The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part V

Wireless is the bandwidth service that gets most of the press these days, but there are big developments afoot in the wired world as well. We’ll wrap up our look into the next decade of bandwidth with what’s going on with copper and fiber optic services.

It’s no surprise that fiber optic networks are expanding. Some of this expansion is prompted by American Reinvestment and Recovery Act that appropriated $7.2 billion to expand broadband access across the country. Rural areas that have been largely ignored by commercial interests are especially targeted. With funds available for middle-mile fiber runs, competitive carriers are taking advantage of the opportunity to expand their networks.

While fiber is being trenched through the countryside to provide broadband delivery to Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) that serve sparsely populated areas, even more fiber is being routed through metropolitan areas to hookup businesses of all sizes. Government incentives aren’t needed here. Businesses hungry for increased bandwidth either foot the bill for hookups to metropolitan fiber networks or commit to service levels that justify carriers to “light” their buildings for fiber service.

Why the interest in fiber optic connections? It’s not just mobile bandwidth that’s straining at the limits. T1 lines may have been all the bandwidth a small or even medium size business needed to handle email, general web browsing and communication with its website servers hosted elsewhere. Now, 1.5 Mbps seems a bit quaint and inadequate for all the smallest operations. What drives business now is cloud connections, Software as a Service, video conferencing, hosted VoIP and other bandwidth demanding applications.

The transition from 3G to 4G wireless also means that cellular carriers themselves are strained for fast enough backhaul connections. T1 lines works great to connect towers that handled voice calls. When users expect 10 or 15 Mbps of broadband service, fiber optics look like the ideal solution. The cost of construction, once a show stopper, becomes another part of the upgrade investment that’s paid once and offers almost unlimited upgrades for future needs.

Cloud computing is a major attraction for many businesses who find that pay-as-you-go is much easier to justify than requisitions for million dollar data center improvements. No need for racks and racks of servers, the environmentally controlled building to house them, the backup power generators, or the round-the-clock technical staff to keep everything running smoothly. Outsourcing that to a cloud service provider gets rid of those headaches, but adds a new one. How to you connect to the cloud? Low bandwidth, high latency connections will bring your operations to a grinding halt. What you need now is high bandwidth along with low latency, jitter and packet loss as a backbone to your virtual servers on the other side of the country. That means fiber optic lines and probably two of them for redundancy.

Fiber technology hasn’t been static during this expansion. Until recently you had a choice of SONET services from OC3 to OC12 and perhaps OC48. That was it. Now, Ethernet over Fiber is coming on strong as a direct competitor. Carrier Ethernet more closely matches the LAN networks that feed it. It is more scalable to meet changing business needs. Best of all, Ethernet services tend to cost less, often considerably less, than equivalent SONET fiber optic services.

But, wait! The era of copper is far from over. Just when carriers were thinking about decommissioning their twisted pair copper to let it corrode in the ground or be sold for scrap, Bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper gain favor as business bandwidth options. While a single T1 line may be too constrained for many uses, multiple T1 lines can be bonded into a single larger bandwidth service up to 10 or 12 Mbps. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology uses the same twisted pair bundles as bonded T1, but a more advanced modulation scheme. EoC bandwidth is distance sensitive, but can easily deliver 10 or 20 Mbps to most businesses and 30, 50 or even 100 Mbps for short runs. Continuing development incorporating wireless techniques such as MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) for crosstalk cancelation is pushing the limits of copper into the hundreds of Mbps and even to a fiber-like Gigabit per second bandwidth.

The next decade of bandwidth is likely to be dominated by massive fiber optic build-outs for fixed locations, such as office and industrial parks, along with copper solutions to bridge the gaps where fiber doesn’t yet connect. Wireless is clearly headed for a common 4G LTE nationwide infrastructure. Compatibility will be built into portable and mobile devices, perhaps as prolifically as WiFi is now. There may be some surprises in store, such long range and interconnected WiFi hotspots or whitespace transmitters as wireless competitors, high bandwidth satellites covering rural areas better than spotty fiber and cable construction, and the development of much higher microwave frequencies (60 GHz and above) and even infrared mesh networks as new service options.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this speculative look into what’s likely to happen in the next 10 years or so, as our appetite for higher bandwidth Internet and private network connections demand satisfaction. There are many good options available right now to support your current business needs. You may not even be aware of how much development has been going on in your area to increase service levels and reduce costs. This would be an excellent time to get competitive options and quotes for business bandwidth services.

See what's available now in the way of T-carrier and Ethernet copper, SONET and Ethernet fiber, fixed wireless and Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). Get instant bandwidth pricing up to 1 Gbps and fast quotes on other services.



This has been a 5 part series on bandwidth. If you’ve missed any part of it, you can access Part I, Part II, Part III, or Part IV to catch up at any time.

Stocks Going Ex Dividend the Second Week of January 2012

Here is our latest update on the stock trading technique called 'Buying Dividends'. This is the process of buying stocks before the ex dividend date and selling the stock shortly after the ex date at about the same price, yet still being entitled to the dividend. This technique generally works only in bull markets. In flat or choppy markets, you have to be extremely careful, and may need to avoid the technique during those times.

In order to be entitled to the dividend, you have to buy the stock before the ex-dividend date, and you can't sell the stock until after the ex date. The actual dividend may not be paid for another few weeks. WallStreetNewsNetwork.com has compiled a downloadable and sortable list of the stocks going ex dividend during the next week or two. The list contains many dividend paying companies, all with market caps over $500 million, and yields over 2%. Here are a few examples showing the stock symbol, the market capitalization, the ex-dividend date and the yield.

Abbott Laboratories (ABT) market cap: $86.7B ex div date: 1/11/2012 yield: 3.5%

Empresa Nacional de Electricidad (EOC) market cap: $12.0B ex div date: 1/11/2012 yield: 7.5%

Harsco Corporation (HSC) market cap: $1.7B ex div date: 1/11/2012 yield: 4.0%

Methode Electronics Inc. (MEI) market cap: $311.3M ex div date: 1/11/2012 yield: 3.3%

Shaw Communications Inc. (SJR) market cap: $8.2B ex div date: 1/11/2012 yield: 4.7%

Consolidated Communications Holdings Inc (CNSL) market cap: $570.8M ex div date: 1/11/2012 yield: 8.0%

Saul Centers, Inc. (BFS) market cap: $701.0M ex div date: 1/12/2012 yield: 4.0%

Camden National Corporation (CAC) market cap: $253.8M ex div date: 1/12/2012 yield: 3.1%

Corus Entertainment Inc. (CJREF) market cap: $1.6B ex div date: 1/12/2012 yield: 4.3%

The additional ex-dividend stocks can be found at wsnn.com. (If you have been to the website before, and the latest link doesn't show up, you may have to empty your cache.) If you like dividend stocks, you should check out the high yield utility stocks and the Monthly Dividend Stocks at WallStreetNewsNetwork.com or WSNN.com.

