10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Access Availability

By: John Shepler

Once considered a massive bandwidth suitable only for carriers, 10 Gbps is rapidly becoming the in-demand connectivity for businesses, municipalities, medical centers, content providers, and e-commerce. But is this bandwidth level readily available at a reasonable price? Indeed, it is.

Where is 10 Gbps Dedicated Internet Available?
Most municipalities have 10 Gig Ethernet readily available because of the rapid deployment of fiber optic infrastructure. Fiber is necessary to provide the bandwidth to support 4G LTE and 5G cell towers, replacing legacy T1 copper lines. Fiber is also at the heart of cable systems even though the connection to the cable modem is still coaxial copper. Cities are now installing fiber infrastructure as a utility to serve all homes and businesses.

Once you have fiber optic cables, getting Gigabit and 10 Gigabit broadband is a piece of cake. Each strand can transport 10 Gbps with only one channel. Those same strands can be set up to use multiple wavelengths to carry numerous Gigabit and 10 Gigabit services. A fiber cable can bundle a few to over a hundred fiber strands. Rest assured, there is plenty of 10 Gbps capacity to go around.

What 10 Gbps Options Are Available?
The universal service in demand is Dedicated Internet Access. Dedicated means that your connection to the Internet carries only your traffic. Any capacity that you aren’t using at the moment is idle and available. There is no competition with other companies sharing your line.

Dedicated Internet Access gives you the best consistency and lowest latency way to access the core of the Internet. This is important if your company has remote servers in the cloud or colocation hosting. It’s also key if you are doing business over the Internet and want your customers to have the best online experience.

There are also 10 Gbps private lines that connect point to point between your business locations or from your company to your cloud service provider. This is a step above using the Internet for access. Private lines give you the lowest latency and least congestion. Having a dedicated private line makes your servers seem like they are right down the hall even if they are on the other side of the country.

Cable broadband is now offering a shared bandwidth service that enables 10 Gbps in the download direction using DOCSIS 3.1 and will offer 10 Gbps symmetrical service with DOCSIS 4.0. By sharing Internet access with other users, you can save a significant amount of money, but with the vagaries of varying bandwidth and congestion.

How about wireless? In some metro areas, microwave wireless broadband can give you bandwidths as high as 10 Gbps with no wired connections. Service can be installed rapidly, sometimes within a matter of days or a week.

What About Pricing?
Fiber optic service prices used to be sky high, but that has changed in recent years due to intense competition among service providers and the economies of scale that come from having so many more customers using high bandwidths. If you haven’t checked 10 Gbps prices lately, you owe it to yourself to get a set of current quotes from multiple providers. Yes, there are likely several carriers that can meet your needs right now.

10 Gig E WAN Comes To The Enterprise

Amazing as it sounds, 10 Gigabit Ethernet wide area network connections are now possible for business applications. Perhaps even more surprising are the number of businesses that can actually use this level of bandwidth.

Gigabit Ethernet is just starting up the growth curve for major corporations and high technology companies who's products and services depend on creating enormous data sets and being able to deliver them instantly to their customers. What kind of companies are those?

For anyone engaged in video production or editing, Gigabit per second pipes are no extravagance. Even short video productions chew up hundreds of Megabytes in a matter of minutes. Uncompressed high definition video can do that in seconds. It matters not if you have Terabytes or Petabytes of storage available if there is no practical way to transfer those productions in any reasonable amount of time.

Medical imaging is another high demand generator of data. MRI, CT, and X-Ray images create large files for each picture and image set. As the medical profession moves more and more from physical to electronic files, the amount of data will surely multiply and then multiply again. It's now possible to have a physician in Asia read a medical image from the U.S. during what is the middle of the night for us, but standard business hours in India or China. Being able to use medical consultants worldwide depends on having rapid communications for both text and images.

Scientific research and Engineering are fields that have moved away from notebooks and analog gauges to computer-aided drawing, manufacturing and modeling. Complex projects, such as new building design, collaboration on aircraft design, and drug research increasingly use faster and faster supercomputers. The faster computers generate data that much faster. Can you really expect to use yesterday's bandwidth solutions to maintain cutting edge productivity?

It is high bandwidth applications such as these that are driving companies and organizations to faster LANs within their operations and faster WAN connections outside. With Ethernet the common denominator among network protocols, it stands to reason that Carrier Ethernet solutions are a better match than the traditional SONET fiber optic services. They are also often cheaper. Competitive carriers with regional and nationwide networks optimized for IP services such as Ethernet and MPLS, are highly efficient at delivering high bandwidths over fiber connections. Gigabit Ethernet is often a given for any lit building. But 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gig E, is now emerging as a reasonable service to install for high volume and multiple users.

Do you have a high bandwidth demand that you can't meet or feel you are paying too much for? If so, check out the availability and pricing of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections for your business location.