Broadband Insurance Keeps You in Business

By: John Shepler

Our 24/7 connected lives offer some real advantages for consumers and both sales opportunity & productivity improvements for business. Technology is a thing of beauty… until it isn’t. When your broadband line goes down, you are really, really isolated. Is there anything that can insure you against such a disaster?

Indeed, there is. Consumers have the option of using their 3G or 4G wireless service as a backup for DSL and Cable. The latest smartphones let you set them up as wireless hotspots. Just network your PC, laptop, notebook , tablet and printer to the smartphone and you can carry on. The connection speed may not be as fast as you are used to and you have to be very careful not to exceed your monthly quota. Even so, in a pinch, you can continue to use the Internet when the landlines go down.

Another emergency option is to plunk yourself down in a Wi-Fi hotspot and connect through OPB (Other People’s Broadband). Worst case, you’ll have to buy some lunch or coffee to stay a welcome guest. Other hotspots are in stores or at public libraries where you aren’t expected to actually buy something… at least not right away.

One glitch in this approach is that the same disaster that took your line service down may have also affected the WiFi hotspots in your area. I had this happen when some overzealous backhoe operator chopped the fiber trunk cable in half. It took a couple of days to get 100 plus fiber strands spliced back together. My preferred hotspot and others in the area had been hit by the same outage. I wound up going across town to find a place that still had signal.

While these extraordinary measures can save the day for consumers and some very small businesses, clearly camping out at free WiFi hotspots or glomming onto your smartphone’s diminutive bandwidth budget isn’t going to work for the majority of small office & retail or larger business operations. If your company depends on Internet connectivity to conduct business, a broken connection means you are temporarily out of business.

Fear not. There are solutions for every size company that can keep you connected worldwide no matter what. The Internet itself is amazingly robust. It was designed to handle all types of natural and man-made disasters and still get those packets from source to destination. The weak link is the last mile connection. The reason for this discrepancy is that the Internet core has path redundancies designed in. Any last mile connection is a single point failure just waiting to happen.

This suggests that the way to create a more robust broadband connection is to add redundancy. A popular way to do this has been to has been to order multiple diverse connections to the Internet. For instance, a company might order two T1 lines and specify that they must come from different suppliers and not in the same wiring bundle. You can scale this up to higher bandwidth options, including fiber optic services. The key is that you must be sure that there isn’t a line cut or equipment failure that can take out both your services at once.

There is also a business grade 3G/4G wireless solution from Accel Networks that works well for smaller companies. This is a fixed location receiver with a high performance antenna to ensure a high quality signal at your location. You can order it with enough capacity to handle things like Point of Sale terminals, inventory management, and general Internet access.

A highly desirable feature of redundant network solution is automatic failover. The Accel network continuity solution has this feature. Your users may not even know that the main network connection failed. Work continues using the backup link, perhaps at a smaller bandwidth level.

For landline solutions, MegaPath is offering a “Managed Broadband Failover” solution. They install and monitor CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) that handles the switchover between main and backup links. One really nice feature of this service is that the monitoring notes the main line failure and initiates troubleshooting and repair activities to get you back on the main circuit as soon as possible.

Are you concerned that your business is vulnerable to a loss of connectivity with the Internet, your data center across town, or your cloud service providers? Check out broadband network continuity services that can insure you keep running.

3 Mbps T1 vs EoC Throwdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Note: Photo of boxers courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Find A T1 Line For Your Business

You’re not too happy with your digital connectivity options. DSL and Cable services have attractive pricing, but bandwidth varies all over the place and outages don’t seem to get resolved as fast as you’d like. Perhaps you’ve moved to a location beyond the reach of DSL or Cable broadband. Well, there’s Satellite Internet. It has extensive latency by nature, limited bandwidth, and the signal goes out when the weather gets heavy. Are there any better options?

The gold standard for small business wireline services is T1. These lines are available nearly everywhere, offer a rock solid bandwidth with equal speed for both upload and download, are highly reliable and get fast service in the rare event of a problem. They also give you options for secure connection between business locations and digital phone lines for your PBX telephone system that aren’t offered by other types of digital services.

But what about the cost? T1 lines were once the exclusive domain of the telephone companies to connect their switching centers. Later, they were offered to businesses at prices only larger companies could afford. Today, T1 lines are so prolific and there is so much competition between service providers that T1 lines are affordable by nearly all small to medium size businesses that have their own business locations. Home offices and residential users don’t generally qualify for this service.

