Telexplainer

Connectivity For Multi-Business Buildings

2012-05-25T00:18:00.000-05:00

Many companies lease space in large office buildings, malls or strip centers rather than build their own facilities. This presents the possibility of obtaining higher bandwidths and better bandwidth prices by combining forces with other tenants in your building.

There are a couple of ways to capitalize on the combined demand of several or many businesses. One option is for the owner of the building to become an ISP or bandwidth provider for all the tenants. The owner surveys everyone in the building as to their needs. Next, the owner shops for the best bandwidth prices based on the combined needs of the tenants. The selected service provider installs the line to the building’s router, which then distributes the bandwidth according to how much each tenant has requested. The owner bills those tenants for service each month and pays the telecom bill to the carrier.

It’s also possible that the service provider will take responsibility for breaking out the bandwidth from the carrier managed Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) and bill each tenant separately. That gets the building owner out of the loop, which could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. Yes, it’s less hassle to let the service provider handle all the telecom issues. However, with the building owner as provider there is an opportunity to add some markup to the telephone, broadband and private line services and make telecom a profit center.

The reason this idea makes sense is that the more bandwidth you buy, the cheaper it gets per Mbps. You might think that 100 Mbps would cost 10x as much as 10 Mbps. Not so in most cases. You’ll probably pay 2 or 3 times as much depending on how competitive service is in your area. Even lower levels of 10 Mbps vs 1 Mbps have a cost difference of several times, not 10 times. You can see that a savvy building manager could give each tenant a better deal on their bandwidth needs than they could get by going directly to the carriers, while making a tidy profit in the process.

Some buildings have basic business broadband included in their lease prices as a sweetener to attract tenants. A building owner can have the building wired for 10 or 100 Mbps Ethernet and install a router for signal distribution. Wireless access points can be included. The telecom feed can be as simple as a single T1 line for light duty usage or Ethernet over Copper to get the bandwidth up to 5, 10 or 20 Mbps as needed to keep everyone happy. With 1.5 Mbps T1 lines or 3 Mbps EoC costing under $300 a month in some areas, it’s not that expensive to provide this service to 10 or 20 offices.

Here’s something else to consider. Quite a few businesses now really need fiber optic bandwidth levels to support video production, medical imaging, computer aided design and simulation, and research of all types. You can’t get these high bandwidth services unless your building is “lit” for fiber optic service. Lit means that a fiber optic cable connects from inside the building to a carrier’s equipment outside and that the fiber is delivering bandwidth.

If someone thought to install dark fiber during construction, getting it lit may be an easy process. Chances are, though, that the only communication lines coming into the building are a bundle of copper pairs installed by the telephone company. Spares can be used for T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper, but truly large bandwidths require nothing less than fiber strands. In built up areas, it can be a nightmare to install new fiber in the ground or overhead. It can be even worse in the middle of nowhere when there is no fiber for miles in any direction.

This can be a real inhibitor for high demand business users and a reason to move company operations to a location with better service availability. Carriers might be willing to install the fiber drop but often want the building owner to pay construction costs. What can sway their opinion is the opportunity to sign up a number of customers in one building with a very large total bandwidth need. All carriers are looking for lucrative business opportunities to expand their networks. If you and several to several dozen of your fellow tenants or the building owner can present a tempting enough opportunity, one or more carriers might absorb some or all of the construction costs to light your building.

Are you a building owner, manager or tenant who needs private lines, dedicated Internet access, SIP Trunks or similar telecom services? If so, get competitive telecom service quotes for yourself, your tenants or the combined needs of multiple businesses in your building.

Note: Photo of Portland office building courtesy of Ian Poellet on Wikimedia Commons.

Should You Buy VoIP as a Service?

2012-05-24T01:17:00.000-05:00

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been around longer than people have been talking about “the cloud.” Frankly, so has VoIP. What’s gaining steam now is a move by larger businesses to tie their multiple locations together via SIP Trunks and outsourcing the PBX function by businesses of all sizes. You might consider this approach VoIP as a Service.

Many residential and small business users embraced VoIP in the cloud as a way to save money by dropping their analog line in favor of letting their broadband Internet connection do double duty as both a high speed Internet connection and a phone line. A device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor turns regular telephones into IP telephones so they can work on a computer network. This approach works, but the voice quality is highly variable. That’s because the Internet is mandated to treat all traffic equally. Unfortunately, this means that large data file or video downloads can congest the network and cause telephone calls to distort or drop.

There are a couple of ways to have both telephone and Internet service brought in on the same line. Cable companies do this by giving each service its own channel, along with the TV channels on the cable. TV channels don’t interfere with each other, so there is no reason that voice and data can’t also coexist as long as you keep them separated. To make this work, you need to get your business phone service from the cable company so they can manage the traffic.

Another method for delivering telephone and broadband service on the same line is the SIP Trunk. This is most often a T1 telecom line or Ethernet over Copper service running over twisted pair telco wiring. What makes it a SIP Trunk is Class of Service (CoS) enabled routers at both ends of the line. Voice packets automatically get priority with all other traffic using the remaining bandwidth. SIP Trunks are available where cable doesn’t go. You also get dedicated rather than shared Internet access for bandwidth that doesn’t vary depending on other users.

Larger SIP Trunks can be set up to interconnect multiple business locations for both voice and data traffic. If you have several branch offices, you probably already have private lines connecting them. Why not include your in-house telephone traffic and avoid paying telephone toll charges for calls to remote offices? The SIP Trunk will do that. It can be set up for multiple CoS levels so that voice and video get highest priority, mission critical data is next in line, Internet access is lower still and background activities like remote backup get whatever is leftover.

Some medium and large companies can benefit from SIP session consolidation. The way this works is that all the branch offices are connected via headquarters to the service provider using a large SIP trunk. The company pays for each channel or session that supports one call. Since the sessions are shared among all users in the company, there is no need to have dedicated separate trunks at each location with excess capacity going to waste.

The question that remains is whether you should continue to operate your own in-house PBX switching system or opt for a hosted PBX. The hosted option moves the PBX into the cloud, where it handles all of your internal and outside traffic. This is the ultimate in VoIP as a Service. You typically pay so much per seat per month. You can add more seats when you need them, as the cloud PBX has all the capacity you’ll ever use. No need to add extra capacity now. You simply pay for what you actually use. Some hosted VoIP providers will even include new IP phones in your monthly service fee so you don’t have to make any capital investment at all.

Does VoIP as a Service make sense for your company? Find out by getting competitive pricing and features for SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX telephone services for business.

Optical Ethernet Connections To The World

2012-05-23T00:48:00.000-05:00

Fiber optic connections are becoming common for network operations. How about for WAN (Wide Area Network) connections? Are you limited to what’s available on Ethernet over Copper or forced to abandon Ethernet for an unrelated telecom protocol?

Not any more. Ethernet connections have become established and far more common than you might think. This does include the lower bandwidth options over twisted pair copper, but it also includes high speed services over fiber optic connections. With fiber, you can pretty much have all the bandwidth you care to pay for. That payment may also be a lot less than you think.

Ethernet over FIber or EoF offers a set of high bandwidth services that meet the specifications of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). All together, these standardized services are referred to as Carrier Ethernet as distinguished from Ethernet that runs on a local area network. These two types of Ethernet are highly compatible. Carrier Ethernet runs in the switched configuration only. There is no CSMA/CD capability. This is actually the way most networks run today. Nearly all use switching and routing to gain full duplex performance. Carrier Ethernet also has provisions for OAM or Operations, Administration and Maintenance that is needed by carriers to ensure that the link keeps working reliably.

There are some real advantages in having standardized services available that meet the MEF requirements. Like standardized equipment, you know what you are getting and that it will interoperate or work with similar services from other vendors. Part of the rapid expansion of Carrier Ethernet is due to the ability of exchanging traffic between service providers through an Ethernet NNI or Network to Network Interface. All carriers have limited fiber optic assets and would be constrained by their own service footprints if they couldn’t interconnect with other carriers. By entering into traffic sharing arrangements, it is possible for carriers to span the nation and the globe.

Two of the standard Ethernet services you may be interested in are E-Line or Ethernet Line and E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service. E-Line is the equivalent of the point to point private line available with T-Carrier and SONET telecom services. E-LAN is something different. This is a multipoint connection that can be used to network multiple business locations as if they were on the same bridged LAN. Everything operates at layer 2 so that switched Ethernet is available across town or to the other side of the globe.

Carrier Ethernet connections are through ports on a UNI or User Network Interface. Typical fiber optic port speeds mirror standard LAN speeds of 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps GigE and 10,000 Mbps 10GigE. This differs a bit from standard telecom services that have unique circuit interfaces for T1, DS3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, etc. Many carriers find it easy to install Gigabit Ethernet ports as a standard practice and then rate limit the bandwidth to the amount ordered by the customer.

The port itself will accept traffic at any speed up to the limit of the port capability. Let’s say that’s 1 Gbps. Since you have only ordered and are paying for 150 Mbps bandwidth, that’s what you’ll have on your Ethernet Line or LAN service. The real beauty of this system becomes apparent when you need to upgrade from 150 to 500 Mbps. All you need to do is call your service provider and notify them of the change. They’ll adjust the rate limit to increase your bandwidth up to the 500 Mbps level. There is no physical change to any of the equipment in the signal path. That means the change can be implemented in a matter of days or hours rather than weeks or months.

Ethernet bandwidth services often have many bandwidth increments available. You don’t have to jump from 150 to 500 Mbps. You may be able to get 200, 250, 300, 400 or some other increment offered by the carrier. Most carriers have a fine layer of granularity available because it’s all done in software.

Can you make good use of fiber optic Ethernet connections to the Internet or other business locations? If so, get prices, features and bandwidth levels available for optical Ethernet connections to your business location.

Note: Photo of Earth from space at night courtesy of NASA on Wikimedia Commons.

Crowdsourcing In Lieu of Outsourcing

2012-05-22T01:22:00.000-05:00

The last couple of decades have seen a trend toward outsourcing versus traditional hiring to meet business needs. Coming out of the Great Recession, there is an even newer concept starting to pick up steam. It’s called crowdsourcing. Why not tap the power of the crowd when you have a specific task that needs a solution?

Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach to problem solving. You normally think of handing a task to a specific employee or to a manager who will delegate it to a particular employee. In lieu of that, you can go out and bring in a temp or contract employee or forget the employment model completely and hire an outside firm to do the work. If you want to sell a building, you contract with a real estate agent. If you want to build a building you contract with an architect and general building contractor.

Crowdsourcing works something like contracting with a local firm except that the world is your marketplace. Many tasks like web design, logo design, artwork, article writing, app development and so on don’t require someone located nearby. Pretty much anything you can do on a computer can be done anywhere on Earth. On the network, the home office in Beijing is just as close as the corporate office down the hall.

Isn’t this just another form of outsourcing? It is, but on a micro scale and with interesting payment options. What I’m describing is farming out your tasks to individuals and crowds, not setting up your own shop to get cheaper labor overseas or partnering with a major corporation as a service provider.

When you go out for services locally, you probably start with the Yellow Pages or an online directory equivalent. You pick from who’s available in the area so you can meet with them in person to describe the assignment, write the contract and review the progress & results. When you go out for services online you do lose the ability to press the flesh or get your hand around somebody’s throat - literally. But if you can get comfortable doing business without the physical contact, you open up a world of new opportunities - literally!

The biggest enabler for online contracting or crowdsourcing is having a marketplace were buyers and sellers can meet. It’s a lot less dicey than trying to conduct business in forums and chats. Fortunately there is a very large and established marketplace already available with 6 million members worldwide. It’s called Witmart. They’ve got the resources and the tools that make it easy for service providers and clients to hook up successfully.

Here’s where the crowdsourcing idea comes in. You have the usual option to offer a job on a contract basis where you specify qualifications, negotiate the reward, job content and completion date and then pay upon completion. But you also have the option to make a contest out it. You specify the job and the amount of the reward and let the marketplace have at it. You then pick from best solution or solutions and release the reward to the winner or winners.

Where does the contest approach work best? It’s for things like logo design, business card designs, website design, marketing slogans, promotions, and so on. These jobs need quick solutions, don’t demand a lot of time and effort, and the value of diverse perspectives is an asset.

Contracting is more suitable for bigger jobs that require lots of time and effort, need considerable communication and coordination and have many specific requirements. Often the work is done in stages with payment released based on meeting milestones.

Do you occasionally or regularly need to find someone to build a website, translate documents, develop an iPhone App, promote a brand or come up with a company logo and find it a big hassle? Your life could get a lot easier right now by checking out the freelance marketplace with verified high quality providers at Witmart.

Business Phone Goes Hosted

2012-05-21T00:47:00.000-05:00

Business telephone service has expanded over the years, from the single line analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) to multi-line PBX systems that handle hundreds and thousands of phone sets. What’s the next logical development? Could it be even larger and more sophisticated in-house PBX systems? No, just the opposite. The PBX is moving out as business phone service goes hosted.

Hosted business phone is another term for telephone switching in the cloud. Hosted means that a service provider hosts your telephone service on their equipment. The responsibility for running the PBX system and providing the lines to the public telephone system are effectively transferred from your company to your service provider’s.

Why would you want to go the hosted route? It generally boils down to finances and flexibility. The first financial advantage is that you no longer have to buy expensive capital equipment and provide a space for it in your building. This is seldom a one time allocation. Every so many years you find that your equipment has become obsolete and too expensive to maintain or it can no longer keep up with the demands placed on it. You need a newer and likely larger system to replace it. That process is called a “fork lift upgrade” because it you can’t often salvage any of the existing equipment. A fork lift truck drives in and hauls out the old PBX system. It then drives back in to deliver the new replacement.

Granted, smaller PBX systems that support branch offices or retail locations may be something you can pick up and carry yourself. Even so, the “fork lift” metaphor applies. It’s out with the old and in with the new. Hopefully you can pay off the old system before it’s time to replace it.

With a hosted PBX system, there are phones but there is no PBX or telephone switching system in-house. That lets you avoid a major capital expense and also the guessing game of trying to predict how much capacity you’ll need during the lifetime of that system. If you guess low, you’ll be replacing it while it still works just fine. If you guess high, you’ll pay for capacity that you never use. Either way, it’s hard to know the future well enough to pick just the right size PBX.

The other financial advantage is that PBX phone systems cost more than just the purchase price. Every time to you to do a “move, add or change” with your telephones, somebody has to do some rewiring and change some programming in the system. That could be a dedicated staff member who is the telephone manager full or part time. Otherwise it is a contractor known as a VAR for Value Added Reseller. Either way, there’s ongoing expense to run the system and keep up with the changes.

How do hosted business phone systems save you all that grief and expense? The service provider has a much larger shared PBX system and the staff to run it 24/7. They keep up with day to day maintenance and upgrades. Because this system is so large, it can accommodate many customers and easily expand to meet your changing needs. That’s the principle behind the cloud. You don’t have to worry about all the hardware, software and personnel needed to keep the phone system running. The service provider specializes in this and handles it for you.

What’s available in the way of hosted phone services? There are a number of cloud communications providers who offer this capability. They generally provide the service on a “per seat” per month basis. Each phone has internal, local and long distance switching capability included. Most of the time its a single price for all calling other than international and for all the features. Some providers can include your mobile phones so that they are part of the PBX capabilities. Some providers even include the physical phones. These are IP Telephones than plug right into your company LAN. You connect to the provider with a network connection called a SIP Trunk.

Can hosted business phone make sense for your company? There are solutions for every business from the smallest retailer to the largest corporation. Get prices and features for competing hosted PBX service providers now and see if you can save both money and effort.

Payroll Software In The Cloud For Small Business

2012-05-18T01:36:00.000-05:00

There’s a myth that’s grown up with cloud computing that suggests that the cloud only works for large companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. That story probably got started because major enterprises pioneered the move to the cloud. Today, the cloud is as much or more benefit to the SMB as to multinational corporations.

One good example is the SaaS (Software as a Service) Patriot Software. Patriot offers payroll software, tax filing, time and attendance, employee self-server, and human resources software for businesses operating with 50 or fewer employees in the United States. What all this software has in common is that it is hosted in the Patriot data center cloud, not on your PCs or local servers.

You don’t need IT infrastructure to run your payroll system. An Internet connected computer will give you the access to the cloud that you need. That means you aren’t stuck at a dedicated terminal or your desktop computer. You can take your laptop with you and run payroll from wherever you need to be at no additional charge.

Patriot PAY lets you pay your employees the way you want to. You can define your pay frequency, create an unlimited number of earning codes, define your overtime multiplier, and pay with multiple methods such as cash, handwritten checks, printed checks, direct deposit and payroll debit card. Create an unlimited number of user-defined deductions, such as medical, 401K, expenses, etc. Also create company match / contribution rules that can stand alone or be tied to deductions. All of this is done quickly, easily and securely online.

If you are running a small business, you may have gotten started with a manual system and then switched to a software package that runs on your PCs or servers. You know that there are costs above and beyond the initial cost of the hardware and software that is needed to keep your payroll system up to date. This can get into a considerable amount of labor to run nightly and weekly backups to protect your data, maintenance fixes and version upgrades to the software, loading new payroll tax tables and repair and upgrade of the computer equipment.

All of that grief goes away with cloud hosted solutions, also known as Software as a Service. The actual payroll software runs on a sophisticated cloud server system within the Patriot Software data center. All of the data and servers are housed in a SAS 70 Type II compliant facility that features redundant telecom backbones to the Internet, battery backup augmented by diesel generator backup, and full security. The operations center runs 24/7 to ensure that any problems are caught and fixed quickly. Most small companies have limited security on their systems and little or no support after business hours.

Besides physical security, there is electronic security to protect your data. In this case, Patriot Software uses secure socket layer (SSL) encryption just like banks and credit card companies. The data is protected by 256-bit encryption during transmission. The data servers that save your information are not directly connected to the Internet, so no one else can access your information unless they are physically standing in front of the servers.

What you need to ensure access to the system is a robust dedicated Internet access service with a second way to connect, wired or wireless, to ensure that you can get to the cloud when you need to. Everything else is provided for you on a cost per “seat” or “license” per month basis. This gives you the advantage of knowing your costs and buying only the level of service you need to support current business activity. When things pick up substantially, you simply add order up more capability from the cloud. There is no need to go out and invest in an expensive server system and software to run it just so you’ll have the capability when needed. Cloud services are on a pay as you go basis.

Patriot goes one step further by not requiring any long term contracts for their payroll system. If you want to cancel you can do that without penalty and go back to the way you did business before. Chances are, once you move to the cloud, you’ll like it enough to stay in the cloud.

Are you intrigued by this advanced approach to handling payroll but unsure if it’s for you? Try the system free for 7 days using a sample account pre-filled with sample data that you can experiment with. If you like the way it works, you can go ahead and become a customer. Otherwise, the sample account will be deleted at the end of the trial period and you own nothing. You don’t even need a credit card to give it a try. Go ahead and try Patriot PAY cloud-based payroll software now.

Symmetrical Internet Providers

2012-05-17T01:47:00.002-05:00

Most people who use the Internet are consumers, not producers of content. The mix of content has migrated from largely text to largely images and streaming video over the last couple of decades. Even so, the connection arrangement for broadband Internet access has remained asymmetrical with bandwidth in the downward direction 5 to 10 times that provided in the upload direction.

Why is that the setup? Think about how you access the Web on a PC, tablet or smartphone. It almost always involves selecting some content to read or view. The selection process is a matter of mouse clicks or keyboard entry. Those are pretty low bandwidth activities. The viewing of the results or the acquisition of a file is just the opposite. A server assembles those results and delivers fairly large pages consisting of text, graphics, photo images and perhaps video. All of that material comprises a lot of bytes and needs a considerable bandwidth to deliver in any reasonable time.

Since bandwidth is a scarce commodity, relatively speaking, there is a noticeable cost involved in providing the wireline or wireless channel for transport. There is no point in provisioning a fast upload link if it is only going to be lightly used. It’s download that customers value and demand as much as they can get for their broadband dollar.

Social media is changing the mix of upload and download requirements. When most of us were web page readers, the low bandwidth upload and high bandwidth download channels were the obvious setup. Today, many more users are creators as well as consumers of content. They post to blogs and Facebook. They upload photos and videos as well as download them. New applications like VoIP telephony and video conferencing consume equal amounts of bandwidth in both directions. The pressure on service providers is for more upload bandwidth as well as download bandwidth.

