Your 50 Mbps WAN Bandwidth Options

By: John Shepler

The 50 Mbps bandwidth level has become very popular lately because of business requirements for cloud services, remote data center access, big data files, ecommerce, high resolution image transfer and video content distribution. You should know that there are several options to acquire 50 Mbps bandwidth connectivity. Let’s take a look at the advantages and limitations of each.


DS3 & T3
The classic telecom service at this level is DS3, also known as T3. It was developed by the telephone companies to transport large numbers of simultaneous calls between switching centers. DS3 actually runs at 45, not 50 Mbps, but this is close enough for many applications. DS3 is a time synchronous channel technology, not packet based. Therefore you need a DS3 interface module for your router. You may also acquire a managed router provided by your service provider to take care of this protocol conversion.

Copper / Fiber Hybrid
DS3 is actually a hybrid fiber & copper technology. It is delivered to the curb over fiber optic cable and then connected to your equipment using coaxial cables for transmit and receive. The same fiber optic cables that pass your location can also deliver true fiber bandwidth at the OC3 level. In fact DS3 likely rides as one signal on an OC3 carrier.

OC3 Fiber Optic
If you want the entire OC3 service, it runs at 155 Mbps, the equivalent of 3 DS3’s plus overhead. Some carriers will install OC3 but rate limit the bandwidth to 45 or 50 Mbps. If you don’t need more bandwidth than this, there are some cost savings involved. You may also have the option to upgrade to the full OC3 capability when you need it.

Carrier Ethernet
The new competitor to OC3 is Carrier Ethernet. This is an extension of the Ethernet that runs on your company network but scaled up for long distance transmission. The interface with your equipment is easy. You simply plug into an Ethernet connector installed by the service provider. Carrier Ethernet can be provided over twisted pair copper telco wiring or fiber optic cable. While it is possible to transmit 50 Mbps Ethernet over copper for limited distances, it is far more likely that you’ll have this service delivered over fiber.

DS3, OC3 & Ethernet Compared
Let’s compare DS3, OC3 and Ethernet over Fiber. All three will give you 45 to 50 Mbps in dedicated, symmetrical bandwidth. All three are highly reliable and come with service level agreements. DS3 and OC3 have been around longer and may be easier to find. Carrier Ethernet is newer, but where available it often has a significant cost advantage. It is also easier to scale Ethernet bandwidth up and down as you need to. Popular Ethernet bandwidths range from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps, with 50 and 100 Mbps now commonly used in business.

The Cable Broadband Alternative
An alternative service called D3 or DOCSIS 3 is provided by cable companies. This is the same technology now used for residential cable broadband. The business version runs on the same cable but has options like static IP addresses and higher priority customer service. The advantage of D3 is that you get a lot of bandwidth for the money. For half what you’d pay for DS3 or Ethernet, you can get 50 Mbps business cable broadband. However this isn’t the same type of bandwidth. The total bandwidth on the cable is shared among many users, so your line speed will constantly vary. It is also asymmetrical, meaning that your download speed may be 50 Mbps, but your upload speed may be limited to 5 Mbps or so. This isn’t a problem for email or Web access, but may not work for other applications. Also, this service is provided on a “best effort” basis with no service level agreements. Availability of this service is limited to locations near the main cable run.

How to Choose?
Which type of bandwidth will work best for your business needs? Get advice and fast quotes on 50 Mbps WAN bandwidth or service from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps and higher, please call toll free (888) 848-8749 or enter your inquiry.

Cloud IT Online Backup For Business

Backups in the cloud are becoming popular for personal files. Some of this is for protection against losing important photos and other files in case of accidental erasure or hard drive failure. Even more attractive is the ideal of keeping everything in the cloud so it can be accessed anywhere from any device. How about for business? Are cloud IT online backup services worthwhile for business users?

Independent professionals, such as consultants and sales people, may easily get by with something like Apple’s iCloud or other backup and storage services targeted to consumers. Businesses with multiple employees and perhaps multiple locations may do better with cloud services designed specifically for businesses. This is especially true if they are part of a managed solution that includes other IT services.

There are two approaches to cloud based file backup. One is to use the cloud as a separate repository for maintaining copies of important business files. The other is to take advantage of the inherent self-healing properties of the cloud itself.

“Cloud” is a moniker that is slapped onto just about any remote data center facility. The cloud is somewhere, out there. It may be as simple as a rack full of disk drives that you write to remotely. The real cloud model, though, is based on virtualization. A virtualized environment separates functionality from specific hardware. All the hardware is pooled and allotted on an as-needed basis. Cloud providers ensure that there is sufficient real hardware to not only meet any anticipated needs, but also to handle any equipment failures. If something should go awry, it is the cloud system’s job to make equipment reassignments invisible to the user.

This argues for running everything in the cloud. If your servers, storage and applications are all run out of the cloud, you don’t have to worry about how you are going to run backups. That’s all taken care of automatically. You also have access to the cloud anywhere you have connectivity. With a virtualized desktop you can even use various devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones, from office or field locations to get files and run applications.

A good example of such cloud solutions is the service provided by NewCloud Networks. One of the options you can specify is to have every file you upload to your cloud server mirrored 1:1 elsewhere in the cloud. If the hardware fails, your data is still available right there in the cloud. No need to upload everything again. You can also specify snapshot backups of your entire server and automatic hourly, daily, weekly or monthly backups.

Their virtual servers have self-healing architectures. If any node fails, cloud servers running resources on that node will be re-provisioned to alternative hardware automatically. Failover can be engineered to be instantaneous for applications with critical requirements.

The virtualized environment is all contained within a SAS-70 Data center with 100 Gbps on connectivity provided by four separate fiber strands from two different providers. Two power feeds come in from two separate entrances. There are multiple air conditioning units, redundant power supplies on each physical server, redundant routing and switching and backup power from UPS battery backup and redundant diesel generators.

The alternative approach is to keep all of your IT assets local and use the cloud for backups and disaster recovery. This has the advantage of causing the least upset in your current way of doing business while offering the protection of offsite backup to prevent data loss from local fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and the like.

Perhaps the biggest limitation to simple remote backup and recovery is the capacity of the link to your service provider. This is no problem for individual file access but can be a bottleneck for recovery operations. Electronic data today piles up in Gigabytes and Terabytes. Larger organizations can be generating this much data per employee. It may all be safely stored as created and modified, but how long will it take to get back. If all you have for connectivity is a T1 line, it’s going to be a long, long time. Even with faster Ethernet over Copper or fiber optic services, you could be in for a long download process to restore everything after a major disaster. For servers in the cloud, backup data is right next door and can be accessed immediately.

What works best for your business? File backup to the cloud or computing and storage within the cloud? Compare cloud IT online backup services for business to find the optimum price/performance solution for your company.