Texas Fiber Optic Network Expansion

There are big things afoot in the Lone Star State. In this case, it's big network expansions from partnerships and mergers. The result is more options and fiber network availability for businesses located in Texas.

Transtelco is a major competitive provider with a fiber network that stretches from Houston to Los Angeles and dips into Northern Mexico to pick up Monterrey, Chihuahua, Nogales, and Tijuana. The have expansion plans for both Mexico and Texas routes.

Within Texas, PAETEC, another major competitive provider, has considerable fiber assets serving Dallas, Austin and Houston, to name a few of their Texas POPs (Points of Presence). PAETEC now has offices in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and The Woodlands.

What’s afoot is a joint venture between PAETEC and Transtelco that has PAETEC building out Transtelco’s fiber leg connecting El Paso and Temple. With half ownership in this project, PAETEC gains additional SONET ring diversity for its network across the southern US and into Mexico. They also have access to offer voice, Internet and fixed wireless to agencies of the state government that use services of the State of Texas Department of Information Resources.

What makes this situation even more interesting is that PAETEC has been acquired by Windstream Communication, a competitive carrier serving the southeast and midwest US, including fiber runs into Dallas, as well as a network that extends into Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia. Windstream has major fiber connections planned into other states, plus existing data centers in Newton, Iowa, Brookfield, Wisconsin, Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida, Charlotte, Cary, and Raleigh North Carolina, Ephrata and State College, Pennsylvania and Boston, Massachusetts. Windstream’s existing fiber network spans some 60,000 route miles.

Windstream offers MPLS network services based on a resilient optical core to service companies with multiple business locations. Their network offers VPN (Virtual Private Network) with VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) connectivity. It’s a fully meshed network that allows regional sites to exchange traffic without having to depend on a central hub server. For companies with converged voice and data networks, Windstream offers Real-Time QoS that ensures voice packets receive top priority to keep them from getting slowed down or held up by less sensitive data packets.

Do you need fast and reliable access to the Internet? Windstream offers Ethernet Internet with symmetrical bandwidth up to 1 Gbps. This is a dedicated connection that offers consistency you won’t get in shared cable connections and bandwidth that far exceeds the capability of T1 lines and DS3 connections. Windstream's service level agreement guarantees 99.99% uptime to ensure availability.

Do you have a business presence in Texas with a need for better voice or data connectivity than you have now? Get competitive fiber optic bandwidth quotes from PAETEC, Windstream and other competitive carriers serving Texas, the southern states, or the entire United States, with optional connections to international destinations.




Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

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.

Ethernet over Copper Connects Nationwide

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has quickly made a name for itself as a last mile access connection for dedicated Internet, MPLS networking, and linking two or more company LANs. The flexibility, ease of interface, and cost savings make this a service in demand. What’s held it back to date is lack of availability. Well, that’s about to change.

MegaPath, one of the country’s major competitive carriers, is moving in with Telx, a major network interconnection provider. What does that mean? It means that your Ethernet over Copper connection can go a lot farther than it used to.

MegaPath has been on a major construction effort to roll out EoC equipment to over 680 central offices within the next year. The central office is key because this is where the subscriber copper loops terminate. MegaPath used specialized G.HSDL technology with up to 8 bonded copper pair to deliver line speeds to 100 and even 400 Mbps in selected area. Their standard symmetrical speeds are 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 20 Mbps. Both layer 2 and layer 3 services are offered along with QoS/CoS to support business data and real-time voice and video simultaneously.

For its part, Telx operates 15 data centers with direct access to over 950 customers who have chosen to colocate within the Telx facilities. These include major telecom carriers, Internet service providers, content producers and delivery networks and cloud service providers. Telx is a pioneer in Ethernet Exchange, a way for carriers to exchange Ethernet traffic without having to first convert to another protocol like SONET. The E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface benefits each carrier who participates because now they can directly access customers on other carriers and vice-versa.

