150 Mbps Ethernet vs OC3 Cost

When DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps isn’t enough anymore, it’s time to take a look at higher service levels. So, do you make the jump to OC3 at 155 Mbps or take a look at competing Ethernet services? It can be worth your while to do the comparison. Let’s see why.

Once you start moving into higher bandwidth services, you are looking at fiber optic delivery. Yes, in rare situations you may qualify for 100 Mbps or higher Ethernet over Copper or fixed wireless microwave service. For these to work you need to be very, very close to the provider’s office and, in the case of microwave, have a clear line of site from your building to theirs. For everyone else, it’s fiber optic cabling. Fiber can transport Ethernet or OC3 equally well. So, how do you choose?

One big factor in your decision may be the cost of construction. If there is fiber running nearby, but not yet installed into your building, there is a certain one time cost involved in trenching the fiber and its conduit underground or bringing in the fiber cable overhead. Oddly enough, in densely packed downtown business districts, the cost of fiber construction can be higher than it is out in the burbs. Why? It’s because the available conduits may be all full or hard to obtain and the expense of tunneling under major roadways can be a deal breaker.

Don’t be discouraged by the possibility of high construction costs until you get competitive quotes for fiber optic service to your building. Each situation is unique. The cost for installing similar service to buildings across the street from each other can vary wildly. It’s also possible that you may get your installation for free or at a big discount. Some fiber providers are aggressively building out their networks. If they want your location, they may foot the bill for construction or at least part of it. The more bandwidth you need, the more attractive your situation is. If you are in a multi-tenant building, it could be worth your while to get together with other tenants and offer a much larger bandwidth requirement to lure potential service providers.

Another possibility is that your building is already “lit” for fiber optic service from one or more carriers. Let’s say that someone in your building is already leasing OC3 bandwidth from a telecom carrier. That carrier has already gone to the expense and trouble of bringing in the multi-strand fiber cable and installing termination equipment. They’ve hooked up the other end to their metro fiber network running nearby. How much trouble is it to also provide you with OC3 fiber optic service?

Not much trouble at all. Unlike copper cables, fiber optic bundles can support nearly unlimited bandwidth. It’s a matter of setting their add/drop multiplexers to bring enough bandwidth into the building and demultiplex it into separate services for each subscribing tenant. As you can imagine, the construction costs will be minimal, perhaps even complementary.

The same is true if there is already high bandwidth Ethernet over Fiber service installed in the building. The Ethernet service provider has done all the hard work. They can easily add you to the network rapidly and at minimal cost.

This may be the deciding factor. If one service is already installed and the other is not, the capital cost factor can outweigh other advantages. What if both services are in the building? Then it becomes a more level playing field. In general, Ethernet service is less expensive and easier to scale than SONET services, such as OC3. There is also a service called Ethernet over SONET that uses traditional SONET ring networks to carry the newer Carrier Ethernet protocol. That means a legacy carrier may well be able to offer you either OC3 or 150 Mbps Ethernet at an attractive price over already installed infrastructure.

How much will it cost you to get the high bandwidth business connectivity you require? Each situation needs to be evaluated on its own merit. You can get cost quotes for Ethernet services up to 1 Gbps instantly, with fast response on SONET or Ethernet over SONET services by using the Fiber Network Quotes service for US based locations. US to international destination quotes are also available upon request.

Telecom Providers Build Their Own Clouds

Just as cloud companies are beginning to mature as businesses, Internet service providers and other carriers have decided to build out their own cloud offerings. Now, how does a harried IT manager or small business owner sort through all the various opportunities?

It’s important to remember that we are in the early days of the cloud. Like all new technologies, this one has a maturity or learning curve. We are on the early part of the upward slope. What that means is a lot of activity from a lot of players. You can expect new companies with new services to be popping up all the time. It also makes sense that current players in the computer and networking space will want to corral as much of this business for themselves as possible. If not, they may be justifiably concerned that they could be relegated to sidelines.

