10 Mbps Ethernet T1 Line Replacement

By: John Shepler

Early in your business, you needed a robust connection as things were just ramping up on the Internet. Dial-up was too annoying. DSL was too flakey. SONET fiber was just way too expensive and had bandwidth you’d never need. T1 was the right solution at the right time. Always on. Always reliable. Low latency, low jitter and low packet loss. That 1.5 Mbps bandwidth may or may not still be getting the job done, but like all good things, T1 is coming to an end. What to do now?

It Still Works. Why Get Rid of It?
T1 lines were based on telephone lines. That is, twisted pair copper wires. That was the genius of the design. The phone companies could install T1 service using the same wiring they already had in place for multi-line business phones. Just about any business could get T1 and many, many did over the decades.

So, why not stick with a winner? Two reasons, really. First, the Internet today isn’t the nascent Internet of the ’90s. E-commerce is pretty much universal. Nearly every business has a website and most take online orders. A lot of businesses are online only. Those that aren’t still need to be connected for credit card verification, inventory control, supplies ordering and customer interaction. High definition graphics and video have supplemented email and text files that dominated early Internet use. A T1 line’s 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is getting to be a limitation for even small business operations.

The other reason is that copper telco lines are something like incandescent light bulbs. They’ve served us well for more than a century, but it’s time for new technology to take over. Phone companies own the copper lines in the ground and on poles. The costs of maintenance are getting too high considering the dwindling number of users. More and more areas of the country are seeing phone company notices that copper service is being discontinued. The replacement is generally fiber optic or, in some cases, wireless broadband.

A Sensible Replacement for T1 Internet
If you need a bandwidth upgrade or find yourself being cut-off from T1 service, you might be interested in an entry-level fiber optic bandwidth service called 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. What you get is 10 Mbps always on bandwidth versus the T1 line limit of 1.5 Mbps. It is also dedicated to your business only, so that you are not sharing this capacity with other companies. That means your speed won’t be varying depending on what others are doing. This is Carrier Ethernet service that is directly compatible with your Local Area Network. Just plug it into your router and go.

Oh, but how much more will you pay for this faster service? Thanks to extensive buildouts and more competition in fiber networks you may not pay any more for 10 Mbps Ethernet DIA than the old T1 contract you’ve kept renewing. Maybe even less.

Fiber Optic Ethernet is Easily Upgradeable
Once you have fiber installed, you should be good to go for the foreseeable future. That’s because the fiber itself has nearly unlimited bandwidth. What you are using is determined by the terminal equipment installed in your business and how much you want to pay each month. You may start off with 10 Mbps but then find you really need 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps to support your expanding business. These days Gigabit Ethernet is standard for many companies and more are bringing in 10 Gigabit service. In rare instances with unusually high Internet demand even 100 Gbps makes sense.

Typically the provider will install a GigE or 10 GigE port for your service. You can then order up to 1 Gigabit with the GigE port or 10 Gigabits with the 10 GigE port. Many providers will give you an online account that lets you change your bandwidth at will. You’ll automatically get billed for the higher rate when you upgrade. Unlike the old SONET days, upgrading bandwidth won’t generally require a truck roll and change of terminal equipment at your site. You can make the speed increase yourself almost instantly.

Private Lines Also
Ethernet over Fiber offers private lines as well as Internet access. A private line connects two locations directly and does not use the Internet. That means you are unaffected by Internet congestion or other Internet problems. Many businesses are choosing to host their business software in the cloud rather than run their own data centers on-site. A dedicated private line from your location to your cloud service provider, called a direct connection, helps to make the system run smoothly without lags and cutouts.

Are you ready for or in-need of a replacement for your aging T1 Internet line? If so, check competitive pricing on 10 Mbps and higher Ethernet over Fiber service now.

How The Cloud Is Making Obsolescence Obsolete

Managing technology is a lot like trying to swim upstream. Stop for even a breather and you start getting dragged backwards. Wait too long and you look up to see all your competitors way upstream while you’re moving downstream toward the waterfall.

This is the thing about technology. It’s moving like that stream. As soon as you buy any device or any system, it is already going obsolete. The longer you use it as-is, the farther out of date it gets. At some point you find that what you have is no longer being supported or that it only partially works anymore. Oh, the hardware is just as good as the day you bought it. The problem is that you can’t access the latest resources or that your perfectly functional hardware platform hasn’t got the horsepower to use the most up to date software.

We’ve went through this for a generation with the PC. Every few months, the next model came out with more RAM and a faster processor. Everybody talked about how many Mbps and then Gbps their CPU clocked. My first PC was an 8-bitter that could only address 64 KB of RAM. Wow, did I feel powerful when I got all the memory sockets loaded with that much memory. That euphoria lasted until the 16 bit machines hit the market and raised the bar from KB to MB. Now, memory is in GB and disk storage is in TB and processor speeds have flattened out around 2 Gbps, with more processors on-board to increase throughput.

Have you noticed that things have slowed down a bit in the PC wars? The machine you buy this year isn’t necessarily going to have 5x or 10x the number of cores as last year’s machine. You won’t be moving up from 2 GB to 10GB or 100GB of RAM any time soon. Anybody entertaining the necessity of a 10 or 100 TB hard drive on their desktop?

