EarthLink Offers Healthcare IT Resources

Healthcare automation is seen as a major cost reduction opportunity for doctor’s offices, clinics, hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Not all healthcare providers have the IT resources to modernize their operations to take advantage of new technology. They may even find it difficult to meet privacy regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). This is where a major network services provider like EarthLink Business can fill the void. As an example, check out this video on how EarthLink meets the needs of Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough, New Hampshire.



Like many healthcare facilities and other businesses, Monadnock has multiple connectivity requirements. In addition to the primary location with over 700 employees, there are four other satellite locations. They need both voice and data solutions.

In this case, the telephone system is powered by multiple PRI trunk lines, the satellite facilities are linked through an MPLS network and broadband Internet access is provided by a partial DS3 line.

EarthLink has a comprehensive portfolio of services that include basics, such as ISDN PRI telephone trunk lines and Internet access with speeds that range from 1.5 Mbps (T1 line) on up to 100 Mbps. Bonded T1 lines will take you from 1.5 to 12 Mbps. T3/DS3 covers the range of 15 to 45 Mbps and Ethernet offers speeds that range from 3 Mbps on up to 100 Mbps.

MPLS networks are proving ideal for linking multiple business locations. The Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology is designed to transport whatever protocol you are using from point to point or in a meshed multipoint arrangement. MPLS networks offer high bandwidth, low latency, and low jitter & packet loss characteristics. Unlike proprietary networks that you construct yourself using dedicated point to point lines, MPLS lets you quickly and easily add locations to your network. Best of all, the cost is considerably more attractive than alternative solutions.

Locations with their own in-house PBX phone systems have traditionally used analog business lines when only a few are needed and ISDN PRI digital trunks for a dozen or more outside lines. ISDN PRI is a cost saver for multiple line phone services and still the mainstay of business telephone systems. A newer technology that is providing a competitive solution is SIP Trunking. This is an IP transport technology that is most often associated with enterprise VoIP telephony. SIP trunks can be used with PBX, IP PBX and hosted PBX. Hosted solutions are becoming more popular because the burden of maintaining the switching hardware is handled by the service provider. As a user, you pay the by seat per month for your usage. You can also quickly and easily add phones to your system. Some providers even include new phones with their service plans.

Does your hospital, medical center, doctor’s office or other business have a need for IT services? Would you be interested in looking at competitive quotes or alternative solutions, included cloud hosted solutions? Get network service options and pricing now, for large, medium and small operations.

Texas Fiber Optic Network Expansion

There are big things afoot in the Lone Star State. In this case, it's big network expansions from partnerships and mergers. The result is more options and fiber network availability for businesses located in Texas.

Transtelco is a major competitive provider with a fiber network that stretches from Houston to Los Angeles and dips into Northern Mexico to pick up Monterrey, Chihuahua, Nogales, and Tijuana. The have expansion plans for both Mexico and Texas routes.

Within Texas, PAETEC, another major competitive provider, has considerable fiber assets serving Dallas, Austin and Houston, to name a few of their Texas POPs (Points of Presence). PAETEC now has offices in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and The Woodlands.

What’s afoot is a joint venture between PAETEC and Transtelco that has PAETEC building out Transtelco’s fiber leg connecting El Paso and Temple. With half ownership in this project, PAETEC gains additional SONET ring diversity for its network across the southern US and into Mexico. They also have access to offer voice, Internet and fixed wireless to agencies of the state government that use services of the State of Texas Department of Information Resources.

What makes this situation even more interesting is that PAETEC has been acquired by Windstream Communication, a competitive carrier serving the southeast and midwest US, including fiber runs into Dallas, as well as a network that extends into Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia. Windstream has major fiber connections planned into other states, plus existing data centers in Newton, Iowa, Brookfield, Wisconsin, Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida, Charlotte, Cary, and Raleigh North Carolina, Ephrata and State College, Pennsylvania and Boston, Massachusetts. Windstream’s existing fiber network spans some 60,000 route miles.

Windstream offers MPLS network services based on a resilient optical core to service companies with multiple business locations. Their network offers VPN (Virtual Private Network) with VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) connectivity. It’s a fully meshed network that allows regional sites to exchange traffic without having to depend on a central hub server. For companies with converged voice and data networks, Windstream offers Real-Time QoS that ensures voice packets receive top priority to keep them from getting slowed down or held up by less sensitive data packets.

Do you need fast and reliable access to the Internet? Windstream offers Ethernet Internet with symmetrical bandwidth up to 1 Gbps. This is a dedicated connection that offers consistency you won’t get in shared cable connections and bandwidth that far exceeds the capability of T1 lines and DS3 connections. Windstream's service level agreement guarantees 99.99% uptime to ensure availability.

Do you have a business presence in Texas with a need for better voice or data connectivity than you have now? Get competitive fiber optic bandwidth quotes from PAETEC, Windstream and other competitive carriers serving Texas, the southern states, or the entire United States, with optional connections to international destinations.




Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

OC-48 Pricing Reductions Make 2.5 Gbps Affordable

OC-48 bandwidth is a staple among regional Internet service providers and larger corporations. It forms the core or many fiber optic network backbones implemented as SONET rings over hundreds or even thousands of miles. Even with more availability than ever before, many businesses shy away from even considering this high bandwidth service in fear of the budget-busting sticker shock that they reasonably expect. It’s time to reconsider that decision.

OC-48 is one of the SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) standard service levels. These bandwidth levels pick up where T-carrier copper services leave off. DS3 or T3 lines provide 45 Mbps of transport. The equivalent OC or Optical Carrier level is OC-1 at 52 Mbps. OC-1 isn’t readily available as an actual line service. In practice the lowest level SONET fiber optic service is OC-3 at 155 Mbps. The next practical step up is OC-12 at 622 Mbps. In some areas you can get OC-24 at 1.25 Gbps, but a more popular level is OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. Beyond that is OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

What makes OC-48 so popular? Many incumbent and competitive carriers constructed their fiber optic networks around OC-48, although some of the largest have moved on to OC-192 and OC-768. OC-48 is widely used for tributaries from OC-192 backbone nodes. Some newer fiber networks are built upon IP cores, completely bypassing legacy SONET technology. Many more are running MPLS or Ethernet over SONET.

