Getting Network Connections Into Europe

While many companies need only domestic WAN connections to run their businesses, an increasing number need links to other parts of the world. European markets are especially important for financial trading and sales & support within the EU. The question is how domestic US organizations get connected into Europe and how they do that cost effectively.

The good news is that there are a number of carriers that span the Atlantic and offer connectivity into major European cities. Some American-based carriers have arrangements to hand off traffic to data centers in Europe. AboveNet recently announced just such an arrangement with ancotel GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany.

Hooking up with ancotel’s Kleyer 90 data center gives AboveNet access to more than 430 service providers who represent 63 countries. These include bandwidth services, VoIP providers, hosting companies, content delivery networks and cloud networking. About 75% of the traffic that goes in and out of the Frankfurt data center is routed to destinations outside of Germany.

In addition, Frankfurt itself is a major financial hub for Europe. AboveNet specializes in low latency connections that support high speed trading. They offer a Gigabit Ethernet service between New York and London with the extreme low-latency needed for algorithmic trading and the secure completion of financial and banking transactions. AboveNet’s low-latency transatlantic service reaches the key financial locations in London including, Slough, The City and Docklands. In the New York Metro area, they connect you with Manhattan and New Jersey, including Newark, Weehawken, Secaucus, Carteret and Clifton. Metro access under 1 msec to hundreds of buildings in the New York and London metro markets.

Another carrier with a global reach is Level 3 Communications. They have multiple fiber optic connections from the New York metropolitan area cross the Atlantic and landing in England, France, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands. From there, fiber networks connect to Germany, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Finland and other European destinations. They have an extensive network covering North America, so that your traffic is on-net even if you aren’t located on the East Coast.

Global Telecom and Technology also has extensive network connectivity in the United States and Europe. They have access to over 100,000 point of presence (POPs) worldwide and experience with installing networks in over 80 countries. GTT offers both international WAN connectivity and International Dedicated Internet Access (DIA).

What kind of international connectivity can you expect to find? The classic solution is a point to point telecom connection running over fiber optic undersea cable. At the low end are T1 lines in the United States and E1 lines in Europe. These run at 1.5 Mbps and 2 Mbps respectively. Faster services are the SONET/SDH fiber optic connections from OC-3 at 155 Mbps on up to OC-192 at 10 Gbps and perhaps OC-768 at 40 Gbps. Network cores are currently being upgraded to 100 Gbps. An alternative service is Carrier Ethernet at 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Ethernet can be configured as a point to point dedicated line or a point to multipoint connection to link multiple locations.

MPLS networks are becoming increasingly popular for international network connections. You can interconnect all your domestic business locations with a mesh network connection running over MPLS. That MPLS network can also include locations in Europe or elsewhere across the globe. What MPLS offers is high performance, security and lower costs than multiple point to point line connections.

Does your business need access to Europe to include sales, distribution or manufacturing? Do you perhaps have special requirements such as high bandwidth or ultra low latency for financial services? If so, there are telecom services available to meet your needs. In many cases, you can get multiple competitive bids for international network connections and choose which carrier to do business with.

New Low Latency Fiber Optic Services For Atlanta

Atlanta, Georgia is a major hub for fiber optic traffic serving the United States and International destinations. It’s also the home of many Fortune 500 companies and thousands of enterprises in need of high performance bandwidth services. AboveNet has recognized a growing need in the Atlanta metro market and is making a major expansion of its low latency fiber optic routes for downtown Atlanta, Alpharetta, Buckhead and Norcross.

AboveNet is a highly competitive carrier that focuses on high bandwidth connectivity. They operate about 2.3 million fiber miles in top US and European markets feeding more than 2,800 optically-enabled commercial buildings. Their major hubs in the SouthEast are Atlanta and Miami, with others in Houston, Austin, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco / San Jose, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Boston Philadelphia, Baltimore, The New York Metro Area and the Washington DC Corridor. In addition, AboveNet connects to Asia in Tokyo, Japan and to Europe in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris.

