Just a few years ago, 10 Gigabit bandwidth was a basis for core transport networks. Now that speed is 100 Gbps. Even 40 Gbps is being left in the dust. Bandwidth levels at 10 Gbps are now available for both metro and long haul connections. Don’t need a full 10 GigE right now? How about fractional 10 GigE? These are bandwidths between 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps. Fractional bandwidth services are much more available with Carrier Ethernet than SONET. Ethernet is designed to be more scalable. Rather than specific standardized WAN speeds like OC-48 or OC-192, you can specify many granular bandwidths up to and including the full speed of the installed Ethernet port.
What’s available in 10 GigE connectivity? The point to point private line is typical. This is an optical bandwidth connection from your premises to somewhere else in the country or around the world. 10 Gigabit connections are useful for connecting data centers for data mirroring and high speed backup. Geographically diverse data centers are desirable to protect against natural and manmade disasters that can take out an entire area. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and toxic spills fall into that category.
The newest application for a 10 GigE connection is likely to be the most popular one soon. This is the connection between your facility and the cloud. Cloud computing services offer extremely high performance. It’s so easy to scale resources in the cloud that before long you can find yourself with Terabit processing and Megabit connections. Somehow all that data has to go back and forth between your offices and your cloud service provider.
Amazon Web Services has defined a service called AWS Direct Connect as an alternative to using the Internet for accessing their cloud services. This is a private line connection using a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps port. The sheer size of Amazon’s cloud makes it logical that they would pioneer speeds of this magnitude. Other cloud providers are hot on Amazon’s heels, though, and it won’t be long before 1 Gbps is considered entry level and 10 Gbps is the standard way to connect to your cloud provider.
What about the Internet? The Internet has limitations as your path to the cloud. Latency and jitter are unspecified and uncontrolled. Bandwidth can vary when paths become congested. Companies are finding that for high performance applications the Internet is a bit too unpredictable. The more employees you have accessing the cloud, the more you risk productivity by using an indeterminate connection.
High speed Internet connections are a must for Internet service providers, content distributors and large e-commerce sites. The Internet is the only viable way to connect to the public at large. It will be a long time before individual users expect 10 Gig downloads, but large Cable MSOs and wireless service providers need that bandwidth level to divvy up among hundreds or thousands of users.
The same limitations that make the Internet unsuitable for cloud connections also make it unsuitable for massive content transport. Video content distributors have found that the only suitable way to electronically get their content to market is to bypass the Internet and connect directly to their customers, such as Cable and satellite networks. This has spawned the CDN or Content Delivery Network. The CDN is a private network that is designed to transport content at high speed to specific destinations. There is no public traffic on the CDN even though the content is meant for public consumption at the far end.
What does this mean to businesses? If you are involved in e-commerce, video production or distribution or Internet access services, you need a high speed connection to a CDN or the Internet backbone. This is where a dedicated 10 Gigabit Ethernet line can be critical to your operation. That’s true even if it is only a last mile connection.
Are you feeling constrained by the bandwidth limitations of your current service provider? It’s time to get prices and availability for 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to your business location.
