Dedicated Bandwidth vs Cable

There are a couple of good but quite different approaches to business Internet connectivity. One is dedicated bandwidth, as exemplified by T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper. The other is Cable broadband. Let’s take a look at what each has to offer and how you would pick the right service for your business.

Small and medium size businesses that pick dedicated bandwidth services do so either because there is no shared bandwidth service readily available or because they value the consistency and service level agreements provided by the dedicated telecom providers. Companies that choose Cable broadband do so because they get a lot of bandwidth for a relatively small price. Cable BB is an established service that has been proven in years of service to residential and business users. The service availability is generally quite good, especially during business hours, and the low prices may be more important than service guarantees.

It’s important to note the definition of the term “dedicated” in this context. It doesn’t mean working extra hard like, say, a dedicated employee. What dedicated means is that a certain amount of bandwidth is reserved or dedicated to your exclusive use. If you order a T1 line, you can count on having 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download capability available at all times. There is no such thing as overage charges or fair use policies. You can load that T1 line up to the limit and run it that way all month. You’ll be charged the same as if you lightly used the service during business hours and let it idle overnight.

Cable broadband is sold on a different basis. First of all, the bandwidth is shared not dedicated. You’ll notice that Cable bandwidth is specified as “up to” 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and so on. At any given moment you may experience the full bandwidth or a small fraction of it. Why? It’s the sharing involved. What Cable companies do is lease large dedicated bandwidth circuits and then divvy that bandwidth up among their subscribers. The chunk allocated to your area may be shared by dozens or hundreds of other users. Whether or not that makes a difference depends on what you are doing on the Internet and what others on the same service are doing.

Cable broadband is designed to match the expected activities of the typical Internet user. You know that when you are looking something up online, you first query a search engine. Then you read through the first page or two of listings deciding on what site to visit. Finally, you select a site and it downloads in your browser. You may quickly go to visit another page on that site or you may spend a minute or two reading what’s on the screen.

Notice that what you were doing was sending out commands from your keyboard, waiting for a page download and then not accessing the Internet at all while you perused the material. That’s why shared bandwidth works. Not everyone is going to be typing on their keyboard or in the midst of a file download simultaneously. While you are reading, someone else can be downloading and vice versa.

This is also the reason why asymmetrical bandwidth works so well for Internet access. Asymmetrical means that upload and download speeds are vastly different. You may order 30 Mbps download with 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps upload and be perfectly satisfied. It only takes a small amount of data from the keyboard to trigger much larger data packages in the form of websites or videos to download.

Dedicated bandwidth services like T1, DS3, EoC, EoF and SONET fiber optic tend to be symmetrical. The upload and download speeds are the same. This is particularly valuable if you are communicating between organizations, sending files back and forth, uploading to a remote server or backing up files. In these cases, upload capacity counts.

The other service that works much better over dedicated rather than shared bandwidth is VoIP telephony. In fact, you are much better off connecting directly to your VoIP service provider with a dedicated T1 line or SIP trunk than using the Internet at all. The Internet offers no class of service controls so your sensitive voice packets can easily get pushed around by someone else’s data packets. That situation is even worse on shared bandwidth access services where your bandwidth varies all over the place.

Is your business in need of Internet access, point to point connections or multi-location connectivity? Check prices on dedicated and shared bandwidth options and get complementary expert advice on what services make the most sense for your business requirements.

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.

Hosted VoIP Solutions Include New Phones

When we think of cloud services, it’s fairly easy to imagine the server racks down the hall being replaced by a much larger set somewhere out there. Similarly, it’s easy to see that the PBX in the telecom room disappears one day to be replaced by a much larger hosted PBX system in the cloud. But what about all those phone wires that used to plug into the PBX FSX and FSO ports? What do they plug into now?

They need to do what the network connections do. Moving data servers outside is made easier by connecting the LAN to an edge router that has a high capacity WAN line to your cloud service provider. When you outsource the PBX, the same thing needs to happen. In this case, the connection is called a SIP Trunk. Yes, it’s possible to terminate the SIP trunk into a myriad of analog phone ports so you can just plug in the phones you now have and keep going as if nothing has changed. But if you do that, you’ll miss out on one of the big advantages of upgrading to Hosted PBX service. That’s all the special features enterprise VoIP has to offer.

A big cost saver with VoIP, especially for medium and large organizations, is the consolidation of the separate phone and computer networks into one converged voice and data network. The phones are now like computer peripherals. There’s an RJ-45 jack on the back that connects to the network just like a PC. The phone has its own MAC address. You can move it around on the network and still have it ring at the same phone number. Forget rewiring or reprogramming like you have to do with standard phones when you make changes.

Analog phones can be made to work like IP phones by using an adaptor box called an ATA (Analog Telephone Adaptor). This is something of a kludge because the phone still has only the rudimentary features it had before. That’s why the ATA approach is only used for residential, home office and very small business situations. For every other application, the right thing to do is bite the bullet and move up to IP phones, also called SIP phones. These are telephones designed to run on the converged network and make use of productivity features you can get with networked telephony.

