Wavelengths for Multi-Clouds & AI Workloads

By: John Shepler

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.

AI Is Going to Eat Your Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

We may be nearing the end of the age of person to person communications, or at least human communication dominating the use of telecom resources. The decline began when computers started using our phone lines to exchange data. It’s only accelerated since nearly all computers are now connected to the Internet at broadband speeds. Even so, much of that computer activity is in the service of people accessing websites, messaging and sending email, posting on social media, watching videos, backing up their files and doing their jobs. Not for long. Pretty soon machines will cut us out of the loop and simply talk among themselves.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
The scary thing about artificial intelligence, or AI, is how insidious it is. It’s actually been creeping in for decades, probably since the start of the computer age. There’s a lot of AI in search engines, although we may not think of it that way. Most software, in fact, has been adding analytical and decision making capability deep under the hood. You may not be specifically asked your preferences, but that doesn’t mean the program isn’t figuring things out or selecting what information to display and how.

More recently we’ve seen an explosion of “chat bots”, intelligent assistants such as Siri and Alexa, and some quirky writing and photo capabilities in ChatGPT. In fact, it’s the last one that has fueled an explosion of interest and investment in what is called Generative AI, the tech that “creates” all that new content at the push of a button.

NVIDIA can’t make big enough processors on a large enough scale to sate the demand. Data centers are expanding to host more and more servers and new centers are rapidly under construction. One big worry is where all the energy is going to come from to feed the exponentially demanding power-hungry AI processes. Some data centers are being built right next to power plants to grab and many megawatts as they can.

How Nuts is This Going to Get?
One might suspect that we’re in an AI mania combined with a speculative bubble in anticipation that artificial intelligence will render pitiful human capabilities and their jobs obsolete in the matter of a few years… or less. The computer age has certainly eliminated or greatly reduced some roles, like telephone operators and adding machine clerks (human computers), but added new ones as fast or faster. The new AI fever sees the elimination of writers, graphic artists, analysts, software coders, customer service representatives and even law clerks as imminent.

Not so fast. The chat bots I’ve dealt with are complete simpletons that can’t solve much of any real problem. The writing is tedious. The artwork is artificial at best, and inane at worst (how many extra fingers can you add to a person’s hand?). Self driving trucks? Look out when they come barreling around a curve during an ice storm.

I suspect the AI crazy has hyped up expectations far beyond what is really going to work anytime soon. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real germ of innovation underway. One example is the “Internet of Things” that is being touted as the real driver of 5G wireless. Better, faster, cheaper and smaller electronics makes it possible to add both processing and communications to any device. That can be any tool, any monitor, any control system, and most products. It is only logical that these “things” will communicate with other “things”, including computer systems, without our constant knowledge or intervention. The more of these “robots” that are deployed, the more sophisticated the software needed to keep them employed efficiently.

What to Likely Expect
Yes, technology marches on in the name of progress. We’re not going back to living in mud huts or slaving in dingy factories, and the nature of what we do at work will continue to evolve. The increase in productivity should improve our standard of living if we’re smart about it as a society. At any rate, the demands on technical infrastructure are surely going to accelerate.

You can expect more devices on every network, talking faster and demanding faster results. The “cloud” may become an “overcast.” Both fiber optic and wireless bandwidth requirements will move up another order of magnitude or more. A 100 Mbps connection may have been plenty not long ago. Now we clamor for a Gigabit line, with 10 Gbps an emerging business standard. How long before 100 Gbps is routine and 1 Tbps starts looking like a requirement? Within the data center, this could be tomorrow. For access, maybe the day after tomorrow.

How about your business? Are new tools, processes and devices straining the capability of your data center or WAN network? We can help. Get pricing and support on bandwidth and hosting for your current and future needs right now, before those needs become a crisis.







Note: This article was not generated by any AI. It was written by one human (myself) who only worries about the machines scraping the Internet and regurgitating copyrighted material far and wide without any thought of compensation to the author, a real and present danger.

The Lure of Fiber Lit Buildings

By: John Shepler

The mantra of real estate is “location, location, location.” That mantra is being joined by a new mantra for business, “fiber, fiber, fiber.” Everybody wants it and, sooner than you think, everybody will have it. The only question is: “Will they get it in your building or the one next door?”

