Rural Business Broadband is Getting Better

By: John Shepler

Businesses located in cities and suburbs have a wealth of choices in connectivity, including Internet access and private lines. Out in rural areas, not so much. In fact, until recently it might be what former FCC Chairman Newton Minnow referred to as a “vast wasteland”, although he was talking about television content. Rural broadband has really been a scarce resource… but it is getting better; A lot better.

What is Driving Rural Broadband Expansion
The biggest factor driving broadband expansion is broadband itself. The technology is mature and the defacto standard for Internet access. The Internet has also matured and expanded to include nearly every business and consumer in the United States and most worldwide.

Speeds have multiplied and multiplied again. Dial-up is long gone. T1 lines available for rural business are woefully inadequate for most purposes as they are capped at 1.5 Mbps. Even if still available, they won’t be for long. Telcos are abandoning their copper wireline assets as quickly as they can.

Part of the problem in getting high bandwidths into rural areas is the cost per user. Cities with dense populations can easily support hookups to metropolitan area fiber networks. In the countryside, there may be miles and miles between paying customers. The infrastructure costs have been just too high for the revenue generated to support… until recently.

What’s changed? One big change is the advancement of cell phone standards to 4G LTE and 5G. The Internet connectivity supported by these standards just can be satisfied by even multiple copper T1 lines. So, the phone companies have been pulling fiber optic cables and adding microwave relays to remote tower sites.

Another change is a national initiative to get everyone connected, much the same way as rural electrification and universal telephone service interconnected the entire country. This initiative is called BEAD for Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment. It will be underway for maybe another five years before Internet Service Providers can hookup everyone, everywhere. The preferred solution is fiber optics for expandability far into the future.

Multiple Technologies Fill the Broadband Gaps
Fiber is slowly but surely making its way past every business, home, farmstead and cell tower. Those cell towers can do double-duty as Internet Service Providers. With 5G blanketing the country, an easy solution to remote access is to use a Fixed Wireless Access modem plugged into your broadband router. This device is a smartphone without the keys, display and apps. As long as you can get cell service, you can get full time broadband.

In essence, FWA is expanding on the idea of WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers. Those operate in limited service areas and deliver broadband from a tower to antennas mounted on your home or business in a direct line of site.

Another source of broadband is straight up to the sky. LEO (low Earth orbit) satellite constellations like Starlink and the upcoming Amazon Project Kuiper and Blue Origin TeraWave are designed to deliver high bandwidths at low latencies to mimic fiber optic broadband but pretty much anywhere no matter how remote.

The next step is direct to phone service that will act as cell towers in space and orbiting data centers powered by solar arrays. It’s likely that some mix of satellites, cell towers and fiber will give us all the connectivity we need for the foreseeable future.

Are you having difficulty getting broadband in a rural or remote area? Opportunities are more available than ever before. Find out what rural broadband solutions are available for your business right now.

Can You Afford a Slow Internet Connection?

By: John Shepler

Time is money. In business, that’s almost always true. Your expenses for labor, facilities and services keep draining the cash register. You need to refill it faster than it is draining or you’ll be out of the game at some point. Things need to keep moving at a steady clip just to make your nut each month. On top of that, customer satisfaction often depends on how fast you can service them. What’s the last thing you need? A process that slows you down!

Where are the Bottlenecks?
Most businesses have at least some online presence and many have their business processes inextricably connected with software running on remote or cloud servers. That means that no matter how much you scurry about in the office or shop, you may be inherently limited by computer processing a thousand miles away and the connections to them.

Let’s assume for the moment that your data center has all the resources needed to process any requests instantly. With elastic computing you don’t even have to worry about peaks and dips in traffic. The system automatically assigns whatever computing hardware and software are required to keep up with the necessary tasks. Let’s also assume that the data center has as much Internet bandwidth as needed to handle all the incoming and outgoing traffic. That's more than likely as major carriers tend to have points of presence with massive bandwidth located within key data centers.

So, where might things slow down? The Internet itself is vulnerable. It is designed to work around traffic jams to keep things moving. Even so, there are times when too many things go wrong and the entire network drags. Far more often, the problem is not within the backbone of the Internet but with your connection to it. This is referred to as the last-mile connection.

Unclogging the Last Mile
Last mile problems tend to be caused by limited bandwidth, congestion from too many users needing that bandwidth at the same time, latency from long paths and repeated transmissions to get the packets through intermittent connections.

Bandwidth is the easiest to address. If you are still stuck with aging T1 lines or DSL you likely don’t have near enough bandwidth to handle modern Web traffic. In the dial-up days, a Megabit per second was considered broadband. Today that’s more like a Gigabit per second. Smaller users may get by with fractional Gbps, but large operations may be needing 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps to keep traffic streams from interfering with each other.

Fortunately, fiber optic bandwidth is more the norm than the exception now. If you have a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps port installed, you should have the bandwidth you need unless your requirements are extraordinary.

Fiber bandwidth also tends to be low in latency. That’s important to responsiveness because when you have enough bandwidth latency will make communication sluggish and adding more bandwidth won’t help. Low latency is especially important in real-time processes including phone calls and video conferencing. You want those communications channels to be full duplex or instantly two-way all the time.

A fiber connection is the gold standard in the office, but you may also need high performance while portable or mobile. That’s where 5G rises to meet the challenge. You likely have this on your smartphone. Other devices can also have built-in 5G or connect through a portable hotspot that is essentially a 5G phone without the user interfaces or apps. It simply converts 5G bandwidth to WiFi. Any WiFi compatible device can then access the Internet.

Private Lines offer Superior Performance
One limitation to the most readily available Internet connections, such as cable and 5G broadband, is that they are a shared resource. The price is kept low by sharing the cable or radio channels with many users at the same time. When things are going well, you don’t even know there is anybody else on the line. But when everybody wants to send huge files are download video simultaneously, you’ll definitely feel the speed bumps.

If the loss in productivity due to varying congestion is a problem, consider a direct private line from your location to your cloud service provider. This bypasses the Internet completely and is available only to your organization. This service is sometimes called “direct access.” You may also want private lines among your facilities and even key suppliers and customers. In essence, you create your own private Internet.

An alternative that can enhance performance and improve reliability of your connection is called SD-WAN. This involves having two or more Internet connections with a special router that prioritizes traffic and selects which path offers the best performance at the time. The SD means software defined, which is the intelligence in the router that monitors your connections and makes instant decisions on how to best route traffic.

Is your business struggling to keep up because your Internet connection isn’t responsive enough? Look into better alternatives for faster, more reliable connectivity to boost productivity and ensure customer satisfaction.

Redundant Internet Connections Keep You Online

By: John Shepler

The Internet has become so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. It’s a utility, like gas, water and electricity. It’s always there quietly and efficiently running in the background… until it isn’t.

The Danger of Single Point Failure
Any time we’re dependent on one key element, we’re subject to what is called “single point failure.” Your entire business could be running like a well oiled machine, with orders being fulfilled and customers pouring in. It’s high efficiency and high profits. Then, the connection goes down and stays down. Computers do nothing. Point of sale terminals are frozen. Business grinds to a halt.

