Copper Ethernet Line Prices Instantly!

You’re no doubt aware that Ethernet over Copper is making a strong challenge to be the bandwidth service of choice for businesses. How much of a challenge? The bandwidth increases and cost reductions are making it hard to choose anything else if EoC is available. Just how much can you get and for what price reduction? Why not check Ethernet over Copper prices instantly!



Through the magic of the Telarus GeoQuote automated pricing system, it’s now possible to get Ethernet quotes immediately any time you want. Simply use the handy input form you’ll find at CopperEthernet.com and you’ll be automatically set up to get Ethernet over Copper pricing.

How accurate are these prices? They could be considered budgetary pricing, although they are quite accurate. GeoQuote mimics the same procedures that carriers use to make service price quotes. If you go directly to a carrier, however, you’ll probably have to wait a few days or more to get the results back. You’ll also be limited to one provider's offers. Why settle for one quote when you can get several or more to compare?

Telarus is an award winning telecom and network services broker that has agreements with dozens of service providers. You get the same or better pricing through the GeoQuote system as you could by spending hours on the phone calling around for competitive quotes.

It is well worth your while to talk to a Telarus bandwidth consultant, as there are often short term special deals available that don’t show up in the automated results. Your consultant can let you know what’s on “sale” so you can make the best buying decision. At the end of the quote process, you’ll have the option to call Telarus toll free for further discussion or just click a link and a consultant will call you promptly.

You should also know that Ethernet over Copper isn’t the only service that’s available for instant price quotes. If you wish, you can explore options for T1 and bonded T1 lines, business Cable broadband, fixed wireless broadband, Satellite bandwidth, fractional and full DS3 services and Ethernet over Fiber. Yes, quotes are available for fiber optic services from 10 to 1000 Mbps using the same instant pricing process.

Are you anxious to see how much you could be saving over your current telecom services contract? Take just a minute from your busy day and get Copper Ethernet line prices instantly. After you see the results, you’ll probably want to take a few more minutes and call in an order.

Computing In The Cloud

“Cloud computing” is the term you see everywhere lately. But what is computing in the cloud all about and are there really benefits to moving out of your own data center and into the cloud?

Cloud computing originally meant accessing a pool of computers to accomplish a task that was too big for the resources you could afford to own. You may have contributed some unused computing power to the SETI@Home program to help search for ET. It’s still going, by the way, after almost 12 years of combing through the output of radio telescope signals. The genius behind this project is to link thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of idle personal computers through broadband Internet connections. Each PC has a small but significant amount of unused processing power. By divvying up a large computing task into bite (byte?) size pieces and collecting the results, all those computers can be linked to create one enormous virtual supercomputer.

The idea of calling remotely located distributed resources a “cloud” goes back to the public telephone network and later to the Internet. Engineers would draw a picture of a cumulus cloud to represent a network who’s complexity was far more than needed to be diagramed every time you wanted to use it. Somewhere out in the misty core of that cloud were all the resources required. You only needed to understand it abstractly, the way most users don’t need to understand the detailed workings of their PC to be able to use it effectively.

If we had infinite budgets, there wouldn’t be much use for cloud computing. Every company would simply buy all the computers, software, storage, data center facilities and staffing they needed. One problem is that much of the time, especially on second and third shifts, most of capacity you pay for sits idle. Even during business hours, you need enough resources to handle peak loads to maintain employee productivity and customer satisfaction. That means your average usage is well below the maximum capacity of your systems most of the day.

Few companies have infinite budgets and today’s financial environment makes it difficult to get enough capital for all the computing capacity they would like. Even the well-heeled want to hedge their bets by just using what they need as they need it, without long term commitments. The fuzzier the future looks, the more attractive pay-as-you-go looks.

That’s the impetus behind today’s rush to all things in the cloud. Yes, you can buy processing by the minute if all you need is more computing capacity. But the cloud computing definition has expanded to include all sorts of resources including web servers, online disk storage, backup and recovery storage, standard software packages, development platforms, and even PBX telephone systems. The hosted telephone services are known specifically as cloud communications services.

What’s important from a business aspect is that you rent rather than buy these services. They are available on a per minute, per seat or per feature basis. You use what you need without regard to what other customers of the service may be doing. The cloud computing provider has the responsibility to have enough capacity on-hand to meet everyone’s needs and to keep everything up to date and running smoothly.

