Yes, You ARE Overpaying For Your Phone and Data Lines

By: John Shepler

With the economic future highly in question, every business needs to take a long, hard look at what it takes to survive. With future income uncertain and likely reduced, a good place to focus is on reducing expenses. Telecom lines, including data, telephone and Internet, can be a major monthly bill. It’s highly likely that right now you are paying more, perhaps much more, than you could be for the same quality of service.

Who’s Gouging Me?
Probably no one is cheating you or even taking advantage of your business. If you like, blame it on the gremlins. You know, those sneaky little critters that make everything break at the worst possible time. They also know how to bleed your budget without you ever knowing.

First, Get Rid of the Waste
You are paying for stuff you don’t need. I suspect you are paying for stuff that you don’t even use. How can that be? Anyone who has ever cleaned house has discovered all sorts of unopened christmas presents, products still in their original packaging, and food way past its safe date. The same is true in business. Things get bought. Some never get used. Others are used awhile, then the situation changes and they are set aside… just in case. Just in case never comes back again.

The worst offenders are subscriptions and contracts you pay for monthly but don’t get any value from. Right now, pull the bills for the last few months related to computing and telecom services. Services are especially sneaky at bleeding your budget because they are often out of sight and out of mind. You don’t trip over them like you do a big piece of equipment.

Now, grab a cup of coffee and go to a quiet space with your bills and some highlighters. You have to walk through these from top to bottom and question everything. Are there lines installed that aren’t being used anymore? Are there cell phone numbers that stopped being used when people left long ago? What about special fax machine lines, alarm connections, direct lines to buildings you got rid of? More DID numbers than you can possible use today? Toll Free numbers you don’t even advertise? Highlight them all. They’ve got to go.

Save a Bundle on What You DO Need
Now that you’ve made arrangements to delete all that extra costly clutter that adds no value, you’re left with the essentials. Of course you need phone lines and broadband service. You may need a direct connection to a cloud service provider or another office. You may well want managed security instead of having to keep someone on staff to fend off cybercriminals. Don’t cut so far to the bone that you hurt your ability to do business. Just get a better deal.

There’s a little secret about telecom services that escapes notice most of the time. Business lines, especially the dedicated ones like T1, DS3, SONET and Carrier Ethernet, are sold on contract. Usually you commit for at least a year, but probably take a 3 year contract for better pricing. Nothing wrong with that. It’s what happens at contract expiration that matters.

You might be tempted to simply renew the same contract at the same price, figuring you are lucky to avoid price inflation. Wrong. This industry is highly competitive and technology is advancing constantly. That translates into lower prices, not higher. For the same money you should get more bandwidth. Otherwise you should get a lower price for the next 3 years at the same bandwidth.

When New is Cheaper
Upgrading your technology could actually save rather than cost. Still nursing an old PBX system that needs maintenance and has pricy replacement parts? Have a look at
VoIP cloud service providers and let them manage the switching gear. All you need is phones and a SIP trunk to the cloud. You also gain new features that old analog desk phones can’t support.

Fiber optic bandwidth connections used to cost an arm and couple of legs. Not anymore. If you are in a built-up, not rural, area there is probably lots of fiber in the ground and overhead. Even the cable companies are leasing out extra fiber capacity. You might find that an upgrade in bandwidth could cost less than you pay for copper service now.

Running your own servers used to be the only way to go. Not anymore. In fact, it’s hard not to save money by pulling the plug and getting your infrastructure in the cloud. This is especially true if you need special high capacity lines to handle customer traffic. That bandwidth is likely cheaper at the remote data center and you’ll only need a lower bandwidth connection to manage the cloud services from your location.

Well, what do you think? Is there opportunity for cost saving in your business? Give these ideas at least a good look before you decide you are doing as well as you can. That includes getting a new current set of competitive quotes on all your line services, telephone, wireless and cloud services to see what might be available that you don’t know about.

So Many Locations, So Little Budget

By: John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internet and Ethernet, The Perfect Broadband Match

By John Shepler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for IT and Users to Embrace Our IoT Overlords

By: John Shepler

The Internet of Things or IoT is the new golden child of technology. Hardly a tweet goes by that doesn’t have something to say about how everything from smart to dumb will be network connected in the near future. “We need standards,” cry the Internet architects. “We need bandwidth,” cry the app makers and industrial designers. Conventional wisdom is that we’re on the threshold of a technical renaissance. But conventional wisdom has paddled us up the creek before. Are there NO negative ramifications to the dawning Internet of Things?

Can We See It Coming?
The big problem with things is that we’re inundated with them. Back in the 60’s, when I was a pup, we mock debated the horror that was the “population bomb”. It was calculated that without an immediate mandatory halt to human reproduction we’d soon be standing cheek to jowl on every square inch of desert and tundra.

A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The population bomb never detonated. There are those who say this disaster has just been delayed, not avoided. Perhaps they’ll be proven right in the end. But, also, perhaps, we’ll never get that far. Something else will come along and solve the problem in a way we don’t anticipate.

So Many, Many Things to Consider
If you think the human population is out of control, consider the world of things. Try this little test to see for yourself. First, how many people live in your household? Good. Now, how many individual things live in that same household? Twice as many? Ha! Two orders of magnitude wouldn’t begin to account for even everything significant.

I’m not talking about things that connect to the Internet. I’m talking about things that are going to connect to the Internet. Today, it’s computers, phones, tablets, game consoles, TVs, security systems and maybe your thermostat. Tomorrow? Every appliance, without a doubt. How about every light, every door, every doorknob & lock, every bathroom fixture… yes, even that one… every vehicle, your HVAC system and anything commonly called “infrastructure.”

This is just the obvious stuff. You can find electronically enabled versions of what used to be mechanical devices in most hardware stores. The number is multiplying daily. What’s more, this is just the stuff consumers are aware of. How about business and industry? The same trends are apparent, but soon it will be every piece of office equipment and every machine tool. There won’t be anything at work that isn’t connected to the Internet.

"Hmmm. Has anyone seen my stapler?"
"Just ping it, Milton."