What’s happening is that the battle is moving to another front. PCs, tablets, smartphones, and laptops & notebooks are at the point where they can support what you need to do with a shift in the model of how its done. Software is on the way out, apps are on the way in. Overreaching all of this is doing everything remotely in the cloud.

Shifting the center of activity from the PC or other device to the cloud doesn’t reduce the computing or storage requirements. It just shifts them to a central point where they are easier to provision and maintain. Your local computing device becomes a computing device in name only. The bulk of the work is being done elsewhere. You simply need the resources to properly display and interact with the system in the cloud.

The battle that is going on right now is the battle for bandwidth. Connectivity is the new choke point. Whatever near-infinite capacity the cloud has doesn’t do you any good if you can’t get to it. Your Internet, SIP trunk or dedicated line service has to have the capacity to become transparent in the process. As long as you can perceive a latency or congestion in the path to the cloud, everything will run no faster than this weakest link.

Bandwidth, particularly mobile bandwidth, is what has cloud services stymied and both carriers and the FCC in a near-panic. It is starting to dawn on individuals and companies alike that the cloud is the place to compute everything, store everything, access everything, and even do functions like telephone switching. If the cloud service provider takes care of maintenance, updates and provisioning capacity, you can get out of the business of technology management. No more worrying about upgrades, patches or adding hardware resources. It’s all being handled invisibly behind the scenes in the cloud. Now, if only we could get to the cloud.

The wireless bandwidth issue is going to be on a steep learning curve for a long time. The near term solution will be a mass migration to LTE and its advanced versions. It’s going to be years before everybody has enough bandwidth available that they stop fretting over how much bandwidth they have available. Carriers will bring fiber to the cell towers as fast as they can get it installed. The FCC will divert bandwidth to the wireless industry as fast as they can pry it loose from other services, even if that means paying license holders to sell their claims for auction.

For many businesses, the connectivity issue isn’t that dire. Bonded T1, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber and SONET fiber optical services are more available than ever and much lower in cost per Mbps than only a few years ago. If you are eyeing the cloud with the thought that you’d be better off with hosted services than trying to keep up with managing all the technology yourself, you’ll be happy to know that getting there is a lot easier and less expensive than you might expect.

Clod Computing Challenges The Cloud

Cloud computing is making a name for itself by challenging the cost of running traditional corporate data centers. But just as the cloud is reaching critical mass, a new challenger appears with an even lower cost model. They call it clod computing.

Just what is the “clod” and why is it cheaper? The business model is based on reducing infrastructure cost by getting computing resources for free. As explained by startup vendor Chip-On-A-Shingle, “A clod is simply a cluster of unwanted computers and peripherals all hooked together to create some really awesome processing.”

It’s true that there is a surplus of computers headed for landfills simply because they are no longer the new shiny thing. Most computers go to their graves perfectly functional. They’ve simply gotten too slow due to lack of memory or processing power to keep up with the latest software applications. Some are tossed for simple ugliness as UV exposure turns their once cream colored cases a nasty shade of orange.

“What gave me the idea,” said J. Unkmann, a pioneer in the new technology of OaaP (Obsolescence as a Platform), “was when I saw all these computers sitting out by the curb on trash day. It seemed like every other house had a tower or a monitor. They didn’t even bother putting them in the recycling bins. I got to thinking about all that processing power going to waste and decided to pick up a few and see what I could do with them.”

Unkmann’s breakthrough was in networking dozens, then hundreds, of old computer CPUs and selling the processing capability as a service. As he points out, “Any old 486 may not have much throughput, but when you have hundreds or thousands of cores you’ve got yourself a super-computer. I don’t dare take my array out of the country. The government has laws against exporting this advanced technology.”

Instead, Unkmann and a legion of similar visionaries are offering their services to anyone from caffeinated gamers to corporate IT departments. Unkmann’s below-ground data center has wooden racks filled from floor to ceiling with everything from old IBM PCs to brightly colored iMacs. The primary cost of the operation is electricity. “Heat could also be a problem, he remarked, but we live up North so it’s cold most of the time. Security isn’t much of a issue, either. Mom’s got a mean dog upstairs and the storm cellar door has been rusted shut for years.”

In addition to processor cycles, Chip-On-A-Shingle offers scalable storage as a service. “You can see how extensive our disk array is,” noted Unkmann pointing at a shelf stacked high with hard drives. “Some of these are only 40 GB or so, but people are throwing out computers with 250 GB drives these days. Just call up and tell me how many you want and I’ll plug ‘em in.”

Costs for clod computing are running considerably lower than those quoted by well known cloud service providers. J. Unkmann has flexible financing available that includes anything from PayPal contributions to bartering arrangements. “I’m most interested in PoD (Pizza on Demand),” he commented.

Connectivity arrangement are flexible, too. “We can wire up just about anything you want. Dial-up works just fine if you are on a tight budget. I’ve got maybe a thousand modem cards in a box over there. We can also go wireless. Just send me a time card for my prepaid phone.”

Major carriers and cloud service providers have been loath to embrace clod computing so far. But as the recession drags on, breakthrough ideas such as this may come to fill a very low end niche in the marketplace, until the economy picks up... hopefully by next April 1.