Bandwidth for Health Care Automation
T1 and DS3 services support hospitals,
medical centers and doctors offices for telemedicine, medical
records transfer, and telephony.
When it comes to automation, health care is the
new manufacturing. With health care costs escalating and a Baby
Boomer population that is only getting older and more in need
of the best our health care industry has to offer, the opportunity
for cost savings is almost a given. As health care professionals
migrate from prescription pads and paper files to PDAs and electronic
data transfer, the need for digital bandwidth is multiplying.
Best Effort Isn't Enough
While "best effort" Internet connections such as DSL
and Cable broadband are suitable for casual Internet access,
they are inappropriate for serious reliable connectivity. The
low cost of such services is not so much due to an outdated or
unreliable technology as it is due to being shared bandwidth
with no guarantees of throughput or availability. Often hundreds
or thousands of casual Internet users are multiplexed to the
same Internet connection with the assumption that only a certain
number of people will be online at once. As more users log-on,
the shared service slows down.
Reliable, Low Cost and Available T1
Lines
The basic professional WAN or Wide Area Network service is the
T1 line. It offers a guaranteed and exclusive bandwidth of 1.5
Mbps for both upload and download plus a service level guarantee.
T1 is a regulated and tariffed telecommunications service and
gets the support you would expect for a high availability connection.
A 1.5 Mbps bandwidth is generally enough to support small medical
or insurance offices or independent medical professionals. Small
clinics who do not have heavy documentation upload or medical
imaging requirements may also be serviced by a T1 line.
Another big advantage of T1 service is
that it is almost universally available. T1 was engineered to
be provisioned on two pair of copper telco cable, so if you have
conventional phone lines, you can probably get a T1 line installed.
Cost is different for every installation, being based on the
distance from your building facilities to the nearest telco office.
This is called the local loop. From the local office, a T1 signal
by be carried any distance over competitive network facilities.
Add Bandwidth Incrementally
What happens if you run out of bandwidth? T1 line service is
designed to be easily multiplied or "bonded" by combining,
2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or more T1 lines together so that they act as a
single data pipe. Bandwidths of 9 Mbps are often easily obtained
even in smaller towns or remote areas.
Hospitals and larger medical offices, especially
those heavily involved in teleradiology and centralized medical
records storage, will require higher bandwidth circuits. A T3
line or DS3 service provisioned on fiber optic cabling, delivers
45 Mbps. This is enough to support full motion video conferencing
and high bandwidth data transfers.
Larger medical operations are finding even
DS3 service too limiting for highly computerized facilities.
With fiber optic bandwidth, there is practically no limit to
the bandwidth available. Metro SONET or Gigabit Ethernet services
provide hundreds to thousands of Mbps. DWDM or Dense Wavelength
Division Multiplexing lights up dedicated fiber optic loops to
provide the Giga and even Tera bits per second needed for backup
storage and medical campus interconnections.
Get Your Best Bandwidth Solution
What
WAN bandwidth do you need and what does it cost? Let our bandwidth
specialists at Shop for T1 help you choose the optimum service
for minimizing costs today with planned growth potential for
future use. Simply fill out the form below to see instant pricing
on most services. Or call toll free 1-866-436-7868 Ref. # 1265
to talk to our technical consultants about your business needs
and receive customized proposals.