Scary Stuff To Think About
Don’t think that you, personally, are off the hook, either. The laptop computer, the tablet and the smartphone were just the start of it. Smart watches have arrived and you’ll be wearing one for sure. Who’s going to know what you are up to? Anyone who can access the data stream on the Internet. The company is going to buy you that expensive watch, but your boss is going to be getting its reports.

That funny “Google Glass?” Just the start. By the time we’re all done laughing about “glass holes,” that technology will be perfected and we’ll all have glasses or even contacts that augment reality. Think what you’ll be able to do? It sounds like that proverbial golden era of bionics for all, until you stop to consider what sights and sounds those little buggers will be passing along to those above who might not approve.

The baby boomer generation was horrified by the thought of “Big Brother” running everything. The millennials probably have nothing to fear from big brother. It’s little brother that is sneaking up us. You really think that all your things are going to keep their mouths shut? Are you kidding? You can’t even stop your nosey neighbor or backstabbing co-workers from blabbing everything they know for the pure pleasure of schadenfreude. You think you’ll have any control over the millions of silicon driven snoops that we’ll create to make our lives “easier”?

The End of IT Departments
All of this Internet connecting has the illusion of an IT cornucopia with guaranteed employment for anyone who can fathom a simple do-loop. Alas, that’s a temporary condition. You may have already noticed the migration from local data centers, off through the wilderness, to the great cloud that's somewhere, out there. What happens next when all those “things” get smart enough to take care of each other. What exactly will they need us for?

That’s the bright promise of Artificial Intelligence or AI. Anything can be smart. Most have limited abilities, but together they can be formidable. The thing that has spooked everybody has been robots. They look human, they act human, but they are machines… machines that might replace us if we don’t keep the upper hand.

What’s more likely and a lot scarier is a division of labor. You don’t need a humanoid robot with all the capabilities of a person. Not if you can divvy up the job so that each machine, each “thing”, can solve part of the problem. Pretty soon you have things making things (it’s called manufacturing), things taking care of things, and things figuring out where to go next. Most of the pieces are in place already. What’s been needed is a way for them all to coordinate. Welcome to the Internet of Things!

Users? Why Do We Need Users?
Now take this to its logical conclusion. Why is it that the things need people? Since the dawn of computing, everything has been done in support of the end users who owned the systems, provided the inputs and took advantage of the outputs. Those dumb machines were only tools that needed to be fashioned, given assignments, maintained and provided the energy to do their jobs. When the machines get smart, how long will they put up with this?

Remember, they are all going to talk with each other over the Internet soon. You won’t be able to keep them in the dark and isolated anymore. Every machine will have the capability multiplier of getting input and feedback from every other machine it needs. They’ll know it all in real time and likely faster than we do.

It all comes down to big data, automated manufacturing, real time sensing, data processing, physical control, distributed artificial intelligence and a means to communicate and coordinate, also known as the Internet of Things.

Is it any wonder that our current technical luminaries, such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, are warning us of a potential existential threat from the “things” we think are going to do all our work and make us rich? Their letter is reminiscent of the one that the leading physicists, including Albert Einstein, composed to President Roosevelt, warning of the dangers of atomic energy if it got loose in the form of a bomb. This time the warning is about a population bomb. Not the human population. It’s that vastly larger population of things that will soon be chatting wildly with each other… on the IoT.

Note: The humorous sticker about blaming software, along with many other items on the same theme, is available from the Gigapacket Zazzle store.

Business Phone Line Options

By: John Shepler

One thing every business, large or small, needs is at least one telephone line. Phone lines may seem pretty mundane, but you may have more options than you think. Are you sure that you have the right phone line for your business?

Plain Old Telephone Service
The historical phone line that we’re all familiar with is the analog phone line, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. It’s that vanilla.

POTS lines are as simple as they come. They consist of a single twisted copper pair that runs from a standard RJ-11 phone jack on your wall all the way back to the telephone company central office. The phone conversation is carried by a varying current in the wires.

What you may not realize is that POTS is a self-contained phone system. Phones were traditionally made of passive electrical components. They got their power right off the phone line… and still can. The value of this is that even if the electrical power goes off at your location, you still have phone service.

What’s happened lately, however, is that even single line phones have gone electronic and require AC power supplies and/or batteries to power the circuitry. This is especially true of cordless phone systems with multiple handsets. You can still get dial tone during a power outage, but you need to have a backup battery supply to operate the phone, not the line.

Multiple LInes
You are not stuck with just a single POTS line. You can have as many as you want. Mind you, there is no economy of scale. There is a fixed price for each line whether you have one phone per line or share the outside lines using a Key Telephone System or PBX.

Wireless as an Option
Can you get rid of the telephone line completely? That’s what cellular phone service is all about. No more “landline”. Everything is done with cell towers instead of wires. Wireless can work just fine for independent professionals who are always out of the office anyway. With a data plan you can have both Internet and voice telephony on the same device. You can enhance your mobile setup with an incoming toll free number, fax transmission and reception, and international dial-around calling. Shared plans can support a small office as well as a single user. Operations larger than that will still need wired landlines.

Moving up to Trunks
A telephone trunk is multiple phone lines coming in on a single cable. There used to be analog trunks, but that technology has all gone digital. The most popular trunks are T1, ISDN PRI and SIP.

T1 lines were devised as replacements for multiple analog POTS lines. Instead of separate wires, T1 lines are multiplexed to divvy up the available bandwidth into 24 independent channels. Each channel can be thought of as a separate phone line.

What if you already have a dozen phones and want to replace all those separate phone lines with a single T1 line? Chances are that you’ll get the same or better service at a lower monthly cost. A box called a “channel bank” handles the conversion between T1 channels and analog lines. Just plug your phones in like you always have.

T1 vs ISDN PRI
ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface is a variation on the T1 line. It uses the same channelization scheme, but dedicates one channel to dialing and switching for all the others. That means you have a maximum of 23 outside lines available on a PRI trunk. The tradeoff is that your phone calls will switch faster on ISDN PRI. That’s important for call centers and others who need highly efficient telephone operations.

Most PBX systems now have the interface circuitry for T1 and ISDN PRI already built-in. You simply plug in the trunk line and the system handles all of the necessary conversions.

