Dedicated Connections Offered by Cape.Com

In today's fast-paced business world, speed and efficiency can make the difference between staying afloat or sinking. Give your business the power it needs to keep its competitive advantage with high-speed dedicated connections from Cape.Com.

We provide a number of different high-speed methods of connecting to the Internet. The particular type of connection you choose depends on how you plan on using the Net and, in particular, what your bandwidth (speed and capacity) requirements are.

If you already know what type of dedicated service you need, please contact us for pricing and further details at networking@cape.com or by phone at (508) 539-9500.

At the present time, Cape.Com provides several types of dedicated connections, in order of increasing speed and reliability:

• Dedicated Dialup modem connection at speeds up to 56Kbits Asynchronous
• 56K Frame Relay for a 56Kbit Synchronous connection
• ISDN, either a 64Kbit or 128Kbit Synchronous connection
• DSL, up to 1.5Mb
• T1 connectivity for up to 1.5Mbit of bandwidth

These connections are either 'switched' or 'permanent'. A switched connection requires that your equipment dial Cape.Com and negotiate an Internet connection. A permanent connection is a digital telephone line that's always connected to the network. Dedicated (aka "permanent") Dialup and ISDN are switched services. 56K Frame Relay, DSL, T1's are permanent connections.

Cape.Com is extremely competitive on the pricing of dedicated connections. Most often, we are lower than the larger carriers and offer much more responsive customer support. Pricing varies according to service level desired. Please contact Cape.Com for a committed quote for a specific dedicated service.

All of our dedicated connections provide a means of getting Internet data to all of the appropriate systems at your site. Cape.Com will provide you with a block of 'IP' numbers to meet your current and anticipated needs. An IP number is required for each workstation or server that is connected to your internal network which will be used for communicating on the Internet.

Dedicated Permanent Dialup

A dedicated dialup connection provides you with a phone line and modem at Cape.Com which is exclusively available for your use 24 hours/day. If you have a business account with Verizon and, therefore, are subject to telephone toll charges, Cape.Com can provide a dedicated phone line to your business which is not metered; a Centrex extension line from our Mashpee office. This phone line is only available for Internet use. The dialup connection provides you with a 56K, V.90 connection. A technique known as multilinkPPP is available to join 2 or 3, V.90 connections to form a single link with up to 150K of bandwidth. Although this connection can be used 24 hours a day, it is still a 'switched' circuit.

Dedicated Dialup (permanent dial-up) is available for $40/mo. on one workstation or server. A simultaneous connection (simul) to this server is an additional $30/month.

Hardware:

• Customer purchases router/modem from Cape.Com. Cape.Com will configure this equipment. Customer can also choose to supply their own equipment.

56K Frame Relay

This is a permanent, full time, connection to the Internet. A synchronous serial connection, 56K Frame Relay provides roughly twice the bandwidth that you would expect from a dialup modem connection. We've found these connections to be highly reliable and consider this the premier choice for a permanent, reliable Internet connection.

A 56K Frame Relay starts as low as $125/mo. (does not include telephone company charges.)

Hardware:

• Customer purchases router and CSU/DSU (a piece of equipment which connects the router to the Verizon line) from Cape.Com. Cape.Com will configure this equipment. Customer can also choose to supply their own equipment.

ISDN

ISDN is a switched digital service provided by the local telephone company. An ISDN line has two 'data channels', each providing 64Kbits of bandwidth. Depending on your bandwidth requirements, you can purchase either 64Kbits or 128Kbits of ISDN bandwidth. Verizon has a flat-rate, non-metered ISDN business service called Virtual Office ISDN. Coupled with an appropriate Cape.Com dialup plan, ISDN is a cost effective, high-speed solution to connect your business network to the Internet. ISDN service is not available in all areas. Contact Verizon for line order and pricing information.

Cape.Com ISDN dialup services start as low as $23/mo. for 75 hours of 2-channel ISDN dialup (does not include telephone company charges.)

Hardware:

• Customer purchases router/modem from Cape.Com. Cape.Com will configure this equipment. Customer can also choose to supply their own equipment.

DSL

DSL is a relatively low-cost connection that provides high speed, always on, connectivity over your existing telephone line. It does not interfere with existing voice or fax service and provides an appealing alternative for residential and small business use. Download speeds of up to 1.5 Mb are available.

DSL service starts as low as $49/mo. and varies according to the number of workstations and speed desired.

Hardware:

• A DSL modem or router is required at your location. These can be purchased from a number of sources, including Cape.Com. For business customers, Cape.Com stocks spares of DSL customer equipment and will make them available in the event of a failure.

T1

A T1 connection is a permanent digital leased line service. Currently, Cape.Com offers several choices of bandwidth over a T1 circuit - 384Kbit, 512Kbit, 768Kbit, or 1.5Mbit. The 512K and 768K speeds can burst to 1.5Mbit. Custom higher bandwidth plans are available at 3M, 4.5M and 6M; please inquire about rates and provisioning.

T1 charges start as low as $550/mo. Rates are determined by bandwidth desired and term contract selected (12 and 24-month terms available.)

