Same Budget, More Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Is your network sluggish? Are slow file transfers, telephone calls breaking up, pauses in audio and video streaming, unpredictable delays in getting a response from cloud services, and slow web page loading getting on your nerves?

Is Bandwidth The Answer?
You may well need more bandwidth. You don’t necessarily need to increase the speed of your internal LAN. It’s more likely that your outside, or WAN, connection just isn’t getting the job done anymore.

How Can You Tell?
It’s a likely problem if you’ve had the same level of service for years, yet your business has grown or you’re using a higher percentage of multimedia content than you used to. Even a decade ago, T1 lines were standard for small and some medium size businesses. At that time consumer broadband speeds were also a few Mbps. Users were happy because email and Web pages were relatively small. Many business applications were things like credit card verification and after-hours inventory updates.

Look what’s happened recently. Emails are huge. Why? Because they often contain photos and other high resolution images. Web pages are more interactive and more visual that they’ve ever been. Many contain embedded video players.

The Cloud In The Room
This is nothing compared with the growth of the cloud. Cloud services offer near infinite capacity, ease of scaling up and down as needed, and no requirement for capital investments or maintenance activities. This has proven an irresistible combination for many businesses. What gets lost in all the excitement are the increased bandwidth requirements.

What’s happened is that all the traffic that used to flow effortlessly through your Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet Local Area Network now has to be transported up to the cloud and back down. All those packets have to go through a carrier network for hundreds or even thousands of miles. They have to do that with a minimal time delay and at a price you can afford.

Declining Cost per Mbps
Fortunately, WAN bandwidth services have gotten a lot more competitive, lower in cost and available in a wider variety of options during this same period of change. You may not be aware of it if you’ve simply kept renewing your old line contract or paying month to month since it expired. There’s an excellent chance that you can get the bandwidth you need today without having to jack up your budget… if you’re willing to look at alternatives.

New Quotes Needed
The first thing you need to do is get a fresh set of competitive quotes. By competitive, I mean pricing from as many carriers as possible that serve your location. In the heart of metropolitan business districts you’ll have lots of options. Farther out there will be fewer choices, but almost always two or more. This works to your advantage because the more competition there is, the lower the prices for the exact same service. A number of carriers may have entered your marketplace when you weren’t looking.

Expanded Options
You may also have more options for getting the same job done. For instance, Ethernet over Copper runs on the same wires as T1 service. It offers the same highly reliable dedicated and symmetrical bandwidth. But, Ethernet over Copper can give you twice or more bandwidth than the older T1 technology for the same cost. You may also be able to get higher bandwidth levels with the newer Ethernet services.

How About Fiber?
Impossible to get where you are located? Way too costly? Perhaps not anymore. Fiber buildups have quietly accelerated and carriers have expanded their service footprints around the country. Some of this is driven by the cell phone industry that needs fiber bandwidth to their towers to support 4G LTE. Other runs have been built by the Cable industry that needs much higher bandwidth to deliver digital video channels and video on demand.

The bottom line is that all these fiber operators have bandwidth to spare and they are in fierce competition to get buildings “lit” with their network. They want your business a lot more than they did some years ago. It’s not unusual to find several fiber optic services available where there were none the last time you looked.

New Fiber Options
Like copper-based bandwidth, fiber service is also available in two technologies. The legacy service is SONET, with bandwidth levels such as OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48. Ethernet over Fiber is the newer technology and offers highly scalable fiber services in a wide variety of bandwidth options from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps in most areas. Some locations can now get 100 Gbps if needed.

Just like Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber has a cost advantage over SONET. It’s not unusual to get twice and much bandwidth or more for the same cost as your old Optical Carrier contract.

How Much More Bandwidth Can You Get Now?
You may feel that you are limited in bandwidth by budget constraints. It’s possible, even likely, that the budget you have now can be worth 2x, 3x or more high performance business bandwidth in today’s market. Don’t wonder if this is the case. Find out now by checking out the range of bandwidth options and competitive pricing for copper and fiber services available at your business location.

Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber to Your Door

Big data, cloud services, medical images, video production and other bandwidth intensive applications are stretching the capacity of many traditional WAN services to point of congestion. That’s were bad things happen to good data. Frustration, productivity loss, delays in file delivery and unworkable telephony and video conferencing rear their ugly heads when there just isn’t enough bandwidth to go around. Fortunately, solutions are easier to come by than ever before.