Somewhere, somehow the Internet has stopped cold. But it’s designed not to do that, right? Indeed it is. The technology behind the Internet was designed by the military to keep functioning during a nuclear attack when whole areas were vaporized. No one cable or router can stop the data flow. It simply re-routes to paths that are still functional. Well, except for that last connection. You, know. The one that hooks your business to your Internet service provider. How many lines is that? That’s right… ONE. What happens when that gets cut? Right again. Service to and from the Internet stops cold.

The Value of Redundancy
Redundancy is what protects you from single point failure. For things that are so critical you can can’t do business without them, you need a backup. When you have a primary connection and a backup you have redundancy

A simple example of redundant connections is found with many home based businesses. As a solopreneur, you probably can’t justify having a second fiber optic or cable service just in case one goes down. But you likely do have redundancy. Your desktop computer is connected through the router and modem to the ISP. Rarely do you lose service, but it does happen. What then? No need to call up and order another service, you already have one on your phone. Simply use the personal hotspot feature with your phone to supply cellular broadband to your computer and you’re back in business.

There are a couple of fine points here. First, you wan’t to get back to your primary service as quickly and you can or you may get overage charges on your cell phone bill. You typically get only so may GBs per month before they start tacking on extra fees. Second, is your primary Internet service a Fixed Wireless Access from the same provider as your phone service. That might be a great money saver but likely not a redundant connection. If the tower you are accessing is off the air, your phone goes dead and your FWA goes dead at the same time. What’s left to do? Pack up the laptop and head for a hotspot. Hopefully that coffee shop has a different ISP and is still Internet ready. Best to check before you settle in and order.

Robust Business Redundancy
Most businesses don’t have the option to flee the office or store and head out for a break to get reconnected at the nearest hotspot. It makes a lot more sense to have redundant service connections with enough speed to keep running no matter what. Also in most offices it isn’t practical to have everyone pair their PC with their smartphone, although that can work for a short period in some cases. It’s better to have a second redundant service available for the network you already use.

What are some things to think about when setting up this redundant connection? Ideally, you want at least automatic failover. That means when one line goes down, the other picks up the load automatically. This is similar to the way a battery backup power supply works. When the line drops, the battery powers an inverter and the computer doesn’t even blink.

Even better than automatic failover is having a dual or multi-port router that can automatically share the load or pick and choose what route to send each packet for best performance. That’s SDN (Software Defined Networking) or SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network). The beauty of this approach is that instead of one line sitting idle until it is needed, you can make use of all the available bandwidth all the time. Only when one connection goes down does the total bandwidth available get reduced for the duration of the outage.

A good SDN supplier will ensure that you have truly redundant services, but here are a few guidelines if you are going to set this up yourself. First, don’t just have a pair of lines going from your location to your iSP using the same route. Chances are they run in the same bundle. If a backhoe cuts the bundle, you lose all your connectivity at once. Instead, use diverse pathways so that no one disaster can take out all your lines.

You may also want to have different providers for each service. They can be fiber, cable, wireline, fixed wireless, or satellite. At least use two different providers and you may want to consider two different technologies that are unlikely to be affected by a particular outage… be that wire cut, storm, or power loss. It’s valuable to have battery, generator, or solar power backup for your own equipment as well as redundant Internet.

Have you experienced Internet outages or concerned that a sudden loss of service could damage your business? If so, speak with a technology expert and see what redundant Internet options are available for your situation.

Can CPaaS Make Your Job Easier?

Are you getting a bit overwhelmed with a myriad of business applications that kinda, sorta work together but just don’t seem to give you the seamless communications that you really wish you had? Perhaps something new could help. It’s called CPaaS or Communications Platform as a Service.

What is CPaaS and Why Should I Want It?
CPaaS doesn’t replace what you have now. It extends your capabilities without having to rip out your current systems or buy new expensive hardware. CPaaS is focused on communications. It a suite of tools that plug into your existing systems to add capabilities you don’t have now or find awkward to use. Best of all, you don’t need extensive technical support to make CPaaS work. These are developer friendly APIs hosted in the cloud and available as needed.

What Can CPaaS Do?
Which API’s you elect to use may depend on the industry you are in. For instance, in healthcare you may want the ability to have video consultations for Telehealth, send appointment reminders and have secure HIPAA-compliant messaging. Financial businesses may desire 2FA authentication for secure login and chatbots to handle FAQs. Other businesses may want interactive telephone response, email updates, SMS alerts, virtual meetings and contact analytics.

Note that all of these applications are related to enchanting communications with customers, clients, supplies or team members. They are designed to fit into what you are using now without a lot of muss and fuss. You can customize your workflows and automate interactions without having to purchase, install and train on whole new systems.

The Cloud Makes It Painless
The mere thought of having to take the time and effort to dig into the systems you use every day or hire the expertise needed to do this is cringeworthy. It’s way more complexity than most companies want to deal with. Plus, once you start creating ad-hoc custom solutions, you are stuck with ongoing maintenance and upgrades and tracking who has what throughout the company.

The cloud aspect of CPaaS greatly simplifies things. All the hardware and software that makes the internals of these application interfaces function is handled by the CPaaS vendor. You are just dealing with inserting the APIs and easily customizing the user features as you desire. There are low code and no code solutions including pre-built templates to make it easy on your tech team.

What’s the Cost of CPaaS?
As a service, CPaaS is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. You decide what apps you want to deploy and to what extent. You only pay for what you use. As business conditions change, you can increase or decrease your usage as needed. There is no need for an upfront capital outlay in hardware or software.

Does Communications Platform as a Service sound like it might be something that would make your business more productive? If so, you are invited to talk with a technical expert and see what CPaaS offerings make the most sense for your situation.

The Cloud Offers Communications as a Service

By: John Shepler

The migration of everything to the cloud has coined a new phrase: “as a service”. This implies the business model of pay-as-you-go rather than owning vast capital equipment and software resources and the support staffs that go with them. You still need in-house support for your staff and to liaise with your cloud service provider, but you no longer have to be involved in all the nuts-and-bolts that make the system work.

In addition to the backroom business software humming along in the background, the cloud now offers to take on your electronic communications with the idea of offering a more features for less cost that you’d likely have if you tried to run everything in-house. The name of this new opportunity? Why, Communications as a Service, of course.

Two Flavors of Communications as a Service
If you think of communications as “the telephone”, you are partially right. The landline phone has been the mainstay of business for over a century. It has been joined by the FAX machine to send documents over those same phone lines and the mobile phone that frees us from the wires. The marriage between phones and computers has expanded options to include instant messaging, audio, video and web conferencing, texting, file sharing, call routing and recording, call analytics and integration with business applications like CRM and project management software.

Communications as a Service or CaaS splits off into Unified Communications as a Service or UCaaS and Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS. What’s the difference? UCaaS is intended for use within the company for team collaboration CCaaS is for communicating with customers. You can think of UCaaS as replacing the old PBX business phone system and CCaaS as a technical upgrade to the old call center phone system.

How Unified Communications as a Service Works
With UCaaS the PBX in the closet down the hall or the key telephone set on your desk is gone. If you have a desk phone it connects to your LAN using VoIP rather than its own proprietary phone network. Your new phone system is in the cloud. Since much of your business software is also in the cloud, that makes it easy to integrate traditional phone applications and traditional business software applications.