Businesses have had the symmetrical bandwidth requirement for a long time. It’s the businesses that run those servers that provide content to their customers. Large files going to the server need lots of bandwidth. There may be more email flowing out of a business than into it. Some businesses are providing streaming video content to the Internet and consume more bandwidth in the upload direction than the download direction. Cloud services have heavy traffic moving in both directions.

Right now, your choices in Internet bandwidth services can be divided into symmetrical and asymmetrical categories. Symmetrical means that upload and download speeds are the same. Asymmetrical means one direction is much faster than the other. That’s almost always the download stream.

Traditional telecom services are symmetrical. They were developed by the telephone industry and later adapted for transporting data. Telephone is inherently two-way with no difference in the amount of traffic flowing in one direction versus the other. If you order a T1 line, Ethernet over Copper, DS3 connection or OC-3 fiber optic service, you will get symmetrical bandwidth by default.

Symmetrical bandwidth services also tend to be dedicated Internet services, abbreviated DIA for Dedicated Internet Access. What does dedicated mean? It means that the bandwidth is assigned exclusively for your use. A 10 Mbps EoC Internet service gives you 10 Mbps in both directions, called 10 x 10 Mbps, anytime you want to use it. Any bandwidth you don’t need at the moment sits idle until you do.

Symmetrical bandwidth services are often covered by Service Level Agreements or SLAs. These agreements spell out the technical characteristics of the line, such as bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss. They also define such things as MTTR or Mean TIme To Repair for any outages that might occur. There are generally remedies available, like refunds on your bill, if the service provider can’t deliver to the terms of the SLA.

Asymmetrical bandwidth services are generally targeted toward consumers where price is far more important than performance. The bandwidth is shared among multiple users, not dedicated to you alone. That means that your download and upload speeds will vary depending on how many others are trying to use the service at the same time. Instead of SLAs, asymmetrical services are provided on a “best effort” basis that lacks any guarantees.

There’s quite a difference in price and performance between symmetrical and asymmetrical bandwidth services. Which is right for your business? Get prices and features from business broadband Internet providers to compare options and select the best match for your company needs.

A Bottomless Battery For Your Smartphone and Tablet

2012-05-16T01:26:00.001-05:00

Mobile technology is the way we stay connected on the go. WiFi hotspots combined with 3G or 4G cellular give us bottomless connectivity. Now if we only had bottomless power to go along with it.

The bane of any technology not tethered to a wall outlet is the battery. Batteries are always going dead long before the day ends. It’s bad news when you are out in the field or at the restaurant table without the wall outlet. When the power in your device fades, it’s lights out. This is why heavy users have taken to toting an external battery to recharge their fading device or substitute for the internal battery. The only problem is that if you are out and about long enough you end up with two dead batteries instead of one.

What you really need is a battery that never runs out of power. Wait! Why, that’s perpetual motion! It’s technical heresy!

No, it’s clever engineering. What Solio has done is create a battery that recharges itself. It’s not perpetual motion because it does draw in energy. It’s just doesn’t suck it from a wall socket. The Solio Bolt gets its charge from the Sun.

When you think of solar energy, you’re probably imagining an acre of mirrors in the desert or a field of panels on the roof of the office. Those are solar power, alright. They’re what’s called large scale solar. There’s also such a thing as small scale solar. It’s been pretty much ignored up to now as a niche technology suitable only for applications that need power at any price. Emergency phones, remote monitoring, satellites, and so on have used small scale solar power for decades. What’s new is the mashup of solar cells, a high capacity lithium battery and control electronics that’s small enough to fit in your pocket, yet powerful enough to completely recharge your smartphone or tablet.

The enabling technologies are high efficiency solar cells and a 2,000 mAh Li-Poly battery. Battery technology has really advanced since the days when all you could get was nickel cadmium cells that couldn’t hold much of a charge and died long before your calculator did. These new lithium based cells can disappear in the palm of your hand yet pack 2 Ampere hours of juice. That’s a lot of juice, electrically speaking.

So, here’s how it works. Everything’s contained in the palm-size plastic package. You swing it open about its central axis to reveal two solar panels. There’s a hole at the axis that is just the right size for a pencil. Stick in a pencil so that the Solio will be propped up and facing the Sun. Then do something else like eat lunch or read a book. While Solio is basking, the battery is quietly charging. No line cords required.

We got one of these at home. When it’s not needed, it hangs by a cord in a window. A red LED in the back lights to indicate that the battery is charging on solar power. You can push a button at any time to get a reading of how much charge it’s gained. One flash means 10%, two flashes means 20% and so on. Yes, it takes all day to fully charge in sunlight, but what else is it doing? Just leave the Solio where it can see the Sun and it will top off before you know it. No having to remember to plug-in to charge that battery. The crew at Solio puts theirs on an outside window ledge. They get more sunlight than through a window. You can use that pencil that’s propping the unit up as a sundial to aim for best exposure. When there is no line showing, the alignment is optimal.

The Solio Bolt comes with a USB connector that you can plug your iPhone or iPad cable into to grab a charge. There’s even a special Apple mode that optimizes charging for Apple products. Everything else gets standard USB charging rates. If you need to recharge your Solio fast or it’s dark outside (night owls) you can recharge the battery through a USB wall charger or from a laptop. Non-eco friendly but effective.

You might think that something like this would really work well in the bush and you’d be right. In fact, it is so ideal for remote areas like rural Kenya, that Solio runs a solar leasing business there. Now households can have power for lights, radios and cell phone charging and avoid burning kerosene indoors at night. It will work just as well at your fishing cabin or wherever you pitch a tent.

Have you seen the light now? Would this solution meet your needs? Learn more and get your Solio Bolt quickly and easily. For a bottomless battery, it’s eminently affordable.

3 Mbps to 6 Mbps Bonded Internet Access

2012-05-15T01:19:00.000-05:00

Business Internet access is critical to communicating with customers and perhaps taking and fulfilling orders. You want rock solid stability and decent bandwidth, but at a price that won’t break the bank. Here’s a look at how you can incrementally increase your Internet connection speed to match your business activity.

Not that long ago, you had a couple of choices for dedicated Internet access. You could get a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps or move up to a T3 line (DS3 bandwidth) at 45 Mbps. There really wasn’t anything in-between. Shared bandwidth services offer a larger range of choices, but shared bandwidth means variable performance and assurance of availability. You also have to contend with asymmetrical speed, where download line speed is 10x the upload line speed.

Dedicated Internet access, like T1 and T3, offers symmetrical bandwidth that is the same for both upload and download, a fixed line speed that doesn’t vary, and high availability with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The one issue is cost, especially when you need more than what a T1 line can provide but not the full capacity of a T3 line.

Sometimes you can get what’s called a fractional line service. The service provider installs a full capacity line, but rate limits your bandwidth. The result is referred to a fractional T3 or fractional DS3 service. It saves some money over the full service level but isn’t that great of a deal on a per Mbps cost basis.

A better option today is to order bonded line service to increase your bandwidth. Bonding is an industry standard for connecting multiple lines of the same type to combine their bandwidths. For instance, you can bond two T1 lines together and get 3 Mbps instead of 1.5 Mbps. The view from your router is one larger bandwidth service rather than juggling two separate lines. That bonding process takes place within the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that is installed by the service provider.

Bonding is a great way to increase your bandwidth incrementally, but there are a couple of things to consider. First, you can’t just go out and buy a second T1 line from just anybody. You have to get your bonded lines from the same carrier. Remember that it is the service provider who does the bonding through equipment at both ends of the line.

Also, the cost goes up by the same increment as the bandwidth. In other words, two T1 lines cost twice as much as one T1 line. There is no economy of scale. That’s no big deal if you are happy with doubling your line speed and your cost versus have to pay 10x the price to move up to the next standard line speed increment of T3. However, this technique does get less attractive with the more lines that you bond in.

Yes, you can go beyond double bonded T1. Bond three T1 lines for 4.5 Mbps, four lines for 6 Mbps, 5 lines for 7.5 Mbps, 6 lines for 8 Mbps, 7 lines for 9.5 Mbps or 8 T1 lines to get 11 Mbps. By the time you get 8 T1 lines bonded, the cost may be approaching what you’d pay for 45 Mbps T3 and you’d have a lot higher line speed.

There is an alternate bonded line service that may give you more bandwidth for less money. This is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Like bonded T1, EoC uses multiple wire pairs to transport the signal. Providers will bond 2, 4, 6 or 8 pair to increase the speed of Ethernet over Copper service. Unlike T1, EoC offers a much wider range of available bandwidth options. For the price of a T1 line, you can get 2 or 3 Mbps EoC. Other speed options include 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 and 45 Mbps. Cost per Mbps actually decreases as you order higher bandwidth levels.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper is availability. It is a newer service and not all central offices are equipped to provide this line service. Also, EoC is highly distance sensitive. You need to be close to your CO to get the highest speeds. Otherwise you may top out at 10 or 15 Mbps. That’s still about the best you can do with bonded T1 and for considerably less cost.

Are you looking for a rock solid connection to the Internet to support your business activities. If so, check availability and pricing for bonded T1 and EoC dedicated Internet access options.

Getting Network Connections Into Europe

2012-05-14T01:20:00.000-05:00

While many companies need only domestic WAN connections to run their businesses, an increasing number need links to other parts of the world. European markets are especially important for financial trading and sales & support within the EU. The question is how domestic US organizations get connected into Europe and how they do that cost effectively.

The good news is that there are a number of carriers that span the Atlantic and offer connectivity into major European cities. Some American-based carriers have arrangements to hand off traffic to data centers in Europe. AboveNet recently announced just such an arrangement with ancotel GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany.

Hooking up with ancotel’s Kleyer 90 data center gives AboveNet access to more than 430 service providers who represent 63 countries. These include bandwidth services, VoIP providers, hosting companies, content delivery networks and cloud networking. About 75% of the traffic that goes in and out of the Frankfurt data center is routed to destinations outside of Germany.

In addition, Frankfurt itself is a major financial hub for Europe. AboveNet specializes in low latency connections that support high speed trading. They offer a Gigabit Ethernet service between New York and London with the extreme low-latency needed for algorithmic trading and the secure completion of financial and banking transactions. AboveNet’s low-latency transatlantic service reaches the key financial locations in London including, Slough, The City and Docklands. In the New York Metro area, they connect you with Manhattan and New Jersey, including Newark, Weehawken, Secaucus, Carteret and Clifton. Metro access under 1 msec to hundreds of buildings in the New York and London metro markets.