One reason for this is that the SONET core is already in place, including all the routing and switching equipment. Another is that SONET is a proven technology that is widely supported and designed for carrier-class services. For instance, most SONET rings are dual rings that offer protection from fiber cuts and equipment failures. In the event of an outage, switching from one ring to another is accomplished in less than 50 mSec.

Once a technology that carriers kept for themselves, OC-48 pricing has dropped so much over the years that it is now a popular connection for many businesses. This includes large hospital and medical center networks, video producers, content delivery networks, broadband Internet service providers, computer aided design firms, businesses with substantial e-commerce activities, popular websites, and heavy users of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is something of a two-edged sword. The advantages include fast scaling of services up and down as your needs change, high reliability, and the ability to empty local data centers to avoid ongoing capital and operating expenses. What might get lost in the initial zeal to outsource to the cloud is how you connect with your new virtual data center located hundreds or thousands of miles away. All of a sudden, WAN connections that were perfectly adequate when most of the IT servers were still on the corporate campus are now sluggish and unresponsive.

If you want to maintain or regain that snappy performance that comes with high speed low latency dedicated private line connections, you’ll need to upgrade your connections between your headquarters and your cloud services providers. OC-48 fiber optic bandwidth may be just the ticket. At two and a half times Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth, you’ll have the capacity you need to avoid network congestion. With a protected service and SLA (service level agreement), you’ll have the reliable service you need for critical business operations. Finally, with recent price reductions from competitive service providers, you can now afford a level of service that previously seemed out of reach.

Have the requirements of your business increased because of business automation, new technologies such as video transport, or a move to the cloud? This is a good time to get a new set of lease prices for both Carrier Ethernet and SONET fiber optic services. High bandwidth circuits, such as OC-48, are now more affordable than ever before.

Hosted VoIP Can Improve Telephone Reliability

Many mid-size and even large companies insist on maintaining their own in-house telephone systems in the belief that it’s the only way to ensure reliable communications. Is this really true, or just one of those long held beliefs that need to be re-examined?

There’s been a major game changer introduced into the telephone services industry recently. It’s the rise of hosted PBX or HPBX. You’ll also hear it called hosted VoIP or communications in the cloud. Like everything else “in the cloud,” this is truly a revolution in technology. In a decade or two, we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t always do it this way.

“Cloud, schmoud,” you say? I can see how you might feel that way, especially if you’ve been burned by a poor implementation of VoIP technology. VoIP isn’t a particular product or even standardized methodology. It’s a general class of voice communication based on packet switched network technology. VoIP runs the gamut from software running on a laptop computer at the coffee shop, to dongles that let you plug your telephone into a PC, to broadband phone that shares an Internet connection, all the way up to enterprise and even carrier level solutions that are indistinguishable from traditional phone systems to the caller.

What successful enterprise implementers of VoIP telephony know that others don’t realize is that you need a carefully engineered network from the telephone handset to the service provider to protect fragile voice packets from being crushed by more numerous and robust data packets. In most cases, that means stay off the Internet except when you absolutely have to in order to include a remote worker or someone traveling. One reason is that the Internet does not support Class of Service controls to ensure the integrity of voice packets. Other parameters, such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss and out of sequence packet arrivals are uncontrollable on the public Internet. All of these are readily managed on private lines, MPLS networks and SIP trunks.

With the connectivity issue solved, there is still the issue of reliability. Won’t an in-house hardware solution that’s been proven over years of operation be inherently more reliable than “something out there, somewhere?” Not when you realize that the “something” you are referring to is the latest high quality servers set up for redundant protection with multiple levels of backup power and complete environmental controls. Like everything else in the cloud, there is a lot of virtualization involved so that resources are available in depth and instantly scalable.

The hosted solutions provider absolutely must provide high quality service or they’ll go out of business. After all, this is either a major part of their business or all of it. They almost always have technical staff on duty 24/7 and keep up with maintenance activities. How about at your company?

This is where the superiority of in-house PBX starts to become suspect. First of all, is your system really that rock solid? Parts never fail? The power never glitches or goes completely off? You may have duplicated the security, environmental control and power backup of a SAS 70 Type II data center, especially if you need this facility for your IT equipment. On the other hand, if your PBX is simply sitting in a “telephone closet” or maintenance room where the phone and data lines come in, you may not be all that well protected against disasters.

How about the age of that machine? We know that computers go obsolete almost before they are unboxed. PBX phone systems aren’t quite that bad, but they do start to degrade as the years go by. At some point, it’s hard to find replacement parts or even someone knowledgeable to maintain the system and make repairs. New features are introduced into the telephony marketplace, but you can’t take advantage of them. Your system is just a bit too old to be upgraded. This is how obsolescence begins. Pretty soon, you’re patching together a dinosaur that should have been hit by a meteor years ago.

It is being recognized that hosted VoIP solutions can be as reliable and even more reliable than in-housed PBX telephone systems. You need to pick a quality supplier and install highly reliable network connections to gain the benefits of high reliability in the cloud. If you do that correctly, you’ll enjoy reliable communications, access to the latest productivity features, integration with mobile devices, and the cost savings of paying by the month only for what you need.

Has this discussion piqued your interest on how hosted solutions might be a better choice than what you have now? If so, get pricing and features for Hosted VoIP solutions that meet your particular requirements. See if you can’t get more value for the same or less cost than your current business telephone system.

Enterprise Communications Services To The Cloud

There’s a great migration underway. This is a technical migration, from the public switched telephone network and private branch exchanges to cloud based communications services. XO communications is a leader in cloud communication services. Here’s why they predict that in the next few years 60% of companies will move close to a third of their voice communications to the cloud...



If you would like a complementary consultation and competitive quotes for your enterprise communication needs, we can offer you prompt and courteous service through our affiliated Telarus product specialists.

So, is it time to rethink your approach to voice communications, such as business telephone? You know that the upgrades you want to make are going to cost a fortune in up-front capital at a time when big capital outlays are frowned upon. You could just let the whole thing go until the economy picks up steam and money flows like water. But...