Ethernet over Copper along with Ethernet over Fiber form the basis of Carrier Ethernet. This is the familiar Ethernet protocol that runs on your LAN adapted for use on telecommunication networks. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has standardized a number of Carrier Ethernet standards so that they are compatible across network boundaries. These include EPL, EVPL, and ELAN.

EPL stands for Ethernet Private Line. This is equivalent to the point to point private line services familiar with T-Carrier and SONET services. EVPL is Ethernet Virtual Private Line. This is very similar to EPL. The virtual designation means that you can have a number of EPL services running to a single physical Ethernet port. This is particularly useful for companies that want to run private lines from a single headquarters location out to multiple branch locations. Together, EPL and EVPL form what is known as E-Line or Ethernet Line service.

ELAN stands for Ethernet LAN Service. You may also see this written as E-LAN. What differentiates E-LAN from E-Line is that E-LAN is a many to many or mesh network service. You can use it to tie together multiple business locations so that any location can communicate with any other.

Have you been interested in Ethernet over Copper services but concerned that they may not be available to support your particular location or your many locations nationwide? This is a rapidly changing market, with more service being rolled out almost daily. If you haven’t checked lately, you may be pleasantly surprised at how much connectivity is available and how much bandwidth your can get for your telecom budget. Check pricing right now, if you like. Ethernet over Copper prices from 1 to 100 Mbps are available instantly online. Other services for business locations will be promptly quoted by a Telarus bandwidth expert, upon request.

EoC and EoTDM Complement Fiber

Traditional telecom services have large bandwidth gaps in service levels, especially when you compare what is available for smaller businesses and what the large corporations install. You may be slogging along at T1 lines rates of 1.5 Mbps, while the big corporate campus across the street has 100x to 1000x the bandwidth. It’s the difference between copper and fiber, or at least it used to be that way.

Newer technologies, namely Ethernet over Copper (EoC) and Ethernet over TDM (EoTDM), have expanded the range of bandwidths supported on already installed copper infrastructure. It’s now a smooth scale of steps between T1 and Gigabit or higher speeds.

Integra Telecom is one competitive carrier who has embraced the concept of augmenting their fiber optic network with Ethernet copper-based solutions. Integra is a major telecom services provider in eleven states, primarily in the Western US. Their 10 Gbps IP fiber backbone connects major cities throughout these states and also to Chicago, New York, Dallas and Ashburn, Virginia. It totals 5,000 miles of long haul and 3,000 miles of metro fiber.

From there, Integra is aggressively lighting new buildings for fiber service. Just during the first half of 2011, they had expanded their lit buildings by 20 percent or 300 new buildings. Even the most casual observer can see that fiber-based bandwidth is the future. Business automation, cloud connections and video transport are gobbling up Mbps and Gbps about as fast as they are deployed. But what do you do in economically constrained times to provide higher bandwidth levels to every business that needs them?

The answer is a two-pronged approach of complementing fiber network resources with copper-based last mile connections. Traditionally, this has meant T1 lines with DSL as a low end option. T1 provides excellent availability and rock solid bandwidth, albeit at 1.5 Mbps. Many businesses get around this limitation by installing multiple T1 lines bonded together to double or triple the bandwidth. This is a solid technical approach, but the upper limit is typically around 10 or 12 Mbps and the cost is a simple multiple of T1 cost times number of bonded lines.

Another hitch is that most competitive metro and wide area networks are now IP based. Previously the public switched telephone network was dominant using telco standards like TDM for digital transmission. Businesses today have IP networks in-house and often wish to connect them to other IP networks through Ethernet services such as E-Line and E-LAN. It would be ideal to keep everything on IP networks.

Integra Telecom recognizes this and bases their fiber/copper strategy on IP standards. The core network is already IP for metro and long haul connections. Where copper connections are needed, they are made using Ethernet over Copper or Ethernet over TDM.

