Differences Between Fiber and EoC

Many companies, constrained by their dedicated Internet and private line bandwidth, are doing the trade studies necessary to justify a move to fiber optic services. Now they have another option to throw in mix. It’s Ethernet over Copper or EoC.

Just what is it about EoC that presumes to place it in the same category as fiber optics? Perhaps surprisingly, it’s both bandwidth and cost.

Traditional fiber optic services are based on the SONET or Synchronous Optical NETwork standard developed by the telephone industry. SONET services start with OC-3 at 155 Mbps. This is 3x the speed of DS3 or T3 service. More importantly, SONET was designed to be compatible with T-Carrier standards so that T1 lines and DS3 services can be readily transported on SONET. It is common practice for these copper-based services to hitch a ride on fiber optic carriers for long haul connections.

The beauty of fiber is that it has nearly unlimited bandwidth potential. When fiber optic cable is brought in, it’s not just a small diameter cable with a couple of fiber strands. There are almost always dozens if not a hundred or more fiber strands in that cable. Why? Because the big cost is in the construction. Trenching underground, installing conduit and pulling the fiber cable is way more expensive than the difference between a very small fiber cable and a larger one.

How about the fiber bandwidth? Each strand can easily transport 10 Gbps or more. If you add coarse or dense wavelength division multiplexing to send multiple beams on each fiber strand, you can ramp that bandwidth capacity up by 10 to 100x. Future technology advancements may increase capacity even further. It’s clearly going to be a very long time before businesses start to “fill up” their fiber optic cable capacity... once they have it.

Therein lies the rub. The reason that almost 2/3 of business locations still don’t have fiber optic service is that the construction costs are overwhelming. You need to be reasonably near a carrier’s service and then pony up to have a drop run to your building and the termination equipment installed. More and more buildings are being “lit” for fiber optic service every day. Some day every business location will be pre-wired for fiber just like they are for telephone and electricity. That day may be well off in the future, however.

So, where does this option of EoC come in? One main selling point for Ethernet over Copper is that you may be able to avoid construction costs completely. The copper involved is nothing more than twisted pair telco wire that runs between your building and the telephone company’s nearest central office (CO). Residential lines typically contain 2 pair. Business cables can easily have 25 or more copper pair installed as a matter of course. Some of these are used for business telephone lines. Others can be used for T1 lines. Still others can be employed for Ethernet over Copper. What’s important is that your CO has EoC termination equipment installed.

Let’s say that you can get Ethernet over Copper service at your location. What’s available and what does it cost?

EoC carriers use up to 8 unused copper pair to provision your service. More pairs mean higher bandwidth. How much depends on the CO equipment and how long the copper run is. Within a few miles of the CO, you can generally get 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, even as much as 45 Mbps over 8 pair. In some situations that can be pushed to over 100 Mbps if you are mere blocks away from the CO, which is not that unusual in metropolitan areas. The 45 Mbps level is popular because it is a direct replacement for DS3 bandwidth that is most often transported over fiber.

How about the cost? EoC is typically half the cost of T-Carrier or SONET bandwidth or you can get twice the bandwidth for the same money. For instance, many smaller companies are upgrading to 3 Mbps for the same price as their older 1.5 Mbps T1 line. In addition to lower monthly lease prices, construction costs are minimal to zero compared to new fiber construction.

EoC can effectively compete with lower level fiber optic services because many companies have been forced to make the jump from T1 to DS3 to OC3 because of limited options. Really all they needed was 10 or 20 Mbps, but those are not standard telecom line speeds. Ethernet services are far more scalable, with increments of 1 or 5 Mbps rather than large jumps. You can often increase your service bandwidth by simply making a phone call to your provider. No equipment changes are necessary as long as you are below the maximum port bandwidth.

Should you be considering EoC in place of fiber optic services? Get current pricing for Ethernet over Copper and Fiber as well as SONET optical services to see what works best for your business location.

3 Mbps T1 vs EoC Throwdown

There’s a battle that’s been brewing for a couple of years and is now raging in full force in many markets. That’s the contest between bonded T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper. Regardless of who the technical winner is, the business winner could be you.

Let’s take a step back and review just what this battle is about and who the players are. Ultimately, it’s all about bandwidth and cost. Bandwidth needs to go up and cost needs to come down. Why? Because businesses are becoming more and more dependent on connectivity. They are especially tied to the Internet, but also need to connect privately to remote data centers and clouds. Telephone connectivity is moving from a completely separate service to something tied-in with data connections and/or the Internet.