What’s So Special About Fiber?
Fiber optic telecommunication lines used to be a niche service for special applications. You’d find them at Internet Service Providers, Fortune 500 companies, scientific labs, video production companies and the like. Only the most technically demanding and well funded operations got fiber. They might even choose to locate closer to where fiber POPs (Points of Presence) were already in-place to minimize construction costs.

This may still be true if you require enormous amounts of bandwidth for your data center or minimal latency for processes like high speed trading. In those cases, the best solution might be to pack up your gear and move it to a “carrier hotel” or “colocation center.” Even when you do that, however, you still have the problem of how to connect your offices to the data center. Yesterday, a few T1 or DS3 lines might have provided this connection. More and more, though, only fiber will do the job now.


Call It a Utility
We’re rapidly approaching the time where fiber optic bandwidth will be on the same level as electricity, water, sewer and gas. Companies just won’t consider locations that don’t provide these basics.

Here’s why. Today’s business operations have become highly automated. Paper documents are disappearing as fast as they can be shredded. Typewriter? What’s that? Everybody has a PC on their desk, a smartphone in their pocket, and probably a tablet to carry around in lieu of a yellow legal pad. Productivity is the name of the game, and that means data moves through the organization in bytes, not printed characters.

The demand for fiber has been pushed to critical proportions by the mass exodus from local data centers to cloud service providers. That means that all that data that used to flow on high speed copper and fiber lines to the data center down the hall now has to go cross-country to get to the new data center in the cloud. This requires much higher MAN and WAN bandwidths, but also low latency to enable interactive business applications and real-time services such as VoIP telephony and video conferencing.

How Much Bandwidth is Enough?
Entry level bandwidths for smaller companies and independent professional offices is now about 10 to 30 Mbps, up from a few Mbps a decade ago. Most medium size companies can make good use of 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet today and will soon need 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. In fact, Gigabit Internet access is becoming the new ISP standard for both businesses and consumers. Those large and unique applications? They require 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps services.

Fortunately, fiber handles these bandwidths with ease. Copper telecom lines drop off rapidly above 10 Mbps, even with the new Ethernet over Copper transmission technology. If you want 50 or 100 Mbps, you better be located very near to the telco office. The exception is cable broadband, which can go as high as a Gigabit (1 Gbps). The actual cable is only used for the premises connection. The rest of the network is fiber.

Fiber Bandwidth Options
The two major competing technologies for business fiber are SONET and Ethernet over Fiber. SONET is the older, more established, technology developed by the phone companies. Ethernet over Fiber is rapidly replacing SONET because it is more easily scalable and less expensive.

Scalability is important because you never really know how much bandwidth you are eventually going to need. You may start out at 10 Mbps and quickly find you need to up that to 50 or 100 Mbps. Later, you’ll want to take that up to 500 or 1,000 Mbps. Ethernet over Fiber allows you to start off paying for just what you need and then increasing the bandwidth level as needed. No equipment changes are needed as long as you have a port that can handle the highest bandwidth you require.

Getting a Fiber Lit Building
“Lighting” is the term used to describe having fiber installed and turned-up or “lit” by one or more laser sources. Once you have lit fiber in the building, it is generally easy to get all the bandwidth you need. Fiber, itself, has nearly unlimited capacity and can serve many users in the same building.

Competitive carriers are now at a fever pitch to find suitable buildings that are un-lit and get their facilities installed before someone else. Generally, a building is lit by only one competitor, who is there for the long term. All tenants contract with the carrier for the service they desire.

If you are a building owner, it is highly desirable to offer fiber optic bandwidth service as one of the utilities. You’ll need to have the suites wired (with fiber) that connects with the telecom room. Then each tenant can order what they need and pay the bill, just like with other utilities. Some building owners have found it advantageous to order very high bandwidth service themselves and then portion it out to the tenants at a profit. In effect, the building owner becomes the service provider.

Are you a building owner or tenant looking for fiber optic bandwidth service? You can find out quickly and easily if your building or one nearby is already lit with fiber. If not, it may well be worth your while to get your facility lit or work with a carrier as a group to get fiber service installed.