Let’s have a look at what a T1 line can do for your business and then see how to find providers and prices quickly and easily.

The most popular use for T1 lines today is for dedicated access to the Internet. This is a broadband service that offers 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download. If you need more than that, you can order additional T1 lines and have them bonded together to create one large bandwidth connection.

Note that this is called dedicated access. What that means is that you always have the full bandwidth of the line available for your exclusive use. What many people don’t realize is that DSL and Cable services share their available bandwidth among many subscribers to keep the cost low. Unfortunately, if others are heavily using the Internet your available line speed will slow, sometimes to a crawl. T1 is always available at full bandwidth.

Another configuration for T1 lines is for private point to point connections. This is like having a direct digital wire linking two business locations. There is no connection to the Internet. It’s an empty pipe that is for your exclusive use to upload and download data between locations. This service is particularly popular for linking branch offices to headquarters.

Finally, T1 lines can be ordered in a special configuration called T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. This is a telephone service. A single T1 PRI line can bring in up to 23 separate telephone lines plus Caller ID service. Many call centers, sales offices and medium size office businesses use T1 PRI as a lower cost connection for their PBX telephone systems than bringing in multiple business phone lines.

There is also a special service called Integrated T1 that combines up to 12 telephone lines and broadband Internet service on one T1 line. Small sales offices can often save money by using this service in place of separate telephone and broadband connections.

So, how do you find a T1 line for your business? The best way is to use the Shop For T1 real-time quote engine. It’s an online service that’s available 24/7. You simply enter some basic information about your company and the program will automatically generate a list of T1 line services and their prices for your location. Be sure to specify if you want high speed Internet, dedicated voice service or integrated voice and data by using the drop down menu for service type. If you wish, an expert consultant will be happy to go over the entire range of options available for your location and make recommendations. There’s no charge for this service.

Future Proofing Your WAN With Ethernet

The nature of wide area networks is changing. Once the exclusive domain of telephone technologies, core networks are being re-engineered for packet switched services. Voice will always be important, but data and video are now the dominant forms of network traffic. How does this affect your business connections and should you be doing anything to stay ahead of the curve?

Most businesses and organizations are being affected by increased requirements for bandwidth. As their line service contracts come up for renewal, savvy managers are taking a look at what’s available now and rethinking their options. Do you simply renew the T1 line contract that you’ve had for years or switch to a newer Ethernet service?

I mention Ethernet because Ethernet in the WAN, also called Carrier Ethernet and Metro Ethernet, are becoming the network connection resource of choice. What’s behind it is a recognition that virtually all business, organizational and home networks are based on standardized Ethernet. That includes the wildly popular WiFi wireless routers and hotspots that have Ethernet inputs and outputs. It seem intuitive that Ethernet would make a good metro and wide area connection technology.

What’s held back Ethernet WAN services is the entrenchment of telephone technology line services. Until deregulation, there was a century of monopoly ownership and development of analog phone lines, carrier telephony, T-Carrier digital line service and SONET/SDH fiber optic services. All of these services were designed to support the basic core element of the individual two-way telephone conversation. Even the vast cellular networks were designed with telephones in mind first and data piggybacked on later as an afterthought.

With data and video dominating digital traffic, it makes sense to take another look at what network characteristics make the most sense for now and in the future. Network providers, including incumbent telephone companies, have done this and are moving rapidly to IP networks and connections. The two most on the ascendancy right now are Ethernet and MPLS Networks. MPLS is an excellent choice for creating a virtual private network cloud that can transport nearly any type of traffic across the country or worldwide. It readily supports Ethernet, making those two network technologies a powerful combination.

While there are other network protocols for specialized applications, it looks right now like we are headed toward an everything-over-Ethernet world. It’s an easy connection from your switches and routers to the carrier that transports your packets to remote destinations. You just plug-in and go. You also have the option of ordering a layer 2 Ethernet service so that you can make all your distant sites connect like they are on the same bridged LAN. In a way, Ethernet makes the WAN portion of the network disappear.

Is it the right time for you to move to Ethernet services? You’ll likely find that they are less expensive per Mbps that other options and offer scalable bandwidth anywhere from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps or more. Check out the cost and availability of Ethernet WAN service for your locations before you commit to other options. You could be missing out of a better deal.