Here’s the problem. You want and need the productivity improvements you can get with unified communications right now. You may also suspect that you are spending too much on operations and maintenance, and rightly so. The dilemma is that with traditional approaches you can’t afford to make the changes that will give you the available savings.

Now, here’s the solution. It’s called communications as a service. Instead of trying to be in the telephone business yourself, turn that over to experts in enterprise level VoIP over MPLS networks. That way, you can get all of your many business locations on the same network using the same equipment with the same connectivity. You can get niceties like HD voice and video, mobility integration, plus calling features you don’t have now. Best of all, you pay as you go with a predictable per-user monthly cost.

No need to stay mired in limbo. XO cloud communications and other competitive carriers offer migration paths where you can integrate what you have now while you gradually shift to the new cloud solution. Eventually, you just pull the plug on the old PBX and PSTN trunk lines when you no longer need them.

Does pay as you go sound like a better business model for these days than invest and wait years for a payback? If so, you owe it to yourself to take a few minutes and get a complementary consultation and competitive quotes for enterprise services in the cloud.

Get Your Building Fiber Lit For Free

There are some tremendous deals on fiber optic bandwidth these days. Many companies would dearly love to move up to Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps or even 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The one problem is that their building isn’t lit for fiber optic service yet. When they see the construction cost quote to bring in the fiber, the up-front cost is just too high in this economic environment. But, what if you could get your building fiber lit for free? Would that change your bandwidth plans?

It’s absolutely possible that you can upgrade to high speed fiber services without having to pay construction costs. The little known secret is that some competitive carriers see such an opportunity in the demand for higher bandwidth services that they are willing to put up money for construction costs themselves. One carrier is willing to build up to 1,500 feet of fiber if that’s what it takes to get you on their network.

Oh, but do you have to pay extra in monthly lease fees to get the free hookup? No way. In fact, you may be surprised at how much fiber lease costs have come down lately. If you haven’t gone out for quotes in a few years, you are dealing with pricing so obsolete that it’s a joke. You need to get a new set of competitive quotes right now.

Everything is pulling in the same direction now for fiber optic bandwidth. First, demand is increasing by leaps and bounds due to the increased use of video in business, including video conferencing. Business automation is making employees more productive than ever, but it comes with an increased need for bandwidth to connect to providers. Cloud services are adding additional pressure on WAN connections to provide response times similar to what you experience with a local data center.

We normally think that when something is in high demand, the price goes up not down. Just the opposite is happening in the network bandwidth market. Why? Increased demand has encouraged competitive carriers to build-out their regional, national and international fiber networks. Many have embraced new service options, such as MPLS networks and Carrier Ethernet. What every competitive carrier wants is more customers to connect to their massive core networks. That means getting more buildings on-net.

What on-net means is that your particular building is on the network of a particular fiber optic carrier. If you are on-net, that carrier has fiber strands coming into your building and terminating in equipment that the carrier provides. From there, they can connect you and other tenants in the building, if there are any, to whatever speed and format service you require.

Many carriers don’t want the aggravation of butting heads with competitors in the same building. Instead, they’ll try to find nearby buildings that aren’t already lit and get in there first. Once established, it’s easy for them to sell and keep customers. Fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited, so scaling services up and down is no trouble at all. Do you need to move up from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps? You might be able to make that happen in a matter of hours if you already have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed. Just call the carrier and tell them you want a speed increase. They can likely do that without having to change out any equipment at all.

It’s a real land-rush situation for competitive carriers, since something like 12% of business locations are already lit for fiber service. You are in the majority if you don’t already have fiber optic bandwidth. But if you are close enough to a carrier point of presence, you may be able to get those fiber services cheaper than you ever thought possible. Why not see what opportunities are available and then decide how much you can upgrade and still stay within your budget? Get instant online fiber optic prices for Carrier Ethernet from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps now. Other services will be quoted promptly, including construction costs if any. You may be in a better spot to get affordable fiber service than you ever thought possible.

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.

When More Bandwidth Doesn’t Help

You’re probably familiar with this scenario. You’ve had a T1 line or DS3 bandwidth circuit for years. Everything ran just fine until recently. Now, all of a sudden, the Internet just crawls and your new VoIP telephone system sounds like calls from the far side of the moon. Employees are peeved because they can’t get anything done. Customers are livid because they can’t even carry on a civil conversation over the phone. Management is getting hot under the collar. Better get more bandwidth on order, right?

Maybe. It’s entirely possible that you’ll call up your provider and double your dedicated Internet bandwidth only to find out that you still have the same problems and now you’re paying twice as much. Talk about adding insult to injury! What’s gone wrong here and what can you do to really fix it?

The problem is that we visualize broadband connections like water pipes. You can just see that traffic flowing smoothly through the pipe. Applications demand more capacity and the flow increases, just like opening a faucet wider. Obviously, the only way you’ll hit the limit on capacity is when you fully open all the faucets at once. Then each application, the lawn sprinkler, the shower, the dishwasher and the wash basin each get less than they would like.

The fix seems equally obvious. Just put in bigger pipes with higher capacity. The water meter will spin a lot faster, but now you can support a lot more users full-on and nobody will suffer a reduction in flow. The telecom equivalent of a bigger pipe is what is called in the industry a “bigger pipe.” That means a line with more Mbps or Gbps. The analogy is clear. Just order a bigger pipe and your troubles will be over. Or will they?

The snag in all of this is that network traffic isn’t homogenous like water. One water droplet may be just like the next. One Ethernet packet may be not at all like the next. Some applications, like file transfers, just brute force move packets from one place to another. Others, like video conferencing or VoIP telephony are highly sensitive to latency, jitter, lost packets and packets arriving out of sequence. If your network gets congested, the file transfer will work fine. It will just take a little longer. Get in the same situation with real-time applications and they’ll crumble in the battle for packet transfers.

So why not just increase bandwidth when business grows to the point where more users are trying to do more things simultaneously? It’s likely that at some point you’ll have to do just that. But also know that simply adding more capacity may not make a big difference. Why? It’s because some applications will take as much bandwidth as you give them regardless of what they really need. If you simply double the bandwidth, Web pages may load a little faster, files might move a little faster, but the telephone and video may still break up mid-conversation.

