Google Message Continuity, announced today, allows companies to protect their email by backing up their Exchange servers to Google’s cloud. Read more
Archive for 2010
Hiring: Part-time Sales & Marketing Assistant
The ideal candidate should be:
- Creative and innovative in marketing and selling our services to businesses and government in Las Vegas & Reno.
- People-oriented and able to build relationships with prospects, partners and customers to drive sales/referrals.
- Able to educate prospects on how company’s unique services solve specific business needs
- Available to attend networking events
- Knowledgeable in Microsoft Office applications and Internet savvy
- Skilled in writing and able to draft newsletters and blog posts
Please forward your resume.
Can 1Velocity see under your clothes?
Millimeter-wave Body Scanner (tsa.gov)
What do the TSA’s new body scanners and 1Velocity have in common? Both use millimeter-wave spectrum.
The news this week is filled with stories about new body scanners at airport security that can see through passengers’ clothes. Those scanners use the same millimeter-wave spectrum 1Velocity uses in its Gigabit Ethernet backbone ring.
Does that mean 1Velocity can see under your clothes?
Millimeter-wave Spectrum
A spectrum is a range of light frequencies. Millimeter-wave is a spectrum not visible by the human eye.
A rainbow shows the visible spectrum, from the red frequencies all the way to the purple (Ever seen a double rainbow?). But there many spectrum that we cannot see with the naked eye.
Millimeter-wave, X-rays, gamma rays, microwave, and infrared are each different spectrum of light above or below what we can see with our eyes. And each spectrum has its own characteristics, useful for multiple applications.
Your TV remote and night-vision goggles both use infrared spectrum in different ways. Radar and microwave ovens use microwave in different ways.
Does your TV remote give you night-vision?
Like infrared and microwave, millimeter-wave has multiple uses.
While the TSA scanners send broad beams like a flashlight, 1Velocity uses targeted beams like a laser.
Using pencil-thin beams, 1Velocity can provide business Internet and metro Ethernet at a rate up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). With a much-broader beam, the TSA body scanners to scan under passengers’ clothes for guns, knives, and explosives.
Since your TV remote doesn’t give you night vision, you have probably already guessed that 1Velocity’s pencil-thin beams cannot see under your clothes. All we can do is provide high-speed data connections across town or to the Internet, which is still pretty cool.
Why Ethernet is Better for Business
In the past, most businesses used TDM (T1, DS-3, OC-x) instead of Ethernet for WAN and Internet connectivity. Today, businesses are increasingly choosing Ethernet instead.
Why?
Ethernet has been used on corporate networks for decades because it is reliable, scalable, and cost-effective. Why have businesses only recently started using Ethernet for wide-area networks and Internet?
A Quick History Lesson
Back in the day, the only network in town was the telephone network. Corporate LANs spoke Ethernet, but the telephone networks did not. Engineers had to figure out how to transmit packetized data (Ethernet) over a circuit-switched telephone network.
The solution? Use a router to encapsulate packets into telecom protocols like TDM.
TDM: Inefficient, Costly, and Inflexible
As you can guess, there are a few problems with using a telephone network to route data.
- Overhead: putting IP packets over TDM carries significant overhead. Keeping data packetized throughout the network would be more efficient.
- Costly and Inflexible: to provide a 10 Mbps connection over copper, a carrier had to provision an entire 45 Mbps DS3; for a 100 Mbps connection, a fiber 155 Mbps OC-3.
- Inefficient: Unlike a phone call, data comes in bursts. On a voice network, unlike an Ethernet LAN, the bandwidth is always dedicated to that line, and the time between packets cannot be used for other packets.
The Switch to Carrier Ethernet
As data traffic overtook voice traffic, carriers found increasingly affordable ways to transmit packetized data on the phone networks.
Finally, some new carriers like Yipes, Cogent, and Telseon built end-to-end Ethernet long-haul fiber networks dedicated exclusively to data. Ironically, now that data traffic has far-surpassed voice traffic, many providers now send voice traffic over data networks using voice over IP (VoIP). In fact, AT&T has begun lobbying Congress to do away with the old telephone network.
Ethernet: Better Network, Better Costs
Ethernet has become the de facto standard for most corporate data networks thanks mainly to its affordability, scalability, and flexibility. Using Ethernet for Wide Area Networks (WANs) has many advantages:
- Scalable: you don’t have to pick 1.5, 45, or 155 Mbps. Most Ethernet carriers allow you to choose, 10, 50, 100, 500, or 1000 Mbps. And the leading Ethernet carriers allow you to scale in 1 Mbps increments.