Windstream, a major competitive carrier for T1 lines, MPLS networks, dedicated Ethernet Internet and enterprise VoIP, saw the handwriting on the wall when they acquired Hosted Solutions last year. Adding the assets of Hosted Solutions to Windstream’s existing data centers, has given them the critical mass to get into cloud services for existing customers. Such services include such things as cloud storage, Infrastructure as a Service and private, public, and hybrid clouds. Other carriers, such as Level 3 Communications, also have cloud services available.

Most carriers have large data centers for their own use. They often leverage these assets by offering colocation services within their secure and highly reliable facilities. Colocation is something of a forerunner of the cloud. The provider offers racks and cages where you can move your servers and network appliances. They provide the electricity with backup, environmental control and security. Another big draw of colocation is the proximity to large amounts of bandwidth. Many companies either can’t get or can’t afford the cost of constructing fiber optic connections to their own facilities. At a colocation center, the carrier is right down the hall and a mere cross-connect away. It’s the best deal on bandwidth you can get.

More recently, colocation centers have begun to offer contracted technical support and even leased servers for those who don’t want to buy their own. In essence, the colo becomes your data center and you don’t need the capital expense, operational expense or staffing to run your own. That being the case, what’s different about cloud services?

The primary difference between colocation and the cloud likes in both outsourcing and virtualization. The cloud infrastructure consists of massive computing power and storage, all virtualized so that it can be sliced and diced as users require. While in the cloud, you are unaware that you are not the only one using the facilities. The same bank of servers that run your applications can be running dozens or hundreds of others simultaneously. The magic of virtualization creates the illusion that you have one or more physical servers all to yourself.

A good cloud is much more than that. Not only do you rent rather than buy, but you rent by the minute or hour times the number of servers you are using. You can add or subtract virtual servers at will and only pay for the ones you are reserving. The same is true for storage. You don’t worry about buying a new disk when you fill up the one you have. You simply increase or decrease storage as needed and pay by the byte.

The ability to increase and decrease resources almost instantly is a feature unique to the cloud. This scalability is highly desirable for companies with varying loads or ones that are rapidly growing. There is no need to be constantly buying and upgrading equipment when you can simply log into your cloud account and add resources at will.

What carriers bring to the table is one stop shopping. They already provide last mile access, multi-site connectivity, and converged voice, video and data networks. By adding cloud services, you have one bill to pay and a single point of contact for resolving issues such as latency or availability. Independent cloud service providers will need to be on their toes to stay ahead of the carriers, by offering more advanced services and lower pricing to stay in the game long term.

Are you ready for the cloud? The range of services and competitive pricing makes cloud computing and storage, colocation and managed services more cost effective than they’ve ever been. Inquire about availability and pricing for the networking and computing services you need for your particular applications.

Cloud Service Providers Colocate With Customers

There’s a new migration on. No, not the migration from local data centers to the cloud. It’s a migration of cloud service providers to colocate with their customers.

Why? It’s the rude awakening that companies suffer when they find that applications running way out there don’t have the same zip as the ones running on servers down the hall. That can be fixed, of course. It requires engineering your connections to the cloud so that they have sufficient amounts of bandwidth and very low latency, jitter and packet loss. But why go that that expense when you can just cozy up to your service provider with little more than a long patch cord connecting you?

That’s what Telx thinks. They’re throwing open their doors and working to lure cloud service providers to take up residence in one or more of their high performance colocation centers. It’s an acknowledgement that the speed of computing has gotten to the point where interconnections are the weak link. The venerable T1 line or DS3 connection that worked so well when all you needed to do was surf the Web, exchange email or generate sales leads quickly chokes when you start adding virtual servers by the dozens or hundreds.

There are a couple of big crunches that strain the cloud service model. One is business processes that are now automated and support hundreds or thousands of employees. The other is high performance e-commerce, with enormous catalogs and thousands of simultaneous shoppers who have little patience for sluggish servers and none at all for errors in their shopping experience.

