Page 2 - Indiana WAN

Simplify Business Internet, Voice, Data by using converged IP communications

Friday, October 2, 2009 by Ron Pirau

Do you want to simplify your operations for IT and Accounting Payable? If you are using separate providers for Internet, Voice Circuits, and Data Circuit consider using a single provider for all. IP communications has facilitated the ability to converge all three on a single network or WAN. By dealing with one network you are removing the complexity of having to deal with multiple networks from an IT operations standpoint. Accounting also only has to pay to one provider rather than three. WAN providers can development a network to transport the data and voice converted to IP. You don't have to have a VoIP PBX solutions in place to transport voice over the WAN. Most VoIP Service Providers support SIP natively, the Voice transport over IP, but they can also provide a gateway to provider analog or digital interface to traditional phone systems. Now instead of having a PRI circuit for voice and a T1 circuit for data you can have a single circuit for both (as long as there is enough capacity). If you do transition to VoIP PBX Solutions and VoIP Service Providers you can reduce overall complexity in managing the communications by having a single network and also a single company to pay.

LightBound offers top of the line WAN consolidation

Thursday, October 1, 2009 by Kate Rance

LightBound, Indiana's Internet Service Provider, offers WAN consolidation within a customers network, or by utilizing the LightBound data center.
LightBound also offer WAN Optimization products that help avoid packet delivery issues common in shared WAN environments, like MPLS and Internet VPNs. The optimization also eliminates the transfer of redundant data across the WAN by sending references instead of the actual data. The compression relies on data patterns that can be represented more efficiently and are best suited for point to point leased lines, which LightBound can provide.

Salesforce & Fonality Trixbox disruptive innovation that changes the game for SMB

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 by Ron Pirau

I attended the Techpoint Innovation Summit '09 in Indianapolis, Indiana and Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Professor, was the keynote speaker. He spoke about "disruption innovation" and the way that it drives innovation that upsets the apple cart for the incumbent providers of products and services. One interesting service he pointed out was Salesforce CRM. CRM systems typically were only affordable by large corporate entities that had large central systems and a corporate WAN to distribute access throughout the corporation. Salesforce is a CRM system that provides enterprise level functionality, accessibility and scalability to the smallest of businesses, even a single person business, as long as they have High Speed Internet in Indiana. Another disruptive innovation that offers enterprise level functionality, including call center capability, is Fonality Trixbox IP PBX. Call centers typically are six figure capital investments requiring a large staff to support. Fonality Trixbox is a VoIP PBX Solutions that can be implemented for about 20% of the cost and it integrates with Salesforce CRM. The combination of the two can enable a start up or SMB compete with the large Fortune 500 corporation at a fraction of the cost.

Optimize business continuity with data center high availability

Monday, April 20, 2009 by Ron Pirau

For Data Recovery Indiana consider setting up a Managed Servers Hosting at Lightbound's data center. Many Small Business Server Hosting customers who are looking for business continuity are now setting up their backup or even their primary servers at the data center. Lightbound provides 24 x 7 x 365 managed support with a high availability data center with power, HVAC, and security round the clock. Customer's can consolidate their data and use our Off site Data Backup Service along with Server collocation to protect their servers. If they have a VOIP PBX solution they can move all their voice services to the data center as we are one of the few SIP Indiana VOIP providers. Additionally centralizing WAN communications at the data center can completely provide a robust solution to keep a business up an running through most any type of weather related incident. Look to Lightbound data center for the optimum in business continuity.

Carrier or Carrier Reseller What is the difference

Saturday, February 28, 2009 by Jack Carr

As we are out quoting projects it is constant battle with non-carriers quoting services as resellers of carriers. They often oversell their capabilities or the carriers capabilities by setting false expectations of how services are delivered. We often have to walk away from projects, but luckily we get second chance to re-quote after the customer discovers the quotes are incorrect.

In other words watch out for the pretend carriers, especially in the Indiana WAN environment. They are at least 2-3 Indiana WAN carriers that have signed up some many resellers you never know who might offer you WAN products. Make sure they are register CLEC or ILEC. They often represent themselves as the carrier.

