Is DS-3 Bandwidth An Endangered Species?

DS-3 has long been the go-to telecom service for companies needing moderate amounts of bandwidth for dedicated Internet access, file transfers and video transport. It’s been steadily coming down in price as more providers compete in the network bandwidth space. But even if costs are a fraction of what they were a decade ago, DS-3 may be in its twilight years. What could be causing that?

The seeds of change were sown when data packets replaced digitized voice as the primary traffic on the world’s networks. Now video is arguably demanding the lion’s share of available bandwidth. What’s true for data and video, and increasingly voice, is that packet switched IP networks are the new bandwidth services of choice.

DS-3 connections offer a symmetrical bandwidth of 45 Mbps. Delivery is most often over a fiber optic cable, although there are short range fixed wireless solutions that are popular in densely populated business districts. The user handoff is via a pair of coaxial cables, one for transmit and the other for receive. This hints at the copper legacy of DS-3.

There’s a lot you can do with 45 Mbps, especially in medium size companies. It’s a big step up from the closest related technology of T1 lines that run at 1.5 Mbps each. These can be bonded together to give you 10 to 12 Mbps, but that’s about it. From there you move up to DS-3 at 45 Mbps. The next step is to OC-3 SONET fiber optic service running about 156 Mbps. As you can imagine, there are big pricing level jumps that accompany the bandwidth jumps in these legacy telecom services.

What can possibly threaten the dominance of an entrenched technology like DS-3? It’s the rise of Carrier Ethernet service in recent years. It’s actually been more like a tsunami lately. The popularity of 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps and higher Ethernet bandwidth has been surging for two important reasons. First is availability, second is price.

The term Carrier Ethernet is used to describe a range of services from local Metro Ethernet to long haul networks with national and international footprints. All of these services are extensions of the familiar switched Ethernet protocol that runs on nearly every business LAN. In fact the handoff is a simple Ethernet connector, such as the ubiquitous RJ-45.

Why Ethernet? It just makes sense to use the same technology that is running on the majority of networks today. Interfacing is easy. There are no protocol conversions involved. Network services such as level 2 LAN extensions are readily available. Both point to point and multipoint options are standardized service offerings.

Ethernet is more scalable and more quickly scaled than competing telecom services, like DS-3. You can get lower bandwidth Ethernet service in levels such as 2 Mbps, 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps and 20 Mbps delivered over twisted pair copper. These can replace higher priced fractional DS-3 services delivered over fiber.

Higher speed Carrier Ethernet services, including the popular 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps , 250 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1,000 Mbps and 10 Gbps levels are delivered using fiber. The equipment tends to be more automated than legacy telco gear, allowing rapid changes to customer bandwidth without having to change equipment or wiring.

More than anything else, though, what’s endangering DS-3 bandwidth is the lower cost of Carrier Ethernet. How would you like to get 50 Mbps Ethernet at a lower cost than 45 Mbps DS3? Would you be impressed if you found out you could get 50 Mbps Ethernet for half the price of your old DS-3 connection? What if you could get 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service for less than the cost of that DS-3 connection? How long would it take for you to make the switch for more bandwidth at lower prices?

The price you pay has a lot to do with availability of services for your particular business location. The only way to know for sure is to get the latest competitive quotes for both DS-3 and Ethernet. Then make your decision. You may be surprised by how much WAN bandwidth has changed recently.

Job Posting Tool Offers Free Trial

It’s time to think about hiring again. Perhaps you are already in need of qualified candidates, but are none too anxious to wade into the snowstorm of resumes and phone messages that result when you run a job ad. Then there’s the cost of advertising and the dedication of staff time to screen applicants. The improving economy can seem like a mixed blessing unless you have a way to make the hiring process more efficient and less painful. Here’s one you should consider.


ZipRecruiter is in the business of improving the job posting and candidate review process. They have created an online-based system that takes a lot of the burden off you and your staff. If you like it enough to give it a test drive, you can try the system free for four days. Keep all the candidates you acquire during that trial period. If you want to continue with the product, pricing is very attractive.

What does ZipRecruiter do that’s easier than doing it all yourself? The leverage the power of automation to improve productivity. Sure, you can post to all the job boards online, one by one. ZipRecruiter will do that posting for you to the most highly trafficked free job boards on the internet. We’re talking a collection of resources that draws tens of millions of job seekers every month. You click once. your job gets posted to multiple boards.

Now brace yourself for the response. With the job market just recovering, there is a lot of excellent talent out there. There are also a lot of desperate, but unsuitable, candidates to vie for your attention. Don’t let the perfect matches get lost in the shuffle. One way to reduce resume spam is to ask your candidates real-world questions about your business. ZipRecruiter lets you set up an optional online interview so you can review candidate response along with the resumes they submit.

You’ll probably want collaboration with your colleagues before you commit to the time and expense involved with bringing someone in for a face to face interview. With the ZipRecruiter tool you can rate the candidates and share notes all in one place. There’s a tab to view the resume and another to quickly view the candidate's answers to your interview questions.

You know that social media is the way to connect these days. This tool has social networking capability built-in. It takes just a couple of clicks to spread the word about your job openings on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Buzz.

This is a customizable job posting tool with a hosted company job page that promotes all of your job openings in one place. You can simply link to this page from your company website instead of having to build and maintain a completely separate job listing resource.

Want to manage your candidate data offline as well as online? No problem. ZipRecruiter makes it easy to export your candidate to an Excel spreadsheet.

Does this sound a lot easier than doing it all manually or coming up with your own proprietary tools? You bet it is. But why not decide for yourself by getting a free trial of ZipRecruiter right now? See how fast and easy it works for you. You probably won’t go back to the “old” way of posting jobs and evaluating candidates.

20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper

You need bandwidth and a lot of it. So, call up your service provider and upgrade your account. Oh, you can’t do that? Is it because there are no facilities at the level you want or the cost is so astronomical that it isn’t worth considering? Have you considered 20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper?

What’s special about 20x20 EoC is that it offers an extraordinary level of bandwidth using only commonly available twisted pair copper cable. You get a symmetrical 20 Mbps upload and 20 Mbps download speed. This is a professional-grade WAN networking service that is highly reliable. Your bandwidth is dedicated to your applications and is not shared with other customers. It’s also full duplex, so you can upload and download at the same time using the full bandwidth available.

T1, the basic and most popular of the T-carrier services, offers just 1.5 Mbps delivered using 2 copper pair. You can upgrade that by adding more T1 lines with a binding process that combines their bandwidth. This works well up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Then it becomes too expensive compared to other solutions.