Does the cloud computing business model sound like an attractive option for your business? If so, or if you would simply like to investigate the options, check out features and pricing for cloud computing services. One or more of these services may well be more cost effective that what you are doing now.

SIP Trunks vs ISDN PRI

Enterprise telephony long ago advanced beyond analog business lines in favor of PBX telephone systems and ISDN PRI trunking. Now there’s another option that may offer cost and performance advantages for companies that want to improve their voice services. It’s called SIP Trunking. Let’s compare and contrast SIP Trunks with ISDN PRI to see how to choose between them.

You should know that we are still talking exclusively about digital telephony. There is no analog transport in either a SIP Trunk or PRI. What differentiates the two is that ISDN PRI is based on a switched circuit model and SIP Trunking is based on packet switching.

For many companies it could be six of one and a half-dozen of the other. That’s because either trunking service can be made to work with your in-house phone system. The idea behind digital trunking is to carry a half-dozen or more outside phone lines on a single digital line. Usually that’s one or more T1 lines, although DS3, OC3 fiber or Ethernet can also be used.

ISDN PRI uses a T1 line configured into 23 separate voice channels plus one data and control channel. Most PBX systems and the newer IP PBX phone systems make it easy to connect to ISDN PRI. They either offer one or more PRI ports built-in or accommodate a plug-in adaptor card.

If you need more than 23 lines, you simply add more ISDN PRI lines incrementally. Each additional line can bring in up to 23 more business phone lines. You’ll have to check what’s available for your phone system, but it is not uncommon to have 2 to 4 PRI lines plugged into a PBX system.

The technology used for ISDN PRI is defined by the Integrated Systems Digital Network specification. PRI is the Primary Rate Interface. There is also a lower performance BRI or Basic Rate Interface that isn’t seen much anymore. This is a legacy telephone technology designed to support the idea of separate digitized telephone lines, one per channel. There’s no chance of interference between calls because the channels are strictly defined and timed using Time Division Multiplexing.

SIP Trunking is more of a network than a telephone based technology. It is a packet switched network line, much like you would use to connect two business locations. What SIP Trunking can do is directly support a converged voice and data network. You can run SIP Trunks between business locations to expand your voice and data network geographically.

The SIP in SIP Trunking stands for Session Initiation Protocol. That’s the switching technology used in VoIP telephone systems. In SIP trunking the control signals for the phone system are transported in packets that travel down the same network pipe as the voice packets.

ISDN PRI isn’t so much about convergence. It’s really about having separate telephone and data lines leave the premises, although you are free to converge your in-house network and let an IP PBX system on the network handle call routing, including outside calls on the ISDN PRI trunk line.

SIP Trunking doesn’t have to be about convergence, either. You can simply use a SIP Trunk to connect your PBX system to a telephone service provider rather than using an ISDN PRI. Depending on which CODEC or coding scheme you use, you may be able to handle more than 23 lines on a SIP Trunk. If you are using an Ethernet connection to your provider, you may be able to support dozens of phone lines depending on the bandwidth available.

For small businesses, SIP Trunks can be configured to transport both voice and data to your service provider. Most often this is used to bring in telephone lines and broadband Internet service on the same SIP Trunk. There’s a cost advantage, even if you are not running a converged voice and data in-house.

Since either ISDN PRI or SIP Trunking might be able to support your needs, how do you choose? That depends on the features you desire and what’s available to serve your particular business location. You may have several options to choose from. To find out, check out SIP Trunks and ISDN PRI availability and pricing now.

100 Mbps Colocation Center Bandwidth

Companies often look to colocation as a way to avoid the capital and operating expense of running their own data centers. There is also another important incentive to go the colocation route. It’s high bandwidth availability at lower costs.

A colocation center, or colo, is a facility that serves the data center needs of many businesses. Each server farm requires the servers themselves, networking switches, routers and appliances, equipment racks, rack wiring, electrical power, cooling air, and connectivity. Plus you’ll need physical security, fire suppression and a staff to monitor operations and take corrective action 24/7. You can provide all of this in-house or get it at a colocation center.

