Is There Business Fiber Optic Internet Near Me?

By: John Shepler

Are you still struggling with DSL or some other Internet service that is burdened by low speeds, network congestion, high latency, packet loss or all of these? It’s a frustration, isn’t it? What’s more, you are probably losing more money every month than you would spend to upgrade to high performance fiber optic broadband service. The big question: “Is there business fiber optic Internet near me?”

Times Have Changed
When you first moved up from dial-up ISDN, or X.25 connectivity to broadband, options were probably few. There was a time when DSL was state of the art. Even ADSL shared on a standard phone line offered a huge advance in line speed over what else what available.

If you could afford them, T1 lines were a lot more stable and reliable, although speed was capped at 1.5 Mbps… still plenty in the early days of e-commerce.

Many businesses opted for satellite as a way to connect retail locations to the home office. High latency and weather outages were just something to be dealt with.

But, this is ancient history. The whole nature of business operations has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. The Internet isn’t just for email or looking up information anymore. It’s IS your connection to all-things in the cloud and around the world. There’s no good reason to just get by with whatever connectivity you’ve had. That is, not when fiber optic Internet might be right next door and a fraction of the cost it was when you last took a look.

Fiber Has Been Sneaking Up on You
It’s a fact that conduits full of fiber optic cables have been quietly being trenched into both urban and rural right of ways all across the country. You don’t see headlines about this anymore, because it isn’t breaking news that somebody just put a fiber cable in the ground like it used to be. Fiber is now considered vital infrastructure and is being routinely installed, just like gas pipes and power lines. You almost have to be a little careful where you plant a shovel in the ground these days. You might just chop a fiber cable in two…. and that is one expensive situation to fix.

Who’s Burying Fiber Cables Nearby?
The telephone company is the traditional installer of telecom infrastructure including copper and fiber lines. In fact local telcos pretty much own all of the twisted pair copper in the ground and on the poles. Fiber… not so much.

While telephone companies are, indeed, in a mad dash to upgrade their physical plants to meet the nearly insatiable bandwidth demands of 4G and soon to be 5G wireless, cloud services and video distribution, there are other major players too.

You might think of cable companies as married to coax copper lines. That’s what they install in your building, after all. What you don’t see is that those coax lines terminate to fiber lines not far away. Cable fiber forms the backbone of their networks. It’s only recently that the major cable companies have offered business users fiber connections to their network. Get business cable fiber and you’ll have almost unlimited bandwidth, low latency and minimal packet loss, all at a reasonable price.

Independent network companies are the other big source of fiber optic infrastructure. These companies have built out their own regional and national fiber networks and may well completely bypass both the telephone and cable companies to hook you up directly.

So, How Do I Get Fiber?
You can get out there and do your own research, but you may miss some of the best fiber providers. They don’t necessarily have a local office or advertising. Your best shot to get the most options at the best competitive pricing is to go through a bandwidth broker. This is a company that has relationships with dozens of service providers and the service maps to know exactly what is available and how close it is to your location. You might even be surprised to learn that the building next door is already lit for fiber broadband and it is no trouble at all to get you a connection quickly.

Want to find out right now where fiber optic Internet services are relative to your business (not residential) address? Take a minute or so to enter your address and get a map and list of fiber optic Ethernet broadband near you. Then use the handy inquiry form to describe just what you are looking for and how you’ll use it to get pricing and install times for the best service options.

When Only T1 Will Do

By: John Shepler

In the age of gigabit fiber connections, the venerable T1 line might be thought of as a relic of the past. Not at all. T1 service is alive and well. It might even be exactly what you need right now in the way of bandwidth and affordability.

Why Would Anyone Want a T1 Line?
T1 is the most mature, most deployed and most available of the telecom line services. You might think that Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) would be the leader in that category. It was. POTS is giving way in many organizations to newer premises VoIP and telephony in the cloud. That still leaves what used to be the POTS lines connected. What are they good for? Think: T1

T1 lines are amazingly versatile. They make perfect telephone trunks for channelized T1 phone, ISDN PRI and even high quality VoIP. They are almost certainly available at your location, wherever you may happen to be. Plus, T1 is readily affordable by just about any size business.

The T1 Telephone Line
Did you know that T1 actually started out as a telephone trunking technology? If the telco companies didn’t have a burning desire to consolidate the mass of wiring that interconnected their switching centers, T1 might never have come about. In the beginning, it was one telephone conversation per pair of wires. Then the phone companies found a way to send multiple conversations down the same pair simultaneously using a method called carrier telephony. It works like the radio band. Each conversation had its own assigned carrier frequency separated from the others so they wouldn’t interfere. This is the analog way to get the job done.

The breakthrough that was T1 involved the conceptual change from analog to digital. By digitizing the phone conversations, you could send 24 of them down the same pair of wires and they wouldn’t interfere. What’s more, digital technology got rid of all that noise and crosstalk that analog long distance lines were famous for in the first part of the last century.

A channelized T1 telephone line consists of 24 time division multiplexed segments or channels that are synchronized at the transmitting and receiving end. Each analog phone signal is digitized into 8 bits by 64 Kbps, which preserves the call quality. What grade of wiring do you need to transmit these calls? Ordinary twisted pair telephone cable will do just fine. With signal regenerators every mile or so, a T1 line can be stretched as far as you like.

ISDN PRI Telephone Trunks
T1 telephone lines are used by in-house PBX business phone systems. In recent decades, that technology has been upgraded to something called ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface. It’s the same T1 line, but with a slightly different format. ISDN PRI provides 23 separate phone lines plus a control and signaling channel that runs the system. This is the preferred option for call centers because of its fast connection times and high voice quality. Multiple T1 lines can be installed to most PBX systems to match the number of outside lines needed.

T1 for VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a different method of achieving the same phone service. VoIP was designed to be compatible with computer networks rather than a unique telephone standard. Even so, VoIP trunks, called SIP trunks are needed to get the phone calls to the telephone service provider in the cloud. Unchannelized T1 lines work great for this because they are highly reliable and offer enough bandwidth to carry two dozen or more simultaneous telephone conversations.

T1 Internet Lines
T1 for Internet access, with its paltry 1.5 Mbps bandwidth might be considered laughable in this age of gigabit broadband. It’s not so funny when your business is on a farm or so far out in the wilderness that you are lucky to have a landline phone. Those landline phone wires can also carry T1. That means if you can get phone service, you can get at least T1 broadband where there is no fiber or even cell towers for miles.

Is 1.5 Mbps truly a problem? It likely is if you want to transfer HD video production. Not really, though, if you have a small business and need the line for credit card verification, a connection back to a franchise office, or just email and casual web browsing. You can increase this bandwidth by combining, called bonding, multiple T1 lines together. This will give you anywhere from 3 to 12 Mbps, depending on the number of lines you bond.

How About The Cost?
People who think T1 is expensive remember back a decade or two, when a single T1 line would set you back at least a grand a month. Today, that figure is more like $200 to $300 in most cases. It still depends on how much competing service is in your area and how far you are from the telco office. Is this expensive? Business grade cable broadband is also priced in that range, but with “up to” higher advertised bandwidth… if you happen to be next to where the cable line runs. Even then, cable is shared bandwidth while T1 is dedicated to your particular company.

If your need is for highly reliable PBX telephone lines, point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access or rural broadband applications, T1 might still be the optimum service for your company. Check out T1 and bonded T1 pricing and availability and compare with your alternative service options.



Note: Products with the humorous theme "Wan Man" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

Backing Up Broadband

By: John Shepler

In the last couple of decades, broadband Internet access has gone from being a marginally used business tool to a critical infrastructure for most companies. Both speeds and traffic have increased by orders of magnitude. So, answer this question: “what happens if your broadband goes down?”