The cloud is becoming a victim of its own success. Cloud service providers have mastered the technology of being able to ramp up or down the number of servers online in a matter of seconds. Storage is a bottomless well that data fills as needed. Public-facing bandwidth is easily handled with multiple Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Internet connections with enough margin to serve all customers. While cloud companies have gotten used to this scale of resources, most businesses have not. They don’t have the private line connectivity to take full advantage of near-infinite, near-instantaneous computing resources.

More savvy companies have mastered the connectivity issues, but who’s going to turn down the opportunity to get more performance for less money? The notion of being on the same floor of the same building with your service provider and ditching the telecom line in favor of a local fiber or wire connection has a lot of appeal. The issues of bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss simply disappear.

A lot of medium and larger companies already have equipment in colocation centers, such as Telx. The economic tradeoff between running your own environmentally controlled facilities with backup power, fire suppression and round the clock monitoring and simply renting space in a larger facility with its economies of scale makes colocation attractive. On top of that is the fact that you have easier access to competitive carrier services with more attractive pricing than you can get locally. Now, add to these advantages the opportunity to connect to a cloud service provider in-house and you are looking at really attractive cost vs performance figures.

The new Telx Cloud Connectivity Centers with cloud-optimized infrastructure to support cloud service providers in each of their 15 data centers is an idea who’s time has come. Enterprise users and cloud companies are like opposite magnetic poles trying to get as close to each other as possible. Colocation is the obvious answer.

Can your business benefit from colocation as a service provider or service user? Get pricing and technical specs for the IT resources you need and compare with what you are doing now.



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

Dark Fiber Community Builds Infrastructure

You hear the stories that our infrastructure is crumbling. Not all infrastructure. There’s a big construction project underway now to ring the country with a thousand fiber strands, a high bandwidth nervous system for information technology. Lighting up this dark fiber promises almost unlimited low latency bandwidth for the foreseeable future.

Why the need for this dark fiber infrastructure? It’s not so much that the old infrastructure is crumbling as it is chock full. You remember the great fiber buildout late last century? It seemed to be way overdone when the tech crash came. Indeed, it’s taken over a decade to light up all that excess fiber. There may still be some underutilized fiber rings looking to see the light, the laser light that is. But there is also an enormous additional need coming from business process automation, high frequency financial services, electronic medical records, and 4G wireless, to name a few demanding applications.

Rising to the challenge is Allied Fiber and its Dark Fiber Community. Allied fiber isn’t a carrier. They are an infrastructure builder. They are where the carriers go to get new unlit fiber routes. One of the most prestigious fiber optic carriers, AboveNet, has just joined the Dark Fiber Community to provide expertise in high performance fiber optic networking and be part of this enormous resource.

The Dark Fiber Community is an association of over 60 members that include equipment vendors, carriers, industry technical associations, financing companies and other interested parties. It’s hosted by TMCnet.com as an online resource and educational platform to support Allied Fiber.

Allied Fiber, itself, is the company that is building out and leasing this enormous national dark fiber optic backbone. It will eventually be in the form of a ring linking New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, Ashburn, VA and back to NYC. Draw a circle around the lower 48 states and you’ll have the general route for Allied Fiber.

But what if you don’t happen to be located in one of those major cities on the fiber route? Here’s the cleverness of the design. It’s not just a few long haul fiber routes. It’s two parallel routes. One is long haul between the major cities mentioned. The other, running side by side, is broken up into 60 mile segments. These short haul routes terminate in colocation huts where the laser signals are regenerated to boost them for the next segment. Inside the same hut are racks for multiplexing equipment to add and drop network services on the route. This long-haul/short haul arrangement allows Allied to provide low latency fiber between major city pairs while having the flexibility to also serve many other locations along the way and connect to other short haul routes off the major route.