The two technology contenders in fierce competition are T1 lines, the reigning champ, and Ethernet over Copper (EoC), the up and coming challenger. In some ways, these services are more alike than different. Both are wireline services. In fact, both use the exact same twisted pair copper telco wiring that comes in multi-pair cables from the incumbent telephone company. That’s your business telephone wiring. What you may not realize is that there are extra wires in that cable that can be used for private data lines or Internet connections. What else you may not realize is that there are many competitive carriers who would like to provide you with those digital services.

How is this possible if the cable bundle runs directly to the telephone company’s central office? By law, the local or incumbent phone company owns the copper telephone wires that run underground or overhead. However, other companies can lease the unused pairs. In fact, other companies can even install their own termination equipment within the phone company’s office. That lets competitive carriers offer services that compete with phone company offerings or even services that the phone companies don’t offer.

T1 line service was actually developed by the telephone industry to transport multiple telephone calls on one line. Later on, it was offered to business as a way to connect to the Internet or for private point to point data lines between two locations. T1 line technology has matured to where it is well entrenched with small, medium and larger companies. T1 can be provisioned just about anywhere you can get landline telephone service. It runs at 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. T1 is often offered with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees availability.

The 1.5 Mbps bandwidth of a T1 line was once its main selling point. Today, 1.5 Mbps is more of an entry level service, especially for Internet access. Fortunately, there’s a solution for that. Just add more T1 lines. The trick is to combine their bandwidth through a process known as bonding. You can bond 2 to 8 T1 lines this way to get anywhere from 3 to 12 Mbps over ordinary copper telco wire. The most popular level right now is dual-bonded T1 for 3 Mbps. Many smaller companies don’t need any more bandwidth than that. The price for bonded service is the cost of one T1 lines times the number of lines you bond. There is no economy of scale.

The direct competitor to dual-bonded T1 is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. It also uses multiple copper pair, but a different modulation scheme than T1 to transport the signal down the line. The tradeoff is bandwidth vs distance. EoC is highly sensitive to the length of the telco line. Close to the Central Office (CO), you can easily get 10, 20, 30 or up to 50 Mbps. A few miles away you get can’t get any service at all. Forget EoC out in the countryside. This is a city service.

One big reason that companies choose EoC instead of T1 is that they can get higher bandwidth without the expense of bringing in fiber optic services. The construction costs can be prohibitive if your building isn’t already “lit” with fiber. The other big reason to go with Ethernet over Copper is cost. A 3 Mbps EoC service will cost about the same as 1.5 Mbps T1. Another popular option is to move up to 10 Mbps for about the same price as dual or triple bonded T1, depending on location.

Which service will win the “battle of the bandwidths?” For now, they’re pretty well matched, with T1 having the advantages of near universal availability and being the incumbent service. EoC is coming on strong, as companies find they need higher levels of bandwidth and like the price advantage of Ethernet over Copper.

How about your situation? Which bandwidth service is right for your company? Why not get competitive prices quotes for both T1 and EoC to check out your options. Chances are, you can get better deals now than you could even a year ago.



Note: Photo of boxers courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

What Makes 10 Mbps Ethernet So Popular?

One of the most popular bandwidth services for business right now is 10 Mbps Ethernet. What’s that about and how can you benefit too?

What we’re talking about here is Metro Ethernet or Carrier Ethernet connections running at 10 Mbps. They can be used to connect two business locations in a point to point setup. They can be used to provided a dedicated Internet access connection. They can also be used as an on-ramp to a larger cloud network for national or even international connectivity.

So why 10 Mbps? It’s a bit of a sweet spot in the spectrum of bandwidth choices. T1 lines have been that sweet spot for the last decade. But business applications are getting more and more bandwidth hungry. The 1.5 Mbps provided by a T1 connection isn’t really enough anymore, even though T1 line prices have come down considerably. The Ethernet equivalent is a 3 Mbps connection for about the same money as T1, but offering twice the bandwidth. For many small businesses, 3 Mbps Ethernet may be all that’s needed for the time being.

Companies with more that a few employees or using video conferencing, on-site web hosting and other demanding services find that 10 Mbps Ethernet offers a considerable bandwidth upgrade at a reasonable cost. It’s not that much more expensive than T1 was a contract or two ago.

One technical reason that 10 Mbps Ethernet is in a “sweet spot” of bandwidth pricing is that you can often get it delivered on copper as well as fiber optic cabling. By copper, I mean multiple pair of twisted copper telco wiring. It’s the same bundle that’s used to bring in analog telephone and T1 lines. The service provider leases this already-installed copper from the local telephone company and then connects those pair to special EoC termination equipment. That’s the magic that makes it possible to get such a bandwidth jump without an equivalent jump in cost.