The next logical upgrade is T3 or DS3, which are pretty much the same service these days. The bandwidth is an impressive 45 Mbps, but you won’t get that over twisted pair telco cable. You’ll almost certainly need to have a fiber optic connection. In some situations you may be able to get fixed location wireless at that bandwidth as long as you have a short line of site path between you and your provider.

What 20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper does is fill the gap between slower speed bonded T1 lines and higher speed fiber options. A bandwidth level of 20 Mbps is fast enough for many medium size companies to use for dedicated Internet access, file backup and restore, medical image transfer, computer aided design and manufacturing, video transport and similar demanding applications.

The way 20x20 Mbps EoC works is that it divides the bandwidth among multiple twisted pair wires in a binder group. The modulation scheme is chosen to minimize interference between the signal wires or even cancel out interference on the lines. One of the technical reasons that EoC is highly reliable is that no one pair carries the entire signal. If a wire breaks or the circuit connected to it fails, other pairs can continue to provide service, albeit at a reduced bandwidth level until repairs are made.

It sounds like 20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper is an almost ideal service, doesn’t it? It gets better. Mbps for Mbps, Carrier Ethernet services tend to be less expensive than their legacy telecom competitors, including T1 and DS3. The one caveat is that EoC isn’t universally available as of yet. It’s primarily a Metro Ethernet service found in cities and suburban areas, with very little rural service. There are distance limitations to the technology. You need to be within a few miles of a carrier POP (Point of Presence) to get Ethernet over Copper services.

What about higher bandwidths? EoC is most popular in the range of 2 Mbps up to 20 Mbps. Very near provider offices, speeds up to 45 Mbps might be available. Above that, you are going to need fiber run into your building. This is not necessarily a budget breaker. Some competitive providers anxious to acquire fiber optic business will subsidize or even fully cover the cost of a fiber optic buildout if you order significant bandwidth.

Are you in need of higher bandwidth but unsure about availability and costs? Find out quickly and easily if you can get 20x20 Mbps Ethernet over Copper or other high bandwidth services at very affordable prices.

Cloud Computing and WAN Bandwidth

Cloud computing has become a major trend in IT services. It sometimes seems like there is a wild stampede to anything and everything in the cloud. What may get lost in the details is just how you actually get to the cloud. That mechanism is WAN bandwidth.

The WAN, or Wide Area Network, is often used to describe any connection beyond the boundary of the business office or corporate campus. Locations in town may be served by a MAN, or Metropolitan Area Network, that is limited to a small geographical area. Beyond that, you need WAN bandwidth to reach other locations or networks.

So, why is WAN bandwidth so important? It all has to do with traffic levels and where that traffic goes on the network. When data centers were all local, network traffic primarily stayed on the LAN. Once remote data centers were implemented for backup and disaster recovery, MAN or WAN bandwidth increased to accommodate the extra resource needs. Now that the server racks and disks have been replaced by cloud services, the lion’s share of network traffic goes to and from the cloud.

Where is the cloud? One of the most popular depictions of the cloud is the Internet. You don’t need to be formally involved with cloud computing to be using the Internet. Most everyone does. The reason that the cloud symbol is used for the Internet is that, as users, we don’t have to be concerned with the details of what all is on the Internet nor how it all interconnects. All we need to know is that we connect using a broadband Internet access service and use certain resources available through the Internet.

Now the term “cloud” is used to describe other services that may or may not have anything to do with the Internet. In may cases, it’s only the network that changes. The idea of having servers running applications and using storage owned by a service provider at some distant location isn’t unique to the Internet. What’s different about today’s cloud is that your connection is likely a private point to point data line that is used only to connect your business to the cloud services you require. With the Internet, many, many services and many, many users all share the same network.

This is where WAN bandwidth comes in. If you happen to be using cloud services on the Internet, you’ll be wanting a dedicated broadband Internet connection with enough bandwidth to ensure that your link is never congested. For non-Intenet services, you’ll want private line services with similarly adequate bandwidth. In some cases, latency and class of service are also critically important to your needs. That’s especially true for high performance applications such as financial trading or real time services such as enterprise VoIP, content delivery or telepresence.

Some clouds are private clouds in that they are owned by a particular organization for its own needs. The idea of having your own cloud is a way to share computing, applications, and storage among multiple company locations. The need for adequate WAN bandwidth still applies. You need to ensure that the traffic displaced from the LAN to the WAN still has a large enough pipe to flow through unobstructed.

Are you involved with private or public cloud computing as a user or supplier? You may have more bandwidth options that you realize. Find out by checking prices and availability of WAN bandwidth services for your business locations.



Note: Cloud networking diagram courtesy of Guivaloz on Wikimedia Commons.

Broadband Ethernet Connections

When we think of Ethernet, it’s probably in regard to the protocol that runs on our LANs. Broadband? That’s something else entirely. Or is it?

Ethernet has moved from the LAN to the MAN to the WAN. That gives companies the opportunity to extend their networks across town, across the country and even internationally. But what about the Internet? What does Ethernet have to do with the Internet?

Ethernet and the Internet have been closely coupled from the beginning. The Internet is based on IP routing, not legacy telco circuit switching. But the Internet would have gone nowhere without telco technologies such as T1, DS3, and SONET/SDH (OC3, OC12, OC48, etc.) That’s because the telephone companies owned the digital lines and their mature technologies. The sensible and cost effective approach has been to do what is necessary to use these existing services to transport IP packets as well as other voice and data traffic.

That brings us to access. What do you have to connect with the Internet? It’s likely a T1 line, DS3 connection or a fiber optic service based on SONET. Very small businesses may be using DSL, Cable broadband, two-satellite or 3G & 4G cellular wireless. Why not use Ethernet as your last mile connection?

That’s a good question. In fact, it makes more sense now to install a broadband Ethernet connection to the Internet than ever before. The technology is proven and already deployed to most major cities and suburbs. What’s more, it will probably save you money.

The most popular and lowest cost Ethernet broadband services use Ethernet over Copper or EoC technology. This appears to be similar to T1 technology in that it is based on using twisted pair copper wires to bring the service into your building. Chances are that you have the wiring in place already for multi-line telephone service and perhaps a T1 line or two.

Ethernet over Copper offers dedicated Internet access, just like T1, where you have a committed bandwidth level that does not vary and is not shared with other users. The technologies are a bit different in that the EoC interface to your LAN is a simple Ethernet connector. If you are already using a managed T1 router, that may not be important because the interface is already handled by the service provider and you simply connect your edge router to the T1 router.

You’ll notice a difference in bandwidth scalability. T1 lines are designed around a fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. If you want more, you bond additional T1 lines in 1.5 Mbps increments. This is practical up to around 10 Mbps before it become too expensive for most applications. Ethernet over Copper bandwidth typically starts at 2 Mbps, with 3 Mbps a popular speed for about the same price as a single 1.5 Mbps T1 line. But EoC can easily deliver 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps and even 20 Mbps. If you order a port with enough capacity, you can often just call your service provider and have them increase your Ethernet bandwidth at will.