Note: Products with the theme "White Light Burst Blue Skyscraper" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

Big Data Makes Big Push For 100 Gigabit Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Just a few years ago the notion that businesses and government agencies needed 100 Gbps WAN bandwidth seemed absurd. Why, the provider’s core networks ran mostly at 10 Gbps, with some moving to 40 Gbps to handle high traffic levels from many simultaneous customers. Today, those same customers are expecting their service providers to give them the option of 40 Gbps and even 100 Gbps connectivity.

What could be causing this massive increase in bandwidth requirements? Two words: Big data. Big Data offers big opportunities to enhance business processes and mine databases, but it consumes big processing, big storage and big bandwidth. Big storage and big processing have been the focus of cloud computing providers as well as data center expansions. Big bandwidth is now the last piece of the puzzle to be put in place to create an integrated solution.

Where is all this bandwidth going? Some of it goes to interconnecting multiple business locations. Other connections go to remote data centers for disaster backup and recovery. Some is needed to communicate with customers and suppliers. In the case of content producers, large amounts of bandwidth are needed to transport that content to the local service providers, like cable companies, or directly to the end user. The latest wrinkle is the rapid rise of cloud computing solutions. Putting those cloud resources to best use is proving to require massive increases in bandwidth.

The reason that cloud computing needs big bandwidth is that most of the traffic that used to be carried on the LAN now needs to be carried through the WAN. The enterprise data center with all its processors and disk drives is generally located in proximity to the users so that the organization can have control of the network connections. This has the dual benefit of minimizing costs because there are no traffic fees and increasing security because the entire network is under local control.

The cloud changes this equation. Processing and storage is moved to a remote data center and most of the local data center facilities go dark. The local network still connects all of the PCs, printers, SIP telephones, switches, routers and other devices. Some servers may still stay local. But the big data processing is done elsewhere where there are enough compute resources to crunch all that big data into more bite size pieces. The issue is how to get all that data to and from the cloud.

What happens when you skimp on WAN bandwidth? The cloud keeps running at full speed, but its inputs and outputs slow to a crawl. Think of a WAN connection as a pipe, as it is sometimes called, and you can visualize how too small of a pipe keeps the flow (of data) at a trickle. The local experience is that the system isn’t very responsive and interactions can become unpredictable. There can be big congestion delays where nothing happens on the screen for long periods of time. What’s worse, you don’t know if you’ll have a result in half a second, half a minute or who knows how long? That’s a productivity killer if there ever was one.

People to cloud communications is critical for high employee productivity, but machine to machine communications can be more important. It’s the machines that generate data at a rate humans can’t possibly equal. Those machines might be data banks, sensors, machine tools, video cameras & displays, server farms and so on. What’s important is that they are not constrained by the capacity of the communication channel.

tw telecom is one of the latest carriers to announce that it has introduced 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps business Ethernet services in the 75 metro markets that it serves. These services are in addition to the 2.5 and 10 Gbps bandwidth options that have been in place for some time. Traditional fiber optic technology offers up to 10 Gbps on a single fiber strand or one of several wavelengths that share that strand. Bonding multiple wavelengths using DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) increases that carrying capacity up to 40 or 100 Gbps with a single connection to the user.

Who needs 100 Gbps bandwidth? Right now it’s only the largest corporations, financial institution, research labs or government agencies. But how long ago was it that DS3 at 45 Mbps was considered big bandwidth and OC-3 entry level fiber at 155 Mbps was plenty for most enterprises? Today 100 Gbps is on the cutting edge of technology. Tomorrow that level might be considered par for the course or even entry level for many businesses.

Would your organization’s productivity benefit from a bandwidth increase? You may not need anywhere near 100 Gbps, but you should know that fiber options from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps are readily available and more affordable that you imaging. Get fiber optic bandwidth options available for your business locations.

Comcast’s 100 Gbps Core Network Supports Business

Major telecom carriers have been in the process of upgrading their core networks from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps over the last year. Comcast is the latest to make the move, fitting Ciena’s Wave Logic 3 interfaces to their current Ciena 6500 packet optical platforms. Why would a cable company do this and how can it benefit your business?