Where is 10 Mbps Ethernet service available? It’s offered now in most metropolitan areas from multiple competitive service providers. Downtown in major cities, you can almost always get 10 to 50 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. The exact speed available is determined by the distance from your location to the nearest carrier point of presence. In suburban areas and smaller cites, you may also find EoC. If not, some carriers are offering Ethernet over DS1 or EoDS1. This is a similar service, but uses T1 line technology with signal regenerators to extend the service range.

What if you need even higher bandwidths? Ethernet is probably still your most cost effective choice, but it will be provisioned on fiber optic cable rather than copper twisted pair. Way out in the boonies, that can be a problem when there are no fiber cables for miles around. In town, construction costs may not be that expensive if you are close to a service provider’s office. If you, or you plus other businesses in your building or industrial park, order enough bandwidth, construction costs may be waived or greatly reduced.

Does this sound like a promising bandwidth service for your organization? The way to find out is to get a summary of availability and competitive pricing for 10 Mbps Ethernet Service. Quotes for higher speeds up to 10 GigE are also available.

Copper Thrives In The 21st Century

Alexander Graham Bell loved copper wire. His Bell Telephone Company and others strung it on poles and buried it in the ground until there were thousands upon thousands of miles of small gauge copper wire connecting nearly every home and business. And that’s the way it’s stayed for over 100 years. Now that we’re in the 21st century, all that copper is just another metallic element being reclaimed by nature as we move on to fiber optic cables. Isn’t that the way it is?



Nope. The fiber optic era was fantasized along with flying cars. Fiber technology has advanced farther than George Jetson’s personal vehicle, but it’s still copper that rules. Even the old stuff that’s been in the ground for decades is getting a new lease on life in the digital age.

Copper is so popular because there is so much of it. A century of standardization and build-out makes it very attractive to connect to those copper pair fastened to the plywood sheet in the telephone closet. You could insist on a more modern fiber optic termination, but there are no glass fibers on that plywood. If you want fiber, you have to pay to have it brought in. It probably costs no more than stringing new copper, but the copper’s already there. Somebody else paid to have it installed a long time ago.

But isn’t copper an old analog technology that can’t possibly keep up with today’s high speed network demands?

Well, it’s true that copper telco wiring was installed with analog signals in mind. But a flowing electron is a flowing electron regardless of whether it is part of a 48 volt battery current or a Ethernet packet. The physics of conduction doesn’t know the difference. Where we hit the wall was when we tried to send digital signals down a circuit that was still set up for analog telephony. Those were the dial-up modems that topped out at 56 Kbps. But do you know that those very same telephone wires now carry Megabit per second signals?

In fact, DSL shares the very same wires as analog telephone service. Instead of trying to mimic a phone call the way modems did, DSL sends digital signals on frequencies well above those you can hear. True, DSL signals fade out quickly over distance. But if there is a digital termination nearby you can transport as much as 100 Mbps to the home or business using DSL technology.

That distance restriction is removed if you use two pair of copper telephone wires to deliver T1 line service. The bandwidth is a solid 1.5 Mbps in both directions and is highly reliable. Where can you get T1 service? Just about anywhere you can get a regular telephone installed.

T1 is the most popular form of digital connection for business. It is used for telephone trunk lines with up to 23 phone lines carried by a T1 PRI trunk, also knows as ISDN PRI. Business broadband is provided by T1 dedicated Internet access. You can also get something called Integrated T1 that combines both telephone and Internet on the same line.

As the need for business bandwidth expands, copper remains viable. It’s easy to bond T1 lines together to multiply bandwidth by 2x, 3x, or even 10x. Bonded T1 line service allows businesses to add lines as network activity increases.

A newer and lower cost bandwidth option is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This technology uses special termination equipment to bond multiple copper pair to deliver Ethernet Internet service at the standard 10 Mbps up to 45 Mbps. You can also order lower bandwidths if you don’t need 10 Mbps at this time.

Standard analog loops, DSL, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper are extending the useful life for installed copper telephone wiring well into the 21st century. Eventually it will all be replaced by glass fibers, but probably not in this generation.

DS3 Speed Challenged By EoC

Once a company has outgrown its T1 lines, the standard upgrade has been to move to DS3 for more bandwidth. But DS3 is typically delivered over fiber optic SONET connections. That can mean significant construction costs unless your building is already lit for fiber optic services. But now a new service offers DS3 speeds over standard copper telco wiring. Can this be a money saver? You bet it can.