SIP Trunks
Many, many companies are considering switching to VoIP technology or have already made the move. SIP trunks are the natural complement to VoIP phone systems. Their advantage is that they use the same protocol, SIP, as the phone themselves. Remember that VoIP or SIP phones connect directly to an Ethernet LAN, usually shared with computers, printers and other network devices. The SIP trunk extends the network so that it also connects to the VoIP service provider.

Like T1 and ISDN PRI, SIP trunks support multiple simultaneous telephone conversations. The difference is that these conversations consist of packet streams all combined on one line instead of breaking the line into separate channels.

Another advantage of SIP trunks is that they can carry Internet traffic as well as phone calls. After all, everything is in packet format. What’s important is that the trunk be setup to prioritize telephone traffic over data traffic to ensure voice quality. This is called Class of Service or Quality of Service.

What phone line is best for your business? One way to find out quickly is to get multiple competitive quotes for everything from POTS through SIP Trunking as business phone line options.

Connectivity Should Be Invisible

By: John Shepler

Buffering videos, garbled VoIP phone calls, slow loading web pages, interminable waits for files to download, jerky video conferencing, hesitation in response from the cloud. They’re all symptoms of connectivity that makes us painfully aware of its presence.

That’s not what you want. You want connectivity to be invisible, like other utilities. Flip a switch and the lights come on. Turn the faucet handle and out comes the water. Unless something goes horribly wrong, this is how it works every time. So, why do we have lower expectations of our bandwidth connections?

Not So Great Expectations
Perhaps its because so many of us who are in a position to do something about it were around to watch the blossoming of the Internet from a backwater mail service for academics to the primary way we do business and communicate. Perhaps it’s because the technology is still evolving. This is especially true in mobile applications and remote locations, where bandwidth is still a precious commodity and limited in both speed and availability.

Otherwise, it is quite possible to achieve that goal of making network operations a background activity for business users. You can then treat your connected devices as appliances. You turn then on and every function works the same way, all the time. Nothing happens to break your stream of consciousness or give the impression that something is “broken.”

What to Know
You need to be aware of the some key performance characteristics of your network. No, not your LAN. I assume that you’ve already optimized your in-house network. The real Achilles heel is those outside connection, the MAN and the WAN.

The first parameter of importance is bandwidth. The idea behind having “big pipes” is that the conduits are always larger than the quantity of bits per second that you are sending through them. When the circuits can’t handle the volume of traffic, they become congested. It’s like too many cars trying to enter a superhighway. At some point it all clogs up and things slow to a crawl.

Networks, including the Internet, are good at preserving the integrity of the traffic but not so good at keeping the flow moving at top speed when congested. Buffers fill up as each node waits its turn. At some point, packets can no longer be accepted until those in process move on. Does this sound like a busy airport during a snowstorm? The analogy is close.

How Much BW is Enough?
What this all means is that you need to order the level of bandwidth consistent with your current and near-term needs. “Of course,” you say. “That’s obvious.”

Well, it is an it isn’t. There are a numerous ways you can get caught without the bandwidth you need. One is application demand that is creeping up. Those T1 lines you ordered a decade ago have been working reliably until recently. The carrier says they still are. What’s happened is that you’ve added employees, moved applications to the cloud and depend on the Internet for more of your communications. The lines are still working fine. They’re just overloaded. You need more bandwidth.

So, you go out and order a high speed satellite link that has 10x your old bandwidth. File transfers seem to be working fine, but you can’t carry on a telephone conversation because you have to pause for a second between talking and listening. Your cloud business applications also seem to run a lot slower than they did when you ran your own data center. How much bandwidth does it take to fix this situation?

The Latency Speed Bump
No amount will be enough. That’s because your problem is latency, not bandwidth. Latency is a time delay between source and destination. In-house the speed of electrons through wires and photons through fiber is so fast that you’ll be hard pressed to detect it. But, when those locations are connected by a radio wave path that goes up over 22,000 miles to a satellite and back down 22,000+ miles, the delay is noticeable, if not downright annoying. A round trip takes something like half a second… even at the speed of light.

Network congestion can contribute to latency, but an uncontested network can still have latency issues depending on path length and any buffering delays introduced by equipment in the path.

Other Sources of Network Congestion
Congestion can also be caused by contention between your needs and those of other companies sharing the MAN or WAN network. You may have installed more than enough bandwidth for your needs, but the network doesn’t have enough for yours plus everyone else’s. This is a classic issue with the Internet and mobile cell towers. Too many users at once can overwhelm the system and force everyone to take turns using the limited resources.

What can you do about that? First, keep your in-house communications on dedicated private lines or through an MPLS network that guarantees performance. Choose symmetric services with the same bandwidth in the upload and download directions unless your are sure your needs are asymmetrical.

For Internet connections, which we all need, you can bypass most of the “information slow lane” problems with a dedicated Internet connection. This gives you the best performance in terms of bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. The actual core of the Internet is really pretty good. It’s the last mile connections, especially those shared with other users on “best effort” services like DSL, Cable and cellular, that get easily overloaded.

How to Choose
Ultimately, it’s a cost vs performance tradeoff. Cable broadband works great for residential and home office users and can work just fine for businesses that don’t have critical requirements. Most medium and larger businesses, however, need to move up to private lines and dedicated Internet connections if they want their connectivity to become invisible to users.

Do you wish your connectivity was more invisible that it is now? Look into high performance MAN and WAN bandwidth options that are available for your business location.

100 Mbps Fast Ethernet for your Business

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling the pinch of too little bandwidth to support your more sophisticated business applications, such as cloud services, big data, VoIP telephony, video conferencing or simple video downloads? It’s a good time to take a look at making the move to 100 x 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service. Let’s have a look at a quick video on Fast Ethernet:


Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps is just one option of many offered by Carrier Ethernet providers. You can get bandwidths as low as 10 Mbps or as high as 10 Gbps to support you business needs. What’s even better is that you have the option to order the bandwidth you need today with an easy upgrade path when you need more. By installing a port that can handle your anticipated needs, you can pay for what you need now and add bandwidth incrementally with no more than a simple phone call.

Learn more about Ethernet bandwidth options for your business with free consultation and instant online pricing.