These AboveNet hubs are connected by DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) equipment that terminates the fiber runs. Most backbone trunks offer 10 Gbps, with individual city locations providing up to 40 Gbps connectivity for carriers and companies that need this capacity.

AboveNet is making its complete suite of high performance bandwidth services available to businesses in the Atlanta metropolitan area. These include both Metro Area Network (MAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN), plus WDM Wavelength Services, Metro Ethernet, WAN Ethernet and IP Transit.

Few providers can offer wavelength services for MAN users. These include standardized Carrier Ethernet services that have the MEF 9 and MEF 14 certificates. Single wavelength service offers a 40 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps or 1 Gbps wave service to extend your corporate LAN/WAN to multiple metro area locations. Data mirroring can be done with a Fiber Channel, ESCON or FICON wave. Both protected and unprotected options are available.

Metro WDM applications include virtualization and the serverless office, real time transactions backup and high speed business continuity, streaming multimedia, Storage Area Network (SAN), delivering mission critical enterprise data and applications, and e-commerce transactions. There are basic, enhanced and custom wave solutions to meet any business requirement up to 40 Gbps.

WAN services allow you to reach beyond your metro area to connect with other metro locations are around the world. eXpressWave long haul optical transport is a point to point inter-city connection service that supports voice, data and video between more than 78 city pair combinations. Bandwidth options include 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps going from POP to POP. Metro connectivity is available in top US and European cities for companies with national and international business locations.

Do you have a business in the Atlanta metro area or other major city in the US that needs very high performance connectivity for metropolitan, national or international business needs? If so, get pricing and features for the fiber optic bandwidth solutions you need from AboveNet and other high performance carriers.




Note: Photo of downtown Atlanta at twilight courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Fiber Optic Direct Connections To The Cloud

The Internet offers an extensive and cost effective means to access services in the cloud. What it doesn’t offer is consistent low latency, low jitter and high bandwidth performance. It was never intended to. The Internet’s claim to fame is universal connectivity. If your business processes in the cloud suffer from inconsistency or have become sluggish compared to when they were hosted onsite, you could benefit from a direct connection to the cloud.

One of the most popular cloud services is the Amazon AWS Cloud Computing Platform. Leveraging the enormous computing facilities owned by Amazon, users can pay as they go for application hosting, Web hosting, backup and storage, content delivery, enterprise IT applications and scalable database solutions. This nearly unlimited resource set can place a considerable load on typical bandwidth links used by corporations. It gets worse as you move more and more of your business processes to the cloud while leaving your employees in-place, often thousands of miles away.

The Internet works just fine for e-commerce, with thousands or millions of individual customers accessing centralized servers from their homes and offices. It’s also well suited for accessing company resources by remote workers and traveling employees. Where it starts to stumble is when you expect consistent real-time performance between the cloud and your data center or user base similar to what you get from hardwired connections in-house. The closest thing to your LAN is a high performance direct connection.

There are a couple of ways to achieve that direct connection. Amazon is currently offering direct connection to its cloud at Equinix’s Ashburn, VA and Silicon Valley, CA colocation facilities. Equinix provides colocation facilities for over 4,000 enterprises, cloud, content and financial companies through its network of colo centers. If you happen to have your equipment in their Ashburn or Silicon Valley facility, a simple cross connect is all that’s needed to hook your servers to Amazon’s.

If you are not collocated in an Equinix data center, you’ll need a WAN connection. AWS has two approved carriers that can make the connection. One is Level 3 Communications, a leading international fiber-based carrier with services to over 125 international markets. The other is AboveNet, Inc., another leading fiber optic carrier with 2.3 million metro fiber miles and connections in place to more than 450 data centers. AboveNet is offering connections to the AWS Direct Connect service at 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps.

AWS Direct Connect network service works withe the same AWS services that you would otherwise access over the Internet. These include Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). You can use AWS Direct Connect to create multiple logical connections between your network and Amazon VPC. You can even establish multiple VPCs over this connection if you have enough bandwidth available.