The answer to big bandwidth demands is big bandwidth services. T1 lines were left in the dust years ago. Many companies thought that moving up to DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps would keep them in good stead for the foreseeable future. That future came sooner than foreseen. While Ethernet over Copper and fixed wireless can give you 50 or 100 Mbps of reliable symmetrical bandwidth, they’re also being left in the dust. What remains? Fiber optic WAN services in both SONET and Ethernet flavors.

SONET is the grandaddy of fiber optic bandwidth. It’s a standard developed by the telephone companies for transmitting or “trunking” large bundles of telephone calls between switching centers and overseas. Options begin at OC-3 with 155 Mbps. If that’s not enough, then OC-12 at 622 Mbps is the next step up. OC-24 offers 1.2 Gbps, but isn’t so widely available. You may be required to take OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps. In some cases, you’ll be able to contract for OC-192 at 10 Gbps or even OC-768 for 40 Gbps. Those are usually reserved for network operators themselves, but are now becoming more available to businesses.

So that solves the bandwidth dilemma, right? It would except for budget constraints. OCx SONET services have traditionally been pretty pricey. Those costs have plunged in recent years due to increased competition, but the need for bandwidth is expanding faster than corporate budgets. Fortunately, there is another alternative. That’s Ethernet over Fiber.

EoF, as it’s called for short, has some real advantages over traditional SONET optical carrier services. First of all, it’s Ethernet. Yes, the same Ethernet that runs on your local network but extended so that it can reach across town or even around the world. That makes interfacing easy and efficient. There’s also the cost factor.

Ethernet over Fiber typically costs a fraction of what you pay per Mbps for equivalent SONET bandwidth. A lot of this has to do with competition that has come into the market after deregulation of the phone companies. With SONET, you almost always have the local phone company involved in running the last mile connection. Ethernet has been adopted by newer competitive carriers who operate their own fiber networks, including owning the fiber. They can run a drop from their closest point of presence (POP) to your building and give you just about any bandwidth you require.

Not only are these carriers hungry for business, they have a much wider range of bandwidth options at their fingertips. Carrier Ethernet, as it is called, was designed from the get-go for ease of scalability. SONET has fixed bandwidth levels known generically as OCx. Each OC level has its own interface requirements and they don’t intermix. If you want to jump to the next level, the service provider will have to roll a truck and plug in a different module. They may also have some changes to make in their network to ensure they can deliver the contracted bandwidth.

Contrast that with Ethernet over Fiber. The interface to your equipment is called a “port”. A port has a maximum speed that it can run but no lower limit. You could install a 10 Mbps Ethernet port, but today’s practice is to install a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet port or a 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet port. With a GigE port, you can order, say, 200 Mbps now and know that you can ramp up to 500 Mbps or even 1000 Mbps with little more than a phone call. In fact, it takes just hours to a few days to increase your line speed. Compare that to traditional practice that can require weeks or months.

Installation is still a consideration. Many business locations are still not connected to any fiber optic carrier. That doesn’t mean they can’t be. Metro Ethernet Networks are expanding rapidly, especially in larger business districts. Even if you couldn’t get anything last year, you might have a couple of providers to pick from this year. You’ll almost certainly be served if your equipment is in a colocation center or you are renting cloud computing services. All of these data centers are served by multiple fiber optic bandwidth providers. That gives you the option of moving your demanding applications to where the bandwidth is readily available and then connecting back your facility with a lower but adequate speed service like Ethernet over Copper.

Another strategy is to get together with other tenants in your office building or park to woo a fiber carrier who might not otherwise think the investment is worth it. With multiple clients all ready to commit to fiber bandwidth, the combined capacity can lure service providers to run a drop to your facility where each customer can connect their equipment to the provider's edge router. You might even get a substantial break on construction costs or pay nothing at all if the commitment is high enough.

Are you interested in more bandwidth for your business? If so, check options and get free consultation on what’s available in high bandwidth fiber optic network services.

Metro Ethernet Networking Technology

Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) are well established as a way for businesses to transport their traffic within a given metropolitan area. Now the MAN is becoming the MEN, or Metro Ethernet Network. Let’s take a look at what this new technology has to offer.