Dividend definitions:

Declaration date: the day that the company declares that there is going to be an upcoming dividend.

Ex-dividend date: the day on which if you buy the stock, you would not be entitled to that particular dividend; or the first day on which a shareholder can sell the shares and still be entitled to the dividend.

Monthly Dividend Stock List
Record date: the day when you must be on the company's books as a shareholder to receive the dividend. The ex-dividend date is normally set for stocks two business days before the record date.

Payment date: the day on which the dividend payment is actually made, which can be as long at two months after the ex date.

Don't forget to reconfirm the ex-dividend date with the company before implementing this technique.

Disclosure: Author did not own any of the above at the time the article was written.

By Stockerblog.com

DS1 Bandwidth vs Ethernet

DS1 is a popular WAN bandwidth service for business, although you may know it by it’s more popular name, T1. Let’s have a look at what you get with DS1 and what you can do with it. We’ll also compare DS1 with another popular bandwidth service, Ethernet over Copper.

Actually, DS1 and T1 aren’t exactly the same thing, although most of the time the terms are used interchangeably. They are defined in the same family of technical specifications developed by Bell Labs. This is the T-carrier digital line service introduced as a replacement for analog carrier telephony. While designed for the telephone industry, DS1 and T1 have since greatly expanded their application into data connections for point to point private lines and dedicated Internet access.

Just what does DS1 mean? The term DS1 or DS-1 stands for Digital Signal 1. It is a time division multiplexed set of channels that are also referred to as timeslots. Each channel is 8 contiguous bits. The collection of 24 channels lined up end to end amounts to 192 bits. These are send out as a serial bitstream from transmitter to receiver. How do you tell the channels apart? One additional bit is added to the front of the pack to act as a synchronizing or framing bit. The sync bit says “start a new frame here.” The first 8 bits are channel 1, the second 8 are channel 2, and so on.

The DS1 frames repeat 8,000 times per second. This frequency isn’t arbitrary. It was selected to be just fast enough to adequately sample an audio signal that ranges from 300 to 3,300 Hz. You’ll recognize that as the voice range allocated to telephone calls. To avoid distortion, you need to sample at least twice the highest frequency with a little extra margin for filtering. The combination of 8 bits or 256 different levels times an 8 KHz sampling rate gives each channel a bandwidth of 64 Kbps. The string of 24 channels equals 1.536 Mbps. Add the framing bit (1 bit times 8 KHz) for another 8 Kbps and the grand total is 1.544 Mbps. There is where the T1 bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps (rounded) comes from.

This is what is going on inside a DS1. Each of those 24 channels is called a DS0. You can use them separately to carry 24 separate telephone conversations or combine their capacity to carry 1.536 Mbps of data payload. There is a special service called Integrated T1 that uses some of the channels for voice and some for data. This gives you both telephone and broadband Internet service on the same T1 line.

DS1 is the digital signal that rides on a T1 line. The line is a physical transmission system. It was originally specified as two twisted pair copper phone lines, one for transmit and one for receive. The signal on the line consists of alternating positive and negative pulses that represent the logical “1” level and zero voltage representing a logical “0. Nowadays, other modulation schemes like HDSL and HDSL2 may be used to increase transmission distance and reduce the number of pairs needed from two to one. Regardless, these are all called T1 lines.

There is now a competing line service called Ethernet over Copper (EoC). It uses the same twisted pair copper wiring as T1 lines, although the termination equipment on each end is different. Both T1 and EoC can combine multiple copper pairs to increase bandwidth. Ethernet, itself, is not a channelized protocol. Instead, it uses packets to transmit voice, data or video.

T1 is highly reliable, reasonably priced and almost universally available due to its deployment on the telephone infrastructure over half a century. Ethernet over Copper is also highly reliable and less expensive than T1, where available. You can typically get 2 to 3 Mbps EoC for the same price as 1.5 Mbps T1. Ethernet bandwidths can easily go up to 20 or 30 Mbps, while bonded T1 lines are limited to around 12 Mbps. The limitation of Ethernet is that the signal fades rapidly with distance. You need to be fairly close to the telco central office that terminates your copper pair to get the higher bandwidths. In some areas, Ethernet services are still not readily available.

Would you like the best deals on voice and data service to support your business? If so, get instant online prices and availability on DS1 and Ethernet bandwidth services for your particular location. Higher bandwidth services are also available with excellent pricing.

Copper First, Then Fiber Bandwidth Solution

What do you do when you really need to get your business connected, but fiber optic service installation just isn’t going to happen soon enough? One option is to adopt a two-stage process that gets you going now and then steps up to the bandwidth you really need when it's available. The key is utilizing two different technologies to take advantage of their strengths.

Fiber optic bandwidth, either SONET or Ethernet, will get you the bandwidth you need for any conceivable application. The low end starts around 50 or 100 Mbps and goes up to at least 1 Gbps, with many locations eligible for 10 Gbps Ethernet (10 GigE) or OC-192 SONET (10 Gbps).

Copper bandwidth, either T-Carrier or Ethernet, will get you the bandwidth you need much faster. That bandwidth, though, is going to be a lot slower than what you can get with fiber. T1 lines are reasonably priced, available almost anywhere, and can be installed in a matter of weeks. The base bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps. Not enough to even consider? Then multiply that bandwidth by bonding additional T1 lines. You can get 12 Mbps over T1 by bonding 8 T1 lines together to act as one big bandwidth pipe.

An alternative is Ethernet over Copper. This service uses the same twisted pair copper telco lines as T1, but has a more efficient modulation scheme. You can easily get 10, 20 or 30 Mbps using 8 copper pair. EoC technology trades off bandwidth and distance, unlike T1 which is 1.5 Mbps no matter how far you are from the central office. If you are within a mile from the CO and the office is properly equipped, you may be able to get 50 to 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. Those speeds are starting to get competitive with OC-3 (155 Mbps) and Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps).

If fiber is what you really want, you could be looking at months to complete the installation. That’s especially true if the metro fiber is running down one side of the highway and you are on the other side. Or, if the nearest fiber connection is blocks away in the city. It’s much faster if your building is already “lit” for fiber optic service, even if you are not a subscriber. Adding customers to an already existing fiber installation is relatively easy. It’s also reasonably fast and easy if there is a fiber lit building next door.

You’ve got the idea that fiber installations aren’t a given for any particular business location. Not yet, anyway. Some estimates are that less than 25% of all business buildings are lit for fiber optic service. On the other hand, nearly 100% of all business buildings are already being served with copper telco lines. Most often these are multi-pair bundles installed for multiple line telephone service. Unused pairs can be quickly pressed into service for Ethernet over Copper or T1 line service. After all, they are already hooked up at both ends of the cable run.

With that in mind, here’s a two step solution that I’ve seen work when a business needs both high bandwidth and fast installation. What you do is work with a carrier that has both copper and fiber technologies available. That’s fairly common now. Have them install bonded T1 or Ethernet over Copper at the highest bandwidth they can quickly install. At the same time, place an order for fiber optic service at the bandwidth you really need. The trick is to get an agreement that you can drop the copper service without penalty once your fiber service is turned up.