There probably is some line speed that is so fast that everything will work at the same time with no problems. That might be 10x or even 100x what you have now. You’ll pay a fortune just to have enough capacity at hand to support rare moments when everyone is on the phone and watching YouTube videos at the same time the system is doing full backups. Is that really necessary?

No. Not at all. What you really need is a way to prioritize traffic so that preference is given to real-time two-way streams that are extremely sensitive to network congestion. You need to establish CoS or Class of Service controls that carve out a certain capacity to meet the needs of your VoIP phone system and video conferencing system and then divvy up the rest among lower priority processes. You can go further to push time insensitive file transfers and backups into the background so that they won’t interfere with anyone working online.

That solution is called the converged network. It’s more than just plugging everything into the same LAN and WAN. You need Class of Service both on your LAN and on the WAN. Techniques for the LAN are well established. The WAN is another matter if you are using the Internet for access to your VoIP provider. The Internet strips off those CoS tags in the name of network neutrality. One solution is to use a SIP Trunk to connect to a single provider for VoIP and Internet broadband so that CoS can be maintained on that link. Another is to keep the broadband you have, but use a separate point to point connection to your VoIP provider.

MPLS networks can maintain CoS among multiple business locations. You may be using Internet VPN connections to make those multiple connections, but with limited success if voice or video are involved.

Another interesting option is the “intelligent bandwidth” approach being offered by Telnes, a major competitive carrier. They’ve developed a technique called IP Priority Class of Service to maintain CoS on an Internet circuit using managed routers. This recognizes that most of the congestion issues occur on the link between you and the core of the Internet. By cleaning up that connection, real time applications, such as hosted VoIP, can run much more smoothly that they will on uncontrolled Internet broadband services.

Are you suffering slowdowns, application breakage and poor telephone voice quality? You may need more bandwidth or you may just need better bandwidth management. Before you go out and spend a bundle to no avail, get a complementary telecom engineering consultation from Telnes and other competitive service providers and review your options. You may be able to get results for a fraction of what you thought you had to spend.

Multi-Carrier WAN MPLS Solution

Businesses that want to link their many far-flung locations have had several options available. They could set up their own private point to point lines, go with a Frame Relay network or sign up for MPLS network service. Which of these offers the best cost solution? Let’s have a look.

When companies and small and growing, the temptation is to grow the network along with the company. If there are only two locations, the logical move is to order a point to point T1 line or higher bandwidth service. This directly connects the new locations with dedicated private bandwidth. When another location is set up, add another private line back to headquarters. If you want the two remote locations to talk directly, you can add a third private line between them.

You can see how costs grow rather quickly when you try to create a mesh network using dedicated private lines. Pretty soon you have a rats nest of connections and a soaring telecom bill. What happens then is someone in IT decides that it makes more sense to have only one private line to each location and arrange them in a star network with headquarters at the center. The headquarters router will take care of directing traffic among all locations. This is better, but you are still paying more than necessary.

That conundrum is what led to the development of Frame Relay networks. The idea is that a shared WAN network is more cost effective than every company creating its own private WAN. The Frame Relay network is one of the original clouds. You simply connected to the network from each of your locations and long haul traffic was routed through the cloud. If a cloud is running correctly, you have no sense that there is other traffic on the network while you are using it.

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching takes the concept of Frame Relay and improves upon it. Frame Relay networks reached the height of their popularity in an era where bandwidth demands were generally lower and most traffic was data packets. MPLS is designed around fiber optic core networks with a regional or nationwide footprint. There are class of service tags included in the labels that encapsulate the user packets. These ensure that time sensitive applications like VoIP telephony or video conferencing get the special treatment they need to work successfully. As the name implies, MPLS can transport any protocol. Multiple customers can transport different protocols simultaneously and they won’t interfere.

Since MPLS networks can handle any protocol, have enormous bandwidth at their disposal and have inherent security because of the proprietary nature of the network technology, doesn’t it make perfect sense to connect to an MPLS network to link business locations?

Yes it does. Your best cost solution for a given performance level across more than two locations is likely to be an MPLS network solution. The one fly in the ointment is that any given MPLS network doesn’t necessarily go everywhere you want it to. You may be able to connect some of your locations to the network but not others. There are some massive MPLS networks that can connect nearly everywhere, but they can also command top dollar. Is there a better solution?

The approach that can give you the connectivity you need with at the best pricing is a multi-carrier or meshed MPLS network. It’s a network of networks. In other words, several MPLS networks are joined to cover all of your business locations at the best price point for each.

Where do you find this type of service? Obviously, contacting any particular carrier will only get you access to their MPLS network. If you want to interconnect them, you have the tricky issue of network to network interfacing. That’s a job better left to telecom network specialists. One company, AireSpring, has the expertise to make this happen and the carrier relationships to gain access.

Does your company need to interconnect multiple business locations? Telecom broker Telarus has access to the best rates on MPLS networks, including Meshed MPLS from AireSpring. Get availability and pricing for MPLS solutions. You are probably spending too much right now.

SIP over MPLS for Enterprise VoIP

SIP Trunking is widely popular for smaller businesses who can save on their monthly telecom bill by getting both their telephone and Internet broadband services on a single integrated line. SIP Trunking is also a cost saver for large corporate headquarters or call centers that need many outside phone lines and already have converged voice and data LANs. But what about the organization with multiple locations?

The answer may well be SIP over MPLS. You may already have an MPLS network in place for sharing data files between branch offices and headquarters. Cost tradeoffs almost always give the advantage to an MPLS network over a suite of point to point data lines of equivalent bandwidth. With MPLS, you only need a last mile connection to each of your locations. As the name implies, these are point to point pipes measuring just thousands of feet to the nearest central office. The major distance spans are handled by the fiber optic core of the MPLS network.

There are also security advantages with MPLS versus IP networking, such as the Internet. MPLS uses proprietary labels to direct traffic, not the IP header information that is often the target of malicious activity. The network is privately operated and not accessible by the general public. You need to be a contracted customer with defined locations and connections between them that are managed by the network operator.