What about higher bandwidths? Above 20 Mbps, perhaps as high as 50 Mbps, you’ll need to switch to a fiber optic connection that offers almost unlimited bandwidth expansion. Once again, Ethernet over Fiber is as scalable as Ethernet over Copper. A Fast Ethernet speed of 100 Mbps is very popular because it is also a standard LAN speed. Larger organizations or more demanding applications will want 1 Gbps or Gigabit Ethernet speed. If you need it, 10 Gbps and even 40 Gbps or more is available.

Broadband Ethernet is not available for residential or home office users. For businesses with their own business addresses, you can get pricing and availability on broadband Ethernet services for whatever bandwidths you are interested in. Costs are very attractive, although Ethernet is a metro service and not readily available in rural areas. For those locations, you’ll need to stick with T1 and bonded T1 solutions.

Using T1 Between Offices

T1 lines have many uses, including making connections between offices in the same city or across the country. Let’s take a look at how you would do this and what options are available.

The basic interoffice connection is the point to point T1 line. The term point to point means just what you think it does. This is a circuit that runs between two locations only. Actually, the connection is made from one business location to the nearest telco central office, then from central office to central office, and finally from the far end central office to the other location.

Why not just run wires directly between locations and avoid the routing through the central offices? You could do that, but unless the buildings are within sight of each other and you own the land or right of way in-between, it’s going to be prohibitively expensive. The reason that T1 lines are so affordable is because all the necessary elements needed to make the connection are already in place.

T1 lines are provisioned over common twisted pair copper telephone copper wiring found in multiple pair bundles called binder groups. This copper cable is run to nearly every business location during construction, since almost all business locations order landline telephone service. T1 service is delivered on 2 pair in the binder. Who owns the binder cable? It’s the incumbent local exchange carrier, the local phone company, that installed it. They actually make the service installation, although the lines may be leased and sold by a competitive service provider.

Those copper links to the central offices are often called the “first mile” or “last mile” connections. In between, the T1 signal may travel on copper or be multiplexed on a fiber optic service for long haul transmission. It might even be sent through a MPLS network owned by the competitive provider who has your T1 line contract. By the way, that MPLS service can be set up to connect 3 or more locations into a multipoint to multipoint network so they can all communicate with each other.

From a user standpoint, you can think of your T1 line as a dedicated digital “pipe” with a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. There are no usage limits. This is your line full time. You can send as much or as little data through that pipe between locations as will fit at 1.5 Mbps. It’s inherently more secure than sending files over the Internet because you are the only user of that particular connection. You can elect to encrypt your data during transmission to make the connection even more secure.

T1 lines can carry voice, data, video or some combination of these. Most often, T1 lines are used as digital data connections for sending files between locations. They can also be used to provide branch offices with access to central servers and databases at headquarters. If 1.5 Mbps isn’t enough bandwidth, you can order bonded T1 to increase that to 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9 or more Mbps.

Another popular use for point to point T1 lines is to interconnect PBX telephone systems. Each office may have its own self-sufficient phone system. When you tie them together with a T1 or T1 PRI line, your offices can talk to each other without having to pay any toll charges to the phone company.

Do you have a need to connect two or more business locations? Check out prices and availability for point to point T1 lines and other appropriate telecom services.



Note: Photo of Empire State Building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Document Digital Signature Made Fast and Easy

Are you frustrated because you have business documents you need to send for signature? It’s a pretty old school process, isn’t it? You have to print copies, mail them, wait for your client to sign and then send the completed documents back via return mail. It takes a long time, costs a bundle in postage, and generally brings business to a crawl. What if you could accomplish in minutes what might otherwise take days or weeks? What if you could try it for free?


This is the world of digital signature. You wouldn’t think of requiring someone to put on a powdered wig and use a quill pen dipped in an inkwell. So why are you stuck in the past century with mail and FAX? Especially since so many people don’t even have a FAX machine. If they every had one, they unplugged it at the same time they unplugged their typewriter. Today it’s all about desktop, laptop and notebook PCs, iPads, iPhones, Blackberries and the like. These people don’t want to go hunting for pen and paper. They want to mouse and swipe and be done with it in minutes. Now you can enable them to sign your documents electronically, quickly and easily.

The service you want is called RightSignature. It’s a sophisticated way to send documents for signature online. Here’s how it works. You choose a document from your favorite web application, select a Google Doc or upload a PDF or Word file. Then enter the name and email of each signer that you need on the document. Write a short subject and message and click to send. You can also add text fields, check boxes, initials boxes and other form fields that you need to recipients to complete. For many documents this will take you all of about a minute.

Your recipients are automatically notified via email that you’ve sent them a document for signature. They click on a link and are taken to the online document. They read it over and then sign. How? There are several methods that all work well. Most recipients just use their mouse to write their signature. You can also enable an option for signers to type their names to create a valid electronic signature. There’s a RightSignature iPhone App available free in the App Store so that iPhone users can sign by just using their finger on the touchscreen. Business users may sign on their BlackBerry. Even retro users who want a pen and paper solution can print out the signature page, sign it, and fax it back to RightSignature in order to execute the document.

Are these signatures valid? In this electronic age ESIGN and UETA laws have established the legal validity of electronic signatures in the US, and similar legislation has been passed in many other nations. Check out these laws to satisfy yourself that electronic signatures will work for your needs.

Your document has been signed by all parties and now it’s available for you to download as a PDF. Each signer and cc is automatically sent an email with that PDF document as an attachment. Each signed document also includes a Signature Certificate with contains signer information, an audit log and a unique identification number.

How much does this all cost? Probably less than what you are spending on copying and postage now, not to mention the waiting time you’ll avoid with digital document signatures. If you have a need to send out documents for signature and are curious if this solution will work for your business, take a 5 document free trial. No credit card is needed. Get started in just seconds. You may forget what a pen even looks like.

Integrated Access Using Ethernet over Copper

T1 lines are generally set up as either broadband data pipes or digital telephone trunks. Having to buy separate T1 lines for voice and data proved to be too pricey for many smaller businesses that wanted the robustness of T1 line services but didn’t really need all the capability of a two line arrangement. The solution was Integrated T1. It’s a combination of voice and data on a single T1 line. Integrated T1 has been a problem solver for small businesses over the years, but now there’s an even more cost effective service available. It’s Integrated access using Ethernet over Copper.