By working out this type of arrangement, you may get as much as half the bandwidth you need on a fairly quick schedule. By the time you get used to doing business on the copper lines, your fiber will be cut-in and it will seem like someone opened the bandwidth floodgates. You’ll only have to pay for one service at a time, although you might think about it and keep the copper connection as a backup for your fiber if the budget permits.

Do you have a situation that needs special consideration for connectivity? There may be more options than you think. Get consultation and bandwidth option prices and provisioning times now.

Copper Bandwidth Connections Push 1 Gbps

Just when you think they’ve wrung all of the speed possible on ordinary twisted pair telephone wire, clever engineering demonstrates that we haven’t hit a bandwidth ceiling yet. Would you believe 1 Gbps copper business service?

It’s not available in your office park yet, but it’s on the way. Chinese networking and telecommunications company, Huawei, has a prototype Giga DSL system that can deliver a combined rate of 1 Gbps line speed within 100 meters of a remote terminal (RT) cabinet. It scales down to 500 Mbps if you can connect within 200 meters of the cabinet.

This follows another Huawei project called SuperMIMO that uses four twisted copper pairs to deliver 700 Mbps over 400 meters. You might recognize MIMO as the WiFi 802.3n antenna technology used to extend range using multiple antennas for both transmitter and receiver. MIMO stands for Multiple Input Multiple Output. The ideas is that radio waves bounce around and interfere with each other and themselves in an effect called multipath distortion. With more than one antenna and some intelligence in the system, you can sort out the wave patterns and recreate a clean signal.

So what does wireless transmission have to do with copper wires buried in the ground? For business telecommunications, such as multi-line telephone, T1 and Ethernet over Copper, the twisted pair lines are not installed individually. Instead, collections of them run together in binder cables with 50 pair or more. The twisted conductors cancel out most electromagnetic interference for low speed transmission, such as analog phone and dial-up Internet access. Higher speed signals, such as EoC or T1, can transfer to other pairs in the cable creating crosstalk interference. This is where MIMO can reduce that interference between wired paths in the cable just like dealing with multiple paths through the air.

Other telecom equipment vendors have been active in this field as well. Alcatel-Lucent has their own approach called DSL Phantom Mode that delivers 300 Mbps over two copper pairs. Over longer distances up to 1 km, it can deliver 100 Mbps. With 1 km spans, this system would work well for Ethernet over Copper in business districts and industrial parks.

Alcatel-Lucent’s breakthrough is something called a phantom circuit. These circuits were used in the early days of wired communications to transmit more telegraph signals or telephone calls. The principle is that two phone lines, consisting of one twisted pair each, will carry two separate telephone calls. But if you connect a circuit between them, that can be used as to carry a third telephone call or telegraph signal. Interference is eliminated by using transformers on each end of the lines and connecting the third circuit between center taps on the transformers. Since the lines are balanced, they don’t notice this third or phantom circuit riding along on the same copper.

Alcatel-Lucent also uses bonded copper pair to increase bandwidth carrying capacity and VDSL2 vectoring to cancel the cross talk between multiple lines in the same bundle. Like MIMO, vectoring employs digital signal processing to analyze the effect of interference on signals among copper pairs on a symbol by symbol basis. This is something that was out of the question before high speed DSP became affordable. By throwing enough mathematics at the signal waveforms, it is now possible to make finer and finer corrections to maximize throughput of any wired or wireless transmission system.

What’s driving such a fury of investigative work into leveraging century old copper connected to telephone company central offices? Bandwidth demand is ramping up exponentially right along with the processing and storage needs of big data. The move from local data centers to the cloud also means that faster network lines are needed for WAN as well as LAN connections. Fiber speeds are increasing, too. But fiber only reaches 75% of business locations, at most, and is expensive and time consuming to install. If existing copper can be made to meet the increasing bandwidth demand, businesses can rapidly increase their MAN and WAN network speeds using connections they have now.

Are you feeling pressed for speed on your network connections? Both copper and fiber solutions are available now that weren’t in place even a short time ago. Check Ethernet over Copper and Fiber bandwidth prices now and see what’s available for your business location.

What is Ethernet Service?

Carrier Ethernet services for business are becoming more and more popular. If you’ve been hearing about Ethernet service and wondering if it makes sense for your company, here’s what it’s all about.

Ethernet is the most popular LAN protocol by far. It’s hard to remember that not that many years ago there were all sorts of competing network protocols. Now switched Ethernet is almost universal. Something similar is underway with telecom services. We’re in the process of changing over from switched circuit technologies popularized by a century of telephone development to packet switched networks more compatible with computing devices. As you might suspect, Ethernet is making its bid to become the universal protocol of metropolitan and long haul networks.

Ethernet originated at Xerox PARC as a short distance communications technology to interconnect computing equipment. It was intended for use within an office or building. Communication farther than this required interface to telecom technologies, such as T-Carrier, SONET and Frame Relay.

Over the years, Ethernet has been extended and improved with the introduction of switching to eliminate the problem of collisions and fiber optics to increase network speeds. What has remained the same until recently is that connection to the outside world required conversion to a different set of protocols and back again at the other end. This is the last frontier of Ethernet networking that is now being addressed by Carrier Ethernet.

What is Carrier Ethernet? It’s the same as Ethernet, only extended to work over long distances on a telecommunications network. Carrier Ethernet standards have been developed by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), an industry standards body. By introducing MEF compliant Ethernet services, carriers can be assured that their services will work with readily available customer and provider interface equipment and that network providers will be able to exchange traffic. They do that through an Ethernet Network to Network Interface (E-NNI).

Two of the most popular Ethernet services are E-Line or Ethernet Line Service and E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. E-Line is a point to point dedicated line service that replaces traditional private lines such as T1, DS3 and OC-3. One end of the line can be connected to an Internet Service Provider give you Ethernet Internet service. In addition, E-LAN offers a many to many or meshed connection so that numerous business locations can be tied together on one large Ethernet network.

How about bandwidth? There are two physical layer options available. They are Ethernet over Copper (EoC) and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). Ethernet over Copper is a direct T1 line replacement. It uses the same twisted pair copper telco wiring that T1 is provisioned over. Multiple pairs are employed to increase line speed. Popular EoC speeds are 2 Mbps, 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps 15 Mbps and 20 Mbps. Copper based Ethernet is distance sensitive, so the closer you are to the central office, the higher speed you can obtain. It’s not uncommon to get 25 Mbps, 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps or higher bandwidths for connections under a mile.

Ethernet over FIber picks up where Ethernet over Copper leaves off. Bandwidths from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps are readily available, meeting the needs of just about any business.

In addition to easy interfacing and options such as E-LAN, a major draw of Carrier Ethernet services is their reduced cost. It’s not uncommon to get twice the bandwidth for the same money with Ethernet versus other telecom services. Also, that bandwidth is more easily scalable. The carrier equipment design makes it easy and fast to increase and decrease bandwidth as needed, up to the maximum speed of the installed port.

