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.

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.

EarthLink Means Business With 10 GigE Fiber

Most of us remember EarthLink from land rush days of the Internet when anyone and everyone just had to get on the net now, and dial-up 56K service was the best you could get. EarthLink is still a viable ISP for consumers with both dial-up and broadband access available. But there’s another side to this famous company. EarthLink Business is a facilities-based competitive carrier serving everything from SMB to enterprise needs with over 28,000 miles of fiber installed and more in the works. They’re in the process of installing two new 10 Gigabit Ethernet fiber rings in Ohio and Eastern Pennsylvania. There’s also a new high speed fiber route going in between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

What’s with all the new high-bandwidth construction by EarthLink and others? In case you haven’t heard, business is automating like crazy and heading to the cloud. The enduring slowdown in economic expansion has given corporations a chance to re-examine their operations and re-engineer for what they’ll need in the future. One thing they’ve found is that office automation can be as big an enabler of employee productivity as the factory automation of decades past. That means more computers, more processing and more communication between business sites, vendors, customers and remote employees. Any business that has outsourced overseas has found that a key to making this work efficiently is to tie together the far flung operations as if they were right next door. You can’t do that physically, of course, but you can do it virtually if you have the right networking.

The cloud is also seen as a game changer in a world where it’s hard to predict what resources you’ll need next season or even next month. Traditional in-house data center construction is a capital and time intensive approach. If what you are doing will run just as well in a remote data center, you gain the advantages of avoiding capital investments and buying what you need by the moment with the knowledge that additional resources are always available when you need to scale up. Scaling up is the expected path as a company grows over the years. Now you have the option to scale up and scale down as business fluctuates so you never have idle resources running up expenses.

The one thing that process automation, outsourcing and cloud operations have in common is that they are bandwidth intensive. That bandwidth was fairly easy to come by when everything was on your local network. Now you need the same big conduit going between cities, across the country and perhaps overseas.

SONET is the proven core network technology for fiber optic WAN networks. You can certainly run legacy OC3, OC12 and OC 48 fiber optic connections for your business connectivity. But today it’s Ethernet services that are hot. No problem. Ethernet runs over SONET just fine. In fact, many advertised Ethernet fiber optic networks are really running SONET at their core. OC-192 is a good match for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with a special WAN-PHY protocol designed especially to transport 10 GigE on a OC-192 optical carrier.

EarthLink is expanding their nationwide fiber network and their suite of business telecom services that include MPLS networking, full and fractional DS3, EVDO 3G wireless, SIP trunking and Metro Fiber Ethernet. They added three new data centers in Rochester, NY, Marlborough, MA and Columbia, SC with 10 Gigabit fiber rings connecting each location to the network backbone. Such high bandwidth connections allows them to offer real time data replication and cloud services to interested companies.

Is your business re-engineering for higher productivity and more agile operations? If so, you may benefit from some of the new cloud services and high bandwidth network connections that have become recently available. Even your current operations can cut costs while retaining the same performance with competitive telecom services.