Triple Play For Business

One of the hottest trends in consumer telecom services is called the “residential triple play.” This is a bundling that combines three electronic services that nearly every home subscribes to. They are television, telephone and broadband.

The bundling is made possible because one provider can deliver all three at a combined price that is lower than buying the same services from three separate providers. Cable companies are in the best position to deliver the triple play, but the package is also offered by telephone companies and wireless service providers. The advantage for cable is due to the very high bandwidth capability of their HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) facilities.

That’s great for consumers, but what about business? Is there such a thing as triple play for business? You bet. It’s available for businesses with their own business locations.

Not surprisingly, a huge provider of triple play is Comcast. You may know that Comcast is the largest Cable TV provider in the US. Comcast broadband is hugely popular with both consumers and small businesses. But did you also know that Comcast is the 3rd largest phone company in America?

The idea that the coaxial cable from a Cable company is pretty much the same as the one that connects the TV antenna on the roof is way out of date. Today’s cable is a sophisticated collection of multiplexed channels that carry voice, video and data equally well.

Multiplexing is the technique that divides the 1,000 MHz bandwidth capacity of the coaxial combined fiber and copper transmission facility into neatly spaced 6 MHz channels. Those channels are exactly the same size as over the air TV channels so it’s easy to fit one TV station per channel. However, those channels can be used for other purposes as well.

The two most popular non-TV services on Cable are broadband and telephone. You have your choice of one or more standard business phone lines or an ISDN PRI trunk line that is bundles up to 23 lines for connection to an in-house PBX telephone system.

You probably are using DSL, satellite or T1 lines now for your business broadband service. It’s likely that you’re getting something like 1 to 2 Mbps download bandwidth. DSL can go higher, but your bandwidth decreases the further you get from the telephone company central office. Cable has such high bandwidth capacity, that it delivers business broadband at 50 to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. Comcast’s smallest service starts at 12 Mbps/2Mbps.

You’re probably wondering if you can afford a triple play package? It’s likely you can’t afford not to go this way if you have the type of business where your customers wait on-site, like a doctor’s office or auto service center. That's where the TV service of triple play has its value. There are also packages for businesses like bars and restaurants that serve a walk-in clientele. How much are we talking? About the price of that T1 line will get you faster broadband plus telephone service with basic TV channels included.

What if you don’t need television in your business? Is there such a thing as double play?

Of course. Many, many professional offices, retail stores and quick service restaurants need a combination of reliable phone service and high speed broadband to meet their needs. Get these two services cheaper than buying separately from a telephone company and an Internet service provider.

Can you cut costs while getting the same or better voice, data and video services for your company? It’s well worth your time to find out. Check availability and pricing for bundled business broadband, telephone and TV services now.

Cable, T1 and EoC

Today, there are three excellent broadband options for the small to medium size business. They cost roughly the same, but offer different options. Which do you choose? Let’s take a closer look at business-class Cable, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper.

We’ll start with T1 lines because they are the mainstay of SMB connectivity. T1 lines come in several flavors depending on what you want to do with them. They’re all based on the same technology developed by the telephone industry half a century ago.

T1 is a T-carrier technology based on transmitting digital signals over ordinary twisted pair copper wiring. It takes two copper pair to make one T1 line. One pair is used for upload, the other for download. When used for telephony, one pair is talk and the other is listen. The speed of the digital signal on the line is 1.5 Mbps. This doesn’t vary. The equipment at each end of the line is synchronized to maintain a steady bit rate regardless of whether anything is being transmitted or not.

Originally, the purpose of this arrangement was to transmit telephone calls in channels called DS0s. There are 24 channels on a T1 line. You can use them separately or combine all the channels to make one large broadband pipe. The most common T1 telephone line now is called a T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. It has 23 separate phone lines plus one channel for signaling and Caller ID.

A broadband T1 line delivers a fully symmetrical bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. The upload and download speeds are the same. This line can connect directly between two business locations as a private line or it can be used to connect to the Internet or another network, such as a MPLS cloud network. When used as an Internet connection, the arrangement is called a dedicated T1 Internet connection. Dedicated means that the full bandwidth is always available for your use only.

The most direct competitor to T1 is now Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet over Copper uses the same twisted pair telephone wiring that T1 lines use. The main difference is that the equipment on each end uses a more advanced technology to transport higher bandwidth through each copper pair. Often multiple pair in the same binder cable are used to bring in a higher bandwidth EoC service.

Ethernet over Copper is available is bandwidths from 1 Mbps on up to typically 20 Mbps. In some areas, it is now possible to get speeds as high as 90 or 100 Mbps delivered over copper pair. Those are bandwidth levels that have demanded fiber optic connections until recently. EoC is also designed to be highly scalable. You order and EoC port at the speed you ultimately expect to need but only sign up for the speed you need now. In the future, you can have that speed raised by simply calling your service provider and the change will be made in days or even hours.

A comparable service priced the same as a T1 line is 2x2 Mbps Ethernet or 3x3 Mbps Ethernet. Those designations mean that you get the same speed for upload and download, just like with a T1 line. Note that the bandwidth is as much as twice as high, however.