Are you interested in what Carrier Ethernet can do to support your business? If so, get instant online pricing for Ethernet services up to 1 Gbps and prompt quotes for other services to 10 Gbps.



Note: Ethernet patch cords photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

DS3 and Fractional DS3 Broadband

In the quest to upgrade bandwidth, companies have generally turned to DS3 bandwidth service. Here is what DS3 is all about and the different technologies used to provide DS3 and similar mid-level bandwidth services.

DS3 stands for Digital Signal 3, a standardized switched circuit TDM telecom service. As a refresher, DS0 is the basic building block at 64 Kbps. That’s one channel of digitized telephone call. DS1 is a bundle of 24 DS0 channels at 1.5 Mbps. You are probably more familiar with its implementation as a line service called T1. DS3 is the next step up at 45 Mbps. It’s a bundle of 672 DS0 channels as a large telephone trunk or 28 T1 lines multiplexed together for transport. When you order a T3 line, you are getting the line service implementation of DS3.

Even though DS1 and DS3 were originally conceived as telephone company technologies, they are more often used to transport data packets today. That includes private point to point lines and dedicated Internet connections. In these applications, the entire payload is used to transport data packets.

A full DS3 circuit will give you 45 Mbps bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. This is the most common service ordered and is readily available nationwide. You’ll need an interface card for your router to connect to a DS3 termination. There are two interconnect cables, one for transmit (upload) and one for receive (download). They are 75 ohm coax, similar to what you’ll find for Cable TV connections, although the specified cable type is Bellcore 734 or 735 for this application. The connectors are type BNC. You’ll find these on the router interface card. There may be more than one pair if the router can handle multiple DS3 connections.

At this point, you might be imagining coaxial cables stretched from your building back to the telephone central office, like the twisted pairs used for T1 and multi-line telephone service. In practice, the coaxial connection is only used for short distances. The DS3 bandwidth itself is most often delivered over a SONET fiber optic cable, where it is demultiplexed and dropped off at your premises.

DS3 bandwidth may be higher than you require. There’s a big gap between T1 line bandwidth at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 at 45 Mbps. Companies often begin scaling up their bandwidth by bonding multiple T1 lines to double or triple the individual line bandwidth. This works up to about 10 or 12 Mbps in most cases. Let’s say you only need 20 or 30 Mbps right now. What do you do?

One option is to order fractional DS3 service. A full DS3 interface is installed, but the line bandwidth is limited to the fractional amount you order. That could be 15, 20 or 30 Mbps. You can possibly save money this way, but not necessarily. The reason is that full DS3 is more of a standard service that is readily available. The fractional services are a special order that may or may not be available in a particular location, depending on the service provider. In the end, it might make the most economic sense to get a full DS3 connection.

There are other technical options in this bandwidth range that compete with fractional and even full DS3. The most popular is Ethernet over Copper. This is a highly scalable service that competes with T1 at the 1.5, 2, and 3 Mbps levels. You can also get 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 50, and sometimes even 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. This lets you match your budget more closely to the bandwidth you require. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is often less expensive than either T1 or DS3 for similar bandwidths, although not as readily available as yet.

Downtown in major business districts you may also find fixed wireless bandwidth services. These often deliver DS3 bandwidths, but perhaps in an Ethernet protocol. Most of the time that’s what you want anyway, since you’ll be connecting to a LAN running Ethernet.

A final option isn’t DS3, but might give you a similar benefit for a lot less money. That’s business class Cable broadband. It is shared, not dedicated, and the bandwidth varies with the amount of user activity. Still, you can get up to 50 or 100 Mbps download with 5 or 10 Mbps upload service for about the price of a T1 line. You’ll need to have the cable passing by your business location for this service to be available. Otherwise the construction costs are prohibitive.

Are you in need of higher bandwidth to support your growing business, additional computerization or a move to cloud services? If so, get pricing and availability for DS3 and fractional DS3 services, plus related bandwidth services that may also meet your needs.

100 Mbps Internet for Business

DS3 Internet bandwidth at 45 Mbps has been the mainstay of many mid-size businesses. It is readily available and a substantial bandwidth increase over T1 or even bonded T1 lines. Now even DS3 bandwidth isn’t enough to keep up with many simultaneous video users or cloud service applications. It’s time to move on up to 100 Mbps Internet access.

The 100 Mbps service level is particularly significant because it precisely matches one of the standard Ethernet LAN speeds called “Fast” Ethernet. Most all NICs (Network Interface Cards) built into nearly everything from PCs to routers, switches and printers support 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. That’s the 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps network speeds. Newer NICs expand that to include Gigabit Ethernet or GigE with 10/100/1000 Mbps ports.

The point is that if your LAN is running at 100 Mbps and you connect to the Internet at some lower speed, you are going to experience a slowdown on anything to or from the Internet. At low network activity levels, you may not notice the difference. It’s when there are lots users doing lots of things simultaneously that the congestion occurs. The big choke point, more often than not, is the WAN or wide area network connection to the Internet.

Fortunately, 100 Mbps Internet service for businesses is more available and less expensive than ever before. Let’s take a look at the different technical approaches and their advantages or disadvantages.

The traditional 100 Mbps telecom service is OC-3, which actually runs at about 155 Mbps. This is a SONET fiber optic service offered by switched circuit telecom companies nationwide. OC-3 is a transport service that can carry anything from thousands of telephone calls to private point to point connections to dedicated Internet access. It’s also often used to deliver lower speed services, such as DS3. You probably don’t think of DS3 as a fiber optic service because your connection is through BNC connectors on small diameter coaxial cables. Still, it’s likely dropped off at your location using an add/drop multiplexer connected to a SONET fiber cable.

OC-3 has the advantage of being a well established and highly popular digital line service. It comes with an SLA or Service Level Agreement, standard in the telecom industry. Your bandwidth is both dedicated and symmetrical. Dedicated means that you don’t share that 155 Mbps with any other company or individual users. Whatever bandwidth you aren’t using at the moment sits there idling so that you always have the full 155 Mbps at your disposal. Symmetrical means that you have 155 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. Sometimes this is expressed as 155 x 155 Mbps Internet access.

Competing directly with OC-3 bandwidth is Carrier Ethernet. Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps is an easy interface to your LAN. All you need to do is plug in a standard RJ-45 patch cable and your router has Internet access. There’s no need for fiber optic cabling and special interface cards like you have with OC-3 or a managed OC-3 router installed by the service provider. Like OC-3, 100 Mbps FAST Ethernet is both symmetrical and dedicated. It also comes with an SLA from the provider.

Fast Ethernet service is available over both fiber optic and twisted pair connections. In fairness, the Ethernet over Copper service at this speed is fairly distance limited so you’ll likely find it only in major metropolitan business districts. Slower speeds, say 10 or 20 Mbps, have a much greater range and are more readily available.

