The Value of Low Latency Fiber Optic Connections

By: John Shepler

If you are frustrated with your network performance, especially those connections going to the Internet or other business locations, you may be suffering from a latency related problem. Let’s take a quick look at achieving lower latency network connections for businesses and organizations:


When you are involved in very demanding applications where maximizing network performance is critical to success, such as high frequency financial trading, it’s clear that you need to focus on minimizing latency. Some companies have gone so far as to co-locate in the same facility as the stock exchanges to be a matter of feet rather than miles from the servers.

Most applications are nowhere near that demanding, but do require some attention to bandwidth, latency, packet loss and jitter. These are areas where private lines and MPLS networks shine and the Internet doesn’t do so well. Revisions to the network neutrality doctrine might, and I emphasize might, offer some performance increase for the Internet. That will be done by giving some traffic priority over other traffic.

Still, if you want to take control of your destiny, you need control of all of your network connections and you’ll only get that with services that you own or can lease with strict performance guarantees.

What common applications are highly sensitive to latency issues? Anything real time certainly is. That includes VoIP telephone systems, any network voice services, teleconferencing and telepresence.

Slightly more tolerant are interactive services that are not strictly real time. Think cloud servers. You issue commands or requests and the server sends back responses. Delays in cloud server response have come as a shock to some companies that thought they would get more performance, not less, when they moved from local data centers to the cloud. After all, cloud resources are virtually infinite, aren’t they? Even if they are, you’ve got to take the link between you and the cloud into consideration. Any latency caused by limited bandwidth, network congestion or equipment induced time delays are going to show up as an unexpected pause in data going up and down between you and the cloud.

If you upgrade to higher performance network connections, will your latency problems go away? Not unless you also manage your local network to minimize latency on critical applications. You’ll need multiple classes of service so that voice packets get priority and interactive cloud packets are next in line. Big data transfers, email, downloading videos and even casual Web browsing have to take a lower priority and they generally can. Companies that are just implementing enterprise VoIP to replace old-school analog phones are more likely to run into these issues than those who have worked the bugs out of their networks over the years.

What class of network connection service is optimum for your needs? There are a wide variety of private and public connections, each with a particular performance and price tag. Why not get a fresh set of low latency bandwidth quotes available at your business locations. This service is fast and the cost can be lower than you expect.

Five Years Of The Explainer

T1 Rex’s Business Telecom Explainer celebrated it’s 5th anniversary this month, with well over 800 posts since 2004. We started off with a mission to explain the intricacies of telecommunications services and offer competitive service options to businesses. This mission has expanded to include a host of products, services and issues of interest to our readers. As we get ready to enter the second decade of the century, let’s see if we can make sense of what happened in the “aught” years of the Millennium and where we might be going next.

As the name implies, this explainer blog was launched in conjunction with T1Rex.com. T1 Rex came to be because of a new invention in the world of telecommunications. A company called Telarus developed a software process called GeoQuote (now patented) that automates the pricing of commonly used business telecom services. The focus was T1 lines, which are the most common professional grade voice and data connection for most businesses.

Prior to GeoQuote, the way you got a quote for a T1 line was to submit an inquiry form or answer questions over the phone and then wait a week or two while your request was passed through channels and your quote was manually calculated. With the GeoQuote automated quote form on T1Rex.com, a curious business manager or network engineer could enter some basic information online and get a quote that was better than 90% accurate in less than a minute. It’s even more accurate today and there are many more options than just T1 lines.

GeoQuote upended the marketing of telecommunications services the same way that the IBM computer changed accounting, numerical control changed manufacturing, and computer aided design changed engineering. Once automation gets into a process, everything happens faster and with fewer errors. The productivity increases can be orders of magnitude above what they were with the old manual processes. There’s no going back.

We’re all getting a taste of this in our private and well as business lives. Social Networking has emerged in the last few years to revolutionize how we communicate. Remember when everyone wanted to make a website? Hardly anyone builds sites anymore unless they have a very specific business or special interest need. Websites were replaced by blogs. Blogs are being replaced by social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn. Do you still email? Twitter is the new email. It nicely complements and integrates with cell phone text messaging.

Even Twitter may seem like yesterday’s news later this decade. Most cell phones now have cameras with fairly good resolution and the ability to take short video clips. Picture and video messaging are gaining popularity. How soon before there’s a video screen on a service like Twitter so you just click for a short video message? Video and audio won’t replace text, of course. There are too many situations where you need to communicate briefly and with stealth. They’ll simply add another dimension.