One series of connections will be Fiber to the Tower or FTTT. You may not have heard of FTTT before, but you will hear plenty about it in the near future. The wireless industry is moving into 4G as fast as they can. Unfortunately, their old T1 based copper backhaul infrastructure is maxed out for bandwidth. That means new fiber connections to those cellular base stations in many cases. Allied’s FTTT plan is to provide access to the duct fiber every 1 to 2 miles in order to create lateral extensions from the main fiber route to where the towers are located.

Are you in need of higher bandwidth fiber optic services at highly competitive prices? If so, you may have more options than you think. Find out by getting prices and availability for dark and lit fiber optic bandwidth services now.



Note: Photo of workmen installing fiber optic cable courtesy of Paul Keleher on Wikimedia Commons.

What is Metro E?

Metro E is short for Metro Ethernet, a popular and rapidly expanding network connection service.

Metro E is Ethernet like the protocol you run on your Local Area Network (LAN). But it has been standardized and adapted to also run on a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). The organization behind this standardization is the MEF or Metro Ethernet Forum. It’s an industry standards organization dedicated to Carrier Ethernet.

Here’s why you should you know about Metro E and seriously consider using it for your business connectivity. Metro Ethernet services are better suited to today’s packet switched networks than the legacy telecom services such as T1. Connectivity is almost trivial. Ethernet is what nearly all networks are running as a protocol. The connection from your service provider is an Ethernet jack. That’s it. No need for special conversion equipment to connect to your switches and routers.

Metro E is supported by a number of incumbent telecom carriers, plus many new competitive service providers that have no connection to legacy telephone services. Nearly all of these new competitors have built their networks on fiber optic lines and IP or MPLS core networks. Metro Ethernet services are easily transported on these networks. The result of all this competition is that Metro E prices are often considerably lower per Mbps than T1, DS3, or OCx bandwidth. It is not uncommon to get 3 Mbps Ethernet service for the same price as 1.5 Mbps T1 and similarly reduced costs at higher bandwidths.

Like other telecom services, Metro Ethernet can be set up to provide point to point connectivity between two business locations. Unlike older technologies, Ethernet Line Service can be configured as a layer 2 connection between two LANs, effectively connecting them to make one larger LAN. Ethernet LAN Service, or ELAN, can do the same thing for multiple locations. It’s a high performance and cost effective way for businesses to tie-together branch offices, factories, headquarters and warehouses. It works just as well for hospitals and their related medical centers in the area.

Another use for Metro E is as an access network connection. Metro E links are used as last mile connections to larger MPLS networks for national or worldwide service. They are also used as dedicated broadband Internet connections for small, medium and large organizations.

Metro E bandwidth tends to be easily scalable. Service at 3 Mbps is a popular entry level bandwidth. Many companies move up to 10 Mbps, a standard LAN speed. Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10 Gigabit Ethernet are other standard LAN speeds that are also supported by Metro E providers. While these speeds are popular, most providers offer incremental bandwidths between each of these levels. You can order any bandwidth up to the limit of your installed Ethernet port. Start with what you need now and easily upgrade as the need arises.

One thing you should know is that the Metro in Metro E generally means just that. This service is available in most metropolitan areas, but rarely in rural areas. It may be possible to get Ethernet connectivity over T1 lines, called EoDS1. This is a way to extend service to include remote business locations.

If Metro E the right service for your business situation? A quick way to find out is to request a list of Metro E service levels and prices for your business location or locations.

Ethernet MPLS Has Cost and Bandwidth Advantages

Two of the hottest voice, video and data networking technologies right now are Carrier Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet, and MPLS networks. But did you know that Ethernet and MPLS can work together to give you more bandwidth at lower cost?

What Ethernet brings to the table is a way to avoid the big protocol speed bump that has traditionally existed at the demarcation point between customer network and telecom network. These two networks have very different historical development and would be completely incompatible were it not for some very clever interfacing. Today it is possible to transport packets from one LAN to another LAN via a telephony-based telecom network designed for voice channels, not datagrams. But why should you?