Ethernet over Fiber is similar to OC-3 with two important advantages. First, the cost per Mbps is often lower, even much lower than OC-3 where available. Another advantage is that Carrier Ethernet services are highly scalable. The next increment up from OC-3 is OC-12 at 622 Mbps. With Carrier Ethernet, you could go from 100 Mbps on up to 200, 500 or even 1,000 Mbps without an equipment change. The trick is to have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed initially. Then order the bandwidth you need today with the understanding that you can easily upgrade in the future when you need to.

A final option that is becoming more available is 100 Mbps Cable business broadband. This is a shared asymmetrical bandwidth service sold without service level agreements. It’s very similar to the Cable broadband you get at home, but with extra features such as static IP addresses and special customer support. Your 100 Mbps is in the download direction only. Upload speeds are on the order of 10 Mbps. This bandwidth is shared by many other users, so it varies all over the place even during business hours. Even so, you can’t beat the pricing which is similar to a T1 line. If all you need is casual Internet access for many employees and have a very limited budget, this could be the answer for you.

Are you ready to establish Business Internet service at a new location or upgrade from bonded T1 or DS3 to 100 Mbps or higher Internet access? If so, check 100 Mbps Internet pricing and availability for your business location. Complementary consulting is also available to help you sort through the options.

Internet Wholesale Bandwidth Options

There are two types of organizations that buy Internet bandwidth. Most are end users. They want the access for their employees. The others are resellers. They take large Internet connections and divvy up the bandwidth to hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses. These are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) looking to buy at wholesale and sell at retail.

The largest networks in the world, called Tier 1, don’t purchase Internet access. They are part of the core network itself. Those major world wide networks exchange traffic on basis of equals called peering. Each network gets as much traffic as it sends to the others, so all benefit and no money is exchanged.

Everyone else has to get to the Internet by accessing one of these Tier 1 networks. The next level down, the Tier 2 networks, are also very large Internet service providers. Since they don’t have the enormous global traffic to participate in peering, they purchase what is called IP Transit. This is Internet access sold on a per Megabit per second per month basis.

Smaller Tier 3 networks can purchase IP Transit from Tier 2 networks, if they are large enough to have an assigned AS or Autonomous System number (ASN) to identify them as part of the Internet. Large scale ISPs fall into this category as well as some large corporations and other organizations.

Local and regional Internet Service Providers, including WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers), buy DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. DIA connections are like point to point private lines, except that one end connects to the Internet. Other private line characteristics still apply. The bandwidth provided is completely dedicated to the ISP and not shared with anyone else. There are generally SLAs or Service Level Agreements that spell out characteristics such as maximum latency, jitter and packet loss as well as time to respond to outages and time to make repairs.

Dedicated also means that there are no extra charges for heavily loading the line. You can use the entire capacity of the circuit in both directions or only some of it. The price is the same.

The smallest DIA service is usually a T1 line running at 1.5 Mbps. This is a symmetrical service, meaning 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Usually the download path is much heavier loaded than the upload path for typical Internet access. If fact most consumer Internet access is sold with 5x to 10x higher speeds on download than upload. For business users, upload speeds can be important when transferring large files to remote backup sites and servers within colocation centers.

Obviously, T1 lines can’t serve a large user base but they work great for WiFi hotspots and rural or subdivision WISP service where signed-up customers number in the dozens, not hundreds. A nice feature of T1 lines is that they can be bonded by adding more lines to double, triple and quadruple bandwidth up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. The other nice feature of T1 lines is that they are available where other line services don’t reach. If you can get business telephone system into a facility, you can probably get T1 DIA service.

The next increment in traditional telecom bandwidth is DS3, also called T3 lines. This service runs at 45 Mbps which is large enough for a good size service provider to offer competitive bandwidth. Beyond that, SONET fiber optic services include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.5 Gbps are very popular.

A strong competitor to T-Carrier and SONET bandwidth is Carrier Ethernet. It comes in two flavors, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) typically from 1 to 50 Mbps and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps. In a some metropolitan areas, you can also get EoFW or Ethernet over Fixed Wireless at DS3 and Fast Ethernet speeds. Where available, Carrier Ethernet tends to have considerably better pricing than other services.

Do you resell Internet access to other ISPs or end users? If so, see if you can get better wholesale pricing on Dedicated Internet Access and IP Transit services.

Combine T1 Lines For Higher Speed

T1 lines have been popular with small and medium businesses for decades. They are highly reliable, private, dedicated bandwidth, and easy to come by. With fierce competition bringing down prices in recent years, what’s not to like? If only you could get T1 lines to run faster....

There’s a way to do that and still keep all the advantages of T1 line technology. The technique is called bonding. It’s an industry standard method of combining the bandwidth of multiple T1 lines so that they behave as a single much larger connection.

You can’t really hot-rod a single T1 line. The system was designed to be synchronized so that the line can be segmented into 24 separate telephone lines or multiplexed into higher bandwidth services. A T1 line runs at 1.5 Mbps and that’s that. What bonding does is let you bring in another T1 line and hook the two together for 3 Mbps.

Why upgrade in the first place? Bandwidth demands are increasing. You know that every few years you need to upgrade the processing power and RAM in your PCs to keep running efficiently with upgraded browsers and other applications. Expect the same to be true of your WAN connections. Whether it’s file transfers from point to point between business locations, Internet access or a connection to cloud services, you’ll need higher bandwidth to stay competitive.

T1 lines can be combined in larger groups to give you even more bandwidth. Bonding 3 T1s provides 4.5 Mbps, 4 T1 lines offer 6 Mbps, 5 bonded lines equal 7.5 Mbps, 6 T1s provide 9 Mbps, 7 T1 lines offer 10.5 Mbps and 8 bonded T1 lines get you to 12 Mbps. Eight line bonding is about as high as most carriers go. The cost of bonded T1 is equal to the price of a single T1 times the number of lines used. When you get past 8 T1s it is generally cheaper to move up to DS3 or even fiber optic connections.

How do you connect all these T1 lines coming into your facility? Your service provider will take care of that. They supply a managed router with multiple WAN Interface Cards (WIC) that handled the interface to each T1 line. The router then does the bonding in tandem with carrier equipment on the other end and delivers a single bandwidth port (RJ45) running at the higher bonded speed.

This is important. For bonding to work, you need to get all of your T1 lines from a single provider. If you try to mix and match vendors, they have no way of coordinating line operation and you just wind up with Individual T1 lines. You can do load balancing with your own routers or buy a bandwidth aggregation appliance to combine unrelated lines, but this is not true bonded T1.

Does any other service compete directly with bonded T1? Yes, Ethernet over Copper does something very similar. It bonds multiple twisted copper pair (up to 8 pair) to deliver a single bandwidth service from 2 Mbps to over 100 Mbps. The trick in delivering the higher bandwidths is a more sophisticated modulation scheme that is distance sensitive. The nearer you are to the central office, the higher the speed available. If available, you can probably get higher bandwidths and better prices than bonded T1 services. However, availability is generally limited to metropolitan areas at this time.

