Fiber Optic Connections from USA to Paris, France

By: John Shepler

For many companies, business is a global effort. Some simply import and export. Others have offices and factories worldwide. All need connectivity from their business locations in the United States to other locations thousands of miles away. More importantly, they need the right type of connectivity.

Direct Internet Access (DIA) will get the job done for many smaller organizations that simply need email, file transfers and web access. More sophisticated operations want to link their local area networks in each location as if they were one giant LAN.

Others need low latency to support two-way video conferencing, VoIP telephony, financial trading, cloud access and other real-time delay sensitive applications.

Ethernet over Fiber and MPLS networks are the first choice of most companies with important electronic business processes in the US. But, what is possible if you need international access, such as to the European continent?

Zayo has been a leader in both domestic and international high performance bandwidth solutions. They operate an extensive fiber optic network nationwide. Many customers use the Zayo network to link their various operations from state to state. What you may not realize is that Zayo also connects transatlantically to an expanding fiber network that also covers Europe.

You can think of the Zayo long haul European fiber network as a loop that interconnects London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris. From there you can get to just about any location on the Continent via Zayo or other metro and WAN connections.

What’s new is a greatly expanded presence in Paris, France. Zayo is becoming a major network provider in the Paris metro area by acquisition of the French infrastructure company, Neo Telecoms.

What resources is Zayo adding to its international network assets? First, an already built-out fiber plant consisting of 350 metro route miles in Paris. That fiber connects more than 500 on-net buildings plus 9 colocation centers across France. Zayo will now have an additional 36,000 square feed of data center space serving France.

Neo Telecom created Paris’ first fiber optic MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) to support business in the city. Their services include dark fiber, IP, Ethernet, wavelength and colo. More than 600 enterprise customers and other carriers are already on the network. They are primarily involved in the financial, tech, media and telecom sectors.

Zayo itself operates 77,000 fiber route files in the US and Europe plus 27 carrier-neutral colocation facilities in the United States.

Does your company do business in both France and America? If so, you now have a single provider in Zayo who can meet your domestic and international network connectivity needs. You may be especially interested in Gigabit Ethernet and MPLS IP network services that can transparently link your LAN’s worldwide and to collocated data centers and cloud services.

Other services of interest include 25,000 miles worth of dark fiber, wavelengths with up to 100 Gbps bandwidth in metro and intercity links, traditional SONET fiber from DS3 to OC192 for point to point, hub/tail and dedicated rings, mobile infrastructure and Tier 1 IP network peering.

Now would be a good time to investigate the ever expanding domestic and international colocation and interconnection services available from Zayo and other high performance service providers. Call toll free (888)-848-8749, or submit an online inquiry anytime.


Note: Map of France courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Better Network Connectivity Into France

Many, many companies are now global organizations. Even if your business isn’t a true multinational, chances are that you do at least some business beyond the borders of the United States. Connections to Europe are especially important, as the European Union represents an enormous pool of both producers and consumers. Within the EU, one of the most important destinations is France.

Well, there’s good news if you need to connect to French enterprises. One the major worldwide telecommunication carriers, Level 3 Communications, recently announced and expansion of resources, infrastructure and services for enterprise customers in France. A key piece in this initiative is expanded network reach and access from increased deployment of carrier Points of Presence (POPs) in Paris and the surrounding area. They are also extending core network capabilities in and around Lille, Lyon, and Toulouse. This gives businesses in these metro areas more access to the Level 3 network for connection to global markets.

In addition to the expansion of network connectivity, Level 3 is now offering enterprise services that include converged voice, VPN, high performing websites, content distribution networks (CDN), managed DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) mitigation for network security, and collaboration services to the expanded markets in France.

Paris has long been a major on-net fiber optic hub for Level 3, including Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) and a colocation data center. It is connected across the Atlantic by undersea landing sites on the West coast, at Saint-Brieuc and Lannion. On the other side of the pond, these fiber cables terminate in the New York and New Jersey area. This is important for companies needing low latency connections for very high performance applications like automated financial trading.