The third option is business class Cable broadband. This service is offered by Cable TV companies, such as Comcast, that also provide consumer broadband. The coaxial cables used for Cable TV have tremendous bandwidth capacity and can easily transport broadband as well as television signals. You connect via a Cable modem. The latest Cable modem standard is DOCSIS 3.0 that can deliver 50 or 100 Mbps to business users.

It may seem amazing that you can get 50 or 100 Mbps for the same price as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line, but there are some differences in the services. Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. You’ll find that your bandwidth varies during the day depending on how heavily other users are uploading and downloading. Also, Cable bandwidth is not symmetrical. You may be getting 100 Mbps in the download direction, but your upload path will be only 10 or 15 Mbps. That may not matter if you are primarily accessing Web pages or watching video clips. It could be a problem if you expect to be transmitting video service or uploading very large files frequently.

Cable does have one extra advantage in that you can get what’s called a “triple play” service. That’s broadband, telephone and television all on the same cable for one bundled price. This is especially attractive to businesses that have waiting rooms for the public, like doctor’s offices or auto service facilities. There are special bundle prices for public businesses like bars and restaurants.

Which bandwidth solution is best for your business? Why not get prices and availability for Cable broadband, T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper for your business location? Then pick the solution that makes the most sense for your applications.



Note: Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

HFC Broadband For Business

Many small businesses don’t fall into the category of “residential” users but don’t need or can’t afford the cost of traditional business telecom services, such as T1 lines or Ethernet over Copper. One possible solution is HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax broadband services.

Hybrid what? You may have heard of this as Cable broadband for business. A lot of home based businesses successfully use Cable broadband to manage their websites, access information on the Web and send and receive email. But try to order residential service for a business location and you’ll get turned down flat. That’s because residential broadband is priced for single homes and apartments with few people accessing the service and probably no-one online most of the day. Knowing that, some business owners incorrectly assume that you can’t get Cable run into a business. But you can.

So, what’s available and why the funny name? HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax refers to the technology used to deploy high speed Internet access, telephone service, and Cable television. You know that Cable TV and Cable broadband are called that because of the coaxial cable that provides the connection to the network. When Cable systems were first deployed, they were constructed from various size coaxial cables. What’s happened in recent years is that the long connection from the Cable office or the “head end” where the signals are picked up and run for miles to various neighborhoods has been replaced by fiber optic cable. The last few hundred feet or so are still copper coaxial cable, also called coax. The result is a system that is a hybrid of fiber optic cable and coax cable known as Hybrid Fiber Coax or HFC.

Why go with a hybrid arrangement rather than just make it fiber optics all the way? It’s mostly a matter of cost. While fiber has a far larger capacity, there is a lot of coax already in the ground. The interface connection at the premises, either a Cable modem or set top box, is much less expensive than the termination equipment needed for fiber. Don’t count that coax down and out yet, either. With digital signals, there is more than enough bandwidth for triple-play services to small and medium businesses as well as consumers.

With an already built-out infrastructure and a high number of users to cover costs, you might expect that HFC services are lower in cost than most telecom services available for the SMB. You’re right, they are. But you need to know the performance tradeoffs to make a smart buying decision.

One excellent use for HFC is broadband Internet access when employee use is primarily Web browsing and email. That includes information research, making purchases, doing simple banking, messaging customers, providing a WiFi hotspot and so on. If most of what you do is similar to the way you use a computer at home, HFC should work just fine. You select a bandwidth tier that offers enough speed to work efficiently and still saves you money over other options. Typical bandwidth for smaller businesses goes up to 15 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload, although some Cable companies are offering speeds as high as 50 or even 100 Mbps.

You’ll likely be able to get a high speed Internet solution that meets your needs with a lot more bandwidth than a T1 line offers and for a lot less money. But beware. T1 lines are dedicated bandwidth that stays a rock solid 1.5 Mbps all the time. Cable bandwidth is shared among all the users on the Cable and can vary all over the place. That’s one way they hold the cost down. If you are running high traffic ecommerce servers or using business processes that expect constant bandwidth, you might find the speed variations not worth the cost savings. Otherwise, you might be quite happy with both the performance and reliability of HFC broadband.

Another service that Cable companies have gotten into is business telephone, essentially VoIP. One big difference between this service and simply running a third party VoIP service over your broadband connection is that the Cable version never transits the Internet. The voice packets travel over the cable network and are then terminated to the public telephone network by the Cable company or a telephone service provider. By doing it this way, the HFC operator has more control of things like latency, packet loss and network congestion to ensure decent voice quality.

Finally, HFC offers Cable TV channels. After all, that’s why the network was built in the first place. Businesses with waiting rooms, like automotive service centers and doctor’s offices, can put business Cable TV service to good use.

Have you been frustrated by your current choices in network services? Why not compare prices, availability and service features of HFC, T1 and Ethernet so you can make the best buying decision? You may be surprised by the range of options available.



Note: Diagram of coaxial cable construction courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.