Copper Decommissioning Expands Demand for Metro Ethernet

By: John Shepler

If you are still getting by with last mile Internet over DSL, T1 lines, or Ethernet over Copper, you should take a serious look at Metro Ethernet over Fiber. You’ll get more bandwidth, better pricing and… it will continue to be available.

Copper Decommissioning is Now
Copper based telecom services have been the go-to technology for the last century, but not this century. The ubiquitous twisted pair telephone line has supported our needs from the introduction of the telephone through the fevered growth of the commercial Internet. But, like cellphones the size of a brick, the technology has run its course. Copper just can’t keep up with today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

The phone companies know this. The network operators know this. They are well aware that we are way past “peak copper”. As you read this, copper lines nationwide are being retired or “decommissioned”. In some cases the copper is physically ripped out of conduits so that fiber optic cables can be pulled right back in. In other cases the copper bundles in the ground are simply disconnected and left to rust away on their own. In the coming years there will be fewer and fewer copper options available to order, until a copper wireline is as rare as a cranked telephone set.

Fiber is the Future AND the Present
The replacements for copper telco right now are Cable in the form of hybrid fiber/copper systems, Fixed Wireless Access, and Fiber Optic bandwidth. Fiber in cities is also called Metro Fiber or Metro Ethernet. Most urban, suburban and even small town businesses now have access to Metro Ethernet and its flexible options.

Fiber is your most flexible option for several reasons. First, fiber optic strands offer extremely high bandwidths, to 10 Gbps or more. With wavelength division multiplexing, you might get a dozen or more 10 Gbps lambdas, each a virtual fiber in itself. Now, consider that nearly all fiber cables have multiple strands, even dozens, and you can see how fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited. Once installed, that fiber will likely last as long as you need.

Second, fiber, unlike cable or most wireless, can provide exclusive dedicated line services. You can order private point to point connections and have all of the bandwidth available for your traffic. Compare that to the consumer-oriented broadband services that share bandwidth among many users to keep the cost down. With dedicated Internet access or private point to point lines, you won’t be competing with everybody else for limited resources at high traffic times. This can be especially valuable in connecting your network to a distant cloud provider that hosts business critical applications.

In addition to massive available bandwidth, fiber service is also very scalable. You can typically start off as low as 10 Mbps at pricing comparable with a current T1 line, but with over 6x the bandwidth. Many smaller businesses find that 100 Mbps is plenty, but Gigabit bandwidth is easy to come by and very affordable. If your applications demand it or your workforce is substantial, 10 Gbps is easily available on fiber. Even 100 Gbps is now being offered to larger companies and hospital complexes, content developers, etc.

Why Ethernet over Fiber
The earlier implementations of fiber optic service were based on a telephone company standard called SONET that offered fixed bandwidth levels and was designed for voice calls, not data. While protocol conversion circuitry made SONET the backbone of the Internet, Carrier Ethernet is now the standard to be embraced. This is the same switched Ethernet that runs on your local network, but extended to transport packets over hundreds or thousands of miles.

Metro Ethernet uses the Carrier Ethernet standard running over fiber optic cabling. This makes it virtually plug-and-play with your network. You can even set it up so that your business locations all over the state or country act like they are on one big network. Metro Fiber Ethernet is the new standard for business connections. Network connections within the metro area are often referred to as MAN or Metropolitan Area Network, while those more distant are referred to as WAN or Wide Area Network.

Are you ready to replace aging T1, DS3, DSL or other network services with something more modern that is future-proof and likely less expensive? Check your Metro Fiber Ethernet options for one or more business locations now.

We’re Headed Toward Universal Elasticity as a Service

By: John Shepler

We’ve all suffered the frustration of visiting a web site that normally works great, only to find it is slow or completely stalled. Perhaps you are trying to finish a project at 5 PM on a Friday and your cloud service has slowed to a crawl. Maybe the video you are watching just buffers over and over, raising your blood pressure to an unacceptable level. Why doesn’t this stuff just work?

Resource Starvation
Anytime systems that normally run without hesitation get bogged down, it’s caused by some type of failure or being starved for resources. On rare instances there is a hardware failure. More likely the failure is the software gone wandering down some unpredictable path or stuck in a loop. Even more likely you are experiencing resource starvation.

You are starved of resources when you need more of something than is available at the moment. This can be compute cycles, RAM memory, disk space or bandwidth. If the problem is caused by a sudden demand for more service than usual, you might be starved for all of these.

How can this happen? Imagine a e-commerce web site that is sized to handle the usual number of shoppers, plus some margin for peak shopping times. A major TV network presents a story on a product that has become popular on social networks. All of a sudden, it seems like everybody on Earth is searching for this item and many are finding your site. Traffic? Through the roof! Sales? Not so many more. You’ve been skunked by resource starvation.

But My Services Are Scalable!
Sure they are. All you have to do is hope someone has detected the surge in activity. They notify someone else in charge, who analyzes the situation and takes action to provision more resources. In most operations this is done by changing settings on a control panel or making a phone call to the service provider. After some minutes or hours, the traffic congestion has been relieved and everybody who still wants to place an order can easily do so. But… how many buyers have given up or found another seller?

The other weakness of scalability is that you may wind up paying a premium for unneeded capacity after the surge in traffic has passed. It takes a keen eye to match resources with need to minimize the cost of your computing and network services.

Elasticity Acts Faster Than Scalability
Think of elasticity as the automation of scalability. Elastic resources are those that automatically adjust for need without human intervention. Yes, the robots have come for our jobs and, in this case, they are welcome to this maddening task.

Elastic cloud computing allows the cloud to assign you virtual servers and storage as needed. You really couldn’t do this back in the day when your own servers had to be ordered, shipped, installed in racks and connected to the rest of the infrastructure. Oh, that’s still the way it is done. It’s just invisible to you. Now the cloud company takes care of installing dozens or hundreds of physical servers at a time. The hypervisor software slices and dices them into virtual machines that can be assigned to any user at any time, faster than you can ask for them.

Another beauty of elastic computing is that resources can be deleted as fast as they are added. With the system automatically monitoring the traffic demand, this means you only have what you need at any point in time. It also means that you only pay for what you are using as you use it. A good cloud service will appear to be an infinite well of resources that you can check out and turn back as required.