If you are designing your own in-house enterprise grade VoIP telephone system, you’ll need to budget for new phones as well as the IP PBX equipment. Count up the number of desks and wall phones, multiply by the cost of each IP Phone at several hundred dollars per, and your eyes may pop out at the total investment required. You can put together a capital investment plan and go face the bankers or take the alternative approach of pay-as-you-go.

Who let’s you pay by the month for your complete telephone service? Hosted PBX providers, that’s who. The pay for usage model is what’s making cloud computing such a hot service these days. There’s no reason telephony can’t be put on the same basis. The one variable is the telephone sets that remain at your business, not in the cloud. You can buy those, of course, or you can have the lease cost included in your per-seat pricing for the system. That way you get brand new sophisticated desk phones that are guaranteed to be compatible with the hosted phone service. You also have one provider to deal with for everything. If you’ve ever had to referee between phone set manufacturers and carriers blaming each other for something not working, you’ll recognize the advantage of having “one neck to wring.”

Would you like to avoid the never-ending capital appropriation and procurement cycle in favor of just paying for what you need as you need it? Hosted VoIP may be the way to go for your business. Get competitive quotes and features for hosted VoIP telephone systems and compare with the what you have now.

Where Hosted PBX Solutions Save

Business telephone systems range from the very simple with a few phones and a few lines to complex private branch exchanges that support multiple sites. The new approach is a hosted PBX that makes things simple again. But do hosted PBX solutions really save anything and can they maintain voice quality?

With the simplest arrangement of a single landline phone connected to the local phone company, there really isn’t much to manage. You pay so much per month for “dial tone” that makes your phone work and gives you typically unlimited local calling. You have the option to switch to a different provider for long distance service or use a dial-around service for international calling. These are options to save you on the per minute calling rates.

The basic analog or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone service seems simple because all the complexity is at the other end of the wire. What you don’t see or have to deal with is the intricacies of connecting your line to any of billions worldwide or to even more billions of wireless callers. If you have, say, 3 business locations with 1 phone each, they talk to each other by dialing up the desired location just like any other phone number.

Businesses found out just how complex the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) was when they got big enough to have lots of desk phones and a dozen or more outside lines. What many companies did was to buy their own telephone switching system called a PBX (Private Branch Exchange.) The advantage of having your own PBX system is that calls within the company stay on your own wiring and you don’t have to pay the telephone company to connect them. That includes more complex PBX arrangements with digital tie lines that connect multiple locations in a private network. Once again, the motivation is to keep as many calls as possible off the public network to avoid “toll” charges.

Many companies have rued the day the got into the telephone business. PBX systems are expensive to buy and need constant updates as employees move within the company. There is also maintenance activity for both the PBX and its telephone network wiring.

Hosted PBX is a fairly new service that offers to offload the expense of in-house phone systems. It only became possible when most companies installed Local Area Networks for their computers and the price of private digital lines became affordable. The enabling technology is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In this case, Internet refers to the technology standard and not necessarily use of the public Internet.

Hosted PBX refers to using a large PBX telephone system that is located or hosted by a third-party service provider. This PBX is big enough to handle the telephone traffic of many different companies to gain an economy of scale. In a way, this is similar to going back to the days where each phone was individually connected to a local telephone company that took care of call switching.

So, where does the cost savings come from? Network consolidation is one area. Both telephones and computers run on a single converged voice and data network. There are no separate telephone wires. This network is extended to the hosted PBX provider using a private digital line called a SIP trunk. You are not tied to a particular service provider. There are many competing hosted PBX solutions and that competition is another way that cost savings can be offered.

The private SIP trunk helps to maintain high voice quality because it provides the characteristics of low latency, jitter, packet loss and congestion, along with quality of service mechanisms that keep data packets from interfering with voice packets. You can also buy Internet based hosted PBX services at lower costs, but the vagaries of the public Internet can introduce distortion and clipping in the conversations.

Do hosted PBX solutions offer a real cost savings for your company? It depends on how many seats you have, what features you want and what your existing system is costing you. If you are close to replacing an aging PBX or one that has run out of capacity, the economics highly favor hosted solutions. To decide for yourself, get competitive pricing on hosted PBX solutions for business. It may come down to whether you want to pay as you go versus investing in your own in-house phone system.

What is a PRI in VoIP?

We tend to think of VoIP as a “new generation” phone service based on IP technology unrelated to the historical public switched telephone network. Well there’s some truth in that, but no matter what you implement you’ll still be dealing with the good old PSTN. The bigger your company or organization, the more “outside” phone lines you’ll need. You should take a close look at ISDN PRI to make the connection to all the phones that are not part of your enterprise VoIP telephone system.