Phone, or shall we say voice, features including call recording, call forwarding, call routing, teleconferencing, Inclusion of smartphones into the company phone system, and inclusion of work-from-home employees into the company phone system.

But that’s just the start of what can be done. The unification of voice, video and devices means that you are interconnected wherever you are and whatever device you are working from. You don’t have to be near your desk to make or receive calls and you can share documents or collaborate on applications as well as have conversations.

Expanding into Contact Center as a Service
UCaaS is great for interconnecting everyone within a company. Wouldn’t it be great if you could also include customers? That’s been the function of the call center, now renamed contact center. CCaaS supports incoming customer service and outgoing customer marketing.

You still get as many phone sets as you need, but they’re on the network connected to the cloud and not a room full of equipment down the hall. Instead of buying and maintaining all that equipment, you subscribe to the CCaaS system. You’ll get automated outbound dialing, interactive voice response for customer self-service, automatic contact distribution, analytics and other features that have traditionally been part of call center operations.

In addition, CCaaS is omnichannel in that is can communicate with your customers through voice, SMS, video, web sites and social media. Chatbots and virtual agents can handle routine inquiries so that your employees can concentrate on the more difficult issues.

Benefits of Service in the Cloud
With cloud communications as a service, you no longer have to budget large capital outlays for massive amounts of equipment only to have to replace that same equipment years down the road. You are not bothered with having to install constant fixes and upgrades or scheduling time for a vendor to come and service your system. It’s all being done invisibly within the cloud operation. You get the latest features all kept up to date and with enough hardware to run everything. You simply subscribe for as much service as you need when you need it. As your business grows, your cloud service can expand as needed.

You have a choice in how you connect to the cloud. Some companies, especially smaller ones, simply use an Internet service with Direct Internet Access or SD WAN as the most reliable options. For even better performance and reliability a private line direct cloud connection makes the cloud seem part of your facility… as it should.

Are you ready to move up from an antiquated phone system to UCaaS or CCaaS? Talk with a technology expert and find out the features and prices of a system just right for your organization.

Is Network as a Service Right For Your Business?

By: John Shepler

Running a company network can be a big operation. Perhaps too big. You need lots of capital expenditures for switches, routers and software. Then you need staff to plug everything together, deal with system failures and constantly keep on top of updates, security patches and incoming threats. But, hey, isn’t that just the price in being in business today? There really isn’t any way to avoid all this cost and hassle and still operate, is there? Or IS there?

Network as a Service
Actually there is a new trend in network management that might work to your advantage. Instead of doing it all yourself, how about buying the network functions and capacity you need as a service?

You’re familiar with the migration of everything data center to the cloud. Now, the network is moving there too. All that stuff you would otherwise buy and manage, including switches, routers, and security appliances, can be had on a pay-as-you-go basis. What’s more, you can easily scale up and down as your business needs change. No more buying equipment like crazy to meet a demand and then trying to offload it as surplus when the need evaporates.

NaaS takes care of acquiring the physical devices needed to make the network function, but also handles ongoing support. It has the smarts to optimize the network for optimum performance and keep everything up to date. In addition, NaaS can support automatically onboarding new users and supporting new locations without a lot of muss and fuss at your end.

What Does AI Have to Do With It?
Artificial Intelligence is the latest buzzword in business productivity with great promise for future profitability. Actually, AI is here already and has been quietly integrated in all sorts of technology behind the scenes. AI is important to Network as a Service in that the network is being virtualized, adding all sorts of complication. But AI can run this, optimizing the network and responding to changes as they arise. As businesses need to integrate multi-clouds and multiple locations, the workload on IT staff can go through the roof. Letting AI handle all this complexity on a real-time basis can give you much more capability without soaring expenses.

But Will It Help YOU?
Could Network as a Service be advantageous for your company? Maybe, maybe not. The way to make a decision is to find out the costs and capabilities of NaaS options suitable for your size business. Get a complementary quote now and see if you can get more for your network dollar.

The Time for POTS Replacement Has Come

By: John Shepler

Nobody likes change when it is forced upon them. But change we must as technology relentlessly advances. On its way out are innovations from the gilded age. The incandescent light bulb? Gone. The telegraph? Long gone. The telephone line? You guessed it. It’s going fast.

POTS is Kaput!
Alexander Graham Bell’s fantastic invention, the telephone, is going stronger than ever. But, it has morphed into technologies that weren’t dreamt of by Bell or Watson. What’s on the way out is the century-old connection system of twisted pair copper wires and the instruments that connect to them.

Plain Old Telephone Service or POTS is the current jargon for standard telephone lines consisting of two small diameter copper wires connected to a telephone company office that provides the power, switching and signaling needed to allow any phone to talk to any other phone around the world.

Why Ditch It?
There are two answers. Cell phones and Computer Networks. Neither have any use for POTS interfaces. Residential users have long embraced their smartphones to the exclusion of most everything else. Fewer and fewer are willing to pay the phone company ever increasing fees just to have an old-timey desk or wall phone available just in case the cell tower goes out.

Businesses have been on a similar trajectory. Mobile phones have become important business tools, but the desk phone still has a lot of value. The only difference is that the desk phone often connects to the computer LAN rather than its own unique network. This enables a lot more calling features, including a mash-up of desk sets, smartphones, laptops, PCs and tablets.

With this every increasing switch away from POTS, the phone companies find themselves with huge stockpiles of lines and switching equipment but less and less revenue to support them. That’s why the petitioned the FCC to let them decommission their copper resources and convert the central offices to data centers in high demand by AI and other computing needs.

Why Copper Retirement is Actually a Problem
Not everybody is on-board with chucking a perfectly good technology that is serving them reliably. Lots of businesses still have multiple POTS lines with in-house switching. Larger systems use a digital connection called PRI that multiplexes 23 POTS lines into a par of… you guessed it…twisted pair copper wires. Yes, as POTS goes away so does PRI and its cousin, T1 lines, that use the same wiring.

Another problem is FAX. Traditional FAX machines were designed for POTS and don’t like packet switched networks such as the Internet. Other systems specific to elevator phones, fire and burglar alarms, credit card verification, gate access, and emergency call boxes also were designed for POTS and only POTS. You don’t just plug these into your LAN and call it a day. So, what to do?

POTS Replacement Options
While POTS, PRI, T1, DSL and other copper line connections are rapidly fading into the sunset and not likely to return, there are replacement solutions available. Some popular ones are based on LTE cellular with dual SIM cards, battery backup, and failover Internet access. Also important is that a POTS replacement box provides the same signaling and RJ-11 connector that you’d get from a telephone line wall jack.

On a larger scale, SIP trunking is a replacement for carrying multiple phone lines used in offices and call centers. It can be provisioned over the Internet or, better yet, through a direct connection to a cloud phone service provider that interconnects with the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Have you been notified that your POTS service is being discontinued or greatly increasing in cost? It’s time to consider moving on with a new network based system or a POTS replacement appliance that simply drops in place of your old phone line. Get expert technical advice and pricing on POTS replacement solutions now.

Why Symmetric Bandwidth?

