Fast Ethernet over Copper

Fast Ethernet has been a networking standard for many years. You may know it as 100 Mbps Ethernet speed. Nearly every computer, router and switch now has a Network Interface Card (NIC) rated at 10/100 Mbps or 10/100/1000 Mbps. Many smaller networks find 100 Mbps more than adequate. Larger networks use 1000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). The largest corporate and other high performance networks have at least part of their infrastructure running at 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE). Its when you leave the LAN and connect to metro or long distance networks that things slow to a crawl.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same network speed regardless of distance? That way it wouldn’t matter where you were transferring files to or from. The time to transfer would be independent of distance. This is especially important to companies with multiple business locations. The illusion of everyone being on the same network is shattered when it takes ten or a hundred times as long to get information from the remote site as it does within your own building.

What has stood in the way of upgrading network connections to a common speed is cost and availability. Fast Ethernet for MAN and WAN connections have been cost prohibitive for smaller companies. If your location isn’t on a fiber path, getting bandwidth above 10 Mbps or so has been out of the question. Well, not any more.

PAETEC, a major network services provider, is blazing new ground by deploying Fast Ethernet connections over copper as well as fiber. If your buildings are within the service footprint of this new technology you can avoid the budget breaking costs of fiber construction completely. PAETEC uses multiple bonded copper pairs within the same telco conduit to provide bandwidths as high as 200 Mbps.

Chances are that the multi-pair copper conduit is already installed in your building for multi-line telephone and lower speed services like T1. The beauty of T1 lines are that they use standard twisted pair copper telco wire. The major limitation is that the bandwidth is fixed at 1.5 Mbps. You can bond T1s together to get higher bandwidths, up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Technically this works just fine, but it gets pricey because the cost is the price of a T1 line times the number of lines needed.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is much more cost effective. First, the advanced modulation techniques support higher bandwidths per pair of wire used. Second, the cost does not multiply as fast at bonding T1 lines. Third, you can now get Fast Ethernet bandwidth using EoC.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper technology is distance. The higher bandwidths require you to be near the central office that connects to your copper bundle. That’s perfect for businesses with metropolitan locations, especially in major business districts. If you are located out in the boonies, you’ll have fewer options.

Do you need cost effective Fast Ethernet connections to support your business processes? Check Fast Ethernet over Copper availability and pricing now. Fiber and wireless may also be available at lower prices than you imagine. Sorry, no residential service available.

100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper Rivals Fiber

Ethernet over Copper is rapidly taking over from T1 lines as the bandwidth service of choice for low to medium speed applications. Multiple copper pair can support bandwidths of 20 Mbps up to 50 Mbps in some locations. Beyond that, it’s assumed that fiber optic service has to be brought in. Not any more. Now there’s 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper available from Paetec.

Twisted pair copper has a legacy of connecting central offices to telephone sets for over a century. The enormous installed base of copper connections makes this an extremely valuable resource even in the era of digital communications and fiber optic cabling. The problem is that unshielded small gauge copper wire loops were engineered to carry low frequency audio signals up to several miles. It’s a tribute to clever engineering that these same pairs can be repurposed to carry high frequency digital signals.

Paetec is applying Ethernet over bonded Copper Products from Overture Networks as the technology behind this amazing bandwidth fete. Overture acquired the technology when it purchased Hatteras Networks earlier this year. Their HN product series can deliver up to 15 Mbps per copper pair depending on distance. By bonding up to 32 pairs, bandwidths approaching 500 Mbps can be achieved. Typically, the equipment is used to support user bandwidths from 10 to 100 Mbps.

Speeds in the hundreds of Mbps, even up to 1 Gbps, over copper have been announced in experimental setups. Now, you can order 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper as a standard bandwidth service. This is particularly significant in that 100 Mbps “Fast” Ethernet is a standard LAN speed. By extending this into the MAN and WAN, the bandwidth speed bump experienced when exiting the office is eliminated. Two locations can share files as if they were side by side in the same building.

Ethernet over Copper technology has been gaining in popularity as the need for higher speed network connections increases. Business automation, medical file transfers, video transport and the move to cloud based services is rendering low bandwidth connections obsolete. T1 line used to be considered a broadband service at 1.5 Mbps. Now many companies need at least 10 Mbps to get their jobs done. So, too, wireless backhaul was fine using T1 lines as long as the traffic was voice and low speed data. Since 3G and 4G have become so popular, slow backhaul is no longer acceptable.

Why not just switch to fiber optic service with it’s unlimited bandwidth? Someday that will be the case. Right now, ready fiber access is available in core business districts and colocation centers. Many metropolitan buildings remain unlit for fiber. Small and medium size towns are relatively fiber-poor. Yes, there is a lot of fiber construction underway. But why pay a king’s ransom and wait six months to a year when there are multi-pair copper cables already run into your building? By employing Ethernet over Copper technology to take full advantage of that existing wiring, you can have higher bandwidths now without enormous construction costs.

Can high speed copper-based bandwidth be the solution that works best for your company? Find out by getting availability and pricing for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet over Copper service for your business locations.

