Cloud Hosting Providers For Converged Networks

Cloud computing services are growing geometrically. If you haven’t gotten on-board yet, it’s probably because you aren’t convinced of the cost savings, security or the ability of the cloud to cover all bases for your IT needs. That picture is changing rapidly. Let’s take a snapshot of what’s available now for SMB users.

When we think of cloud computing, the picture that comes to mind is one of a giant brain in the sky that runs operations for hundreds or thousands of companies. That’s the approach that gets all the press, but it’s far from the entirety of the market. Indeed, there are many other providers out there who can deliver the virtual services you need on a less grand scale. You may not be able to get everything from one service provider, but the building blocks are out there to handle your voice and data needs.

That’s important, because enterprise VoIP solutions are driving a trend toward converged networks. If you only consider moving traditional data center servers to the cloud, you’ll be missing a big piece of the puzzle. The other trend that’s important is fixed mobile convergence that integrates cell phones into your telecom infrastructure. Mobility can be the link that makes or breaks your productivity in the future.

The foundation of cloud computing is cloud hosting that incorporates Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud infrastructure is virtualization on steroids. IT departments have found that virtualizing servers ups the efficiency of the physical server hardware. What cloud computing does is greatly expand the virtualization to include huge racks of high performance servers plus storage and bandwidth. It differs from the virtualization that you would do yourself or the virtual servers you’d rent from a colocation center in that it is sold incrementally on-demand. You pay by the minute, by the hour or by the number of CPU cycles used.

Another characteristic of cloud hosting is that it is highly elastic or scalable. If you start to run out of capacity, you simply order up more virtual servers. The cloud operating system takes care of how these resources work in concert to provide the capacity you need. At no point do you have to purchase, install or maintain any equipment. The cloud service provider takes care of this with a 24/7 technical staff.

There are actually three types of clouds to choose from. The one that first comes to mind is the public cloud that serves many users simultaneously. You gain access via a private line or dedicated Internet service. Companies that have highly sensitive applications, unique requirements or simply want more control go with a private cloud. That is a similar infrastructure to the public cloud but on a scale suitable for one company. The hybrid cloud is a combination of the two. Public facing or non-critical applications run on the public cloud, while a separate private cloud handles very sensitive applications.

While cloud computing is thought of a data processing service, there is also a voice cloud known as cloud communications or hosted PBX. In this case, the computing resources are specific to telephony needs and the connectivity is by SIP trunk from your location and to the public switched telephone network from the provider. You no longer need a PBX phone system in-house or any telephone trunk lines. What you have is SIP telephones connected to your network and a converged SIP trunk from your business location or locations to the service provider. Some hosted PBX systems integrate cell phones into the system so that you have the same capabilities while mobile as at your desk.

Some of the cloud services you can readily get include cloud hosting, hosted PBX, unified communications, enterprise cloud security, private/public clouds, cloud storage, hosted Exchange, SharePoint, disaster recovery, anti-spam and anti-virus, hosted firewalls, and dedicated cloud access connections.

Are you feeling that you may be missing out on productivity improvements, cost savings, agility of scaling your business, or advanced features available in the cloud? This would be a good time to explore options with multiple cloud hosting providers. You can start small and grow or make a step-change relocation to the cloud, depending on what works best for your company.

Why NOT to Buy a New PBX

For decades, the standard answer to a failing business phone system or one that had run out of capacity was to install a new PBX in a process known as a “fork lift upgrade.” A new PBX is something like a new car. You get higher performance, greater reliability and more capacity. So now that you are in the market for a shiny new PBX or IP PBX, the best one to buy may be none at all.

What? You mean hang on to that old junker that’s almost impossible to keep running? No, not at all. Don’t go out and spend a thousand dollars or much more on yet another PBX box. Instead, look at a hosted PBX solution.

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP or PBX in the cloud, is a service rather than a product. You simply remove your old PBX and don’t put anything in its place.