Ethernet over Copper, or EoC, is coming on strong as a competitor for the same needs as T1 lines. Both services are provisioned on common twisted pair copper telco wiring that is likely already in place for most businesses. Both are highly reliable telecom services with dedicated, not shared, bandwidth. So, why would you pick one solution over another?

In many markets you’ll find that T1 and EoC now cost roughly the same. But look closer and you’ll see that for the same price T1 is giving you 1.5 Mbps and Ethernet over Copper is delivering 2 Mbps and sometimes 3 Mbps. You can trade up for more bandwidth on both T1 and EoC by bonding-in additional copper pair. But the cost of those extra T1 lines goes up a lot faster than Ethernet bandwidth increases.

Now, let’s look at how Integrated voice and data is achieved. Dynamic integrated T1 lines are the latest incarnation of the T1 Integrated service. Bandwidth is assigned by default to broadband access. Anytime a phone line is requested, the bandwidth needed for that phone call takes priority and is protected for the duration of the call. This is the dynamic nature of the service. The bandwidth you have available for broadband is a function of what’s left over after all the telephone calls in progress are taken care of. When someone hangs up, that bandwidth is immediately put back in the broadband bandwidth pool.

In practice, Integrated T1 is a good service if you need 12 or fewer outside phone lines. More than this and your broadband Internet service will be creeping along at less than 750 Kbps. But integrated Access using Ethernet over Copper offers more phone lines and higher broadband speeds. A common EoC service running at 10 Mbps has lots of bandwidth for both. You may be able to get as many as 46 phone lines on EoC, which is equivalent to two full ISDN PRI trunks. In fact, this service delivers its phone lines with a PRI handoff to your PBX telephone system. You may also be able to choose an analog handoff for smaller phone systems or SIP handoff to your newer IP PBX in-house telephone system.

How much of your 10 Mbps will 46 phone lines eat up? That depends on what CODEC you are using, but let’s say it is G.711, the international standard. Figuring on 80 Kbps per call with overhead, a figure used by many SIP bandwidth calculators (Cisco uses 87.2 Kbps), that adds up to around 4 Mbps. That leaves you over 6 Mbps for broadband access, similar to what many companies are using now.

No need to stop there, though. Ethernet over Copper is often available in the same locations at bandwidths of 15 Mbps and 20 Mbps. This is far higher than is practical or even affordable with T1 lines. Are you running a larger company network or a call center that needs much higher capacity? It’s likely time to consider Ethernet over Fiber, or EoF. At this point you are probably running a converged voice and data network and can benefit from SIP trunking based on SIP switching for enterprise VoIP telephone systems.

What voice and data bandwidth solutions are best for your operation? There is a wide range of service suitable for the smallest mom and pop grocery stores right on up to Fortune 500 corporations. Why not let an expert telecom service broker get a complete list of services and pricing to meet your particular needs? Request a voice and data bandwidth quote now to see what’s available for your business locations.

Metropolitan Area Networks

We’re all familiar with LANs. Those are the local area networks used in nearly every business to interconnect computers, centralized storage, printers, wireless access points, WiFi hotspots, scanners and, increasingly, telephones and video equipment. When we want to connect to the outside world, we might think of a long haul or WAN connection to the Internet or distant business location. But there is another important type of network in-between the LAN and the WAN. That’s the MAN or Metropolitan Area Network.

The Metropolitan Area Network is an important service in its own right. For many companies, the only long-haul connections they may need are a dedicated broadband Internet and long distance telephone services. Most all of their traffic stays local. Not local as on the LAN, but geographically local. That means within the bounds of a city, suburbs and nearby locations.

This is where the term Metropolitan Area Network got its name. It’s a network that spans a given metropolitan area and not much further. You don’t find MAN services out in the countryside. Not that there aren’t important customers beyond the city limits, mind you. It’s just that MAN networks tend to be build upon fiber optic networks and very little fiber exits out in the boonies right now.

As you might suspect, the greatest concentration of MAN services will be found in business districts of major cities. That’s simply because the greatest population density and number of businesses are also found downtown and in the business districts of adjoining suburbs. Fiber optic cable construction and equipment are expensive. Service providers need lots of traffic from lots of customers to justify the expense of building out a MAN.

It’s possible to construct your own private MAN by ordering point to point lines between each of the locations you want to connect, or by establishing a star network with corporate headquarters at the center. Many companies buy MAN services instead because the costs are lower for a given bandwidth level. That makes sense, since the network infrastructure cost can be amortized over a large user base. A properly run MAN will give you the performance and security you require at a savings over creating your own private network.

How do service providers build a MAN? A classic approach is to construct a fiber optic SONET ring around the city, linking all the important office buildings, industrial parks, data centers and carrier hotels. SONET is the Synchronous Optical NETwork standard for legacy switched circuit telecom services. It features two lit fiber strands sending traffic in opposite directions for redundancy. If one fiber fails, the other picks up the load within 50 mSec.

Newer MAN services are build upon Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet. The core network may still be running SONET or it may be an IP core network. Either way, the customer only sees an Ethernet interface. It may be an E-Line point to point connection or an E-LAN multipoint to multipoint connection. MPLS networks implemented as a MAN have the advantage of being able to handle nearly any type of traffic.

Downtown, you may also have the option of using a wireless MAN. These are based on fixed wireless transmissions between a carrier’s tower and radio equipment at each location served. These are short range services and require line of sight between buildings. If it happens to work out for you, wireless has the advantage of fast installation and low construction cost compared to bringing in fiber to locations not already lit.

Does your business need to communicate between two or more locations in town? If so, Metropolitan Area Networks are what you are looking for. Get prices and availability for now.



Note: Photo of New York City courtesy of I, Laslovarga on Wikimedia Commons.

New Data Center Networking Solutions

Data management and storage requirements for enterprise level organizations continue to increase. In addition, a majority of enterprise IT departments now replicate data between data centers. This has created a need for new and more cost effective bandwidth services, especially at 10 Gbps and above. Level 3 is addressing these needs with an enhancement of its existing data center networking solutions.

What’s different about data center connectivity compared to other business requirements? Data centers are far more concentrated than other computing resources. This is especially true for storage, a prime driver for offsite data centers in the first place. What this does is increase the need for high bandwidth connections between the concentration of storage and the concentration of users. It also influences the connectivity required.

What you need for last mile connections to an MPLS network or private lines to link business locations can usually be handled by T-Carrier, SONET/SDH or Carrier Ethernet line services. Data centers need higher bandwidth connections, but may also need special SAN protocols including Fibre Channel, Infiniband, ESCON and FICON.

SAN stands for Storage Area Networks. These are large collections of disk drives that connect directly to the application servers. SAN networks have traditionally been very localized, with the disk arrays physically near the servers. But what do you do when you need to duplicate data between data centers?