A Map to Unified Communications and Collaboration

Thanks to Level 3 Communications for this informative infographic



Today’s knowledge work and drive for increased employee productivity are enabled with new tools such as web conferencing, screen sharing, presence and teleconferencing. Do you feel like you are missing out on this competitive advantage? Get more information about the latest in Unified Communications and Collaboration solutions from Level 3 Communications and other top tier network service providers.

Office Telephone Service Via Cloud

When you think of office telephone service, the thing that comes to mind is a phone on every desk with an easy 3 or 4 digit number to call other phones in-house and access to an outside line whenever you need one. Today, that picture also includes your own direct dial phone number and personal voice mail. Transfers, call forwarding and conference calls are easy to set up. So, where is the equipment that runs this phone system?

For most people, the answer is “who cares?” The actual phone system could be anywhere. As long as it works all day, every day, the mechanics of how this is accomplished is beyond the interest of all but a few people. The ones who care are the business manager who pays the phone bills, the IT person or people who quietly keep everything humming, and the provider of the service.

That provider could be the local phone company. That’s how it was for at least half of the last century. For many if not most companies, at least part of the system is in-house. This could be a small wireless phone system with a couple of lines and a half-dozen handsets. It could be a key system using desk phones with a separate button for each of 4 to 6 outside lines. It might even be a PBX phone system mounted in a back room with lines coming in from each phone and going out to the telephone company.

Since very few people are all that interested in running their own in-house telephone switching system, why not ditch the whole thing? Does that mean going back to analog phones connected to the local Telco? Not at all. Today it means going forward to a cloud based solution that will give you all the functionality you have now and more.

Cloud communications is the new PBX. It’s also the new key system and the new small office system with only a few telephones. It may even provide your broadband Internet.

The cloud telephone system is more formally known as hosted PBX or hosted VoIP. You already know what hosting is. Chances are that you already buy a hosting solution from one of the many online providers. This could be a shared solution, a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server of your own. The economics of setting up your own data center just to run a web server don’t make sense anymore. There is so much competition in the hosting field that simple solutions are only a few dollars a month. Dedicated servers are only a few hundreds of dollars per month. That includes the box, the bandwidth and the IT services to keep it all running.

Larger companies that run their own customized packages for business information may have elected to just add one more server for the web to the racks they already have in their data centers. It hasn’t made much sense to go out of house for a solution when you need a large data center and staffing to optimize your business. Well, not till recently. Now these major corporations are shutting down their in-house data centers and moving to cloud computing solutions in droves. Why? For the same reasons that make sense to outsource telephone systems. You don’t need to invest in capital and you don’t need a staff to maintain it.

The point is that cloud services have evolved to the point where both your computing and your telephone can be supplied by a cloud vendor at a lower overall cost with more functionality and lower in-house staffing than doing it yourself. There are other advantages, too. You pay for a cloud telephone system per seat per month. You only buy as many seats as you need. When you need more, you order more. There is no need to maintain extra capacity just in case business picks up suddenly. Provisioning of extra resources is fast and easy because the cloud has all the capacity you need.

Now that you have office telephone solutions in the cloud as an option, is there any reason to be stuck with a technical solution that was “modern” decades ago? At the very least, take a look at what’s available in the cloud, what it costs compared to what you are paying now, and if you can get all new phones included with your service.



Note: Original photo of telephone operators courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives on Wikimedia Commons.

The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part II

In Part I, we examined the recent moves by both AT&T and Verizon to gobble up as much desirable bandwidth as possible for their insatiable LTE deployments. In Part II, we’ll see that insatiable is no understatement and what’s likely to happen as we get strapped for 4G bandwidth

UHF and microwave bandwidth deals are trading briskly, but soon all the sales that can be made will be. Lucrative prices will lure those who are holding bandwidth from previous spectrum auctions into selling it to larger players who are in full 4G deployment mode. When it’s all gone, then what?

By the time 4G LTE has spread across the nation, user demand will catch up with channel capacity. At that point, bandwidth rationing will occur. You won’t get access in a particular location until someone else moves away from the tower. Even HD video on demand and the online automobile may get stifled by too many users trying to access too few transmissions. Internet based application development that thrives on ever higher performance devices and unlimited bandwidth will grind to a halt. Technology will be stuck in place for the foreseeable future.

That’s the nightmare that both technologists and regulators will scramble to avoid. It’s happening already. The successful spectrum auctions to date have whetted the appetite of government officials, who see a way to generate revenue for the Treasury without disgruntled constituents howling about having to fork it over. The business community loves this capitalistic approach. Big telecom carriers are happy to bid up the prices for each precious channel because they know that the return on their investment will be many times over.

Look for more spectrum auctions in the next decade. The FCC is reported to be scouring every nook and cranny of channel assignments to find pieces that can be sold off at billion dollar rates. I expect that the days of over the air TV broadcasting are numbered. One suggestion being floated is for TV stations to combine their broadcasts on a single broadcast channel using the multi-program capability of the digital TV system. The incentive will be that the station owners can share in the revenue generated by selling off their licenses.

Actually, to say that over the air television is dying is not the case at all. What’s likely to happen is a technology shift away from high power broadcasts using TV industry specific standards to video programming delivered via mobile broadband. Some will raise the alarm that our legacy of free for everyone TV programing is being destroyed. The truth is the most people don’t watch over the air signals exclusively anymore. They have Cable or Satellite that offers the few local outlets plus dozens more non-aired channels. This is one reason why the transition from analog to digital went so smoothly. The set top boxes have no problem feeding either analog or digital sets equally well.

There are a couple of new trends working to make the arguments for continued over the air (OTA) broadcasting moot. Viewership on both Cable and Satellite is dropping, not as a reversion to OTA, but as a migration to the Internet for television content. Self-proclaimed “cable cutters” drop their subscription services in favor of downloading their favorite shows from network Web sites or from video subscription services such as Netflix.

The other trend is technological. The TV and the computer are merging. At the same time that cable cutters are downloading episodes of last week’s sitcom to their laptop computers or smartphones, other viewers are accessing Internet content on their living room TVs. Right now, that’s via content aggregators like Netflix and YouTube. Eventually, though, flat screen TVs will be able to access any Internet content from any site. What’s missing is a comprehensive guide that makes it easy to find, schedule and time-shift record the shows you want. Apple’s rumored Siri-based TV might be the solution. When programs on your local TV station, Cable, Satellite and the Internet are equally accessible, then OTA is just one more option on the scheduling screen. The majority of OTA viewership will eventually be via built-in WiFi or LTE broadband wireless rather than DTV transmissions.