Oh, then what do the phones plug into?

The phones will plug into your computer network. Nearly every company has a LAN with Ethernet jacks for each desk and office. You are used to having two separate networks in your company. One for the telephones and one for the computers. A hosted solution is based on a converged voice and data network, which is the Ethernet LAN that you have now. Larger companies have long ago converged their voice and data networks to take advantage of enterprise VoIP solutions. Small and medium size businesses can do the same. What’s important in a converged network is that voice packets have priority over data packets so that phone call quality is maintained regardless of the load on the network.

Clearly, you can’t just plug your old telephones into the LAN. The connectors are different sizes. That’s for good reason. Standard analog telephone equipment is completely incompatible with computer networking standards. There are two ways to resolve this. Either put network adaptors on each phone or replace the phones with newer IP phones that already have standard network interface cards built-in. You’ll probably want to use IP phones because they support more features over the network.

What do the phone lines connect to? There won’t be any outside lines connecting to your building like there are now. In other words, no analog business lines and no ISDN PRI. All the outside lines are connected to the hosted PBX at the service provider. You connect to that service provider using a line called a SIP Trunk. This can be a T1 line or Ethernet over Copper configured for SIP Trunking service.

I should mention that SIP Trunking can be setup to support your current analog telephones and wiring directly. In this case, the provider installs a piece of equipment called an IAD or Integrated Access Device. The IAD splits the SIP Trunk into telephone lines and broadband Internet service. In other words, it supports the two separate networks that you have now.

The whole reason you installed a PBX in the first place was to gain control of your internal calls and manage the sharing of multiple outside lines. The hosted PBX does the same thing from afar. Your internal calls stay on the network so that you don’t pay for office to office calls. Outside calls connect to the public telephone network at the cloud service provider.

A hosted PBX does some tricks that your old PBX doesn’t. You can have offices in many different cities all on the same phone system. You can also have local phone numbers in cities where you have customers but no physical office. Callers may dial a local number in Bangor, Maine and you’ll answer it in Phoenix, Arizona.

A major advantage of hosted telephone services is that you don’t have to come up with large amounts of capital to purchase a PBX system nor hire the staff to maintain it. That’s all handled for you by the service provider. They buy a much larger PBX system and have the staff available around the clock to maintain it and handle any problems that arise. You pay by the month for service, which often includes unlimited local and national calling plus a wealth of features to make office operations efficient. Some providers even include the IP phones in your service plan.

Are you getting ready for a telephone system upgrade? Don’t go out for a bank loan yet. Instead, get a quote for cloud hosted PBX telephone service and see if paying by the seat per month rather than making a big investment makes more sense for your business.

SMB Phone System Needs Only Phones

Anyone who wrestles with programming and maintaining an in-house phone system occasionally longs for the days when you just plugged in the phone, lifted the receiver and there was dial tone. Those days have returned with the rise of cloud communications systems.

The magic is in moving the complicated switching equipment to a service provider who keeps it up to date, well maintained and easily expanded when your needs change. The name of this service is Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. The hosted part means that someone else provides the bulk of the telephone system and the connectivity to the public switched telephone network. What you have in-house is the telephones.

These aren’t just any phones. They are IP phones designed to connect to computer networks rather than plugging into a phone outlet. The electrical signals are completely different, but then so are the connectors. That little RJ-11 telephone plug? It’s been replaced by a fatter RJ-45 plug. Does it look familiar? That’s because this is the same connector used by most computer equipment. In fact, your telephone has become a networked device, just like a PC or printer.

In a typical hosted VoIP system, you have a converged voice and data network that connects to both your telephones and other computer equipment. There are no separate telephone wires. Convergence is the process of making sure that one network can handle the very different requirements of data and voice. Phone conversations are very sensitive to network limitations such as latency, jitter and congestion that don’t bother data transfers or Internet access.