The new service is called EoC or Ethernet over Copper. What it gives you is higher bandwidth services, even up to the DS3 level of 45 Mbps, without fiber optic cabling. But if DS3 requires fiber optics, why doesn't EoC?

The explanation is in the technology. DS3 is a signal level definition developed for the original T-Carrier digital telephone standard. It was originally deployed over coaxial copper cable called T3 lines. But coaxial copper has given way to fiber optic cable with its much higher bandwidth capability. Nowadays DS3 is most often deployed over SONET fiber optic services. The usual SONET service starts at OC3 or 155 Mbps. But the way the T-Carrier and SONET signal levels were defined, DS3 and even DS1 (the signal level for T1) are easily multiplexed and demultiplexed onto SONET carriers.

Ethernet over Copper, EoC, is something else entirely. It's not based on any of the earlier telco standards. But it uses telco wiring. The way that works is that the Ethernet provider leases the wires running to your building from the local phone company. Only the wires are leased. There's no dial tone or other services provided by the telco. Bare lines like this are called "dry pairs." The Ethernet provider hooks specialized termination equipment at each end of the dry pairs to transport the Ethernet signals. Usually a number of pairs are connected or "bonded" so that the system has enough capacity to deliver significant bandwidth.

The mechanics of how this is done are technically interesting, but are not something that you as a user need to deal with. The service provider will install customer premises equipment at your location to provide the interface between the copper telco pairs and the RJ45 connector that provides the WAN network signal to your local area network.

Nearly all businesses are already wired with multipair telephone cables used for traditional office telephone service. Some of the wires in these cables will be pressed into service to deliver your Ethernet service. But you should know that EoC is a limited range service. In other words, you need to be located within a few miles of a carrier office or POP (Point of Presence) to take advantage of this service. The closer you are to the POP, the higher the bandwidth you can get. Bandwidths of 5, 10, 20 and up to 45 Mbps are available depending on location.

Speed is one of Carrier Ethernet's advantages. The other is cost. Ethernet services tend to not just rival DS3 pricing, but can be considerably less costly as well. You can attribute that to aggressive new competitive providers as well as the technology. You may well find yourself paying less for EoC service for point to point data connections or dedicated Internet service that you would going with traditional DS3 over SONET. That's especially true if you don't need the full 45 Mbps but require more than the 1.5 Mbps you get from T1 lines.

Will Ethernet over Copper work for your business? Find out now what Ethernet services are available for your location.

Find Metro Ethernet

If you've been using T1 lines to provide dedicated Internet service or point to point connectivity for your business, you may be wondering if there is a way to get more bandwidth without having to pay a huge premium to upgrade to DS3 over fiber optic cable. There is. It's called Metro Ethernet. Sounds great, but how do you find it?

Finding Metro Ethernet service is easy if you know where to look. Isn't that the case with just about everything? The trick with Ethernet is having a special tool that is designed specifically to find locations where Ethernet bandwidth is available and map them in relation to where you are located. You've used Google Maps, right? Wouldn't it be nice if you could specify a location and then see flags where Ethernet service is already provisioned?

You bet it would. Why? There's an old saying among prospectors. If you want to find gold, look in places where it has already been found. The same is true for bandwidth services. If you want to find Ethernet, look in places where Ethernet is already established.

What's so special about mapping out Metro Ethernet service? You need to realize that bringing in high bandwidth connections is an expensive and time consuming proposition. Competitive carriers need to trench fiber optic cables or fly them overhead on utility poles. When they get to a location where there are lots of potential customers, they'll establish a POP or Point of Presence. From there they extend service to major office buildings and other establishments that are willing to commit to bandwidths in the hundreds of Megabits/second or even Gbps.

You don't have to be a user of massive bandwidth. You only need to be near one. Then the cost of connecting you up is only the hop from the nearest distribution point to your location. If all you want in somewhere between 5 and 50 Mbps, chances are that you can get EoC or Ethernet over Copper. This is a technology that uses already in-place copper pair telco wiring to bring in Metro Ethernet service. For this to work, you need to be within a couple of miles or so of a service location.

Another option is to colocate your equipment in a facility that has Ethernet connectivity already available. These "carrier hotels" or colocation centers specialize in providing rack space, power & cooling, security and bandwidth at all levels at quite reasonable pricing.

Ready to find the nearest source of Ethernet service? Simply use the GeoQuote (tm) Shop For Ethernet online search engine by entering your business address. In a matter of seconds the system will respond with a map and list of nearby locations of buildings that are already "lit" for Ethernet.