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.

Metro Fiber Ethernet Handles Just About Everything

By: John Shepler

When it comes to a “one size fits all” network service, Metro Fiber Ethernet seems to be closest to meeting the criteria of a universal solution. Let’s see why that is and what Metro Fiber Ethernet can do for your business.

The Panoply of Connectivity
Telecommunications network transport services have evolved through a rich set of technical options that can be generally classed into copper, fiber optic and wireless.

Amazingly, copper-based telephone and broadband lines are still based on twisted pairs of small wires that can run for miles between a telephone company’s central office and the business location where they terminate. Copper can also include coaxial cable that is primarily used for cable broadband, often as part of a hybrid fiber coax network.

Wireless involves microwave, cellular and satellite. A major application for wireless is portable and mobile operations where any type of physical connection just won’t do.

Fiber has gone through its own evolution from a proprietary long distance telephone trunking system to the modern packet switched protocol that forms the heart of the Internet. It has also become the connection of choice for most business applications.

Why Metro Fiber Ethernet?
The beauty of Ethernet over Fiber is that it perfectly mirrors the now universal Ethernet protocol running on local area networks. As you might suspect, it is pretty much seamless to connect your LAN to a Ethernet transport service to the Internet or to another LAN hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Metro Fiber Ethernet is the name given to Carrier Ethernet over Fiber within populated areas. Ironically, perhaps, the growth of 4G and soon 5G cellular wireless has prompted a major deployment of metro fiber to cell towers well beyond the city limits. Traditional copper solutions just don’t have the bandwidth to support high speed broadband. Fiber has as much as you need… once you have the cables in place.

Don’t assume that just because your business isn’t located in the downtown business district of a major metropolitan area that you can’t get fiber optic service. Fiber is become more and more ubiquitous, even in smaller towns and some rural areas.

What Service Levels Are Available?
Unlike T-Carrier or SONET fiber technologies pioneered by the telephone companies, fiber optic Ethernet doesn’t require changing hardware every time to want to move up a level in speed. Most network equipment now supports 10/100/1000 Mbps, with some capable of 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps. These same service levels are available with Metro Fiber Ethernet.

Ease of Scaling Service
A typical fiber installation will include an edge switch or router with a Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) or Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps) port. The port speed determines the maximum, but not the minimum, speed of your connection. You order the bandwidth level you want and the carrier will rate limit the connection speed to that level, say 50 Mbps. If you find you need a faster connection, a quick phone call or online control panel change can increase that to 100 Mbps. If you have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed, you can change the speed to 250, 500, 750 or 1,000 Mbps at will. Of course, the price of your service will depend on the speed you select.

Other Characteristics of Metro Fiber Ethernet
This is commercial, not consumer, grade service. Regardless of speed, your fiber service will have high reliability, low latency, low packet loss and low jitter characteristics. Many carriers will spell out and guarantee the line performance in a SLA or Service Level Agreement.

Ethernet service is also dedicated, not shared like cable or wireless broadband. You have exclusive use of the bandwidth so there is no congestion caused by competing with other businesses on a common line. This gives you consistently high performance that is important for mission critical applications. There are no data caps. You can use as much or as little of the maximum line capacity as your wish.

Applications
Metro Fiber Ethernet can be thought of as a fast, nearly transparent, pipe. It can be your high speed connection to the Internet, a dedicated link to your cloud service provider, or a point to point line between two business locations. it can also be an “on ramp” to a larger MPLS network for linking multiple locations on a semi-private network that can include locations around the world.

Metro Fiber Ethernet is being rapidly deployed to support 4G and 5G cell towers. It can easily provide the Internet service connection for a WISP or Wireless Internet Service Provider as well. This offers a business opportunity in areas not well served by telco DSL or cable broadband.

Is your business being limited by inadequate Internet service or needing dedicated links to other locations? If so, you will likely be surprised by the cost and performance of Metro Fiber Ethernet service to your building.

Metro Fiber Ethernet Gets You The Bandwidth You Need

By: John Shepler

Back when your company was smaller and business was slow, the old DSL or T1 line offered plenty of bandwidth to get the job done. Not so much anymore. Things have picked up and more of the content you need involves higher resolution graphics and video. Network congestion has your business throttled and that’s a bad situation.

Metro Fiber Ethernet Means Bandwidth
There is a clear trend in the telecom and network connection field. It is a gaining momentum toward everything fiber. That’s right, the fiber optic connections you used to take a pass on because of high cost or lack of availability are now ready for your business and at much better prices.

Fiber has the advantage over traditional twisted pair copper and wireless distribution because there is just about no limit to how fast those glass strands will run. Technology advances take the same glass fibers and increase the carrying capacity every few years. Too much data in the fiber bundle is a problem for the distant future, if ever.

What level of bandwidth is available now? Business users can generally get anything from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps in selected areas. Once your have the fiber installed, it’s your choice how much capacity to order. Same line, multiple bandwidth options.

Pay For Just What You Need
As fiber optic installations are multiplying, another technology is also taking over. That is, Carrier Ethernet. Yes, this is a compatible protocol with the Ethernet you already use on your Local Area Network. You simply plug into the Carrier’s termination, often a managed edge router, and you are connected to the Internet or via a private line across town or some other business location in the world.

Another beauty of Ethernet service is that there are no fixed bandwidth levels as there were with the older SONET fiber service. If you want 400 Mbps, you can get that. If you’d prefer 100 Mbps or 1,500 Mbps you can order those levels too. As long as the Ethernet Port installed at your location can handle the bandwidth, you can run at just about any speed.

This suggests a major cost savings for you. If your business level only requires 100 Mbps today, then order that. You may soon need 1000 Mbps, also called Gigabit Ethernet. No problem, call up your carrier and tell them to increase the speed of your line. They likely do that without any hardware changes and simply adjust your bill to reflect the increase in service level. You know that you have the flexibility to incrementally increase bandwidth as you really need the capacity.

More Availability, Less Money
You are no doubt aware that smartphones are getting faster and faster. 3G broadband is pretty much on the way out. Now it’s 4G everywhere, with 5G trials underway. One effect of this is that the old T1 lines that powered cell towers through 2G and 3G don’t have the capacity to support 4G and certainly not 5G. Support of high speed wireless has ironically caused fiber optic installations to boom. Fiber used to be rare and extremely pricey. Not so anymore. Pretty much all communication infrastructure being installed right now is fiber or wireless towers… or both.

All this fiber means capacity galore and lots of competition between a myriad of providers, all vying for businesses of all sizes. Even the Cable companies have gotten into the act recently. They’re offering access to their fiber optic networks that have the same quality of service as other business fiber services.

Why Metro Fiber Ethernet?
As the name suggests, metro fiber is more for locations within populated areas than out in the boonies. Metro also includes smaller cities, suburbs and business parks, not just major downtown areas.

What you want is competitive pricing on fiber based Ethernet bandwidth in a given metro area. Fortunately, that’s easy to find if you have the right tools. Want to see just how much bandwidth you can get for much lower prices than you’d expect? See how many Metro Fiber Ethernet Services are available for your business (not residential) location in a matter of a couple minutes.