What are the best bandwidth services available to support your applications? Get instant online pricing for bonded T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper to compare prices and availability at your business locations.

Ethernet Internet Service Access For Business

Internet access has become key to doing business, both on the Web and for bricks and mortar operations. The Internet has become ubiquitous in connecting to customers, suppliers, remote workers and even between company locations. So, is business Internet the same as what consumers use or are there differences?

There are various characteristics of Internet service access you can choose, including dedicated or shared, symmetrical or asymmetrical, wired or wireless, copper or fiber, bandwidth level and cost. One of the newest and most cost effective services that meets the needs of many business locations is Ethernet Internet service. Can it be what you are looking for? Why not get an instant online price quote and compare with what you have now?



These Ethernet Internet service access quotes are for business locations only, not residences. At the low end of the price spectrum are business Cable broadband connections which are shared bandwidth and asymmetrical. They give you a high maximum download speed, but that speed varies all over the place since the bandwidth is shared among many users. Download speeds are 10x or so upload speeds, specifically intended for Web surfing, email, and watching online video.

Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber Internet Service works more like traditional telecom lines. The bandwidth is symmetrical so that upload and download speeds are the same. You also get the bandwidth you order since it is dedicated to your use only and doesn’t depend on what other users are doing.

Ethernet over Copper uses the same twisted pair copper telco wiring that you use now for multi-line telephone and T1 lines. That’s makes construction costs negligible in many cases. Line speeds are available from 1 Mbps on up to 100 Mbps or more, depending on how far you are from the central office where your wiring connects. Up to 8 copper pair may be used to deliver the higher bandwidths.

Ethernet over Fiber requires a fiber optic line, but it delivers much higher bandwidths. With EoF, you can easily get Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbps. In some cases 10GigE is also available for large enterprise applications.

Can you get twice the bandwidth for the same money as you pay now by switching to Ethernet Internet Service for business? Check the speeds, prices and availability and compare with your current Internet service.

Ethernet over Copper Connects Nationwide

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has quickly made a name for itself as a last mile access connection for dedicated Internet, MPLS networking, and linking two or more company LANs. The flexibility, ease of interface, and cost savings make this a service in demand. What’s held it back to date is lack of availability. Well, that’s about to change.

MegaPath, one of the country’s major competitive carriers, is moving in with Telx, a major network interconnection provider. What does that mean? It means that your Ethernet over Copper connection can go a lot farther than it used to.

MegaPath has been on a major construction effort to roll out EoC equipment to over 680 central offices within the next year. The central office is key because this is where the subscriber copper loops terminate. MegaPath used specialized G.HSDL technology with up to 8 bonded copper pair to deliver line speeds to 100 and even 400 Mbps in selected area. Their standard symmetrical speeds are 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 20 Mbps. Both layer 2 and layer 3 services are offered along with QoS/CoS to support business data and real-time voice and video simultaneously.

For its part, Telx operates 15 data centers with direct access to over 950 customers who have chosen to colocate within the Telx facilities. These include major telecom carriers, Internet service providers, content producers and delivery networks and cloud service providers. Telx is a pioneer in Ethernet Exchange, a way for carriers to exchange Ethernet traffic without having to first convert to another protocol like SONET. The E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface benefits each carrier who participates because now they can directly access customers on other carriers and vice-versa.

Ethernet over Copper along with Ethernet over Fiber form the basis of Carrier Ethernet. This is the familiar Ethernet protocol that runs on your LAN adapted for use on telecommunication networks. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has standardized a number of Carrier Ethernet standards so that they are compatible across network boundaries. These include EPL, EVPL, and ELAN.

EPL stands for Ethernet Private Line. This is equivalent to the point to point private line services familiar with T-Carrier and SONET services. EVPL is Ethernet Virtual Private Line. This is very similar to EPL. The virtual designation means that you can have a number of EPL services running to a single physical Ethernet port. This is particularly useful for companies that want to run private lines from a single headquarters location out to multiple branch locations. Together, EPL and EVPL form what is known as E-Line or Ethernet Line service.

ELAN stands for Ethernet LAN Service. You may also see this written as E-LAN. What differentiates E-LAN from E-Line is that E-LAN is a many to many or mesh network service. You can use it to tie together multiple business locations so that any location can communicate with any other.

Have you been interested in Ethernet over Copper services but concerned that they may not be available to support your particular location or your many locations nationwide? This is a rapidly changing market, with more service being rolled out almost daily. If you haven’t checked lately, you may be pleasantly surprised at how much connectivity is available and how much bandwidth your can get for your telecom budget. Check pricing right now, if you like. Ethernet over Copper prices from 1 to 100 Mbps are available instantly online. Other services for business locations will be promptly quoted by a Telarus bandwidth expert, upon request.

Copper Ethernet Line Prices Instantly!

You’re no doubt aware that Ethernet over Copper is making a strong challenge to be the bandwidth service of choice for businesses. How much of a challenge? The bandwidth increases and cost reductions are making it hard to choose anything else if EoC is available. Just how much can you get and for what price reduction? Why not check Ethernet over Copper prices instantly!



Through the magic of the Telarus GeoQuote automated pricing system, it’s now possible to get Ethernet quotes immediately any time you want. Simply use the handy input form you’ll find at CopperEthernet.com and you’ll be automatically set up to get Ethernet over Copper pricing.

How accurate are these prices? They could be considered budgetary pricing, although they are quite accurate. GeoQuote mimics the same procedures that carriers use to make service price quotes. If you go directly to a carrier, however, you’ll probably have to wait a few days or more to get the results back. You’ll also be limited to one provider's offers. Why settle for one quote when you can get several or more to compare?

Telarus is an award winning telecom and network services broker that has agreements with dozens of service providers. You get the same or better pricing through the GeoQuote system as you could by spending hours on the phone calling around for competitive quotes.

It is well worth your while to talk to a Telarus bandwidth consultant, as there are often short term special deals available that don’t show up in the automated results. Your consultant can let you know what’s on “sale” so you can make the best buying decision. At the end of the quote process, you’ll have the option to call Telarus toll free for further discussion or just click a link and a consultant will call you promptly.

You should also know that Ethernet over Copper isn’t the only service that’s available for instant price quotes. If you wish, you can explore options for T1 and bonded T1 lines, business Cable broadband, fixed wireless broadband, Satellite bandwidth, fractional and full DS3 services and Ethernet over Fiber. Yes, quotes are available for fiber optic services from 10 to 1000 Mbps using the same instant pricing process.

Are you anxious to see how much you could be saving over your current telecom services contract? Take just a minute from your busy day and get Copper Ethernet line prices instantly. After you see the results, you’ll probably want to take a few more minutes and call in an order.