Comcast is best known as a Cable TV company or MSO (Multi-System Operator). They serve over 20 million residential and commercial customers in 40 states and the District of Columbia with video television, high speed Internet and telephone services. You may already know that Comcast broadband service is highly popular for home, home office and small business use. It comes in on a coaxial cable and is highly affordable. But did you also know that Comcast operates one of the largest fiber optic networks in the United States behind the scenes?

Many people think that cable companies still connect everything from their head-end towers and satellite dishes to locations around town using various size coax. That was true in the early days of analog TV cable systems and master antennas for large apartment buildings. The technology has long since moved on. Now everything is digital and the signals ride fiber optic cables most of the distance to your location. It’s that connection from the curb to your building that is still RG-6 coaxial copper wire.

Why? Because it works just fine and the cost of installation has already been paid. DOCSIS 3.0 modems offer broadband Internet in excess of 100 Mbps. That’s is well within the needs of most users. What’s really important to residential, home office and very small business users is low monthly cost combined with adequate performance. The shared asymmetrical bandwidth (higher download than upload speeds) and “best effort” performance is more than adequate for accessing the Internet and downloading documents, pictures and video.

Where HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) services run out of gas is when the need for bandwidth is high, dedicated low latency service is needed, symmetrical upload and download speeds are required, and an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is desired. These characteristics are common for traditional telecom services such as T1, DS3 and SONET fiber and the newer Ethernet services such as FastE at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps and 10 GigE at 10 Gbps.

What isn’t as well known is that Comcast operates an enterprise grade fiber optic core network to interconnect their many offices and provide high bandwidth connectivity to businesses. Would you be surprised to learn that Comcast operates a network that covers 147,000 fiber route miles? How about that business class services are available from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps? Their business class services include dedicated Internet access, point to point Ethernet private lines, Ethernet LAN service to interconnect multiple business locations and converged layer 2 centric VPLS to support voice, video and data.

Comcast, like other major fiber optic carriers, recognizes the increasing demand for higher and higher bandwidth services. What’s driving these speed increases is more use of HD video, big data files and a rapid move to cloud computing services. The cloud, especially, present new challenges for businesses used to having all their processing in-house and connected over the corporate LAN. Cloud service providers offer the opportunity to rapidly scale resources up and down, pay only for what you use during the month, and avoid both capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs. The tradeoff is that you now need much higher and very reliable bandwidth to connect your employees to the cloud.

Comcast’s upgrade to 100 Gbps fiber optic bandwidth meets today’s perhaps tomorrow’s needs for their own use and in support of small, medium and large companies. When even this massive capability fills up, the Ciena system they’ve chosen has an upgrade path to 400 Gbps. It’s likely that we’ll see even higher speeds at 1 Tbps and beyond sooner than anyone expects.

Are you running short on bandwidth and wondering how much you can afford as an upgrade? Get multiple competitive fiber optic service quotes for Comcast Business and other high performance fiber optic carriers now. It’s likely that you can turn up your WAN bandwidth at little or no increase over your current monthly least cost.

Next Stop 100 Gbps WAN Bandwidth

Big data, cloud computing and HD video are pushing the limits of what we once considered high bandwidth private line and MPLS network connections. Gigabit Ethernet is now popular with companies that have high bandwidth demands. Some firms are moving to 10 GigE, as 1000 Mbps is no longer adequate. If 10 Gigabits per second is also a limiting factor for your business, the time has come to consider 100 Gbps bandwidth.

Most of the larger fiber optic carriers have been busy upgrading their core networks to 100 Gbps. They need this kind of backbone bandwidth to avoid having to install new fiber to meet demand. Few, however, have offered this capacity to their customers.

Zayo is changing the game. They are now offering 100 Gbps as a wavelength service between major cities. The 100 Gbps connections are located in key traffic aggregation points and IP nodes throughout the U.S. This makes the service especially attractive to content producers and large ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who have inherently high bandwidth demands.

Why choose wavelength service versus SONET or Ethernet transport? High bandwidth options is one reason. Another is the ability to specify protocols and security measures. Leasing a wavelength is the next best thing to leasing an entire fiber strand or deploying your own fiber optic cabling. Unless you are in the business of operating a regional or national fiber optic network, the cost of creating all this infrastructure is prohibitive. However, leasing a wavelength may well be within reason.