We’ve Quietly Become Dependent
The conversion from traditional to automated business processes and digital communications have taken place so gradually that many companies don’t quite realize what would happen if it all suddenly went dead. You know what happens if you lose power. That facility is temporarily out of business. You know what happens if your data center loses power. Your computer-based processes are out of business. If that’s not acceptable, then what have you done to ensure continuing operations?

The Danger of Single Point Failures
What is the communications equivalent of battery and diesel generator backup for electrical power? It’s one or more redundant communications paths. If you have a single broadband line powering your network, you have what’s known as a “single point failure”. That’s one place where a failure of any sort puts you out of business. You can have all sorts of extra computers, printers, servers, battery backup and people cross-trained to take over whatever is a priority task regardless of who gets sick. It’s all for naught if yours is an online business and there is no way you and your customers can connect.

Start With the Best Line You Can Get
There are broadband services and then there are broadband services. They really break down into two categories. There are telecom services designed for high reliability and often available with service level agreements, a type of performance guarantee. Then there are “best effort” services designed for low cost and no performance guarantees. Which do you suppose is best for your critical operations?

Telecom based services, such as T1, DS3, SONET, Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber are examples of dedicated high reliability services. So are MPLS networks if you want to create a private “Intranet” among your own facilities. DSL, Cable, Cellular and other broadband services popular with consumers generally fall into the “best effort” category. Best effort means just that. The carrier will make their best effort to keep you up and running, but there is no guarantee of what that will wind up being.

The Need For Redundancy
Even the best technology can go awry. Amplifiers short out, backhoes cut through copper and fiber cables with alarming regularity, and technicians make mistakes, perhaps disconnecting your circuit instead of the one they intended. Accidents will, indeed, happen, but that doesn’t mean your business has to be the victim.

One tried and true way to protect yourself from equipment failure is to have a backup in place. If one fiber optic line is good, two are better… with some caveats. Redundant lines really need to be independent. Ideally, you want to get them from different carriers who run them in different cable bundles that even leave your facility in different directions.

I remember a few years ago when our Cable company had one of those backhoe mishaps. It took two days to get TV and broadband restored because they had to splice over 100 fiber strands to complete the repair. You could have leased ten of those strands to make your connection redundant and you would have lost everything in one big chop.

Can Cable Backup Fiber?
Business cable broadband can actually be a very good way to get redundancy into your communications without doubling the budget. Cable services have gotten a lot more reliable since they switched from large coaxial trunks to fiber optic runs to the curb or neighborhood.

The DOCSIS 3 standard, that is now almost universal, offers bandwidth capability in the hundreds of Mbps, even up to 1 Gbps in some locations. The cost per Mbps is just a fraction of what you’d pay for Ethernet over Fiber or legacy SONET. That’s because cable service is, indeed, “best effort”, the bandwidth is shared, not dedicated, and the bandwidth is asymmetrical. That is, download speeds are much higher than upload speeds.

Taking all that into account, you may sleep a lot better at night knowing that if your premium dedicated fiber takes a hit, you can continue operations uninterrupted with broadband cable that is unrelated to your main service. You simply need a way to ensure automatic failover so that your employees and customers won’t see a service interruption.

Other Options
Some companies are quite happy to have T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, two-way satellite, or even 4G LTE wireless as backup services for their main channel. Any channel that is completely independent is a good backup candidate. The only real limitation to any of these is the amount of bandwidth available and latency low enough not to impact what you are doing with the broadband connection.

Are you feeling that a single high capacity line is leaving you vulnerable to a service interruption? Why not look into an affordable broadband backup service for peace of mind?



Note: Products with the theme "Ethernet Cables Earth" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

How Your Port Sets Your Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

As users of MAN and WAN telecom services, we’re acutely aware of the bandwidth we’ve contracted for. What once was seemed like more than adequate line speed now seems a bit confining. In the worst case, applications don’t run right and productivity slows to a crawl as everyone waits on something to download. Now, what’s needed to jack up the bandwidth and get rid of all that congestion?

Every Connection Has its Speed
You can often run any line at less capacity than it is capable of, but not more. Factors that go into the maximum speed include type of transmission medium, such as twisted pair copper, coaxial cable, fiber optic strands, or microwave wireless. They also include the capability of the port on the access router or other customer premises equipment (CPE). Let’s have a look at some common connectivity solutions and their port speeds.

T1 Lines
T1 lines run at a synchronous speed of 1.5 Mbps. Synchronization between source and destination is typical of the TDM or Time Division Multiplexing technologies that include T-Carrier (T1, T3) and SONET (OC-3, OC-12, OC-24, OC-48). The way these lines carry traffic is to chop up a fixed line speed into smaller pieces called channels. T1 happens to have 24 channels of 64 Kbps each. That turns out to be just right for packing one telephone conversation into each channel. For data traffic, all the channels are combined into one large pipe.

It’s easy to see how you can have less than 1.5 Mbps by using fewer channels or rate limiting the data speed. This used to be popular as a cost savings mechanism when T1 lines were very expensive. Nowadays, 1.5 Mbps is considered an entry level broadband at best. So, how do you get more than 1.5 Mbps out of a T1 line?

Short answer: You don’t. Longer answer: You combine or bond two or more T1 lines so they act like a single transmission line. This gives you the option of creating bandwidths from 3 to 12 Mbps. The thing to remember is that every time you want to add another line, it has to be physically installed by the same carrier. They will usually have to change out your CPE as well as connecting the additional line wiring.

T3 Lines or DS3
T3 and DS3 are pretty much the same thing, although there is a hair of technical difference between those designations. They both run at 45 Mbps and are delivered on a pair of coaxial cables to a specific plug-in card on your router. What you don’t see is that the DS3 signal almost always runs multiplexed on a SONET fiber optic service to the curb. All of these are TDM services, like T1 lines on steroids.

SONET Fiber Optic
SONET or Synchronous Optical NETwork is a family of standards that offers an easy upgrade from T-carrier. Yes, SONET still uses the 64 Kbps channels when it is set up for telephone trunking. Otherwise it offers a very large data pipe that can also be used as a SIP trunk.

Like T-Carrier, every flavor of SONET has a different interface. You’ll need specific cards or carrier supplied routers for OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps. You can sometimes get rate limited bandwidth at each level for some cost savings.

Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper (EoC) uses the same twisted pair transmission wiring at T1, but is capable of higher speeds, albeit at shorter distances. Typical bandwidth range from 3 on up to at least 10 or 20 Mbps. In special circumstances, this can be increased to 50 or 100 Mbps.

Ethernet is a bit different from TCM in that there are no synchronous channels. Instead, everything is carried by packets. The number of packets that the line will carry each second is its bandwidth. The bandwidth you can get depends on the capability of your carrier and the speed of the installed port on the CPE. Most often this is a managed edge router they install in your premises.

You simply plug into the Ethernet port on the router using a standard RJ-45 Ethernet cable. Port speeds follow the Ethernet standards of 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps. If you have the 100 Mbps port installed, you can specify the bandwidth you want in fairly small increments up to the technical capability of the connection. Better yet, you can tell the carrier to change your bandwidth at any time and it will be done quickly. Some carriers even let you make the change yourself through your web browser.

Ethernet over Fiber
Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) works just like Ethernet over Copper except that it runs on fiber optical cabling all the way and offers nearly unlimited speed options. Your access ports can be copper or fiber connections. Twisted pair copper jacks make sense for 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps ports. Fiber connections are used for 10 Gbps and above.

Fiber has become far more economical in just the last few years. Today it makes sense to install Ethernet over Fiber service as low at 10 Mbps. With a typical 1000 Mbps port, you typical have all the expansion capacity you’ll need for the foreseeable future. There won’t be any equipment changes needed until you breach the Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth level. Then it’s likely you’ll move up to a 10 GigE port. By that time, 100 GigE ports may be rule rather than the exception.

