SIP Trunking Providers Want Your Bandwidth

The telephone industry is changing. Not long ago, the standard setup for most companies was an in-house PBX system managing dozens, hundreds or thousands of phones. For outside calls, the most cost effective approach has been to bring in ISDN PRI trunk lines with 23 local and/or long distance lines each. Even small companies chose key telephone systems that can handle two to six outside lines. Those setups are changing fast.

There are two strong trends in the industry right now. One is cloud based hosted PBX telephone and the other is SIP trunking. They work perfectly together, but you can also have SIP trunking without cloud services.

A telephone trunk is a number of telephone lines all bundled together. This can be a wire bundle, such as a multi-line copper cable. It can also be an electrical bundle on a single line. ISDN PRI trunks, for instance, bundle 23 separate phone lines plus Caller ID and switching on a single T1 line. A SIP trunk is a telephone trunk line designed specifically to work with IP phones in VoIP telephone systems. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching technology used in VoIP in lieu of SS7, which is used in traditional switched circuit telephony.

So, why are SIP trunks such a hot item right now? It’s because a SIP trunk can be connected directly to your network or IP PBX to bring in multiple lines from your VoIP carrier. On a converged local area network, you are already running SIP. Why go to the trouble to converting to another protocol just to gain access to the public telephone network?

SIP trunks are also how you connect to a hosted PBX system as a cloud service. Companies are rapidly discovering that the per-seat cost of a cloud based telephone service is less than they pay now when you count the personnel, operating and maintenance costs of an in-house phone system. With hosted PBX, you no longer have to invest in new hardware every few years and your system is always being maintained and upgraded by the service provider.

It stands to reason that SIP trunking providers want your telephone business, but why do they want your bandwidth?

The reason that your carrier wants to provide you with both telephone lines and Internet bandwidth is so they can guarantee the quality of your phone calls. With traditional telephony, the telephone and computer networks are kept completely separate and cannot possibly interfere with each other. One of the cost saving advantages of enterprise VoIP solutions is that they use the corporate data network for everything. To make that work, you need to prioritize voice packets so that your phone conversations don’t distort or break up no matter what the computers are doing.

When your SIP trunking provider delivers both telephone and Internet service on your trunk line, they prioritize packets using CoS or Class of Service tags. These tags tell all equipment that recognizes them how to handle different types of traffic to ensure service quality. Not all bandwidth providers do this, so if you mix various line services you can wind up undoing your carefully engineered network quality.

There’s also a cost advantage, especially for small businesses who get both telephone and broadband on one line instead of two. You don’t even need IP phones to take advantage of this service. The provider will install an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that can connect to conventional analog phones and your broadband router.

Now that you know why SIP Trunking providers want your bandwidth, why not find out what sort of deal they’ll make to get it? Request competitive quotes for telephone trunking, dedicated Internet access and cloud hosted PBX services now.

Fast Ethernet over Copper

Fast Ethernet has been a networking standard for many years. You may know it as 100 Mbps Ethernet speed. Nearly every computer, router and switch now has a Network Interface Card (NIC) rated at 10/100 Mbps or 10/100/1000 Mbps. Many smaller networks find 100 Mbps more than adequate. Larger networks use 1000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). The largest corporate and other high performance networks have at least part of their infrastructure running at 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE). Its when you leave the LAN and connect to metro or long distance networks that things slow to a crawl.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same network speed regardless of distance? That way it wouldn’t matter where you were transferring files to or from. The time to transfer would be independent of distance. This is especially important to companies with multiple business locations. The illusion of everyone being on the same network is shattered when it takes ten or a hundred times as long to get information from the remote site as it does within your own building.

What has stood in the way of upgrading network connections to a common speed is cost and availability. Fast Ethernet for MAN and WAN connections have been cost prohibitive for smaller companies. If your location isn’t on a fiber path, getting bandwidth above 10 Mbps or so has been out of the question. Well, not any more.

PAETEC, a major network services provider, is blazing new ground by deploying Fast Ethernet connections over copper as well as fiber. If your buildings are within the service footprint of this new technology you can avoid the budget breaking costs of fiber construction completely. PAETEC uses multiple bonded copper pairs within the same telco conduit to provide bandwidths as high as 200 Mbps.

