BluegrassNet is facilitating high-capacity, extremely reliable enterprise-grade Metro Ethernet Internet connections throughout our Louisville and Lexington, KY service areas. These are connections that are offered anywhere as low as 3 Mbps through 1 Gbps.

Internet connections that are capable of this capacity and reliability are generally run over sometype of fiber based network. In the past, this was through traditional telco provisioning, such as DS-3 (also known as T-3) which is 45Mbps, or OC-3, which is 155Mbps. These telco loops, between the customer and ISP, are very reliable, yet are relatively expensive since they are based on mileage sensitive tarriffed services. Recently, the preferred transport option in our service areas is called Ethernet (which can run between 10Mbps and 100Mbps, and anywhere in between), a 10mbps Metro E connection might be provisioned via copper wiring, but most frequently it is provisioned via fiber-optic, and all levels 20mbps or higher are always fiber-based.

BluegrassNet is currently connected to four fiber carriers in the Metro Louisville and Lexington areas: Bellsouth, Telcove, Espedius, and Alltel. This is of critical importance since we can benefit from the many different buildings that these various companies have run their network to. Most of these carriers are now offering both Ethernet and Provisioned Services (DS-3 and OC-3), and being connected to these companies helps us get our customers provisioned quickly.

Without knowing much about your network and uses, we can tell you that most businesses upgrade from cable or DSL to commercial-grade transport options like T1, wireless, or Metro Ethernet for 4 reasons:

1. Capacity. Cable and DSL are asymmetrical, usually offering good downstream bandwidth but very limited upstream. Businesses hosting servers in-house or wanting to perform off-site backups demand more upstream bandwidth and just cleaner bandwidth overall.
   
   
2. Performance. Cable and DSL are half-duplex while T1 and Metro Ethernet are full duplex. Half duplex services can only send or receive at once like walkie-talkies while full duplex services can both send and receive simultaneously like telephones.
   
   
3. Quality of service. The more expensive commercial-grade options are classified as “mission critical” and offer shorter MTTR (mean time to repair) than “best effort” services like dialup, cable, or DSL
   
   
4. Scalability. Multiple T1’s can be bonded to increase bandwidth while Metro Ethernet and wireless can frequently be scaled on demand. It is possible to load balance cable and DSL to increase capacity but the effect

What are the Cost Considerations between Metro Ethernet and other options?

Your budget will probably be the deciding factor on what service you go with, but for comparison between the services here are some retail rates so you can see how they stack up:

Class of Service, Bandwidth, Approximate Cost:

Single T1, 1.5mbps x 1.5mbps, $395/month

2x bonded T1s, 3.0 mbps x 3.0 mbps, $750/month

Metro Ethernet, 10.0 mbps x 10.0 mbps, $1300/month

Metro Ethernet, 20.0 mbps x 20.0 mbps, $2500/month

Other reasons to Consider Metro Ethernet:

• Available in most areas of Kentucky and Southern Indiana
• Extremely Reliable
• Termination equipment for Metro Ethernet is significantly less expensive than OC-3 or DS-3.
• Disaster Recovery Implications and Uses: BluegrassNet has many clients who are able to justify the expense of this higher-bandwidth connection by working it in to their disaster recovery plans. With Metro Ethernet in place, it becomes much easier to place an off-site server in a colocation environment (like at our data center) and push backups off-site each night. So if it’s hard to justify the expense of the connection for Internet access alone you might consider addressing it from a Disaster Recovery perspective as well.