Among the many opportunities for locating your business, one group of buildings is special. These are the lit buildings, otherwise known as fiber lit buildings. Find one of these and your bandwidth woes will be over.
Lit Building DefinitionWhat is a lit building? In this case, it’s not a building with all the lights turned on. The lit building meaning is that this particular facility is already “lit” for fiber optic Internet and, likely, point to point bandwidth service. The light this is referring to is the laser beam that shines down the glass fibers to transport digital signals at high speeds.
What’s So Great About Fiber Lit Buildings?
Pretty much every business today, from the smallest hamburger stand to the largest multinational corporation has a need to communicate electronically. Do you or any of your employees ever use a computer? Obviously, you have a need for connectivity. Even the smallest retail businesses have to process credit cards and likely need to place Internet orders, send and receive emails. and perhaps run a website. If you are not online, you are probably not in business.
Seems obvious, until you move into a new facility and find out there is no Internet in the place. If it’s a stand alone building or you are the first tenant in a strip center, office building or warehouse, you’ll be the one who has to order service and have it installed. It’s then that you find out that there are construction costs involved in bringing in the cabling and having the termination equipment set up and working with the provider. That’s all before you can plug-in your network.
Lit buildings take most of that grief away because the expensive and time consuming construction work has already been done. All you need to do is contract with the carrier who has lit the building to add an account for your business. Then just plug in your router to the termination point they give you and… Voila! … you are up and running.
What Services Are Available in Lit Buildings?
The advantage that fiber optic connections have over traditional landlines and even cable is that they can support nearly infinite bandwidth. Oh, there are technical limits to how many Gigabits or Terabits per second you can cram through a fiber strand, but they are pretty hard to breach. The modulation and multiplexing techniques are getting more sophisticated every day, leading to new upper limits on bandwidth through even a single fiber strand. A 10 Gbps service is no challenge. Now 100 Gbps is getting easy to come by. If that’s not enough to support an industrial park or office campus, fiber cables can bundle 100 or more individual strands that each operate independently.
The range of services available spans pretty much everything you can ask for. Most popular is Ethernet over Fiber, which is directly compatible in nearly all LANs. Bandwidth is easily scalable from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and beyond. Many carriers are now giving users portal access so they can adjust service bandwidth at will. Traditional SONET services like OC3 to OC48 may also be available. These can even be demultiplexed to provide traditional T1 line or ISDN PRI phone service. SIP trunking for VoIP and direct cloud connections are generally a standard offering.
Why NOT Go With Fiber?
Fiber is a truly transparent bandwidth transport in the literal sense of the word. It’s future proof and easily scales to meet your needs as your business grows. The only hangup may be that fiber is often not the least expensive solution for very small businesses and tight budgets. For that, the service of choice is business cable broadband. As long as the cable passes your location, you can probably get hooked up with 1000 Mbps of asymmetrical shared bandwidth at a bargain price. Many times there isn’t even a construction fee. Also, availability of cable is completely unrelated to whether the building is already lit for fiber.
Are you considering a move? Before signing a lease, make sure your bandwidth needs will be met now and for as long as you’ll stay there. Check for lit building fiber optic services and cable broadband availability now, to be sure.