The copper involved is the very same twisted pair copper that is already installed into nearly every business for multi-line telephone service and T1 data lines. That pretty much guarantees that businesses in the service footprint can get connected to the network one way or the other. Ethernet over Copper uses specialized equipment and multiple copper loops to deliver Ethernet bandwidth from the fiber network to the business LAN. Ethernet over TDM is similar, but uses T1 line technology to transport the Ethernet signal.

Why EoTDM? One tradeoff with EoC is that you can get a very wide range of bandwidths but over a limited distance. The closer you are to the central office that connects to your copper telco lines, the higher the EoC speeds available. EoTDM is not distance limited. T1 technology was designed for extended distances experienced by some customers who are located in smaller or more rural population areas. Integra has installed EoC equipment in 120 COs and EoTDM in nearly 300 COs throughout their Western service area.

Are you ready to move up to higher bandwidth levels, but stymied because you’ve been told there’s no fiber available? That may be old information, as carriers are aggressively building out their fiber assets. Even if fiber is not an option, you may be able to get bandwidth from 2 or 3 Mbps to over 100 Mbps on copper based connections to the fiber backbone. Check prices and availability of copper and fiber network services for your particular business locations.

100 Mbps Corporate Ethernet

A new standard connection speed for medium to larger organizations is getting to be 100 Mbps. It may sound like an expensive and unnecessarily large network capacity, but it is actually neither. Fast Ethernet is the new DS3.

For those who remember only a few years ago when a T1 line offering 1.5 Mbps was considered a high bandwidth connection, the notion that 100 Mbps is now the benchmark may be a bit unnerving. A lot has changed over the last decade. Application requirements have increased dramatically. We might have settled for fuzzy slow motion video conferencing when even that was a novelty. Now it’s full motion HD two-way video and telepresence. E-commerce has gone from an add-on service for a bricks and mortar facility to the dominant way that many companies do business. Dynamic interactive web pages with video have replaced low resolution static HTML brochure pages.

There are also many businesses that can’t operate electronically without high bandwidth connections. These include video production, content delivery and medical imaging. It’s 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps... or forget it.

There’s no reason to forget it anymore. High bandwidth services are readily available and lower in cost than you may imagine. That’s the other big change between the start of this decade and the end. Line prices have plummeted as new competitive carriers with the latest network technology have come on the scene. While T-Carrier and SONET may be the entrenched legacy carrier services, Ethernet has become the bandwidth solution of choice. On a Mbps and Gbps basis, Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet solutions are often a fraction of the price demanded for T-Carrier or SONET and a small fraction of standard pricing ten years ago.

Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps makes a lot of sense as a bandwidth requirement for dedicated Internet access or point to point and multipoint connectivity. The standard Ethernet LAN speeds are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. In some cases, that’s been increased to 10 Gbps. Many, Many networks have most of their nodes running at 100 Mbps simply because so much equipment has network interface cards standardized at 10/100 Mbps. The big speed bump has been at the edge of the LAN where it connects to the outside world. Fast Ethernet may be more than adequate for internal file transfers. But going from 100 Mbps inside to a 1.5 Mbps T1 line outside can slow traffic to a crawl.

Medium and larger companies have reduced the speed bump by upgrading from T1 to DS3 connections. DS3 offers 45 Mbps, a bandwidth increase of 28x when line overhead is factored in. The new replacement for DS3 is Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps. That’s more than double the bandwidth, a protocol that is directly compatible with corporate LANs, and a cost savings to boot. What’s not to like?

Is your company missing out because you thought that 100 Mbps was beyond your reach? Take a few minutes right now to get 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet prices and availability. You may well be able to get more bandwidth for less than you spend now.



Note: Photo of network switches courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

What Is Lowering Gigabit Ethernet Bandwidth Pricing?

If you have recently gone out for quotes on Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth, you may have been surprised by how much prices have dropped the last few years. That’s one pleasant surprise for organizations that need higher levels of business bandwidth for cloud computing access, e-commerce, medical image transmission, video distribution and the like. But is this for real and what is driving these prices lower?