By: John Shepler

Bandwidth is bandwidth and the more the better, right? Well, not so fast. There is bandwidth and then there is bandwidth. All connectivity solutions are not the same. Let’s see why.

Sharing Isn’t Always Caring
Some connections are dedicated. Some are shared. You need to know which you are ordering.

A dedicated connection means a fixed amount of bandwidth that you are contracted for and are guaranteed to have all the time. The classic T1 line, SONET fiber optic, and many Ethernet over Fiber and private wireless solutions are dedicated. They may be set up as point to point private lines , cloud connections or last mile Internet access.

The advantage of dedicated lines is that your network capacity is always there even when you are not loading it up to the max. This improves latency and congestion compared to your other choice, shared bandwidth.

Shared bandwidth connections have other company’s traffic on the same line as yours. You have no idea how many there are or what they are doing. You may well feel their presence, however, as your WAN connection speeds up and slows down for unknown reasons.

So, why on Earth would you share bandwidth? Simply to save cost. Shared lines are dedicated lines that the carrier has sliced and diced to support many users instead of just one. If there is enough bandwidth and not so many users, you may not have a problem and can save considerably on monthly rates. Typical shared bandwidth services include cable broadband, wireless 4G LTE and 5G, and some passive optical fiber optic services that are available at bargain rates.

Symmetric vs Asymmetric Bandwidth
Symmetric bandwidth is when you upload and download speeds are the same. Asymmetric bandwidth means that one direction has much more capacity than the other. The high speed link is almost always the download path. Download speeds may be 10x faster than upload speeds.

Why? Asymmetric setups were designed to mimic the way people actually use the Internet. For the most part you download videos much more often than upload them. You enter short addresses in your browser and download web pages and content far more than you upload them. Or… Do you?

Business users may use their networks much more symmetrically than typical residential users. Business users likely transfer large files back and forth. Many of their applications reside in the cloud with data flowing up and down. VoIP phone and video conferencing are inherently symmetrical. Voice and images go both ways. Remote back-up is asymmetric for the most part… but the other way. Most data is being uploaded to the remote storage.

Traditional telecom networks are designed with symmetric bandwidth in mind. Consumer solutions, which are also typically shared bandwidth, are asymmetric in nature. For casual users and small businesses this may not be an issue. However if you are a heavy bandwidth user, depend on software as a service, do extensive video conferences or back-up your data to remote storage, you will likely be better served with symmetric and dedicated solutions.

Is your business running out of bandwidth or are you just frustrated with the solution you have now? Discuss your real needs with a technology expert and get quotes for multiple options that will work for you. There’s more available and at better prices than you think.

Bandwidth to Support Your Data Center

By: John Shepler

Data centers are hot these days. Oh, not just the temperature of the air exiting the servers. Data centers are hot business. As businesses are transformed digitally and AI is implemented to improve productivity, all eyes are on the data center and what it takes to gain the benefits of this technology.

Not Yesterday’s Server Closet
You can see advances in data center technology as information tech has grown in importance. Once a company is big enough to have more than one PC, it needs networking to interconnect computers and shared resources such as storage, printers and servers. Hot and noisy racks of equipment are quickly moved out of the office and into their own room, which might be the size of a broom closet. Hence, the server closet.

Little rooms soon become big ones with lots of equipment, special floors and ceilings for wiring, uninterruptible power and heavy duty HVAC. This is the genesis of the data center. Today’s businesses are dependent more and more on information technology and require substantial data centers and staff to process and serve that data 24/7.

Some companies still choose to maintain their own data centers in-house or at remote facilities. Others outsource that function to colocation facilities or cloud service providers. Still others see the skyrocketing demand for data center services to support crypto and AI and look to get a piece of the action.

What Connections Do You Need?
Even if you keep everything in-house, you’ll need external connections. That’s at least broadband Internet and telephone connections. If you have other locations in the same area, you can’t go trenching your own cables. You’ll need carrier connections from point to point or connect everything via the Internet.

There are two flavors of Internet access. They are called dedicated and shared. Dedicated Internet Access or DIA offers the highest performance. Dedicated means that the connection is for your use only and no other company is on the same circuit… at least until you get to the core of the Internet. Since most of the congestion occurs in that first mile, DIA can avoid many slowdowns during peak usage times. Fiber optic DIA is available from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps available in some areas.

Shared Internet Access is what is available with Cable broadband and Fixed Wireless Access. Your cost is lower because you are not the only one using the line. How well this works depends on how sensitive you are to interruptions and how many high volume users are sharing the same link.

Your data center servers will also likely need Internet access. Most colocation and cloud facilities have multiple carriers serving their facilities. This give you the option to have redundant connections so that if one goes down, another service provider is unlikely to be out at the same time. You can set up an arrangement like this for your own in-house data center. Just be sure that the two or more Internet Service Providers are not sharing the same fiber or other facilities or you may lose all service with a single point failure.

You can also get dedicated Ethernet point to point fiber optic service between two or more of your own locations. This gives you high performance networking without the security issues and variable performance seen on the Internet.

Connecting to the Data Center
If you choose to place your equipment in a colocation facility or contract for cloud services, you’ll need a way to connect from your company building to the remote data center. Some companies choose to do this through the Internet, but you can get much higher performance and better security with a dedicated point to point line also called direct cloud access. This is a private fiber optic circuit that runs from your facilities to the cloud service provider no matter how far away. You’ll generally have lower latency and more consistent performance than connectivity via the Internet.

Do you need a high performance connection to a data center or cloud service or Internet service to the Internet? If so, get highly competitive prices and availability of connection services for your business locations now.

Goodbye Employees, Hello Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Office employment has been undergoing a major shift since the rise of the Covid Pandemic in 2020 and it’s likely to accelerate rather than return to “normal.” Office buildings nationwide have been emptying out, some being converted to residential units or commercial malls. Even with employees being ordered to return to the office or be replaced, things aren’t really going to go back to mass commutes five days a week, as we’ll soon see. This also has major ramifications for the bandwidth you’ll need and where you’ll need it.

Reluctant Office Workers Offer Opportunities
How do you get ‘em back in the office after they’ve seen work from home?

That might be the title of a song for the 2020’s. The abrupt culture shock from everyone being sent home, with most expected to keep on working, did indeed break the expected paradigm of where you are supposed to be all day. Once appropriate computers and Internet connections got settled, quite a few customer service reps, programmers, and other information workers found they could work just as well from a spare bedroom or dining room table as in the corporate cubicle. Their productivity even improved without the distractions of office chatter or pro-forma meetings.

Employees might have picked up an hour or two of extra personal time not spent commuting and some could drop the expense of outside daycare for children. Meanwhile, companies that continued this arrangement after the pandemic threat had passed found they could reduce office space expense, including real estate and utilities.

One demand that might have increased is the need for fast highly reliable bandwidth to connect now far-flung individuals. Residential Internet connections have improved greatly during this millennium. High speed cable broadband, fiber to the home and 5G fixed wireless access have made most connections nearly transparent. For more demanding applications, SD-WAN and dedicated point to point private lines can reduce latency and congestion.

Not All of Us Are Coming Back to the Office
Remote work may be a boon for some employees and their employers, but many other companies, including some of the largest ones, want the old culture of co-located teams back for camaraderie and supervision. In fact the managers are insisting on it. To some extent this coalescence will occur, but there is another force at work that is going to disrupt it again.