What you may not realize is that MPLS networks can handle voice traffic as well as data. The name MPLS actually stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. The network can handle nearly any protocol and is perfect for packet switched services of all types. For larger organizations, MPLS provides the WAN connections you need to link a few or many converged voice and data networks.

Do you currently have data connections between your sites but stand-alone analog or PRI telephone lines at each? That works, but you are probably paying toll charges to call between offices. There’s no economy of scale if each facility is relatively small and in a different city or state than the others. By consolidating your telephony, data lines and perhaps broadband connectivity with a single provider you can likely realize a considerable cost savings while maintaining call quality and network speed.

The MPLS labels or tags do their magic by not only specifying packet destinations, but also class of service. This keeps data file transfers from damaging the much more fragile real-time demands of voice and video. If you have company wide VoIP now and conversations get distorted or calls drop when the network gets congested, traffic engineering is what you need. MPLS networks are engineered with committed rates for your services, as well as those of other network customers. That ensures that you have the bandwidth you purchase regardless of what anyone else is doing. Contrast that commitment with the best-effort information services, such as the Internet, where performance is all over the map.

With SIP over MPLS, your telephone calls within the company stay on-net and off the public switched telephone network. You don’t pay toll charges for office calls that stay on your network regardless of whether they are from desks twenty feet apart or branch offices thousands of miles apart. It’s even possible to include international locations on the same MPLS network to truly integrate your company communications. When calls go off-net to outside landlines or mobile phones, those terminations are handled by your SIP Trunking service provider. Since the network is converged, there is no need for a separate telephone network and your support needs may also be reduced.

Does your organization have multiple locations that could be more efficiently run by a voice and data MPLS network? Get pricing for MPLS Network Services quickly and easily to compare with your current bills.

Managed Security Moves To The Cloud

When cloud services are discussed, it’s most often Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, or Software as a Service. You can now add Security as a Service to the list. Integra is offering a suite of Cloud Security Services, starting with Cloud Firewall Service.

Managed security is attractive to many companies that don’t have full time IT staff or don’t want to get into the acquisition and maintenance of their own security appliances. Instead, they buy this service by the month with the provider installing a security device on the premises. Security in the cloud is a bit different. Not only do you not have to make the capital investment in security hardware or maintain it, but the hardware is invisible to you as well.

Integra Telecom is uniquely positioned to provide this type of cloud security because they are both a facilities based telecom carrier as well as a cloud services provider. Most providers are in one business or the other. The advantage of this dual role becomes apparent when you see just how the security is being accomplished. Integra builds a firewall between the public Internet and your network. What’s different is that they do this off in the cloud, not at the edge of your LAN. A major advantage is that you can also include your VPN or VPNs and MPLS network connections between business locations behind that firewall.

The actual security component is a Palo Alto Networks Enterprise Firewall. Their solution is a rack mounted appliance that supports firewall throughput up to 10 Gbps with up to 4,000,000 sessions and 20,000 SSL VPN users. You could buy one of these and install it in your own data center, but you can gain the benefit without the management headaches by letting Integra do this for you in their cloud.

Integra’s Cloud Firewall Service goes beyond mere port blocking for network protection. Their solution is application aware so it can block unauthorized traffic based on policies for a particular application. Application visibility, control and reporting is part of the standard level of service designed for smaller organizations. The mid-level “plus” service adds intrusion detection and protection, URL filtering, policy customization, report customization, and an optional VPN client for remote users. The premium level of Cloud Firewall Service adds network anti-virus and anti-spyware protection along with file and data content filtering.

Like many cloud services, this firewall service offers the opportunity to increase the protection of your network while reducing the total cost of ownership. Is it any wonder that the cloud is moving in to envelop just about every business? There are also advantages for smaller companies to assure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements without having to staff up a separate security department.

When considering managed security, it is well worth your while to take a systems approach that treats network security as tightly integrated with public and private network connections. Integra is well versed and equipped to provide connectivity as simple as dedicated Internet access and complex as private multi-site converged voice, video and data networks.

Could your business benefit from managed network security in the cloud? Why not get competitive pricing and options for cloud services that make sense for the requirements of your particular organization? Then see if doing it yourself still makes more sense.

MPLS Point to Point Alternative

The traditional way to connect two business locations to send files back and forth is with a point to point data connection. T1 lines have been perfect for this at modest bandwidth levels. DS3 and OCx SONET services work the same way when higher speeds are needed. Ethernet line service is the latest entry into the Point to Point bandwidth space. But have you considered MPLS networks as your best value for the money?

MPLS may seem like an odd choice, since MPLS networks are really targeted for multi-point connectivity in place of older technologies like Frame Relay. MPLS networks are organized as clouds with multiple access points over the service footprint. If you have a dozen or a hundred locations to network, an MPLS solution is likely the best solution by a mile. Yet, there’s no reason you can’t just specify connecting point A to point B as your only connection.

The one possible downside might be cost. Whether a dedicated point to point line service or an MPLS network service makes sense for any given application depends a lot on the distance between locations and whether you intend to order more than one line. Why multiple lines? While some businesses have only two locations to connect, many others have three or more. The most expensive way to make multiple connections is by running point to point lines from each location to the others. A more cost effective approach is to set up a star network with the routing equipment at headquarters and point to point lines fanning out from there to each satellite location. The least cost most flexible solution is often to simply connect every location to a regional or national MPLS network and specify the connectivity within the cloud.

T1 point to point lines became popular because they are relatively inexpensive and offer the security and performance of a dedicated line. You have exclusive use of the 1.5 Mbps bandwidth in both directions. Since the line is “nailed up” to interconnect two locations, security is high. It’s difficult to impossible for snoops and troublemakers to gain access to your private line.

One disadvantage of using dedicated T1 lines is that you are limited to 1.5 Mbps per line, although you can often bond T1 lines together to multiply the bandwidth up to a maximum of 10 or 12 Mbps. Another drawback is that there is no economy of scale. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. They also tend to be priced by distance. A point to point line in town costs much less than a connection from coast to coast. If you need to cross an ocean or international border the cost goes up significantly.