Another carrier with a global reach is Level 3 Communications. They have multiple fiber optic connections from the New York metropolitan area cross the Atlantic and landing in England, France, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands. From there, fiber networks connect to Germany, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Finland and other European destinations. They have an extensive network covering North America, so that your traffic is on-net even if you aren’t located on the East Coast.

Global Telecom and Technology also has extensive network connectivity in the United States and Europe. They have access to over 100,000 point of presence (POPs) worldwide and experience with installing networks in over 80 countries. GTT offers both international WAN connectivity and International Dedicated Internet Access (DIA).

What kind of international connectivity can you expect to find? The classic solution is a point to point telecom connection running over fiber optic undersea cable. At the low end are T1 lines in the United States and E1 lines in Europe. These run at 1.5 Mbps and 2 Mbps respectively. Faster services are the SONET/SDH fiber optic connections from OC-3 at 155 Mbps on up to OC-192 at 10 Gbps and perhaps OC-768 at 40 Gbps. Network cores are currently being upgraded to 100 Gbps. An alternative service is Carrier Ethernet at 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Ethernet can be configured as a point to point dedicated line or a point to multipoint connection to link multiple locations.

MPLS networks are becoming increasingly popular for international network connections. You can interconnect all your domestic business locations with a mesh network connection running over MPLS. That MPLS network can also include locations in Europe or elsewhere across the globe. What MPLS offers is high performance, security and lower costs than multiple point to point line connections.

Does your business need access to Europe to include sales, distribution or manufacturing? Do you perhaps have special requirements such as high bandwidth or ultra low latency for financial services? If so, there are telecom services available to meet your needs. In many cases, you can get multiple competitive bids for international network connections and choose which carrier to do business with.

Commercialize Your Training Courses Easily

2012-05-11T00:24:00.000-05:00

Is training part of your company culture? For most businesses it certainly is. You spend a lot on training and need it to deliver the results intended. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that made it fast and easy to create and manage online training courses? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could make money off the training materials you already have? Take a look at this and see what you think...

Can you believe that it’s this easy to make your in-house training program more efficient and generate an additional stream of income as well? Why, training could transform from an expense to a profit center overnight. Seems like it’s hard to go wrong with this approach. Go ahead and try it for free to get the ball rolling.

This is power of Internet applications. You can get started right away by opening an account (free to try) and uploading presentations that you already have. These can be files in PowerPoint, video, Word or PDF format. They’ll be automatically converted into an online course that anyone designated can access over the Internet. It’s up to you how many files you want to include and how you want them arranged in your training program.

There’s no software to install to use this system. It’s all online, accessible through your web browser. Trainees don’t need anything but their Internet enabled computers to participate. Upload your company logo to identify the training as a product of your organization.

Part of what this system does is to get your training materials online so that you aren’t constantly copying handouts and standing up to present slides and give quizzes. Once you’ve got the material ready to go, trainees can go through the multi-media training themselves. Go ahead and include a quiz. Those who pass will be able to download and print their own certificate of completion. Three different designs area available that you can select in lieu of designing your own.

Managing the training process can now be done from your PC screen. Keep track of where trainees are in the process and see who is doing great without assistance and who needs extra help. Set up automated reminders for those who just can’t seem to get to the material on their own initiative.

Don’t forget that unless you consider your training materials so proprietary you don’t want anyone outside to see them, you can make money off the same courses that you paid to develop for your own people. The marketplace for this is a feature of the system. You pay a small commission for each program purchased. Plus, you can even get graphs of your customers’ progress in using the materials.

Is this the best thing that’s happened to training in our lifetime? You bet it is. Get some of this action for yourself right now. Build & track online training courses with a 30 day free trial and see how much your training improves.

1 Gbps Point to Point Ethernet Connection

2012-05-10T02:37:00.000-05:00

With WAN bandwidth requirements increasing as businesses move to the cloud and become more involved with bandwidth intensive activities such as video and big data, it is not uncommon anymore to be requesting 1,000 Mbps connections. A popular match for this requirement is a 1 Gbps Ethernet or GigE point to point connection. Let’s take a look at what’s involved and your options for Gigabit Ethernet service.

Ethernet is the standard protocol of the LAN. Most network interfaces run at 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10 Gbps. Many standard network devices support multiple speeds, typically 10/100/1000 Mbps. It is only logical to want to extend the LAN through the WAN and to another LAN somewhere else. The way to avoid speed bumps that cause network congestion while avoiding over-provisioning and overpaying for WAN bandwidth is to match your LAN to your WAN. That means standard LAN speeds and protocol.

Fortunately, this has all been figured out by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), an industry group that sets standards for interoperability among vendors. They have created the standards necessary to take LAN Ethernet and transport it through WAN connections. In the WAN, this is called Carrier Ethernet.

It all starts and ends with a User Network Interface or UNI. This is a “port” provided by the carrier or service provider and installed at the user location or locations. The UNI is designed to run at standard LAN operating speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps. That doesn’t mean that you are limited to one of those service speeds. The installed UNI defines the upper limit to the bandwidth it will support. The carrier rate limits the actual speed of the service to match the bandwidth you are paying for. That could be 20 Mbps, 75 Mbps, 450 Mbps or some other value. There are typically many increments to choose from so you only have to pay for the bandwidth you really need.

There is a big advantage to this arrangement. Not only are you not stuck with a service that is too big or too small for your needs, but all the hardware is set up to support the port speed of the UNI. The rate limiting is a software function that can be changed quickly by the service provider with a few keystrokes into their system. That means that you can call up and request a bandwidth increase at any time and have it available in days, maybe hours of your request. The carrier will enter the change and adjust your billing to match. Compare that to traditional telecom service that require truck rolls to install new equipment and perhaps pull new wiring. If your UNI supports 1 Gbps, you won’t need any hardware changes until you want to go above that speed.

The actual transportation takes place on an Ethernet Virtual Connection or EVC. The EVC provides point to point connectivity between designated UNIs and prevents data transfer between sites that aren’t part of the same EVC. The popular Ethernet point to point service is known as EPL or Ethernet Private Line. It is a direct replacement for TDM private lines.

Another interesting feature of Ethernet UNIs is that they can handle multiple EVCs. That may seem a little strange compared to typical telecom UNIs that connect physical wires and transport a single Point to Point (PTP) line service. Each EVC can be considered a separate private line. Multiple EVCs delivered over a single UNI is called EVPL or Ethernet Virtual Private Line service. One popular topology is a hub and spoke arrangement where a headquarters location is connected to multiple branch offices using EVPL. Only a single physical UNI is needed at HQ to support all the private line spoke connections.

Is your operation ready for higher bandwidth WAN service? Find out how little it now costs to support 1 Gbps Point to Point Ethernet Connections using EPL and EVPL.

Many Ways To Connect To MPLS Networks

2012-05-09T01:50:00.000-05:00

MPLS networks are becoming very popular for connecting multiple business locations. Let’s take a look at what MPLS networks are all about and the many ways you can get connected to them.

The simplest situation is when you have two locations and want to tie them together. The logical thing to do is order a point to point private line. These lines come in all sizes, bandwidths actually, to meet your needs. They are exactly what they sound like. One end of the line connects to location #1. The other end of the line connects to location #2. It’s like there really is a long piece of wire that extends across town or across the country.

There is one difference between a private line and a piece of wire. Private lines are actually telecom services deployed on those wires or fiber optic strands. There is a certain protocol and speed for each type of line. A T1 private line, for instance, gives you 1.5 Mbps bidirectionally to interfaces meeting the T-carrier specification. You’ll need T1 cards for your routers at each end. Nothing else will work. They have to be exactly the same for the T1 line to function.

You could build a larger network with 3 or more locations the same way. It will cost the least if you set up a star network configuration and do the routing at headquarters with lines running to each business location. Then HQ can decide who can communicate to who. You might set it up so that any location can send files to any other, having them routed through headquarters. Or, you may set it up so that each location can communicate with HQ only and then headquarters will decide where, if anywhere else, the data goes.

Like the two site private line arrangement, if all your lines are T1s, then every port will be a T1 interface. In this case, though, you have gained a bit of flexibility. You can use T1 lines for the smaller operations and install T3 lines for the larger ones. The setup at HQ will require a mix of T1 and T3 interfaces to handle various size remote locations.

Here’s where MPLS networks come in. The MPLS network is a cloud as far as its users are concerned. If you peek inside, you’ll see that it is a fairly large scale fiber optic network. Many MPLS networks have regional or national service footprints. Some even span the globe. What’s special about MPLS is the protocol used. It’s not T-carrier, SONET, IP or anything else. It’s a proprietary technology called label switching that wraps each packet in a special label that is used to manage traffic. The label gets attached when entering the network and removed upon exit.

What this does is make an MPLS network “protocol agnostic.” That means it doesn’t care what protocol you are transporting. It’s also speed agnostic. It doesn’t really care how fast your line is running as long as it connects via an appropriate interface port. Once on the network, all packets have the bandwidth needed to prevent congestion.

This really opens the window to connecting all locations, large and small, via the MPLS “cloud.” You simply need to get your voice, video or data to the network. From there on, the service provider is responsible for getting packets from one location to wherever you have specified that they go. Each location has a “last mile” connection that is the on and off ramp to the MPLS network. Those last mile connections can be just about anything.

Typical MPLS connections include T1, bonded T1, E1, T3 (DS3), E3, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber, 3G and 4G fixed wireless and DSL.

You don’t have to use the same connection at every location. The network will handle the traffic regardless of how it connected. However, there can be an advantage to standardizing on Ethernet as you only protocol. That way you can make use of standard Ethernet services such as E-Line and E-LAN. Ethernet LAN service is especially valuable because it lets you tie all your LANs together in one large bridged LAN at layer 2.

Do you have two or more business locations that you would like to link together? Get expert advice and competitive pricing for MPLS network services and last mile connections that meet your requirements.

Benefit From The Great CAPEX to OPEX Migration

2012-05-08T01:47:00.000-05:00

There’s a great migration underway as we speak. This isn’t a physical movement of people or animals, it’s a change in the way business does business. The migration is from a CAPEX or capital expense model to an OPEX or operational expense model. If you haven’t been swept up yet, you might think that this is something pretty subtle as movements go. It’s actually a major turning point that will eventually encompass every business, including yours.

