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.

Dark Fiber Services to 400 Gbps

It’s clear that bandwidth demands are on the rise. Even the smallest companies are swapping out their 1.5 Mbps T1 lines for 10 Mbps Ethernet over Copper. Medium size companies are increasingly moving up to 50 or 100 Mbps connections. Large companies are climbing the Gigabit ladder higher and higher.

Usually we expect available bandwidth to top out at 5 or 10 Gbps. Sometimes carriers can support 40 Gbps on their networks while they move up to 100 Gbps themselves. Now, one competitive carrier is setting a new benchmark at 400 Gbps.

Integra Telecom is one of the country’s leading providers of fiber optic networking solutions. They own and operate a long-haul fiber network that stretches for 5,000 route miles. This is expanded by 3,000 miles of metropolitan fiber connecting more than 2,200 enterprise buildings and data centers.

This describes only the lit and operational fiber assets provided by Integra. Among their 160,000 miles of fiber assets are dark fiber pairs just waiting to be pressed into service. If your requirements go beyond the usual WAN requirements, dark fiber may be the answer to your high bandwidth needs.

What is dark fiber? It is essentially fiber optic strands in a fiber bundle that are not in use. Fiber itself is cheap compared to the cost of burying it in the ground. That’s why anyone installing fiber cables over any distance makes sure that there are many, many extra fiber strands beyond those they expect to use. If you install too small a cable and see your traffic grow in the future, it gets very expensive to duplicate your network by installing more fiber. Since fiber strands are about the size of thick hairs, why not install a cable that has 100 or more pair even if you are planning to light only a dozen?

Integra has lots of fiber beyond their immediate or expected needs. Rather than let all of that unused capacity sit idle, they are offering it to large enterprises, healthcare organizations, governmental agencies and educational institutions that can put it to good use. Their options include bundles, lease and Indefeasible Rights of Use (IRU) that offer complete fiber pairs dedicated to your exclusive use.

Why would you choose to use dark fiber instead of other bandwidth services? Bandwidth is certainly a driver. A single pair of dark fiber supports up to 400 Gbps of lit transport. A pair is used to provide protection against failure in a single fiber or the equipment it connects.

How is it possible to get this much bandwidth from one fiber pair? It has to do with how you transmit your data. The glass fiber itself has nearly unlimited bandwidth, at least for any applications we can envision now. The inefficient way to transport data is to feed one end of the fiber with a laser of a certain color and modulate that beam with your data. Sure, you could get 5 Gbps or more using this technique. You certainly won’t get 400 Gbps. For that massive capacity you need to use the fiber more efficiently.

Right now, the go-to technology for increasing fiber capacity is called DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Instead of sending one beam down the fiber core, you send dozens or even a hundred or more beams simultaneously. Each is a different wavelength or color called a Lambda. You split up your data stream at the sending end and recombine it at the receiving end.

Of course, you can treat each wavelength as a separate and individual transmission path. This is most often how DWDM systems are set up. Each channel is a high bandwidth communications link completely independent of the others. There is no requirement that the channels use the same protocol or run at the same speed.

Another big advantage of dark fiber is network security. You and you alone have use of the fiber strands. There are no other customer’s signals multiplexed with yours as they generally are on the usual data services. This can be especially advantageous for companies with very high security requirements, such as banks and governmental agencies.

You should also know that there is another step between fiber optic bandwidth services and dark fiber. This involves leasing a complete wavelength on a lit fiber link. You have the security of being the only traffic on that wavelength and avoid the cost of buying and operating your own terminal equipment.

Are your bandwidth needs well beyond the services that are being offered commercially? Dark fiber pairs may be the solution to your demanding requirements. It’s readily available in many business locations.



Note: Picture of glowing fiber optic strands courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.