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Voice, Data &
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January 2008, Number One
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Add a 2nd Internet Connection to Your Company Network
Increase Speed, Redundancy & Employee Productivity!
Overview Action
Plan Background
T1 vs. Cable/DSL Bigger &
Cheaper Case Study
Vendors About/Contact
Overview - Because of the cheap broadband
Internet pipes they have in their home offices (cable, fiber and high-end
DSL); employees have discovered & implemented “high bandwidth”
applications that make their job easier and increase their productivity.
To adapt these applications and associated productivity increased in their
main offices, business owners and managers will need to both double or
triple their main office Internet speeds as well as provide for a
secondary Internet connection to fall back on in case the primary Internet
connection fails.
Many businesses today have a just single broadband Internet connection
plugged into their company network. Because of the prevalence of three
years contacts in the industry, these companies have had the same
broadband connection for a while (meaning they’re not likely getting the
best rate anymore) and will have it a while longer before their current
contract expires. These businesses have found that the cheapest way to
increase their current Internet speed, take advantage of today’s lower
broadband Internet contract prices and increase redundancy is to bring in
a second broadband Internet connection from a separate broadband Internet
provider and use it together with the first Internet connection through
the use of a “dual WAN, load balancing router”. This solution provides
increased Internet speeds, lower overall per Meg pricing and redundancy in
case one Internet connection fails.
Because most businesses have a “wired” terrestrial circuit as their
first Internet connection, many are choosing a “fixed wireless” provider
to bring in their second Internet connection. While fixed wireless
requires that a radio dish be installed on the roof of their building,
business users are finding that fixed wireless can be installed three
times faster than a wired Internet T1 and is usually up to 30% less
expensive than a wired Internet T1 with the same amount of bandwidth.
Action Plan -
1. Confirm the contract terms of your current Internet connection & ask
current Internet provider for terms to increase Internet speed through a
redundant, separate connection
2. Ask IT provider for terms to upgrade to “dual-WAN, load balancing”
Internet router
3. Ask telecom broker/consultant for terms of second, alternate
broadband Internet connection
4. Budget to accommodate adding second, redundant high-speed Internet
connection
Background - Just a couple years ago,
when many people still had dial-up Internet connections in their homes,
working out of a home office was somewhat problematic due to slow Internet
speeds. Employees had to work out of the main offices because that’s where
they had access to the fastest Internet connections. Now just the opposite
seems to be true. Where many business have a synchronous (same speed up
and down) office Internet T1 speed of 1.5 Mbps, the Internet speed many
people have at their home is 3.0 Mbps down and 768 kbps up or even higher.
(Some phone companies with "fiber to the curb" offer residential customers
Internet speeds of 12.0 Mbps down & 2.0 Mbps up for less than $100 per
month.)
Why do home office workers do with all that speed? Well just as a gas
will expand to fill the container it occupies, so too will Internet
applications expand to use up the bandwidth they can get. What business
applications are expanding to sop up all the bandwidth available?
A. Voice - Many businesses have come to the conclusion that they
don't want to buy one T1 for voice traffic and one T1 for Internet
traffic. To save money many want to put their voice phone calls over their
Internet T1 and then cancel their voice T1. When experimenting with this,
IT managers are finding that uncompressed voice traffic is pretty fat, 80
kbps for a single call. Ten simultaneous phone calls take up half a T1.
Compressed to 32 kbps or less, a data T1 can accommodate 48 simultaneous
talk paths.
B. Video - While video conferencing may or may not ever become
indispensable to the average business, on-demand (watch it whenever you
want to) video will. What kind of on-demand video will become
indispensable? Training videos, webinar playbacks, and audio playbacks to
name just three. Over the next year or so, anything that can be read will
be converted to something that can be watched. Even small mom and pop
businesses will have "infomercials" on their websites to separate
themselves from their competitors, "it slices, it dices, it makes Julian
fries!" YouTube, the company that set the standard for Internet video,
advises that it takes 500 kbps per simultaneous viewer to have a decent
video experience.
C. Email Attachments - This is the real bandwidth killer. Ten
years ago when a company needed to get a contract out immediately they
sent it via overnight mail. Now employees just scan and email it. Ten
years ago, sending an email with any kind of attachment was considered
rocket science. Today, people can't understand what the big deal is over
attaching a 10 Meg document to an email and sending it to every employee
across the country.
D. Online Applications - As businesses migrate their critical
applications off their local servers onto remote, web-based servers they
find that their small Internet portal is creating a log jam. An "online
application" may not be a service many businesses are currently familiar
with, but they will soon find that they can't run their businesses without
them. Online "apps" most people already know about include Ebay.com
(selling your stuff), YouTube.com (sharing videos) & Flickr.com
(organizing & sharing photos). For a list of online business apps visit
http://bizsolutions.google.com. One of the most successful online business
apps is SalesForce.com. Many if not most of today's business software
providers are in the process of offering their solution as an online
application. This model of online delivery of a software solution is also
known as SaaS ("software as a service") or ASP ("application services
provider"). Call it whatever you like but it means more employees using
Internet access as the same time and demanding more bandwidth.
E. Multi-media Publishing – Remember secretaries? Before the
Internet and before everyone had a computer on their desk, business
executives needed secretaries to “publish” all their letters and
correspondence. Today, not only do employees not need secretaries to send
letters, they don’t need advertising agencies to do the majority of their
marketing or publishing. It’s not ad agencies that are uploading all those
videos to YouTube. And practically everyone with a camera has figured out
how to email their photos to their friends or post them to their MySpace
or FaceBook web pages. Whatever content a business needs to distribute
about itself can now be created and distributed from the office assuming
the Internet bandwidth is available.