Many companies operate two or more data centers, sometimes a half-dozen or more. Some of this is due to mergers and acquisitions of formerly independent organizations with their own IT infrastructures. Much is driven by a need for disaster protection and recovery. When your business is critically dependent on its electronic data, normal backup processes aren’t adequate. You can have multiple copies of your files locked up locally and still be put out of business by a fire, tornado, flood, earthquake, hurricane or other disaster that destroys whole buildings and everything in them.

This means that you want to have copies of your critical data dispersed geographically. Establishing independent data centers in two or more cities far apart means than a disaster that takes out one center probably won’t knock out everything. There’s also an advantage to content providers in having the servers and data content located close to the customers. Latency is reduced and performance is increased due to less network congestion. A challenge is how to make sure the data is replicated exactly at all locations.

This is where long distance SAN networking comes into play. You need high levels of bandwidth but also support for SAN protocols to keep everything synchronized. FCoE or Fiber Channel over Ethernet is a popular protocol for transmitting Fibre Channel frames over 10 Gbps Ethernet connections. WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing avoids having to layer protocols to connect facilities. Each wavelength in a fiber optic link can be assigned its own protocol, regardless of what is running on other wavelengths in the same beam.

Level 3 Communications has expanded its data center networking portfolio to include SAN fiber channel protocol, dark fiber and managed fiber solutions. This is in addition to dedicated bandwidth services from 1 Gbps to more than 40 Gbps, including 10 Gbps EVPL or Ethernet Virtual Private Line service. They offer low latency route guarantees and an international service footprint, including a presence at key public exchange facilities.

Are you concerned with managing multiple high performance data centers? Would you like to have more options and/or better pricing for all your telecom connectivity needs? If so, get complementary consulting help and pricing and availability for high bandwidth networking services.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons

Will You Save With Fractional Line Services?

If you need and want professional-grade telecom line services but don’t need the full line rates, can you save by ordering fractional rates? Conventional wisdom says yes. Reality may be different.

The idea behind fractional bandwidth is that it ought to be cheaper to buy less than the full line rated bandwidth. For instance, the smallest line service you can generally get with dedicated bandwidth and a service level agreement is the T1 line. These used to be very expensive and cost over $1,000 even in metro areas. At the same time, bandwidth demands in many smaller companies weren’t all that high. Something like 500 or 750 Kbps was plenty for email and text file transfers. Seemed a shame to have to pay for 1.5 Mbps and not make full use of it.

That’s where the idea of fractional T1 lines came from. If you don’t need and can’t afford 1.5 Mbps, then why not order a T1 line but only have it deliver a fraction of the full bandwidth? There should be a cost savings, since the service provider didn’t need as large a backbone network to serve many customers who are only running fractional T1 lines.

Well, yes and no. It’s true that Internet access has a port cost of so much per Mbps. But what about point to point dedicated lines? Is there really any savings to throttling back a line that’s used for only one customer? Plus there is the basic cost of the line itself. A T1 line runs synchronously at 1.544 Mbps whether it is carrying any traffic or not. That’s the basic technology. The pipe, if you will, has a certain diameter regardless of how much is flowing through it.

At any rate, many telecom service providers have offered fractional T1 lines and fractional DS3 service to accommodate customers who can’t pony up the cost of full line speed. This may have as much to do with marketing as anything else. The cost has never been scaled as much as the fraction of maximum rate. In other words, you can order a half-speed fractional T1 line but pay three-fourths or more of the price for a full T1 line.

Now it’s becoming more expensive in some areas to get fractional line speeds as it is to simply order a full T1 line. Why? It’s because a T1 line is a standard product and the fractional service is a special order that needs additional engineering. In that case, you might as well order the full T1 line and just not use all the capacity. It’s cheaper.

Traditional switched circuit telecom services such as T1 lines, DS3 connections, OC3 fiber optic service and the like never were very scalable. They were designed as a technology family with large standard increments between the service levels. But there is a newer service that may be just what you are look for in the way of bandwidth scalability. That’s Carrier Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet, also called Metro Ethernet, was designed from the beginning to be highly scalable. There are standard network speeds, such as 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps, but there are a plethora of in-between bandwidth levels available. Popular Ethernet service levels are 2 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps and above.

What’s important with Ethernet is to have a port installed that can handle the maximum speed you expect to want. Then buy just the bandwidth you need right now and upgrade later. If you’ve got the right port in place, you can often upgrade your bandwidth quickly and easily with just a phone call to your service provider.

Are you looking to get just the bandwidth you need and not pay extra for unused capacity? Compare pricing for fractional T1, DS3 and OC3 services with Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber and see what is most cost effective for your applications. Prices will vary with location, so you need a specific quote for your business address.



Note: Image of fraction dice courtesy of Arjan on Wikimedia Commons.

What is Metro Ethernet?

We’re all familiar with Ethernet, the packet switched network standard that runs on our LANs. But what is Metro Ethernet and how does it differ from Carrier Ethernet? Is Metro Ethernet the same protocol running on local networks but just going longer distances?

From a users standpoint, Metro Ethernet really is just like local Ethernet. In fact, the connection to the Metro Ethernet Network is a standard Ethernet connector. There are no special interface modules needed to convert protocols or establish signal levels. You simply plug one network into the local Metro Ethernet connection and another network into the Metro Ethernet connection across town and they are connected together.

Actually, it has taken quite a bit of effort to make Metro Ethernet so simple. That work has been done by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), a industry standards group. The beauty of standards is that both providers and users know exactly what they are dealing with. There aren’t the ugly surprises that come from trying to engineer basically incompatible products and services.

The terms Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet tend to be used interchangeably. Carrier Ethernet is meant to describe standard switched Ethernet adapted for use over much longer spans than within a building or corporate campus. Carrier Ethernet can be deployed on IP core networks, over SONET/SDH, or over MPLS networks. The end user isn’t generally aware of the transport mechanism. From the customer’s standpoint, it’s just Ethernet ports at each location.

Metro Ethernet is the term that is used to refer to Ethernet services limited to a particular city or metropolitan area of city and suburbs. It’s a popular service for companies that have two or more separate business locations locally. Medical groups consisting of several hospitals, diagnostic centers and clinics are also find Metro Ethernet attractive because of its high bandwidths, ease of connection and lower costs compared to traditional telecom line services.

The customer service connection is made at a User-Network Interface (UNI) installed by the service provider. On one side is the Customer Equipment (CE) and on the other side is the Metro Ethernet Network (MEN). The path between UNIs is made through an Ethernet Virtual Connection (EVC). The EVC maintains the Ethernet MAC address and frame contents unaltered, so it is possible to establish Layer 2 connectivity between locations. It also ensures that traffic goes between the proper UNIs and nowhere else. Think of an EVC as similar in function to a “wired” network connection between two locations.

