come down depends on the competitive situation. If they are the only provider or are going up against someone with obviously high prices, they only need to offer a modest savings to land the contract.

The way to get dramatically better deals is to change the competitive landscape. Are you aware that there are probably several and perhaps many competitive service providers that are not listed in the phone book? Yet, they provide telephone trunk lines, dedicated Internet service, fiber optic bandwidth, and wireless or satellite delivered services.

Many of these carriers will contract with your local phone company to get last-mile access via telco lines to your business. They may just least the copper connections but use them to provide advanced services such as Ethernet Wide Area Networks. Or they may construct their own fiber optic lines to your location if you are close to one of their Points of Presence. Satellite Internet connections for retail stores, gas stations, theaters and other businesses with multiple locations is available just about anywhere.

You could spend a lot of time researching alternative service options, but that's not necessary. Not since there is a service already available that does this for you with a team of experts and a lot of proprietary technology. What would you say if I told you that you can use this service for free and you'll get prices as good or better than if you negotiated with each carrier yourself?

I hope you are saying "I'll take that service." OK. Go ahead and use the online telecommunications service inquiry form we have available at T1 Rex. Or call the toll free number posted there. If you use the form, it will take only a couple of minutes and you'll see online search results for service and prices available at your location. These include T1 lines, DS3 line service, ISDN PRI telephone trunks, bonded T1 lines, and more. Other services, such as Metro Ethernet, OC3 and other fiber optic SONET services require a little more effort by the staff and don't show up immediately. Neither do special limited time offers, so it will be worth your while to have a chat with one of the expert consultants.

Once you have a printout with 3 to 30 competitive quotes for the voice or data services you need, you'll no longer have to fear contract expirations. You'll likely be looking forward to them. Some companies have even found savings so great that it makes sense to pay cancellation fees on their old contract because they can make it up quickly with the dramatically lower prices of their new contracts. That might not be your situation, but you'll never know until you try. Take a few minutes and check competitive voice and data service pricing now.

New Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Eyes SaaS and Video

Cisco Systems, Inc. is upping the ante on data center bandwidth with its new Nexus 7000 series of switching products due to ship later this year. The new benchmark is 15 Tbps (Terabits per second) in a single chassis. To put that in terms of bandwidths we experience every day, that's 15,000 Gbps. At that speed, you could suck the Internet dry in seconds. Well, at least the searchable databases you can access today. Don't get too overwhelmed by this benchmark, though. It's likely to become the rule rather than the exception before too long.

What's with the need for speed? The primary driver is the move from static data to video as a way to communicate. Long distance telephone service, the reason nationwide networks were developed in the first place, gets lost in the packet shuffle on high speed IP networks. Not that voice services don't need care and feeding to maintain their integrity on converged networks. It's just that a 64 Kbps VoIP stream is truly nothing compared with the flood of packets needed to support high definition video feeds.

Standard and high definition video, including telepresence, video conferencing, Web site video feeds, and real time creative content represents a shift in media. It's the same type of shift that took us from newspapers to radio to television. Video won't replace text, graphics and audio feeds. It will add to them. You can see this on many commercial Web sites now. You can either read a story or have the option to see a video interview.

Another trend driving data center bandwidth is SaaS or Software as a Service. SaaS replaces the model of buying and locally hosting software packages by instead accessing applications via the Web as needed. The advantage of this approach is that the IT department isn't constantly scrambling to install, deploy and maintain a myriad of software packages. The service provider takes care of all that. Server capacity requirements are traded off for bandwidth demands that add to network load. This is especially true for WAN bandwidth, the pipe that connects a company to the outside world. That Wide Area Network needs expanded capacity to handle the video streams and application access.

Cisco's Nexus 700 is designed to support up to 512 10 Gbps Ethernet connections, with future delivery of 40 and 100 Gbps Ethernet. As LANs speed up to 10 Gbps and higher speeds locally, nationwide and regional carriers are expanding their core networks toward 100 Gbps and greater fiber optic bandwidths.

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