So buyer beware of the who you buy your IP WAN service from.

WAN Consolidation can resolve issues faster

Thursday, February 12, 2009 by Ron Pirau

Have you ever had a recurring problem with a WAN circuit that just wouldn't go away? Your circuit went down and you called the carrier to report the issue and they told you there was no problem? The problem would be fixed temporarily and then come back the next few days. If you reply on High Speed Internet in Indiana to get your business done this can be very frustrating. If you consolidate your WAN services in a data center with an experience NOC staff they can help solve these issues quicker. An experienced NOC engineer will know the tricks of the trade to keep a case open to resolve the issue once and for all instead of having repeated outages. The carrier technical support call center rep has one goal in mind - to close cases as fast as they can. The quicker and the more cases are resolved the more they are paid. A long standing open case costs the technical support representative so they would rather close a case than keep it open to make sure the issue is solved. Lightbound NOC engineers have one goal in mind - to keep your circuits up and running and minimize any downtime. They can do this 24 x7 x 365. Does your IT support staff provide this type of service. If not try calling Lightbound today for Indiana WAN and Internet Service in Indiana.

VoIP Service Providers can help cut cost during tough economic times

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 by Ron Pirau

Companies are all looking for ways to cut costs during these tough economic times. VoIP Service Providers can reduce cost by selling customer exactly the voice lines they need. If a company needs 30 voice lines typically they will purchase two PRI circuits which is 46 lines. A VoIP Service Provider can provide this solution by delivering the exact amount of SIP trunks. SIP trunks work best when working with a VoIP PBX solution. Costs can be further reduced through WAN consolidation of sites that cross LATAs that result in interstate or intrastate long distance charge for calls. If the voice services are consolidated on the LAN all calls can be made site to site at no extra cost for long distance. If you are in the Indianapolis, Bloomington, Lafayette, Columbus, Kokomo area or counties surrounding Indianapolis you can get this servie from Lightbound, an Indiana VoIP provider that offers direct connectivity to the data center to provide quality VoIP services on a private network and local calling service.

To control costs consider WAN consolidation in a data center

Friday, February 6, 2009 by Ron Pirau

Companies that are looking for ways to cut costs in this economy should look at consolidating voice and data WAN circuits in a data center. The data center can now become the central hub for distributing services for Internet, Voice, and Data connectivity. Many data centers have a large number of carriers to choose from. Instead of using a single carrier the data center staff can help find the best value and cost for services by using multiple carriers. Instead of paying large fees to deliver the last mile of the circuit the customer essentially has the cost of cross connects at a fraction of the cost. In addition to costs savings business continuity can greatly improve because a data center generally has better redundancy for power, cooling, and security. Data disaster recovery can be enhanced by having servers at the data center that backups can be restored on or even mirrored production servers. Data centers typically have staff available 24 x 7 x 365 that can take care of issues when normal operations support staff are not available. In most cases problems are taken care of before a customer knows there is a problem! Small businesses can get the same type of support as large enterprises by using managed server hosting along with WAN consolidation. With cost saving and improved reliability it make sense to consider this option.

Investment in Health IT and Economic Stimulus

Wednesday, January 28, 2009 by Ron Pirau

I ran across an interesting article about Indiana Health IT driving Economic Stimulus. See :

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=T&ct=us/0-0&fd=R&url=http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl%3FACCT%3D104%26STORY%3D/www/story/01-28-2009/0004961987%26EDATE%3D&cid=1298199546&ei=G4eASbD6GIbElQT254H-AQ&usg=AFQjCNG2ZTF8PbhV92mvleOLxFemAiBcTg

It's pretty interesting that Central Indiana is considered a leader in Health IT. I think much of this has to do with the Internet Service Indiana providers that facilitate high speed broadband connectivity to many of the Health providers. Typically in the past T1 circuits were typically used, but now 10, 100, and Gigabit Ethernet circuits are becoming common to connect health care providers. This is necessary to due the large amount of data that medical imaging requires and access that remotely connected physicians need to access it. Many of the medical providers in Indiana WAN are being moved to data centers to provide business continuity to facilitate always on connectivity 24x7x365. The cost of high speed broadband in central Indiana is helping to facilitate the exchange of information to improve health information exchange.