There are two Metro Ethernet services you’ll be interested in. One is Ethernet Line or E-Line service. This is the equivalent of point to point private line service using T1 or DS3. The other is Ethernet LAN or E-LAN service. This is a multipoint to multipoint service that can be used in place of private proprietary networks, Frame Relay, or MPLS networks to connect multiple locations in a mesh network. Both of these services are suitable for linking offices, factories, warehouses, data centers and other sites within a metropolitan area.

Could your organization benefit from Metro Ethernet? If you have need to connect two or more locations within a city or small geographical area, you may be able to get more bandwidth for less money than you can with other connectivity solutions. To find out, check Metro Ethernet Network availability and pricing for your business locations.

New Phoenix Data Center Offers Colocation Services

Data centers are expanding as the business climate improves and companies pursue productivity increases and lower costs. Many businesses that never gave a second thought to using colocation facilities are taking another look. In the Southwest USA, a good place to consider is the new PAETEC Data Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

PAETEC has just cut the ribbon on their 4,400 square foot Phoenix data center as part of an expansion program that adds to their facilities in Bethlehem and Conshohocken, PA, Andover, MA., Houston, TX and Milwaukee, WI. Why? Customer demand. The role of Information Technology is changing and the “cloud” has a lot to do with it. PAETEC is positioning itself to capitalize on this movement with services that improve business continuity, information safeguarding, network latency reduction and a reduction of management needs.

The idea behind the cloud is one of economy of scale. You can have every company buying servers and racks, putting them in environmentally controlled rooms, providing the electrical power for both equipment and the cooling needed to take away the heat generated by the equipment, and hiring a staff to tend to the data center facilities. Alternatively, you can have a service provider create a much bigger facility and let companies buy their computing and storage services for a fee.

This is what cloud service providers do. They figure out the IT services that are common to many businesses and then provide those as a service themselves. But isn’t that six of one and a half dozen of another? How is the cloud a net saver of anything?

This is where economy of scale comes into play. The cost of operating a cloud services company doesn’t go up linearly with size. You need a certain amount of real estate, electrical power, HVAC, bandwidth and staffing to create a data center of any size. Having twice as many servers, disk drives and network appliances doesn’t necessarily mean you need to double your staff. Yes, you’ll need more floor space, air conditioning, electrical power and backup generation, but it probably won’t cost twice as much. The same is true for bandwidth. It gets cheaper by the Mbps and Gbps when you order big lines compared to little ones. Your staff can also be more specialized, since they are only dealing with a certain range of facilities and a defined set of services.

The contrast is even more dramatic when you compare the startup cost for small companies to create their own IT services compared to simply purchasing what is needed from a company that already has the facilities and expertise. Web site hosting, for instance, has gotten so cheap when purchased from a large hosting service that small businesses are hard pressed to justify buying and running their own servers. Many of them are now finding that offloading their telephone systems to a Hosted PBX service saves investment and staffing.

The colocation center fits somewhere in-between running your own facilities and outsourcing to the cloud. The colo offers the economy of scale for environmentally controlled and secure server space and WAN bandwidth. Yet, you have the option of providing your own equipment that you maintain yourself. Some colocation providers are now offering cloud-like services that include renting servers and storage they already have available and handling maintenance and repair through their 24/7 technical staff.

Should you be going to the cloud or relocating to a colocation facility instead of trying to do it all yourself? It may be time for a quick study to compare the capital and expense costs that you pay now with the monthly fees to get the same services outside. Get complementary support for pricing and availability of cloud and colocation services so you can do a good job.



Note: Photo of Phoenix skyline courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Managed IP Services Cloud

Cloud services are seeing a lot of interest lately, as companies look to reduce their capital expenditures for IT and gain capabilities they couldn’t otherwise afford. But did you know there are a wide range of IP services available in the cloud?

Cloud services can be in-house or private, or they can be purchased from a cloud services provider. Providers have a wide range of specialties. Some offer only remote storage. Others specialize in high performance computing. Still others offer alternatives to in-house telephone switching systems and even network security. What they all have in common is that their services run over IP networks. Hence, IP services or managed IP services.

The idea of managed services involves letting the carrier or services provider take over the job of making sure that everything is running correctly. Traditionally, that’s the job of the on-site IT staff who monitor what’s going on at all times and swing into action to make repairs whenever a fault occurs. Not every company can afford a 24/7 staff or even a full-time IT employee. Others may have a small staff that has gradually become overwhelmed as more and more applications have been turned up on the network. Managed services offer a way to offload some of this responsibility.

One basic managed service is the network WAN connection to the Internet. This could also be a private line between facilities or connections to an MPLS network to link multiple geographically diverse business locations. You often have the option of simply ordering a line service and then monitoring it yourself to ensure proper operation. The alternative is to have the carrier provide a router that allows them to monitor the line right up to the connection with your LAN. This is called a managed router or managed line service. Often you can get this management feature at no extra cost by shopping around.

The beauty of a managed router is that the carrier’s network operations staff is far larger than yours, available 24/7/365, and has the expertise in their own systems to rapidly troubleshoot and correct problems. It’s not uncommon to have a line failure in the middle of the night and have it back up and running before business hours commence. You may not even be aware than a fault occurred.

A step up from the managed line service is colocation of your servers and the bandwidth that feeds them to a carrier hotel or colocation center. You can elect to manage everything yourself or let the colo center staff handle server maintenance and repair, including any network connections.

Recently, Managed IP Telephony has become popular as an alternative to in-house PBX systems. Instead of a dedicated piece of switching equipment that you have to program and maintain, the telephony switch resides at the service provider. You connect by means of a network connection called a SIP Trunk. This assumes that you have converted to IP telephony or SIP phones and have converged your LAN for both voice and data.

SIP Trunking providers often go the extra step of providing both broadband Internet and telephone service on the same SIP trunk. This is a perfect interface to a converged local network that already transports both voice and data packets. Because the services and trunk line are fully managed, you are ensured that voice quality won’t suffer due to conflicts with data packets on the same line.

Would you like to ease the burden on your IT staff or avoid the capital expense of in-house facilities that may be more affordable in the cloud? If so, investigate Managed IP Services to see what’s available and compare costs.

HFC Broadband For Business

Many small businesses don’t fall into the category of “residential” users but don’t need or can’t afford the cost of traditional business telecom services, such as T1 lines or Ethernet over Copper. One possible solution is HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax broadband services.

Hybrid what? You may have heard of this as Cable broadband for business. A lot of home based businesses successfully use Cable broadband to manage their websites, access information on the Web and send and receive email. But try to order residential service for a business location and you’ll get turned down flat. That’s because residential broadband is priced for single homes and apartments with few people accessing the service and probably no-one online most of the day. Knowing that, some business owners incorrectly assume that you can’t get Cable run into a business. But you can.