Cost Considerations
TDM services such as T1, T3 and SONET are proven technologies, but they represent the past in telecommunications and networking. The new competitive carrier networks are designed around Ethernet for scalability and compatibility with the Ethernet protocol that runs nearly every company network. In most cases, you’ll find that Ethernet offers a cost savings over TDM in both the copper and fiber formats. That cost savings can be as much as half or more depending on what’s available in your area.

Is your current connectivity starved for bandwidth? Clearly, it’s time to consider an upgrade. Get competitive quotes on copper and fiber optic services available for your location and be sure to specify a port speed that will handle both your current and expected needs.

Fiber Optic Bandwidth is Closer Than You Think

By: John Shepler

If you’ve had your telecom line contracts for years, maybe decades, you may not be aware of all the connection options that have become available recently. Some have popped up only in the last few years. Don’t continue to assume that something like T1 lines are all that are available without taking another look. You may be surprised at what you find.

 

You Need More Bandwidth
Fiber optic bandwidth has been talked about for years at the wave of the future. When you look at the type of applications that are popular with both consumers and businesses, it becomes obvious quickly that nothing else will accommodate the bandwidths that are needed.

You’ve seen it coming. Static web pages have given way to embedded video clips. SD video has been supplanted by HD Video. Now that clamor is for 4K and, soon, 8K video streams.

How about software? Software used to come on tape reels, floppy disks and CD ROMs. Now software is downloaded. The old “packages” are on their way out, if not gone. They’re being replaced by apps that are acquired over the Internet. That takes a lot more than DSL or T1 bandwidth.

Downloadable apps may have a short lifespan, too. There is a mad dash for the “cloud” for both applications and storage. On-site data centers are emptying out. Massive cloud data centers are popping up as fast as they can be built. When you access everything through the cloud rather than over the LAN, your wide area network bandwidth requirements shoot up by orders of magnitude.

Why It’s Got to Be Fiber
The need for increasing levels of bandwidth have not been lost on service providers. In fact, any carrier that is still married to circuit switched architectures and copper connectivity is just marking time until it is no longer needed.

Ethernet over Copper has extended the life of the installed twisted pair copper plant by offering speeds of 10 Mbps to at least 50 Mbps and sometimes higher. DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 are doing the same for coaxial cable. Premises connectivity is likely the last bastion of copper. It only needs to stretch to the curb, where it connects to… fiber.

What about wireless? It looks like the world is now standardizing on 4G LTE and looking forward to 5G, as everything we do at the desk also needs to be done while mobile. Even so, capacity limitations dictated by the amount of room in the electromagnetic spectrum will keep wireless primarily as a mobile connection. Perhaps meshed WiFi and pico cells will again multiply the capacity of wireless… but it’s never going to be fiber.

An Avalanche of Fiber Now
The beauty of fiber is that it offers unlimited bandwidth as far as we can tell. Each strand might only support 10 Gbps with todays lasers, but DWDM creates dozens or more of those 10 Gbps channels on a single fiber strand. Why install a single hair-thin fiber when you can bundle 100 or more in a cable about the size of the familiar twisted pair bundles?

Of course multiple strand cables are the only way to go. For awhile it looked like way too much capacity had been installed during at the tech boom of the 90’s. Now those dark fiber strands are being lit up en-masse and more capacity is being installed nationwide.

Google has it right. The future… the near future… is fiber and Gigabit bandwidth is something we won’t be salivating over for long. Soon it will be 10 Gbps and then 100 Gbps. There is no end in sight.

It’s not just Google in selected cities or Verizon’s FiOS. Every incumbent telecom company and all the new competitive service providers are in a race to get to fiber as their standard connectivity for both home and business.

Goodbye SONET, Hello Ethernet
The incumbent telcos and the long line providers built their fiber networks with the SONET protocol, as it was the logical upgrade from TDM copper such as T1 and E1. All the new networks are being built around Carrier Ethernet and the older ones are converting rapidly.

Sometimes the most sensible thing to do is install Ethernet over SONET as an upgrade. When starting from scratch, native Ethernet is the protocol of choice. It’s unlikely we’ll return to a circuit switched world. It’s packet switching as far forward as we can see.

The beauty of Ethernet is that it is directly compatible with the local networks in every home and business, and all of the equipment that connects to them. Carrier Ethernet is designed to be highly scalable, with many more increments in bandwidth than were offered by SONET and fractional SONET services. You can pretty much pick the bandwidth you want, although standard LAN speeds of 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps are popular, with 10 Gbps more in demand every day.

Moreover, Ethernet services are fast and easy to scale. You can generally call your provider and get bandwidth upgrades immediately or within a few days. As long as the installed port for your WAN service can handle it, you can keep upgrading as needed with no change in premises equipment.

How to FInd the Fiber Services Quickly
You can try looking the old fashioned way, by looking in the phone directory for telecom carriers in your area. Or just run an online search. You’ll find some of them for sure, but might miss out on others that are new or not widely publicized.

It makes more sense to use a search engine that is dedicated to finding fiber optic bandwidth and nothing else. That’s the GeoQoute (™) system. How difficult is it to use? Trivially easy, in fact. You simply start by entering some basic contact information and the type of service you want. In a few minutes, the automated system will give you a list of options with budgetary pricing. If you like what you see, a complementary discussion with a product specialist can help you narrow down the choices and find out about limited time special offers that might be an even better deal.

Sound good? Do a fast search for fiber optic network services now and see what you may have been missing for years.

Cyber Monday is For Business Buyers Too

By: John Shepler

Cyber Monday is the new tradition for shopping online to get deals that you couldn’t in the rough and tumble of brick and mortar Black Friday sales. You’ll see numerous offers for special deals targeted at consumers today. But what about businesses? Is there such a thing as Cyber Monday for business?

There should be. Business purchases are a huge part of the economy. What’s more, what businesses have to pay for products and services reflects in the price consumers have to pay. If your business can get a bargain on Cyber Monday, it’s a win all the way around.

Let’s have a look at some things that you might not think are ripe for savings, yet actually are. While prices for these services might not be specific to this particular day, there’s still a huge incentive for you to take a closer look. You’ll likely find savings that you didn’t know were available. Whatever you save will pay off for months and years into the future.

1. T1 Lines
Just about every company has leased a T1 line at some point in its growth. Many still do, and new T1 lines are being provisioned every day. Why has this decades old telecom service retained its popularity in the face of technological advancement?

It’s hard to beat a winner. T1 lines have a long history of reliability and versatility. You can use a T1 line as a point to point private line, dedicated Internet access, MPLS network connection, or as a T1 or ISDN PRI telephone trunk for your telephone system. They offer the same bandwidth in both directions and are inherently low in latency.

What T1 lines have that many other telecom services don’t have is near universal availability. They come in on ordinary twisted pair telephone cable that is available to just about every business building. The one gripe has been cost. Ten years ago, T1 lines were pricey. You had to swallow hard and sign the contract if you needed connectivity. Today, prices are a fraction of what they used to be and are attractive to even very small businesses.

If you are unhappy with “consumer grade” broadband or have a T1 contract that is a few years old or more, you should get an instant price quote for T1 line services now.

2. Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper, also called EoC, is the direct competitor to T1 lines. EoC is a newer technology and uses the same twisted pair copper wires that provision T1. It’s also symmetrical in bandwidth, highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss.

What Ethernet over Copper offers is higher bandwidth and… Ethernet! While your phone system may still be a traditional Key Telephone System or PBX using analog POTS lines or ISDN PRI, your computer network is almost certainly based on Ethernet. EoC lets you connect to other locations or the Internet while keeping your packets in the Ethernet protocol all the way. This opens the door to services like E-LAN that let you set up a bridged LAN that includes locations across town or nationwide.

Unlike T1 that has a fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps no matter the distance, EoC technology trades off speed for distance. If you are close to the central office you can get very high speeds, perhaps 50 Mbps or more. Farther away, available line speed drops off as the line length increases. Even so, most business locations can get 3 Mbps up to 10 or 20 Mbps using Ethernet over Copper. Even better, the cost per Mbps is usually lower than what you pay for T1… perhaps half as much.