All businesses have both capital and operational expenses. The operational kind are what it takes to keep the business running day to day. Your utilities are operational expenses. So are your office supplies. So are your salaries and wages.

Capital expenses are your investments for the future. If you go out and buy a building, that’s a capital expense. So are major pieces of equipment. Your in-house PBX telephone system is a capital expense and one that may soon become an operational expense instead.

What characterizes a capital expense is that it involves a large sum of money that is plunked down to acquire the asset. You derive the benefit of that asset over the years and may wind up paying for it over the years. Another approach is to go to the bank and extract some of your savings or take out a loan so that you can pay for the asset up-front.

Either way, your money is tied up for a long period of time regardless of how well your business is doing. Your cost is the same in lean times or boom times. You can hire or lay off employees. It has no effect on your capital items unless you decide to sell some off or acquire more.

What’s more, many capital expenses have operational expenses that accompany them. That new data center requires people to run it and additional cost for electricity. There are maintenance and upgrade costs to keep your asset up to date and functioning at peak efficiency.

All of this suggests that capital expenses are something of a gamble. You do your best trade studies to make sure you are buying the right thing, sized correctly to support your current and expected level of business. If you guess wrong, you either have to buy another one or rip out the one you bought and replace it with something that suites your changed requirements.

The last decade of rampant volatility has convinced many businesses that they need to be far more agile in riding the waves of business activity. One technology that is making this more possible for all size businesses is the cloud. The “cloud” is shorthand for any service that is performed remotely by a specialized service provider and purchased on a pay as you go basis. Many cloud services are priced by the “seat” or user by the month.

There are two advantages to this cost model. First, your costs vary with your level of activity. When times are lean, you cut back and use fewer services. You pay less each month. When business picks up, you use more services and add more “seats” as you add more employees. You pay more, but the increased income from your increased business activity covers this. At no time do you run to the bank to withdraw savings or take out a loan. The cloud is the epitome of OPEX.

What kind of services are available in the cloud? Certainly your computing services, including anything you would run in a data center yourself plus security for your networks. Also, your telephone system. Remember the expensive PBX acquisition? That’s gone for good with Hosted PBX services. Your phones work the same as they always did, probably with more features, but you only pay per phone per month. Sometimes the phones themselves are included, obsoleting any need for CAPEX at all.

Should you be joining the migration from CAPEX to OPEX, at least where technology is concerned? Find out the range of cloud services and pricing available for your business needs. Then see if it still makes sense to continue with capital expenditures.

Why Get Fiber Services From A Cable Company?

2012-05-07T00:48:00.000-05:00

When we consider purchasing new or replacement fiber optic services, the first thing that comes to mind is the telecom companies. That is, the telephone companies and the competitive service providers or CLECs. Most bandwidth providers have their own core network facilities but rent lines from the telcos for last mile connections. This is especially true with SONET services that originated in the telephone industry.

There is a type of fiber optic service provider that doesn’t use telco facilities at all. That is the cable companies or MSOs (Multi System Operators.) The reason is that cable systems were all built from the ground up to serve a specialized market for television signal distribution to homes and businesses. In fact, most cable systems have been built from the ground up twice. The first implementation used large diameter coaxial cable to transport the combined TV signals picked up from over the air and satellite downlinks. The second implementation was an upgrade to use fiber optic cable for signal distribution to the neighborhoods, while keeping small diameter coax for the final connection.

This system is known as HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax. Nearly everyone recognizes the 75 ohm coax and F type connector used for Cable TV work. What most people aren’t aware of is the extensive fiber optic infrastructure in place behind the scenes. The larger cable systems have thousands of miles of fiber optic cabling, some cables with 100 or more fiber strands. These cables run all over town and often between towns as well. Nationwide cable companies have nationwide fiber optic networks.

Television is the primary content transported by the cable fiber, but there is also a lot of telephone, Internet and point to point data traffic. Ever since television went digital, there is little difference with how you transport video and how you transport other services. It’s all bits and bytes.

The cable companies have recognized this and recently started marketing their capabilities to businesses. The low end services are delivered over broadband coaxial cable. Some of the most popular services are the shared bandwidth Internet access tiers up to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. This service is priced about the same as a T1 line but can serve many more employees using the Internet. Cable broadband is often used to feed WiFi hotspots for restaurants, hotels and other retail locations.

Many businesses, especially larger ones, don’t want the variability and lack of guarantees associated with shared bandwidth services, even at bargain prices. They need rock solid symmetrical bandwidth and guaranteed parameters for latency, jitter, bandwidth, packet loss and availability. The other thing they need is higher bandwidth levels for connecting multiple business locations and cloud services.

Many cable companies are eager for this premium level of business. They’re now in a position to provide it with some unique benefits as well. One major benefit is complete diversity from the telecom system for redundancy needed for business continuity. If you want to protect your connectivity from outages, you need a redundant connection. If that connection goes right to the same central office as the main connection, you haven’t added much redundancy. A fire or equipment at the CO can take out both your connections. So can a cable break if both your fiber strands are in the same bundle.

You won’t have that problem if one of your fiber services comes from a telecom company and one from a cable company. They have nothing in common to be a single point of failure. If the whole town gets wiped out, you may still have a problem. But that needs to be addressed with geographical diversity from multiple business locations.

What can cable providers offer in the way of fiber optic services? Typically, you can get 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps Ethernet over Fiber that is MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) compliant. That includes point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access and MPLS networks that interconnect multiple locations. Those locations can be in the same metro area or they can be scattered around the country. Many cable companies have NNI (Network to Network Interface) agreements with other companies so that traffic can be passed from system to system.

What is the interface to these cable systems? You can often get your choice of a copper or fiber handoff at the demarcation point in your building. One standard arrangement is for the cable company to install a Gigabit Ethernet port regardless of the bandwidth level you are contracting. That way, if you decide you want a higher bandwidth level they can turn in up by simply making a few keystrokes into the system. No hardware changes will be necessary until you want to move up to a 10 GigE port.

Do cable system fiber optic services make sense for your business? You may well benefit from these providers. Find out by getting competitive quotes for fiber optic network services that meet your business needs.

Note: Photo of fiber optic conduit spools courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Macintosh Hard Drive Data Recovery Made Easy

2012-05-04T00:11:00.000-05:00

Here’s something that will make you break out in a cold sweat. You’re on a deadline to get your project completed. You’re typing like crazy on your Mac. All of a sudden you remember you need one more file to complete the job. No problem. You’ll just grab it out of the project folder. Oh, no. What you really need is one version back. That’s the one you dumped in the trash so yo wouldn’t get it mixed up when the latest version. No problem, you’ll just rename it and pull it back to the desktop. Oh...no...no...no. You emptied the trash this morning and all those old project file versions are gone for good. Or, are they?

What you need to be able to do is drill down into your hard drive and get those old files back. What you need is a tool called Disk Drill that will do just that. With a copy of Disk Drill on your Mac, you can recover lost or deleted data even after you empty the trash. In fact, you can recover files you deleted yesterday, last week or a month ago as long as they haven’t been overwritten yet. Most of the time that disk space won’t get reused for a long time and your data will still be hiding there unseen.

The thing that saves our sorry hides when we delete files is that we really don’t delete them at all. What gets deleted is the index to where they are on the disk. Out of sight, out of mind so to speak. Everything you’ve every done on your Mac is still there until your disk drive decides to reuse the space occupied by those “deleted” files. You might be surprised what’s still on your hard drive hiding just below the surface.

This is why you have to sanitize the disk before selling or recycling your computer. If you don’t have software or hardware for that, the safe thing to do is pull the hard drive and lock it away or smash it to smithereens. Otherwise some clever person with data recovery software can gain access to all the personal data you thought you deleted forever.

The fact that computer drives act this way can work to your advantage too. With software like Disk Drill, you can be the one to search your internal or external drive and get back the data you thought you deliberately or accidentally deleted. You can recover data form any drive you can mount in Mac OS X. You can also recover data from memory cards or USB flash drives. It may well still be there. This is really valuable for lost photos that are hard to impossible to replace.

How about repartitioning? Did you repartition or reformat your disk drive and now regret it? No problem. You can recover data from repartitioned or reformatted drives as well.

Here’s an extra bonus. You can recover deleted and lost music, videos, podcasts and other data from your iPod Classic, Nano, Mini or Shuffle. Enable disk access to your iPod in iTunes and start immediate iPod data recovery using Disk Drill.

Many types of file systems are supported. That includes HFS, HFS+ (journaled/extended), FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, EXT4 and other file systems for Macs.

Once you get your data back, why not take a proactive approach to protecting yourself from data loss? Disk Drill has a monitoring feature that monitors your ATA, SATA and eSATA disks for impending hardware failures and gives you a warning if something is going horribly, horribly wrong. Keep an eye on your hard drive’s temperature with a temp icon in the menu bar. Backup up any failing disk or partition into Disk Image (DMG) for further data recovery in case the original media is lost for good.

Does the cost of losing data make you nervous? Make a small investment to protect your big investments. Even before you do that, you can play with the software for free to get comfortable with how it works. Then get the professional version of Disk Drill that you need for yourself or your entire company. You’ll breathe a lot easier when you have it.

Take a Bow For The SIP Revolution

2012-05-03T03:07:00.001-05:00

There’s a revolution underway in companies large and small. No, it’s not political, social or process related. This is a quiet revolution that few employees are aware of. It’s not really visible. It doesn’t force anyone to change the way they do things. All it does is give you more capability and save you money. Meet the SIP revolution.

What’s SIP and why is it so revolutionary? Here, watch this and get a quick introduction...

SIP is the language of VoIP telephony. If you think that VoIP is all about making home phone calls on your Cable broadband so you can ditch your telephone landline, you are only seeing a small piece of what SIP is all about. The reason that you can piggyback phone calls on a broadband service is that VoIP using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for control and signaling transforms voice calls into a protocol that networks can transport.

Consumer VoIP services are all about trying to save money by having Internet broadband do double duty as a computer network and phone line. Once you get off the telephone company owned wiring, you can get your dial tone and local service from anywhere, just like switching long distance service. This same principle works for businesses, although using the Internet for this purpose is fraught with quality issues. It’s the concept of merging voice and data onto a single company network that’s important and where the big cost savings are.