What makes a colo center cost effective is economy of scale. Instead of each customer having to maintain their own backup generators and fire suppression systems that are rarely used, the colocation facility has much larger units that serve all customers. The costs don’t scale linearly. The incremental cost of adding another user to the facility is pretty low and the facility cost spread over all users is less than what you can do on your own.

The somewhat hidden secret of colocation centers is that they have bandwidth available that you may not be able to afford on your own. A common connection is 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. You know that it’s no great shakes to connect a 100 Mbps Ethernet node to your own LAN. Getting a 100 Mbps connection beyond your property line may be anywhere from expensive to impossible. At 100 Mbps, you are beyond the capability of twisted pair services such as EoC or T1/E1 lines. You’ll need fiber optic cabling brought into your building and lit for SONET/SDH or Metro Ethernet service.

Why is there such a difference in price between 100 Mbps bandwidth provided in a colocation center and the same level of service delivered to your facility? One big reason is construction costs. Downtown in a major metropolitan area there may be many fiber facilities in your office building or nearby. If you order a significant amount of bandwidth you might not even be charged construction costs. But move a bit off the beaten fiber path and those charges go up dramatically. If you are located in a smaller town, industrial park or rural area you can be looking at tens of thousands of dollars or more to trench fiber optic cable from the nearest carrier point of presence.

The other reason for bargain prices at colocation facilities is competition. Once again, depending on population density and popularity of high bandwidth network services, you might find yourself with only one carrier serving your location. Your negotiating ability is pretty limited without competition. Colocation centers, however, are carrier magnets. Service providers know that there are dozens or hundreds of customers in a single building who all need their services. It’s no wonder they all set up points of presence within the colo. Often, there is a “meet me room” where carriers and customers are connected.

The combination of having several or more eager carriers vying for your business combined with the trivial construction costs of running a drop to your equipment racks is what makes it easy and relatively inexpensive to get all the bandwidth you want in a colocation center. Can you say the same for where you are now? There’s an easy way to find out. Simply request bandwidth availability and pricing for both your location and a nearby colocation facility.



Note: Photo of server rack wiring courtesy of Guillaume Paumier on Wikipedia Commons

Free Help On Your Telecom Needs

How would you like to hire some help for free? Not just any help, mind you, but high quality technical expertise to assist you with your telephone and computer networks. No out of pocket cost today or ever. Do you think that offer works well with today’s shrunken personnel budgets?

I’ll bet you do. In fact, you are probably chafing at the bit to find out where you can get some of this help before it’s all gone. Well, relax. There’s plenty to go around.

How can this be true? After all, if you expect to get a service then you also expect to pay for it. You can’t get something for nothing, can you? Yes, you can, if someone else is paying the bill.

Perplexed? Don’t be. What I’m talking about is a telecom brokerage service that has a large group of expert consultants in telephony, computer networking, international network services, wireless business solutions and the like. They stand ready to work with you right now, if only you would let them know what you need. You don’t have to be too specific. Just type a sentence or two to give them the general gist of what you are after. Someone will email or call you shortly to work through the details.

What happens after that? Your friendly consultant may take a few hours or even a couple of days to gather quotes of dozens of competitive service providers and sort out the best price/performance offers to present to you. This is the type of leg work your own staff would otherwise have to do... while you are paying them. No available IT staff to query dozens of potential suppliers in order to find the best match to your needs? Then you really need this service.

Some of these expert consultants routinely spend hours, even dozens of hours working on a single project for their client. How much do they bill per hour? Nothing at all. Oh, they get paid alright. But it’s not by you or any other end user. The brokerage service is paid by the service providers themselves in lieu of having to hire their own staff to do this work. You don’t get dinged with a higher price for service either. You’ll pay exactly the same as if you tracked down each competitive carrier or other service provider and ordered service directly from them without any outside assistance.

One other big advantage of working through a telecom broker is that they have the ability to compare and contrast offers from several to several dozen providers offering a suitable service for your business and location. They can keep a cool head sorting through the offers because they aren’t beholding to a particular vendor. They also know about special limited time offers being run by each providers, information you are unlikely to discover yourself.