Artificial Intelligence is heralded to be the next dramatic productivity improvement. There is a mad scramble on to build data centers and secure baseload power to support the coming tsunami of AI applications. These promise to be far more sophisticated than the inane chatbots on many sites that can’t seem to answer the simplest questions. Expect these to get a lot smarter. A lot of the coming AI will not be customer facing. It will handle back office paperwork, data entry, report writing, proposal generation, language translation, code generation, graphic arts, network monitoring & troubleshooting, quality control, financial analysis, legal research and medical image diagnosis just to name a few.

In other words, the century long migration from farm to factory to office is about to hit a brick wall of automation. There is already concern that new hires in white collar professions will be facing an increasingly tough job market, followed by job eliminations right up the ladder.

What Network Technology Will You Need?
If office automation is soon taking over, what do you need to plan for to support this transition? In addition to remote worker systems and bandwidth, you’ll need robust connectivity to the AI data centers where many of these applications will reside. Any apps that deal with the customer directly will require substantial Internet connections, likely right from the data center. Your office team will also need solid connections to those same data centers. The Internet may not be adequate for high bandwidth, low latency, jitter, packet loss and general congestion. A dedicated fiber optic private line, also called a cloud on-ramp, can make this connection transparent and help maximize productivity.

A lot of your communications may be in the form of video conferences, including a mobile workforce and well as the office staff. Don’t forget to include enough mobile bandwidth so that the people in the field are as well connected as those in the office.

Finally, you may be looking at whole new systems of computers, phones, pads and other devices that integrate your staff, management, suppliers and customers along with the AI applications that make it all work seamlessly.

Are your business needs in a state of change? Yesterday’s solutions might not support your future. Let an experienced technology advisor help you acquire the networking services you need to stay at the top of your markets.

10000 Mbps Business Internet is Available

By: John Shepler

Growing businesses seem to always be running out of bandwidth. No matter how much you have, it doesn’t take long and you’re starting to push against that upper limit. That’s where the conversation gets a bit difficult. Is there more bandwidth to be had? If so, will it be even remotely affordable?

Good news! Behind the scenes, the infrastructure of Internet access has been moving fast. You are no longer stuck with what copper pair wiring will carry or the jaw dropping cost of telecom oriented fiber optic protocols. There are reasonably priced options available right now for your business that stretch to 10000 Mbps or even higher.

Why Such a Need For Speed?
Today’s bandwidth isn’t yesterday’s bandwidth. Everything has changed and it has happened seemingly overnight. What’s driving changes to the networking industry is the way businesses and consumers have evolved in their use of the Internet. What started out as a simple way to send electronic messages between computer centers has morphed into a life support system for an all-digital environment.

Take your business, for instance. In fact, take any business. Nobody logs onto the Internet anymore. It’s just there, running all the time. It is probably running processes for you in the background even when your screens are dark and everybody goes home. Turn off your PC. It doesn’t matter. The programs aren’t running on your PC. They’re on the network somewhere. That used to mean a server in the back room. Now it’s a server in a colocation facility or a server cluster in a cloud service provider.

Today’s business processes are large and often customized packages from a provider who offers everything you need from sales to inventory to customer service. Your office telephones are probably integrated with the computers and also any mobile devices including smartphones. Communications run the gamut from text messages to traditional email to in-app messaging to video conferences. All of these have a bandwidth demand, with video needing the most and being the most sensitive to interference from other applications.

Oh, and then there are your customers. Do they all just walk in? Sure, some do. Especially in businesses where face to face service is necessary or customary. Other business may derive most of their sales online and not even have a showroom or client conference room. Those online customers need to connect to your business instantly and without glitches. If they have trouble, they’ll go somewhere else. After all, your competitors are just as easy to get to as you are.

Add it all up and you can see that a digitally oriented business environment demands a support structure that is far more robust and seamless than they days when the Internet was just an accessory tool to a legacy bricks and mortar operation.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough
Every business type has its unique set of demands. Similar size companies in similar industries will likely have more or less similar demands. Large and small companies will have large and small demands. Some applications, like content delivery or medical imaging may have enormous needs. Most all of these can be accommodated with a combination of fiber and wireless bandwidth, and perhaps cable broadband.

Ethernet over Fiber has become the de-facto connectivity for demanding business applications. Copper-based services like T1 and DS3 are on the wane. They probably won’t be with us too much longer as the telecoms are decommissioning the facilities. In most cases it doesn’t matter. The limited bandwidth of these services has been eclipsed by newer technologies.

The older SONET fiber services developed by the telephone industry and adapted to business metropolitan and wide area networks is also going by the waysides. It may still be at the core of many networks, but is less and less offered to businesses directly. Ethernet over Fiber directly connects to business Local Area Networks without the need for any proprietary protocol conversion.

A major advantage of standardized Ethernet over Fiber infrastructure is that it accommodates a wide range of bandwidths using the same protocol. 10 to 100 Mbps is entry level, with 1000 Mbps a typical standard offering. Gigabit Ethernet, also known as GigE, seemed the most anyone would need not so long ago. Nowadays, the need for increased speed goes beyond a gigabit per second.

Bandwidth You Can Afford
If you are nearing the end of a three year contract or have just been paying month to month for years, you owe it to yourself and your company to get fresh quotes for the bandwidth you need right now and into the foreseeable future. As long as you have a port installed that will handle your anticipated growing needs, you don’t need to pay for the maximum bandwidth right now. Most providers will lease you the capacity you need today with the understanding that you can easily upgrade at any time on just a phone call or even through a Web portal.

What’s available? Fiber serves the lion’s share of today’s business locations. It’s been quietly installed without much fanfare. You can likely get any bandwidth you need from 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps (that’s 10000 Mbps) quickly and easily… and for less cost than you might think. If your demands are really stringent, 100 gbps or 100000 Mbps is not available in many metropolitan and suburban business districts. Cable and wireless broadband up to 1000 Mbps is also often a reasonable option.

Go ahead. It doesn’t cost anything to simply ask for current pricing. You may be surprised at the business Internet that is available to you.

Today’s Best Business Broadband Options

By: John Shepler

If you are still using a copper wireline service, such as DSL or T1, for your business Internet connection, it’s time to upgrade your service… before you are forced to.

Forced to? Why would that be? Fact is, the major telecom companies are all in the process of decommissioning their copper wire assets. Basically anything that uses century-old twisted pair wiring is on the way out.

Technology marches on. T1 lines were once considered broadband. They don’t even qualify with today’s standard. DSL? Pretty much an obsolete system that was once a good way to re-purpose standard telephone lines for fast Internet access.

AT&T and others have made it clear that they are either pulling up old copper lines or abandoning them to rust in place. The wire centers or central offices that connect to these lines are being repurposed as data centers for the insatiable needs of AI.

So what are better options? Surprisingly, one of the best is also an older technology that has continuously upgraded to keep it competitive with the times.

Cable Broadband Is a Great Deal for Small Business
That coaxial cable that plugs into the back of a set-top box or cable modem has been a familiar tech standard for many decades. Physically, it’s the same. What’s changed is the signal that comes out that center wire.

