Enterprise and wholesale bandwidth users in Canada now have access to expanded high speed network connections throughout the country and to the United States and other international destinations. Let’s take a look at what’s happening, what it might mean and how you can get access to these services.
XO Communications is a major international telecommunications carrier based in the United States. Within the U.S., XO supports fiber connections to 4,000 on-net buildings with more than 1.6 million fiber miles in a 29,000 mile Tier 1 IP network that spans the nation. They also connect internationally to nodes in Madrid, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Toronto that feed 55 countries.Toronto is a recent addition. XO initiated service through its new hub at the 151 Front Street West carrier hotel in Toronto last October. This hub connects to Montreal and back to the U.S. XO network through a 600 mile fiber route to Albany and Buffalo, NY.
XO has now expanded its Canadian services to cover all of Canada’s six time zones with high speed fiber network services that include Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), high speed IP transit for other carriers, MPLS IP-VPN, VPLS, Ethernet, Private Line and Wavelength services for enterprises and wholesale customers. For multinational companies, MPLS IP-VPN can interconnect facilities in 60 countries. The expanded connections in the United States include New York City, Cleveland and Seattle.
Canada and the United States share the worlds longest border called the International Boundary. Cross-border business exceeds $1 billion per day & is growing at 5% a year. Communications between our two countries is vital to that commerce. Not the slow traditional line speeds, mind you. What’s in demand is 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps links. These connections support a wide variety of enterprise needs in the fields, of finance, manufacturing (especial automotive), media,& entertainment including film and television production, retail, plus energy including oil and gas production.
Today’s high productivity business requirements include high bandwidth, high capacity, low latency, packet loss & jitter, and high security. Point to point Ethernet private line services provide that kind of connectivity between two locations. Many large companies have traditionally created their own corporate long haul networks using multiple point to point private lines. A newer and more cost effective approach is to employ MPLS networks to accomplish the same results.
What do MPLS networks offer? They’re also called MPLS IP-VPN because these networks inherently provide virtual private networking by design. They easily transport IP traffic, but are not IP at their core. They use a proprietary switching and routing scheme called label switching, which is the LS in MPLS. Being privately owned and operated combined with label switching technology provides a much higher degree of security than you’d expect from the public Internet. If you feel that you still need an even higher level of security, such as for financial data, you have the option of encrypting the traffic you send to the MPLS network.
MPLS networks enjoy a substantial cost advantage over dedicated private lines because they use a common network infrastructure to serve many customers. Each customer has a committed information rate without interference from other customer’s traffic. It feels like you have the network all to yourself, but don’t have to pay for the construction and operation of a large international fiber optic network.
Do you need connectivity within Canada or cross-border between Canada and the United States? You have more options now than ever before. Find availability and pricing for Ethernet, MPLS, Wavelengths, private lines and Dedicated Internet Access from XO Communications and other major international network service providers.
Note: Map of North America courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