If you are running out of bandwidth on your T1 line or want to see if you can get the same or higher bandwidth at a better price, you’ll want to check out Ethernet over Copper bandwidth speeds and prices for your locations.

3. Metro Ethernet over Fiber
If Ethernet over Copper is a good idea, Ethernet over Fiber is a even better one. Fiber optic networks have multiplied in recent years, with tentacles reaching into nearly every city around the globe. The other revolution is the rise of independent private carriers to compete with the traditional telephone companies. This competitive environment has expanded service availability and reduced prices.

If you’ve had fiber optic services for years, chances are that you have one of the legacy SONET telco fiber lines. These include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.4 Mbps. SONET is highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss. It traditionally has suffered from lack of availability, few fixed bandwidth levels, and high prices per Mbps compared to what is available now.

Yes, SONET is still a good fiber service to have. Prices have come down dramatically over the years. But Ethernet over Fiber is an even better deal. Like EoC, EoF keeps your traffic in the Ethernet protocol for easy interfacing, and the ability to get LAN-type connectivity among multiple locations.

it’s also highly scalable. You can get just about any bandwidth level you want between 10 Mbps and 10 Gbps. In some major business centers, speeds as high as 100 Gbps are available to businesses as well as carriers. What’s more, you can generally get your service upgraded quickly with just a phone call to your provider. Quickly means anything from a few hours to a week or so. Compare that with weeks or months if you need a SONET upgrade.

If you need bandwidth of 10 Mbps or higher for your business (not residential) location, it is well worth your while to take a few minutes this Cyber Monday (or any other day) and check out the fiber optic bandwidth and pricing options available right now.

4. Hosted PBX
Everybody knows what a business telephone is. It’s that box with a handset and dial pad that sits on your desk and has its own wiring to the phone company or an in-house phone system. Business phones are essential for business. The traditional phone systems aren’t so essential anymore. In fact, you are likely missing out on both features and cost savings if you aren’t looking at the new cloud hosted VoIP or cloud PBX phone services. So, let’s take a Cyber Monday shopping trip.

There are numerous companies offering “hosted” phone services. These range of single line VoIP telephone services all the way up to call centers in the cloud. They’re all based on the idea that if telephones can connect to the computer network, then the switching equipment can be located anywhere. Today, the best deals are cloud service providers who operate massive data centers dedicated to IP telephony.

Don’t confuse enterprise VoIP services with the low-end Internet VoIP services. They may use similar technology, but the trick to consistently high voice quality is a dedicated network connection between you and the provider. This is known as a SIP trunk. The bandwidth of the trunk determines how many simultaneous calls it will support. You can have a few lines or thousands. Only the speed of the connection changes.

What Hosted PBX does is change the way you pay for your phone service. Instead of making a major capital investment in equipment and ongoing maintenance expenses, you pay per phone per month to a service firm. That firm bears the cost and responsibility of running a highly reliable and easily scalable phone system for your company. All you have in-house are the IP phones plugged into your computer network and a specialized router to prioritize the voice traffic.

Is your phone system too small or getting a little “creaky”? Before you go out and drop a bundle on a shiny new in-house equipment rack, see how competitive and feature-filled a Cloud Hosted PBX service can be.

Now you see how Cyber Monday can be as asset to businesses beyond what you sell to consumers on this single day of the year. Use Cyber Monday as an incentive to shop for your business as well as yourself and get deals that will pay off handsomely for years.

Many Flavors of Business Internet

By: John Shepler

You need to connect your business to the Internet. In fact, it’s almost impossible to do business now without a broadband Internet connection. Your customers, your cloud services, your emergency backup, your suppliers and perhaps the connection to your home office, remote sites or franchisees are all via the Internet. The only question is how to best achieve that connectivity.

Most businesses don’t have a lack of options for getting Internet service. What they have is a confusing situation with may different services offering different characteristics at different price points. Choosing the lowest price option may result in frustration when the connection can’t support your particular business activities. Automatically picking the highest priced option can increase your internet costs significantly and may also not provide the connectivity you need. Let’s see if we add some clarity to this decidedly unclear situation.

Business Internet options generally fall within two categories. The first are telecom services, usually regulated and tariffed. These were the first connections invented and adopted by business as well as the carriers themselves. The other category includes information services that are were primarily designed to serve the consumer market but now available for businesses too.

Telecom services include familiar names such as T1 lines, DS3, SONET fiber optic services and the newer Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber connections. These are almost always intended for commercial and large organizational use. Most carriers won’t even provision these services to residences. That’s seldom a problem, because these telecom services range from several times to an order of magnitude higher in price than what residential users are used to spending.

What do you get for your telecom dollar? These services almost always offer symmetrical, dedicated bandwidth with a service level agreement (SLA). The service level agreement specifies the technical characteristics of your line service, the expected availability and how fast problems get attention and repaired. It’s a type of guarantee that you’ll get top rate performance.

Dedicated bandwidth means that you have exclusive use of the bandwidth you are paying for. You have access to a certain number of Mbps or Gbps on a 24/7 basis. You can run traffic occasionally or load up the line to full capacity continuously. The price is the same. It’s your bandwidth and nobody else gets access.

Symmetrical means that you get the same bandwidth in both the upload (transmit) and download (receive) directions. This isn’t important if you are just browsing websites, but it can be critical if you are running a server, backing up files to a remote data center, using cloud computing services, video conferencing or VoIP telephone.

Consumer oriented services are also referred to as “information services.” This is intended to imply that they are not a guaranteed telecom service and offered on a more casual basis. That basis means “best effort” delivery. The providers will make a good faith effort to ensure that you have reliable bandwidth service, but there are no guarantees of performance.

Typical services that fall into this category are DSL, Cable broadband, WiFi hot spots, 3G and 4G wireless and consumer oriented satellite service. Beyond the best effort delivery, what helps to hold the cost down is the use of shared asymmetrical bandwidth.

Shared means just that. There is a pool of bandwidth to connect to the Internet that is shared among dozens or hundreds of simultaneous users. How much you get at any given moment is determined by how many other users are online to divide up that bandwidth pool.

Asymmetrical means that your download and upload speeds are different. Typically, you get several to a order of magnitude (10x) faster speed on download that upload. Why? It’s because most Internet users are accessing web pages or streaming video. These are primarily one way activities. You need the extra bandwidth for those large file transfers from the server on the Internet to your PC.

There are some factors that muddy the waters. The consumer oriented services have business equivalents that are basically the same service but installed at commercial than residential addresses. They are often 2x to 3x the cost for business users. You do get better customer service and, often, the option for static IP addresses if you need them to run a server. Most consumer services prohibit running servers or sharing the bandwidth, such as offering a free WiFi hotspot.

So are these lower cost services something to avoid? Not at all, if they meet your needs. Even home broadband can be highly reliable and quickly repaired if the line is cut or equipment fails. It’s not unusual to get higher bandwidths, as high as 50 or 100 Mbps download and 5 to 10 Mbps upload, for roughly the same cost as a 1.5 Mbps T1 or 3 Mbps EoC line. If most of what your employees do is use email and web browsers or view video clips, you’ll likely get faster speeds for everyone with cable broadband than even bonded T1 lines. Sometimes wireless is all that will work at your location. In that case, a 3G or 4G cellular broadband can save the day when there are no wireline services available.

On the other hand, if you are running enterprise applications, especially in the cloud, or have converted your entire telephone system to VoIP, you’re not going to be very happy with the lower end services. The variability in bandwidth, latency and jitter will drive you crazy and drive your customers crazy as well. You’ll be much better off with dedicated symmetrical bandwidth. In fact, you may well want a direct connection to your cloud service provider or between business locations rather than deal with the vagaries and security issues of the Internet. Many companies need both: dedicated private line service for internal operations and an Internet connection to reach customers and access data.

