Ethernet over Copper Reviving The Local Loop

There’s been a decline in utilization of local loops as of late. Most of it is the result of residential users dropping their analog phone service in favor of going totally wireless or a combination of wireless and VoIP. This has given some phone companies the idea that local loops should just be decommissioned totally. There have even been feelers to the FCC on this idea. Sadly, the idea of decommissioning copper is coming at exactly the same time as technology advances are breathing new life into the local loop.

Someday all telecom connections to the building may be fiber. That day is not today by any means. Something like a mere 12% of all business locations are currently lit for fiber optic service. Some could be but the demand isn’t there. Others might be except for the construction costs. Others still are nowhere near a fiber point of presence and won’t be in the near future.

That leaves copper as the most popular way to bring telecom services into a facility. The standardized connection is the local loop. This is a pair of small diameter plastic insulated copper wires that are twisted together to reduce noise and crosstalk pickup. One end of the copper pair terminates at a network interface device mounted on or inside the building to be served. The other end runs to the nearest central office location up to a few miles away.

Residential local loops or subscriber lines typically have two copper pair or four wires in a small diameter cable. Business locations can have dozens of individual pairs in a binder cable. Each pair can carry one analog telephone line. Two pair can provide 24 digital phone lines or a broadband data line. A dry pair has no signal at all. It is an unpowered circuit between two points. This local loop is owned by the incumbent local phone company but can be leased by competitive carriers.

What competitive carriers are doing is deploying a new bandwidth technology on the local loops that they lease. It’s called Ethernet over Copper for good reason. The last mile connection is two or more local loops connected to EoC equipment at both ends of the line. One electronics box is mounted at the central office. The other is installed in your building.

What does Ethernet over Copper offer? It’s a way to deliver higher bandwidth than you can generally get with T1 lines, another user of the local loop. T1 lines are provisioned on one or two copper pair and deliver 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. You need an interface box called a CSU/DSU to convert that to an Ethernet protocol that will connect to your LAN. Often the CSU/DSU is a circuit card that plugs into an edge router rather than a separate box. With Ethernet over Copper, that circuit interface is unnecessary. The signal from your service provider is already in Ethernet protocol.

EoC services are available from 2 Mbps on up to 200 Mbps. The 2 and 3 Mbps levels are good replacements for T1 lines as they offer more bandwidth at about the same price. Many companies are now upgrading to 10 or 20 Mbps as more sophisticated online applications are bandwidth hungry. Also, more content from the Internet is now video which benefits from higher bandwidth connections.

The higher Ethernet over Copper bandwidths can replace DS3 services (45 Mbps) and even fiber optic lines at the OC-3 (155 Mbps) level. In addition to a considerable savings on the monthly lease cost, these bandwidths can help a company avoid fiber optic construction costs and still get the line speed they require. By the time fractional or full Gigabit bandwidth is needed, your building may be lit for fiber optic services.

EoC is strictly a business location service as of now. Cable broadband serves the residential market that hasn’t kept a local loop in service for DSL. Businesses, however, have more demand for copper wireline circuits than ever before. Plunging costs on T1 lines and EoC services are causing even small convenience stores and other retailers to rethink satellite links in favor of higher bandwidth, highly reliable and reasonably priced copper-based connections.

Could your business benefit from more bandwidth at lower prices that you’d expect? Find out what Ethernet over Copper bandwidth services are available for your location or locations and how much they cost with an immediate online quote. You may be surprised that you can easily upgrade without having to pay more.

Benefits Of An MPLS Mesh Network

Once your business has expanded to include additional locations, like branch offices, offsite data centers, factories or warehouses, you need a way to get all those locations on the same network for data, voice or both. The latest and greatest way to do that is the MPLS Mesh Network.

Companies with two locations don’t generally start off with an MPLS network. What they do is buy a point to point T1 line or Ethernet Line service to link the locations. T1 is the traditional P2P telecom service. Ethernet line service is newer and offers the ability to link two LANs at the layer 2 switching level.

So, who needs an MPLS network for two locations? Maybe you do. The reason isn’t that you need the multiple site connectivity that MPLS makes easy. It’s a matter of cost. Depending on the availability of T1 or Ethernet point to point service, you might be better off getting T1 or Ethernet last mile connectivity to a much larger MPLS network. The major incumbent and competitive carriers have regional, nationwide or international service footprints. If your two locations are across the country rather than across town, it’s conceivable that taking advantage of an MPLS network for the long haul span might actually have a cost advantage.

Now, let’s consider the business with 3 or more locations. You can still use the point to point line strategy to link them. If you try to create a mesh network with P2P lines from each location to every other location, you’ll find this topology gets pretty expensive pretty fast. What many companies have done is create a star network with point to point lines radiating out from company headquarters to each remote location. All traffic gets routed through HQ regardless of where it is going.

When you do this, you are effectively becoming your own WAN network provider. It has the advantage of giving you complete control of the network on a instantaneous basis. But it costs you the staffing needed for constant vigilance and the need to establish new long distance P2P lines every time another location is added. The cost goes up linearly as you add locations because there is no economy of scale when it comes to dedicated point to point data lines.

Where you do get economy of scale is by sending your traffic over a privately run MPLS network. All those P2P lines are replaced by access network connections at each location to be served. The lines are only long enough to reach the carrier's local point of presence, and priced accordingly. The carrier then sets up paths through its core network to interconnect your locations as you specify. You can specify which locations can connect to which other locations and how much bandwidth they have available. The MPLS connections can be set up as fully meshed so that every location can interact with every other location.

Beyond that, MPLS networks can easily handle fully converged voice, data and video networks so that you can include your telephone service and video conferencing on the same network. That can be an enormous cost saver for companies with business sites spread over many states, or with international locations included.

Are you paying too much to run your own wide area network to link multiple business sites? Get the quality and performance you require and enjoy a significant cost savings as well when you switch to an MPLS Mesh Network.

Gaining Ethernet Internet Access

You’ve no doubt heard by now that access to the Internet for business locations offers cost and bandwidth advantages over traditional telecom connections. So, how do you gain Ethernet Internet access? That’s easy. Just use this handy Ethernet Internet Finder.



You’ll likely find that there are a number of options for Ethernet Internet service, although not all of them are available at every business address. Note that this is a business service only. If you need residential or home office broadband, try “Can I Get DSL?” for DSL, cable, satellite, wireless 4G, and fiber to the home.

Your least expensive option for Ethernet Internet access is probably Ethernet over Copper, where available. That’s generally in metropolitan and suburban areas with dense populations. EoC, as it is called, offers bandwidths typically from 3 to 20 Mbps. You’ll pay about as much for a 3 Mbps Ethernet connection as you’d pay for a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. A very popular service is 10 Mbps Ethernet access, which is the standard Ethernet network speed.

Of course, local area network bandwidth has increased dramatically since Ethernet was first introduced. Most LANs are now operating at the Fast Ethernet speed of 100 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbps. Would you be surprised to know that Ethernet WAN connections are also available at 100 and 1000 Mbps? That includes dedicated broadband Internet access with Ethernet in the first mile. These services require a fiber optic connection over SONET or native IP network.

Even if your business is located a bit beyond the service footprint for EoC or fiber optic delivery, it may still be possible for you to get Ethernet over DS1. Bonding T1 lines together may give you the Ethernet bandwidth you need at a reasonable price.

Does Ethernet Internet Access offer advantages for your business? Use the Ethernet Internet Finder to run a quick check and see.