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Growing High Speed Access Alternatives

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Leigh Sandy0 Comments

Ethernet Express Family

Donet has been developing and expanding a family of access products to benefit businesses and organizations in the Dayton region by balancing costs and features that meet current and future network requirements.  The Ethernet Express family includes a set of scalable access products using standardized Ethernet technology delivered over several types of physical connection types.

Several business requirements have led to this innovative family of products.   One of the most significant requirements has been the price for products at 10mbps or higher speeds.  Dayton businesses and organizations have been limited to contracting for high cost DS3, Sonet (OCn), or fiber to get scalable speeds at 10mbps or higher.  In 2008, Donet engineers developed and deployed our first Ethernet Express product that offers up to 20mbps of Internet access service to any location within the Dayton region that qualifies for competitive 6mbps DSL.  This product uses technology that is not in use anywhere else in the world (as far as we know) and is an innovation of several technology standards applied in a unique fashion.  The pricing for 10mbps is below traditional T1 prices and scales up to 20mbps for significantly less than fiber or DS3.

Another business requirement has involved the ability to transfer higher volumes of bandwidth out of the organization.  Both DSL and cable have slower upload bandwidth and operate at half-duplex (sharing the pipe in both directions).  Donet expanded access with the introduction of Ethernet Express Plus products.  This combined full duplex upload at speeds from 1.5mbps up to 6mbps with the faster download speeds of Ethernet Express (from 5mbps to 20mbps).  Donet provides Ethernet Express and Ethernet Express Plus services to around 50 businesses and organizations today.

Many businesses and organizations are located outside the reach of traditional copper and fiber solutions, so Donet has partnered with P&R Communications to offer a high speed, full duplex solution called Ethernet Express Unwired that is delivered over Motorola wireless equipment from a ring of towers surrounding the Dayton region.  Two speed tiers are currently being offered (5mbps x 2mbps and 10mbps x 3mbps).  Multiple sites can be tied together into a LAN over this product.  No other local network carrier is offering a similar wireless service as a switched or routed product.  Pricing is similar to traditional T1 costs.

Businesses also want the benefit of straight LAN traffic between multiple sites or to outside data centers, along with upload speeds that exceed 6mbps.  This may be for large file transfers, server replication, or heavy offsite backups.  Donet offers Regional Ethernet through arrangement with all the local fiber carriers.  All the features of traditional fiber are supported.  Our pricing can be more competitive than going directly to the carrier by maintaining a higher volume with those carriers and selecting the best combination of providers (combine both AT&T fiber with TWTelecom fiber, for instance) to reduce build costs.

It will be quite some time before fiber is built to every business and organization, and the time to deploy fiber can be three months or longer in many cases.  Donet has developed and started deploying (in October of 2010) our Ethernet Express Metro service with full duplex speeds from 5mbps to 40mbps.  Multiple sites can be tied together into a LAN over this product.  This service is currently only available initially in locations close to the downtown Dayton area, but will be available in other areas in the future.  No other local carrier is offering this service in the Dayton area today.  Ethernet Express Metro can be provisioned in around two weeks and is priced around traditional T1 rates, well below fiber or DS3 prices.

Another business requirement involves the need for access services to be reliable as more and more critical applications are dependent upon the network connection.  Every product in the Ethernet Express family use best-of-class hardware, like Cisco routers and switches, that our certified network group monitors, manages, and maintains around the clock.  All copper connections (except Ethernet Express 5) have multiple loops to provide a high level of redundancy.  All our services can be combined together to provide a very reliable service delivered over multiple physical media.