Does that mean that there is a problem with having broadband Internet access on the same network with your telephones? Not necessarily. In fact, the best enterprise VoIP solutions have voice, video, Internet, file transfers and other processes running simultaneously without conflict. The trick is engineering QoS or Quality of Service into the network so that different classes of packets don’t interfere. Just plugging everything into the LAN and hoping for the best is going to cause problems.

One trick in making VoIP work for business is to keep the telephone service off the Internet but allow the two to co-exist otherwise. Why? Because the Internet is great for data connections and one-way downloads of media such as audio and video. It’s the instantaneous two-way nature of phone conversations that can get compromised on a network designed for one way transfers that take whatever time is required to ensure every packet is sent and received correctly.

There’s a service of special interest to small and medium size businesses called SIP Trunking. A SIP trunk is the broadband connection between you and your service provider. This is a private line connection that is engineered to carry both phone service and broadband Internet. The two share the line but don’t Interfere. They are split at the service provider’s end, with the phone lines going to the hosted PBX and the broadband routed to the Internet.

Would you like to have only telephones to deal with in your business and leave management of the telephone system to someone else? If so, then it pays to look into Hosted VoIP Solutions to get the features you want without the cost and complexity of an in-house phone system.

Where Hosted PBX Solutions Save

Business telephone systems range from the very simple with a few phones and a few lines to complex private branch exchanges that support multiple sites. The new approach is a hosted PBX that makes things simple again. But do hosted PBX solutions really save anything and can they maintain voice quality?

With the simplest arrangement of a single landline phone connected to the local phone company, there really isn’t much to manage. You pay so much per month for “dial tone” that makes your phone work and gives you typically unlimited local calling. You have the option to switch to a different provider for long distance service or use a dial-around service for international calling. These are options to save you on the per minute calling rates.

The basic analog or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone service seems simple because all the complexity is at the other end of the wire. What you don’t see or have to deal with is the intricacies of connecting your line to any of billions worldwide or to even more billions of wireless callers. If you have, say, 3 business locations with 1 phone each, they talk to each other by dialing up the desired location just like any other phone number.

Businesses found out just how complex the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) was when they got big enough to have lots of desk phones and a dozen or more outside lines. What many companies did was to buy their own telephone switching system called a PBX (Private Branch Exchange.) The advantage of having your own PBX system is that calls within the company stay on your own wiring and you don’t have to pay the telephone company to connect them. That includes more complex PBX arrangements with digital tie lines that connect multiple locations in a private network. Once again, the motivation is to keep as many calls as possible off the public network to avoid “toll” charges.

Many companies have rued the day the got into the telephone business. PBX systems are expensive to buy and need constant updates as employees move within the company. There is also maintenance activity for both the PBX and its telephone network wiring.

Hosted PBX is a fairly new service that offers to offload the expense of in-house phone systems. It only became possible when most companies installed Local Area Networks for their computers and the price of private digital lines became affordable. The enabling technology is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In this case, Internet refers to the technology standard and not necessarily use of the public Internet.

Hosted PBX refers to using a large PBX telephone system that is located or hosted by a third-party service provider. This PBX is big enough to handle the telephone traffic of many different companies to gain an economy of scale. In a way, this is similar to going back to the days where each phone was individually connected to a local telephone company that took care of call switching.

So, where does the cost savings come from? Network consolidation is one area. Both telephones and computers run on a single converged voice and data network. There are no separate telephone wires. This network is extended to the hosted PBX provider using a private digital line called a SIP trunk. You are not tied to a particular service provider. There are many competing hosted PBX solutions and that competition is another way that cost savings can be offered.

The private SIP trunk helps to maintain high voice quality because it provides the characteristics of low latency, jitter, packet loss and congestion, along with quality of service mechanisms that keep data packets from interfering with voice packets. You can also buy Internet based hosted PBX services at lower costs, but the vagaries of the public Internet can introduce distortion and clipping in the conversations.