Elastic Bandwidth Completes the System
It doesn’t do any good to have a supercomputer in the back room if all you’ve got is a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps to access it. What you really need to complement your elastic computing is elastic bandwidth as well. Software control and billing is making this a realistic prospect. You cloud provider may have many Tbps or Pbps of fiber bandwidth connected directly to the core of the Internet. You don’t have to pay for all of it. You can be billed by the average bandwidth that your computing resources need per hour.

Software Defined Networks now make it possible to virtualize bandwidth the way clouds virtualized servers. This capability will optimize the use of of bandwidth in the connections to your company locations. With elasticity, your lines won’t get congested nor cost your a fortune for idle capacity.

MPLS Networks with bursting capability have offered a form of this elasticity for years. You pay for a certain throughput, but are allowed to automatically increase your traffic for short periods of time.

Rapid scalability is now typical of fiber optic Internet and point to point bandwidth service. Soon, elasticity will become the norm and we’ll forget the days when you were never quite sure if you ordered enough bandwidth or way too much.

10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps Internet Upgrades

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling stymied by your company’s low Internet speeds? It’s to be expected. Today’s online applications are far more demanding than the static websites and text based email that were the norm when you got your first T1 line. Today, 10 Mbps can be considered entry level for most businesses. Demands for 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps are entirely reasonable. So, what’s the best way to upgrade?

Movin’ On Up
You can sometimes get away with incrementally increasing your bandwidth as needs grow slowly. Bonded T1 lines can give you 3 to 12 Mbps in 1.5 Mbps steps. You need to order all your lines from the same provider and there will be equipment changes every time you want to step up. Even so, this can be the best option in rural areas where there isn’t much service available.

A competing approach is to order Ethernet over Copper rather than T1. It’s available in most metro areas, although not so much beyond the city limits. EoC can give you higher bandwidth levels, 3 to 20 Mbps, at lower cost than bonded T1 solutions. It’s distance sensitive, so the closer you are to the office supplying your service, the higher your bandwidth.

The best option today is looking more and more like Ethernet over Fiber. Yes, fiber optic service used to be rarely found and very expensive. The legacy SONET fiber services still are pricey, although they’ve come down dramatically in recent years. Ethernet over Fiber is a newer approach that offers a number of advantages for business users.

What Ethernet over FIber Offers
Ethernet over FIber (EoF) is pretty much like it sounds. It uses the same Ethernet protocol that runs on your company LAN, but adds some features that make it suitable for telecom carrier use. You’ll also hear it called Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet. This is currently a metropolitan service. There isn’t much fiber in the boonies, although more is being installed all the time to boost the capability of cellular towers.

Because it’s Ethernet, EoF is easy to connect to your network. Your handoff from the service provider is a fiber or copper Ethernet connection. Plug it into your edge router and you’re in business

Ethernet over Fiber was designed to be highly scalable. That means upgrades are very easy and probably don’t need equipment changes. Compare that to legacy services that always required the carrier to swap out termination equipment and often took weeks and months to complete. With EoF, you make a phone call and your speed will be increased in a matter of hours or days. The latest offerings let your make changes on-demand. You can increase or decrease your bandwidth right from your computer.

How about bandwidth?
Ethernet over Fiber typically starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps or more. Popular speeds mirror the standard Ethernet LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 1000 Mbps. Actually, you can get many increments in-between these standards. If you like, start off at 10 Mbps and then upgrade to 20 or 30 Mbps and eventually move on up to 100 Mbps or more.

The one consideration that makes this easy is the port speed you install. That the speed of the connection to the provider’s equipment. You’ll want at least a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet connection to provide 10 to 100 Mbps. If you expect to go into the hundreds of Mbps, you’ll want at least a Gigabit Ethernet port. Want more than 1 Gbps? Get a 10 Gbps port installed initially so you won’t need equipment changes from running out of port speed.

The Pleasant Cost Surprise
Many traditional and new carriers are now offering Ethernet over Fiber, since it has become so popular. This makes for a highly competitive marketplace and that’s great for you as a buyer. EoF pricing is far more attractive per Mbps than bonded T1, DS3 (T3), or any of the SONET (OC-3, OC-12, OC-48) services. You can easily find yourself paying half or less than you would with other telecom services. You retain highly reliable service with low latency, jitter and packet loss.

Does this sound like just the business Internet access you need now? Check out prices and available of Ethernet over Fiber bandwidth options for your business location now.

How to Find GigE Connections For Your Business

By: John Shepler

Gigabit Ethernet, or GigE, is becoming the bandwidth connection of choice for many businesses and other organizations. So, how do you find bandwidth services at this level and how can you be sure you’re getting the best deal? Let’s take a look.


Business Quality High Bandwidth
Professional grade GigE services are offered by incumbent and competitive telecommunications carriers. These are high quality fiber optic lines with dedicated symmetrical bandwidth that is low in latency, jitter and packet loss. They generally come with SLAs or Service Level Agreements that guarantee performance.

Legacy SONET Services
Not ALL telecom carriers offer GigE. Some still operate only legacy SONET fiber optic services that are higher in price and less scalable. These include OC-3, OC-12, and OC-48.

Carrier Ethernet Options
Most of the legacy carriers and newer startups with their own fiber optic networks now offer what is known as Carrier Ethernet. This is network Ethernet that has been extended for long haul connections. Typical bandwidth levels are 10 Mbps Standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, and 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet, called GigE for short.

Ethernet Scalability
You should know that Carrier Ethernet services are very flexible and that you can order nearly any bandwidth you need, with the option to easily upgrade later.

Where Do You Find GigE?
Finding GigE connections can be a challenge if you aren’t involved in doing so frequently. Prices are constantly in flux and generally headed downward. New service providers show up without notice and may offer deals that disrupt the traditional marketplace. How do you know that you’ve found everything available to you?

GeoQuote Makes It Easy
The easiest and most comprehensive approach is to use an automated online tool from a major telecom agency, such as Telarus. Their GeoQuote is patented software that goes out and gathers pricing information from dozens of carriers and presents a comprehensive list of those available for your location. All you do is provide some basic information that the system needs to run the search. Then push the button and wait for the results.

How long does It take?
Usually a minute or so. Sometimes the system needs a few minutes to gather a large range of options. You’ll soon see a table with the appropriate services, including GigE bandwidth, on your browser.