Chances are that the multi-pair copper conduit is already installed in your building for multi-line telephone and lower speed services like T1. The beauty of T1 lines are that they use standard twisted pair copper telco wire. The major limitation is that the bandwidth is fixed at 1.5 Mbps. You can bond T1s together to get higher bandwidths, up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. Technically this works just fine, but it gets pricey because the cost is the price of a T1 line times the number of lines needed.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is much more cost effective. First, the advanced modulation techniques support higher bandwidths per pair of wire used. Second, the cost does not multiply as fast at bonding T1 lines. Third, you can now get Fast Ethernet bandwidth using EoC.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper technology is distance. The higher bandwidths require you to be near the central office that connects to your copper bundle. That’s perfect for businesses with metropolitan locations, especially in major business districts. If you are located out in the boonies, you’ll have fewer options.

Do you need cost effective Fast Ethernet connections to support your business processes? Check Fast Ethernet over Copper availability and pricing now. Fiber and wireless may also be available at lower prices than you imagine. Sorry, no residential service available.

3x3 Mbps Ethernet Doubles Your Bandwidth

Who couldn’t use a little extra bandwidth these days? The size of files, applications and web pages has been steadily increasing. Unfortunately, IT budgets haven’t. What would you say if I told you that you could double your bandwidth and not have to pay any more than you do now? Would you go for a deal like that?

It may seem odd to think that you can get twice the bandwidth for the same line cost that you are paying now. After all, network service providers aren’t in the business of giving away something for nothing. Of course not. The cost savings doesn’t come from simply replacing what you have with an identical service from another vendor. It comes from switching to a newer technology that has lower costs.

You could double your bandwidth with your current vendor or a competitive one if you want to stay with T1 line service. What you do is call up and order another T1 line to be bonded with the one you are running now. Bonding is a process of making two lines work as if they were one larger line. A T1 line has a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. Bond in a second T1 line and you have 3 Mbps. 

There are a few limitations to this process. First, you need to get both of your T1 lines from the same vendor. That’s either the carrier you have now or a new one for both lines. Second, your monthly bill is going to double. After all, two lines equals 2x the cost. You may well be able to pay less than twice your current line charges by going with another vendor that charges less for the same service. But this alone it isn’t likely to get you 3 Mbps for the price of 1.5 Mbps. 

Instead, consider changing from T1 line service to Ethernet over Copper. Both are highly reliable WAN services with dedicated bandwidth for business applications. Both services are available as managed services with the service provider taking care of any customer premises equipment needed to interface to the lines and to your network. 

The other similarity between bonded T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper is that they are both delivered over multiple twisted pair copper wires. These are the same copper wires that already come into your facility to provide multi-line telephone service. There is a technology difference between the signals on a T1 line and those on an Ethernet line, but from a users perspective they operate the same. 

What isn’t the same is the cost. Ethernet over Copper is a newer technology that makes more efficient use of the potential bandwidth available from copper landlines. Ethernet over Copper or EoC pricing is very aggressive and is currently running at about half the cost of double bonded T1 lines. In other words, you pay the same for a 3 Mbps EoC service as your pay for a 1.5 Mbps T1 service. 

There are a couple of other differences, too. T1 only scales up by increments of 1.5 Mbps. Every time you bond another T1 line you add 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. Ethernet is far more granular. You can find Ethernet bandwidth services from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps, although the higher line speeds require fiber optic cabling. But unlike T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper has a limited service footprint. You are most likely to find it in major cities and suburbs, not out in rural areas.

Would you like to double your bandwidth for the same money you spend now? Get pricing and availability for 3 x 3 Mbps Ethernet over Copper or other Ethernet bandwidth services to see how much savings is available at your location.

Content Delivery Networks Transformed

It’s no secret that bandwidth requirements are increasing across the board. Much of this has resulted from the move to IP video streaming and downloads. It’s also a function of more sophisticated websites than what were envisioned in the early days of HTML. Now graphics are huge and sites are interactive, with all sorts of browser and server based application code. The issue has been how to deal with network bandwidth requirements that are accelerating with no end in site. One answer is to transform the network and the sites that use it.

Why isn’t simply increasing WAN bandwidth sufficient? Indeed, WAN bandwidth is increasing by leaps and bounds. In fact, the flood of packets on the Internet has resulted in such traffic jams that CDNs or Content Delivery Networks have arisen to create fast bypass lanes around the Internet superhighway.