Do hosted PBX solutions offer a real cost savings for your company? It depends on how many seats you have, what features you want and what your existing system is costing you. If you are close to replacing an aging PBX or one that has run out of capacity, the economics highly favor hosted solutions. To decide for yourself, get competitive pricing on hosted PBX solutions for business. It may come down to whether you want to pay as you go versus investing in your own in-house phone system.

Enterprise Cloud Communications Arrives

Cloud computing has been in the headlines as the next generation of information technology. What’s breaking out now is cloud communications, a move to make telephony as well as number crunching and file serving available as cloud services. You know it’s arrived when a provider the size of XO Communications launches an enterprise level cloud communications service.

In an odd way, what’s new is old. The origin of telephone services is in a cloud called the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Your basic phone is simply a client that derives its functionality from the massive telco switching network.

Then came in-house phone systems in the form of key telephone systems and PBX or Private Branch Exchange systems. These are essentially small phone companies that you own and maintain. All calls within the company stay on the internal system. It’s only when you need connectivity to the outside world that you have to rejoin the PSTN.

Telephone services are now moving back to the cloud, but with a difference. This time it's IP communications rather than switched circuits. It’s also not about a monolithic public network but private networking services with competitive features that go way beyond what the original telephone network was engineered to provide.

The new cloud communications offerings also go by the title of hosted PBX. The idea is that it is more efficient to establish a large IP switching center with a dedicated expert staff than for every business to be its own telephone company. The business users need only have the telephone handsets, speakerphone and similar desk equipment connected to their local networks. The large, expensive and hard to maintain switch moves out to the cloud.

Therein lies the key to cloud communications. It’s the rise of converged IP networks to handle voice, video and data, replacing separate dedicated networks for each. Once you’ve installed SIP phones on your LAN, it seems a bit inefficient to send that traffic to an in-house IP PBX system that connects to the PSTN with specialized analog and digital trunk lines. Why not keep all of the traffic on the converged network as long as possible?

That’s what XO says. They’ve built their business by creating an enormous fiber optic network footprint to provide digital connectivity to both businesses and other service providers. With an extensive converged network already in place, it’s logical for XO to add value by providing telephony solutions in their cloud. This way you have only one supplier for both network connectivity and the communication services running on that network.

The enterprise cloud communications model works especially well for companies with more than one business location. XO can tie your headquarters, regional offices and branches together as if they were in a single large facility. The converged WAN network give you all the standard calling features you expect in an enterprise telephone system plus high definition video conferencing and the ability to include mobile phones in a unified communications system. These communications services are priced on a per-seat-per-month basis.

Are you interested in upgrading your business communications while avoiding a massive capital investment? Look into future proofing your voice, data and video with hosted services in the cloud. Get pricing, features and availability on SMB and enterprise cloud communications services now.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Ethernet Exchange For Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the replacement for the Public Switched Telephone Network may well be Carrier Ethernet. More evidence for this is the expansion of Ethernet Exchanges that allow carriers to transport each other’s traffic. Telx, a major colocation and interconnection service company, has just added Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles to its suite of Ethernet Exchange facilities nationwide. Let’s take a look at why Ethernet Exchange matters and how it influences the direction of international wide area networking.

The century long dominance of the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network can be attributed to its universal acceptance. Every phone can connect to every other phone in the world and work correctly. This network has been adapted for data and well as voice service for worldwide connectivity. It’s a circuit switched rather than packet switched network, but with proper interfacing and protocol conversion it gets the job done.

Another model of universal connectivity is the Internet. The Internet is an IP network that is based on packet switching rather than circuit switching. Isn’t the Internet the model to emulate for the next generation in commercial connectivity?