Support Readily Available
You have the option to contact a Telarus product specialist with a toll free call or online inquiry… or have then call you at a convenient time. These agents can help you do the tradeoffs among options, and they have access to limited time special offers that may not show up in the automated system. There is no obligation for this free service.

Discover Your Options Now
Would you like to find out what GigE services are available in your area and what they cost? We have a form at Telexplainer.net that lets you access the GeoQuote system. You may also call toll free (888) 848-8749 for assistance and discussion with an expert agent.

What’s to Become of Data Centers?

Both large scale colocation centers and traditional in-house company data centers are being challenged by cost and technology. Here’s a quick graphical look at what’s going on right now in this infographic courtesy of David Vellante on Wikibon:


Your Data Center Options
Are you thinking that it may not make sense to invest in a new data center or continue running the one you have now? There are a wide range of options available from colocation at a major commercial data center to cloud hosted services to choose from. Call now toll free at (888) 848-8749 to speak with a product specialist who can recommend everything from WAN connectivity up to complete IT outsourcing or describe your data center needs for quick quotes on appropriate services.

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.

Fiber Optic Leased Lines for Business

Copper-based leased lines have been the go-to solution for connecting business sites and for dedicated access to the Internet. However, copper’s days are numbered as big data, HD video and a migration out of the corporate data centers and into the cloud accelerate. The era of fiber-everything is approaching. Fortunately, prices are lower and options greater than ever before.

Fiber optic leased lines have been employed for decades by major corporations and businesses, like video production and distribution, that can’t function without the bandwidth fiber affords. Nearly all of this bandwidth has been supplied by a telephone industry standard called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETworking.

SONET picks up where T-carrier stops. T1 is good for 1.5 Mbps and up to 12 Mbps when multiple T1 lines are bonded. T3, often called DS3, is a 45 Mbps service, although it can be rate limited to 10 or 20 Mbps to lower costs. DS3 stands at the crossroads between copper and fiber. DS3 bandwidth is most often carried on a multiplexed SONET service for most of the transport distance and then converted to coaxial copper connections at the customer site.

SONET fiber optic lines start with OC-3 at 155 Mbps. Like DS3, OC-3 can be rate limited to offer fractional OC-3 bandwidth at 50 or 100 Mbps. Most often it is leased as a full rate OC-3 service.

Other SONET service levels offer increasing bandwidth. OC-12 runs at 622 Mbps. OC-24 is a Gigabit service running at 1.2 Gbps. It is not widely offered. The next popular SONET service is OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. OC-192 steps this up to 10 Gbps. OC-768 is a 40 Gbps line service that has been popular as a carrier backbone but now offered to businesses in some areas.

Note the big gaps in bandwidth between the SONET optical carrier levels. If you need a Gigabit connection, you may have to order an OC-48 service even though it has twice the bandwidth you require. We’ll take a look at how Carrier Ethernet is far more scalable and can give you fine degree of granularity for selecting just the right bandwidth for your applications.

Another thing about SONET is that it is a TDM or Time Division Multiplexed technology. This means that the signal is a string of bits divided into small channels and carefully synchronized to communicate with other SONET lines. Why this arrangement? It is the telephony legacy of SONET. It was designed to be compatible with Bell’s T-Carrier standards that are also TDM-based. Each channel in a T1 line or OC-768 is 64 Kbps to support one telephone call. Of course, these channels can now be combined so that you can use the entire line capacity less overhead to transport your data packets.

Since SONET is not a packet switched protocol, you need a protocol converter to translate between TDM and Ethernet in order to get your network data from place to place. That is generally a plug-in module for your router. Each SONET level has a specifically designed module that is unique to that optical carrier level.

What SONET has going for it is a long history and extensive deployment worldwide. You don’t have to worry about the intricacies of protocol conversion or signal interfacing, as they problems were solved long ago. SONET is most popular when deployed in rings of two redundant fibers that can switch in under 50 Msec to keep the data flowing even when faults in the system occur. Most metropolitan and long haul fiber optic networks are set up in the SONET ring topology for reliability.

What now competes with SONET is Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). Yes, this is the familiar Ethernet protocol that runs on your LAN but extended for long haul transport. The extended protocol is called Carrier Ethernet.

The advantages of Carrier Ethernet include easy and rapid scalability, a packet oriented protocol directly compatible with nearly all company networks and edge routers, and a considerable cost savings compared with SONET. Typical service levels start at 10 Mbps, the standard Ethernet service level. Other popular options are 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE).

You aren’t limited to these particular service levels. You can pretty much pick any bandwidth you like as long as the Ethernet Port installed at your facility can support the maximum speed you require. Easy scalability also means that you can often simply call your service provider and request an increase in bandwidth. It’s likely to be available in a matter of days if not hours.

Ethernet over FIber was almost unknown even a few years ago but now widely deployed. If available at your location, you’ll find that the cost per Mbps is much lower than SONET, perhaps half the cost for the same bandwidth. This is why Carrier Ethernet is rapidly taking over the fiber optic transport market, although SONET prices have also been plunging in response to the new competition.

Does your company require higher bandwidths that you can get from copper wireline services? Are you using fiber now but wondering if you can get a better price? Do you have a new application and want to get the best deal on bandwidth? If any of these apply, get competitive quotes on SONET and Ethernet fiber optic leased lines available for your business location.

Scalable Cloud Servers Free Trial

You’ve been thinking about moving away from in-house physical servers to cloud servers. It’s the amount of grief involved in making the move and the potential cost that has you spooked. You don’t really need a supercomputer to run your business. You’d just like to have the advantages of elasticity and pay as you go pricing. Is that a reasonable thing to ask?

You bet it is! Before you get into a contract with one of the larger cloud services companies, have a look at scalable cloud servers perfect for small and medium business applications, as well as larger corporations. This particular service offers per second billing, the ability to pay only for what you use, free setup, no contract commitments and... there’s a free trial available.

Talk about low risk. Here’s your opportunity to get into cloud computing without a lot of fuss and bother and without committing to something that you’re not sure will work for you. There’s no big learning curve involved, either. These Windows and Linux cloud servers work like physical servers you are already familiar with. Have you spent years running your servers using cPanel and WHM? You can still manage them using CPanel/WHM. You’ll be able to turn up cPanel/WHM-ready cloud servers in a matter of seconds. That’s a lot faster than you could install the software if you were sitting right next to a server in your facility.