What is a PRI? It stands for Primary Rate Interface. That’s telephony talk for a particular standard related to another telephone industry term, ISDN. ISDN is the Integrated Services Digital Network. There’s a history to the development of ISDN that relates to the once lofty ambition of replacing all analog home and business phone lines with digital versions. You may not have heard of this, as it fizzled when broadband Internet came along and usurped the data role intended for ISDN. Even so, the business version persists and is more popular now than ever. That’s what’s called PRI or ISDN PRI or even T1 PRI.

Why T1 PRI? It’s because ISDN PRI is physically transported on a T1 line. T1 is another telephone industry standard widely used in business for dedicated Internet and point to point data connections. T1 lines have the advantages of being provisioned on copper wires so you don’t need fiber optics installed. They can be extended to nearly any distance, are highly reliable and reasonably priced. The pricing has gotten really attractive lately due to all the competition in the industry. With all this going for it, T1 makes a great choice to carry PRI.

What’s different between a regular T1 line and a T1 PRI line? The line speeds and voltages are the same. What differentiates a PRI is how it is organized. Instead of a big chunk of bandwidth, ISDN PRI is set up as 23 channels that each represent one digital telephone line. A 24th channel is used for signaling and data such as Caller ID. It’s an upgrade to an older T1 telephone standard that was set up as 24 phone channels and no Caller ID.

The beauty of bringing in an ISDN PRI line or “trunk”, as it is called, is that you get 23 outside phone lines coming in on a single digital line. It’s a lot more compact and is almost always cheaper, usually a lot cheaper, than dealing with 24 individual analog business lines.

The interface is also generally very easy. Most PBX and IP PBX telephone systems either come with ISDN PRI capability or offer it through a plug-in module you can buy. All the circuitry to convert between 23 individual phone lines and the PRI digital trunk are implement on that circuit board. You simply plug-in one or more ISDN PRI lines and you have outside phone lines and a lot of them.

But why would you connect a T1 PRI to a VoIP phone system rather than keep it 100% VoIP? The simple explanation is that the rest of the world isn’t serviced by VoIP or at least the same VoIP provider. The only thing universal is the PSTN, where you can dial any number and get connected to any telephone in the world. Your enterprise VoIP phone system can save you a bundle on internal calls that stay on your own network. You can also buy a SIP Trunk that connects you to a telephone service provider completely in IP or Internet Protocol. But, guess what happens at that service provider when you want to call an outside number? That’s right. You’ll be switched through to the ISDN PRI lines that connect them to the public phone network.

Which is the best deal for your company when it comes to analog (POTS) phone lines, ISDN PRI or SIP trunking? Why not let an expert consultant get you competitive quotes for these various options so you make an informed decision? The service is fast, easy and free.

Fixed Wireless Broadband Services For Business

We’ve come to think of business grade telecom services and copper wireline and fiber optic services. That’s why IT managers may cringe when someone says they’ve got to have new high bandwidth Internet access, point to point transmission or VoIP telephone service right this minute. We all know that there is no such thing in WAN networking as right this minute. Or is there?

An option that’s becoming increasingly available is fixed wireless service. Think of getting the same bandwidth services you have now delivered without the wires. This is quite different from cell phone service designed for mobile use or wireless access points that have a range of only a few hundred feet. It’s also not satellite broadband, which has such long latencies and limited bandwidth that you can’t really use it for any but the most limited applications.

This fixed wireless service uses outside antennas that communicate over a range of some miles. Airband, a leader in this field, has installed base stations in 14 major cities. Each base station can communicate with customers up to 5 miles away, forming a service footprint of 78 square miles. Each customer has a subscriber unit (SU) that provides a two-way radio connection with the base station and a simple Ethernet connection to the LAN.

What services can Airband offer? Broadband Internet is a popular choice. You can get speeds from 2 Mbps to Gigabit Ethernet. Yes, you can get replacement service for T1 lines and DS3 connections. But there is also the standard Ethernet speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps. Plus you can choose any bandwidth in-between to scale your service to exactly what you need. Don’t worry about picking the wrong bandwidth level and needing an upgrade quickly. Upgrades are made by network software changes and can be accomplished in hours. Installation itself can be completed in just days. What’s that quote you got to bring in fiber? Six months? Outrageous!

Being wireless, can’t anyone just stick up an antenna and intercept your datastream? They won’t have much luck. Airband uses 128 bit AES encryption to keep your data safe. They also offer a 100% uptime guarantee, with service level guarantees on jitter, latency and packet loss.

With such tight control on network parameters, this fixed wireless solution can be used with confidence for VoIP as well as point to point data, business Internet and private IP VPN. There are several options available. You can simply replace your existing ISDN PRI trunk lines (or add new ones) using a SIP trunk with PRI interface. The newer IP PBX systems can often connect directly to a SIP trunk. Or let Airband own and manage the hosted PBX system and just have telephone sets at your location. This is all done on a private IP network so that the quality of your voice communication is assured.

Does this sound like the quality of service you need with the speed of installation and avoidance of copper and fiber line construction costs you require? If so, you may be delighted with how little you have to pay to enjoy fixed wireless services from Airband and other providers. Get details on fixed wireless costs and availability now.