Metropolitan or Metro Ethernet Networks are based on Carrier Ethernet standards established by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), and industry standards group. This ensures that you know what services you are getting and that you can directly compare these services from provider to provider.

Why bother with Metro Ethernet when the MAN connections you have now are working just fine? While these services are no doubt running reliably and getting the job done, you may be missing out on service options that could better meet your needs. You many also be paying more than you really have to.

The core networking technologies of Metro E networks could be pure IP networks or they may be Ethernet services running on top of legacy SONET fiber optic networks. That’s a perfectly legitimate technical approach. Protected SONET rings have a history of high reliability, low latency and considerable bandwidth. As a user, having to deal with SONET at the SONET level does limit your options compared with Carrier Ethernet. You can be better off with Ethernet over SONET or Ethernet over IP core networks.

SONET is a TDM or Time Division Multiplexing technology with all traffic loaded into neat little time slots lined up one right after the other. An ADM or Add/Drop Multiplexer handles getting specific traffic on and off the network. Your connection is by one of the standardized Optical Carrier levels, such as OC-3 (155 Mbps), OC-12 (622 Mbps), OC-24 (1.24 Gbps) or OC-48 (2.5 Gbps).

Carrier Ethernet is based on packets rather than time slots. Packets are distinguished by the information in their headers that are read by switches and routers. This is the same Ethernet than runs on your company LAN. That’s the first advantage of Metro Ethernet. It’s directly compatible with LAN Ethernet so there are no inefficiencies from protocol conversions between dissimilar networks.

The other obvious advantage is interfacing. Connections to Metro E is a conventional Ethernet connector. At lower bandwidths, including 10, 100 and even 1000 Mbps, a standard RJ-45 connector can suffice. Higher bandwidths have fiber optic connectors.

Carrier Ethernet is designed to be both highly and rapidly scalable. You can generally get far more bandwidth options than are available with SONET levels. They are also easy to scale up and down. What sets the limit on your bandwidth is the port speed that you connect through. If you have a 100 Mbps port, you can specify any bandwidth up to 100 Mbps. With a Gigabit Ethernet port, you can get any bandwidth up to 1,000 Mbps. Likewise a 10 Gig E port lets you scale to 10 Gbps. The GigE port is very popular for this reason. You can call up your provider and move up from 200 to 400 Mbps in a matter of hours or days. There is no need to change hardware interfacing as long as you are operating below the maximum port speed.

Metro Ethernet Networks can give you the same point to point connections that you are getting now or a multipoint service that operates as a LAN extension. E-Line is an Ethernet Line Service. E-LAN is an Ethernet LAN service. E-LAN can run at layer 2, letting you connect multiple metro locations together in one large bridged LAN. This is a popular service for companies with multiple offices, factories, warehouses, retail outlets and so on within a given metropolitan area.

Can Metro Ethernet networking technology work to your advantage? Get network options and pricing for Metro Ethernet services to compare with your current connection setup.



Note: Photo of city lights courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Wavelength Services vs Dark Fiber

Fiber optic services are popular for high bandwidth metro and long haul connections. They typically start about 100 Mbps and go on up to 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and occasionally 100 Gbps bandwidths. But what if you find that fiber optic bandwidth services are too restrictive for your needs? There are a couple of alternatives. One is leasing dark fiber routes and the other is wavelength services. Let’s see how they compare and why you might find one more attractive than the other.

Fiber optic bandwidth services are standardized, packaged services that offer either SONET or Ethernet connectivity from point to point. You may think of them as private line services, but chances are that you are not the only customer riding on the fiber strand. At lower bandwidths, such as OC3, you are probably being electrically multiplexed with other users to create a much larger bandwidth signal that is more cost effective to transport. If you are using a 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps service, you are still sharing the strand with other users but optically multiplexed using wavelengths.

One problem with these pre-packaged fiber optic services is that they generally limit you to a particular protocol and speed. If you change your mind, it can be time consuming and costly to change or upgrade your service. For this reason, some companies have decided to become their own bandwidth providers by leasing dark fiber and lighting it up with equipment they own. This gives you the ability to have multiple protocols running on the same fiber at whatever bandwidth makes sense. When you want something different, your own engineering staff reconfigures or changes out the equipment one each end. There’s no waiting around for carrier personnel because you are the carrier. The dark fiber is just an empty pipe, as the name implies.