Wavelength services are created by a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. The idea is that each fiber strand can support much higher bandwidths if fed by multiple lasers instead of just one. Each laser is tuned to operate on a particular frequency or wavelength according to a standard international grid plan. The wavelengths all shine through the fiber simultaneously, but they do not interact. You can think of each wavelength as a separate fiber for most purposes.

How much bandwidth can a wavelength carry? By using simple on-off keying of the beam, a wavelength can transport up to 10 Gbps. For 100 Gbps you would have to combine or aggregate multiple beams or use a more advanced modulation scheme such as CP-DQPSK (Coherent Polarization-Multiplex Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Key) to transmit multiple bits per symbol. With a plug-in card such as the CIsco CRS 1-Port 100 Gigabit Ethernet Coherent DWDM Interface Module, a single wavelength can now transport 100 Gbps. There is standards work underway to extend that to 400 Gbps and eventually 1 Tbps.

Zayo offers wavelength services at 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps, 40 Gbps or 100 Gbps. Diversity and sub-50 msec protection switching is available to improve reliability to carrier standards.you can order single or multiple waves as needed to support your applications. Zayo has the ability to scale bandwidth capacity along their routes to 8 Tbps when such a need arises.

Companies interested in high bandwidth wavelength services are also often interested in low latency. Zayo offers low latency routs with up to 100 Gbps of bandwidth between Seattle, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia to key data centers and financial and enterprise locations. Their low latency routes also include a hop to London as well.

Zayo will continue to deploy their 100G wavelength service across major markets for through the first half of 2013. Their entire network includes 67,000 route miles serving 45 states and Washington D.C. with 10,530 on-net buildings that include 535 data centers, 515 carrier PoPs (points of presence) and 2,743 cell towers. They also offer colocation facilities with over 141,000 square feet under management.

Does your company need higher levels of bandwidth to maintain or improve productivity or support demanding applications? If so, there are fiber optic service options available for 100 Mbps up to 100 Gbps at attractive prices. Competitive quotes are available at no charge.

Ciena Takes New Bandwidth Technologies On The Road

If you happen to be near Waltham, MA today, June 29, you have an opportunity to see the latest in carrier bandwidth technology right at your doorstep. Simply step into the Ciena Innovation Lab and check out the demos of their optical, Ethernet and software solutions. Next stop is White Marsh, MD on July 15.

What’s the Ciena Innovation Lab? It’s a semi trailer chock full of the newest telecom and networking developments. Here, take a look:



If you are involved with Gigabit and Terabit bandwidth applications, you are familiar with Ciena... or should be. Certainly, fiber optic service providers keep a keen eye on developments from the Ciena labs. But now major corporations, content providers and large medical organizations need to familiarize themselves with packet-optical transport and switching systems. Today, you may be just broaching the idea of installing Gigabit Ethernet service. Tomorrow, you may well be ordering dark fiber for your own private point to point networks.

Ciena now has platforms that make deploying 40G and 100G fiber optic connections as easy as 10G. They are ready to support carrier Ethernet services, including high speed access, backhaul and aggregation. Their software suites make it easier for you to manage optical networks, Ethernet services and other high bandwidth networks services.

Is your company ready to move up to gigabit and higher levels of service? If so, you’ll benefit from a discussion with our Telarus bandwidth brokerage consultants. No charge for this service, of course. Take just a minute or so and describe your bandwidth needs in an easy online inquiry.

Qwest Brings 100 Gbps to Your Business

Qwest is upping the ante on bandwidth with an upgrade to its long haul network from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps. The build-out has already begun and will continue through next year.

So, what does this mean for your business? Qwest offered some perspectives on how fast point to point network traffic is at 100 Gbps. You know how long it takes to download a 4.7 Gigabyte DVD. At 100 Gbps, you can download 138 of them in 60 seconds. A 2 hour HD movie or presentation will transfer in 9 seconds flat. You can backup a fully loaded 500 Gigabyte hard drive in 46 seconds. For hospitals, medical centers and physicians offices, 100 Gbps will transfer 90 digital mammograms per second.