Video is the long heralded “killer app” for the Internet. You know what a phenomenon YouTube has been. Now TVs and Blu-ray players come Internet-ready so they can play those YouTube clips on the big screen and also access full length network programs on the Web. You can catch up on many TV shows you missed by watching them on your computer. But you know that you really want to lay back in the recliner and watch them on the TV. That’s going to be common very, very soon.

Video conferencing is breaking out of the corporate conference room and onto the desktop right now. My iMac came ready to video chat with a built-in camera and microphone. Many other computers, including laptops and netbooks, are similarly equipped. As I write this, the airlines are busy tightening security because of terrorist attack that almost succeeded. Some of the new rules are going to make an annoying travel experience nearly insufferable. That, combined with the Great Recession that may linger for years, is going to get a lot of business people and casual travelers thinking about alternatives. In many cases, a convenient video conference can do the job of a personal visit. As this catches on, you can expect a push to improve quality and ease of sharing photos and videos similar to what Cisco calls Telepresence.

Video conferencing is also going to be big on cell phones. If people can walk down the street working their thumbs while staring at text on a screen, they can certainly watch the person they are communicating with in real time. To think that they laughed at Dick Tracy’s wrist TV in the 60’s. We wouldn’t even settle for a screen that small anymore.

Video is what has gotten the telecom carriers scared stiff, and for good reason. Just like the move from email to interactive Web sites forced the upgrade from dial-up to broadband, the move to video and high definition everything is forcing carriers into a bandwidth upgrade. Verizon has wisely started deploying fiber optic to the premises before demand makes it mandatory. The cable companies are deploying DOCSIS 3.0 for the same reason. There will soon be no such thing as too much bandwidth. For business locations, the best answer seems to be Ethernet over copper or fiber. When multiple business locations outside of a metro area are involved, MPLS networks are the emerging leader for high bandwidths at reasonable prices.

It’s the cellular carriers that feel faint at the thought of everyone having a smartphone. Their thousands of towers were equipped to efficiently handle telephone conversations and text messaging. Light duty Web surfing and limited multimedia is being accommodated with 2.5 and 3G upgrades. But they will need 4G and a lot of it to handle the load of HD video streaming on a near-continuous basis. Even the FCC is already wondering if there are more over-the-air TV channels it can repurpose for cellular broadband. There’s a real danger that there just isn’t going to be enough spectrum to go around. At sometime during the next decade you can expect a major fight to ensue over what is the “best” use of the choice VHF and UHF frequencies.

A new technology we’ve just started following is called Poken. It’s wireless, but what’s called near-field wireless. Using low frequencies that won’t be part of the TV/Cellular/Microwaves slugfest, Poken devices exchange information when they touch each other. The idea is to replace business cards and social business cards with an electronic data transfer and a portal to manage the contact information. It nicely supports hot links to your current social networking and business sites, for instant access by those you contact. Poken is already hugely popular in Europe.

Well, this is almost certainly the tip of the technology iceberg. Many exciting developments in the coming “teens” decade haven’t even emerged yet. It’s our plan to be writing about them as they do, and I hope that you’ll be with us for what is bound to be an exciting time.

Cisco's Virtual Teleportation Replaces Airports

Aficionados of Star Trek have long anticipated the day when we could simply beam instantly to wherever we want to go. Well, the technology just isn't there yet. There have been some interesting experiments in quantum physics that suggest physical teleportation may indeed be possible. But it's probably going to have to wait for another century. We we have now, thanks to Cisco, is virtual teleportation.

What can the virtual form of teleportation do for you? How about take you instantly to a business meeting in Hong Kong or Germany or New York? You walk into the conference room and find your colleagues seated around the meeting table. But only some of them are where you are. Others are somewhere else in the world. They look the same, they sound the same. But they are on the other side of a table that you can't reach across.

Cisco calls this technology TelePresence. It's a major improvement in the last big advance in collaboration, video conferencing. The low resolution, small screen size and muddy audio typical of many video conferencing systems has been replaced by large flat screen displays, high definition full motion video, high fidelity audio, and a virtual conference table.