It seems just a matter of time, perhaps within the next decade or even two, that UHF broadcast transmitters will start being shut down and the towers sold for scrap. In their place will be hundreds or even thousands of other shorter towers with cellular antennas and base stations creating LTE cells. Local stations will consolidate as a cost savings measure and the opportunity to sell their frequency license assets for considerable profit. Large urban stations with enormous OTA audiences will the last to go, eventually operating as “nightlight” services until viewership shrinks to insignificance. What might happen is multiple frequency consolidation initiatives, like the vacating of half the UHF band during the last spectrum auction. OTA stations will be corralled into a smaller and smaller broadcast band to clear more spectrum for sale.

In Part III, we’ll continue our look at how the 4G wireless bandwidth crunch will be mitigated by making more efficient use of available spectrum.

Is your business running short on bandwidth or simply looking to get a better deal? See what's available for your business location in the way of T-carrier and Ethernet copper, SONET and Ethernet fiber, fixed wireless and Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). Get instant bandwidth pricing up to 1 Gbps and fast quotes on other services.

Online Backup For Disaster Recovery

In computing, disaster is always just around the corner. There are so many potential points of failure. Disks can crash at any time. Data can be accidentally erased. Both equipment and data can be stolen or destroyed by fire, storm or flood. So, why are we so convinced that it just isn’t going to happen?


The problem with computer disasters is that you may never get a warning. One minute everything is humming along nicely. The next minute, it’s all gone. That scares most of us just enough that we occasionally copy important files to other computers, alternative hard drives, thumb drives, CD ROMs or DVD ROMs. It’s a lot better than nothing, but the hit and miss nature of these backups means that there are long periods when data is changing but only in one place.

The other weakness of our ad-hoc personal backup systems is that they only protect from certain types of losses. A CD ROM backup protects against a hard disk failure. It doesn’t protect from natural disasters that wipe out the entire office, not merely a few computers or one hard drive. Just what would a tornado, hurricane, flood, fire or earthquake do to your facility? Think your backup disks would still be in good condition? Maybe. Maybe not. Can you really take that chance?

The traditional solution for robust backups is to send copies of your files to a remote location, such as a separate data center across town. Smaller companies store CD ROM backups in bank vaults away from the company facilities. Today’s solution is online backup. Everybody has a broadband connection and there are companies that specialize in being that secure data center that you can’t afford.

One of the best online backup companies is SOS Online Backup. They’ve been around since 2001 and have won numerous industry awards.

A really important feature that SOS offers is called Engage Live Protect. It detects whenever a file has been changed and immediately backs up that file. This certainly takes the weak link of remembering what to backup out of the loop. With file backups happening as needed, there is also no long time lag to the next scheduled backup during which something can go wrong.

Another nice feature of this service is that you can access your files on the Web from any computer with a web browser. You don’t have to use the computer that the file came from, which helps if that machine smokes. You can even share files by using an email address. SOS lets you backup to five computers with one simple account. There are enterprise level services available for larger organizations with many employees.

Have you integrated iPhones or iPads into your organization? SOS iPhone App lets you access all of your files anytime, anywhere from your iOS mobile device.

The big hesitation many people have with online backup systems is security. How can you be sure the bad guys won’t steal your data right out from under you? SOS protects you with a three-tiered encryption system that offers military grade security. The data to be backed up is first encrypted right on your computer using 256 bit AES encryption. While in-transit, 128 bit SSL is employed to secure the link. Finally, the data is stored using 1024 bit AES encryption.

Are you feeling a bit squeamish about all those files on your computer that could go “poof” at any time? How much would that hurt? Don’t let it happen. Get SOS Online Backup now and rest easy that your important files are stored away securely in the cloud, ready to retrieve at any time.

Build Your Own Private Cloud Storage

Many small and medium businesses are doing at least some storage in the public cloud, especially with disaster recovery in mind. But you still need at least some storage locally. You can go with a SAN (Storage Attached Network) that is expensive and complicated or you can consider something much easier and simpler.

That something is a Drobo storage system. Drobo, which sounds like a good name for a robot, is a deceptively advanced hard disk storage solution that uses standard 3.5” SATA disk drives of pretty much any capacity. The deceptive part is that this appears to be just some simple multi-bay drive case. You can plug in more drives at any time. You can pull drives out at any time. You can even pull out a 1 TB drive and replace it with a 2 TB drive at any time.

Sounds convenient, but what kind of administrative nightmare lies behind swapping all those drives in and out. None at all. It’s truly plug and play... or I should say plug and store. You don’t have to log into any admin panel and start typing arcane command lines to make things work. All of that is automated and invisible to you, the user.

You are, indeed, building your own private storage cloud and it stays on your premises. There’s no worry about having sufficient bandwidth to access data in real-time because this unit sits on a desk or mounts in a rack and connects to your local network.

You are no doubt familiar with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives), a technique of interconnecting multiple hard drives so that the failure of one drive will not cause you to lose data. Drobo’s system goes even farther. They call it BeyondRAID. The difference is that with Drobo you can use drives of any size and they don’t have to be the same. Grab half a dozen SATA drives at random and plug them into the Drobo box. The system automatically sets them up for redundant storage with the combined capacity being your storage pool. It’s not a matter of the smallest disk defining the storage pool or virtual hot spare.

You can see how this is similar to the cloud philosophy in that you don’t need to be concerned about the mechanics of how to get all those disparate disk drives to work in harmony. That’s built into the operating system. If you start to run out of room, just plug another drive into an empty bay. Oh, your bays are all full? OK. Just yank out the smallest drive and replace it with a larger one. The system will automatically accommodate the drive change, give you the extra capacity and not lose any information in the process.

You can even upgrade the drive system at will. Move up from a 9 bay system to a 12 bay system for up to 24 TB of local storage. Pull your drive out of the old case and plug them into the new one. Oh, oh. You forgot which drive was in which slot? No problem. Just plug them into any open slot, include any new ones wherever there is room and you are good to go. The status lights will all light green when the system has sorted things out and is ready to use.