With Ethernet in the metropolitan and wide area networks, the speed bump between inside and outside networks disappears. Ethernet packets flow seamlessly down the line as far and the connections exist. Often that is right into a branch office or other remote site LAN owned by the same company. Metro Ethernet point to point line service makes it easy to interconnect business locations.

Because it is Ethernet all the way, there is an extra advantage to Ethernet transport services. These connections can be set up to operate at the layer 2 switching level rather than layer 3 routing. That gives you the ability to connect your headquarters LAN to a branch office LAN or remote data center and create what amounts to a very large bridged network for your entire company.

So where to MPLS networks fit into this? MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is a technology that accommodates just about any protocol. You can use it to transport telephone calls, data backups, video feeds, and anything else you need to get from point A to point B. In a way, an MPLS network is something like a postal or shipping service. It doesn’t care what’s in the boxes. It just gets them there on time and undamaged.

MPLS networks are an alternative to the public telephone network or the Internet. They are operated by telecom carriers with regional, national or international service footprints. What MPLS networks offer technically are carefully engineered network services with guaranteed bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss characteristics. What they offer economically are very cost effective ways to transport your sensitive voice, video and data with a high level of quality and security.

Now, combine Ethernet and MPLS and what do you get? You get the performance and cost advantages of Ethernet connections from your business locations to the MPLS network cloud. Within the network, your Ethernet packets are transported transparently between locations. You simply specify what type of connectivity you want among the locations you choose and the service provider sets that up.

Ethernet MPLS solutions are readily available and highly competitive. That provides an opportunity for you to consolidate your telecom services and reduce costs while maintaining quality of service. Check Ethernet MPLS pricing and availability now.

MiFi Points The Way to Wireless Transition

Verizon Wireless just made an amazing announcement. They will be selling the Apple iPad in their stores. But aren’t Apple and AT&T exclusive partners? Indeed. So, why is Verizon selling a product that won’t work on their network? ...Or will it?

Yes, it will. How Verizon accomplished this clever feat of engineering points the way to the future of wireless broadband. Actually, not the future future. Just the immediate future. Call it the era of wireless transition.

Wireless technology has pretty much developed along two lines. One is the telecom carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. There are other players in the cellular wireless game, but they are simply private branded versions of the big four within the US. What characterizes the major carriers is that their offerings are proprietary. What works on AT&T won’t work on Verizon Wireless, and vice versa.

The other wireless path is an industry standard known a WiFi. It comes in flavors such as a, b, g, and n. But unlike telecom carrier services there is enough commonality and backwards compatibility that pretty much any WiFi device will work on pretty much any wireless router, hotspot or access point.

What Verizon has cleverly done is marry the two lines. They can’t get into the iPad through the front door, so the come in the back door. How? Very simple. They use an interface device to convert cellular to WiFi. That device is the MiFi. The Verizon MiFi is a little box about the size of a pack of cards. Inside is a cellular radio, a WiFi radio, a battery and some circuitry to make it all work. All you do is push a button to turn it on and the converter works automatically. It allows up to 5 wireless devices to gain access to the Verizon 3G wireless network as if they were Verizon-enabled to begin with.

The Verizon iPad will consist of an Apple iPad and a Verizon MiFi bundled together. They are separate pieces of equipment, but the MiFi will slip into your pocket or bag so it isn’t intrusive. At first blush, it may seem like having to carry around two pieces of equipment instead of just one is a big disadvantage for Verizon compared to AT&T. But Verizon may get the last laugh after all. The MiFi provides 3G connectivity for your iPad, but it also provides 3G connectivity for your other devices that don’t have their own 3G service built-in. That includes your laptop computer, netbook, games, and even your Apple iPod. If you had to buy separate 3G service for each device, you’d go broke. But one MiFi can serve whatever gadgets need connectivity, as long as they are WiFi enabled.