The trick to having multiple protocols on one fiber is called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. It’s somewhat akin to the idea of electrical multiplexing in that many different signals can share the same transport mechanism. However, technically it is quite different. WDM uses multiple wavelengths or colors of laser light that are separate enough in frequency to be distinct. All of these colors, also called lambdas, exist in the infrared portion of the light spectrum that is seen as nearly transparent through glass fiber.

Think of WDM as shining a whole rainbow of laser beams down a fiber optic cable where they are detected separately at the other end. Each beam is independent of the others. One color doesn’t care that it is running Ethernet and the next color up is carrying SONET or ESCON. They don’t see each other and don’t interfere.

Since WDM is an established technology running on just about all carrier fiber optic networks, there is no reason why you can’t just lease an entire wavelength instead of a service running on that wavelength. That’s fairly easy to do these days because many networks have excess wavelength capacity available. You can have your own wavelength running a high bandwidth Ethernet service (10 GigE) or 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps SONET.

Why lease a wavelength instead of dark fiber? For one thing, you may not need the entire capacity of the fiber or all those wavelengths you can create yourself. There’s considerable capital cost in purchasing the WDM systems for each end of the fiber that you can avoid by just leasing the wavelengths you need by the month. Capital expense and network management then become the service provider’s problem.

Dark fiber may not be available for the entire route you have in mind or you may be planning to install your own fiber in a particular area. Until it is ready, you can make good use of existing capability by leasing wavelength services as long as needed.

Dark fiber, wavelength services, Gigabit Ethernet or OCx SONET. Which is right for your needs? Get comparative pricing and availability of fiber optic services now to do a good trade off analysis.



Note: Photo courtesy of Sandia National Labratories.

Gigabit Ethernet vs SONET

With the expansion of video content and moves to cloud services, business bandwidth now easily pushes the Gigabit per second level. This certainly means a move from copper to fiber optic services. But did you know that there are two types of fiber optic bandwidth to choose from? They are SONET and Gigabit Ethernet.

SONET is the original fiber protocol developed by the telephone companies to transport large numbers of simultaneous telephone calls between switching centers and internationally. SONET stands for Synchronous Optical NETwork. There is an international version of this protocol called SDH for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy. Together they are often referred to a SONET/SDH.

SONET’s origins go back to the initial development of digitized telephone conversations and the transmission of these a groups using trunks known as T1 lines. The larger T3 lines can carry the equivalent of 28 T1 lines or a data bandwidth of 45 Mbps. There are no faster copper telco standards. The next step up is OC-3 at 155 Mbps. That’s enough to transport 3 DS3 circuits and, indeed, the protocol is designed to easily multiplex and demultiplex lower level services. When you order a DS3 today, it will be transported most if not all of the way multiplexed into a OC service. A device called an ADM or Add-Drop Multiplexer gets the service on and off the optical network.

You’ve probably guessed that OC stands for Optical Carrier. There are a number of optical carrier levels that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.24 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.49 Gbps, OC-192 at 9.95 Gbps and OC-768 at 39.8 Gbps. When you hear about 10 Gbps SONET, it is an OC-192 service. The 40 Gbps that many carriers use for long haul transmission is OC-768.

What about intermediate rates? Not all levels between 1 and 768 are defined. Others, such as OC-9, OC-18, OC-36 and OC-96 are standardized but not generally offered in service.

SONET/SDH is set up in ring arrangements with two separate fiber strands for each ring. They are redundant circuits, so if one fails the other can pick up the load within 50 mSec.

Ethernet is a completely different protocol developed by the computer industry rather than the telephone companies. It is based on packets rather than telephone channels. Most LAN connected devices have a NIC or Network Interface Card that supports 10/100/1000 Ethernet. That means the device can run at 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps (1 Gbps). Corporate LANs may now run at 1 Gbps with some parts of the network using 10 Gbps or 10 GigE.

The equivalent of Ethernet in the LAN for local networks is Ethernet WAN or Wide Area Network. Switched Ethernet used for WAN applications is also called Carrier Ethernet. If the service is local to a particular city or metro area, it is often called Metro Ethernet or Metropolitan Ethernet and the network is referred to as a MAN or Metro Area Network.