A SIP Trunk is a line that can transport multiple telephone calls simultaneously along with data such as private point to point links or broadband Internet access while protecting voice quality at all times. SIP Trunks work for all size businesses, but they are especially attractive to companies with multiple business locations. This includes any company with branch offices, warehouse and factory sites, remote sales offices and regional headquarters.

What’s special about multi-site operations? Business productivity today depends on office automation. That automation is based on sophisticated software programs and databases running on a complex IT Infrastructure. Nearly every desk has a PC connected to the corporate LAN. The corporate LAN has MAN and WAN connections to include those remote sites as well as headquarters. It’s a sophisticated and expensive network but it is totally necessary. Unfortunately, it’s often duplicated by a separate multi-site network supporting the in-house telephone system.

What SIP Trunking can do is let your multi-site network support voice, data and Internet so that you don’t need a separate telephone network or separate outside telephone lines and broadband connections at every location. A central IP-PBX can handle switching internal calls among locations and connections to a telephone and dedicated Internet service provider. Are the savings that result from doing this significant? Does 20 to 60% cost savings sound significant to you?

Can your company benefit from the SIP revolution? You’ll never know until you get competitive pricing and system features for SIP trunking solutions appropriate to your size operation.

Concentric Cloud Solutions Virtualizes Your Business

2012-05-03T01:53:00.000-05:00

You’ve been hearing a lot about virtualization recently and are wondering if it could be the answer to your unpredictable business costs. The only problem is that you don’t know quite where to start. It seems like there’s a lot to know before you can start deploying virtualized anything. Relax. Concentric will take care of that for you.

Virtualization started out in the local data center but it’s now moved to the cloud. The whole idea behind virtualization is that you can get higher performance out of a hardware infrastructure by making one server look like many servers and a cluster of small servers look like a super computer.

Why not just pair off software applications and computers? That’s the way we’ve done it for generations, ever since the days of ENIAC. It certainly works but it’s inefficient. As loads vary, you may be using only a portion of a server or have is so overloaded that you really need two. It takes so long to order new equipment, get it mounted and spun up, that you can’t respond quickly to changing needs. In order to get reliability, you wind up over-provisioning hardware. Then a big unexpected surge of activity comes in and you crash.

Virtualization separates server functionality from server hardware. You may have a dozen servers running on a single physical machine. You may have one server running over a dozen machines. All the magic is done in software, so changes can be made almost instantly.

This is the secret of the cloud. Racks and racks full of physical servers can be sliced and diced into virtual servers provisioned with a few keystrokes. Disk farms become virtualized storage. If one company is the sole user of all this, it’s called a private cloud. If many customers can share the same resources without interference, it’s called a public cloud. The owner and operator of the public cloud has just one job. That is to keep the cloud running no matter what happens. Each tenant needs to feel like they are the only one in the cloud no matter how many clients there really are.

If you do it right, you can move your back office infrastructure to the cloud. That’s what Concentric Cloud Solutions is offering businesses as an alternative to in-house IT and Telecom facilities. Services include Enterprise Cloud that offers on-demand cloud computing on a pay as you go or monthly prepaid plan. Cloud Storage complements cloud computing by making storage sharing and management of files and data available in the cloud. Managed Services offer a private cloud environment for companies that still want dedicated servers but don’t want to make the investment in-house. Smaller companies can benefit from Cloud Hosting to support websites, email and domains.

Content providers have special needs when it comes to getting their products to their customers. Concentric Acceleration Services address these needs for digital media, online content, mobile and web-based applications. Content Caching accelerates deliver of static web content that is repeatedly downloaded. Application Acceleration does the same for dynamic content you find on information portals, e-commerce apps and social media. Video content, such as webcasts and movies, is improved by Video Streaming Content Acceleration.

Cloud Voice Services address “your other network.” Telephony has occupied its own proprietary space until recently. Now the trend is converged voice and data networks to get to one network for everything. The next step is moving the voice support infrastructure to the cloud just like you do data servers. Concentric offers a Cloud Contact Center so you can establish virtual contact centers that free agents to work from anywhere. Pricing is pay as you go. Interactive Voice Response, Intelligent Call Routing, Conferencing and Concentric Connect create a suite of services that make communications in the cloud the sensible way to go.

Are you facing another round of capital investment to upgrade an aging or inadequate infrastructure? Don’t sign any loan applications until you first take a look a virtualized cloud-based solutions for voice and data. You’ll have greater flexibility and minimal investment with pay as you go solutions.

T1 or Better Internet Service

2012-05-02T01:12:00.000-05:00

Have you been running “business” grade DSL or Cable broadband and find yourself dissatisfied with the results? Let’s take a look at why that may be and what the options are for higher performance business broadband connections.

First of all, there’s nothing inherently bad about DSL and Cable Internet services. Millions of people are quite happy with the performance of their services, especially for the price they pay. Therein lies the dilemma. Companies salivate at the low cost of these broadband options but are disappointed when the telecom-grade performance isn’t there. The more you think that broadband-is-broadband, the more likely you are to think that it’s all a vast conspiracy to deny you the performance that the technology is capable of.

The truth is that bandwidth is a scarce resource. Like electricity, water, gasoline and other commodities, pricing is set by the cost of acquisition and the forces of supply and demand. Where does broadband come from? The Internet isn’t one big pipe somewhere. It’s a collection of thousands upon thousands of networks. These days, most of those networks have fiber optic cores. If you’ve ever watched a utility crew slowly trenching conduit and big rolls of fiber cable underground, you can understand why there is considerable investment in metropolitan and national fiber networks.

We get lots of inquiries from residential users and home office businesses who think that business broadband services like T1, DS3 or Ethernet over Copper are going to be priced incrementally higher than the consumer broadband they have now. It always comes as a shock for them to see the quotes at 10x or more what they expect to pay. There is no gouging involved. Business telecom services are priced lower today than they’ve been in recent memory and an order of magnitude below what they were when most Internet access service was through dial-up modems. You just aren’t going to get dedicated access connections with consumer grade pricing.

What’s the difference if the Internet is the Internet at its core? There’s no difference between the price that businesses pay for a high performance Internet connection and what your Internet Service Provider (ISP) pays. It’s exactly the same line service. The problem is that nobody but businesses who generate revenue through their Internet connection can afford the cost of this service.

So, here’s what happens. The ISP buys their bandwidth at wholesale rates at the going price for 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or more. Then they divvy up that bandwidth among hundreds or thousands of their customers. Each customer pays a small amount, say $20 to $60 a month, for their slice of the bandwidth pie. All together, the revenue collected from all those subscribers more than pays for the cost of the ISP’s Internet connection.

That’s right. As a consumer you don’t have an assigned direct pipe to the Internet. What you are doing is sharing a pool of bandwidth provided by your ISP. How fast your service runs depends on how many of your neighbors are in the pool at the same time. If every teenager in the neighborhood is streaming vampire flicks in high def, your line will slow to a crawl. In the wee hours of the night, you may be zipping along at high speed. There will be a maximum you can’t exceed even if nobody else is on. The ISP limits your speed to the service tier you are paying for. But... there’s no lower limit. You could be getting dial-up speeds if everyone absolutely, positively has to be online at once. The reason most customers remain satisfied is that only some customers are actually sitting at their computers at any given time. Anyone not home or doing something offline is effectively donating their share of bandwidth to their neighbors.

Businesses struggle with this kind of service. They all tend to work the same business hours, so every business is a heavy user for 8 hours or so a day and very little after hours. You can’t have your activities come to a halt because the company across the street is hogging all the bandwidth. This is why businesses who don’t like the performance of shared bandwidth services go with dedicated bandwidth. Dedicated bandwidth means that you are assigned a certain guaranteed line speed that doesn’t vary. If you buy 10 Mbps, you’ve got 10 Mbps all day every day whether you use it or not. It doesn’t go into any pool at night. It just sits there waiting for someone to come to work and download files.

You pay higher rates for dedicated line services but you gain important benefits. First, that bandwidth is always available. Second, it is the same bandwidth in both the upload and download directions. Consumer services and business services based on the consumer model have much higher download than upload speeds. That matches the way most personal users access the Internet. However, if you are running a server or upload large files a lot of the time, you’ll run out of bandwidth more often than not.

The third difference involves Service Level Agreements or SLAs. These are guarantees by the ISP as to how quickly they’ll hop to it and repair an outage and what parameters like bandwidth, latency and jitter you can depend on. Don’t know about these? They’re unheard of in consumer circles. Unless you have an SLA, you are dependent on the good intentions of your ISP. They all mean well, but as their ads say, “you get up to so many Mbps of bandwidth.” That means you can’t get more but you can surely get less.

What dedicated Internet services are available for business? These include T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps, bonded T1 from 3 to 12 Mbps, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) from 2 to 45 Mbps, DS3 at 45 Mbps and fiber optic services up to 10 Gbps. The higher your bandwidth, the lower your cost per Mbps but the higher your payments each month. In case you are thinking that you might pony up for one of these in your home office, forget it. It’s rare that any telecom providers will install dedicated services to a residence. You need your own business address.

Do you have such a business address and a burning desire for more dependable and higher performing Internet access? If so, then check prices and availability for dedicated business Internet solutions in your area.

ISDN PRI For PABX

2012-05-01T02:40:00.000-05:00

The Private Automatic Branch Exchange, PABX, also known as the PBX, is the telephone system of choice for medium and large companies. If your company is large enough to invest in a PABX, it’s got enough employees to require multiple outside phone lines. The question is what is the best technology to supply those phone lines?

Businesses that only need a handful of telephone lines usually start off with a few analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines and add more, one at a time, as needed. At some point you start to wonder if a digital trunk makes more sense than a dozen separate POTS lines. You are likely right.

Digital trunks are a technology to transport multiple phone calls to a subscriber using fewer wires. Each analog line requires a separate pair of wires. A trunk may use one or two pair to carry 23 or 24 phone calls.

How is this accomplished? The most popular technique is digitizing each phone call and then multiplexing all those bits onto a serial data stream. The line is synchronized at both ends so that individual time slots can be separated into channels. Each channel holds one concurrent call. This technology was standardized by Bell Labs in the T-Carrier system. The most popular of the T-Carriers is T1, although T3 is still used but generally called DS3.