Verizon isn’t the only one with a MiFi. Novatel, maker of the MiFi, offers an unlocked version for GSM carriers AT&T and T-Mobile. There’s a MiFi specifically for Virgin Mobile. Sprint goes one further with their Sierra Wireless Overdrive 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot. It works on both the Sprint 3G Mobile Broadband network and its 4G WiMAX network. CLEAR offers a similar 3G/4G converter called Clear Spot.

Even these converters are transitional technology. Smartphones, starting with the Droid X by Motorola and Samsung Epic, have the cellular to WiFi hotspot capability built-in. This is likely to become a standard feature on smartphone designs, as WiFi and Bluetooth are the industry standard wireless technologies. WiFi has the greater transmission range.

Down the road a few years, the tide of wireless seems to be going in the direction of standardizing on LTE as a 4G standard. Cellular phone may give way to VoIP over LTE. At that point it will be hard to tell the difference between a mobile phone, a smartphone and a digital device like a tablet computer. Perhaps a single smart radio chip will provide universal wireless connectivity. Just pick your carrier and sign up for a service plan after you buy the device. The wireless transition era will be complete.

Fiber Optic DWDM Up to 100 Gbps Per Wavelength

The incredible growth of bandwidth demand continues unabated. Odd, perhaps, in these soft economic times. It’s the proliferation of video and especially high definition video that has dramatically increased network bandwidth requirements, including metro and long haul WAN networks. Now a new benchmark has been achieved at 100 Gbps per wavelength in DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing fiber optic systems.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we were hearing of the move from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps channels. Alcatel-Lucent is offering a new upgrade module that operates at both 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps using a single optical carrier. It’s available in their 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS).

What does it take to achieve such speeds on existing fiber that was intended for 10 Gbps transmissions? After all, you can’t exactly rip up all that installed fiber and lay new cables just to up the bandwidth. Also complicating the design is that in wavelength division multiplexing not all wavelengths will be scheduled for simultaneous upgrade. What’s needed in an upgrade that won’t interfere with existing 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps signals nor demand larger amounts of rack space and power.

Alcatel-Lucent has met these design goals with a new electro-optics engine that depends heavily on digital signal processing and better modulation and detection techniques for the optical signal. It starts with a change from amplitude shift keying (ASK) to phase shift keying (PSK). With a constant amplitude, the signal has better resilience against non-linear effects in the fiber. Both two-phase-state and four-phase-state coding schemes can be used to load more information on the signal. They then double the bit rate again without increasing the symbol rate by adding PDM or polarization division multiplexing on the same signal.

As you probably guessed, transmitting more information on the same wavelength has a price. That price is sophistication of the electronics. Coherent detection uses a local oscillator mixed with the optical signal to produce interferences that give an output of phase, amplitude and polarization to the digital signal processor. Some heavy duty number crunching allows the DSP to compensate for linear distortions in the fiber while it recovers the bit information.

Alcatel-Lucent proved all this out last fall during a field trial in Spain, by transmitting 112 Gbps per channel along with 40 Gbps and 10 Gbps channels on a 1088 km link between Madrid and Merida via Seville, as described in their technology white paper, “Next-generation Electro-Optics Technology with Coherent Detection”.

Ciena has a competing system, the OME or Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 that also runs at 100 Gbps. These two companies should set the standard at 100 Gbps... at least for awhile. You know that whenever there is competition, there will be the competitive spirit to take things to the next level. What is that? 200 Gbps? 500 Gbps? 1 Tbps?

Service providers worldwide are in a scramble to provide higher speed services at lower costs. Prices have dropped so much in the last few years that you can probably afford more bandwidth than you think. Why wonder when you can get high bandwidth fiber optic service quotes quickly and easily. It only takes a minute to inquire, so why not take that minute right now?