Are your connectivity demands so stringent that even Gigabit and 10GigE fiber optic lines are inadequate? Rather that simply adding additional point to point or Internet connections, you should seriously consider moving up to wavelength services.
What is a Wavelength?Unlike traditional copper MAN and WAN circuits that directly carry electrical signals, fiber optics first converts those pulses to bursts of laser light that travel down glass fibers to a termination where they are reconverted back to electrical signals.
A fiber circuit can use a single laster at a particular frequency or color. Multiple lasers can also use the same fiber at the same time as long as they are running at different frequencies or colors. Another designation for the frequency is in terms of wavelength of the color.
These aren’t colors you can see. They are in the infrared spectrum. A device called a dense wavelength division multiplexer (DWDM) does the conversion, assigns signals to particular wavelengths, and creates the composite laser beam that feeds the fiber. There may be dozens to hundreds of wavelengths on each fiber strand.
Advantages of Wavelength Services
Think of a wavelength as your own private path from one point to another. There may be other signals on other wavelengths on the same fiber, but they have no access to your particular wavelength. This naturally increases the security of your transmission. If you need even more security the data can be encrypted prior to transmission and decrypted at the far end.
Wavelengths are a Layer 1 service. That is, they run at the physical level. There are no routers or switches in the path. The wavelength simply goes from one point to another unimpeded. Over very long distances, optical amplification may be used to keep the beam intense, but it stays optical. A big advantage of wavelengths compared to other transmission systems is that latency is very, very low. It’s really determined by the speed of light over the path distance.
Wavelengths are protocol independent. The beam doesn’t care about the format of the data and you are not dealing with switches or routers in the path. Your protocol is determined by the equipment you have at each end.
Wavelength service speeds have increased from the early days of multiplexing so you can typically achieve 10 Gbps, 100 Gbps, 400 Gbps per channel. Future improvements will include 800 Gbps and 1.4 Tbps.
Wavelengths also tend to be highly reliable, as there is less equipment in the path from end to end. Service Level Agreements to 5-nines or 99.999% up-time are available.
Applications That Benefit From Wavelengths
Bandwidths that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago are now simply not enough. One reason is the mass migration from local data centers to the cloud. Larger companies now use multi-clouds to handle their workload. Any shortage of bandwidth or congestion on the line slow performance and productivity.
Wavelengths are great for cloud on-ramps or direct cloud connections. They offer the speed, security, dedicated access, reliability and low latency needed to make the cloud act like it is right next door. Wavelengths can also be used as dedicated on-ramps to the Internet, completely bypassing the “first mile” congestion common with other Internet access.
Data center interconnects can benefit from wavelength services to synchronize databases, perform backups and replicate data in real time. Likewise, wavelengths are high performance dedicated lines between company locations in the metro area or nationwide.
Artificial Intelligence workload are the latest high demand application and their needs are nearly insatiable. Wavelengths provide the bandwidth and low latency to keep up with the processing speed of AI.
Financial services particularly benefit from wavelength services ultra low latency as well as high capacity. As trading speeds increase, each millisecond of delay eliminated translates directly into dollars.
Could your enterprise benefit by moving up to wavelength services? Discover the choices and pricing available for your business locations.