Yes, it’s for real alright. In fact, bandwidth services across the board can be had for a fraction of what you may have paid when you signed your last service contract. That applies to everything from T1 lines to DS3 connections and on up through OCx SONET/SDH fiber optic bandwidth. It also includes competing services like Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gig E. Plus multi-location cloud networks like MPLS. They’ve all dropped in price. But the cost per Mbps is often most dramatic for Ethernet services.

What’s behind the lowered prices? Two factors can be credited. First is the move from traditional switched circuit transport technologies to packet switched IP networks and services. Second is new levels of competition.

Both legacy service providers, the telephone companies, and new competitive carriers have built-out extensive networks based on IP or a networking technology that embraces IP, such as MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching. You can thank the Internet for that. The enormous volume of equipment and services to support near-universal demand access to the Internet has decreased the price of Ethernet and IP networking to a fraction of what it costs for competing technologies. The entire world is going to packet switched networks based on Internet Protocol.

When every LAN is running Ethernet, it just makes sense that the most efficient way to connect all those local area networks is with an Ethernet connection. Ethernet over Copper lets you do this from typically 3 Mbps on up to around 50 Mbps. Ethernet over Fiber is good for 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and even 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Gigabit Ethernet is becoming a requirement for medium and large companies depending heavily on high productivity enterprise software or distributing media content, such as video. At the very highest levels, even 10 GigE is no longer out of the question.

The move from legacy telco technologies to IP based fiber optic networks has brought new players into the marketplace for WAN networking services. These competitive carriers have built their own regional or national fiber optic networks and established colocation facilities and points of presence in most major cities, even some mid-size cities. They can often bring their own fiber into business locations and bypass the telephone companies completely. Now instead of one option for service, you may have several or more even at the Gigabit Ethernet level. That spells competition and competition leads to lowered prices.

Could your organization benefit from the recent cost reductions in high bandwidth networks services? Don’t shake your head no until you check current prices and availability for Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth services and other bandwidth offerings. At the very least, your next service lease could cost you less than the one you have now.

Ethernet Over Copper Can Be A Steal

We all like a good deal on anything telecommunications related. But some of these Ethernet prices can make you feel like you are getting away with something. Are you wondering just how good they can be? Go ahead, take a second and inquire about Ethernet prices for your business locations.



Why are Ethernet service prices so attractive right now? What’s happened is that technology has changed almost overnight. Yesterday the traditional telco services were all that you could get. Today, there are competitive options that change the whole value proposition.

Ethernet over Copper is a major game changer. You may have heard that Metro Ethernet service was available, but when you last checked you found that it was only available over fiber optic cable. That’s a big negative if your building isn’t already lit for fiber optic service. Construction costs can make Ethernet over Fiber prohibitively expensive.

Well, that was then and this is now. A couple of things have changed. First, that fiber you couldn’t afford to have installed a few years ago may be a lot less expensive now. Competitive carriers have been building POPs or points of presence in most major cities and suburban areas. More and more buildings have been lit for fiber optic service. What that means to you is that the nearest fiber connection may be closer than you think. It might even be next door.

But even if fiber isn’t available, you can get Metro Ethernet bandwidths of 10 to even 50 Mbps delivered over ordinary twisted pair copper wiring. That’s the same telco bundle that comes into your building now. That means little or no construction costs. The carrier will provide you with a router designed to interface with the Ethernet over Copper connections. You just plug-in with a RJ-45 cable and you’ve got higher bandwidth.

What’s more, Ethernet services are often dramatically less expensive than their legacy telco counterparts. You may find yourself saving half or more on your next telecom services lease. The higher the bandwidth, the better the savings.

Of course, location is still important. The range of available services and number of competing carriers depends on your business address. But you only need a minute or so to request a list of Ethernet services and prices for your location. You wouldn’t be the first to think that these prices are a steal.