How do you sort through the myriad of options for business Internet and private line option? Get help from a bandwidth brokerage service that can give you a range of options and the consulting support to make the most effective choices for your business. Find business bandwidth options and prices instantly online now.

Asymmetric Bandwidth is Hot for Business

By: John Shepler

What has characterized serious bandwidth for business applications has been symmetry, or having the same Mbps capacity in both the up (transmit) and down (receive) directions. That’s being challenged, now, by new service products that promote asymmetry. Asymmetry means having a different bandwidth available depending on whether you are uploading or downloading. Let’s have a look at why this is happening and if it can be advantageous for your business.

Symmetry has its roots in telecom services that go back to the development of digital line transmission a half-century ago. The inventor of the T-Carrier standards, including the ubiquitous T1 line, was Bell Labs. Bell’s mission was to serve the telephone companies, so the digitization of telephone calls preceded computer to computer communications by decades. Switching from analog to digital long lines virtually eliminated the noise, distortion and crosstalk effects that plagued domestic long distance and international phone calls. It also enabled systems that could transmit hundreds and thousands of simultaneous phone calls on a single circuit.

Why symmetrical operation? Phone calls are bi-directional in nature. It doesn’t matter which end of the call you are on. You need the same line characteristics so that you can talk and listen simultaneously. This results in transmit and receive paths that are identical in design.

When T1 lines, DS3 connections and fiber optic circuits were pressed into service to meet the demand for computer communications, they automatically came with symmetrical bandwidth as well as dedicated circuits, synchronized channels and low latency and jitter. These features of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) get the job done, but at a price.

Asymmetry has its roots in the rise of the Internet and consumer based Internet Service Providers (ISPs). When you access a web site, you send a small burst of packets to tell the server what you want and get back a large burst of packets that carry text, images, audio and video. Nearly all web access by users requires a lot more bandwidth in the download direction than in the upload direction.

This works well for telephone companies providing DSL over shared phone lines and cable companies using spare channels to deliver broadband Internet. Cable, especially, is a one-way medium. When TV was the only service, all channel content went from the head end to the consumer. For asymmetrical broadband, many fewer channels have to be allocated for the upload direction. That leaves the rest available for higher download speeds at premium pricing.

What some businesses, especially the smaller ones, have found is that asymmetrical DSL, cable, wireless and satellite broadband meet their needs just fine. This is especially true when their employees use the Internet primarily for web access and occasional email. Cable broadband is readily available and gives you higher download speeds for a fraction of the cost of a T1 line. When you get into higher bandwidths, say 10 to 100 Mbps, the cost differences are like night and day.

There are some hitches in this rosy scenario. Asymmetry is only one reason why DSL and Cable are cheaper than T1, DS3, Ethernet over Copper and fiber. A big driver in this cost reduction is shared rather than dedicated bandwidth. With shared bandwidth, the Mbps you have in either direction varies constantly depending on what your neighbors are doing. It’s one big bandwidth pool and the more users who are swimming in it, the less bandwidth is available to each user. This can get annoying when you have a critical project in the works and you can’t get much done because other people are downloading high definition videos.

Another difference between the symmetrical and asymmetrical services is that the symmetrical ones tend to be tariffed telecom services with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that specify repair times for circuit outages, usually in a matter of a few hours. The consumer oriented asymmetrical services tend to be classified as “data services” and are provided on a best effort basis. The carrier will take your complaints seriously, but they may not be able to get the line fixed for some time.

Asymmetry doesn’t work for everyone. Applications like disaster backup and recovery, video conferencing, PBX & enterprise VoIP telephony, cloud computing and large file transfers between multiple business sites really need line symmetry for optimum performance. Companies running these applications also tend to need dedicated bandwidth and service level agreements to ensure maximum productivity.

Even so, the heavy competition from cable and other service providers is causing some major telecom carriers to rethink their service offerings. MegaPath, for instance, is rolling out asymmetrical service to customers at a cost savings. They are still differentiating their service with dedicated bandwidth, SLAs and Quality of Service (QoS) options for business applications that need these characteristics. Other big telecom carriers are expected to follow suit.

With so many service providers and connectivity options, how do you choose the optimum service that gives you the performance you need for the least expense? The best way is to get help from a bandwidth broker who works with many service providers and has the volume to get you the best discounts. Get instant online pricing and available consulting for bandwidth services available for your business locations.

Leased Line Prices Lower, More Variety

Leased telecom lines have long been the standard of business connectivity from point to point or for dedicated Internet access. Let’s take a look at what leased line options are available and how prices have changed dramatically in the last few years.

First of all, it might be useful to define what a leased line is and how it differs from other bandwidth options. Leased lines are pretty much what the name implies. You contract with a telecom service provider, a carrier, for a period of typically 1, 2 or 3 years in which you have exclusive use of a line service. There is no other traffic on your line. You can choose to load it up 24/7 or let it idle overnight. The cost is the same. Pricing is based on so many Mbps every month.

Note that this is Megabits per second and not total Megabits of traffic every month. The bandwidth sets the maximum speed of transmission and the maximum number of bits that can go over that line in a month. In practice, few dedicated lines are loaded to the maximum. Users deliberately leave some reserve or margin to handle peak vs average needs. In normal operation the lines are highly loaded at times and lightly loaded at other times.

Dedicated telecom lines are highly reliable and guaranteed to be available for a high percentage of time. You see this expressed as 99.9% or 99.99% uptime. The holy grail of availability is 99.999%, also called “5 nines”. When you order a leased line, it generally comes with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that spells out the promised availability, mean time to repair if a line should fail, and what compensation you get if the provider isn’t able to meet the requirements of the SLA.

As you might suspect, leased lines are professional grade service used by businesses and organizations. They are not a consumer product. In fact, many carriers won’t even install a leased line to a residential address. That’s seldom a problem because there is an order of magnitude difference in price between leads lines and residential broadband.

Why are consumer line services, like cable and DSL, so much cheaper? For one thing, they are based on shared bandwidth. You and dozens or hundreds of your neighbors are actually sharing a leased line that the service provider has installed to their facility. If nobody is on that line but you at any given time, then you get all the bandwidth to yourself. Not the speed of the leased line, but some lower maximum rate depending on how much you pay each month. If many of your neighbors are streaming video, the line speed slows to a crawl for each of you. Most businesses can’t stand that unpredictability in performance. They need the solid bandwidth of leased lines.

Consumer line services don’t come with any sort of SLA. They are offered on a “best effort” basis. That means you get what you get and if something goes wrong it gets fixed when it gets fixed. This lack of commitment also helps to keep prices lower on residential bandwidth. Point to point connectivity for consumers? Forget it. All of these services access the Internet. If you want a secure point to point connection you need to set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for the locations you want to connect.

T1 lines have long been the staple of the leased line business. You can order a point to point T1 that connects two locations directly. You can order a dedicated Internet access T1 that connects you to the Internet. You can even order a T1 telephone trunk that give you up to 24 outside lines for your business phone system.

T1 prices have plunged from over a grand to under $300 a month in most locations. For that you get exclusive use of 1.5 Mbps for a long as your contract goes. If that isn’t enough bandwidth, you can bond multiple T1 lines together to get 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9, 10.5 or 12 Mbps.

What competes with T1? It’s a newer service called Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This is a wireline service that offers high bandwidth and lower prices, but with some distance limitations. Entry level EoC service is generally 3 Mbps for the same price as a single 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Bandwidth can easily range up to 10 or 20 Mbps, with 45 Mbps and even 100 Mbps available in some locations. The more bandwidth you order, the lower the price per Mbps.

If you need more bandwidth than copper offers, you move up to fiber optic leased lines. DS3 at 45 Mbps is often carried by fiber optic line to your location and then by copper coaxial lines to your equipment. SONET is all fiber and starts at 155 Mbps. It goes up to 1 or 10 Gbps in most areas and 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps in some locations.