Everything that has been said about T1 lines also goes for higher bandwidth options, such as DS3, OC3, and so on. The cost increases along with bandwidth. Ethernet over Copper or Ethernet over Fiber offers higher bandwidth at lower prices, but is also a dedicated line service. It’s the protocol that’s different between T1 or SONET and Ethernet services.

MPLS networks have a different cost model. The network is based on a privately owned high speed national or international fiber optic network. None of the core network is dedicated to a single customer. It is intended to be shared among many customers to amortize the cost. As such, the cost of a point to point or multipoint connection is more attractive than for a dedicated line service. In-town or close by, the dedicated line may be the cheaper solution. But for locations spaced thousands of miles apart or overseas, MPLS networks have the advantage.

What makes MPLS networks a good substitute for dedicated point to point lines is that the network offers security and guaranteed performance as well as a cost savings. The proprietary nature of the label switching protocol and the fact that access is limited to customers of the network make security much higher than on a public network like the Internet. The network operators establish the virtual paths through the network on a case by case basis. You may be sharing the fiber strands, but you can’t access another customer’s data and they can’t see yours.

Do you have a requirement to link business locations? Be sure to get MPLS network service pricing as well as dedicated line pricing for even a two location hookup to make sure you have the best deal.

What Is MPLS?

You hear a lot about MPLS networks as a means of linking multiple business locations. But just what is MPLS and why it is better than other network topologies?

MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. It’s a completely different technology from what you may be familiar with in the way of either circuit switched or packet switched networks. You can transport IP traffic on an MPLS network but it does not use IP routing.

The beauty of MPLS networks is that they can transport nearly any protocol without having to do any protocol conversions to fit into the structure of the network. MPLS networks also offer a high degree of security because of their unique technology and because they are privately run networks available only to their customers. Quality of service is designed-in, which makes MPLS a good fit with enterprise VoIP and other latency sensitive applications.

Here’s a brief description of how MPLS works. You connect to the network “cloud” through a special device called a label edge router or LER. Since you are entering, this LER is an ingress router. At ingress, your packets are each encapsulated by adding a MPLS label to them. That label defines a FEC or forwarding equivalence class that determines where the packet is to be sent. As packets traverse the network, Label switching routers (LSR) look only at the label and not the internals of the packet to determine how to route them. At the destination, the labels are removed by a LER that functions as an egress router. The packet now exits the network looking exactly as it did upon entering.

It’s the use of the labels that makes MPLS unique and inherently more secure than, say, the Internet. Someone who found a way to snoop on the data traversing the MPLS network would be completely flummoxed since they would not have knowledge of labels used on that particular network. It’s far fetched that you’d have access to MPLS network data at all, since it does not traverse public networks. For this reason, MPLS networks are also called MPLS VPN. If you want even more security than this, you can encrypt your packets as well as transport them on an MPLS VPN.

MPLS networks support quality of service through the label technology and careful network engineering. The labels have a 3 bit traffic class field that designates quality of service, priority and explicit congestion notification. The network operator has the responsibility of ensuring there is adequate bandwidth to accommodate all customers. MPLS networks are designed for mesh networking, although they can also be set up as point to point connections to link two locations only.

With the move to Carrier Ethernet, MPLS networks are a natural for interconnecting large numbers of sites on a national or even international basis. Each site needs an access connection, which can be Ethernet over Copper or Ethernet over Fiber, depending on bandwidth requirements. The MPLS network will transport the Ethernet packets without changing them. This way you have an end to end Ethernet network without having to maintain a long haul network yourself. The transparency of MPLS lets you establish layer 2 switched connections if you desire them.

Economy of scale makes MPLS networks very cost effective for inter-state or international connections. You’ll have the quality of service you expect with dedicated line services along with the flexibility of a “cloud” that can accommodate additional site connections or increased bandwidth requirements easily.

Is a MPLS solution right for your organization? If you have multiple locations that need to be connected regardless of the protocol or application, you’ll want to get MPLS network services pricing for your particular needs.



Note: MPLS network diagram courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

MPLS VPLS Offers Virtual Private LAN Service

Nearly every business has its own LAN or Local Area Network based on some combination of wired and wireless Ethernet. For businesses with a single office, everything is self-contained other than a single broadband connection to the Internet. What about businesses with many locations that include branch offices, franchises, warehouses, factories and data centers? Each of those locations also has its own self-contained LAN. The question is how to best connect them together.

There are all sorts of schemes used to provide inter-office connectivity, including using the Internet as a VPN or Virtual Private Network. Other companies, seeking more security or higher performance have created their own private networks using dedicated private lines from each location back to headquarters. This is an elegant, but both expensive and management intensive solution. Is there anything better?

The introduction of MPLS networks created the opportunity for companies to get out of the proprietary network business and turn that traffic over to a privately run network that could interconnect their many locations in a secure and high performance fashion. There’s a substantial cost savings involved because MPLS networks aren’t dedicated to the traffic of only one customer. The cost of the network is amortized over the entire customer base, reducing the cost for each.

Isn’t this the same as using the Internet to communicate? Not by a long shot. The Internet is a public resource that allows easy access to anyone and everyone with the modest price of a connection. There are no performance or security guarantees. Even so, for connection to the general public, the Internet is a terrific bargain. It’s just that you may not want your internal company communications on such a public network.

MPLS networks have inherently better security because they don’t use IP routing in their core. Instead they use a proprietary system called label switching that determines how packets get from one location to another. It’s all very deterministic and programmed by the network operator to ensure that each company’s data is visible only to that company. Resources are managed to ensure a committed level of bandwidth and technical characteristics such as latency, jitter and packet loss.

It sounds like MPLS networks are ideal for interconnecting business locations. In fact, MPLS networking has been growing rapidly and now includes the ability to connect to sites nationwide and even internationally. The quality of service controls make it particularly well suited to support latency sensitive applications such as VoIP telephony and teleconferencing.

VPLS is a particular service offered by MPLS networks. It stands for Virtual Private LAN Service. Like any MPLS network, it interconnects two or more locations anywhere served by the network. But VPLS has some unique characteristics. It’s not just a mechanism to transport traffic. It’s a system that interconnects multiple LANs as if they were all part of a single bridged LAN. In other words, two offices on opposites coasts are just as close on the network as if they were right down the hall from each other.