So, whether you don’t have a staff or would just rather supplement their effort with free expert consulting service, you owe it to yourself and your bottom line to take advantage of this offer. Simply enter a brief online inquiry to describe your networking need and a friendly Telarus consultant will be touch pronto. You’ll be surprised at how much information you get for almost no effort on your part.

Ciena Takes New Bandwidth Technologies On The Road

If you happen to be near Waltham, MA today, June 29, you have an opportunity to see the latest in carrier bandwidth technology right at your doorstep. Simply step into the Ciena Innovation Lab and check out the demos of their optical, Ethernet and software solutions. Next stop is White Marsh, MD on July 15.

What’s the Ciena Innovation Lab? It’s a semi trailer chock full of the newest telecom and networking developments. Here, take a look:



If you are involved with Gigabit and Terabit bandwidth applications, you are familiar with Ciena... or should be. Certainly, fiber optic service providers keep a keen eye on developments from the Ciena labs. But now major corporations, content providers and large medical organizations need to familiarize themselves with packet-optical transport and switching systems. Today, you may be just broaching the idea of installing Gigabit Ethernet service. Tomorrow, you may well be ordering dark fiber for your own private point to point networks.

Ciena now has platforms that make deploying 40G and 100G fiber optic connections as easy as 10G. They are ready to support carrier Ethernet services, including high speed access, backhaul and aggregation. Their software suites make it easier for you to manage optical networks, Ethernet services and other high bandwidth networks services.

Is your company ready to move up to gigabit and higher levels of service? If so, you’ll benefit from a discussion with our Telarus bandwidth brokerage consultants. No charge for this service, of course. Take just a minute or so and describe your bandwidth needs in an easy online inquiry.

How Telarus GeoScan Finds Better Network Deals

The nation’s premier telecom brokerage service, Telarus, Inc., is introducing an advanced telecom carrier research tool to its family of proprietary software-based services. The new GeoScan enables Telarus consultants to better search and refine carrier service offerings for clients. By making the search and evaluation process more sophisticated, Telarus agents can ferret out the closest matching offers for a particular set of applications.

Why is such a tool needed? After all, the patented GeoQuote process already leads the industry in its ability to find and organize dozens of competing services from a plethora of carriers. What’s happened is an embarrassment of riches for Telarus. As the company’s reputation has grown in the industry, more and more carriers have requested to be included in the Telarus search results. On top of that, the telecom industry itself is undergoing a major transformation from switched circuit services to packet switched networks worldwide.

Within the last few years, the venerable T1 line, DS3 connection, and SONET/SDH fiber optic carriers have been challenged by Metro Ethernet services with scalable bandwidths from 3 Mbps through 10 Gbps. Include SIP trunking, wireless last mile links, and MPLS networks and you have an order of magnitude, at least, multiplication in the variety of service offerings available to businesses and organizations. It’s a deluge of options that can easily overwhelm the time-honored quote methods used by most telecom agents.

Telarus saw this coming when they refined their GeoQuote system to electronically connect with carrier databases and then assemble a list of appropriate quotes instantly. But a database connection can deliver a fire hose stream of data that’s hard to analyze at a glance for the best opportunities. That’s where the value of GeoScan shines. With this additional tool, Telarus agents can specify parameters such as the max MRC per location, the type of product and term for each circuit. That allows them to mine the data to find the particular service deals that are exact matches to a customer’s requirements.

Today’s business environment is more highly focused on productivity than ever before. That’s resulting in more sophisticated computer processes linking an ever increasing number of physical locations including overseas offices and factories. To keep up, telecom service providers have to step up their own processes to quickly analyze a prospective customer's needs and generate accurate quotes. They also need to be able to rapidly modify options to try “what ifs” and deal with a customer’s dynamically changing requirements.

This is where Telarus shines as the next generation of telecom brokers. They have the tools to tackle large and complex situations and the carrier relationships to offer the best-fit solutions available. This process scales from small businesses such as insurance or real estate offices up through major medical centers and Fortune 500 companies. The tools and the consultants can service any serious business opportunity that comes their way.

Could your company benefit from a complementary review of your voice, data and video networking needs? It’s free, of course, and you’ll likely be surprised by the variety of service options that you didn’t even know exist. Why not give it a try? Take just a minute and tell Telarus about your applications. It will be well worth your while.