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.

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.

4G WiMAX Wireless Broadband Available Now

Have you been frustrated by your choices in home and mobile broadband service? How would you like to find a wireless broadband Internet service that you can use at your desk and take with you on your laptop? Would you like it even more if this service was cheaper than DSL, Cable and 3G wireless? Would you go for it right now if this service was screaming fast? You should really check and see if you can get 4G WiMAX broadband.



What’s WiMAX and why is it better than other broadband service options? WiMAX is a new worldwide standard for high speed wireless data service. If you think the name sounds a lot like WiFi, you are right. In fact, you can think of WiMAX as the coming replacement for public WiFi hotspots. The MAX in WiMAX hints at why. This service gives you a hotspot that covers an entire city. It can extend for 20 or 30 miles. Compare that with WiFi that disappears in a couple of hundred feet.

If you want to go mobile and not have to constantly look for WiFi hotspots to connect, you are probably considering or have a 3G modem aircard. This is a USB device that looks like a flash memory dongle. But the modem aircard has a two-way digital radio inside that connects to a cellular broadband signal. That gives you broadband at speeds similar to entry level DSL but without the wires. The upgrade is 4G or fourth generation wireless broadband. WiMAX is the implementation of 4G that is deployed and working right now.

What does 4G WiMAX have to offer? How about typical download speeds in the range of 3 to 6 Mbps with occasional bursts to 10 Mbps? How about a service that needs no telephone or cable TV wiring even at a desktop location? How about a service that you can run at your desktop and then take with you on your laptop? That pretty much rules out the wireline services doesn’t it? Combine that with a service plan price that starts at $30 a month, and even 3G wireless is left in the dust. You can order home service, mobile service, a combination plan and a plan that even includes 4G VoIP phone service in the bundle.

Now the question is can you get 4G WiMAX broadband at your location? CLEAR offers this service in parts of Texas, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Idaho, Nevada, Hawaii, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. More locations are under construction right now. The only way to know for sure is to check for CLEAR 4G WiMAX broadband service availability. Give it a try and see if you’ve been missing out on faster, cheaper wireless broadband service.

Maxed Out On Bandwidth?

Are you close to maxing out your WAN bandwidth? Has it gotten so bad that you occasionally experience network congestion at the worst time of all... during peak business hours? Well, don’t panic. Here are some ideas that can improve that situation.

First of all, are you using your network in the most efficient manner? In other words, do you just let every device launch its packets and hope for the best, or do you manage quality of service. If the problem is VoIP telephone conversations breaking up but everything else seems fine, then giving voice packets the priority they need will probably improve that situation without bringing every other process to its knees.

Similarly, if you’re trying to do backups over the network to a remote site during working hours you could be hurting employee productivity. Make the backup process low priority or try to run those processes overnight when they’ll have the network all to themselves.

Oh, you’ve done all that? You’ve fine tuned both the LAN and WAN as much as you can and you’re still running out of bandwidth. OK. That’s going to happen to everyone sooner or later. There are a couple of ways to go next.

One technical solution is to accelerate your WAN, usually the weak link in the system, with a hardware appliance. Riverbed is an acknowledged leader in this technology. Basically, you add a piece of equipment to each end of the line that manages the packets. One thing it does is look for repeating patterns and only sends the changes, not the entire data stream. It also makes cached copies of data frequently accessed, so you aren’t constantly uploading or downloading the same information over a limited bandwidth line.

WAN acceleration is particularly valuable when bandwidth is very expensive and hard to come by. But the acceleration hardware isn’t cheap either. So, before you shell out for any solution, it makes sense to compare all your options. Don’t just assume that you’ll pay through the nose for a bandwidth upgrade. Many, if not most, companies are probably paying more for both voice and data bandwidth than they would have to. How can that be? Bandwidth solutions have become more competitive than ever over the last few years. If your contract ran out years ago but you’ve just kept paying by the month for the same line service, you can almost certainly see a cost savings by checking the latest WAN bandwidth options for your business location.

You may have installed a T1 line at a time when that seemed like all the bandwidth you’d ever need. Now you’re maxing out the line. But, do you know that you can get additional T1 lines added to your service so that they act as one larger conduit? There are also newer options, such as Ethernet over DS1 and Ethernet over Copper, that give you lots of bandwidth at very reasonable prices. In some areas, wireless solutions are the best option. In others, fiber optic offers all the bandwidth you could want but lets you pay for only the amount you need currently.

What you need right now is a plan. You can start laying out ideas on paper yourself, but why not get some free consulting help at least to bounce ideas off? A Shop For T1 consultant is waiting to talk to you now. Call the toll free number or enter an online quote request now at T1 Rex to get the ball rolling.