Actually neither the PSTN nor the Internet are ideal for high performance network services. The PSTN has a telephone legacy and is organized around small independent channels bundled together to create larger amounts of bandwidth. It’s also a different set of protocols than are running on a majority of the world’s data networks. The Internet was designed by the government for survivability in the event of war or natural disaster. As such, it’s so autonomous that routes can change spontaneously and there is no such thing as class of service or guarantee of bandwidth, jitter, latency or packet loss.

Carrier Ethernet seems like the ideal protocol for today’s metropolitan and long haul networking. After all, the network most likely to need transport is running Ethernet in the LAN. More and more, that’s converged voice, data and video over Ethernet. When you go to the trouble of carefully engineering your internal networks, it only makes sense to expect to link those networks transparently.

The only fly in the ointment has been network reach. The companies most active in deploying Carrier Ethernet services have not had protected monopolies like the old telcos nor government R&D like the Internet. These are commercial companies, some with legacy telco assets and some with all-new IP core fiber optic networks. While each competitor may have thousands of buildings on-net, nobody blankets the Earth.

Here enters the Ethernet Exchange. The idea is a facility that enables Ethernet network operators to exchange traffic. By doing this, each carrier increases the reach of its network into the footprint of other carriers. Even Ethernet Exchanges can partner. Telx has a partnership with Neutral Tandem to provide access to each other’s exchange locations.

With demand for Ethernet services growing rapidly each year, cooperation benefits all parties involved in transporting high bandwidth Metro and Carrier Ethernet services. Ethernet connections are now available in metropolitan areas throughout the US and in many countries around the world. The cost advantage, scalability and portfolio of services available with Ethernet is working to establish Ethernet as the new WAN networking standard at the expense of legacy telecom services.

Have you been missing out by not taking advantage of Ethernet connectivity for your business? Get pricing and availability for Ethernet network services now. You may be surprised by what’s become available only recently.

How Voice over MPLS Expands Enterprise VoIP

Medium and large enterprises have been converting from traditional telephone and computer connections to VoIP over converged networks. The reasons are higher productivity and lower costs. But what happens when you connect your phones and computer network to the outside world? Do you lose the advantage of your enterprise VoIP technology?

Sadly, for some businesses, this is the case. Everything is efficiently connected over a high performance local area network. That network stops at the edge of the premises. In order to connect with other business locations, both voice and data must be transmitted over common carrier telecom services. This is true for each location. There is one architecture for the internal network and quite a different one for the transport service.

Typical interfaces include a PBX telephone system that connects to multiple outside telephone lines. These may be individual analog business lines or a digital ISDN PRI trunk line. In either case, the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network is used to make calls to both outside phones and the phone systems of the other company locations.

Computer networking is handled with point to point dedicated lines, often set up in a star network with headquarters doing the routing for all locations. This works well, but can be quite expensive when locations are on different coasts or in nearly every state. Add international locations and costs skyrocket.

What’s a better solution? The latest technology is MPLS networking. An MPLS network is a privately operated “cloud” network that uses a special tag switching system instead of IP routers to manage traffic. MPLS networks offer quality of service mechanisms so that real-time traffic, like voice and video, are unaffected by simultaneous data file transfers. That makes MPLS networks ideally suited to extending converged networks among as many locations as needed.

How can this benefit your organization? By interconnecting all of your locations through an MPLS network, you can create a seamless internal voice and data network for telephones and computer connections. Using an MPLS network to carry telephone traffic is known as VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS.

With VoMPLS, all of your internal telephone calls stay off the public phone network and you avoid toll charges. Only when you need to make an outside call do you need to connect to the PSTN. This can be an enormous cost savings compared to your monthly phone bill now. Similarly, the cost of using an MPLS network for file transfers can be considerably less than the cost of all those dedicated lines and the effort it takes to maintain a proprietary network. Plus, any productivity enhancements you’ve achieved by converging your voice and data networks can be shared among your other business locations.

Can Voice over MPLS technology offer you a significant cost reduction? Why now get cost quotes for a VoMPLS networking solution to links all of your business locations? The savings and performance can be impressive.