What sort of features are available with these scalable cloud servers? You’ll get full root/administrative access and the ability to build, test and deploy servers instantly. Your data is backed up nightly. This is not an oversold service, like some VPS (Virtual Private Servers). You get guaranteed CPU cycles and can burst higher when more cycles are available. If you wish to control your cloud servers programmatically, you can use the RESTful API that is available to control cloud servers.

The company that offers these cloud servers, Atlantic.Net, operates state of the art SSAE 16 (SOC 1) Type II (formerly SAS 70) certified data centers. They are secure, fireproof and climate controlled with multiple direct connections to the Internet. Backup power ensures that your servers will always be running. This is no idle claim. The SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a 100% Uptime SLA that includes 100% network uptime, 100% hardware replacement and 100% infrastructure uptime, all with money back guarantees. The cloud itself is designed for high throughput and low latency, running at 40 Gigabits per second. There are multiple nationwide data centers located in New York, Chicago, Orlando, Dallas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

You are probably wondering about pricing. It starts at 1.3 cents per hour or $9.49 a month for the smallest server with 256 MB RAM, 10 GB disk, a 2.4 GHz Xeon processor and a 10 Mbps network connection. It goes up from there, of course. The largest server has 16 GB of RAM, 4 x 2.4 GHz Xeon processors 750 GB of disk storage and a 70 Mbps network connection.

Cloud servers offer the benefits of owning your own server without the commitment of buying the hardware, maintaining it, paying for power and environmental controls, upgrading software and then going out to buy more when you run out of capacity. You know that can take days or weeks instead of the seconds it takes to turn up another cloud server.

Are you at least curious if cloud services are a better approach than the legacy techniques of operating in-house physical servers? Get a free trial of scalable cloud servers and give it a try before you make a final decision. Remember, even after you order one or more cloud servers, you can shut them down at any time and pay only for what you’ve used to date. It’s like having a massive data center all to yourself without having to pay for the infrastructure.

1000 Mbps SONET or Gigabit Ethernet Options

As bandwidth needs have increased for business, many companies are moving to WAN network speeds once considered impractical. The competitive bandwidth marketplace is making 1,000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) much more affordable than you might think. The cost per Mbps has plummeted over the last few years while availability has multiplied.

This is good news for any business moving to cloud computing or inherently large bandwidth users, such as medical centers, content creators and providers, and Internet service providers. The option to use T-carrier or other wireline services isn’t really an option anymore. What you need is a fiber optic connection.

Fiber connections come in several flavors. Your options include traditional SONET service, Ethernet over Fiber, and shared bandwidth service.

SONET is the original fiber optic standard. It was developed by the telephone companies for their own use in transporting massive numbers of telephone calls. As computers became the big users of bandwidth, SONET was made available to businesses as a point to point connection or high speed Internet access.

SONET is actually an acronym for Synchronous Optical NETwork. It’s a synchronous protocol organized as time slots rather than packets. Today’s packet oriented networks need a SONET interface to perform the protocol conversion necessary to load and unload packets into the SONET time slots.

That interface is generally in the form of a card or module that plugs in the back of your router. You need to choose the proper interface to match the speed of the service. SONET comes in discrete bandwidth levels that include 155 Mbps (OC-3), 622 Mbps (OC-12), 1.2 Gbps (OC-24), 2.4 Gbps (OC-48), 10 Gbps (OC-192) and 40 Gbps (OC-768). Each speed level requires a specifically designed interface module, although you can sometimes get fractional speed levels. For instance, you may be able to order OC-12 service that is capable of running at 622 Mbps but have the bandwidth rate limited to 300 Mbps. That saves you money on your telecom expenses until you need the full 622 Mbps.

SONET has been in service the longest of the high speed fiber technologies and forms the backbone of many regional and nationwide fiber optic networks. It is also readily available, especially in major metropolitan areas.

What competes head to head with SONET is Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). This is the Ethernet protocol, directly compatible with your LAN. The handoff from the bandwidth provider is a standard Ethernet connection that plugs right into your router.

Why choose Ethernet? In addition to avoiding protocol conversions between the LAN and WAN, Ethernet services are highly scalable. The speed of the port installed at your business location determines the maximum bandwidth. If you have a Gigabit Ethernet port, a very common installation, you can choose just about any bandwidth up to 1000 Mbps and make changes without having to replace any equipment. Start with what you need today and then upgrade as needed with a simple call to your provider.

Another reason to pick Ethernet over Fiber is that it supports standardized Carrier Ethernet services such as E-Line and E-LAN. E-Line is a point to point connection. E-LAN is a meshed multi-location network. Both E-Line and E-LAN can be set up to run at the layer 2 switching level so that you can interconnect multiple LANs as one large bridged network. These LAN locations can be anywhere in the country and even include international destinations.

Finally EoF tends to be a lower cost service than SONET on a per-Mbps basis. SONET prices have dropped dramatically over the last few years, but Ethernet still tends to be considerably cheaper. The only limitation is that SONET may be more readily available at your location.

The final choice is shared bandwidth. This is the cheapest WAN connection of all, priced at just a fraction of similar SONET or Carrier Ethernet solutions. The tradeoff is that you are sharing a pool of bandwidth with many other users. The bandwidth you have available at any given moment can vary all over the place. Also, shared bandwidth services tend to be asymmetrical. The download speed is much higher than the upload speed. This works fine if all you need is access to the Internet for your employees. It may fall short if you upload many files, need a highly responsive connection to cloud services or use your high bandwidth service for remote backup and recovery.

Are you in need of higher business bandwidth connection but concerned about the expense? Get competitive quotes on SONET and Carrier Ethernet options and see how many different options are available for your business locations.

Will Elastic Bandwidth Help Your Company?

A big advantage to professional telecom services like T1 lines and SONET fiber optic connections has been the rock solid symmetrical bandwidth they provide. Order a T1 line and you can count on 1.5 Mbps in both directions all the time. Likewise, a SONET OC-3 service gives you 155 Mbps, also bidirectionally 100% of the time. What if that is no longer the type of bandwidth you need? What if you need something that can scale up and down at will? Welcome to the world of elastic bandwidth.

You might be thinking that this is similar to the kind of “best effort” services provided by DSL or Cable broadband. Those services do, indeed, provide variable bandwidth. However, the bandwidth that you get is determined by the traffic level on the network. If many users are demanding service at the same time, the total bandwidth gets divvied up and everybody gets less than the maximum capacity of the connection.