The basic T1 telephone line consists of 24 identical channels of 8 bits each sampled 8,000 per second. That adds up to a line speed of approximately 1.5 Mbps. T1 lines were the first deployed as digital telephone trunks. PABX systems often have T1 interface cards and connectors so you can just plug in a T1 line and have up to 24 outside lines available. Larger systems have multiple line interfaces for 48 or more outside telephone lines.

T1 telephone is still highly popular, but is generally deployed in the form of ISDN PRI. PRI means Primary Rate Interface which uses a channelized T1 line for transport. ISDN is another standard called Integrated Services Digital Network. ISDN uses 23 of the T1 time slots for telephone lines but reserves one channel for data and switching. You give up the capability of one telephone line but gain much faster call switching plus Caller ID and ANI (Automatic Number Identification) for the other 23 phone lines.

ISDN PRI is readily available, less expensive than ever before and compatible with most PABX systems. With the capability of handling up to 23 outside lines, it has the capacity to handle the needs of most small to medium size offices and contact centers. By adding additional interfaces, a PABX system can handle 46, 69, 92 or over 100 outside telephone lines.

The competition for ISDN PRI is a newer service called SIP Trunking. SIP is the switching system used for VoIP telephone systems. A SIP Trunk is basically a packet network line with the bandwidth to handle multiple simultaneous calls and perhaps data transfers as well. Voice packets are given priority on a SIP Trunk to prevent call distortion and dropping of phone calls. A T1 line can be used as a SIP Trunk as well as for ISDN PRI, depending on how it is connected at each end.

Many PABX systems can now directly connect to SIP Trunks as well as T1 telephone lines and ISDN PRI. Some are IP PBX systems that use IP telephones as well as standard analog desk phones. What threatens all of these trunks now is not a new design of PABX but dumping the PABX completely in favor of hosted telephone services.

Hosted voice or telephone in the cloud moves the PABX from your office to a cloud service provider hundreds or thousands of miles away. You swap our your phones with IP telephones and a SIP Trunk. At the far end, the service provider does all of your in-house and outside line switching. It’s the provider who contracts for ISDN PRI trunks or other connection to the public telephone system. You simply pay per phone per month for local and long distance service plus in-house call switching. Often that is one flat fee per “seat.”

Which type of telephone system and trunking arrangement is right for your company? Get competitive quotes for POTS, T1 telephone, ISDN PRI, SIP Trunking and Hosted Voice to help with your trade study and selection.

10 Mbps Up and Down

2012-04-30T01:07:00.000-05:00

Have you heard that 10 Mbps is the new 1 Mbps? I've heard it said that 10 Mbps is the new T1. Those statements are pretty close, since T1 speed is 1.5 Mbps. Either way, there’s a move afoot to higher bandwidth levels and it should come as no surprise that 10 Mbps is becoming the new benchmark for SMB business bandwidth. Let’s see why.

T1 bandwidth established itself in the last couple of decades as the telephone industry made this digital technology available to businesses not related to telecom. One big impetus was the rise of the Internet. When the Internet opened up to business in the 90’s companies of all size suddenly got interested in getting online. That meant web servers, email and broadband connections. T1 lines were reasonably speedy for the time and readily available over twisted pair connections.

A lot has happened since the turn of the century. We still use web servers and email, but web pages have grown tremendously and much of the content is now audio, video and interactive. Commerce has moved online. Brochure pages have become full-fledged retail stores. Companies with both online and bricks & mortar operations may have common inventories that are managed in the cloud.

As you may well realize, the bandwidth of yore won’t cut it for today’s applications. Sure, a generation ago a T1 line could be shared by dozens of employees who thought they found the holy grail of high speed connections compared with the dial-up they were used to at home. Nowadays, 6 to 10 Mbps is considered about average for residential broadband. Some users are inclined to pay up for 2x or 3x that amount in order to support their insatiable video habit. You may not be sanctioning long periods of video watching at work, but you still need line speed to keep up productivity.

Look at what’s happening right now. Businesses large and small are relocating to the cloud. Data centers are going dark, as servers are moving to colo facilities and being sold off in favor of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). PBX systems are meeting a similar fate. The telephone closet is emptying out as companies go with hosted communications. What’s left is a phone on every desk plugged into the LAN along with a PC. These are augmented by smartphones and tablets. All that IT infrastructure is gone.

Well, it’s not really gone. It’s just located somewhere else and likely part of virtualized shared resources. What companies may forget in their zeal to gain the economic benefits of the cloud is that connectivity is now a choke point. The problems of running out of LAN bandwidth were solved so long ago that everyone takes lack of network congestion for granted. The memories of moving up from 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and perhaps 1000 Mbps have become fuzzy and faded. Surprise! Those growing pains are being revisited in the form of connections to the cloud.

The bulk of traffic is now flowing back and forth to the cloud for companies that moved to hosted solutions. What that boils down to is that you need LAN quality connections to the WAN. Clearly T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps aren’t up to that. This is where 10 Mbps makes a lot more sense as a baseline. Don’t get too comfortable with that number. It’s going to be 100 Mbps before you know it.

For the moment, let’s take 10 Mbps as a baseline connection requirement. How do we get that without breaking the bank? There are a couple of easy growth paths that will give you 10 Mbps in both directions. That’s important with cloud services because you have data flowing both up and down. Your T1 line is symmetrical like that. It’s 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Wouldn’t it make sense to simply hot rod a T1 line to get more speed?

Don’t laugh. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. You can’t jack up the speed of a single T1 line or it won’t be a T1 line anymore. In fact, it won’t run at all. T1 is a synchronized service that runs at 1.5 Mbps or shuts down. However, there is no reason you can’t run 2 T1 lines and combine their bandwidth. That process is called bonding. Bond 7 T1 lines together and you get 10.5 Mbps. Exactly what you need and a little more.

Another service that will get you to 10 x 10 Mbps bandwidth quite easily is Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This service runs on twisted pair telco cable, just like T1, so there is little or no construction cost involved in an upgrade. The modulation scheme is newer and trades distance for speed. That means that within a few miles of the telco central office you can easily get 10 Mbps and perhaps 20 or 30 Mbps over copper. Closer in that figure rises to DS3 levels of 45 Mbps. What’s more, EoC tends to be less costly on a per Mbps basis than bonded T1 lines.

Is your business straining its WAN connection to get the bandwidth you need? More speed may be less expensive than you think. Get competitive quotes for 10 Mbps bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper services and see if now is the time to make the move.

Celebrate Arbor Day With Hosting That Plants Trees

2012-04-27T03:33:00.000-05:00

If you’ve been considering a move to eco-friendly hosting, now could be the perfect time. It’s Arbor Day 2012, the perfect time to order a tree to be planted in your name. You can just go ahead and contact a nursery, but how about getting your tree included with your hosting package? Yes, Dotster will do that for you.

A tree? With hosting? Yes, it’s true. Dotster is so committed to green hosting that they will plant a tree for you. What they do is purchase a tree from the Trees for the Future program for every new hosting customer. That could include you.

Trees for the Future has been working since 1989 to help communities around the world plant trees. People in developing communities come to them for help in saving their land and way of life. Trees for the Future provides training and seeds for tree planting in Africa, Asia and Latin America. How many trees have they already planted? 50 million and counting.

Dotster’s commitment to becoming a more sustainable business goes way beyond planting a tree for you. Their hosting infrastructure is designed for maximum reliability and efficiency. Efficient power usage offers a double benefit. First, the servers themselves have a lower carbon footprint and draw less power from the grid. Second, these servers need less cooling so that additional power to remove waste heat from the circuitry can be minimized.

What about dirty energy? Aren’t data centers driving us to generate large amounts of coal fired electricity? Yes, they certainly are. Steel making and heavy industry were huge draws on the power grid in the last century. Now it’s data centers for hosting and cloud services. Dotster recognizes that they could be contributing to the problem, so they’ve taken action by offsetting their server power consumption by purchasing renewable energy credits for 150% of what they draw. These credits are purchased by Bonneville Environmental Foundation, which supports renewable energy projects such as solar and wind, plus watershed restoration.

You may already be sold on the importance of sustainable business practices and willing to pay extra for hosting that supports your values. The good news is that eco-friendly hosting needn’t cost more than hosting that doesn’t care two hoots about the environment. In fact, you’ll look long and hard to find a better deal than you can get from Dotster to host your websites. It’s such a bargain that you can’t even afford to run your own servers.

Let’s look at what you get for your hosting dollar. By dollar, I mean $3.75 a month on the annual plan. That tiny sum buys you 10 GB of website disk space with 300 GB of monthly bandwidth. If you have a domain that gets anywhere near 300 GB of traffic each month, that $3.75 is mere pocket change. Ad traffic alone will pay for your hosting plan in an hour or less.

This basic hosting plan runs on Linux servers and supports a single domain. Oh, by the way, that domain is free for the first year. Just register your .com, .org, .info, .net, .biz or .us when you order your plan (Look for the coupon code on the hosting comparison page or remember that it’s FREEDOM15). You can set up unlimited subdomains on your domain if you want to subdivide your site that way. You also get 100 email accounts, 10 MySQL databases, and the use of a WYSIWYG online site building tool that lets you create up to 15 pages with no design software or special training in website design. Yes, PHP5, Perl, Python, and more than a couple of dozen free applications are included. Planning to run a WordPress blog? The app is already there waiting for you to use it.

Basic Linux hosting at $3.75 a month is the best deal for many small companies, independent professionals, bloggers and others. If your company or operation is much larger or you want to host sites for your design clients, you may want to move up to deluxe hosting at $6.75 a month for 50 domains or ultra hosting at $13.75 a month to host unlimited domains with unlimited storage and bandwidth. Windows hosting is also available a very reasonable prices if that better meets your needs.

Does all this inspire you to get started with eco-friendly hosting and have a tree planted for you? Any day is a good day, but Arbor Day is especially significant. Why not have a look at eco-friendly hosting programs from Dotster and see if they don’t make great sense for your business.

Options For Network Connectivity

2012-04-26T01:54:00.000-05:00

Rare is the company that doesn’t need outside connections to its network. The issue is what type of connection will give you the most bang for your buck. Let’s have a look at the latest options that are attractive for small, medium and large enterprises.