Like telco services, Ethernet may be delivered over copper or fiber. Twisted pair copper telephone line can be used up to 100 Mbps. That speed is also available over coaxial copper cable through Cable systems. Beyond that, fiber optic connections can deliver 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps for business applications.

Ethernet is designed to be far more scalable than SONET. Instead of ordering a particular service level, such as OC-24, you order an Ethernet port capable of handling a maximum speed, say 1 Gbps. With the port in place, you can pay for Gigabit Ethernet if you need that much, or you can order 250 Mbps or 500 Mbps Ethernet and upgrade quickly and easily when the need arises.

Which fiber optic service should you order? In general, Ethernet is less expensive per Mbps than SONET. Sometimes the price savings can be dramatic. The one sticking point is that you need to have the service installed in your building. You may have one or the other services now or nothing at all. The cost of construction to bring in the right fiber from the right carrier can outweigh the monthly lease costs. You should know, though, that Ethernet can often be carried on SONET and that competitive carriers are hungry to get new buildings on their networks. These factors can affect the availability and pricing of fiber optic services to your building.

Fiber optic build-outs are progressing rapidly and the demand for high speed bandwidth increases. Even if you went out for bids a year ago, the situation may have changed for the better since then. The best thing to do is get new prices and availability for fiber optic bandwidth services for your particular business location.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

More Mbps, Less Money

The need for more and more business bandwidth is bumping up against the need for larger and larger cost savings. On the surface, it would seem an impossible situation. But look closer and there may be a way to meet both network performance and budgetary constraints.

There are really two approaches to optimizing bandwidth economics with little or no up-front investment. Both work and they are not mutually exclusive.

The first is strictly competitive. Telecommunication line contracts are based on monthly lease commitments for 1, 2 or 3 years. During the course of the contract term, the competitive landscape can change dramatically. What cost $1,000 a few years ago might be had for $500 or less today. That scales all the way from T1 voice and data lines up to optical carrier services. Can you save 25 to 50% or more by simply switching vendors? It's done everyday. The most dramatic savings are seen in areas that have only recently seen competitive carriers move in or in situations where contracts have been automatically renewed over and over with little or no price negotiation.

The second approach is to switch technologies. That may seem like a daunting prospect. After all, you've spend a lot of time stabilizing your network. The last thing you need is to throw some technical incompatibility into the mix.

But transport technologies are more compatible than you might think. Most network traffic today is based on packets. Ethernet packets to be precise. Older metropolitan and long haul networks were developed around telephone technology and based on digitized voice channels. There's no reason that a T1 or OC3 connection can't transport packets instead of voice streams. You've been able to get T1 and SONET data lines for years. To make this work, there is circuitry that performs a protocol conversion so that packet data can be sent as collections of bits the right size for the line technology and then reassembled at the other end.

All of this conversion from one network protocol to another happens transparently and so fast that you are unaware of it as a user. You know that you have a dedicated connection to the Internet or a private data pipe from point to point. How it all works is unimportant. Or is it?

A network designed from the ground up to be compatible with the core protocol that you are running is bound to have less overhead and be more efficient. That's the idea behind IP core networks and Carrier Ethernet. Competitive carriers without a legacy investment in telephony networks have been building out all-new IP networks serving regional areas and even the entire country. This is where you'll find Ethernet services for metro and long haul applications.

But does switching to Ethernet from TDM technologies like T1, DS3 and OCx really save anything. In many cases, yes. No, you won't be able to get a 10 Mbps Ethernet service for the same price as a traditional T1 line, but the cost per Mbps might be 1/3. It gets even more dramatic when you move up to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. Depending on your location, Fast Ethernet even get you twice the bandwidth for less money overall than a standard DS3 service.

A third approach is to add hardware based bandwidth optimization to squeeze the most out of the lines you have. This is more of a trade-off arrangement versus an outright cost savings. There's a cost for the WAN optimization appliances that needs to be offset by the costs avoided by not upgrading to faster connections. If you are in a situation where it would be really expensive to move up the next bandwidth increment due to limited service choices, bandwidth optimization can buy you the breathing room you need for your business activities.