Elastic bandwidth is something different. Instead of being at the whim of network congestion, you actively control the capacity of your connection. You scale it up or down to meet your needs at the moment.

The service provider tw telecom is a pioneer in the field of elastic bandwidth with the recent introduction of their Dynamic Capacity service. Instead of a fixed amount of bandwidth that is determined when the line lease is signed, Dynamic Capacity users have the ability to scale up their bandwidth in a matter of seconds without service interruption. This is done by the customer themselves using a self-service portal. What’s more, users can schedule bandwidth increases for a particular amount of time to accommodate particular events such as overnight data backup. The programmed bandwidth changes then occur automatically without anyone having to manually intervene.

This goes far beyond previous solutions that include the ability to burst or use more bandwidth than you are allocated for short periods of time. It’s something of an extension of the rapidly scaling feature offered by many Business Ethernet providers. Carrier Ethernet is designed to be much easier to scale up and down than legacy line services. Providers will typically let you increase your bandwidth with a phone call to their office. It may take a few hours or a few days to realize the change, but this is far superior to having to wait weeks for a truck roll to change out equipment or make adjustments to the WAN network.

Dynamic Capacity is one of several phases of tw telecom’s Intelligent Network approach. The idea is to create a far more flexible network design that includes customer IT management in the loop. The first phase introduced detailed performance data reporting of Ethernet or IP VPN services. An future phase will add API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) so that applications themselves can request bandwidth changes as needed.

With the advent of cloud services, the concept of resource elasticity is gaining steam. Virtualization of servers and storage makes it easy for customers to provision more resources themselves in a matter of seconds or minutes. You simply pay for what you use and can change your mind anytime, depending on current business demands. Now, that same elasticity is being applied to WAN and metro Ethernet bandwidth services. This seems like the final piece in the puzzle to optimize the performance of cloud services.

Are you frustrated by fixed or limited networking resources? If so, then perhaps a bandwidth increase or an elastic solution like Dynamic Capacity would make a big difference in your business. Get options and pricing for copper and fiber bandwidth solutions now.

1 Gbps Ethernet Service To The Internet

Internet access demands are on an upward spiral, thanks to a greater mix of video content, big data, large web pages, increasing use of cloud services, and other technical advances. Access speeds have gone from under 1 Kbps to 1 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and now 1 Gbps. Can 10 Gbps be far behind? That day will surely come, but for now let’s take a look at how businesses can connect to the Internet with Gbps bandwidth and without breaking the bank.

Until recently, the only way to get hundreds or thousands of Mbps worth of bandwidth connectivity was to bring in SONET/SDH fiber optic service. Your choices have been OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. OC-24 isn’t always available, so you may be stuck with OC-48 as your only choice if you need to approach the Gigabit per second speed threshold.

A newer service option is Carrier Ethernet. Standard service levels match the standard LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps, but much finer increments are also available. You may find steps of 1 Mbps below 10 Gbps, 10 Mbps up to 100 Mbps and 100 Mbps up to 1 Gbps. It’s also possible to get 250 Mbps, 750 Mbps and similar speeds. It all depends on the service provider and how granular they care to offer bandwidth options.

In addition to many more speed increments, Carrier Ethernet is designed to be more rapidly scalable than traditional telecom services. Instead of waiting weeks or months for a service level change to be implemented, you can often get your bandwidth cranked up with nothing more than a phone call to your service provider. That change can be made in a matter of hours or days. The day is not far off when you can get provisioning while-you-wait or do it yourself through a web portal.

Why is Carrier Ethernet able to do this while SONET is not? SONET service levels are strictly defined and each has its own hardware interface. For instance, the plug-in module for your router to connect with OC-12 service is different from the module for OC-48 service. There needs to be truck roll and likely other system changes to upgrade your fiber optic bandwidth even though the fiber itself remains unchanged.

Carrier Ethernet is Ethernet just like you run on your LAN, although extended for long haul deployment and maintenance. LAN network cards (NICs) are generally rated for several bandwidth levels, such as 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps. You can connect to your network with any of these, up to the limit that the cabling and switches can handle. With Carrier Ethernet, it’s the port speed that sets the upper limit. If you order a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet port, you can get any bandwidth level up to 100 Mbps. If you order a 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet port, you can get any bandwidth level up to 1 Gbps.

Gigabit Ethernet or 1 Gbps Ethernet service is becoming very popular, especially for medium and larger size enterprises. What if you see this coming in the next year or two but aren’t quite ready yet? That’s where fractional Gigabit service can match your needs today without limiting you tomorrow. Get that Gigabit Ethernet port installed but order 250, 500, 750 Mbps or whatever bandwidth meets your needs today. You’ll have the peace of mind knowing that you can quickly ramp up that WAN speed without having to pay for unneeded bandwidth right now.

Are you looking for a faster dedicated Internet access connection but frustrated with the service levels and prices available to you? Learn more about Gigabit Carrier Ethernet Internet Service and how it can save you money today and tomorrow.

How To Deal With Sudden Massive Bandwidth Demands

You’ve been cruising along with fairly stable but slowly increasing network bandwidth demands for years. Then, one day, you are faced with an “out of the blue” requirement to crank up your WAN bandwidth by a factor of 10x or 100x. How did that happen and what can you possibly do to deal with this kind of uncertainty?

It would be strange, indeed, if everybody in the company suddenly decided to start downloading HD movies on the sly. Would it blow your bandwidth allocation? You bet. Does it make any sense? No, of course not. Bandwidth demand doesn’t suddenly mushroom for no reason at all. If you get caught unable to support the need, it’s likely that there is a logical reason and one that makes a lot of sense in retrospect. The question is should you be able to see this coming in time to plan for it?

Sometimes you can’t help but get caught off guard. At a large company where I was working I got an email message with a curious attachment. When I opened it, there was a short video animation of a dancing baby. Not having seen this before, I watched it a few times and sent it on to some colleagues. Turns out that this was an early example of viral video. Everybody in the company was getting this video and passing it on to everybody else.

