Lit Buildings Expand Fiber Optic Bandwidth in Houston

Houston, Texas, the fourth largest city in America, is a major center for healthcare and research, oilfield equipment and energy development, manufacturing, aeronautics, and home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Demand for high speed telecom services, especially fiber optic bandwidth, is high and rising every year. To meet this critical business need, Alpheus Communications is extending its Texas fiber network to light key buildings in the Houston business district.

What is a lit building? In this sense, it means having fiber optic service installed and turned up within the facility. The “lit” reference is to the laser light that carries the digital signals through the fiber. There is also such a thing as “dark” fiber. The dark variety consists of fiber strands that have been pulled into the building but not connected to any equipment.

The advantage of having already lit fiber available in your facility is that you can be connected quickly and easily at any bandwidth up to 1 Gbps, or even higher in some cases. The terminal equipment is already in place and running. Other tenants in your office building may already be connected for fiber service. It’s generally no trouble at all to add an additional cable and run it to your particular location. You may even have such wiring in place from when the building was constructed.

In addition to being guaranteed connectivity and having it provisioned rapidly, being in a lit building saves you the often huge expense of bringing fiber in when it isn’t already available. That process can involve trenching for new conduit or threading fiber cable through existing conduit underground. In some cases, the fiber is “flown” overhead on utility poles. There is nothing inexpensive about pulling in new fiber.

So, if there is considerable expense in fiber installation, then why is Alpheus lighting buildings on its own dime? The demand for high bandwidth levels is already there and expected to only increase over the next few years. The buildings that Alpheus has selected are already business centers that can make good use of professional bandwidth services. These are located at 1001 Fannin St., Two Allen Center at 1200 Smith St. and 601 Travis St. Once connected, these buildings will be considered “on-net” for fiber optic service.

Other buildings are expected to follow, with Alpheus making additional investments this year. They have a goal of connecting 100 buildings in Dallas and Houston to their fiber network. Beyond that, the core Alpheus network connects to more than 300 central offices and POPs (Points of Presence). This includes both fiber and copper connections.

Copper? Yes, indeed. Twisted pair copper bundles are already installed to nearly every business location. Fiber easily outperforms copper when it comes to sheer bandwidth. However, not every business needs a Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) connection. Many companies have been getting by with T1 lines running at 1.5 Mbps for years. Cloud services and other business applications are quickly rendering T1 service obsolete. However, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) offers much higher bandwidth using the same twisted pair copper wiring that now supports T1 and multi-line telephone service.

Entry level EoC service typically begins at 3 Mbps for about the same cost as 1.5 Mbps T1. That’s twice the bandwidth for the same money. It is easy to ramp that up to 10 or 20 Mbps at reasonable cost. Some locations qualify for 50 and even 100 Mbps EoC bandwidth. The catch is that Ethernet over Copper is distance limited. You need to be located fairly close to the telco central office to get the really high bandwidths. Even so, many companies are finding that they can get by just fine with EoC right now and put off the investment in fiber construction until necessary. With carriers lighting buildings at a rapid rate, that fiber may even be in place by the time you need hundreds or thousands of Megabits per second.

Alpheus Communications is a high performance competitive carrier serving the DASH (Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Houston) business marketplace. They offer Metro Ethernet, private line, managed wavelength MPLS network, Ethernet LAN (E-LAN), Ethernet Line (E-Line) and both PRI and SIP telephone trunking.

Are you located in Houston or other business locations in the United States, or have connections to the US? If so, there are many high bandwidth, low cost copper and fiber optic network services available to connect your business locations together and to the Internet. Check pricing and features to see what is available at your particular location.


Note: Photo of Houston skyline at night courtesy of Bobby L. Warren on Wikimedia Commons.

All My Access Is In Texas

If the state of Texas is where you do business, you’ll want to be aware of Alpheus Communications and their regional network connecting the major cities in Texas. In addition, they have colocation data center facilities in the Lone Star State. This gives you the advantage of security, reliability and low cost connectivity while keeping everything reasonably nearby.

The Alpheus regional fiber optic network offers high bandwidth and low latency between Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Bryan, Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, McAllen, Harlingen, Corpus Christi, Victoria and Houston. Long haul connections can take your traffic anywhere in North America at bandwidth speeds ranging from DS-1 (1.5 Mbps) up to OC-192 (10 Gbps).

Network connectivity is available in a wide range of options. These include Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Metro Ethernet, Private Line and Managed Wavelength. Alpheus clients can connect with each other through a cross connect arrangement called Metrolocity. You can choose from bandwidth speeds ranging from DS-1 to OC-12 (622 Mbps) and peer with other enterprises and competitive communications service providers. You do not have to colocate or build facilities to other carriers to make these connections. They’re provided by Alpheus as part of their Metrolocity peering.

Alpheus operates four hub facilities in Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Their network operations center (NOC) is also located in Houston. The Austin and Houston data centers are SAS 70 Type II Audit Certified to meet the demanding needs of enterprise clients. These data centers give you the security, reliability and scalability you need to host enterprise applications, disaster recover solutions, high performance websites, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and general IT operations infrastructure. You’ll find hubbed and point to point service from DS-1 to OC-192, Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps managed wavelengths.

Some clients find even SONET, GigE and wavelength services too limiting. To meet their needs, Alpheus Communications offers dark fiber solutions. With dark fiber, capacity is determined by the terminal equipment, usually DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing). In essence, you become operator of your own fiber optic network. That means you have the ability to transport any protocol or multiple protocols at once. Leverage wavelengths to create massive bandwidth for transporting near-limitless amounts of information.

Perhaps a Gigabit Ethernet connection is enough to meet your needs. Alpheus is set up to connect you across the metro markets in Texas or across the country. You can choose from point to point or point to multipoint GigE connectivity. Bandwidth options vary from 51 Mbps on up to 1 Gbps if you don’t need the full 1,000 Mbps right away. Rate limiting is flexible. There are three different classes of service available. The highest is load sharing. With this, Alpheus provides two physically diverse unprotected connections and you have two client interfaces. You take care of the protection switching. The other grades are Network Protection, which does have network protection features but no client protection, and completely unprotected service.

Are you interested in Texas Metro Ethernet service? If so, Alpheus can give you layer 2 networking services that include point to point, point to multipoint and any to any WAN connectivity. This connectivity takes place over a redundant MPLS network on a self-healing DWDM fiber backbone. Your port interfaces include 10/100 Mbps FastE, 1000 Mbps GigE and 10 Gbps Ethernet. Alpheus has last mile connectivity solutions that include Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over NxT1 and Ethernet over NxDS3 plus Ethernet over Wireless to get you connected no matter where you happen to be.

Do you need network access in Texas? You’re in luck. Get pricing, features and availability of Texas metro and long haul network connections from Alpheus and other high quality network service providers.



Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.