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Support  > Policies  > Other  > CIR 

CIR - don't be tricked by 'apples & oranges'
When comparing OpenAccess products to most other products, you will want to refer to the 'burstable speed' on the OpenAccess product.

Committed Information Rate is when a circuit is configured to have both a 'bare minimum' (the CIR) and 'burstable' speeds. For nearly all of our competitors in the marketplace, their answer to CIR is 'not available'.  Either they do not have it, they can not do it, or they will be charging you prices in excess of $1,000 a month right out the gate.

Traditionally, CIR has been used on Frame Relay circuits, but is also applicable to modern infrastructure and in reality is a necessity for any business that relies on the Internet.

OpenAccess has designed its network to both provide CIR and QoS to customer circuits as needed and maintains a pro-active stance on capacity planning.

For instance, a typical small office using the basic OpenAccess multitenant product will have a CIR of 2mbps and a burstable port speed of 10mbps. What this means, is that generally speaking this customer will see speeds approaching 10mbps on a regular basis, however if there is an unexpected event (equipment failure, extreme network congestion/utilization), the customer's speeds could drop as low as 2mbps, but will never drop below 2mbps.

This is in 100% contrast to most other broadband services out there, particular cable modem, where they tell you are getting a certain speed, but that speed is just the burstable speed, and if your neighbors all decide to use the Internet heavily at the same time, your Internet could be crawling so slow as to be nearly unusable.




Frequently Asked Questions

I have a 2mbps/10mbps CIR/Burstable connection, isn't 2mbps pretty slow nowadays?
A.   Yes, absolutely, a 2mbps connection is darn slow. However, there are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Generally speaking, your connection will never 'bottom out' at that 2mbps CIR. OpenAccess capacity plans and continually upgrades its network to try and make sure all our customers are running at or near their burstable connection speeds at all times.
  • If something happens like a fiber cut, router failure, or other unpredictable event, the CIR is there to ensure to the best of our ability that all customers are still up and running with some kind of basic/usable connectivity. This is especially important as more and more customers use VOIP for their telephone service.
  • Finally, to the best of our knowledge (as of 2007.07.15) none of our competitors even offers a CIR, so when you say for instance that a 2mbps CIR from OpenAccess is 'slow', keep in mind that other options have a CIR of -0-.
 
Whats New?
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2010.11.01 Digital telephone & PBX services expanded
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2010.10.21 IPv6 Transition
OpenAccess will be having a mid range time line for adoption and implementation of IPv6.  As most people know who are reading this, there is a certain 'chicken & egg' problem with IPv6 in as much for any organization to move to IPv6 requires that other organizations have moved to IPv6.
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2010.07.15 NAS.COM wholesale VPS and WebHosting services
This fall, OpenAccess will be re-purposing the 'nas.com' domain name to provide VPS and WebHosting services, primarily wholesale to web developers. If you have an e-mail address @nas.com, or a personal website located at http://www.nas.com/~yourusername, those services will continue be supported although we will not be accepting new accounts.
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2010.02.22 Joomla auto install wizard now available.
Due to popular request, we now have a Joomla auto-installer available on our newer cPanel® servers.  This allows customers to quickly and easily install Joomla on their website.  The auto-installer is available under the 'site software' section in the administrative interface of your webhosting account.
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2009.10.25 OpenAccess begins internal testing for Windows 2008 Server hosting solutions.
OpenAccess is happy to finally be able to announce that we are beginning internal testing of cPanelŽ/Enkompass as a platform for our customers to be able to deliver Windows(c) 2008 Server solutions on.
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2007.09.26 Changes in paper billing system.
Effective January 1st 2008 we will be doing what most of our competitors have been doing for years and adding a $1.00 surcharge for paper invoices.
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2007.05.30 New web servers in production.
In May we got two new web servers in production. These machines are based out of our facilities in Seattle and were needed as we have about hit capacity on our existing webhosting infrastructure.
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2007.03.15 Additional nationwide and global network capacity added.
OpenAccess is glad to announce that we have put into production a new circuit providing us with direct Tier-1 nationwide and global Internet transport.
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2007.01.17 Verizon DSL speed upgrades complete
Today we did the work to convert all NAS.COM customers over to our faster connection into Verizon. Everybody should be seeing performance increases.
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e-mail: info@openaccess.org

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