So, what’s available and why the funny name? HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax refers to the technology used to deploy high speed Internet access, telephone service, and Cable television. You know that Cable TV and Cable broadband are called that because of the coaxial cable that provides the connection to the network. When Cable systems were first deployed, they were constructed from various size coaxial cables. What’s happened in recent years is that the long connection from the Cable office or the “head end” where the signals are picked up and run for miles to various neighborhoods has been replaced by fiber optic cable. The last few hundred feet or so are still copper coaxial cable, also called coax. The result is a system that is a hybrid of fiber optic cable and coax cable known as Hybrid Fiber Coax or HFC.

Why go with a hybrid arrangement rather than just make it fiber optics all the way? It’s mostly a matter of cost. While fiber has a far larger capacity, there is a lot of coax already in the ground. The interface connection at the premises, either a Cable modem or set top box, is much less expensive than the termination equipment needed for fiber. Don’t count that coax down and out yet, either. With digital signals, there is more than enough bandwidth for triple-play services to small and medium businesses as well as consumers.

With an already built-out infrastructure and a high number of users to cover costs, you might expect that HFC services are lower in cost than most telecom services available for the SMB. You’re right, they are. But you need to know the performance tradeoffs to make a smart buying decision.

One excellent use for HFC is broadband Internet access when employee use is primarily Web browsing and email. That includes information research, making purchases, doing simple banking, messaging customers, providing a WiFi hotspot and so on. If most of what you do is similar to the way you use a computer at home, HFC should work just fine. You select a bandwidth tier that offers enough speed to work efficiently and still saves you money over other options. Typical bandwidth for smaller businesses goes up to 15 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload, although some Cable companies are offering speeds as high as 50 or even 100 Mbps.

You’ll likely be able to get a high speed Internet solution that meets your needs with a lot more bandwidth than a T1 line offers and for a lot less money. But beware. T1 lines are dedicated bandwidth that stays a rock solid 1.5 Mbps all the time. Cable bandwidth is shared among all the users on the Cable and can vary all over the place. That’s one way they hold the cost down. If you are running high traffic ecommerce servers or using business processes that expect constant bandwidth, you might find the speed variations not worth the cost savings. Otherwise, you might be quite happy with both the performance and reliability of HFC broadband.

Another service that Cable companies have gotten into is business telephone, essentially VoIP. One big difference between this service and simply running a third party VoIP service over your broadband connection is that the Cable version never transits the Internet. The voice packets travel over the cable network and are then terminated to the public telephone network by the Cable company or a telephone service provider. By doing it this way, the HFC operator has more control of things like latency, packet loss and network congestion to ensure decent voice quality.

Finally, HFC offers Cable TV channels. After all, that’s why the network was built in the first place. Businesses with waiting rooms, like automotive service centers and doctor’s offices, can put business Cable TV service to good use.

Have you been frustrated by your current choices in network services? Why not compare prices, availability and service features of HFC, T1 and Ethernet so you can make the best buying decision? You may be surprised by the range of options available.



Note: Diagram of coaxial cable construction courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Low Latency Fiber Network For Orange County

Businesses are demanding more bandwidth at lower latencies to support demanding applications such as financial trading, business process automation, cloud computing & storage and medical image transmission. This is creating an opportunity for new fiber buildout, like the one underway in the Los Angeles Metro area.

AboveNet, a major provider of fiber optic networking services in the US and Europe, is launching what they call a large “feeder ring” to connect office buildings, data centers, and carrier hotels to an existing fiber optic backbone that now serves the business districts of Irvine and Costa Mesa in Orange County, California.

Fiber optic connectivity has become the new battleground for competitive service providers as well as incumbent telcos. A major push has been the transition from legacy SONET/SDH to Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE and 40 GigE, MPLS networks, dark fiber and wavelength services. Networks are becoming more IP oriented, at the expense of traditional switched circuit TDM technologies. This plays well with the dominance of Ethernet networks in business and the move to converged voice, data and video networks.

Cloud services have opened up a further need for increased bandwidth. When companies had on-site data centers for their servers and storage, most traffic was contained within the building or campus LAN. Special links served overnight tape backup at offsite storage centers. Once computing and disk resources move to a colocation facility or a cloud services provider, there is a corresponding increase in WAN bandwidth requirements. With everything “out there,” a much higher portion of traffic leaves the company LAN.

AboveNet and other carriers are in a major push right now to expand their fiber optic network footprints in the US and abroad. Especially important are low latency networks to Europe and Asia to interconnect financial markets and major international businesses. Private networks require an enormous capital investment and the Internet is unsuitable for high performance, secure connections. That’s creating an opportunity for companies that specialize in metro and long haul fiber optic networks to jump in and fill the need.

Some services that are seeing more demand are IP transit to connect with the Internet backbone for companies that don’t have networks large enough to do their own peering, Ethernet Private Line and LAN services, global MPLS networking, and wavelength services that offer both very high bandwidth capacity along with flexibility of protocols.

Competitive pressures have also reduced the cost per Mbps for nearly all leased line services. This is true for even the ubiquitous T1 lines, but even more so for Ethernet connections of all types. Ethernet availability has expanded to such an extent that it is often far less expensive than T-Carrier or SONET in most metro areas. Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE WAN connections are now routinely ordered by larger business and organizations.

Is your company bandwidth starved or simply looking for better prices on existing network services? See if you can do better by checking prices and availability for fiber optic bandwidth.



Note: Orange County, CA photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

WDM Wavelength Services Offer Expandability

If your need is for high bandwidth, security and flexibility, you should take a look at wavelength services. This is more than the typical fiber optic bandwidth service. It’s almost like owning the network facilities yourself.

The thing about fiber optic transmission is that it offers almost limitless bandwidth. That’s a foreign concept to anyone who’s been tied to copper wireline services. It’s also an odd notion for those who pick a fiber optic service level and sign a contract for it. If you order OC3 SONET service, what you get is a line that runs at 155.52 Mbps with a payload of 148.608 Mbps. You don’t have to fill the pipe continuously, but the capacity is there all the time. If you need more bandwidth, you only recourse is to add an additional service or upgrade to something like OC12 or Gigabit Ethernet.

What you are using with fiber optic services is not the entire bandwidth of the fiber. In fact, you may be totally unaware that your signals are multiplexed with lots of others all traveling on the same fiber strand. If there is only one laser beam with a single color or wavelength shining through that fiber, it likely has a capacity of at least 10 Gbps. Chances are, though, that there are many different color beams all riding simultaneously down the fiber. They don’t interfere because they are different colors of light, called Lambdas, all in the infrared region of the spectrum. Each Lambda or wavelength has a carrying capacity as high as 10 Gbps. You can think of these as equivalent to individual high capacity lines. If the fiber optic strand were made of copper, each wavelength would be a separate pair of wires.