These are just five business applications sucking up Internet
bandwidth. As employees find cool web-based productivity applications to
use in their home offices you can be sure they'll bring them to the main
office. Business owners and IT managers will discover that increasing a
company’s Internet bandwidth is the cheapest option available to them to
increase the productivity of their employees.
Business Class T1 vs. Cable, DSL & Fiber
- Business broadband Internet providers are quick to point out that the
non-synchronous fiber, cable & DSL Internet offerings they learn about at
home and see offered to businesses are good for residential and
small-office use only because the speeds are not guaranteed the way
business-class T1 Internet service is guaranteed by a SLA or “service
level agreement”. Most all cable, DSL & fiber services operate as a
“shared commodity”, take a rather lengthy route to the provider’s Internet
portal from the business user’s office, and get desperately slower as more
residential and business customers use the cable, DSL & fiber service
during hours of peak usage. Business-class T1s directly connect a business
customer to the service provider’s portal. Other customers on the service
provider’s network do not affect the “guaranteed-in-writing” Internet
performance of a business-class T1 customer.
Business-class Internet service is more expensive because the speed is
guaranteed by the SLA and that guaranteed speed cost more to provide.
While some businesses will start out on cable or DSL service, when the
business grows to the point of needing dependable and consistent Internet
bandwidth throughout the business day they turn to business-class T1
service. Many ex-cable & DSL users report that their new synchronous 1.5
business class T1 Internet service far outperforms even the fastest shared
cable & DSL service they used to have.
Most businesses who “need to go faster” know that their cable or DSL
isn’t making the grade because of all the broadband Internet testing
websites available. “My upload speed is supposed to be 1.0 Mbps but when I
measure it during slow mornings it’s only 200 kbps.”
Businesses that can’t decide between business-class Internet T1 and
cable or DSL should defer to their IT consultant and/or application
vendor. If one or more of your business process applications absolutely
demands a specific level of broadband Internet service (throughput,
latency, packet-loss, etc.) get it in writing from the Internet service
provider that that’s the service level you’ll get. Few IT consultants and
IT application vendors want the headache of having a business customer
that’s trying to run a critical business application on a non-guaranteed
Internet connection. (Of course some IT consultants will be more than
happy to charge you $300 per hour to figure out exactly why your DSL or
cable Internet connection is not performing to your satisfaction.)
Business-Class T1 Internet Getting Bigger (and
Cheaper) - Over the past several years, 1.5 Mbps has been the standard
size for a business-class Internet T1. Beginning in 2008, 3.0 Mbps will
increasingly be seen as the minimum sized Internet portal businesses will
see as sufficient. To entice early adopter businesses to migrate to the
3.0 Mbps pipe, many Internet providers are offering their best discounts
and router promotions on 3.0 Mbps Internet pipes. New routers are now able
to seamlessly bond up to four 1.5 Meg T1s together to provide a fully
bonded 6.0 synchronous Internet pipe. Businesses that have an Internet
connection on an older contract will be surprised to learn how much prices
have come down.
Unfettered by the restrictions of wire and wired routers, fixed
wireless providers can easily scale broadband Internet up and down from
768 kbps to 6.0 Mbps. With a slightly different receiver, fixed wireless
providers can offer 8.0 Mbps all the way up to 155.0 Mbps – all within a
matter of days (not months)!
Dual-WAN, Load Balancing Router Search Case
Study – In searching the Internet for evidence that the concept of
“dual-WAN, load balancing” actually works I found Joe Mehaffey of GPS
Information.net. From his 2006 web published review I learned that Joe’s
spent five years looking for the dual-WAN router of his dreams. To that
end he came up with 24 router features he was looking for and went through
six router products before settling on a $995 PePLink router that met his
reasonably demanding requirements.
I contacted Joe in January or 2008 to see if the PePLink product was
still working for him and he replied as follows. “It is still generally
current (as far as I know). Peplink and others have some new gear, but I
am ‘delightfully content’ with my PePLink unit after trying a half a dozen
others on the way. It performs flawlessly, never crashes and I actually
forget it is there. And.. The PePLink folks seem to add new features
before I need them.”
Dual-WAN, Load Balancing Vendors –
PePLink – “Our multi-WAN routers combine Internet connections, such as
DSL/Cable/Wi-Fi, from multiple ISPs easily. The addition of a PePLink
multi-WAN router to your network will instantly increase bandwidth,
uptime, reliability, and accelerate speed while reducing the cost of
having a T1.”
Astrocom
– “ Powerlink is Astrocom's family of award-winning WAN failover and ISP
load balancing appliances that provide both outbound and inbound ISP
failover and load balancing for 100% uptime at one-third the TCO of other
products.”
Alvaco Networks, Inc.
– “We offer a free 45 Day trial unit with no obligation. We will
ship the unit and provide tech support with the initial setup for free.”
XiNCOM, LLC - The X16-R
allows businesses to utilize multiple broadband connections for their
Local Area Networks, giving them redundant connectivity to the Internet
and other remote networks, providing better service availability and
improved security.”
Fatpipe
Networks, Inc. – “FatPipe® XTREME is a high-speed router clustering
device from FatPipe Networks. It is the ultimate solution for companies
that want the highest levels of WAN redundancy, reliability, load
balancing, and speed for data traffic directed from the network to the
Internet.”
About/Contact - “Telecom Survival Guide
News” is written for the network service clients and prospective clients
of ATEL Communications, Inc. To discuss the specifics of this newsletter
and how they impact your business or to license or distribute "Telecom
Survival Guide" content, please contact ATEL broker & consultant Dan
Baldwin at 858-646-4655 or
Dan@ATELbroker.com.
Sincerely,
Dan Baldwin,
Telecom Broker & Consultant
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