Ethernet over Fiber (EoF), like EoC, offers scalable bandwidths from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps at a considerable discount over legacy SONET fiber services. Unlike copper Ethernet, there are no distance limitations for fiber optic Carrier Ethernet.

These are the major dedicated line services available for business. For international connections or linking multiple sites, Ethernet Line service over MPLS networks may be more cost effective. MPLS isn’t a dedicated line service, but virtual dedicated connections can be set up to guarantee performance over the MPLS network.

Does your business have a need to connect directly between two locations or to the Internet? There are likely multiple competing providers with both copper and fiber technologies available for your location. Check leased line prices and options to see what’s available right now.


Note: Photo of Ethernet cables courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Why Carriers Are Transforming Copper to Fiber

Alchemists of the ancient world spent centuries searching for the philosopher’s stone. This is a legendary substance that could turn lead into gold. They never found it. Today’s network carriers may well have found a modern equivalent to the philosopher’s stone. It’s the near magic of converting copper into fiber.

Telecom service providers aren’t really after a chemical process to make them rich. They have something even more lucrative. Their version of transmutation involves the wholesale replacement of century old twisted pair copper wiring with the latest in multiple strand fiber optic cabling.

There are untold tons of copper in the ground. Not just the ore, mind you. The copper that makes money for carriers is the refined variety that is drawn into small diameter wire and coated with colored plastic for insulation. The wires are then joined into pairs so a complete circuit can be formed. They are twisted into a spiral to cancel out interfering signals from other pairs and outside influences such as AC power cabling. Collections of twisted pairs are bundled into cables called binders and then buried or flown overhead on utility poles.

The installed copper is referred to as an asset by the companies that own it. These are almost always the ILECs or Incumbent local Exchange Carriers. They are the legacy of the old Bell System that developed the technology and installed the infrastructure in the first place. Copper assets have been the basis of telecom profits for more than a century. So, why turn your back on this valuable resource?

Copper’s glory days are in the past. For more than a dozen decades, copper wires carried most voice and data signals. Data came first, in the form of the telegraph. Voice soon followed with the invention of Bell’s telephone. Even television used copper for signal transport, although using a different type of cable called coax. It’s still the most popular way to connect cable television to homes and businesses. What’s replacing copper? Fiber.

Fiber optic bundles long ago replaced copper cables as undersea cables. They also form the core of nationwide data networks and long distance telephone service. What’s left is the arduous job of abandoning or pulling out all that old copper still used locally and replacing it with the latest in high efficiency fiber optics.

Make no mistake, converting copper to fiber is an expensive process. Verizon has been a leader in FTTH (Fiber to the Home) using passive fiber optic cables to replace old telephone wires. Once installed, the fiber becomes the telecom connection to that location and the copper is decommissioned. Despite the advantages of fiber over copper, this conversion process has not spread like wildfire across the country. It costs a lot to install the new fiber and network interface boxes.

The buildout cost is becoming less of an issue all the time. This is especially true for the copper installations in business locations. Businesses are willing to spend a lot more in monthly lease fees for their bandwidth connections than consumers. They are also faced with the new reality that high bandwidth is critical for the growth of their businesses.

Business demand is one major impetus in the transformation of copper to fiber MAN and WAN connections. Bandwidth demands are skyrocketing and copper is limited in how much it can transport. T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 connections at 45 Mbps are most popular legacy telecom services. DS3 itself depends on fiber optic transmission to the curb, where the final run into the building is accomplished with coaxial copper. T1 uses those twisted pairs originally installed for telephone service. It was specifically designed to be compatible. The good news is that T1 is almost universally available. The bad news is that it no longer has the bandwidth to support modern business processes. A couple of decades ago 1.5 Mbps was all you needed even in larger companies. Now that’s considered entry level at best.

A couple of technical advances are extending the life of the installed copper assets. One is T1 line bonding. You can connect two T1 lines so they act like one line with twice the capacity. Add more lines and multiply the bandwidth. The practical limit to this is 10 or 12 Mbps. Another technology is called Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This uses the same twisted pair copper as T1 but with a different modulation scheme that offers higher bandwidths but distance sensitivity. You can easily get 10 to 50 Mbps, but need to be fairly close to the telco CO for higher bandwidths.

What’s fiber got to offer? How about bandwidths from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps? Cloud computing, video, big data and content distribution need those higher bandwidths that only fiber can easily provide. This requirement is only going to increase in the future. This is why Verizon recently took advantage of the “opportunity” to replace their old copper with fiber in lower Manhattan following the water damage from Hurricane Sandy. It future-proofs their network while opening up a market for higher priced higher bandwidth services.

Is your business being stymied by too low bandwidth? Check availability of Ethernet over Copper and Fiber Optic services for your business location. You may be surprised by the increased availability and lower cost of higher bandwidth metro and WAN services.


Note: Photo of fiber optic conduit spools courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

20 to 100 Mbps Metro Ethernet

Companies often lease telecom lines for dedicated access to the Internet or for Wide Area Network (WAN) connections. These WAN links can span cities, states or even international borders. But what if all you want to do is connect two or more locations in the same town? What you need then is a MAN or Metropolitan Area Network.

The newest type of metropolitan network is called Metropolitan Ethernet, Metro Ethernet or Metro E. What’s exciting about Metro Ethernet is the wide range of bandwidth levels available, the ease and speed of increasing bandwidth as needed, the availability of new standardized services, easy LAN interfacing and the cost advantage of Ethernet compared to traditional telecom services.

A metro area network is exactly what it sounds like. It is a network that covers a particular city or metropolitan area consisting of the city, suburbs and any important industrial or office parks. Metro networks are careful to be accessible by businesses that are likely users of their services. This is strictly a commercial service, not for residential or home office users.

Unlike the Internet, there is no public access to Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN). They are privately operated by a network service provider who grants access only to paying customers. Even those customers can only access their own data. The network operator provides enough resources so that customers are unaware there is anyone else using the network.

What type of services can you get? Two of the most popular are E-Line and E-LAN. Both are standards established by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), an industry trade group. An big advantage of standardization is that you know what you are ordering regardless of service provider or hardware implementation.

E-Line or Ethernet Line service is the familiar point to point dedicated line connection. A EVC or Ethernet Virtual Connection is established between the UNIs (User Network Interfaces) at two locations. Your Ethernet packets travel back and forth on this EVC. It’s virtual because you don’t have a dedicated set of wires between the locations for your use only. Instead, your EVC shares the Metro Ethernet Network with other user’s EVCs.

The other popular service is E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. This is a multi-point networking service that connects 3 or more business locations in a meshed network. This replaces propriety corporate networks created using multiple T1 lines or other dedicated bandwidth connections in a star network arrangement.

What makes E-Line and E-LAN so popular? First, you can get the connectivity you want at a lower cost than using older telecom technologies. Second, it’s Ethernet just like the Ethernet you run on your company LAN. For MAN applications, this is called Carrier Ethernet. Because it’s Ethernet, your connection to the MAN is via a standard copper or fiber Ethernet connector. There are no special interface cards needed. By tying your locations together via Carrier Ethernet, you can choose to use layer 2 switching to create a bridged LAN that includes all of the networks at your various locations around town.

Carrier Ethernet is designed to be easily scalable. You can get connections using copper technology called EoC for Ethernet over Copper in the range of 2 Mbps on up to about 45 Mbps. Fiber technology called EoF for Ethernet over Fiber covers you from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps. This includes the popular range of 20 to 100 Mbps that many companies desire. Note that if you have a 100 Mbps Ethernet Port installed, you can start off with 20 Mbps service and scale up to 100 Mbps with only a phone call to your service provider. If you have a Gigabit Ethernet Port installed, you can get any bandwidth up to 1,000 Mbps.