With VPLS, companies can truly create virtual organizations that are co-located on the network if not physically. There are a couple of technical requirements that must be met to do this. The virtual LAN depends on everything being connected through layer 2 switching rather than layer 3 routing. That means you’ll need Ethernet connections to the MPLS network. These can be Ethernet over Copper, Fiber, Fixed Wireless, or DS1 (T1) connections as appropriate. VPLS arrangements are also meshed by nature. They operate on an any-to-any basis, just like you’d expect on a LAN.

Does a VPLS network sound like what you need to interconnect your business locations? If so, get prices and availability on MPLS VPLS Ethernet Virtual Private LAN Service for as many locations as you need to support.

More MPLS For MPLS

XO Communications, a major provider of Multi-Protocol Label Switching network services, is expanding network services in Minneapolis (MPLS), MN.

The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area will benefit from a 190 route mile expansion of the XO metro network into the northern and eastern suburbs of Anoka, Blain, Crystal, Fridley, Maplewood, New Brighton and Shoreveiw in the Minnesota Twin Cities. In addition to more points of presence, XO is deploying its Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology more broadly to make this scalable, high speed bandwidth service available to more businesses.

XO has been aggressively building out its 19,000 mile nationwide fiber optic network and promoting some of the hottest communications services, including Ethernet over Fiber (EoF), Ethernet over Copper, MPLS IP-VPN, Ethernet VPLS, Cloud Communications, Hosted VoIP and SIP Trunking solutions. Their capability includes speeds up to 40 Gbps to support the most demanding enterprise applications.

MPLS networks and Ethernet over Copper offer an especially cost effective way for businesses to link multiple branch offices, warehouses, retail outlets and headquarters operations within metropolitan areas and even nationwide. MPLS provides point to point or mesh networking with inherent security. EoC offers fast access over already installed wiring.

MPLS IP VPN networks are built on a technology quite different from what’s used on the Internet. The Internet is all about a public network with net neutrality, ease of access for all, and robust routing to work around equipment and line failures. Security is pretty much “bring your own.” MPLS networks are designed for limited access, quality of service controls and careful engineering of parameters such as latency, packet loss and jitter. Security is a feature of limited access and proprietary switching technology that makes outside intrusions much more difficult.

While the Internet is a wonderful resource for low cost connectivity from anywhere to just about anywhere else, it can fall short of the performance required for latency sensitive applications such as enterprise VoIP, video conferencing, financial trading, and mission critical business processes. XO’s MPLS network is fully managed to provide the required bandwidth and class of service needed to transport voice, data, video and converged network services.

Where Ethernet over Copper shines is in local point to point data links or last mile access to MPLS networks. Carrier Ethernet services like EoC and EoF provide a simple standardized Ethernet interface to company networks. Ethernet services tend to be more scalable than T-Carrier or SONET telecom connections, giving you more bandwidth options and faster provisioning on upgrades. Ethernet over Copper has the advantage of being able to be brought in on existing copper pair telco wiring at speeds from 2 to 20 Mbps. Finally, Ethernet connections are more often than not considerably less expensive that equivalent traditional bandwidth services.

Are you a Minneapolis-St. Paul area company, or a business located anywhere else, looking for a bandwidth upgrade or better pricing on the service levels you have now? If so, have a look at competitive pricing and availability of Ethernet and MPLS IP VPN network services. There are major savings to be had right now.



Note: Photo of downtown Minneapolis courtesy of Susan Lesch on Wikimedia Commons

Why Managed IT Services Are So Popular

There’s been a profound shift in the way information technology services are implemented. What’s happened recently is that service providers have entered the realm of managed iT services en masse. Some of this has been a direct result of the rise of cloud computing. Other offerings have been a recognition that both staffing and capital are much more restricted than ever before.

Call it the business environment wrought by the Great Recession or call it a paradigm shift in technology. The upshot is that companies are taking a much closer look at procuring more and more of their IT services through colocation, cloud computing, or managed network services.

Just what makes managed IT services so attractive? To some, it’s a way to put the monkey on somebody else’s back. To others, outsourcing wins the make versus buy cost tradeoff. For many other business, there is so much volatility in the economy that it just makes sense to pay as you go.

Cloud computing fits the pay as you go model perfectly. You know that running your own data center involves buying lots of equipment, installing it in racks located within an environmentally controlled room, and then managing a continuous stream of patches, upgrades and trouble tickets. It’s also a balancing act. If you buy too little in the way of processing or bandwidth, you run the risk of being unable to serve an unexpected surge of customer orders. Buy too much and it sits there unused, but costing just the same.

When you “rent” in the cloud, you have an almost unlimited pool of processing power, storage and customer bandwidth to draw from. There is an expert staff that keeps everything running smoothly 24/7 without your involvement at all. Best of all, you pay for what you need while you need it. Scaling up or down can be done rapidly. There’s less pressure to correctly predict short term business activity when you can adjust on the fly as needed.

Hosted business telephone is another huge growth area for managed IT services. It’s come about for the same reasons that pushed cloud computing in to the limelight. Any business that needs more than a few handsets and outside lines finds itself becoming a small independent phone company. The cost of a PBX system to manage all the in-house and outside connections can run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. You traditionally connect it to all those desk phones through its own network and then have staff to manage the moves, adds and changes.

Once enterprise VoIP became feasible using converged voice and data networks, the dedicated phone network was no longer needed. The IT staff could manage the phone equipment too. But why pay for equipment at all? Just extend your LAN with a SIP trunk to a managed service provider and that expensive central switch, the staff needed to keep it running and all the outside phone trunks become something you can rent by the month.

Do you have a dedicated remote data center for backup storage and disaster recovery? It’s a form of expensive insurance you can’t do without unless there’s an equivalent alternative. That alternative is encrypted cloud storage. You have the protection against outages without having to buy and maintain the asset that gives you that protection.