Bandwidth is expensive. Both copper and fiber based network bandwidth prices have plunged in recent years. Even so, the demand to transport more and more data per user is causing many companies to increase their telecom services budgets to keep up. The end user has also increased their DSL, Cable and wireless broadband service speeds, but there is a limit to what they will pay and what is even available in many areas.

Two companies have teamed up to deal with this dilemma head-on. Level 3 is a global connectivity and content delivery network services provider. Strangeloop is a company that specializes in network and website acceleration. Combine a CDN with advanced acceleration techniques and you create a much faster network. How much faster? Up to a 30% performance improvement compared with what’s been available previously.

Note that this 30% performance boost is not a simple cranking up of network bandwidth. What these techniques do is actively manage three aspects of the process: network, delivery and code. Both Level 3 and Strangeloop actively manage how Web content is delivered to an end user without that user being aware that anything other than a simple file transfer is going on.

For instance, multiple copies of website files are hosted on Level 3’s Content Delivery Network and sent to the user from the most optimal cache server for that user location. Level 3 has 35 strategically placed caching locations. They also offer a streaming service for real-time content such as video.

Strangeloop goes further by actively managing how each page is rendered. They do things like compressing images for mobile viewers, increasing parallel data download from server to browser, reducing roundtrips by consolidating similar resources into single files, and delaying execution of non-critical scripts until the rest of the page has loaded and been rendered on the browser. Their process also lets the browser start downloading page resources while the server is busy generating the HTML page. Normally this is a serial process that takes longer than necessary.

Human nature dictates that the longer it takes for a page to load, the more people bail out due to impatience or mistakenly thinking that the site is broken and will never load. By speeding up the site rendering process so that users see the result in a second or two can dramatically improve the stickiness of the site and desired actions they take while visiting.

Are you frustrated with the sluggish performance of your site or streaming content because of too much information taking too long to reach your users? Perhaps you can benefit from the Level 3 CDN Site Transformer for enterprise users or other network improvements. Explain your need and get pricing and availability on high performance bandwidth services now.

Metro Fiber Network Bandwidth For Denver

Bandwidth is booming in the Mile High City, or soon will be. AboveNet is installing nearly 100 route miles of dark and lit fiber to meet the mile-high bandwidth needs of Denver’s telecommunications, media, financial services, health care, retail and government users.

This could be a sign of things to come for nearly all metropolitan areas. The fact is that our productivity and economic growth is becoming more and more dependent on high levels of bandwidth to connect businesses, supplier, customers and remotely located employees. Copper can take us just so far. Then it’s time to connect with the nearly unlimited resources of glass fiber cables.

How much bandwidth are we talking about? AboveNet has fiber optic networks in cities nationwide that offer single wavelength service of 40 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps or 1 Gbps to extend a corporate LAN/WAN to multiple, metro area locations. You can have 40 Gbps fiber connectivity via an OC-768 handoff at your premises. That’s a level of bandwidth that was available only to carriers themselves not so long ago.

It should also be noted that each fiber strand can support more than one wavelength using a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Each wavelength, or Lambda, is a slightly different color of laser light. Dozens or hundreds of wavelengths can travel through the same fiber without interfering. Each of those wavelengths can support up to 40 Gbps of bandwidth.

But is even this enough for the demands of major corporate or government users in a city the size of Denver? Well, those fiber cables that AboveNet is installing don’t just have one strand of fiber inside. These cables bundle 432 or 216 separate fibers within a large cable assembly. Multiply all those fiber strands times the number of wavelengths each fiber can support times the Gbps that each wavelength can carry and you’ve got some serious bandwidth. It’s more than is needed right now, so some fibers won’t be activated. These are the dark fiber that’s held in reserve for future needs or sold to organizations that want to have complete control over their communication resources by lighting their own fiber.

Do you have a need for metro or long haul fiber optic services from 40 Mbps to 40 Gbps? There are dark fiber and lit fiber optic services available now in most metropolitan areas from AboveNet and other high bandwidth competitive carriers. Prices are lower than they’ve ever been, thanks to improved technology and increased competition. You may be able to afford more bandwidth than you imagine. Find out with a competitive pricing quote and complementary consulting support from our Telarus bandwidth experts.