Cable was originally analog, just like TV signals back in the day. When the Internet came along, some of the unused TV channels were set aside for digital transmission using a standard called DOCSIS or Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an invention of the industry’s R&D organization CableLabs. The current standard is DOCSIS 3.1 with a migration underway to DOCSIS 4.0.

Today’s cable modems are cable of gigabit speeds, with common service levels of 300 Mbps downstream, 30 Mbps upstream. That’s fast enough for pretty much all web browsing, video streaming and data transfer. What’s hard to beat at those speeds is the price. Cable is easily affordable by both consumers and smaller businesses, often with telephone service included.

Wireless Broadband is Now Both Mobile and Fixed
Like cable, cellular wireless had humble beginnings as a mobile telephone service, but has kept up with the times through multiple technology advancements. The first standard that really supported broadband as well as telephone was called 3G. That’s evolved to the current standards of 4G LTE and 5G. With 300 Mbps or so, an iPhone has all the bandwidth it can really make use of.

That high bandwidth, which can reach a Gigabit per second near some of the 5G towers, is easily competitive with fixed broadband services. The capacity limits have been largely eliminated with 5G buildouts and the extra spectrum acquired from government auctions of unused television bandwidth. Now the wireless companies are in a competitive battle to roll out cellular modems that work like cable modems but without the wires. You can put one at a construction site or a pop-up store in minutes. If you move soon, take it with you and have connectivity at your next location.

Cable broadband is being built into laptop computers and tablets and other devices, called the Internet of Things. Remote data acquisition and control are now possible in remote areas that have cell towers but no other connectivity.

Fiber, The Gold Standard and Secret Backbone
The magic that makes cable and cellular broadband so fast is the fiber optic lines that feed these services. It’s all behind the scenes, of course. Even so, you may want to connect directly to fiber yourself.

What’s the fiber advantage? Nearly unlimited bandwidth for one thing. Today’s service levels run from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps just about everywhere, with 100 Gbps service available in some metro locations. That’s important for medium and larger enterprises with many employees who need simultaneous Internet access.

Another big advantage is symmetrical bandwidth That means if you have 1 Gbps downstream, you also have 1 Gbps upstream. Contrast that with most cable and wireless services that offer much higher download than upload speeds. If you need to transfer files up and down regularly or have demanding video conferencing requirements, this can be important.

A third advantage is very low latency and jitter with minimal congestion. This is because fiber is usually a dedicated service, not shared like cable and cellular. For even higher performance, consider a dedicated line between your company and your cloud service that bypasses the Internet completely.

Need the ultimate in performance? Dark Fiber that you “light” with your own equipment gives you complete control of protocols and bandwidth allocation. It’s like having your own network extended across town or across the country.

Do you need a replacement Internet connection or are ready for a bandwidth upgrade or perhaps even a cost saving? Check out the Business Broadband Options available right now.

Is Cellular the New ISP?

By: John Shepler

Internet Service Provider technology has evolved dramatically in the last few decades. It stated out as audio modems over classic landline phones. Then came broadband with DSL and Cable. Business broadband started with ADSL, T1 lines & DS3, upgraded to SONET fiber and then Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Now we may be headed back to telephone technology, as 5G cellular make a move to become an accepted Internet Service Provider.

What’s 5G Got to Offer?
5G is the latest in a long line of technology evolution for wireless mobile phone service. The earliest cellular 0 and 0.5G emerged in the 1970’s, followed by 1G and 2G technologies in the 1980’s. These were voice technologies designed to make the traditional telephone set wireless and mobile. SMS messaging appeared in 2G with e-mail and simple Web browsing added with 2.5G and 2.75G.

The first mobile service that really could be called broadband Internet access was 3G, 3.5G and 3.75G. This is what supported the rise of smartphones. The next generation (G stands for generation level of technology) 4G and 4G LTE (long term evolution) made cellular broadband a real contender as an Internet Service Provider.

The latest phones with 5G are seeing Internet speeds in the dozens to hundreds of Mbps with low latency, jitter and packet loss. The millimeter wave bands support Gigabit per second service and that may be upgraded to 10 Gbps downlink and 1 Gbps uplink with 5G-Advanced upgrades.

5G vs Cable and Fiber
More and more business is being conducted on smartphones and tablets vs desktop computers and even laptops. WiFi is useful indoors to avoid burning cell usage quotas, but while mobile and at customer locations you’ll likely be connecting via 5G from your service provider. Since that applies to all of your mobile devices, the value of an Ethernet connection is limited to desktops and wired phones, with WiFi helpful in moving about in the office or at select locations, such as restaurants.

With so much computing being done via 5G, is it possible to replace everything with a 5G account that supports all your devices?

For an increasing number of consumers and small business users, the answer is yes. Replace your cable modem or fiber termination equipment with a 5G hotspot and continue using the Internet as you always have. You may not even notice a difference in performance. Let’s face it. Once you’ve got all the bandwidth you can reasonably use at one time, doubling or tripling it doesn’t make things go any faster. The limit will likely be the server at the other end that you are connecting to.

Since 5G speeds are often a couple of hundred Mbps or more, the difference between wireless, DOCSIS 3.1 cable and Ethernet over Fiber might not even be noticeable. Where the difference does show up is in your usage limit. That’s only important if you are a heavy user or a corporate operation with dozens or hundreds of users online at the same time. It’s especially true if your business applications are being run from the cloud and accessed via the Internet.

Limitations of 5G Broadband
Yes even with “unlimited” plans, you can’t hog all the bandwidth of the cellular provider all the time. The system isn’t designed for continuous uploads or download from a single customer. Bandwidth is scarce and must be shared with a multitude of users on each tower. Your provider may not drop your connection, but you might find it slowing down severely, especially during busy times, when you are using more that your fair share of capacity.

Another issue to consider is upload vs download performance.Casual web browsing and media streaming is demanding on the download side and not so much for upload. Business applications that transfer large files to and from remote servers or the cloud may well need upload bandwidth that rivals download performance. Video conferencing and telephone call centers also need both upload and download capability about equally. This is where fiber shines. Business fiber is typically symmetrical with upload and download speeds the same. This is also usually provided with no usage restrictions, something you are unlikely to find with cable and 5G.

Selecting a Service
What service works best for your business? It depends on what you are doing and how intensely you are doing it. Some companies will find that only high speed fiber optic service will meet their needs. Others will be fine with cable or 5G wireless service at a lower cost.

Another consideration is ability to connect. While fiber may offer the best performance, there may be no fiber near your rural location or you may be in a dense metro location that hasn’t been “lit” yet. Some companies have found it best to quickly connect with a 5G hotspot and use that service while waiting for fiber to be brought in over a period of weeks or longer.

If you have a need for new or expanded broadband Internet service or are simply curious if you can make a better deal, learn what business broadband options are available and suitable for your business.

Overbuilding Offers Broadband Choices

By: John Shepler

There was a time when you had just a single choice for Internet connectivity. That was the incumbent local phone company. Now you may have many other choices, as competing networks move into your area. Let’s have a look at overbuilding and the opportunities it provides.