- Flexible: configure point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, or (with the leading Ethernet carriers) any-to-any Ethernet virtual private LAN service (VPLS) networks. Ethernet can be used for private networks, Internet access, business continuity, and storage area networks (SANs).
- Affordable: Ethernet is more efficient, so it’s more affordable.
- Resilient: one of the best advantage of SONET is that failover is accomplished in under 50 ms. With Ethernet, failover can happen in as little as 15 ms.
- No Equipment: because packets no longer needs to be encapsulated, you can plug right into a firewall or switch.
- No Training: you already know how to use Ethernet. If you can setup a LAN, you can setup an Ethernet WAN.
What’s the Catch? The Fiber Gap
Historically, Ethernet has required a fiber-optic connection; efforts to put Ethernet over copper lines have been mixed.
Despite all the fiber installed over the last few decades, three out of four U.S. commercial buildings still only have copper cabling and cannot get Ethernet. Most businesses cannot afford the tens of thousands of dollars required for a fiber build.
Carriers such as 1Velocity have been bridging this fiber gap by using millimeter-wave and microwave wireless to build dedicated wireless Ethernet connections to business.
Summary: Use Ethernet for Data Networks
Telephone networks speak a different language than corporate Ethernet LANs. In the past, the phone companies developed technologies like T1, DS-3, and OC-x to transmit Ethernet data over the telephone networks, but these methods were inefficient, costly, and inflexible.
As data traffic overtook voice traffic, some new carriers built Ethernet networks dedicated exclusively to data. Many organizations have switched to Ethernet MANs and WANs for better scalability, affordability, simplicity, flexibility, and resiliency.
But the costs of fiber builds have limited the availability of Ethernet to businesses. Wireless providers like 1Velocity are helping to bridge that gap and bring the benefits of Ethernet to businesses at a reasonable price.
Download as PDF: The Switch to Ethernet – 1Velocity Tips
Internet Redundancy with BGP
BGP with Multiple Internet Providers
Maximizing uptime requires multiple Internet carriers. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) allows companies to use two or more Internet connections at the same time and maintain connectivity during an outage without having to change IP addresses.
BGP has many options, but here are the basics for using BGP with multiple Internet providers.
Three Types of Routes
BGP tells your router where to send outbound traffic. When you connect your network to an Internet provider’s network using BGP, your router can receive three different routes: Default Route, Full Routes, or Partial Routes.
1. Default Route: failover but no optimization
Configuring BGP for each Internet connection using a default route allows a company to have automatic failover between two providers should one provider go down. However, BGP will not load-balance and will send all outgoing traffic to only one ISP. Default routes are often used on routers with less than 512 MB RAM.
2. Full Routes: failover plus optimization
Using full BGP routes with multiple Internet providers allows a company to:
- Optimize: Automatically optimize outbound traffic to choose the provider with the shortest path (shortest AS number, by default) to each destination.
- Failover: Have auto-failover should one of the ISPs go down. BGP tries to find the shortest path from your gateway to a destination IP address. If one of the carriers is down, the router simply chooses a path from the other carrier.
However, Full Routes typically require a router with minimum 1 GB RAM. Advertising full routes requires keeping all the Internet’s available paths in your router’s memory. As of 2010, there are over 280,000 routes on the Internet, so having two ISPs means you’ll need to store over 560,000 paths. A router with 1 GB memory typically starts around $25,000, depending on the vendor.
3. Partial Routes: optimizing a subset of designated paths
What if your router does not have 1 GB memory? You do not have to store all the paths. With Partial Routes, you configure the router to receive only certain routes. You could ask the ISP to only send some routes, but filtering routes yourself allows for more control and the ability to receive full routes if you upgrade your router.
Typically, you would designate a default route for each provider, plus some specific routes through each provider to frequently-accessed IP addresses (web apps, frequently-used web sites and services, off-site servers, etc).
Getting Started with BGP
Regardless of whether you choose default, full, or partial routes, you will need the following:
- Advertisement Authorization from Both Carriers: BGP only routes outgoing traffic. To failover incoming traffic, you need permission from both carriers to advertise the other’s routes.
- AS Number: if you have multiple Internet providers, you need an Autonomous System Number (AS Number, $500 from ARIN). As long as you can show you are using multiple Internet carriers, you qualify for an AS number, no matter what size your organization.
- /24 Subnet: Most ISPs require that you have at least a /24 set of IP addresses for them to advertise your subnet. You can buy one from your ISP, or you can buy one directly from ARIN.
Download as PDF: Internet Redundancy with BGP
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