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.

Triple Play For Business

One of the hottest trends in consumer telecom services is called the “residential triple play.” This is a bundling that combines three electronic services that nearly every home subscribes to. They are television, telephone and broadband.

The bundling is made possible because one provider can deliver all three at a combined price that is lower than buying the same services from three separate providers. Cable companies are in the best position to deliver the triple play, but the package is also offered by telephone companies and wireless service providers. The advantage for cable is due to the very high bandwidth capability of their HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) facilities.

That’s great for consumers, but what about business? Is there such a thing as triple play for business? You bet. It’s available for businesses with their own business locations.

Not surprisingly, a huge provider of triple play is Comcast. You may know that Comcast is the largest Cable TV provider in the US. Comcast broadband is hugely popular with both consumers and small businesses. But did you also know that Comcast is the 3rd largest phone company in America?

The idea that the coaxial cable from a Cable company is pretty much the same as the one that connects the TV antenna on the roof is way out of date. Today’s cable is a sophisticated collection of multiplexed channels that carry voice, video and data equally well.

Multiplexing is the technique that divides the 1,000 MHz bandwidth capacity of the coaxial combined fiber and copper transmission facility into neatly spaced 6 MHz channels. Those channels are exactly the same size as over the air TV channels so it’s easy to fit one TV station per channel. However, those channels can be used for other purposes as well.

The two most popular non-TV services on Cable are broadband and telephone. You have your choice of one or more standard business phone lines or an ISDN PRI trunk line that is bundles up to 23 lines for connection to an in-house PBX telephone system.

You probably are using DSL, satellite or T1 lines now for your business broadband service. It’s likely that you’re getting something like 1 to 2 Mbps download bandwidth. DSL can go higher, but your bandwidth decreases the further you get from the telephone company central office. Cable has such high bandwidth capacity, that it delivers business broadband at 50 to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. Comcast’s smallest service starts at 12 Mbps/2Mbps.

You’re probably wondering if you can afford a triple play package? It’s likely you can’t afford not to go this way if you have the type of business where your customers wait on-site, like a doctor’s office or auto service center. That's where the TV service of triple play has its value. There are also packages for businesses like bars and restaurants that serve a walk-in clientele. How much are we talking? About the price of that T1 line will get you faster broadband plus telephone service with basic TV channels included.

What if you don’t need television in your business? Is there such a thing as double play?

Of course. Many, many professional offices, retail stores and quick service restaurants need a combination of reliable phone service and high speed broadband to meet their needs. Get these two services cheaper than buying separately from a telephone company and an Internet service provider.

Can you cut costs while getting the same or better voice, data and video services for your company? It’s well worth your time to find out. Check availability and pricing for bundled business broadband, telephone and TV services now.

Redundant Business Internet Connection Using Cable Broadband

Larger businesses have shunned what they consider to be “consumer” grade broadband services out of concern about availability and performance issues. While it is smart to deploy your mission critical business processes over dedicated circuits with service level agreements, you may be missing out on a very cost effective solution to backup your telecom services and improve access speed for Internet usage.

Cable broadband has experienced a rapid deployment and continued technical development largely due to its popularity as a consumer Internet service. Other options, such as satellite, wireless, dial-up, and fiber optic are either bandwidth limited, costly to install or often unavailable. DSL is a worthy competitor, but sometimes not located nearby.

What DSL and Cable have in common is that they give you a lot of bandwidth for a small price by telecom service standards. The 75 ohm coaxial cable has far more high end capacity than the unshielded twisted pair copper telephone wires used for DSL. Both offer great deals for 10 or 20 Mbps, but Cable is pulling away with DOCSIS 3.0 modems providing 50 or 100 Mbps now and capable of even higher speeds.

Today’s reality is that you can get 100 Mbps Cable broadband for about the same money as 1.5 Mbps T1 line service or 3.0 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. If you suspect there’s a catch, you’re right. The low price of Cable services are a result of sharing the network and the bandwidth with a large number of other users, mostly consumers. That advertised 50 or 100 Mbps goes up and down all day, depending on what your fellow users on the Cable are doing. If they are all casually browsing the Web, you likely have more speed at your disposal than you know what to do with. But when they start downloading movies and large software packages, there’s not so much excess bandwidth left to divvy up.

You don’t see these performance variations with dedicated line services. The term “dedicated” means you get exclusive use of all the bandwidth that line can carry. It’s less speed, but it doesn’t vary. When you aren’t running the line to capacity, the excess goes unused.