In the Beginning…
In the beginning there was only one network and that was the PSTN or public switched telephone network. The phone network is the original telecom network that started with Alexander Graham Bell and expanded to cover the world. It’s a very specific network, designed for voice communications. Computers came later. Any computer that wanted to talk to any other computer had to mimic human telephone users. Hence, the acoustically coupled audio modem.

That had to change fast. First, with ditching the acoustic coupling. Then overcoming the 64 Kbps limits of a standard phone line. Telephone companies developed digital phone lines to multiplex or combine multiple circuits in to one larger capacity circuit. Business quickly adapted the copper DSL and T1 lines, and then SONET fiber optic lines, for computer connectivity.

Still, there was one place to get service and that was the phone company. After all, Ma Bell owned all the wires. Even when “deregulation” was introduced, those competitive carriers were simply rebranding telco lines they got at wholesale rates.

Cable: The First Overbuilder
Each town has a single incumbent local phone company. But each town also can have a community antenna company, later called a cable company, to deliver television. Utility poles might have power, telephone and cable wires running one above the other all over town.

The cable companies made technical upgrades. First, they added modem service to offer Internet access. Then they converted their networks to digital, with fiber optics as the backbone and coaxial copper as the drop to the premises. This, plus regular modem standard upgrades, allows cable to offer broadband Internet service that meets or exceeds what the phone company can provide.

When two different providers install networks to serve the same locations, that’s called overbuilding. It’s one on top of or over the other. It could also mean excessive building, but that hasn’t generally been the case in the almost insatiable demand for broadband.

Fiber Overbuilds in Cable Territory
Cable pretty much overtook landline telephone, including DSL broadband, for residential and small business Internet. So much so, that the telephone companies are decommissioning their copper assets. Twisted pair copper technology just couldn’t keep up.

What the telcos have done is overbuild their own copper networks with fiber optic cables. They actually had a specialized fiber service called SONET before cable came around, but it was too expensive for residential and smaller businesses. They’ve now adopted the more standard Carrier Ethernet over Fiber technology that is directly compatible with most computer networks.

Recently, competing fiber optic network companies have been overbuilding both cable and telco networks with their own fiber. Some cities have contracted with these companies to install fiber that passes every home and business. This is in direct competition with cable broadband that is already serving many if not most of those customers.

Telco Overbuilds with Fixed Wireless Access
The telcos have been busy building out wireless networks to serve mobile phones and computing devices. It this case there may be several competing wireless companies serving each town. The big three in the US are AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. You never had a choice in landline phone service or cable, but you have had this advantage in wireless.

Now wireless is challenging cable and even fiber. As cellular networks upgraded to 4G LTE and 5G, the broadband speeds have increased. In areas where microwave 5G bands are installed, the speeds can easily compete with cable and fiber.

A proliferation of towers, large and small, is expanding the coverage so that a cellular modem, basically a phone that does just broadband, can provide primary broadband service for residential and business users. If the wireless companies have their way, they’ll displace cable in the same way cable displaced landline phone.

What does all this overbuilding mean for you? The competition tends to lower prices and increase service bandwidth. In other words, you wind up getting more value for less cost.

Which broadband option is best for your business? Check pricing and coverage for fiber optic, cable broadband and fixes wireless access now.

The Cable vs Fiber Broadband War

By: John Shepler

There’s a broadband battle underway right now. It pits cable business broadband against Ethernet fiber optic bandwidth. These are the two leading technologies that will dominate business Internet now and for the foreseeable future. There is also a third contender warming up that we’ll discuss a bit later. Let’s see what the two big players have to offer.

Fiber Takes Over From Copper
The first century of telecommunications was dominated by twisted pair copper wires that provided the last mile for landline telephones, multi-line business phones, point to point computer connections and, when it started developing, the nascent Internet. The ground is chock-full of multi-pair cables. Some will be pulled out and recycled. Others will be left to slowly disintegrate.

Their technological replacement is fiber optic cables. Glass fibers take the place of plastic coated copper strands. Optical fibers have tremendously more bandwidth carrying capacity. A copper T1 line can deliver 1.5 Mbps. A fiber can deliver a Gigabit per second up to at least 10 Gbps. It’s no longer uncommon to have 100 Gbps fiber optic service available for business use.

Fiber itself has undergone a technical evolution in protocol from the early SONET telecom standard to Carrier Ethernet, otherwise known as Ethernet over Fiber. This upgrade made sense as telecom traffic changed from largely audio phone calls to digital computer packets.

What Fiber Optic Service Can Provide
Fiber broadband is readily available and can offer 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps bandwidth. This bandwidth is usually symmetrical, meaning the same speed for upload and download. It is also generally dedicated. That means you don’t share your fiber capacity with any other businesses. It’s all your traffic from your building to where it joins the Internet. This makes for much more consistent Internet performance.

Many companies have been moving from having their own in-house data centers to hosting that equipment at a co-location facility or leasing the same capability from a cloud provider. If your business software is running remotely, it often makes sense to have a direct connection from your offices, factories and warehouses to the cloud provider and avoid any potential congestion from the Internet.

Direct connections are also useful between company facilities, such as branch offices and any owned data center facilities. Essentially, you are extending your LAN out to include all your locations.

How Can Cable Compete with Fiber?
Cable got its start as a community antenna that fed a small town or city. Like fiber, cable has come a long way technically. Analog has transformed into digital. Still, isn’t cable a bandwidth limited copper connection?

Less than you might think. The drop or final connection to your business is still the familiar coaxial copper cable. The innards of the system have long ago upgraded to fiber, just like the telecom industry. That means most of the distance travelled is over fiber optic cables, some with as many as 100 fibers. The TV and Internet signal is converted to drive a copper drop cable just before it reaches your building. This system is referred to as HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax.

The other big advance in Cable broadband has been the upgrading of cable modems using the DOCSIS standard. Most modems are now DOCSIS 3.1 that has the ability to support downstream data speeds of up to 10 Gbps and upstream speeds of 1 Gbps.

DOCSIS 4.0 is in the process of being deployed. This equipment upgrade will support downstream speeds of 10 Gbps plus upstream speeds of 6 Gbps.

Clearly, today’s cable broadband is easily a match for all but the most demanding fiber speeds. One difference between Ethernet fiber and cable broadband is that cable is usually asymmetrical to match the typical usage of retail customers on the Internet. In other words, the demand for download speed is usually more than the demand for upload speed. Often download is 10 times as fast as upload.

Another difference is that cable broadband is a shared access service in the last mile. This means that some heavy users may impact the performance of other users from time to time. For consumers, this is usually not a problem. For a business that depends of steady high performance for employee productivity using cloud services, it could present an issue.

Why Pick One Service Over the Other?
For consumers and many smaller businesses, cost is tie-breaker. Cable business broadband is generally less costly than Ethernet over Fiber for similar bandwidths. However, if you need symmetrical bandwidth, dedicated Internet access, dedicated point to point connections, or a dedicated line to your cloud provider, fiber optic connections can be well worth the added monthly cost. It should also be mentioned that some Cable companies are now offering access to their internal fiber optic networks as a premium bandwidth service.

