Free Help On Your Telecom Needs

How would you like to hire some help for free? Not just any help, mind you, but high quality technical expertise to assist you with your telephone and computer networks. No out of pocket cost today or ever. Do you think that offer works well with today’s shrunken personnel budgets?

I’ll bet you do. In fact, you are probably chafing at the bit to find out where you can get some of this help before it’s all gone. Well, relax. There’s plenty to go around.

How can this be true? After all, if you expect to get a service then you also expect to pay for it. You can’t get something for nothing, can you? Yes, you can, if someone else is paying the bill.

Perplexed? Don’t be. What I’m talking about is a telecom brokerage service that has a large group of expert consultants in telephony, computer networking, international network services, wireless business solutions and the like. They stand ready to work with you right now, if only you would let them know what you need. You don’t have to be too specific. Just type a sentence or two to give them the general gist of what you are after. Someone will email or call you shortly to work through the details.

What happens after that? Your friendly consultant may take a few hours or even a couple of days to gather quotes of dozens of competitive service providers and sort out the best price/performance offers to present to you. This is the type of leg work your own staff would otherwise have to do... while you are paying them. No available IT staff to query dozens of potential suppliers in order to find the best match to your needs? Then you really need this service.

Some of these expert consultants routinely spend hours, even dozens of hours working on a single project for their client. How much do they bill per hour? Nothing at all. Oh, they get paid alright. But it’s not by you or any other end user. The brokerage service is paid by the service providers themselves in lieu of having to hire their own staff to do this work. You don’t get dinged with a higher price for service either. You’ll pay exactly the same as if you tracked down each competitive carrier or other service provider and ordered service directly from them without any outside assistance.

One other big advantage of working through a telecom broker is that they have the ability to compare and contrast offers from several to several dozen providers offering a suitable service for your business and location. They can keep a cool head sorting through the offers because they aren’t beholding to a particular vendor. They also know about special limited time offers being run by each providers, information you are unlikely to discover yourself.

So, whether you don’t have a staff or would just rather supplement their effort with free expert consulting service, you owe it to yourself and your bottom line to take advantage of this offer. Simply enter a brief online inquiry to describe your networking need and a friendly Telarus consultant will be touch pronto. You’ll be surprised at how much information you get for almost no effort on your part.

Ethernet Takes Over, Mbps Prices Fall

The ongoing economic downturn is fostering a changing of the guard in telecommunications services. What might look like a business depression is actually providing fertile ground for a shift in technology. It’s traditional TDM switched circuits out. IP based Ethernet connections in.

What’s driving this change? Oddly enough, it’s the high cost of doing business. While some companies are hunkering down, cutting staff and freezing budgets, others are actively looking for opportunities to get the same or better network services for less money. As their 1, 2 and 3 year contracts run out, these companies are using telecom brokerage services to survey the marketplace and gather competitive quotes. Only this time they are looking beyond just price quotes on their existing services. They’re also considering newer technologies that weren’t available during the last quote cycle.

Two powerhouse technologies are MPLS networks and Metro Ethernet services. These are related, in that they both represent a move from channel based switch circuit TDM networks that have dominated the telephone networks of the world for more than a century to IP core networks based on packets and traffic engineering.

MPLS networks are ideal for linking multiple locations in a many-to-many relationship. They can transport virtually any protocol. You can gain access with a T1 line, DS3 or SONET fiber optic service.

Metro Ethernet and its long haul equivalent, Carrier Ethernet, are LAN extension technologies. They allow companies to provided level 2 switched network connections or level 3 routed connections, as desired. E-Line service gives you the equivalent of point to point connectivity. E-LAN merges multiple locations on a single wide area network.

But Ethernet has another reason to be growing by leaps and bounds while traditional telecom services tread water. It’s cost. Ethernet is currently reported to provide a 20 to 30% cost reduction over frame relay or private line services. On higher bandwidth services that savings might grow as high as 50% or even more.

How is this possible? The quick answer is new competitive carriers with all new IP based fiber optic networks. Traditional pricing doesn’t stand much of a chance when aggressive competition comes to town and shakes up the sleepy old incumbent providers.

There are also new technologies available that can give you Ethernet connectivity up to the equivalent of a DS3 connection, 45 Mbps, over multiple pair of ordinary copper twisted pair. EoC or Ethernet over Copper enables companies to switch to Ethernet even if the cost of a fiber build-out is prohibitive.

Will Ethernet services be a better deal for your company? There’s only one way to find out. Check Ethernet prices and availability, including buildings already lit for fiber connections, right now. You may find yourself paying less and getting more. Isn’t that the best way to survive a recession?

Cheaper Optical Carrier Services

With business transactions becoming more and more electronic, there is a crying need for higher levels of WAN or Wide Area Network bandwidth. What usually stifles company ambitions is not that they can't make good use of faster digital network services. It's that they can't afford them. Or so they think.

Actually, there's been a dramatic reduction in the cost per Mbps of carrier services since many business leaders last got quotes and were so shocked and horrified by the results that they shelved the entire idea. It started with the bursting the famous "tech bubble" of the 1990's. Yes, back then bandwidth was jaw-dropping expensive and not all that widely available. But the collapse of technology sector growth resulted in an almost immediate bandwidth glut and prices did what you'd expect. They fell to a level that matched demand. So dire was the situation that for years conduits chock full of new fiber strands went unlit and unused.

That glut was gradually sopped up by an expanding economy, but costs have not returned to their earlier high levels as you might think would happen with a shrinking supply and increasing demand. The reason is that supply is not shrinking. It is expanding. It is expanding due to new companies entering the field and building out their own networks to the latest standards.

That's important because regional and nationwide fiber optic networks are incredibly expensive to deploy. All that fiber has to go in the ground, on overhead poles, or through unused pipelines. Plus the equipment that regenerates the signals as they get weak traveling hundreds and thousands of miles through the glass fibers, and multiplexes and demultiplexes the various services at each POP or Point of Presence, represents a huge capital investment. Once a carrier has installed a particular type of system, they want to pay it off and generate profits for as long as possible. They're not all that anxious to toss everything out in a "fork lift upgrade" and bring in all new technology.

This gives newer players an advantage because they don't have all that legacy equipment to amortize. They start fresh with the latest and most efficient systems. As as example, many competitive carriers have installed IP based optical networks while the telcos are still running TDM based networks designed for digitized telephone calls rather than packet traffic. With enough slicing and dicing, you can get any network to transport any protocol. But it's more efficient and less costly to match your network to the type of traffic you expect to handle now and in the future.

The result of an increasingly competitive marketplace for optical carrier services encouraged by a rapid growth in business demand for bandwidth to improve speed and efficiency is making for an attractive situation if you are the one buying the bandwidth. A further improvement in the process is the emergence of telecom brokers with sophisticated online comparison tools to gather rate information from many carriers and present them in an ordered list from cheapest to most expensive for the same service.

The best of these is the industry leader, Telarus, Inc., with its patented groundbreaking search tool called GeoQuote(tm) that you can access yourself through Gigapackets.com. This tool accesses the databases of a couple of dozen competitive carriers to generate accurate service quotes for lower speed services such as T1 lines in a matter of seconds.

Higher level services, such as SONET OC3, OC12, OC48 and OC192 fiber optic services or IP services, such as Carrier Ethernet to 10 GigE levels, and MPLS networks require some engineering input and may take a few hours. Telarus consultants usually have a good idea of typical costs for these services so you can get a budgetary figure quickly. Be sitting down when you ask. You may be shocked by the amount of bandwidth you can afford these days.