Can you believe that the US ranks behind Romania and Bulgaria when broadband Internet connections are compared side by side?  This is somewhat of a shock to me.  I understand that in Eastern Europe things came a bit later and many of the companies implementing these solution were able to use better and more current gear than in the US.  They were able to leapfrog because of their late start.  But it is still a shock to me, someone that has been selling Internet bandwidth to the business customer for years.  Eric Pfanner outlines this in an article he recently wrote called, “Broadband Speeds Surge in Many Countries”.

The problem as I see it in the United States is that we are so spread out geographically.  In many of these country to country comparisons a measure is taken across the entire land mass.  Of course a customer with an office in Denver, CO is probably going to have a larger pipe to the Internet than someone from Palestine, TX.  Not that Palestine wouldn’t be a wonderful place to own a business – it’s just west of one of the most beautiful towns in Texas – Nacogdoches.  What’s crazy is that I can get a 20 Mb Ethernet pipe to the Internet (provisioned on fiber) in Downtown Denver, Fort Collins, Greeley, and Colorado Springs at this point in time.  Many of the towns and cities in between these major metro areas are somewhat out of luck.  At that point we need to look for Ethernet delivered on copper for a large pipe to the Internet.  Integra just threw their hat in the ring and started offering this as a product set.  Going with an Ethernet offering greatly reduces the cost on the equipment end so it ends up being very attractive to our friends that manage the equipment for our businesses.

If all else fails on the Ethernet front then a customer can begin looking at bonding multiple T-1s for a large connection (1 T = 1.54 Mb, 2 T’s = 3.0 Mb, 3 T’s = 4.5 Mb, etc….).  Most of the carriers offer this as an option in either a DIA (dedicated Internet Access) option or can deliver it with their VoIP offering which would provide both voice and data delivered over the same T-1 facility. 

VoIP T-1′s are becoming the first solution for many over going with a line + DSL option, or lines + Comcast option.  Costs are finally starting to level out so that even the small business customer that wants 3-4 lines with a broadband connection can go this route.

Ted out – have a great week!