Outside network connections break down into categories. Are you looking for something to get you across town? Those are the Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN). How about something that will take you to another state, across the country or overseas? Those are the Wide Area Networks (WAN). Perhaps all you want is a broadband connection to the Internet. No problem. Internet access is readily available for business users. There’s much more to choose from than in the consumer marketplace. The tradeoff is that you'll be paying something more than consumer prices.

Many metro and wide area network services are more alike than different. What you are probably seeking is a dedicated point to point service or a multipoint mesh network. Point to point private lines have been the domain of the telecom industry using standards developed for digital telephony. T1 lines are classic. They give you dedicated bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. When T1 is not enough, you can bond T1 lines together to incrementally increase bandwidth up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. At that point most companies jump to T3 (DS3) service at 45 Mbps and then SONET fiber services, starting with OC-3 at 155 Mbps.

There’s a new service widely available today that fills in the gap between T1 & T3 and costs less as well. This is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Ethernet over Copper actually starts at 2 or 3 Mbps and has become a strong competitor to T1 lines. You can get twice the bandwidth with EoC for the same price as T1. The other advantage of EoC is that bandwidth levels increment smoothly past 10 Mbps. You can easily get 15, 20, 25, 30 or up to 45 Mbps. That lets EoC take on T3 / DS3 services with better pricing. In some areas, EoC goes right up to 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and beyond. Those levels aren’t so widely available as of yet.

Another advantage of what’s called Carrier Ethernet is that you can get multipoint service as well as point to point. This is great for interconnecting multiple business locations in town or around the country. Each location needs an Ethernet over Copper connection. The service provider sets up the mesh network per standards of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), an industry standards group.

There is also a competitor to SONET fiber optic services called Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). It works the same as EoC, but runs on fiber rather than twisted pair copper. The advantages are high bandwidth levels up to 10 Gbps and better pricing than traditional SONET telecom services.

When it comes to interconnecting multiple locations, especially foreign sites, MPLS networks have become the network connectivity option of choice. Why? Because these networks are already installed and running to many locations you want to go. What you need are on-ramps in the form of last mile connections. They can be as simple as T1 lines or EoC links. You can also install fiber optic lines to get higher bandwidth levels. MPLS can give you point to point, point to multi-point, or meshed network connections. Because the core network is already in place, pricing is very attractive compared to dedicated private lines that require engineering time and effort.

In addition to copper and fiber, fixed wireless connectivity is more available than ever. That’s thanks to the buildout of 3G and 4G networks by the cellular carriers. You can get business grade fixed wireless on these networks with bandwidth similar to T1 lines for such activities as credit card verification and network backup. Prices are very attractive, since the cellular carriers bore the cost of construction and paid for it from consumer smartphone data and voice contracts.

What sort of connection or connections do you need to connect your company network to suppliers, customers and your own operations? Compare network connectivity options and pricing for copper, fiber and wireless services to see what has become available recently.

Internet Service Without The Outages

2012-04-25T02:02:00.000-05:00

The Internet is an amazing place for finding out just about anything related to anything. The sum total of human knowledge is migrating online. Even old books and papers are being scanned and loaded onto webpages and data bases. Combine that with real-time access to shopping, financial services, music and video and you are pretty much attached to the Internet at the hip... or at least the brain. The one major aggravation of Internet everything is when you just can’t get to it.

Internet outages are almost always local events now. The network is so large and so robust that the entire Internet just doesn’t go down. It only seems that way. Perhaps it’s your favorite site or application that is temporarily offline. Perhaps you just can’t get to anything at all.

I’ve felt this pain to varying degrees over the years. As a night owl, I know that the wee hours are the time that network administrators target to do their maintenance. That means my ISP can go offline for an hour or two without warning. It also means that any given online service my be down for maintenance with little or no notice.

Then there are the unplanned and uncontrolled outages. Construction work is famous for taking down telecom services. It’s so prevalent it has a name. They call it “backhoe fade.” It’s pretty much what it sounds like. Someone with a backhoe digs in the wrong place and chops through a wire. A year or two ago, they chopped through a fiber optic cable. There were over 100 strands in that cable and my service was on one of the last to be fused back together. No Internet for two days.

Well, not exactly. The cable modem was dead for two days. I was getting things done at any restaurant where they had free WiFi that wasn’t affected. Inconvenient? Yes, but it got me through.

I’m tied to the Internet for my livelihood, but a local outage isn’t the kiss of death. It’s just a major inconvenience. The reason for this is that all of my hosting, dozens of domains worth, is done elsewhere. In fact, I insist on having multiple hosting services located in different data centers in different cities. That way a local disaster won’t take everything down at once. This happened about 8 years back. Remember the 4 hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004? One of them flooded the building my web host was in. Even though they were on a higher floor, the communications lines were affected so no data was going in or out.

This hints at the first thing you can do to protect your business from Internet outages. Don’t put all of your eggs or servers in one basket. You have more protection when the services you use are divvied out geographically. Disasters rarely affect more than a limited area. This is true for cloud services too. Your cloud provider needs to have diverse backup solutions or you need more than one cloud. Nowadays, that also means you need more than one way to get to the cloud.

Backhoe fade is a fact of Internet access, although there are more and less risky solutions. All in all, you are better off with dedicated Internet access that has an SLA or Service Level Agreement. The really cheap Internet services, DSL and Cable, are shared and not dedicated to you alone. They are also treated as “information services” not telecom services, meaning that the providers don’t jump nearly as high or as fast when something goes wrong. T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber and SONET perform better, have faster mean times to repair and cost more... as you would expect.

It’s good to have diversity in your connectivity. Two T1 lines are better than one. Ethernet over Copper using multiple pairs is more reliable than anything coming in on a single pair. Even better is copper backup for fiber services, even thought it may be slower. There is no one cable that has both the copper wires and fiber strands in it. A cable broadband service can be an inexpensive backup service to your dedicated lines since it doesn’t use telco wiring. Wireless broadband is an excellent backup that also doesn’t have to be that costly. Your smartphone gives you a level of redundancy when your desktop PC goes down. There are fixed wireless services designed for business backup running on 3G and 4G cellular networks. You can set these up for automatic failover so that service won’t be interrupted if you lose a landline.

How much you need to concern yourself with redundancy and disaster recovery depends on what happens when you lose your connection to the Internet. Is it a minor inconvenience or does everything come to a screeching halt? If that’s the case, make sure you have at least two ways of connecting and getting your work done. They don’t have to be the same bandwidth or guaranteed availability. Just make sure that there is no single point of failure that will knock them both out at the same time. There are lots of different services available. Check prices and features so you can get the best mix of business bandwidth services available for your particular location.

Differences Between Fiber and EoC

2012-04-24T00:57:00.000-05:00

Many companies, constrained by their dedicated Internet and private line bandwidth, are doing the trade studies necessary to justify a move to fiber optic services. Now they have another option to throw in mix. It’s Ethernet over Copper or EoC.

Just what is it about EoC that presumes to place it in the same category as fiber optics? Perhaps surprisingly, it’s both bandwidth and cost.

Traditional fiber optic services are based on the SONET or Synchronous Optical NETwork standard developed by the telephone industry. SONET services start with OC-3 at 155 Mbps. This is 3x the speed of DS3 or T3 service. More importantly, SONET was designed to be compatible with T-Carrier standards so that T1 lines and DS3 services can be readily transported on SONET. It is common practice for these copper-based services to hitch a ride on fiber optic carriers for long haul connections.

The beauty of fiber is that it has nearly unlimited bandwidth potential. When fiber optic cable is brought in, it’s not just a small diameter cable with a couple of fiber strands. There are almost always dozens if not a hundred or more fiber strands in that cable. Why? Because the big cost is in the construction. Trenching underground, installing conduit and pulling the fiber cable is way more expensive than the difference between a very small fiber cable and a larger one.

How about the fiber bandwidth? Each strand can easily transport 10 Gbps or more. If you add coarse or dense wavelength division multiplexing to send multiple beams on each fiber strand, you can ramp that bandwidth capacity up by 10 to 100x. Future technology advancements may increase capacity even further. It’s clearly going to be a very long time before businesses start to “fill up” their fiber optic cable capacity... once they have it.

Therein lies the rub. The reason that almost 2/3 of business locations still don’t have fiber optic service is that the construction costs are overwhelming. You need to be reasonably near a carrier’s service and then pony up to have a drop run to your building and the termination equipment installed. More and more buildings are being “lit” for fiber optic service every day. Some day every business location will be pre-wired for fiber just like they are for telephone and electricity. That day may be well off in the future, however.

So, where does this option of EoC come in? One main selling point for Ethernet over Copper is that you may be able to avoid construction costs completely. The copper involved is nothing more than twisted pair telco wire that runs between your building and the telephone company’s nearest central office (CO). Residential lines typically contain 2 pair. Business cables can easily have 25 or more copper pair installed as a matter of course. Some of these are used for business telephone lines. Others can be used for T1 lines. Still others can be employed for Ethernet over Copper. What’s important is that your CO has EoC termination equipment installed.

Let’s say that you can get Ethernet over Copper service at your location. What’s available and what does it cost?

EoC carriers use up to 8 unused copper pair to provision your service. More pairs mean higher bandwidth. How much depends on the CO equipment and how long the copper run is. Within a few miles of the CO, you can generally get 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, even as much as 45 Mbps over 8 pair. In some situations that can be pushed to over 100 Mbps if you are mere blocks away from the CO, which is not that unusual in metropolitan areas. The 45 Mbps level is popular because it is a direct replacement for DS3 bandwidth that is most often transported over fiber.

How about the cost? EoC is typically half the cost of T-Carrier or SONET bandwidth or you can get twice the bandwidth for the same money. For instance, many smaller companies are upgrading to 3 Mbps for the same price as their older 1.5 Mbps T1 line. In addition to lower monthly lease prices, construction costs are minimal to zero compared to new fiber construction.

EoC can effectively compete with lower level fiber optic services because many companies have been forced to make the jump from T1 to DS3 to OC3 because of limited options. Really all they needed was 10 or 20 Mbps, but those are not standard telecom line speeds. Ethernet services are far more scalable, with increments of 1 or 5 Mbps rather than large jumps. You can often increase your service bandwidth by simply making a phone call to your provider. No equipment changes are necessary as long as you are below the maximum port bandwidth.

Should you be considering EoC in place of fiber optic services? Get current pricing for Ethernet over Copper and Fiber as well as SONET optical services to see what works best for your business location.