The other difference between Cable broadband and Ethernet or T-Carrier services is the service level agreement, also known as an SLA. These documents spell out commitments by the service providers in regard to service availability, performance characteristics such as latency and jitter, and remedies in case something goes wrong. If the line goes down, it is rare for it not to be repaired in a matter of hours.

Cable and DSL are considered “best effort” information services, which is another way of saying there are no guarantees or even promises. Even so, these providers have gotten pretty sophisticated as network operators and make every effort to keep their systems up and running.

The reality is that Cable broadband services can be great in the role of broadband backup. Consider that adding a second T1 line will cost you just as much and may not provide much additional reliability. T1 lines all come in through the same wire bundle and probably go to the same telephone company central office. Yes, if one pair breaks or is cut, you have the other line. But if someone with a backhoe chops through the entire bundle, both T1 lines go out. Cable has no relationship to either telephone wiring or the telephone company offices. True, there’s the possibility that some truck could run into the one pole that carries both the telephone and cable wires and knock out both. But for most of the run, your T1 line and your cable line go their separate ways.

The other thing to consider is that Cable’s high bandwidth may more than offset the variations you experience. You might not be getting 100 Mbps every minute, but you’ll likely not be dipping below 15 Mbps and even that’s 10x the speed of your T1 line. Users browsing the Web, sending email or download PDF files may be unaware of line variations. Data backups to hosted storage services will also benefit more from the higher average line speed than be affected by bandwidth variations, although upload speeds are significantly lower than download speeds on these asymmetrical services.

Are you concerned that you can afford only a single line service that could go down and leave you out of business for who knows how long? Why not protect your interests with Business Cable Broadband Service at a very affordable price?

HFC Broadband For Business

Many small businesses don’t fall into the category of “residential” users but don’t need or can’t afford the cost of traditional business telecom services, such as T1 lines or Ethernet over Copper. One possible solution is HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax broadband services.

Hybrid what? You may have heard of this as Cable broadband for business. A lot of home based businesses successfully use Cable broadband to manage their websites, access information on the Web and send and receive email. But try to order residential service for a business location and you’ll get turned down flat. That’s because residential broadband is priced for single homes and apartments with few people accessing the service and probably no-one online most of the day. Knowing that, some business owners incorrectly assume that you can’t get Cable run into a business. But you can.

So, what’s available and why the funny name? HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax refers to the technology used to deploy high speed Internet access, telephone service, and Cable television. You know that Cable TV and Cable broadband are called that because of the coaxial cable that provides the connection to the network. When Cable systems were first deployed, they were constructed from various size coaxial cables. What’s happened in recent years is that the long connection from the Cable office or the “head end” where the signals are picked up and run for miles to various neighborhoods has been replaced by fiber optic cable. The last few hundred feet or so are still copper coaxial cable, also called coax. The result is a system that is a hybrid of fiber optic cable and coax cable known as Hybrid Fiber Coax or HFC.

Why go with a hybrid arrangement rather than just make it fiber optics all the way? It’s mostly a matter of cost. While fiber has a far larger capacity, there is a lot of coax already in the ground. The interface connection at the premises, either a Cable modem or set top box, is much less expensive than the termination equipment needed for fiber. Don’t count that coax down and out yet, either. With digital signals, there is more than enough bandwidth for triple-play services to small and medium businesses as well as consumers.

With an already built-out infrastructure and a high number of users to cover costs, you might expect that HFC services are lower in cost than most telecom services available for the SMB. You’re right, they are. But you need to know the performance tradeoffs to make a smart buying decision.

One excellent use for HFC is broadband Internet access when employee use is primarily Web browsing and email. That includes information research, making purchases, doing simple banking, messaging customers, providing a WiFi hotspot and so on. If most of what you do is similar to the way you use a computer at home, HFC should work just fine. You select a bandwidth tier that offers enough speed to work efficiently and still saves you money over other options. Typical bandwidth for smaller businesses goes up to 15 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload, although some Cable companies are offering speeds as high as 50 or even 100 Mbps.

You’ll likely be able to get a high speed Internet solution that meets your needs with a lot more bandwidth than a T1 line offers and for a lot less money. But beware. T1 lines are dedicated bandwidth that stays a rock solid 1.5 Mbps all the time. Cable bandwidth is shared among all the users on the Cable and can vary all over the place. That’s one way they hold the cost down. If you are running high traffic ecommerce servers or using business processes that expect constant bandwidth, you might find the speed variations not worth the cost savings. Otherwise, you might be quite happy with both the performance and reliability of HFC broadband.

Another service that Cable companies have gotten into is business telephone, essentially VoIP. One big difference between this service and simply running a third party VoIP service over your broadband connection is that the Cable version never transits the Internet. The voice packets travel over the cable network and are then terminated to the public telephone network by the Cable company or a telephone service provider. By doing it this way, the HFC operator has more control of things like latency, packet loss and network congestion to ensure decent voice quality.