T1 connections are considered leased line 'class' service with a responsive, 4-hour time to repair service level provided by AT&T (when problems occur beyond Cape.Com's control.) DSL, in contrast, has a 72-hour time to repair service level provided by Verizon.

Hardware:

• Customer purchases router and CSU/DSU from Cape.Com. Cape.Com will configure this equipment. Customer can also choose to supply their own equipment.

Dedicated Connection Comparison Chart

The following chart provides a quick comparison of the various types of Business class Internet connections that Cape.Com provides. For businesses with multiple offices, the connection to each office may be different, depending on the location of the office and the level of service required. For a detailed analysis of your connectivity needs, contact Cape.Com to schedule a meeting.

* Availability Codes:

• Area1 All of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
• Area2 Eastern Massachusetts, the areas included in the 508, 617, 781 and 978 area codes.

** Distance Restrictions:

• The mileage figures are maximum distances from your location to the Telephone Company Central Office. Contact Cape.Com to request a "loop qualification" to see if ISDN or DSL is available.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• If you're currently accessing the Internet over a dialup connection(s), be sure that you examine your monthly telephone bill(s) when calculating the costs/benefits of a dedicated, leased line connection. Both local and long distance, outgoing calls over business lines are charged a per minute rate of approximately $1.00/hour. If your dial-up connections are frequent and for extended periods of time, it's possible that you're paying more than the cost of a more secure, reliable, and faster, dedicated connection.
  

• The same router is used for either a dedicated dialup, 56K Frame Relay or Fractional T1 connection. This means that if you start with a low speed connection and, at a later time, decide to move up to a faster connection, the setup fees will be considerably reduced because very little of the hardware on your site will need to be changed.

Additional Services:

Enhanced Connectivity Monitoring:

• Continuous, automatic, 24-hour monitoring of your Internet connection. A short test occurs once every 10 minutes to make sure that the router at your facility is connected. If the connection goes down, a Cape.Com system administrator is immediately notified via beeper.*

• Access via a 'red phone' to Cape.Com technical personal from 8am to 10pm 7 days a week. If you call this number during non-business hours, a Cape.Com system administrator will be notified via beeper and return your call.
  
• Access to a graphical display, using your web browser, of traffic on your Internet connection. The data provided is a 5-minute average of Kbit/second traffic through the course of each day. Reports are available on a real-time basis.*

• Continuous, automatic monitoring of Network services which are running at your shop ( e.g., Mail, Web server ). If your server goes down, Cape.Com personnel will know within 15 minutes and a designated contact at your company will be notified.

• Access to our on-line accounting system. A designated administrator at your facility can log into our web-based on-line accounting system. They have the ability to add or delete Associate users, change their passwords, and change the specific services to which each Associate user may have access. These changes or additions occur immediately.

• Tech Support: Free technical support is limited to basic email and connection-related issues. Detailed support for network, hardware and/or unrelated software problems is charged at the rate of $100/hr., whether by phone or on-site.

* certain dedicated connections

Bandwidth Needs

Determining your Internet Bandwidth requirements can be challenging. If you choose too little, you get slow performance and unhappy users. If you choose too much, you are paying for unused capacity. The table below offers some general guidelines on how many full access workstations (Web/FTP/etc.) a given connection can support.

Take these numbers with a 'grain of salt'. The bandwidth depends on what the users are doing and when they are doing it. Twenty workstations asynchronously viewing Web pages (where there are many seconds of inactivity while the user reads the page) is much less of a load than 20 users simultaneously initiating an FTP transfer. A single 56K connection could easily support 500 Email only users.

Please Note: Once you've established a dedicated connection you'll want to track usage using our Bandwidth Statistics Tool. With this tool, bandwidth usage is averaged every 5 minutes and displayed in easy-to-read daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs. It's easy to use, password protected and secure; see the Related Page below for more information.

It has been Cape.Com's experience that most users dramatically overestimate their bandwidth needs. It is important to realize that the speed of your link to Cape.Com is but one factor which determines the overall throughput. The speed of Cape.Com servers/routers and the speed/congestion of our Internet link all contribute. Cape.Com buys enough computers, routers, and quality upstream bandwidth to insure that we can keep the circuits to our customers 'full'.

Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. An IP packet might travel through 15 different computers (routers) between your workstation and its eventual destination. Maybe only five of those computers/routers are under our control, the others may be congested and degrade the throughput. The server on the other end of the connection that is supplying the Web page might be overloaded or have too small a connection to the Internet.

Excluding Audio/Video applications, which require an inordinate amount of bandwidth, FTP and Web activities present the greatest load. It is a useful exercise to visit a Web page with a lot of graphics or initiate an FTP transfer over a dialup analog phone line with an external modem and watch the transmit/receive lights on the modem. If the 33.6Kbps modem was the 'gating' item, the transmit/receive lights on the modem should be constantly blinking. That's rarely the case, frequently, 'someone' upstream is limiting the throughput.

Have Questions? Need Pricing?

If you have questions concerning these or other Internet Services, please contact us at networking@cape.com or by phone at (508) 539-9500.

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