Could your company benefit from 20 to 100 Mbps Metro Ethernet? If so check prices and services for Metro Ethernet Networks available for your business locations.



Note: Photo of city lights courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Many Ways To Connect To MPLS Networks

MPLS networks are becoming very popular for connecting multiple business locations. Let’s take a look at what MPLS networks are all about and the many ways you can get connected to them.

The simplest situation is when you have two locations and want to tie them together. The logical thing to do is order a point to point private line. These lines come in all sizes, bandwidths actually, to meet your needs. They are exactly what they sound like. One end of the line connects to location #1. The other end of the line connects to location #2. It’s like there really is a long piece of wire that extends across town or across the country.

There is one difference between a private line and a piece of wire. Private lines are actually telecom services deployed on those wires or fiber optic strands. There is a certain protocol and speed for each type of line. A T1 private line, for instance, gives you 1.5 Mbps bidirectionally to interfaces meeting the T-carrier specification. You’ll need T1 cards for your routers at each end. Nothing else will work. They have to be exactly the same for the T1 line to function.

You could build a larger network with 3 or more locations the same way. It will cost the least if you set up a star network configuration and do the routing at headquarters with lines running to each business location. Then HQ can decide who can communicate to who. You might set it up so that any location can send files to any other, having them routed through headquarters. Or, you may set it up so that each location can communicate with HQ only and then headquarters will decide where, if anywhere else, the data goes.

Like the two site private line arrangement, if all your lines are T1s, then every port will be a T1 interface. In this case, though, you have gained a bit of flexibility. You can use T1 lines for the smaller operations and install T3 lines for the larger ones. The setup at HQ will require a mix of T1 and T3 interfaces to handle various size remote locations.

Here’s where MPLS networks come in. The MPLS network is a cloud as far as its users are concerned. If you peek inside, you’ll see that it is a fairly large scale fiber optic network. Many MPLS networks have regional or national service footprints. Some even span the globe. What’s special about MPLS is the protocol used. It’s not T-carrier, SONET, IP or anything else. It’s a proprietary technology called label switching that wraps each packet in a special label that is used to manage traffic. The label gets attached when entering the network and removed upon exit.

What this does is make an MPLS network “protocol agnostic.” That means it doesn’t care what protocol you are transporting. It’s also speed agnostic. It doesn’t really care how fast your line is running as long as it connects via an appropriate interface port. Once on the network, all packets have the bandwidth needed to prevent congestion.

This really opens the window to connecting all locations, large and small, via the MPLS “cloud.” You simply need to get your voice, video or data to the network. From there on, the service provider is responsible for getting packets from one location to wherever you have specified that they go. Each location has a “last mile” connection that is the on and off ramp to the MPLS network. Those last mile connections can be just about anything.

Typical MPLS connections include T1, bonded T1, E1, T3 (DS3), E3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber, 3G and 4G fixed wireless and DSL.

You don’t have to use the same connection at every location. The network will handle the traffic regardless of how it connected. However, there can be an advantage to standardizing on Ethernet as you only protocol. That way you can make use of standard Ethernet services such as E-Line and E-LAN. Ethernet LAN service is especially valuable because it lets you tie all your LANs together in one large bridged LAN at layer 2.

Do you have two or more business locations that you would like to link together? Get expert advice and competitive pricing for MPLS network services and last mile connections that meet your requirements.

EoC Takes On Fractional DS3

Before Carrier Ethernet became widely available, you had two logical migration paths from T1 to gain more bandwidth. You could take the big step up to T3 or DS3 service or bond T1 lines for a more incremental approach. EoC or Ethernet over Copper gives you a new and very attractive dedicated bandwidth option.

T1 lines have become popular because they are so readily available and have offered the right bandwidth for smaller companies and specialized uses by larger companies. A T1 line is rated at 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions.

The other line service in the same T-Carrier family is T3 rated at 45 Mbps in both the up and down directions. At one time T3 was delivered over microwave and coaxial cable or waveguide, but that is rare to find now. Instead, the digital service the T3 delivers, DS3, is widely available over SONET fiber optic service. It is transported over a standard SONET service, OC-3, which can carry three DS3 services multiplexed onto the OC-3 fiber. DS3 is then demultiplexed and dropped off at the demarcation point through a standard DS3 interface. That interface is two small diameter coaxial copper cables with BNC connectors.

This works for a lot of companies. If you happen to be in a metropolitan area where metro fiber is readily available, it’s not hard to get provisioned for DS3 service. If you can make good use of 45 Mbps bandwidth and can afford it, DS3 is a fast and reliable telecom service. The question is what to do if you don’t need 45 Mbps, the budget isn’t there, but 1.5 Mbps is really cramping your style.

There are a couple of traditional approaches that can help you out here. One is to move up incrementally from T1 service. The other is to order a fractional DS3 service. It’s DS3 that’s throttled back do deliver less bandwidth at a lower cost.

You may be wondering how you scale up from T1 since DS3 is the next step up in the digital hierarchy. The answer is to combine the bandwidth of multiple T1 lines in a bonding process. You can order a second T1 line and have it bonded to the one you have to get 3 Mbps instead of 1.5 Mbps. Later on, you can add more lines and gradually work your way up to 10 or 12 Mbps. That’s pretty much the practical limit of T1 line bonding.

There are a couple of advantages to this approach. First, you don’t have to make a big bandwidth or cost commitment because you are moving up incrementally. This is the way a lot of businesses grow so it’s a good match. Second, your T1 service is provisioned over twisted pair telco wiring that’s likely already in place for multi-line telephone service. The added T1 lines use vacant pairs in the binder group, the bundle of wires that runs from your location back to the telco central office.

Why is that important? Because it eliminates big construction costs which you may not be able to avoid if you have new fiber optic service installed. If no DS3 is available, you may be stuck with copper or forced to pay a large construction bill. Even if DS3 is an option, fractional DS3 service may not save you that much money over a full DS3 service. The cost savings is not proportional to the bandwidth reduction.

Is there a good solution for this dilemma? Oh, yes. There is now. It’s a fairly new service called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Like T1, EoC is provisioned over twisted pair telco wiring that is already installed. Like fractional DS3, you can get bandwidths far above what T1 lines offer. Unlike either bonded T1 or DS3 and fractional DS3, EoC has a very attractive per-Mbps pricing.

2x2 Mbps and 3x3 Mbps are very popular Ethernet over Copper services for smaller businesses. The 2x2 means 2 Mbps upload and 2 Mbps download. It’s also called 2 Mbps EoC. The 3 Mbps bandwidth level works similarly. What you might not know is that you can get 2 or 3 Mbps EoC for the same price as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Exactly how much you can get for T1 price levels depends on how competitive the carriers are in your location. Either way, it’s more bandwidth for the same money.

The other interesting feature of Ethernet over Copper is that you can easily get 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 and perhaps even 45 Mbps delivered over copper and not fiber. Pricing per Mbps beats T1 and DS3 and can be as little as half the monthly cost. The limiting factor is distance from the CO. Ethernet over Copper technology is distance limited and not readily available more than a mile or two from the central office. Still, that covers a majority of business locations nationwide.

Are you stymied by the lack of bandwidth options or the costs involved in trying to connect via T1 or DS3? If so, check out Ethernet over Copper prices and availability for your particular business locations. You may be surprised by how much you can get for your bandwidth dollar.

Bandwidth Management Gets Easier With Ethernet

Bandwidth demand can be all over the map. It goes up, it comes down. It’s fine now but could go parabolic in 6 months to a year. Or not. How can an IT manager ensure that adequate resources are in place when needed without paying through the nose for idle resources?

Exacerbating this problem is the procurement and provisioning process that worked better in less volatile times. Typically a need is identified, a budget is created, approved and released, requests for quotes go out, vendors are narrowed down, a purchase order is cut, it winds its way through the carrier’s front office, eventually resulting in an installation, turn-up and the start of billing. If something happens and you need more, the whole process starts all over.