Finally, HFC offers Cable TV channels. After all, that’s why the network was built in the first place. Businesses with waiting rooms, like automotive service centers and doctor’s offices, can put business Cable TV service to good use.

Have you been frustrated by your current choices in network services? Why not compare prices, availability and service features of HFC, T1 and Ethernet so you can make the best buying decision? You may be surprised by the range of options available.



Note: Diagram of coaxial cable construction courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

A Myriad of Business Broadband Options

Business class broadband comes in more flavors that ever before. Your options include DSL, 3G & 4G Wireless, Cable broadband, Satellite, T1 lines, and Ethernet over Copper. Those are just for small business locations. Fiber optic services expand the menu for medium and large scale business users. What is it that distinguishes these broadband options and how do you choose?

You should know that there are two different types of Internet broadband access regardless of the medium used. The medium might be wireless, twisted pair copper, coaxial cable, or fiber optic strand. That’s just the physical layer. What makes even more difference is whether you are on a dedicated or shared broadband connection.

Your lowest cost options fall into the shared bandwidth category. These include DSL, Cable, 3G & 4G Wireless and Satellite. What these all have in common is that the bandwidth is shared among multiple users. A tip-off to shared bandwidth is a statement that your service speed is “up to” so many Mbps. The upper limit, be it 2 or 20 Mbps, is the maximum you’ll experience. How much you get in practice depends on how many other people are trying to use the connection at the same time.

Shared bandwidth services don’t have to be asymmetrical, but they often are. What that means is that the upload and download speed differ, often by a large amount. You might get 5 Mbps in the download direction, but only 1 Mbps in the upload direction. Why is it done this way? It’s because these services are most often used for email and Web access. When using a Web browser, you typically type in an address and then download a page of text and graphics. The upload to request the page is a very few packets. The download of everything from the page is a much larger collection of packets.

The same is true of accessing audio and video content or downloading software. It’s primarily a one-way transmission with the speed of the download much more important than the speed of the uploaded requests.

Another characteristic of shared bandwidth services is that they are promoted as “information” rather than “telecom” services. By using the information category, these services avoid regulatory constraints. What you get for your money in the way of bandwidth levels, availability, time to repair, latency, jitter, packet loss is completely up to the service provider.

Dedicated Internet Access or DIA services allocate the full bandwidth of the connection for your usage. A T1 line, for instance, has a speed of 1.5 Mbps at all times. If you aren’t using it, the line simply idles until needed. You can elect to access the Internet via your T1 line as needed, or you can keep the line busy uploading and downloading data files 100% of the time. There’s no such thing as user limits. You’ve got a pipe with a capacity of 1.5 Mbps and you can transport as many packets through it as it will carry.

T1 lines are symmetrical, also called full duplex. The bandwidth is the same in both the upload and download directions. In this case, it’s 1.5 Mbps. Ethernet over Copper, a newer competing service to T1 lines, is similar but offers more bandwidth options. You can often get 2, 3, 5, 10 and even 20 Mbps EoC service. It’s often stated in the form 10 x 10 Mbps Ethernet to show that you get 10 Mbps in the upload and 10 Mbps in the download direction.

T1 and Ethernet services are not information services. They are network telecom services, often with SLAs or Service Level Agreements. These agreements spell out what you can expect in the way of availability, time to repair, bandwidth, jitter and latency. Because these services are more costly to engineer and provide, they have higher pricing than shared bandwidth information services.

So does that mean that you always need a T1 line or Ethernet connection? Not necessarily. If your primary reason to have an Internet connection is to access information on the Web or maintain a Website and email on a remote hosting service, you may find that DSL, Cable, Satellite or Wireless service works just fine and costs half as much. Satellite and Wireless are especially useful for remote locations that aren’t within the service areas of DSL or Cable. You can use 3G and 4G cellular wireless for point of sale terminals, even at temporary locations.

On the other hand, if you want to run your own servers in-house or connect multiple business locations with a converged voice and data network, you’ll probably find that you absolutely need the more robust bandwidth services. The same is true if you are providing rather than consuming content or can’t stand having employee productivity impacted by bandwidth that varies up and down throughout the day. Would a multi-day outage put you out of business? It probably makes sense to either have a backup bandwidth service or pay up for a Service Level Agreement.

What Internet access options make the most sense for your particular business situation? Why not have a bandwidth expert call you with prices and availability for a wide range of bandwidth solutions? Then you can weigh the costs and benefits and make an better informed decision.