In addition to France, Level 3 Communications offers extensive network connectivity in 23 countries of Europe, including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The service portfolio includes metro and long haul services for transport, data, voice, Internet, content and media delivery.

What kind of international connectivity are you seeking? At the low end, the classic private lines are T1 in the United States running at 1.5 Mbps and E1 in Europe running at 2 Mbps. Other than the speed difference, these are essentially the same technology standard and easily interfaced. Higher bandwidths within the TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) family of standards include DS3 at 45 Mbps and SONET/SDH fiber optic services that range from OC-3 at 155 Mbps on up to OC-192 at 10 Gbps or perhaps OC-768 at 40 Gbps. Newer technology services are provided by Ethernet over Copper (EoC) and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) based on Carrier Ethernet standards. Ethernet connectivity options are highly scalable and available up to 10 Gbps.

MPLS networks are becoming the international network service of choice for companies needing to link more than two locations. MPLS can support most any desired protocol and provide you with meshed network connectivity to connect your multiple sites in an any-to-any communications arrangement. A specialized service running on MPLS is VPLS or Virtual Private LAN Service. This gives you layer 2 Ethernet connectivity to create an international bridged network that joins your LANs worldwide.

Does your business need to connect to France or other locations in Europe, The Middle Ease, Africa Asia Pacific, Latin America or North America from the United States? If so, get pricing and features for international network connectivity from Level 3 and other high performance service providers.




Note: Map of France courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Smoothstone’s Converged IP Cloud Expanding To Europe

Smoothstone IP Communications, an innovator in the new field of cloud-based unified communications, is expanding its service portfolio to include European locations. Could this be the start of a cloud that covers the Earth?

You bet it is. Thanks to international MPLS connectivity, it is now feasible to port any IP service to anywhere on Earth. That’s the beauty of MPLS networks. They take whatever you’ve got and transport it anywhere users can connect to the network.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. There’s a matter of scaling involved. Servers that easily handle the load for a limited universe of users in a regional area can become quickly overloaded when a tsunami of new users joins the network from a global footprint. Likewise, the core network has to have the bandwidth needed to handle the increased traffic without degrading latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics.

Smoothstone has addressed these issues, partially by expanding their cloud-based applications platform into several European data centers. That removes a potential bottleneck that could form if all packets needed to be processed through a single U.S. data center. It also makes call termination to off-net European phones easier and less costly.

One of the advantages that Smoothstone touts for moving enterprise voice services to their IP cloud is that internal phone calls stay on the network even when those calls are transatlantic to the UK, France, Germany or Switzerland. It’s only when calls need to be terminated to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) that connection costs are incurred. The more local the call termination, the cheaper it is. That argues for geographically diverse data centers and central office equipment to support telephony in the cloud.

What is also significant is that Smoothstone is not merely another VoIP service provider. The heart of their competitive portfolio is unified IP communications services. That means converged voice and data services to gain the cost advantages that come from deploying one network among business locations rather that separate telephone and data networks. Convergence can be a tricky proposition for time sensitive applications like network voice. If not done properly, VoIP calls can degrade into clipped and garbled conversations. Calls can even be dropped in extreme cases.

MPLS networking is especially suited to supporting converged voice and data. Not only are multiple protocols supported, but these privately owned and operated networks are carefully managed to ensure Quality of Service (QoS) at all times. For companies that want to unify their communications among multiple locations, it’s hard to argue against a solid MPLS core network. Now smoothstone is taking a leadership position to expand the very same converged services to include European cities. By the end of 2010, they expect to be providing applications and services across Europe.

Is your company still suffering from last century’s networking solutions? Have you been stymied by the process of creating unified communications that delivers the quality of service you require? What you need is the right provider with assets and resources to deliver the right solution for your size of operation and be able to seamlessly scale up as your business level increases. See how Smoothstone and other cloud networking services can provide the connectivity you need at a cost that makes sense.