In a way, the whole system is tuned to match the technical characteristics of circuit switched line services. Take a T1 line, for instance. You order the line and you get 1.5 Mbps. No more, no less. If you only need 500 Kbps right now, the other 1000 Kbps goes to waste. You have to pay for the entire 1,500 Kbps because the day is coming soon when you’ll fill that pipe and you need to be ready.

The same is true for DS3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and other traditional telecom services. Moving from one of these to the other, up or down, is a major deal. DS3 is nothing like T1. If you need DS3, you’ll have a completely different demarcation connection from the carrier and you’ll need a completely different interface card for your edge router. It’s a major bandwidth jump, too. You’re moving from 1.5 Mbps up to 45 Mbps.

Not enough? The next jump is to OC3 SONET fiber at 155 Mbps. Once again, there is a long procurement and installation process with unique equipment for a particular service level. If you failed to order enough bandwidth, you’ll be dealing with network congestion for some time. If you way over-order, you’ll be paying a pretty price for a largely empty pipe.

Is there anything that can take some of the risk out of bandwidth management? You bet there is. It’s called Carrier Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet services are fairly new compared to T-Carrier or SONET. They are available for metro, long haul and access networks. Carrier Ethernet is often touted as a technology that can link company LANs at two or more locations. It has an easy interface which is the same Ethernet connection used on your LAN, copper or fiber.

If that wasn’t enough, Carrier Ethernet costs are generally less than equivalent bandwidth levels for T-Carrier or SONET. It is not unusual to get twice the Mbps for the same money as you are currently paying for legacy telecom services. This cost savings is compelling, but may not even be THE important reason to embrace Ethernet in the MAN and WAN.

What Ethernet offers that other protocols don’t is easy scalability. Ethernet MAN and WAN networks are being designed for rapid remote management so that no truck rolls are needed when a customer wants more or less bandwidth. It’s all done at a computer screen so that you can pick up a phone can request a move from, say, 10 to 15 Mbps or 100 to 150 Mbps and you’ll have the extra resources available in as little as a few hours.

Carrier Ethernet is set up something like your LAN in that there are standard port speeds. You know that your switches, routers and PCs all have NICs (Network Interface Cards) with specs of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10 Gbps. Usually, its some combination like 10/100/1000. The Ethernet port that you order installed will generally be 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps, although it could be 10 Gbps if you really need that much. As long as you stay below the maximum capacity of the port, you can have just about any bandwidth level you want.

Very low bandwidths may have increments of 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps. Higher bandwidths might go up in jumps of 100 Mbps. Carrier Ethernet gives you a lot more choices so that you can more closely match the bandwidth you are paying for to the bandwidth you need. The ability to rapidly scale up that bandwidth means that you don’t have to order too much in anticipation of need. Get a port that will handle what you can reasonably expect to require but only order the bandwidth level you need to handle current business activity. If you suddenly enjoy a flood of customers or need to support a new video distribution, you can make that call and get the extra resources when you need them.

The result, clearly, is a major cost savings in not be over-provisioned for bandwidth plus less stress in worrying about what you have to do to be ready for tomorrow’s needs. Could your operation benefit from having this capability? If so, get prices, features and availability of Carrier Ethernet bandwidth services for your business locations.

One SIP Trunk Beats Two T1 Lines

In traditional thinking, you have your business telephone service and you have your business broadband service. One tends to have nothing to do with the other. In fact, you probably buy them from different providers. There’s a good reason to reconsider that approach now. You can get the same or better results for less money. How? With a service called SIP Trunking.

SIP Trunking has nothing to do with luggage or elephants. It’s all about delivering modern telecom services. Trunking is a technical term that means using a single line or other communications path to transport many different transmissions simultaneously. The telephone industry had a pressing need for trunks to handle the explosive growth of telegraph and, later, telephone lines. Both wired and wireless analog carrier systems were developed to consolidate many telephone lines into a few trunks. This was especially critical for connecting telephone switching systems in different towns or states.

The trunk lines that we are most familiar with today are T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI. These are two slightly different standards for a digital telephone line that carries as many as two dozen simultaneous phone calls. T1 or ISDN PRI trunks are very popular for corporate PBX phone systems or call centers. Both need large numbers of outside phone lines to communicate.

In actuality, ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface uses a T1 line to deliver 23 phone lines in individual digital channels plus one specialized channel used for switching, signaling and data such as Caller ID. The T1 voice or T1 telephone lines uses all 24 available channels for phone calls, but doesn’t offer Caller ID and has slower call setup times.

T1 lines are pretty versatile. A lot of companies have two T1 lines coming into the building. One carries IDSN PRI with anywhere between 10 and 23 outside phone lines. The other T1 line provides dedicated broadband Internet access for the computer network. The bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download. Even though there are two T1 lines installed, one has nothing to do with the other. They are electrically separate and may have been ordered from two different service providers.

The cost of two separate T1 lines is more than many smaller businesses can justify. They don’t need anywhere close to 23 outside lines, often less than half that, and 1.5 Mbps Internet access is plenty for credit card verification, online ordering, file transfers, email, and casual Web access. They could probably get by with half an ISDN PRI and half a T1 Internet line if they could buy half a service for each.

SIP Trunking gives you that half-a-service option by combining voice and data onto a single converged trunk line. That could be a T1 line or an Ethernet over Copper connection that uses the same twisted pair telco wiring but offers high bandwidth options. Actually, a single SIP trunk is better than two half-T1 lines. It also costs less than those two T1s you may have now.

The SIP in SIP Trunking stands for Session Initiation Protocol. That’s the switching technology used in VoIP telephone systems. A SIP phone is a VoIP telephone that can plug right into your network. Older analog phones can be turned into SIP phones by using Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATA).

Now, here’s what SIP Trunking does to consolidate lines. A SIP Trunk carries both voice and data simultaneously. It can do that because both are in the same packet network protocol. The broadband Internet data is already packetized. By using adaptors or SIP phones, the telephones are made to look like other network devices. Once everything is communicating in packets, a single line can transport both.

One question you probably have immediately is about how the SIP trunk prevents telephone conversations from being garbled when computers are sending data. Companies that have tried to use broadband phone services to share their Internet service find that performance is iffy. Sometimes the conversations sound good. Other times, not so good. That’s because the Internet doesn’t treat sensitive voice conversations any differently than file transfers or video downloads. One packet is just like the next on the internet.

A SIP trunk uses Internet technology, but it doesn’t use the Internet itself. The SIP trunk is a private line between your company and your service provider. Once your packets get to the service provider they are switched onto the Internet or onto the public phone system, depending on where they are supposed to go. The SIP trunk is engineered to ensure that telephone calls do not contend with data packets for use of the trunk line.

Here’s how that works. The interface equipment, managed routers, at each end of the SIP trunk are set up to establish Class of Service (CoS) for each of the many simultaneous signals that travel over the trunk. Telephone calls have priority in this system. Whenever a call is in progress, it takes the bandwidth needed to ensure high voice quality. Only the bandwidth not used for telephone calls is available to transport broadband Internet service. When a call hangs up, data packets can now use the additional bandwidth no longer commandeered by the phone call.

Obviously, you can’t have dozens of phone calls on a T1 line being used as a SIP trunk or your Internet access will slow to a crawl. Most small companies don’t have that problem. They may need only 6 to 12 outside lines at the most. Even those lines aren’t engaged 100%. The result is that there is plenty of bandwidth for both telephone calls and broadband access at the same time.

Efficiency is what makes SIP trunks a better value than separate T1 lines for voice and data. By actively managing the available bandwidth, a SIP trunk makes unused bandwidth available for Internet service while ensuring that every telephone call has the resources it needs for a high quality conversation.

Are you in the market for both telephone and business broadband service or concerned that you are paying more than you should for these two services? If so, get SIP trunking pricing and options to see if this service is right for your business.