IT departments have also been expected to manage WAN bandwidth, even to the extent of creating their own MAN and WAN networks using dedicated point to point lines. All that grief goes away when you use managed Ethernet and MPLS network services. The service provider has the responsibility of keeping the packets flowing, even in the middle of the night.

Is your company ready to consider managed IT services as an alternative to doing it all yourself? Perhaps you just want to shop for the best deals on these managed services. Either way, get availability and pricing for competitive Managed IT Services now and see how much you can save.

Metro Ethernet MPLS Combo

Two of the hottest networking technologies now are Metro Ethernet and MPLS networks. We normally think of using one or the other. But what advantages are gained when you combine the two?

Metro Ethernet is the familiar Ethernet protocol that we’ve come to know and love on our LAN networks. It’s not exactly the same, because it needs to be adapted to work over longer distances than typical building and campus runs.

This, and other service enhancements, have been standardized by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), an industry group comprised of over 170 companies and more than 75 service providers. The MEF has defined five attributes that distinguish what they call Carrier Ethernet from the familiar LAN based Ethernet. These are standardized services, scalability, reliability, service management and quality of service.

What carriers get is a set of certified network elements that work to connect users on a local or worldwide basis. They also have services that can be transported over whatever physical networks they have available, including legacy TDM networks originally designed for telephony.

Metro Ethernet is Carrier Ethernet implemented within a city or metropolitan area. Two of the popular standardized services are Ethernet Line Service, a point to point connection, and Ethernet LAN Service, a multipoint connection. Companies use Metro Ethernet to link branch office buildings, factories, warehouses, data centers and other locations in the area.

Ethernet can also be used as a last mile access connection to larger private networks or the public Internet. These links have traditionally been T1 lines, DS3 connections, or SONET/SDH fiber optic services. Ethernet is growing in popularity as a network access service because it is lower in cost and more scalable than legacy telecom services.

At the same time that Carrier Ethernet has soared in popularity, MPLS networks have seen a similar growth in demand. Most networks have a defined protocol that they run. This can be TDM, IP, Frame Relay, or something else. The beauty of MPLS networks is that they are designed to support all protocols. Hence, the name Multi-Protocol Label Switching. The label switching part has to do with a tagging system that is used to encapsulate and route packets while they are on the network. Since the MPLS network doesn’t need to use the internal packet structure for routing, it doesn’t matter what those labels are attached to.

Most new large scale networks are based on MPLS. It doesn’t matter what’s running as the core network. It might be IP. It might be SONET. What the user sees is a privately run network that can securely transport voice, data, video or converged network traffic within a city, between cities or around the world. MPLS networks have all but completely replaced the older Frame Relay networks that were once used to link computers over wide areas.

What you probably have guessed is that Ethernet and MPLS are very compatible. Many carriers have nationwide or international MPLS network service footprints. You can combine Ethernet access with a large MPLS network and create a very cost effective way to link your geographically diverse business locations.

Large scale Carrier Ethernet networks are also on the ascendency. A new interconnection standard called ENNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface connects Carrier Ethernet service providers so they can share traffic and effectively increase their service footprints. The underlying transport networks may or may not be MPLS networks themselves.

What’s combination of Ethernet and MPLS offers the highest performance at the lowest cost for your applications? There are network consultants available right now to provide you with Metro Ethernet and MPLS service options and pricing at no charge for serious business and organizational users.

WAN Network Design Options

It’s commonly assumed that the LAN (Local Area Network) and the WAN (Wide Area Network) are completely different animals. You need completely different network design philosophies for each... or do you?

The abyss between WAN and LAN became established by they way they came into being. LAN networks are owned by individuals, businesses and organizations and are based on packet switching. At one time, there were competing topographies such as ring, star and buss. Now it’s all Ethernet on the LAN, with some specialized networks used for such things as disk storage. Most networks are based on twisted pair copper, fiber optic cable, or some combination of the two.

WAN standards grew out of the telephone industry, which has a monopoly on twisted pair telco lines used for both voice and data. Until recently fiber optic networks were also primarily owned by or at least developed to telephone company SONET/SDH standards.

Clearly, there was a technological disconnect between packet switched LAN technology and circuit switched WAN technology. That’s not so much the case anymore, but it is true that you need to do a protocol conversion to connect point to point or to the Internet using telco services such as T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth or OC3 fiber optic connections. Both the circuitry and software needed for WAN network interface are off the shelf items. You simply by a T1 interface card for your router if you want to plug in a T1 line.

What this means is that you can generally mix and match WAN network technologies as long as you have the proper interfaces. T1 line prices have plunged in recent years, making them the entry level WAN option of choice. A T1 line can be used to provide a dedicated broadband connection to the Internet or a direct point to point connection between two business locations. Some companies build customized WAN networks by connecting each branch office back to headquarters using T1 lines to form a star network. The router at headquarters manages traffic between all locations.

What’s new in WAN networking is the rise of Carrier Ethernet and MPLS networks. These are very compatible technologies and can be used together or separately. Carrier Ethernet is a native packet switched technology that avoids LAN/WAN interface issues. You can replace point to point T1 lines with Ethernet line services. Ethernet can also be used to provide a last mile connection to the Internet. Unlike T1, there is an Ethernet LAN service that can be used to connect multiple locations together in a mesh network. Ethernet LAN is a direct replacement for private WAN networks based on T1 lines or higher bandwidth services.

MPLS networks provide a many to many WAN networking solution. MPLS is a protocol that can transport nearly any other protocol in a cloud network. You see T1 lines being used for network access. Ethernet service is also used for last mile network access to the same MPLS networks.

What Carrier Ethernet and MPLS networks offer compared to their telco WAN predecessors is a cost savings and the ability to get out from having to manage the WAN yourself. You can treat Ethernet LAN or MPLS network services as a true cloud that provides the bandwidth, latency and class of service controls you need for converged network operations. Competitive carriers own their core networks completely independent of the telephone companies. In major metropolitan areas, they also provide fiber optic access connections at considerable cost savings over legacy solutions.

What are the best WAN network design options for your company? Why not compare several competing architectures and see which offers the best cost savings for the performance required? Check WAN network solution prices and availability now.



Note: Photo of telecom equipment racks courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.