GigE and FastE Bandwidth Services

Bandwidth upgrades are a matter of course these days. Many companies are moving from T1 line speeds at 1.5 Mbps up to 3x3 Mbps or 10x10 Mbps Ethernet. Often there is little or no additional cost involved in doing so. But what if these bandwidth levels are still to low for your needs? Are there any opportunities at the 100 to 1000 Mbps level?

Carrier Ethernet is now the service to pursue at medium and high bandwidth speeds. These service levels have been dominated by DS3 or T3 lines at 45 Mbps and SONET OCx for higher line speeds over fiber optic cable. Ethernet bandwidth has a cost advantage for this need and also provisioning flexibility.

It’s common knowledge that low and mid-band Ethernet services are readily available over twisted pair copper wiring. In other words, the same telco wires that you currently use for analog business phone lines and T1 lines can also be used to transport Ethernet protocol. The service requires specialized equipment at each end and multiple copper pairs. This is Ethernet over Copper. Bandwidth levels vary from 1 Mbps on up 100 Mbps and beyond. A 200 Mbps service is available in some areas and a new 400 Mbps asymmetrical Internet access is being rolled out.

Most companies opt for Ethernet as a last mile connection to the Internet, metro or wide area MPLS network with bandwidth up to 50 Mbps. This is a direct replacement for their existing copper wire T1, bonded T1 or DS3 connections. By moving up the speed range to 100 Mbps to 400 Mbps, Ethernet can directly replace such fiber optic services as OC-3 at 155 Mbps and perhaps OC-12 at 622 Mbps.

All of this is done over up to 8 bonded copper pair at distances that don’t exceed a few thousand feet to a few miles from the telco central office. This is no problem in densely populated business districts, but as you move out into the burbs, small cities and rural areas, service becomes less available. Ethernet over Copper has a definite distance limitation.

Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps may be available over copper, but Ethernet over Fiber is a better bet. The beauty of fiber is that once you have it installed and your building is “lit”, just about any bandwidth is possible. That includes FastE, of course, at 100 Mbps, GigE or Gigabit Ethernet at 1,000 Mbps and 10 GigE or 10 Gigabit Ethernet at 10,000 Mbps.

Ethernet over Fiber is available from traditional telephone companies, but it is also available from competitive carriers who have built their own IP-core regional and national networks with Ethernet as a standard service. These companies can bring Ethernet right to your building without having to lease any telephone company facilities. This gives them the ability to offer more bandwidth for less money. You may save half or more for equivalent service levels at the higher bandwidths.

A new wrinkle is Ethernet over Fiber offered by Cable MSOs. This fiber was bought and paid for by the Cable Television industry, but has so much extra bandwidth available that these companies are offering access to their fiber optic networks to businesses and other organizations that need anywhere from 10 to 1000 Gbps. That includes Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet at prices that are up to half the cost of other fiber providers.

The options are many and the prices are very attractive right now. There is lots of bandwidth to go around, which may not be true when the economy takes off again. If you need to speed up your networks, you can lock in some excellent deals. Check prices and availability for GigE and FastE bandwidth services appropriate for your business location.

MegaPath Pushes EoC to 400 Mbps

The bandwidth of Ethernet over Copper services has been setting new standards on a regular basis. It’s now at the point where you have to think seriously whether you really need to invest in fiber optic construction to light your building or if EoC will get the job done. MegaPath has just upped the ante for those doing copper/fiber tradeoffs. The new upper limit is 400 Mbps.

Many companies that are using Ethernet over Copper are doing so as T1 line replacements to get twice the bandwidth for the same cost. The 2x2 Mbps and 3x3 Mbps options are especially popular for this application. Other companies are moving to mid-band Ethernet where even bonded T1 cannot go. These are bandwidths in the 10 to 20 Mbps range, suitable for many mid-size operations. It’s the companies that have hundred or thousands of employees to support or are engaged in high bandwidth requirement applications that have been stuck with fiber as their only option.

That’s all changed within the last year. More sophisticated modulation schemes and bonding to 8 copper pairs have pushed the bandwidth limit past 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps and even 200 Mbps. Now, MegaPath is offering a new service that can exceed 400 Mbps. This could be a strong option for companies that have specified OC-3 SONET fiber optic service at 155 Mbps and even OC-12 at 622 Mbps.

To be fair, the 400 Mbps speed is only specified on the download path. Upload speeds could be a fraction of that. Does asymmetrical service make sense in a business environment? It could, depending on what you are doing with it. Internet access is typically asymmetrical in nature, with download speeds 10x what you use for upload. That’s because most internet usage at the desktop consists of sending keyboard requests for Web pages or files and then viewing the results or making other use of the data in applications. The principal is that the huge files are almost always coming to the user rather than being sent.

That’s especially true for video, now the number one source of traffic on the Internet. It takes relative little upload activity to request the video files, even streaming, and a considerable amount of download bandwidth over extended periods of time.

Some cloud applications also fall into this category. If you routinely send huge files to the cloud and expect little back, then the asymmetry is wrong for you. However, if most of your bandwidth activity is using large information packages delivered from the cloud, then an asymmetric bandwidth connection could work in your favor.

MegaPath is also offering symmetrical Ethernet bandwidth up to 100 Mbps x 100 Mbps for point to point, point to multipoint and dedicated Internet access. Other options include Ethernet over DS1 and Ethernet over DS3 to address the inherent distance limitations of Ethernet over Copper service. As part of rolling out the new higher bandwidth services, MegaPath is increasing the number of central offices with EoC equipment from 200 to over 680 within a year.

Are your bandwidth requirements increasing, perhaps because of a current or planned move to cloud-based services? If so, you should know that fiber optic connections are only one option to get the line speeds you need for efficient operation. Get competitive quotes now for low, mid-level, and high bandwidth Ethernet over Copper line services for your business location. Sorry, no residential service available.

Business Internet Connection Service

As a business, you need to connect to the Internet to communicate with your customers and to run your own operation. A business Internet connection is more demanding than a consumer Internet service. When your business connection goes down, you can be losing money. If you are an Internet based operation, a dead connection is like a closed store. Reliability as well as cost are key.

A fairly new connection technology called Ethernet Internet offers both cost and reliability advantages. In addition, you may be able to get bandwidth that has been unobtainable at your particular business location. How can you know what’s available? Use this quick Ethernet Internet Finder and see...



Why Ethernet? It’s the most direct connection to your own network. Whether you are running a wired or wireless LAN, chances are that you are using the Ethernet protocol. Most computers and peripherals come with Network Interface Cards that support 10/100 or 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet. That’s the standard RJ-45 network connector. Your router, wired or wireless, no doubt has an RJ-45 input connection. With Ethernet Internet service, you simply connect an Ethernet patch cord from the provider’s port to your router or switch.

Two popular types of Business Ethernet Internet connections are Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Both are highly reliable and have easily scaled bandwidth. Also, the bandwidth is symmetrical. For instance, 10x10 Mbps Ethernet gives you 10 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. You’ll have the full 10 Mbps at your disposal. This is dedicated bandwidth, rather than the shared bandwidth you get with DSL, Cable or 3G wireless services.