The table is the final touch of magic that makes the TelePresence experience seem real. Each TelePresence room is outfitted with a half table pushed up against a wall. When you turn on the system, the other half of the table appears through the video displays on the wall making it look like there is a single large table. Your local team sits on the physical side. Other participants sit on the virtual side. Except to them they are sitting on the physical side and you are sitting on the virtual side.

Cisco has deployed about 1,000 of these TelePresence systems to about 200 enterprise customers worldwide. They also have a fleet of their own TelePresence meeting rooms in 129 cities of 40 countries. I say fleet, because what Cisco has really created here is a replacement for airlines and airports.

Consider a typical business meeting. You go to an airport, board a plane, land at another airport, and then go to a more or less standard business meeting room at your destination. They're pretty much all the same. You have a large wooden desk with arm chairs in a windowless room containing acoustic tiles and fluorescent lights. There's an overhead projector with screen, a computer to upload your PowerPoint presentations, and a roll-around cart with coffee dispensers. The conference rooms are standardized, as are the airports and planes. So why not just get rid of the airports and planes?

Since all you really need are the conference rooms, just go ahead and hook them together. A TelePresence system and a high bandwidth connection allow you to remove the wall between the conference rooms and simply join them. It's just like opening the partition between two physical rooms in one building. Except that those rooms can be anywhere on Earth that you can get the needed bandwidth. That's pretty much any metropolitan area these days.

Cisco is now renting out their own TelePresence rooms starting at $299 an hour. Expensive room rent? Not really. You'll have a hard time spending less than that to transport one participant via air. If you need to send several people with perhaps overnight stays, Cisco's offer starts to look downright cheap. If your company does a lot of meetings, the cost of a dedicated in-house TelePresence conference center may well be justified. So it may cost up to several hundred thousand dollars for a deluxe setup? So what? How much does that private jet cost to operate and maintain?

Cisco's promoting their TelePresence service as an alternative to the inconvenience of travel. But the benefits go beyond cost savings and the avoided travel stresses. With TelePresence you have the ability to arrange same day meetings with international participation. Teams may just move into one of these rooms to collaborate on their projects. Imagine the productivity improvement when everyone is at the same table continuously. Communications delays become a thing of the past.

Cisco's order of magnitude improvement to video conferencing has created a "realness" to virtual meetings that could become so comfortable that physical meetings may seem ridiculous. Yeah, but, you can't all go out to lunch or dinner, can you? Why not? With the same catering at each end, why can't you dine virtually? There may even be a way to play those silly team bonding games with props and facilitators at each end. Anyone want to hang climbing ropes from the ceilings?

All this virtual collaboration may seem a bit awkward now, but I've got a feeling that it could catch on and become the norm rather than the exception. It wasn't that long ago that exchanging documents was done by overnight mail rather than instantaneous email or even FAX. Who wants to wait for the Post Office anymore? Could the day be far away that people will say, "who wants to wait for a plane anymore?"

Telepresence as a Service

Just as telephone means sending your voice at a distance and television means pictures at a distance, telepresence means projecting yourself at a distance. It's not quite the Star Trek technology of beaming yourself physically from one place to another, but it might be close enough for business purposes. Now that Cisco and AT&T are teaming up to offer telepresence as a managed service rather than a capital expense, could the floodgates be opening for the virtual business call?

Telepresence has its roots in video conferencing. I remember using video conferencing in a large enterprise a decade ago. It wasn't pretty. The system was telephone based with a conference phone on long table and a video projector showing the feed from the far end on a pull-down screen. Images were fuzzy. To get everyone in the picture you had to widen the camera angle so far that it was hard to see facial expressions. Movement? Ha! I think we saw better full motion video from the Moon landings.

The real problem with telephone based video teleconferencing is that there's really not enough bandwidth to get the job done right. Even with 128 Kbps available through ISDN BRI phone service, video looks a long way from realistic. But now that broadband connectivity is ubiquitous, the door is open to high quality voice, video and data sharing. Cisco has been the big player in capitalizing on this new capability and at just the time it is needed most.

The best friend telepresence has is $100+ per barrel oil. High fuel prices are already stifling consumer travel. How much longer before they kill business travel? Not completely, of course. There are some situations where you positively have to meet in person to close the deal. But can you really afford to keep sending teams of a dozen participants to present a business case or attend a professional seminar? How about when you'd like to get together and hammer out some engineering details or contract clauses, but you're in New York and they're in Los Angeles and you'd really like to have things wrapped up by 5 PM? When it's now 2 PM?