There actually are applications that could really benefit from this massive WAN bandwidth today. Movie and video production studios generate enormous databases for their projects. It’s a deluge of data that can clog up the kind of connection that works well for most businesses. With engineering and manufacturing now so distributed, it may make sense for large aerospace companies to have 100 Gbps bandwidth available. Someday even smaller architectural and design firms might not consider this level unreasonable, as prices come down.

Prices have already come down dramatically for WAN bandwidth. T1 lines cost half what they did a few years ago. Ethernet pricing has plunged even more dramatically. You might not have been able to get Metro Ethernet a few years ago. Now it’s readily available and at prices per Mbps that make it even cheaper than T1.

Your bandwidth options have also increased. Standard T1 line speeds of 1.5 Mbps are now considered entry level. Ethernet services scale easily from 1 to 10 Mbps over copper or fiber, and up to 100 Mbps or even 1 Gbps over fiber. While 100 Gbps service isn’t readily available quite yet, you can get 10 Gbps to your door.

Qwest has some ambitious goals for its network upgrade. It now serves 145 markets across the US and expects to add more. They’re installing new Alcatel-Lucent routers and switches out to the network edges. Fewer regeneration sites will be needed, reducing power demands. The overall upgrade is expected to enhance network protection and reduce latency as well.

Is there really a need for all this bandwidth? According to Qwest, Internet traffic is doubling about every 19 months. Individual Internet users are consuming 43 percent more bandwidth each year. That’s right, 43 percent more every year.

With the demands of downloadable and streaming video, electronic medical records, engineering design and simulation, and other high bandwidth applications, keeping ahead of bandwidth demands is a challenge for carriers. No only are they meeting the bandwidth need, but the latest IP based network designs are offering users new services such as Ethernet WAN and bandwidth pricing per Mbps that is better than ever.

Juniper Has Routers For The 100 Gbps WAN

In the ever expanding need for speed, Verizon and Juniper are up to something big. It's 100 Gbps fiber optic connections.

Carriers have been dabbling with 100 Gbps transmission for some time now. It's an order of magnitude above the standard 10 Gbps pipes that are common on long haul networks. There are also 40 Gbps transport systems in use. Now it looks like 100 Gbps is getting ready for deployment. Juniper's contribution is an interface that will handle this bandwidth directly. Currently, carriers have to aggregate multiple links to achieve that speed. Verizon has demonstrated a 111-Gbps channel over 1,040 km.

So, what's all this bandwidth going to be used for? You can pretty much bet it isn't desperately required for telephone calls, email or casual Web browsing. The bandwidth crunch that's upon us is all about video.

If you've ever had the pleasure of editing and exporting movies or other video, you know the feeling of shock and horror that you felt when you first realized that moving and manipulating video files takes minutes and maybe hours, not seconds. I got a taste of it this weekend when I found that the 10 minute movies my digital camera took so easily require long rendering times when you try to do anything with the raw files. For those of us used to working with Web pages, still photos, text and code, the amount of disk space and bandwidth even simple video files can chew up is absolutely astounding.

Now, consider that the entire world is moving not just to video everything but to HD video everything, and you can understand why the telecom carriers and Internet Service Providers tremble at the thought of the Internet going from HTML to HDTV. It's not just an incremental increase in traffic. It's a large and generally unplanned step change.

It's not just Cable broadband and DSL providers that are inundated with video traffic. Wireless carriers are getting their share as the new 3G touchscreen smartphones are bought in significant numbers. Video clips from YouTube just whet the appetite. Now with Slingbox capability on the iPhone as well as laptop computers, people expect to access their satellite receivers and DVRs from anywhere they happen to be. The transition of broadcast TV from analog to digital is truly the tip of the iceberg. The lion's share that's represented by the underwater part of the berg is IP video destined for wireline and wireless broadband transmission.

Little wonder that both WiMAX and LTE networks are going ahead, recession or no recession. Little wonder, too, that Juniper's 100 Gbps is being heralded as not just the solution to today's bandwidth demands, but a stepping stone to Terabit transport channels. Could they be more than a few years away?