The bandwidths of copper and fiber Ethernet services somewhat overlap. For instance Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is available from 2 Mbps on up to 200 Mbps. Ethernet over Fiber typically starts at 50 Mbps and goes up to 1 Gigabit or even 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

The cost of Ethernet Internet connections is lower than what you’ll find with T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth or SONET fiber optic services. You can typically get twice as much bandwidth for the same money as a T1 line and the difference is even more dramatic at higher bandwidth levels.

Does your business need a higher speed or more reliable Internet connection? If so, check out Ethernet Internet connection services for your location. Note that this service is available for business locations only. Sorry, no residential service available.

Ethernet over Copper Data Service

Traditional data service connections include T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, OC-3 and higher level SONET fiber optic technologies. Frame Relay and MPLS networks provide nation-wide and international connectivity. So, why use Ethernet over Copper?

EoC or Ethernet over Copper is a fairly recent last mile connection technology. You don’t find coast to coast EoC being offered. If you do, it is probably implemented as a short hop to the central office, IP-based MPLS networking or Carrier Ethernet over fiber for the long haul, and then another short EoC link at the destination.

What Ethernet over Copper offers is a low cost, high performance solution to connect your business location to a larger private network or public network, such as the Internet. EoC offers the advantage of being able to repurpose existing twisted pair copper infrastructure to avoid the high cost of new fiber optic construction or line of sight limitations with high bandwidth fixed wireless solutions.

What kind of bandwidth can you expect? Low speed Ethernet lines at 2x2 Mbps or 3x3 Mbps are good replacements for T1 lines. These services are typically priced the same as a T1 line but offer higher bandwidth for the money. There are higher bandwidths available, from 5 Mbps on up to 200 Mbps.

The 2x2 designation indicates that this is a symmetrical line service. The bandwidth is 2 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. Similarly, 3x3 Mbps means 3 Mbps upload and 3 Mbps download. This differentiates Ethernet over Copper from services like DSL and Cable, which are asymmetrical. In other words, those services offer much higher download speed than upload speeds. For simple email or Web browsing activities, this isn’t critical. But if you are uploading large files or images, accessing cloud services, or managing a remote server, upload speed becomes much more important.

What is Ethernet over Copper? It differs from traditional telco-based services in that the native protocol is Ethernet rather than TDM or SONET. Ethernet has become the standard LAN protocol and the most common interface to nearly all computers and network equipment. With EoC, you connect to the network using a standard RJ-45 Ethernet connector. That’s it. There are no special interface or conversion circuit cards required.

Ethernet over Copper uses dry or unpowered local loop connections from your location to the nearest telco central office. This is standard telephone wire that isn’t being used for any other purpose. Nearly all businesses have multi-line cables with multiple twisted pairs already installed. Most of the time there are numerous spare wires in that bundle. EoC equipment uses two or more of those spare pairs to transport digital data as Ethernet packets.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper technology is that the bandwidth it can carry depends on distance between the EoC equipment at the central office and similar equipment at your location. Within a mile or so, you can generally get all the speed you want at a fraction of what you’ll pay for other telecom services. At you get farther away, the maximum rate decreases due to signal attenuation in the line. More than a few miles and the signal becomes unusable. That may sound like quite a limitation, but in reality most business locations are well within the range of Ethernet over Copper. The exceptions are rural businesses, and offices where the Ethernet termination equipment isn’t installed yet.

Can EoC give you the bandwidth you need at a cost savings over other solutions? Get pricing and availability for Ethernet over Copper data service connections at your business location or locations now.

IP T1 Line Service

T1 line service has been available for decades. It originated as a proprietary telephone company technology designed as a trunk for transporting multiple phone calls between switching centers. Later, T1 was made available for businesses to support their PBX phone systems. When the Internet came along, T1 lines were pressed into service as dedicated Internet connections. But now we live in an IP world. Can T1 also act as an IP connection?

Yes, it can. That may seem counterintuitive to those who understand the origins and technology behind T1 service. The T-Carrier specifications, of which T1 is the most popular line service, describe a system organized as multiplexed channels 64 Kbps wide. That channel size was optimized to transport a single independent digitized telephone call using PCM (Pulse Code Modulation). Clearly, T1 is oriented toward the switched circuit based public telephone network.

That’s true, but the important thing to remember about digital network technologies is that a bit is a bit. It’s either true or false, one or zero, regardless of the particular physical layer or higher level protocols involved. That means that a time division multiplexing technology like T1 can be used to transport a packet oriented technology like IP or Ethernet with a little protocol conversion.

That’s essentially what’s being done when T1 lines are used for data transmission. It’s been a long time since anything but Ethernet has been the standard for local area networks. Ethernet is an IP technology, based on packet switching. Those packets can be queued up and loaded into T1 frames for transmission through T1 lines and even multiplexed into T3 and SONET frames for longer haul transmission. At the far end, the packets are offloaded and sent on their way through an IP edge router connected to the T1 CPE (Customer Premises Equipment.)

If you want to connect your Ethernet networks over metropolitan and wide area networks, one technology you’ll be interested in is called Ethernet over T1 or EoT1. This is also called EoDS1 for Ethernet over DS1.

DS1 is simply the data service or protocol that runs on T1 lines. The reason there are two designations is that T1 describes a physical line consisting of two twisted pair copper telco loops running at 1.5 Mbps. The DS1 is all the bits formated for transmission just before loading into the actual T1 line. You can take that same DS1 and feed it into an add/drop multiplexer and transport it along with many others on a T3 circuit or a fiber optic service like OC-3. At the other end, the DS1 can be demultiplexed from the other services on the same line and delivered separately.

In practice T1 and DS1 refer to the same thing to the actual user. What’s important is that Carrier Ethernet service can be delivered on a T1 line, albeit bandwidth limited to 1.5 Mbps. Who would want service that slow? Lots of companies need connectivity between locations, but don’t require high speeds. They may be using the service for retail credit card verification, communication with corporate headquarters, or to upload files to their web server. The big advantage they have with T1 lines is that they are almost universally available. If you can get business phone service, chances are that you can also get a T1 line installed. They are connected over the same telco wiring.

The competing service to Ethernet over T1 is Ethernet over Copper. That may seem like a fine line of distinction, but it is important. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) also uses twisted pair copper but a different modulation scheme that offers higher bandwidths but with distance limitations. If you are within a mile or two of the central office that has Ethernet over Copper equipment, you may be able to get 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps or even higher bandwidths from EoC. Some installations are transporting in excess of 100 Mbps over multiple copper pair.

Ethernet over T1 bandwidth can also be improved by adding more copper pair. The process of combining the bandwidths of several T1 lines into one larger bandwidth is called bonding. EoT1 bonding can deliver up to 10 or 12 Mbps to both metropolitan and rural areas, providing the equipment is available.

Are you interested in an IP connection for your computer or converged voice and data networks? If so, get pricing and availability for Ethernet over T1 or Copper now to see how much bandwidth is available for your business locations.