The IT department was flummoxed. All of a sudden they were running out of disk space. It took a day or two for them to figure out that all of our mail boxes were full of separate copies of the dancing baby video. They were multiplying faster than baby rabbits. Soon a missive came out from IT management demanding that we stop sending this thing around and delete the copies we already had. Crisis averted. Gigantic new disk drive order cancelled.

Today we grab everything off the Internet. Instead of getting a file in our email, it’s a Web link. You probably won’t be filling up the storage drive farm anymore, but any content brought down to the screen is going to have to traverse the WAN. It doesn’t take much of a viral anything to clog up a dedicated Internet connection if the file is big enough and enough people want it simultaneously.

Here’s a more recent example of where IT departments are getting caught short. C-level management gets a case of cloud fever when they see the potential cost savings and insist on moving every application possible to the cloud as fast as possible. In the mad scramble that ensues, the local data center goes dark while the same apps light up at a remote cloud provider. With nearly infinite CPU cycles and GB of storage on demand, everyone expects that the days of bottlenecks are over and that every process will just scream. Shock, horror, and disappointment permeate the office when users discover that formerly snappy responses from the system have gotten sluggish.

How can this possibly happen? Adjusting performance at the cloud doesn’t seem to make any difference. What got forgotten is that all that traffic that ran smoothly on the LAN all of a sudden transferred to the WAN. The line capacity is too small and the latency is too great. Whoever had the bright idea of saving a fortune by accessing the cloud via the Internet is finding out that network neutrality favors Netflix viewers as much as Salesforce.com users, as everyone’s packets take their turn on the Information Superhighway.

This scenario can be avoided with carefully planning and enough lead time to get the right bandwidth resources in place. That can be a challenge when bandwidth provisioning time is the long pole in the tent. You can hedge against future upsets by installing connections that have easier scaling than traditional telecom services. Carrier Ethernet is just such a service. Install a 1 GB port but only commit to 250 Mbps of service right now. When, out of the blue, some VP gets every employee signed up for an online video training course on the latest trendy productivity or quality initiative, at least you can grab the phone and tell your provider to crank up the bandwidth immediately.

You may also be served better by contracting with an MPLS network provider instead of running your own private network of point to point dedicated lines. It’s a major reconstruction effort to upgrade bandwidth on all those lines, especially if you have to go from copper to fiber. Your MPLS provider may be able to give you higher committed rates quickly or allow you to burst to handle unexpected peaks. Best to discuss these possiblities before signing a service contract.

It’s always possible to get deluged with a difficult or impossible to foresee spike in resource demand, including bandwidth. Know that there are services available now that make scaling BW up and down a much easier and quicker process than traditional approaches. Do a little planning now and see what’s available in Carrier Ethernet and MPLS Network services designed for rapid scalability.

Secure Hosting In The Cloud For The US and Europe

You’ve been investigating the benefits of cloud computing hosting, but have concerns about the cost and security of cloud hosting solutions. Let’s take a look at what a secure cloud hosting provider has to offer for clients in the United States and Europe.

FireHost has enterprise-class secure data centers in Phoenix, Arizona, Dallas, Texas, London, England and Amsterdam, Netherlands. They are interconnected by a secure private network and offer access through multiple Content Delivery Network (CDN) Points of Presence (POPs) in major cities in the US, Europe and Asia. This offers special benefits to companies doing business globally who need the high performance of cloud hosted solutions.

You might think that this level of sophistication would price secure cloud hosting out of the reach of smaller and medium size companies. That’s not the case at all. One big advantage of cloud hosting is that it is enormously scalable from a minimal server configuration right on up to as much horsepower as you can use. At all times, you have the ability to rapidly scale up and down to meet rapidly changing business needs. You can even set the system up to automatically scale up your resources when you are close to running out of capacity.

If you processes credit cards or are involved in the healthcare industry, you are subject to special regulation. Not every hosting company is set up to meet the requirements of PCI DSS 2.0 or HIPPA. This one is. To support PCI DSS, they have an auditor friendly infrastructure, managed SSL service, application and database server isolation, two-factor authentication, managed antivirus protection and continuous vulnerability monitoring. These same features plus business association agreement friendly solutions makes it easy for you to meet HIPPA requirements for protecting people’s healthcare information.

Enterprise security is included with all size cloud hosting plans. It is VMware based. Hardware firewalls lock down all unnecessary ports with only ports 80 & 443 open for Web servers. You have to option to open other ports at your own risk. Your cloud server is protected by VPN with SSL encryption. The VPN client is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. A web application firewall actively protects websites and applications from sophisticated hacker attacks such as SQL injection, session hijacking, cross site scripting, distributed denial of service, zero day web worms, directory traversal, cross-site request forgery, brute force login and more. Suspicious activity is automatically blocked.

Managed support is available 24x7x365. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) offers 100% network uptime, 100% infrastructure uptime and 1 hour hardware replacement. Their SAS70 Type II compliant certified data centers feature backup UPS power with backup generators to backup the UPS. Multiple Internet providers are employed to ensure continuous network connectivity. There are no support charges or hidden fees for fully managed support services. FireHost manages the physical environment, network, operating systems, databases and web servers. You manage your Web applications and custom applications. Managed 14 day backup is included.

You are probably wondering how affordable this level of secure hosting really is. Would you be surprised to learn that you can get a cloud server starting at $200 per month with no setup fees and no contract? Amazing but true. Scale up to a maximum of 84 GB memory, 8 cores and unlimited disk space as you need it. 1 TB of bandwidth is included. You can buy more if you need it for extremely large applications.

You can easily pay more for a non-cloud server and have none of the benefits included with secure cloud hosting. Plus, HIPPA and PCI compliant secure hosting is available at reasonable prices if you need them. Can you really afford to run your own data center or use standard hosting services anymore? Get secure Web servers with managed hosting starting at $200/mo. now. Check out the HIPPA and PCI packages as needed.

What is an Ethernet Connection?

When we think of connecting to the outside world, what comes to mind is traditional telecom services. Those include POTS and PRI telephone lines for voice and T1, DS3 and OCx SONET for data. A newer technology that deserves a closer look is Carrier Ethernet. It’s Ethernet in the WAN to match up with Ethernet on the LAN.

The idea of extending an Ethernet connection from your building or campus to the Internet or another facility on the other side of the country might seem a bit odd at first. After all, the legacy telecom carriers have pretty much owned that space for over a century. That’s all changing fast. New competitive service providers are coming into the bandwidth marketplace without the history or traditions of using telco standards to define their networks. That frees them to take a “blank sheet” look at what a Wide Area Network (WAN) should be, how it should be priced and what services it should offer.

Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that the WAN starts where the LAN leaves off. I know that there’s often something called the MAN or Metropolitan Area Network in-between. MAN and WAN technologies are more alike than different. It’s mostly a matter of scale. While the MAN tends to cover a city and perhaps suburbs, the WAN has no geographical limitation. WAN services can be regional, national or even international.

Now let’s consider Ethernet WAN connections. Ethernet is the packet switching protocol now nearly ubiquitous on Local Area Networks. It wasn’t always that way. Even a few decades ago, there were competing standards such as Token Ring. Ethernet has become so popular now that the economy of manufacturing scale makes it more economical to implement than other standards. Ethernet has taken over the LAN, but it is just starting to make inroads on the WAN. In the coming decades, we may see a repeat of Ethernet dominance for local, metropolitan and wide area networks.

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has done the standardization work necessary to establish what’s known as Carrier Ethernet. This frees LAN Ethernet from its distance limitations so that it can connect from your building to the other side of the world. The MEF has also standardized Ethernet services so that the Ethernet you get from one carrier is the same as you get from another. This makes competitive bidding possible, driving down the cost for the buyer. It also enables carriers to extend their service footprint by interconnecting with other carriers through Ethernet Network to Network Interfaces (E-NNI).

WAN Ethernet has some definite advantages over the legacy telecom services we’re used to. First is the interface. If you want to connect to a T1 line or DS3 service, you need a specialized piece of equipment or a very specific plug-in module for your router. You can’t just take an Ethernet patch cord and connect your edge router to the carrier’s “smart jack.” The protocols are completely different. However, you can do exactly that with an Ethernet connection. Most often the carrier provides a common RJ-45 jack or a managed router that you simply patch into.

Second is services. You can order Ethernet Line Service to mimic the point to point or last mile dedicated Internet connections that you have with T1 or DS3. You can also order Ethernet LAN service. That’s a multipoint networking service that ties together multiple business locations. You don’t need to mess around with running individual private lines to each location. They all connect through the Ethernet LAN service.

Unlike T-Carrier and SONET services, Ethernet is highly scalable. In other words, you can get a wide range of bandwidths delivered to your installed Ethernet port. That will prove valuable if business suddenly increases and you need to increase your WAN bandwidth to handle the traffic. A change in bandwidth level can often be handled with a telephone call to your provider, with no need wait for equipment to be replaced.

Finally, Ethernet WAN connections have a cost advantage. It’s not uncommon to get twice the bandwidth for the same price as a T1 line. At higher speeds, the cost savings is even more dramatic.

You owe it yourself to at least compare services and pricing for Ethernet WAN connections to what you have now to see if you may be missing out on cost and performance benefits. Ethernet WAN is available over both twisted pair copper and fiber optic cabling.

Gigabit Ethernet Port Scales WAN Bandwidth

When you are ready to make the move from copper to fiber bandwidth levels or upgrading an OC-3 SONET service, you are faced with a choice. What level of bandwidth do you install?

Why not give yourself flexibility for the future and the opportunity to pay only for what you need right now? This is what a Ethernet port strategy can do for you.

Scalability is a new idea in business telecom services. When you install a T1 line, it requires a very specific T1 interface that include a CSU/DSU circuit unique to the T1 line specifications. Upgrade to a T3 line (DS3 bandwidth) and you’ll find that you can’t just plug that T3 into your T1 router. The interface is completely different. Even the connecting cable is different. With DS3 you are looking at a pair of coaxial BNC connectors that don’t support any other service. Now, make yet another move on up to OC-3 service. Your router interfaces for T1 and T3 are no good. You need a fiber input to your router.

It doesn’t get any better when you start moving up the fiber optic hierarchy. You can’t just plug OC-12 or OC-48 into an OC-3 port and have everything spring to life. They are different services requiring modifications. You’ll likely need a new interface card and programming changes to your router. If you have a managed router, that probably means a truck roll to your premises to swap out the CPE (Customer Premises Equipment).

In the back of your mind, you must suspect it doesn’t have to be this way. Those new PCs have NICs (Network Interface Cards) labeled 10/100/1000 Mbps. That means that you can plug them into any LAN running at up to 1 Gbps and they’ll work just find. Even the connector takes the same RJ-45 patch cord. Wouldn’t that approach be far superior for WAN connections too?

This is the beauty of Carrier Ethernet, which includes Metro Ethernet, MPLS network access and long haul point to point connections. Ethernet beyond the LAN has been designed to be as flexible as Ethernet on the LAN.

One of Ethernet’s best features as a bandwidth service is ease of scaling. If you are running 50 Mbps service and find your needs have increased so that you now need 100 Mbps, you can just call up your service provider and request an upgrade. In a matter of hours or a day or two at the most, your WAN network speed will double. In that time, no one has knocked on the door with a new router under their arm. In fact, you haven’t seen anyone from the service provider. It was all done over the phone.

There is a trick to making this work. The magic is all in the installed Ethernet port. When you order Ethernet service, make sure that you have a port installed that will support the highest bandwidth you reasonably expect to be ordering down the road. Most ports are the standard Ethernet speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps. It’s also possible to get a 10,000 Mbps or 10 GigE port with a suitably fast managed router if your needs are that high.

With Ethernet over Copper, you are probably looking at a 100 Mbps Ethernet port at most. Be sure you know just what your maximum speed will be, because EoC is distance limited and requires more copper pairs as speed increases. Ask what bandwidth your installation will support compared to what you are ordering initially.

With Ethernet over Fiber, it likely makes sense to install a Gigabit Ethernet port. The fiber itself has more capacity that you are ever likely to employ. The speed of the port will be the limiting factor, along with the capability of the carrier’s equipment that feeds that port. Once again, it is smart to plan for the future but buy for today. Get the bandwidth you need now, but be sure that the system is engineered to allow for fast and easy upgrades as you need them. That will be especially handy if you get hit with a sudden increase in traffic or a need to support massive amounts of video or enormous file transfers that you didn’t anticipate.

Are you ready for a bandwidth upgrade, but unsure of what commitment to make? Give yourself some breathing room with a Gigabit Ethernet port and the ability to scale up your bandwidth as needed. Get prices and availability of Ethernet ports and line speeds now.