Wireless is the Next Competitor
There is a new entry to the broadband wars that is also worthy of consideration. That is fixed wireless broadband. Once a niche service over very small areas, fixed wireless is now being offered by the major cellular carriers. What has made this possible is the advancement to 4G LTE and 5G. Mobile phones with 300 Mbps or more Internet service are now common. By providing a high performance modem without the telephone features but including Wi-Fi or LAN connection, carriers can deliver high speed broadband over their wireless networks already in place. Advantages include very reasonable pricing and little or no construction cost. You pick up the modem at the cellular store or have it shipped to you and install it yourself right away. It’s also perfect for pop-up stores and construction sites that are only temporary locations.

Which is best for your business? Cable broadband? Ethernet over Fiber? Fixed Wireless? Get pricing and availability for each of these bandwidth options and then choose the right solution for you.

So Long T1 and POTS, Hello AI

By: John Shepler

Have you gotten the word from your telecom service provider that your T1 lines and POTS telephone lines are scheduled for decommissioning? Perhaps you’ve seen news items to this effect. It’s true. The major landline telephone companies are determined to replace their more than a century old copper cables with the newer technologies of fiber and wireless. It’s happening faster in some parts of the country than others. Like the incandescent light bulbs of the same era, copper telco connections are being relegated to history.

Why Do They Hate Copper?
Copper has served us well from the gilded age to this millennium. Copper POTS phone lines are highly reliable and are powered by the phone company. If you lose power, the phone still works because the equipment has battery backup at the central office. If you want the same functionality with your VoIP phones on the Internet, you’ll need add that battery backup at your end.

Copper T1 lines have been the mainstay of both business Internet connections and PBX phone systems for decades. Some companies use them for direct connection from one business location to another. As private lines, they are more secure than the Internet and you avoid the congestion when everyone in the area is trying to work online at the same time.

Like all legacy technology, T1 and POTS lines are getting a little long in the tooth. A T1 bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps was once considered broadband. Now 1.5 Gbps has the same respect. Analog POTS lines and their own unique telephone network are being replaced by LAN and WAN network connected phone systems, often with switching systems in the cloud. As a result, there are fewer and fewer users of these older circuits. Most consumers are primarily dependent on their cell phones and have dropped landline phone. Businesses are heading more and more to the cloud and using fiber optic direct connections to get there.

This is creating quite a dilemma for the phone companies. The incumbent local carriers own all that copper and it is not getting any younger. Fewer customers means less revenue. Corroding wires and insulation result in more any more repair calls. The cost of maintaining that copper plant keeps going up and up.

Copper’s Replacements Are Mostly In-Place
The replacement for all that copper interconnection is fiber and wireless. Fiber has the advantage of nearly unlimited bandwidth. With wavelengths and multiple strands per cable, there is lots of unused capacity that can be pressed into service as data demands increase. The limitation to date has been too few routes installed and lit for service. That’s changing fast. Many cities have seen the future and are contracting for municipal fiber that runs past every home and business. Cellular 5G and eventually 6G require fiber to get the required bandwidths.

The other replacement technology is wireless. The same 5G towers used for phone calls also support fast broadband in the dozens or hundreds of Mbps. Mobile Internet nearly everywhere is already in place. A newer wrinkle is a 5G access point, essentially a phone without the user interface, that installs in a home or business. You have broadband Internet service that is always-on and you don’t need to worry about connecting to a fiber or cable.

There are still dead spots. Sparsely connected areas may not have fiber, cable or cellular coverage. They mostly did have landline phones, though. The replacement for these areas may be GEO or LEO satellite, as they may never get cell towers or fiber lines.

What Becomes of The Copper Facilities?
Oddly enough, the latest technology may provide a new lease on life for the oldest. One proposal is to gut those telco central offices and points of presence and install high powered servers to support the demand for Artificial Intelligence.

The facilities with utility power, battery and generator backup, HVAC, and weatherproof buildings are already in place. By upscaling them to be small data centers located near potential customers, the growing demand for AI services can be supported faster than with all new construction. Another major benefit is the lower latency that comes with having computing at the network edge rather than centralized thousands of miles away.

The copper itself may well be mined to support the need for electrical transmission, electric vehicle propulsion, power generation and more. Some copper cables are pulled out of their conduits as fiber is installed to make room for the new fiber. Copper in the ground and central office wiring may become a welcome source of recycling, much as scrap aluminum is melted down and repurposed. No point in letting it corrode to dust if it costs less to reuse than smelt new ore.

Do You Need Copper Replacement Services?
Have you been notified that your copper telecom services are going to be discontinued or are you just interested in how much more bandwidth you can get for the same or less cost each month? See what fiber and wireless services are available for your business now.

5 Gig Internet Business Fiber

By: John Shepler

You can see it for yourself. Bandwidth needs are climbing higher every day. That Gigabit Ethernet Dedicated Internet Access service you installed a few years ago is already hitting its limit. A GigE to the cloud isn’t enough to completely avoid congestion anymore. Clearly, it’s time to move on up.

5 Gig is the New Gigabit
What’s the next logical level for business bandwidth? Actually, you can have pretty much anything you want in 1 Gbps increments. However, some levels are more popular than others. An emerging standard is 10 Gig. You may not need or want to pay for that much right now. A good intermediate level is 5 Gigabit for Internet or private lines.

Why 5 Gig? It gives you breathing room for business applications running in the cloud, e-commerce Internet connections, remote file storage and access, and lots of video content. The more users you have accessing the same WAN connection, the more bandwidth you need to avoid congestion slowdowns, broken VoIP conversations and jerky video conferencing. Real time applications need fat pipes.

Dedicated Internet Access vs Private Lines
There are two basic types of network connections: Private and shared. The Internet is by design a shared network that connects everybody to everybody else with nobody having priority. You can improve your Internet connection performance by avoiding shared access and using Dedicated Internet Access. That gives you a private link from you business to your Internet Service Provider. The last mile is where most of the congestion and variation problems originate.

A private line is just that. Your company is the only user on the connection that runs from point to point. There is no contention with other businesses or consumers. If you have a 5 Gigabit fiber link, you have 5 Gbps available at all times. Whatever bandwidth you don’t use at the moment is there for headroom. You’ll only experience congestion and the latency it creates when you exceed 5 Gigabits per second momentarily or for an extended time.

Connecting Multiple Business Locations Privately
A private fiber optic network can be set up point to multipoint or mesh as well as a direct cloud link or dedicated line between business locations. You can also employ an MPLS network to span regional, national or international sites for a cost savings. MPLS networks are run by a private provider who guarantees bandwidth, latency and packet loss even though there are multiple users on the network. Everybody thinks they are the only user.

Other High Bandwidth Options
Fiber future-proofs your network and generally offers symmetrical bandwidth so that upload and download speeds are the same. Cable broadband speeds are often above 1 Gbps, with 5 Gbps offered in some areas. The bandwidth is asymmetrical and the last mile connection is shared, but the cost savings may well outweigh the advantages of fiber in less critical applications. Fixed wireless can also offer high bandwidths using a small antenna on your building and are a great alternative where fiber and cable are not available.

Are you running out of capacity on your Gigabit fiber connection? If so, consider an expansion to 5 Gbps with a growth path to 10 Gbps when you need it. You’ll love the extra breathing room.