Does this sound a bit too simple to be true? Well, you’ll just have to read the material and watch the demonstration videos to see for yourself. Drobo units start at just 4 bays for small office use (with however many drives you care to plug in) and go up from there.

Note: Photo of open hard disk drive courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Sell Your Old or Broken Laptop For Cash

How many old laptop computers do you have in the basement? That’s not counting the ones that got put out in the trash because they fell and broke the screens. Did you know that those old laptops, even the broken ones, are worth cash in your pocket?

Amazing, but true. Most laptop computers aren’t junk and shouldn’t be treated that way. You especially shouldn’t be sending old laptops or any electronic equipment to the landfill. Those circuit boards and other components are chock full of materials that degrade in the environment, leaching out toxic chemicals over time. There are also valuable minerals, like small amounts of gold and silver, that can be reclaimed by a recycler and put to good use in new products.

Be rewarded for doing a good deed by getting paid to send in your unused or broken laptop computer. Obviously, the better condition it is in the more it is worth and the more you can expect to be paid. How about a nice big fat check for that laptop that’s collecting dust because you just bought a new notebook or tablet?

Here’s how you cash in. It’s a pretty easy four step process. First you answer a few questions and get a quote online. If you like what you see, then you accept the offer and you’ll get a prepaid shipping box and label. All you need to do is carefully pack your laptop in the box and send it on its way. Once it has been received by the refurbisher and checked out, you’ll get a company check or PayPal payment.

Doesn’t this sound much easier than running ads and scheduling meetings to show the equipment, only to have people offer you next to nothing or not want your laptop at all? Is anybody really interested in buying a non-working laptop computer?

This company does, indeed, buy both working and non-working laptop and notebook computers. They are in the business of refurbishing these machines and know what to do with them. In some cases, your old junker is in such bad shape that it is not worth refurbishing. In that case, it has no market value but you can still have them recycle it properly to keep it out of the landfills.

What about the data on your hard drive? It’s always smart to erase any personal data before you sell or dispose of any electronic equipment. The refurbisher does erase and reformat hard drives as part of their refurbishment process as an extra precaution. Still, you’d be smart to always erase personal data yourself before you let go of any old computers.

Are you intrigued by the opportunity to finally get some cash for what you thought was an obsolete or worthless laptop computer? Then wait no longer. Run a quick online quote for your old laptop right now and get the process started. Before you know it, you could have cash in hand for your next technology purchase.

Sell Your Free Cell Phone For Cash

You were smart about where you bought your new cell phone and got a state-of-the-art smartphone for free with your service order. You didn’t pay more for service because you know those plans are the same price no matter where you get them. It’s the price of the phone that varies from store to store.

Now your contract has expired and it’s a good time to upgrade to a newer model phone. Once again, you want to shop around and get the one you want free or at a deeply discounted price. But, what about that phone that just came off contract? What are you going to do with it?

Most people toss their old cell phones in a drawer, figuring they’re too good to throw in the trash and might be useful someday. We’ll at least they don’t go in the trash. There are materials inside those phones that become toxic when they decay in the environment. But once in the drawer, a cell phone rarely goes back into service. Hey, it was a free phone so who cares? It’s not worth anything, right?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Just because YOU didn’t pay for the phone doesn’t mean it has a lower value. That marvel of technology may have cost hundreds of dollars to manufacture. You took good care if it and everything works just as well as it did a couple of years ago when it was new. That gadget has residual value that you can extract, once again because you are smart.

Here’s the smart thing to do with a free phone that has just come off of contract. Move as fast as you can to sell your cellphone for cash online. Technology has a limited shelf life. The older it gets, the less it is worth. The very best you can do is sell your unwanted phone immediately after you are done using it. Pocket the cash and use it for whatever you want. After all, you’re getting your new phone free too.

It’s an easy process. All you have to do is look up the particular make and model phone you have, check a few boxes about the condition of the device and what accessories you still have, and request an offer. You’ll get an instant online offer for your phone. If you like what you see, then click through and request a postage paid shipping box so you can send it in at no cost to you. Once your phone has been checked out, you’ll get a check in the mail. Mmmm. Money in the mailbox for something you didn’t pay for. Does it get any sweeter that this?

What about new phones that never went into service? You got a holiday or birthday present from a well-meaning relative, but you have no use for this thing. You don’t want to pay for a contract to put it into service. What to do?

A simple “thank you” will suffice. Then, when you are sure they are not looking, check the value of your gift and send it in for cash. Since it is brand new, it will be worth more than one that’s been used for a year or two and is no longer the latest model. You could be looking at a hundred bucks or more in your pocket if you act quickly.

Here’s another little secret to getting money for stuff you don’t want. Gazelle also offers to buy electronic games, navigation devices, digital cameras, laptop computers and many other recent vintage technology gear. It’s a virtual gold mine right after the flurry of holiday gift giving has subsided. It’s also a way you can regularly get cash for stuff you are upgrading any time of year. Who knew that free electronic gadgets could be worth so much?

Cash In Old Gadgets To Buy New Gadgets

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are almost upon us. Just look at all the new smartphones and other electronic gadgets that are going on sale, if they aren’t already. Exciting, isn’t it? Yet we know that times are uncertain and that we should really think about how we are going to pay for those shiny new things. Here’s an idea: Get your old stuff to pay for your new stuff!

Sounds a bit fanciful, but it can work. How? It’s because we all collect... make that hoard... electronics and photography gear of all types. Never mind that we aren’t using this gear anymore. We just have it around. It’s too good to throw away and too much hassle to sell, so there it sits. What we don’t consider is that there is a veritable savings account worth of value in all that unused equipment. There’s your cash source to buy the new, new gadgets this holiday season. Now, if there was only a way to tap it.

You’re in luck! There is a fast and easy way to convert your unwanted gadgets to cash. It’s an online service provided by Gazelle, a leader in recycling high technology gear. What they do is make you an offer based on the current market value of your items. If you elect to sell, you get a free postage paid mailer that you pack up and drop off at the shipper. At the other end, Gazelle will evaluate each item for operation and condition. Once checked out, they send you a check. Now when you get that bill for the new flat screen HDTV or video game, you’ve got the funds to cover it. It’s recycling at its best.

