Colocation Hosting Services and Related Telecommunications Services
In addition to Colocation Hosting Services, Colocation Sales.com and Global
Communications Group partner pages offer a full suite of telecommunications
voice and data services. These services include Data, MPLS, Metro Ethernet,
Frame Relay, ATM, Private Line, IP VPN, and VOIP.
Data Services
Global Communications Group provides IP network solutions that enable you
and your business to benefit from a full range of Internet access services.
From bandwidth needs to network speed levels, to the benefits you receive
from specialty services, we assist you by providing a comprehensive and
affordable solution that reflects your business goals, and grows as your
business grows.
Delivering a dedicated access connection to your location, internet access
offers several bandwidth options that scale to meet your needs. In contrast
to switched access, dedicated access offers you efficient features and functionality
to handle large volumes of traffic.
Services include, DSL. ISDN, T1, DS3, OCx and full range wireless connectivity.
MPLS
Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Private Network Transport (PNT) Service
is a network-based IP VPN solution that uses MPLS technology to provide
secure communications over an IP backbone network. MPLS PNT Service provides
an economical and flexible alternative to private line connectivity or site-to-site
tunnels and is easier to manage and maintain.
Metro Ethernet
A Metro Ethernet is a computer network based on the Ethernet standard and
which covers a metropolitan area. It is commonly used as a metropolitan
access network to connect subscribers and businesses to a Wide Area Network,
such as the Internet. Large businesses can also use Metro Ethernet to connect
branch offices to their Intranet.
Ethernet has been a well known technology for decades. An Ethernet interface
is much less expensive than a SDH or PDH interface of the same bandwidth.
Ethernet also supports high bandwidths with fine granularity, which is not
available with traditional SDH connections. Another distinct advantage of
an Ethernet-based access network is that it can be easily connected to the
customer network, due to the prevalent use of Ethernet in corporate and,
more recently, residential networks. Therefore, bringing Ethernet in to
the Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) introduces a lot of advantages to both
the service provider and the customer (corporate and residential).
A typical service provider Metro Ethernet network is a collection of Layer
2 or 3 switches or routers connected through optical fiber. The topology
could be a ring, hub-and-spoke (star), full mesh or partial mesh. The network
will also have a hierarchy: core, distribution and access. The core in most
cases is an existing IP/MPLS backbone, but may migrate to newer forms of
Ethernet Transport in the form of 10G or 100G speeds.
Frame Relay
Frame Relay consists of an efficient data transmission technique used to
send digital information quickly and cheaply in a relay of frames to one
or many destinations from one or many end-points. Network providers commonly
implement frame relay for voice and data as an encapsulation technique,
used between local area networks (LANs) over a wide area network (WAN).
Each end-user gets a private line (or leased line) to a frame-relay node.
The frame-relay network handles the transmission over a frequently-changing
path transparent to all end-users.
With the advent of MPLS, VPN and dedicated broadband services such as cable
modem and DSL, the end may loom for the frame relay protocol and encapsulation.
However many rural areas remain lacking DSL and cable modem services. In
such cases the least expensive type of "always-on" connection
remains a 64-kilobit frame-relay line. Thus a retail chain, for instance,
may use frame relay for connecting rural stores into their corporate WAN.
ATM
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a cell relay, packet switching network
and data link layer protocol which encodes data traffic into small (53 bytes;
48 bytes of data and 5 bytes of header information) fixed-sized cells. ATM
provides data link layer services that run over Layer 1 links. This differs
from other technologies based on packet-switched networks (such as the Internet
Protocol or Ethernet), in which variable sized packets (known as frames
when referencing Layer 2) are used. ATM is a connection-oriented technology,
in which a logical connection is established between the two endpoints before
the actual data exchange begins.
The standards for ATM were first developed in the mid 1980s. The goal was to design a single networking strategy that could transport real-time video and audio as well as image files, text and email. Two groups, the International Telecommunications Union [ITU 2004] and the ATM Forum [ATM 2004] were involved in the creation of the standards. ATM has been used primarily with telephone and IP networks.
Private Line
In telephony, a private line or tie line is a service that involves dedicated
circuits, private switching arrangements, and/or predefined transmission
paths, whether virtual or physical, which provide communications between
specific locations.
Note: Among subscribers to the public switched telephone network(s), the
term "private line" is often used to mean a one-party switched
telephone line, as opposed to a party line.
IP VPN
A virtual private network (VPN) is a communications network tunneled through
another network, and dedicated for a specific network. One common application
is secure communications through the public Internet, but a VPN need not
have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption.
VPNs, for example, can be used to separate the traffic of different user
communities over an underlying network with strong security features.
A VPN may have best-effort performance, or may have a defined service
level agreement (SLA) between the VPN customer and the VPN service provider.
Generally, a VPN has a topology more complex than point-to-point. The distinguishing
characteristic of VPNs is not security or performance, but that they overlay
other network(s) to provide a certain functionality that is meaningful to
a user community.
VOIP
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a protocol optimized for the transmission
of voice through the Internet or other packet switched networks. VoIP is
often used abstractly to refer to the actual transmission of voice (rather
than the protocol implementing it). This latter concept is also referred
to as IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband, broadband
telephony, and broadband phone. The last two are arguably incorrect because
telephone-quality voice communications are, by definition, narrowband.
VoIP providers may be viewed as commercial realizations of the experimental
Network Voice Protocol (1973) invented for the ARPANET providers. Some cost
savings are due to utilizing a single network to carry voice and data, especially
where users have underused network capacity that can carry VoIP at no additional
cost. VoIP to VoIP phone calls are sometimes free, while VoIP calls connecting
to public switched telephone networks (VoIP-to-PSTN), may have a cost that
is borne by the VoIP user.
Voice-over-IP systems carry telephony signals as digital audio, typically
reduced in data rate using speech data compression techniques, encapsulated
in a data packet stream over IP.
There are two types of PSTN-to-VoIP services: Direct inward dialing (DID)
and access numbers. DID will connect a caller directly to the VoIP user,
while access numbers require the caller to provide an extension number for
the called VoIP user.