What telepresence does is bridge the gap between physical locations for most needs. Cisco's approach has been to emulate the conference room table by dividing it half. Your half, on either end, is still a physical wood table. Their half, also on either end, is one or more high definition video screens with wide band audio. The scene is designed to fool the eye and ear into believing that your colleagues 3,000 miles away are right there on the other side of that conference table. As long as you don't try to pass a pot of coffee or plate of cookies over there, you might just be able to maintain that illusion indefinitely.

The beauty of a telepresence system is that goes beyond just shaving the cost of business travel. The additional leverage of being able to meet virtually at any time with participants from almost anywhere can more than offset the disappointment of not being able to get out of the office and go visiting, depending on how you feel about business travel. Another bonus you gain is all that downtime riding on buses and getting your shoes screened at the airport is recovered. If time is money, the value of additional productive hours may even exceed the bottom line on the expense report.

Up until now, there have been two giant hurdles to improved teleconferencing. One has been the inherent bandwidth limitations of trying to feed anything but phone calls down a phone line. That's been solved by broadband connections, either dedicated Internet VPN service or point to point private networking. Cisco estimates you need 1 to 5 Mbps to support their TelePresence system. Most larger companies have that now with T1 lines (1.5 Mbps) and DS3 connections (45 Mbps). Carrier Ethernet at 10, 100 and 1,000 Mbps makes the high definition conferencing option even more compelling.

The other hurdle has been cost. With specially designed and outfitted conference rooms needed to get the real value from Cisco's TelePresence, the capital expense has been appropriate only for the largest of corporations. Perhaps that barrier is also going to fall. Cisco's partner AT&T has the worldwide IP networking capability to provide the bandwidth. Cisco can provide the dedicated hardware. Companies can pay as they go using this managed service without having to risk huge amounts of construction capital when they're not so sure how much they'll really use it.

On a smaller scale, desktop and small meeting teleconferencing is proving popular for virtual workgroups, online enterprises, and sales training. Many of these are Web conferences with audio teleconferences supporting the slide shows and computer presentations. The cost is low enough that even the smallest companies can afford a service such as GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar.

Do you need help upgrading your audio and video conferencing equipment? How about improving your network WAN bandwidth to support communications with your employees, customers and suppliers? Being agile with your electronic conferencing capabilities offers the potential for faster response time, travel cost savings, and a greener approach to running your business.

New Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Eyes SaaS and Video

Cisco Systems, Inc. is upping the ante on data center bandwidth with its new Nexus 7000 series of switching products due to ship later this year. The new benchmark is 15 Tbps (Terabits per second) in a single chassis. To put that in terms of bandwidths we experience every day, that's 15,000 Gbps. At that speed, you could suck the Internet dry in seconds. Well, at least the searchable databases you can access today. Don't get too overwhelmed by this benchmark, though. It's likely to become the rule rather than the exception before too long.

What's with the need for speed? The primary driver is the move from static data to video as a way to communicate. Long distance telephone service, the reason nationwide networks were developed in the first place, gets lost in the packet shuffle on high speed IP networks. Not that voice services don't need care and feeding to maintain their integrity on converged networks. It's just that a 64 Kbps VoIP stream is truly nothing compared with the flood of packets needed to support high definition video feeds.

Standard and high definition video, including telepresence, video conferencing, Web site video feeds, and real time creative content represents a shift in media. It's the same type of shift that took us from newspapers to radio to television. Video won't replace text, graphics and audio feeds. It will add to them. You can see this on many commercial Web sites now. You can either read a story or have the option to see a video interview.

Another trend driving data center bandwidth is SaaS or Software as a Service. SaaS replaces the model of buying and locally hosting software packages by instead accessing applications via the Web as needed. The advantage of this approach is that the IT department isn't constantly scrambling to install, deploy and maintain a myriad of software packages. The service provider takes care of all that. Server capacity requirements are traded off for bandwidth demands that add to network load. This is especially true for WAN bandwidth, the pipe that connects a company to the outside world. That Wide Area Network needs expanded capacity to handle the video streams and application access.

Cisco's Nexus 700 is designed to support up to 512 10 Gbps Ethernet connections, with future delivery of 40 and 100 Gbps Ethernet. As LANs speed up to 10 Gbps and higher speeds locally, nationwide and regional carriers are expanding their core networks toward 100 Gbps and greater fiber optic bandwidths.

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