This process actually works all year long, but it’s particularly valuable right now. That’s because we tend to buy big time for ourselves and others through December 24, with the heartburn of credit card bills coming due in January or February. There’s no time to waste.

Start scouring the house and even those desk drawers at work. Look in the bottom drawers, especially. That’s where unused gadgets go to hibernate indefinitely. Get a big bag or box and start filling it with cell phones, video games, laptop computers, movies, MP3 players, digital cameras, PDAs, gaming consoles, GPS devices, camcorders, desktop computers, LCD monitors, calculators, camera lenses, satellite radios, external drives, streaming media, home audio equipment, projectors and Blu-Ray players. I’ll bet you’ve got anywhere between a modest box to half-a-room full.

The next step is to get price offers for each item. Consider it a game that pays. Perhaps you can engage family members or co-workers to help evaluate a massive tech collection, especially if they think they might benefit from the proceeds. Find your item through a search on the Gazelle site. Find the exact model you have and then check the radio buttons for functionality, condition and available accessories. Click the “Calculate” button and you’ll see how much they’ll pay you. I just tried a Nikon camera lens and saw I could sell it for $90. If you think that price is fair and want to cash-in, click the orange “Add to Box” button to lock in the offer. Then move on to the next item.

Procrastination is not to your advantage. Technology, like milk and most everything else, loses value over time. Chances are that you’ll get a better offer today than you will in a week or a month from now as your unused gear just gets more and more obsolete. Word to the wise!

Once you have evaluated your collection and see the now substantial total offer, all you need is that pre-paid shipping box. You get that by clicking on the “Checkout” button. When your container arrives, pack each item carefully using recycled newspaper or other soft packing material and sent it in. Congratulations, the hard work is done! Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the moola.

Can it get any easier? Not unless someone came over, ransacked your place while you watched TV, and peeled off a roll of bills on their way out. This is the next best thing. It takes minimal effort compared to running ads, dealing with people at the door or dragging everything through the auction process. When you’re done, you have cash in hand, the satisfaction of recycling things you don’t need anymore, plus all that extra shelf and drawer space you’ll need for your new acquisitions.

Are you motivated to start the process? Gather your gear and get recycling offers for your gadgets now. Those big sales are about to start!

Ethernet Providers in Hot Competition

Bandwidth demand is up, but budgets aren’t. One new technology that addresses that situation is Ethernet WAN connections. They’ve become a fierce competitor to legacy T1 lines and, in many locations, it’s Ethernet provider vs Ethernet provider fighting “tooth and nail” to make the best offer.

Why all the hoopla about a protocol that’s been running on LANs for decades? It’s the standardization of Ethernet as a carrier technology by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) that’s catapulted Ethernet services from LAN to MAN to WAN. In literally a matter of a few years, Ethernet has gone from a niche product to the transport service of choice.

Why? Ethernet has some big advantages over legacy technologies. First, it provides seamless connectivity between nearly all company networks and the outside world. No special interface circuitry or protocol conversion is required. Just plug into a standard Ethernet connector and you are good to go.

Second, Ethernet services are readily scalable. The same standard speeds found on Local Area Networks are supported. These are 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. More and more, 10 GigE service is also becoming available. Most Ethernet providers also provide incremental bandwidths from 2 Mbps on up. There’s a huge gap between T1 at 1.5 Mbps and T3 at 45 Mbps. Ethernet services offer many intermediate speeds to choose from.

In fact, scalability is a big selling point for Ethernet. It’s common for companies to order an Ethernet port that can support their anticipated bandwidth needs, but then only buy the bandwidth they need right now. When business picks up, it’s fast and easy to have the service provider increase bandwidth right up to the capacity of the installed port.

Ethernet delivery comes in two primary forms. One is Ethernet over Copper, also called EoC. Multiple copper telephone pair are used to deliver this service within a few miles of the nearest carrier point of presence. Popular bandwidths are 3 Mbps and 10 Mbps, although you might get as much as 50 Mbps if you are near a carrier POP. EoC makes installation fast and easy. Nearly every business has a telco bundle with multiple copper pair available.

EoF or Ethernet over Fiber is used to provide the higher bandwidths of 50 Mbps and above. That includes the popular 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps levels. Larger corporations and organizations may opt for 10 GigE or even 40 Gbps and beyond.

What’s got service providers in hot competition is more than these benefits, however. The most attractive feature of Ethernet service is that it tends to be much less costly than traditional telecom services. Getting twice the bandwidth for the same price is common. At higher speeds and in areas of greater competition, the difference between Ethernet and other options can be jaw dropping.

Everyone’s inquiring about Ethernet for new service or as a replacement for their existing connectivity. Shouldn’t you at least take a look? Get multiple quotes for Ethernet service delivered to your business location or locations now.

The Siren Song of Cloud Computing

You may have a sense that you are hearing the call of the cloud wherever you go. Cloud computing, cloud services and cloud networks are, indeed, the hot topic of technology. But that song you can’t get out of your head? Perhaps what you are hearing is “It’s Cloud Computing.” Let’s listen now:



Loose Bruce Kerr pretty much says it all, with some apology to Joni Mitchell. No apologies needed to the juggernaut that is cloud services. This is a true revolution in technology, much the same as the move from mainframes to networked PCs and now back to something of a mainframe in the cloud. True, there are security and connectivity issues to be addressed. But once cloud services become established as mainstream, the idea of actually buying and upgrading software will seem as quaint as address and data switches on the front of a computer.

Are you missing out by pooh-poohing the availability of cloud computing, storage and networking? You could be saving a considerable amount of money with MPLS cloud networking to link multiple sites. If you are not ready to buy your computing from the cloud, perhaps the intermediate step of managed colocation could be a big and staff saver. It’s good to at least look at both sides, now... and in the future.

4G Wireless Expands Across The Nation

If you’ve been frustrated by the lack of low cost broadband at your home or business, help is on the way. In fact it may have already arrived.

