Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Metro Fiber Ethernet

By: John Shepler

Have you ever wished that you could stretch your LAN to cover other locations around the block or around an entire city and suburbs? You can. Best of all, you don’t have to do it personally. A Metro Fiber Ethernet connection will plug into your LAN at one location and plug into your LAN at another location.

The Problem Connecting Multiple LANs
Most all private networks are now Ethernet LANs or Local Area Networks. Within your realm, you have complete control. You string the cabling. You provide the switches and routers. You hook up the user equipment. You manage the entire network operations.

It doesn’t matter what the company next door or across town is doing. They won’t be bothering your network. They have their own to serve their employees.

This is all well and good until you get another location that is not on your campus. What are you going to do to tie them together? You could go into the business of pulling a fiber bundle across town. Just get the rights of way, bring in the trenching equipment and get to work. It keeps you in control, but it gets really expensive really fast. It also takes forever and may be blocked by city organizations that just don’t want you doing it.

The Internet Will Interconnect Your Locations… Sort of
Hey, the Internet is available. It goes everywhere. You probably have service at each of your locations already. Why not simply exchange files and route phone calls over the Internet?

Actually, this works after a fashion. You can connect anything to anything over the Internet. However, you need to be mindful about how you do this or you’ll find out it is nowhere near the expectation of a transparent line connection.

The Internet is so available and so cheap because of scale. It does connect everybody to everybody else, and they are all on one big party line. No way do you have any say over priority of traffic or who is accessing that traffic. It’s a big happy family and everybody potentially has their nose in everybody’s business.

There are ways to make this work better. First, get dedicated access. No, you won’t have a private connection through the Internet, but you can order a private line to the Internet. That helps greatly with keeping your service consistent.

Also, make sure you encrypt the daylights out of anything you send through a public network. If not, you are just asking for eavesdroppers to lick their chops as they read through all your sensitive documents or tap into your phone calls and video conferences.

To really make the Internet seem like your private lane, take a look into SD-WAN, or Software Defined Wide Area Networking. This is a technique of combining multiple internet connections of different types, such as wireless, fiber, copper, and cable, using software to pick the best path for each packet despite constantly changing network conditions. It sets priorities and knows that data backups take a back seat to interactive cloud services.

Better Yet, Go Private
Now we’re getting to Metro Fiber Ethernet. It’s a service provided by a commercial carrier but not part of the Internet. You get a LAN to LAN connection between your locations. You can set it up as point to point, like a direct line. You can also set it up as multipoint to multipoint for any number of locations in the area. They’ll all be on that one big LAN. Another flavor of this service is a direct to cloud connection that connects you to your cloud service provider through a local data center.

Sometimes the Metro designation is a bit limiting. You need to connect to cloud services or branch offices in another city, state or even country. Many fiber optic network providers have connections that go far beyond your city and may have interconnections with other networks to extend the reach across International borders.

You can also contract with a private service provider called an MPLS or Multi Protocol Label Switching network. These are wide area service providers that are privately owned and not accessible by the general public. They will guarantee performance and connect your far flung empire with low latency and high bandwidth. Security is enchanted because this type of network has its own protocol that differs from what runs on the Internet.

Do you have a need to interconnect business locations with speed, reliability and privacy? Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Metro Fiber Ethernet might be just what you need at a reasonable cost. For even higher performance 100 Gbps bandwidth are also supported in key metro areas.

What is Ethernet WAN?

The most exciting development in business broadband since the plunging prices in T1 service is Ethernet WAN. Just what is Ethernet WAN and why should you be interested?

As you probably know, Ethernet has become the reigning standard in LANs or Local Area Networks. One might say that Ethernet is now ubiquitous. Every PC desktop and notebook computer comes with an RJ45 Ethernet jack. You may or may not get a CD ROM drive, probably won't get a floppy disc drive, and may never use the telephone modem jack anymore. But you will get an Ethernet connection. The speed of that connection has been creeping up from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps and, soon, 10 Gbps.

Now consider that your company's LAN runs at 1 Gbps. Your computer's Ethernet drop is likely running at 100 Mbps and your connection to the outside world is an astounding 1.5 Mbps. No, that's not a misprint. It's 1.5 Megabits/second not 1.5 Gigabits per second. That's the typical dedicated Internet bandwidth for many small and medium size companies. It represents the bandwidth of a T1 line, which is 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download speeds. That's less than 2% of the bandwidth your computer can support.

Now there are a couple of good reasons for this. First, There are usually many more computers on a company LAN than accessing outside resources at any given time. That means the LAN backbone needs much higher bandwidth than the outside or WAN (Wide Area Network) connection. Second, WAN bandwidth is orders of magnitude more expensive than LAN bandwidth. Only the T1 line price reductions of the last few years have made T1 connections affordable. Larger companies might bond multiple T1 lines together to get higher bandwidths. Or, take the next step to DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps.

What's changed the picture recently is an increasing demand for higher bandwidths brought on by the need to move larger files faster and the convergence of voice and data onto a single network. VoIP telephony gets rid of a completely separate telephone network, but taxes the LAN and WAN bandwidths of the data network. Video uploads and downloads can really swamp a WAN connection. So can overnight file backups for off-site storage.

The service that offers the best chance to relieve this network congestion is Ethernet WAN. It's just what you might guess. Ethernet extended off-premises or into the Wide Area Network. How wide? Metro Ethernet services a single town or metropolitan area. Long Haul Ethernet can easily span the country or the world. It's not at all unreasonable to connect two or more locations separated by thousands of miles and have the network behave like they are right next door. That's the beauty of Ethernet. There's no fancy protocol conversion required to transport it on legacy telephone company services, such as SONET OC3, OC12, OC48, etc. It comes to you on an RJ45 jack that plugs into your switch or router. If you can connect two buildings on your site, you can connect the New York office to the one in Los Angeles. This long haul service is also called Carrier Ethernet and there are many carriers offering it.

The other big advantage of Ethernet WAN service is that it is far cheaper than traditional fiber optic services on a Mbps basis. You can save as much as half the cost on a Fast Ethernet vs DS3 connection, a Gigabit Ethernet or GigE connection vs SONET OCx service, and even traditional T1 lines. Prices vary as does availability. Metro areas are the most highly connected, with many buildings already wired for Ethernet service by competitive carriers. If you are in one of these office buildings or within a mile or so, you could be getting a huge price break on your bandwidth needs right now. Even if your area isn't lit with fiber optic cable, Wireless Ethernet is becoming available at very attractive prices with quick installation times.

So, how do you cash in with Ethernet WAN services? You can check for fiber lit buildings near your location using our handy Ethernet Buildings Instant Locator. Whatever the results, talk it over with our Ethernet consultants and see what can be done to get you a better deal on voice and data network pricing.