QOS is a must when using VoIP PBX or VoIP Service Providers

Friday, January 16, 2009 by Ron Pirau

If you are ever looking for an Indiana VoIP provider that provides a hosted VoIP PBX Solutions make sure that they address the issue of QOS (Quality of Service) over the WAN circuit that delivers Internet Service. The Internet WAN circuit needs to be a dedicated circuit to the location of the VoIP switch so QOS can be set up point to point. Many VoIP Service Providers will position that their hosted managed solution can work over any broadband Internet connection. The hosted voice solution will work most of the time, but there will also be some troublesome times when it flat out does not work at all. This has to do with QOS. The voice call is very delay sensitive and when there is too much delay voice quality suffers with dropped packets and garbled messages. The voice call is contending with downloads (ftp sessions, streaming videos). if there is no priority given of voice over other applications there is no way that voice packets are delivered on time. This is especially troublesome for customers who are looking for small business Server hosting or managed servers hosting because in most cases they don't have IT & telecom staff with the expertise to know how to set up QOS or why QOS matters. The small business customers are many times subject to a bait and switch tactic to get the deal for voice with a long term goal of getting the broadband circuit business. The VoIP service provider will set the hosted voice solution at a low cost per seat versus current service which will attract the customer to sign a contract usually for several years at what appears to be a lower cost of service. But usually after a few months of being frustrated with the occasional voice problems the customer will switch from their broadband Internet provider to a dedicated circuit to the VoIP Service Provider they contracted service with. This will usually be at a premium. It's best work work with VoIP service providers who address the QOS issue up front and are honest with the customers.

Why 24 x 7 Business Continuity is needed in todays economy

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 by Ron Pirau

How many businesses in Central Indiana can afford to maintain a staff 24x7x365 to support their IT systems? How many businesses need 24x7x365 to remain competitive in today's always business environment? All of them! In order to do so many businesses are migrating to an environment that provides business continuity 24 x 7 in order to accomplish this. Moving critical applications to managed servers hosting environment or server collocation in an Indiana Server Hosting Data Center can accomplish this. A data center that has 24x7 network operations center staff can provide data disaster recover in the event an issue happens with one of the servers. In additional moving to a VoIP PBX and locating in the data center using voice services from a VoIP service provide can bring an extra level of business continuity. This type of service is not only for large Enterprise customers. Small Business server hosting can also be done quite cost effectively. WAN consolidation can also provide enhanced business continuity by centralizing in a data center where business applications reside. WAN consolidation also provides considerable cost savings in many cases. The only way this will work for companies is by using high speed Internet in Indiana. Providers of Indiana DSL Internet, Ethernet or T1 Internet can provide this high speed Internet Connectivity. The data center and managed services can provide round the clock support in a highly available and reliable facility at a fraction of the cost of employee staff to perform the IT support functions. To keep businesses running 24x7 this should be a key part of a successful business strategy.

Build a solid WAN foundation for successful VoIP services

Wednesday, November 26, 2008 by Ron Pirau

There is a major transition in communications today due to the evolution of the Internet. There is also a lot of confusion as well. VoIP (Voice over IP) is positioned by many service providers as being able to work anytime and anyplace. Unfortunately this is not the case if there is not built on a solid foundation of a WAN from end to end. Voice is very delay sensitive and sending it on the open Internet as opposed to a well engineered network using “Internet Protocol” can result in voice service that works great sometimes and not very well at others. I have been in the business for 10 years now and have seen this happen over and over again. Unfortunately business customers with little technical background get caught in the middle and have bad experiences by focusing only cost savings not considering quality. This results in switching carriers and phone system providers in order to try and solve the problem. If you are going to deploy a VoIP phone solution make sure that you are getting a solid WAN foundation with a well engineered WAN to provide a long term solution from end to end. It's best to look for VoIP service providers who offers both managed WAN and managed VoIP to get the best results. This is best found by companies with a Data Center who offers managed servers hosting and can monitor services 24/7.