Managed IP Services Cloud

Cloud services are seeing a lot of interest lately, as companies look to reduce their capital expenditures for IT and gain capabilities they couldn’t otherwise afford. But did you know there are a wide range of IP services available in the cloud?

Cloud services can be in-house or private, or they can be purchased from a cloud services provider. Providers have a wide range of specialties. Some offer only remote storage. Others specialize in high performance computing. Still others offer alternatives to in-house telephone switching systems and even network security. What they all have in common is that their services run over IP networks. Hence, IP services or managed IP services.

The idea of managed services involves letting the carrier or services provider take over the job of making sure that everything is running correctly. Traditionally, that’s the job of the on-site IT staff who monitor what’s going on at all times and swing into action to make repairs whenever a fault occurs. Not every company can afford a 24/7 staff or even a full-time IT employee. Others may have a small staff that has gradually become overwhelmed as more and more applications have been turned up on the network. Managed services offer a way to offload some of this responsibility.

One basic managed service is the network WAN connection to the Internet. This could also be a private line between facilities or connections to an MPLS network to link multiple geographically diverse business locations. You often have the option of simply ordering a line service and then monitoring it yourself to ensure proper operation. The alternative is to have the carrier provide a router that allows them to monitor the line right up to the connection with your LAN. This is called a managed router or managed line service. Often you can get this management feature at no extra cost by shopping around.

The beauty of a managed router is that the carrier’s network operations staff is far larger than yours, available 24/7/365, and has the expertise in their own systems to rapidly troubleshoot and correct problems. It’s not uncommon to have a line failure in the middle of the night and have it back up and running before business hours commence. You may not even be aware than a fault occurred.

A step up from the managed line service is colocation of your servers and the bandwidth that feeds them to a carrier hotel or colocation center. You can elect to manage everything yourself or let the colo center staff handle server maintenance and repair, including any network connections.

Recently, Managed IP Telephony has become popular as an alternative to in-house PBX systems. Instead of a dedicated piece of switching equipment that you have to program and maintain, the telephony switch resides at the service provider. You connect by means of a network connection called a SIP Trunk. This assumes that you have converted to IP telephony or SIP phones and have converged your LAN for both voice and data.

SIP Trunking providers often go the extra step of providing both broadband Internet and telephone service on the same SIP trunk. This is a perfect interface to a converged local network that already transports both voice and data packets. Because the services and trunk line are fully managed, you are ensured that voice quality won’t suffer due to conflicts with data packets on the same line.

Would you like to ease the burden on your IT staff or avoid the capital expense of in-house facilities that may be more affordable in the cloud? If so, investigate Managed IP Services to see what’s available and compare costs.

OC3 Bandwidth Costs Just A Fraction Of What It Did

If you are a use of high bandwidth fiber optic connections, you know that these line services don’t come cheap. Well, actually, they do come cheaper these days. But you have to know what to look for and where to look.

Take OC3 bandwidth, for instance. Optical Carrier level 3 is one of a family of fiber optic carrier services using the SONET (Synchronous Optic NETwork) protocol developed for the major telephone carriers and later offered to large business organizations. OC-3 is actually the lowest commonly available SONET service and runs a at a transmission speed of 155.52 Mbps. Of that, 148.608 Mbps is dedicated to payload, with 6.912 Mbps needed to support the overhead of transmission.

Time was, just a few years ago, that OC3 was considered an enormous amount of bandwidth. It was only ordered by major Internet service providers, colocation hosting facilities, television distribution companies and other large corporations. Medium size companies got by with DS3 at 45 Mbps, roughly 1/3 the capacity of OC3. Smaller companies had their needs met by T1 lines running 1.5 Mbps.

Today, OC3 bandwidth is no longer consider as the ultimate business telecom service. Leading edge companies have moved on to Gigabit bandwidth levels and even 10 Gbps is not out of the question. Two factors have been driving that change. One is expansion of the carrier market with many new competitive carriers running their own fiber optic networks. The other is the demand for higher bandwidths by such needs as cloud computing services, HDTV video, CAD/CAM design and manufacturing, scientific supercomputer simulations, and electronic medical records transmission.

While OC3 offers about 155 Mbps, the next level, OC12, offers 622 Mbps, OC48 steps that up to 2.5 Gbps and OC192 provides 10 Gbps performance. These are all SONET switched circuit TDM technologies. Their competitors are IP packet switched networks offering 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10,000 Mbps 10GigE.

With so much competition in the fiber optic arena, prices have come down dramatically over the last decade. In fact, if you haven’t checked competitive pricing in a few years, you may be shocked at how many options you have and at the low lease prices available. But... you may not find these low prices at all unless you check with a bandwidth broker who has access to dozens of competitive service providers. We work with Telarus, Inc., arguably the most innovative and fastest growing telecom services broker today. Their dedication to customer service and extensive automation tools make it easy for you to inquire as to services and pricing and get an answer quickly. Go ahead and simply state your business bandwidth needs now and see how glad you are that you invested the 30 seconds or so that it took to submit that online inquiry.