Ethernet Now Faster and Cheaper Than T1

For years, even a couple of decades, T1 lines have been the go-to professional bandwidth service for small and medium businesses. They are the most popular digital connection for good reasons. T1 lines are available, reliable, secure, dedicated, flexible and relatively inexpensive. What’s not to like?

Agreed. There’s a lot to like about T1 services. But how would you like to get even more for your money? If so, then you need to take a close look at Ethernet, especially Ethernet over Copper.

Not everyone is familiar with the newer Carrier Ethernet services. They’ve only been available for a few years and the big rush has been just recently. Ethernet over Copper, EoC, is primarily a service you find in large metropolitan areas and not in smaller towns or out in the country. It has a distance limitation. You need to be within a few miles of the service provider’s office to qualify for service. Even so, there are millions of business locations that could be served by Ethernet instead of T1. So why aren’t they?

Good question. I suspect that it is more a matter of awareness than anything else. Companies that use T1 line services know the pricing and availability. They also know that prices have been coming down so they can get great renewal pricing, especially on 3 year contracts. What they don’t know is that they can get even more bandwidth for the same pricing with Ethernet over Copper.

It’s incredible, but true. Both T1 and Ethernet cost less than $300 a month in many areas. The difference is that T1 bandwidth is fixed at 1.5 Mbps. Ethernet will give you 2 Mbps, known as 2x2 Ethernet, or 3 Mbps, known as 3x3 Ethernet, depending on the service provider for your particular location.

Yes, you can also get T1 service at 3 Mbps to match the 3x3 Ethernet bandwidth. One T1 line will get you 1.5 Mbps only, so the way this is done is to combine or “bind” two T1 lines to get 3 Mbps. The only problem is that you now have to pay twice as much because each T1 line has a cost and there is no economy of scale.

Ethernet is not only lower cost than T1, but it offers more bandwidth that is also more scalable. You can order Ethernet over Copper starting at 1 Mbps. Common speed increments include 2 Mbps, 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps and 20 Mbps. It’s possible to get other intermediate speeds, too. Binding T1 lines tops out at around 12 Mbps because of both the technology involved and the sheer cost of all those individual lines.

Ethernet keeps on going. You can easily get 10 or 20 Mbps Ethernet service, with 40 Mbps and even 100 Mbps available in some metro areas. Those connections are made over the same type of twisted pair copper wiring that is used to deliver T1. The higher speeds even rival entry level fiber optic services that may be expensive to install.

Are you considering a bandwidth increase or simply want to know if you can get a better bandwidth deal? Get pricing and availability of both Ethernet and T1 line service and see what makes the most sense for your business.

Cable, T1 and EoC

Today, there are three excellent broadband options for the small to medium size business. They cost roughly the same, but offer different options. Which do you choose? Let’s take a closer look at business-class Cable, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper.

We’ll start with T1 lines because they are the mainstay of SMB connectivity. T1 lines come in several flavors depending on what you want to do with them. They’re all based on the same technology developed by the telephone industry half a century ago.

T1 is a T-carrier technology based on transmitting digital signals over ordinary twisted pair copper wiring. It takes two copper pair to make one T1 line. One pair is used for upload, the other for download. When used for telephony, one pair is talk and the other is listen. The speed of the digital signal on the line is 1.5 Mbps. This doesn’t vary. The equipment at each end of the line is synchronized to maintain a steady bit rate regardless of whether anything is being transmitted or not.

Originally, the purpose of this arrangement was to transmit telephone calls in channels called DS0s. There are 24 channels on a T1 line. You can use them separately or combine all the channels to make one large broadband pipe. The most common T1 telephone line now is called a T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. It has 23 separate phone lines plus one channel for signaling and Caller ID.

A broadband T1 line delivers a fully symmetrical bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. The upload and download speeds are the same. This line can connect directly between two business locations as a private line or it can be used to connect to the Internet or another network, such as a MPLS cloud network. When used as an Internet connection, the arrangement is called a dedicated T1 Internet connection. Dedicated means that the full bandwidth is always available for your use only.

The most direct competitor to T1 is now Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet over Copper uses the same twisted pair telephone wiring that T1 lines use. The main difference is that the equipment on each end uses a more advanced technology to transport higher bandwidth through each copper pair. Often multiple pair in the same binder cable are used to bring in a higher bandwidth EoC service.

Ethernet over Copper is available is bandwidths from 1 Mbps on up to typically 20 Mbps. In some areas, it is now possible to get speeds as high as 90 or 100 Mbps delivered over copper pair. Those are bandwidth levels that have demanded fiber optic connections until recently. EoC is also designed to be highly scalable. You order and EoC port at the speed you ultimately expect to need but only sign up for the speed you need now. In the future, you can have that speed raised by simply calling your service provider and the change will be made in days or even hours.

A comparable service priced the same as a T1 line is 2x2 Mbps Ethernet or 3x3 Mbps Ethernet. Those designations mean that you get the same speed for upload and download, just like with a T1 line. Note that the bandwidth is as much as twice as high, however.

The third option is business class Cable broadband. This service is offered by Cable TV companies, such as Comcast, that also provide consumer broadband. The coaxial cables used for Cable TV have tremendous bandwidth capacity and can easily transport broadband as well as television signals. You connect via a Cable modem. The latest Cable modem standard is DOCSIS 3.0 that can deliver 50 or 100 Mbps to business users.

It may seem amazing that you can get 50 or 100 Mbps for the same price as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line, but there are some differences in the services. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. You’ll find that your bandwidth varies during the day depending on how heavily other users are uploading and downloading. Also, Cable bandwidth is not symmetrical. You may be getting 100 Mbps in the download direction, but your upload path will be only 10 or 15 Mbps. That may not matter if you are primarily accessing Web pages or watching video clips. It could be a problem if you expect to be transmitting video service or uploading very large files frequently.

Cable does have one extra advantage in that you can get what’s called a “triple play” service. That’s broadband, telephone and television all on the same cable for one bundled price. This is especially attractive to businesses that have waiting rooms for the public, like doctor’s offices or auto service facilities. There are special bundle prices for public businesses like bars and restaurants.

Which bandwidth solution is best for your business? Why not get prices and availability for Cable broadband, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper for your business location? Then pick the solution that makes the most sense for your applications.



Note: Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.