What if you could lease a wavelength instead of a copper wireline or a fixed bandwidth service on a fiber optic cable? The wavelength doesn’t care what modulation or data pattern you use. It’s just a pure light beam of one wavelength. There’s no fancy footwork required to convert between one protocol and another just to be compatible with what’s running on the line. That opens some interesting possibilities. You could use your leased wavelength to carry Gigabit Ethernet or Fast Ethernet, SONET OC3, OC12 or OC48, Fibre Channel, or ESCON.

Need to transport a variety of high bandwidth protocols? OK. Just lease multiple wavelengths and give each protocol its own Lambda. The won’t interfere. In fact, they won’t even known the other wavelengths exist.

This type of network transport is no longer a pipe dream. All you need to do is lease WDM Wavelength Services from a fiber optic network carrier such as AboveNet. What AboveNet has done is install a base of dark fiber in many metropolitan areas. It’s called dark because it hasn’t already be put into service with a particular fiber optic service in mind. It’s like a blank canvas ready to become any work of art. AboveNet “lights” the fiber as needed using WDM equipment to create their wavelength services.

WDM stands for Wavelength Division Multiplexing. It’s the technology that creates multiple wavelengths on a single fiber strand. This is a standardized process that ensures there is enough separation between the wavelengths that they won’t interfere and that different brands of networking equipment will work together. There are two flavors of WDM: CWDM or Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing and DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. The difference is that DWDM squeezes more wavelengths, up to 160, onto a given fiber but at a higher cost than CWDM.

Is this affordable? AboveNet says that their CWDM service becomes competitive at the OC-3 service bit-rate. If you can use more bandwidth than that, you’ll save money with CWDM. Typical applications include connecting corporate headquarters with branch offices and data centers, or connecting multiple hospitals and medical centers for exchange of medical images and other health service records.

Has your business or organization become limited by the network services available? Perhaps it’s time to move up to wavelength services. Find out by getting prices and availability of fiber optic wavelength services for your locations. Complementary consulting by bandwidth experts is also available for serious applications.



Note: Image of light spectrum from prisms courtesy of Marcellus Wallace on Wikimedia Commons.

50 Mbps Ethernet Takes on DS3

DS3 connections have been the traditional upgrade path for companies that have outgrown their T1 lines. But now there’s a newer technology service that gives you more bandwidth at less cost than DS3 and offers an easy upgrade path. That service is 50 Mbps Ethernet.

Let’s see why DS3 has become such a popular bandwidth service and why it will likely be replaced by Carrier Ethernet. A DS3, sometimes called a T3 line, isn’t simply 3x the bandwidth you get with T1. It is 28x the bandwidth. So if you have a 1.5 Mbps T1 line and you upgrade to DS3 service, your new bandwidth is about 45 Mbps. Those numbers are actually rounded so the multiplication isn’t exact. There are also overhead bits that must be assigned to manage a DS3 circuit.

As you might suspect, T1 and DS3 are in the same technology family. The tipoff is that DS3 is also called a T3 line. The “T” designation comes from “T-Carrier,” a set of specifications developed by the phone companies right after WWII to convert analog telephone trunks to digital. The T-Carrier specs are based on a 64 Kbps channel called a DS0 for Digital Signal level 0. A DS1 is comprised of 24 DS0 channels or 1.536 Mbps plus 8 Kbps for synchronization and maintenance for a total of 1.544 Mbps. That’s the T1 line speed.

A T3 line is also composed of DS0 channels at the most basic level. What’s so important about DS0 is that it is exactly the right size to carry one digitized telephone call. These channels can also be used to carry data packets instead of phone conversations. Package 672 DS0 channels together plus synchronization and maintenance bits and you have a DS3 running at 44.736 Mbps. That’s the T3 line speed.

T1 lines were designed to be delivered on 2 pair of ordinary twisted pair copper telephone wiring in a multi-pair binder cable. T3 lines were designed to be delivered on coaxial copper line or microwave transmission. Today, fiber optic cable is generally used to transport DS3 and higher bandwidth services. Bonded copper pair may get the job done over short distances, but is only found in densely populated cities.

The fact is that an upgrade from T1 to DS3 is a major move that requires equipment replacement, perhaps significant construction costs, and a considerable monthly lease price increase. Once you run out of bandwidth on a DS3, you need to move up to the next level of compatible services, OC3, at 155.52 Mbps.

What’s the competition for T1, DS3, OC3 and above? It’s a completely different family of network services called Carrier Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet. Carrier Ethernet has more in common with LAN Ethernet than it does with T-Carrier technology. T-Carrier was designed to transport telephone calls. Ethernet was designed to transport data packets. Yes, Ethernet can also be used to carry phone calls and does so exquisitely on converged voice and data networks. An Ethernet connection used to transport telephone traffic may also be called a SIP Trunk.

Now, let’s look at the replacement services for the old T-Carrier system. EoC or Ethernet over Copper is a direct replacement for T1 lines. There are two major benefits to going with EoC. First, the bandwidth is higher. A 2 or 3 Mbps Ethernet over Copper service replaces a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. The cost for both services is roughly the same. When you want to, you can upgrade to 10 or 20 Mbps over copper for more bandwidth.

The replacement for DS3 or T3 lines is 50 Mbps Ethernet. You get a modest increase in bandwidth and you’ll likely see a significant reduction in your monthly line services bill. It is not uncommon to pay half or less for 50 Mbps Ethernet compared with DS3.

You’ll need a fiber optic connection for either service. There is no standard fiber service that runs at the DS3 speed, so it is delivered on a SONET OC3 service using just a third of the available bandwidth. Ethernet is far more scalable. 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps are standard network speeds, but you can get a wide range of increments between these levels. A good strategy is to order the Ethernet bandwidth you need now with an eye to easily upgrading to an incrementally higher speed as needed. The trick is to have an Ethernet port installed that can handle the maximum bandwidth you anticipate needing. If you have a 100 Mbps port, you can get 50 Mbps Ethernet out of that port now and then upgrade in steps to the maximum capacity of 100 Mbps later. Often, this can be done quickly and easily with a simple phone call to your service provider.

Are you anticipating a major WAN bandwidth upgrade, or are you already using DS3 service and either want more bandwidth or lower pricing? If so, get 50 Mbps Ethernet pricing and availability before you make any decisions. It’s a service that will serve you well in the coming years and offer a compelling cost savings as well.