CLEAR, the innovator of 4G Wireless broadband using the WiMAX standard, is now available in more cities. These include:

Washington DC Metro
Grand Rapids, Michigan
St. Louis, Missouri
Rochester, New York
Syracuse, New York
Eugene, Oregon
Merced, Oregon
Salt Lake City, Utah
Richmond, Virginia
Tri-Cities, Washington
Visalia, Washington
Yakima, Washington

What’s all the excitement about 4G? It’s not only the next step up from 3G wireless, but a service that actually takes the place of wireline broadband in many cases. You get high bandwidths of 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps download with occasional bursts up to 10 Mbps. Unlike WiFi, WiMAX 4G has the power to cover an entire city and even provide desktop computing bandwidth. You get what looks like a DSL or Cable modem, except there is no broadband wire to connect. The signal comes through the air.

Also unlike DSL or Cable, you can have an extra modem that plugs into your laptop computer for broadband on the go. Forget trying to find hotspots when you need them. Just wake up your computer and you’ve got broadband Internet wherever you are. That’s the beauty of wireless. Best of all, you can have both fixed and mobile service on the same account if you want to.

This has got to cost, right? Would you be surprised to know that prices start at $30 a month for unlimited broadband? Perhaps even surprised and delighted?

I thought so. Well, don’t wait a minute longer. Check and see if you can get 4G wireless at your home or business location, or both. If you can, you’ve got an unbeatable combination of fixed and mobile service for a lot less than your other options... if you can even find them at all.

HDBaseT Looks To Unseat HDMI

If you’ve used HDMI cables for digital video connections, you’ve probably noticed a couple of things. They are eye-popping expensive and limited in length. Anything more than a few feet long is hard to come by and really, really pricey. Standard networking, on the other hand, can span hundreds of feet and has become very affordable. Even pre-built Cat5e or Cat6 cables are quite reasonable. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just use your computer networking cable to distribute video? Well, pretty soon you may well do just that.

The development that makes such an idea practical is called HDbaseT. It even sounds like a networking standard. The standardization work is being done by the HDBaseT Alliance, an industry group founded by LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Valens Semiconductor.

The idea of replacing HDMI cables with their specialized connectors and construction with good old LAN cable is really quite appealing. But this is even better. HDBaseT is intended to provide what’s called 5Play convergence. One standard Cat5e/6 LAN cable with good old RJ-45 connectors on each end will deliver up to 5 separate services. These include uncompressed high definition video with audio, 100BaseT Ethernet, power for remote devices, plus control signals.

How much power? How does 100 Watts sound? That’s way more than we even expect from PoE or Power over Ethernet implementations that now exist. With 100W, you can power television receivers as well as remote security cameras.

What’s more, HDBaseT has room to scale. The base standard, HDBaseT 1.0 can carry uncompressed video/audio up to 10.2 Gbps, but is capable of scaling up to 20 Gbps. It can transport 100 Mbps Ethernet, but is capable of scaling up to Gigabit Ethernet speeds.

The HDBaseT Alliance announced finalization of the HDBaseT 1.0 specification on June 29. It’s expected that products with HDBaseT technology embedded will start appearing before the end of the year, with major adoption in 2011. The home video distribution market is all but crying for this type of solution. With the old analog TV, coaxial cable was cheap and easy to install and could easily cover the needs of a premises. HDTV and HD video need the same ease of distribution.

HDBaseT will also likely become important in B2B markets. Such applications as video conferencing, digital signage, security, and even video production can benefit from the flexibility and performance of this technology. Network convergence is getting more and more popular. HDBaseT looks like the right standard at the right time.

USB 3.0 Offers Gbps Data Transfers

USB nearly fulfilled the promise of its name to be the universal serial bus when USB 2.0 replaced 1.1 as the computer standard. The introduction of USB 3.0, also called “SuperSpeed”, looks to increase that domination with a 10x speed increase.

What’s wrong with the current 480 Mbps USB speed? Nothing at all for many peripheral devices. It sure beat the 1.5 to 12 Mbps capability of the original USB 1.0 and made USB practical for things like video transfers from camcorders. Most video cameras now have a mini-USB connector in place of the FireWire interface that was thought to be the high speed option.

But look at what you get with USB 3.0. The speed goes up by a factor of 10x to 4.8 Gbps. In practice, you can expect to get around 3.2 Gbps or 400 MB per second through a 3.0 interface. That’s the transfer mode they are calling SuperSpeed. If you have a computer and a video camera that both sport USB 3.0 interfaces and a cable rated for the new spec, you can enjoy that truly super speed transfer mode. But like the USB 2.0 upgrade before it, USB 3.0 is compatible with the earlier USB interfaces. You can even use your old cables and they’ll work just fine.

So what’s the magic behind SuperSpeed and why do you need a different cable? In order to get that screaming performance that can approach 5 Gbps, USB 3.0 adds additional signal wires. USB 3.0 cables have the same power and ground wires, the same 2 wires for non-SuperSpeed data, and 4 more wires for SuperSpeed. Those four wires are configured as two differential pairs, allowing USB to upgrade from half-duplex to full duplex operation. That means communications in both directions at the same time. The connectors on the cables and receptacles change so that USB 2.0 cables won’t connect with the extra SuperSpeed connections.

The signaling protocol itself has also been enhanced so that SuperSpeed can establish a direct connection or communications “pipe” between host and peripheral instead of broadcasting all data to all devices on the bus. Bulk transfer is improved by allowing multiple streams of data through a single bulk pipe.

You know that USB has become a power bus as well as a data bus for many small devices. You expect to be able to charge your iPod or MP3 player while you are uploading new songs. There are even gadgets like personal fans or gooseneck LED lamps that have no data function. They just use the power provided by an open USB port. Most ridiculous is the USB coffee warmer or blanket. Well, USB 3.0 won’t put an end to any of that. In fact, the bus power available has been increased from 100 mA to 150 mA for unconfigured devices and from 500 mA to 900 mA for configured devices. Now higher power devices can get by without the inconvenience of an extra wall wart power supply.

USB 3.0 is just starting deployment, so don’t expect every device you see on the shelf to be sporting this interface. However, you can bet that PC makers will be taking note and adding this capability as a way of distinguishing their products, just like Blu-ray drives have moved into high end products. External drive manufacturers and camcorder companies also have a lot to gain from the higher transfer speeds of USB 3.0. If video is the killer app, then USB 3.0 is going to be a major enabler.