AWS Direct Connect is flexible enough to scale your connectivity as your needs change. Each connection offers 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connectivity and you can add multiple connections to increase capacity. Amazon suggests that this approach is better than using VPN hardware that frequently can’t support data transfer rates above 4 Gbps.

Have you already moved to the cloud or anticipate such a move and are concerned that your current connectivity can’t get the job done? Perhaps a direct connection can give you the performance that you need. Get pricing and bandwidth options for fiber optic cloud connections now.

AboveNet Core Wave Makes Dedicated Wavelength Bandwidth Available

What do you do when ordinary bandwidth is no longer up to the task? You go above and beyond with AboveNet’s Core Wave service. For demanding financial services, media, health care, retail and government applications, you really do have to get to the core of fiber optic transport. The very core.

Most telecom services are electrically multiplexed somewhere along the way. What multiplexing does is combine your bandwidth service with dozens, hundreds or thousands of others to fill the capacity of a fiber optic core network. But what if you have enough demand on your own to take all the bandwidth a service provider can deliver?

One answer is to become your own service provider. You do this buy building-out or buying fiber strands or even entire fiber optic cables. That’s what Cable TV MSOs do. So do major telecom service providers. But bandwidth is their business. It’s what they do to generate income. You aren’t really in the business of bandwidth. You simply want to use large amounts of bandwidth to enable your business processes. Does investing large amounts of capital in fiber infrastructure really make sense for your corporate mission?

Of course it doesn’t. What does make sense is to partner with a service provider that has already made the investment and has enough bandwidth capacity at their disposal to meet your current and future needs. AboveNet has that capability and now they are making it available to large organizations in major markets.

Let’s take a look at AboveNet Core Wave. It’s a high capacity bandwidth service for point to point connectivity in metro areas, like New York City. Right now you can get 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps service. The platform is scalable, so that when demand justifies it AboveNet can also offer 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps bandwidth services.

How are they doing this? The platform is built on a fiber optic network managed by ROADMs. A ROADM is a Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexer. This is the cutting edge of fiber optic networking. What a ROADM does is manage the traffic on the network optically. Each fiber transports not one, but many different light beams known as Lambdas or wavelengths. Each wavelength is said to have a different color, although these are in the infrared spectrum and not visible like the colors from a prism. A ROADM can manage dozens or hundreds of wavelengths in a process known as DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing.

Normally wavelengths have such high carrying capacity that they transport traffic for many companies. But Core Wave gives you the option of having your own dedicated wavelength. The wavelength is like a blank slate to be written on, so you are not forced into the protocol of the core network. AboveNet gives you the choice of Ethernet, SONET/SDH, or Fibre Channel for storage networking.

Are your bandwidth needs pressing the limits of conventional telecom services? If so, perhaps it is time you moved up to fiber optic wavelength services, like AboveNet Core Wave. Why not check pricing and availability now? There is likely more capacity available than you think.

Metro Fiber Network Bandwidth For Denver

Bandwidth is booming in the Mile High City, or soon will be. AboveNet is installing nearly 100 route miles of dark and lit fiber to meet the mile-high bandwidth needs of Denver’s telecommunications, media, financial services, health care, retail and government users.

This could be a sign of things to come for nearly all metropolitan areas. The fact is that our productivity and economic growth is becoming more and more dependent on high levels of bandwidth to connect businesses, supplier, customers and remotely located employees. Copper can take us just so far. Then it’s time to connect with the nearly unlimited resources of glass fiber cables.

How much bandwidth are we talking about? AboveNet has fiber optic networks in cities nationwide that offer single wavelength service of 40 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps or 1 Gbps to extend a corporate LAN/WAN to multiple, metro area locations. You can have 40 Gbps fiber connectivity via an OC-768 handoff at your premises. That’s a level of bandwidth that was available only to carriers themselves not so long ago.

It should also be noted that each fiber strand can support more than one wavelength using a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Each wavelength, or Lambda, is a slightly different color of laser light. Dozens or hundreds of wavelengths can travel through the same fiber without interfering. Each of those wavelengths can support up to 40 Gbps of bandwidth.