100 Mbps Colocation Center Bandwidth

Companies often look to colocation as a way to avoid the capital and operating expense of running their own data centers. There is also another important incentive to go the colocation route. It’s high bandwidth availability at lower costs.

A colocation center, or colo, is a facility that serves the data center needs of many businesses. Each server farm requires the servers themselves, networking switches, routers and appliances, equipment racks, rack wiring, electrical power, cooling air, and connectivity. Plus you’ll need physical security, fire suppression and a staff to monitor operations and take corrective action 24/7. You can provide all of this in-house or get it at a colocation center.

What makes a colo center cost effective is economy of scale. Instead of each customer having to maintain their own backup generators and fire suppression systems that are rarely used, the colocation facility has much larger units that serve all customers. The costs don’t scale linearly. The incremental cost of adding another user to the facility is pretty low and the facility cost spread over all users is less than what you can do on your own.

The somewhat hidden secret of colocation centers is that they have bandwidth available that you may not be able to afford on your own. A common connection is 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. You know that it’s no great shakes to connect a 100 Mbps Ethernet node to your own LAN. Getting a 100 Mbps connection beyond your property line may be anywhere from expensive to impossible. At 100 Mbps, you are beyond the capability of twisted pair services such as EoC or T1/E1 lines. You’ll need fiber optic cabling brought into your building and lit for SONET/SDH or Metro Ethernet service.

Why is there such a difference in price between 100 Mbps bandwidth provided in a colocation center and the same level of service delivered to your facility? One big reason is construction costs. Downtown in a major metropolitan area there may be many fiber facilities in your office building or nearby. If you order a significant amount of bandwidth you might not even be charged construction costs. But move a bit off the beaten fiber path and those charges go up dramatically. If you are located in a smaller town, industrial park or rural area you can be looking at tens of thousands of dollars or more to trench fiber optic cable from the nearest carrier point of presence.

The other reason for bargain prices at colocation facilities is competition. Once again, depending on population density and popularity of high bandwidth network services, you might find yourself with only one carrier serving your location. Your negotiating ability is pretty limited without competition. Colocation centers, however, are carrier magnets. Service providers know that there are dozens or hundreds of customers in a single building who all need their services. It’s no wonder they all set up points of presence within the colo. Often, there is a “meet me room” where carriers and customers are connected.

The combination of having several or more eager carriers vying for your business combined with the trivial construction costs of running a drop to your equipment racks is what makes it easy and relatively inexpensive to get all the bandwidth you want in a colocation center. Can you say the same for where you are now? There’s an easy way to find out. Simply request bandwidth availability and pricing for both your location and a nearby colocation facility.



Note: Photo of server rack wiring courtesy of Guillaume Paumier on Wikipedia Commons

100 Mbps Corporate Ethernet

A new standard connection speed for medium to larger organizations is getting to be 100 Mbps. It may sound like an expensive and unnecessarily large network capacity, but it is actually neither. Fast Ethernet is the new DS3.

For those who remember only a few years ago when a T1 line offering 1.5 Mbps was considered a high bandwidth connection, the notion that 100 Mbps is now the benchmark may be a bit unnerving. A lot has changed over the last decade. Application requirements have increased dramatically. We might have settled for fuzzy slow motion video conferencing when even that was a novelty. Now it’s full motion HD two-way video and telepresence. E-commerce has gone from an add-on service for a bricks and mortar facility to the dominant way that many companies do business. Dynamic interactive web pages with video have replaced low resolution static HTML brochure pages.

There are also many businesses that can’t operate electronically without high bandwidth connections. These include video production, content delivery and medical imaging. It’s 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps... or forget it.

There’s no reason to forget it anymore. High bandwidth services are readily available and lower in cost than you may imagine. That’s the other big change between the start of this decade and the end. Line prices have plummeted as new competitive carriers with the latest network technology have come on the scene. While T-Carrier and SONET may be the entrenched legacy carrier services, Ethernet has become the bandwidth solution of choice. On a Mbps and Gbps basis, Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet solutions are often a fraction of the price demanded for T-Carrier or SONET and a small fraction of standard pricing ten years ago.

Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps makes a lot of sense as a bandwidth requirement for dedicated Internet access or point to point and multipoint connectivity. The standard Ethernet LAN speeds are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. In some cases, that’s been increased to 10 Gbps. Many, Many networks have most of their nodes running at 100 Mbps simply because so much equipment has network interface cards standardized at 10/100 Mbps. The big speed bump has been at the edge of the LAN where it connects to the outside world. Fast Ethernet may be more than adequate for internal file transfers. But going from 100 Mbps inside to a 1.5 Mbps T1 line outside can slow traffic to a crawl.

Medium and larger companies have reduced the speed bump by upgrading from T1 to DS3 connections. DS3 offers 45 Mbps, a bandwidth increase of 28x when line overhead is factored in. The new replacement for DS3 is Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps. That’s more than double the bandwidth, a protocol that is directly compatible with corporate LANs, and a cost savings to boot. What’s not to like?

Is your company missing out because you thought that 100 Mbps was beyond your reach? Take a few minutes right now to get 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet prices and availability. You may well be able to get more bandwidth for less than you spend now.



Note: Photo of network switches courtesy of Wikipedia Commons