But is even this enough for the demands of major corporate or government users in a city the size of Denver? Well, those fiber cables that AboveNet is installing don’t just have one strand of fiber inside. These cables bundle 432 or 216 separate fibers within a large cable assembly. Multiply all those fiber strands times the number of wavelengths each fiber can support times the Gbps that each wavelength can carry and you’ve got some serious bandwidth. It’s more than is needed right now, so some fibers won’t be activated. These are the dark fiber that’s held in reserve for future needs or sold to organizations that want to have complete control over their communication resources by lighting their own fiber.

Do you have a need for metro or long haul fiber optic services from 40 Mbps to 40 Gbps? There are dark fiber and lit fiber optic services available now in most metropolitan areas from AboveNet and other high bandwidth competitive carriers. Prices are lower than they’ve ever been, thanks to improved technology and increased competition. You may be able to afford more bandwidth than you imagine. Find out with a competitive pricing quote and complementary consulting support from our Telarus bandwidth experts.

AboveNet Leads in High Bandwidth Ethernet Connectivity

There's a major transition underway in high bandwidth telecom services. It's a move from traditional SONET / SDH technology to Ethernet IP technology. There are good reasons for this evolutionary, or should I say revolutionary, change. They are rooted in the decades-long transition from analog to digital communications and the near universality of Ethernet as the network protocol of choice. Could we be at a tipping point for Ethernet in fiber optic communications? AboveNet makes a good case for just that.

AboveNet is a high bandwidth provider serving fifteen major U.S. markets plus the United Kingdom. They specialize in fiber optic MAN and WAN connectivity from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps for companies that need this kind of bandwidth at lower costs than traditional telco solutions.

In their white paper, "Advantages of Ethernet vs Sonet, A Compelling Choice," AboveNet makes the case that cost is a major driver but not the only reason to switch from SONET / SDH to Gigabit Ethernet (Gig E). Ethernet is a better match with today's networks that are increasingly IP based. SONET is a TDM technology based on channels rather than packets. It works as a metro and long haul carrier for packet based networks, but with an inefficiency caused by the protocol conversions back and forth from TDM to IP. This can result in added latency and increased risk for data loss, as well as higher costs.

What may be lost to history is that SONET, the Synchronous Optical NETwork, is a product of telephone company research. At its foundation is the 64 Kbps data channel or DS0. There are thousands of them all multiplexed and synchronized to create SONET fiber optic high bandwidth services. Why such an arrangement? Each of those small channels is just the right size to carry one digitized telephone call. That was the original impetus for SONET. It was to efficiently transport high volumes of telephone calls from one telephone exchange to another.

SONET, of course, has grown from it's switched circuit telephony roots. With appropriate protocol conversions, those DS0 channels can be aggregated to transport IP packets as well as PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) voice. SONET has been the dominant technology for long-haul networks and fiber optic MAN and WAN connections. It's design includes redundant paths with a 50 mSec failover time to make it a highly reliable transport service.

But telephony as well as everything else in electronic communications is going to IP or Internet Protocol. VoIP is replacing analog and TDM telephony for business and residential users. At the enterprise level, there are enormous cost savings possible with converged voice/data/video networks. Why create an all-IP network based on Ethernet within the enterprise, only to have to convert it to TDM-based SONET for transport between locations or to a distant IP service provider?

Carrier Ethernet, the flavor of Ethernet specified for metropolitan and long haul networks, has the advantage of being IP at its core. No conversions are necessary from LAN to MAN to WAN and back to LAN at some remote location. This seamless connectivity reduces latency and improves network efficiency by eliminating conversion steps.

AboveNet operates its own network with over 2 million fiber miles worldwide and a reach of more than 1,800 lit buildings. Their services included MAN and WAN connectivity, plus managed services for WDM Wavelength, Metro Ethernet, WAN Ethernet and IP transit.

If your organization has a need for high bandwidth services and you want to acquire them at the best possible price, then consider getting competitive quotes on fiber optic services from AboveNet and other highly competitive carriers. This telecom brokerage service is free to serious business users, with complementary consulting on your corporate requirements.