The How and Why of 10 Gbps WAN Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Big data keeps getting bigger. HD video will soon be supplanted by 4K and then 8K video. IT data centers are going dark, one by one, as applications move to the cloud. Where is the bandwidth coming from to handle the demand of ever higher bit rates in the MAN and WAN?

That bandwidth is coming from fiber optic carriers who realize that every organization is going to be upsizing its data pipes or falling behind competitively. A gigabit per second was considered massive bandwidth not that many years ago. Now it’s considered entry level for many medium size and larger companies. Even consumers are anxiously awaiting universal FTTH to satisfy their ever growing media demands. Is 10 Gbps unreasonable for high performance business applications? Not at all.

The next question is how do you go about acquiring 10 Gig bandwidth once you’ve made the determination that nothing less will get the job done. Here’s an overview of the 10 Gigabit Bandwidth Options available for businesses and other organizations.


Note that SONET at the OC-192 level is still a viable option for businesses seeking 10 Gbps bandwidth. It will continue to be a good choice for some time to come because the amount of installed base of SONET/SDH fiber.

However, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is coming on strong and should be looked at carefully as the service of the future. Carrier Ethernet-native networks and those running Ethernet over SONET have big advantages in scalability and ease of deployment compared to the rather rigidly defined SONET OC levels.

The trick is to get a service port installed that is capable of providing the maximum bandwidth you’ll need. If you are considering more than 1 Gbps service, then a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port makes a lot of sense. It will allow you to incrementally scale your service bandwidth from 1 to 10 Gbps without having new terminal equipment installed. The terminal equipment is most likely to be a managed router installed by the carrier as CPE (Customer Premises Equipment).

What if you are going for the whole 10 GigE right from the start? That would merit a discussion on the cost tradeoff (if any) to have a 40 Gbps or 100 Gbps port installed right away. As outrageous as it may seem from the traditional perspective, 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet are real service options available today for many business locations. These are likely to become common bandwidth levels as more sophisticated applications move to the cloud.

Does it make sense to opt for wavelengths or dark fiber? It depends on what you’ll be using it for. If you need to be running multiple protocols through a point to point connection, managed wavelength service can be the right move. If you are sophisticated enough to install and maintain your own DWDM equipment, then you might get the best deal by simply leasing dark fiber to the locations you want to connect. For most businesses, though, dark fiber is beyond what they really need.

How can you tell what the best option is when there are multiple choices available? Make sure you are getting competitive quotes for as many different options and carriers as possible. It’s likely that there may at least several serving your location that you may be completely unaware of. You best choice is to work with a bandwidth broker, like Telarus, Inc., to get the best deal on 10 Gigabit or other bandwidth service.

Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber to Your Door

Big data, cloud services, medical images, video production and other bandwidth intensive applications are stretching the capacity of many traditional WAN services to point of congestion. That’s were bad things happen to good data. Frustration, productivity loss, delays in file delivery and unworkable telephony and video conferencing rear their ugly heads when there just isn’t enough bandwidth to go around. Fortunately, solutions are easier to come by than ever before.

The answer to big bandwidth demands is big bandwidth services. T1 lines were left in the dust years ago. Many companies thought that moving up to DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps would keep them in good stead for the foreseeable future. That future came sooner than foreseen. While Ethernet over Copper and fixed wireless can give you 50 or 100 Mbps of reliable symmetrical bandwidth, they’re also being left in the dust. What remains? Fiber optic WAN services in both SONET and Ethernet flavors.

SONET is the grandaddy of fiber optic bandwidth. It’s a standard developed by the telephone companies for transmitting or “trunking” large bundles of telephone calls between switching centers and overseas. Options begin at OC-3 with 155 Mbps. If that’s not enough, then OC-12 at 622 Mbps is the next step up. OC-24 offers 1.2 Gbps, but isn’t so widely available. You may be required to take OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps. In some cases, you’ll be able to contract for OC-192 at 10 Gbps or even OC-768 for 40 Gbps. Those are usually reserved for network operators themselves, but are now becoming more available to businesses.

So that solves the bandwidth dilemma, right? It would except for budget constraints. OCx SONET services have traditionally been pretty pricey. Those costs have plunged in recent years due to increased competition, but the need for bandwidth is expanding faster than corporate budgets. Fortunately, there is another alternative. That’s Ethernet over Fiber.

EoF, as it’s called for short, has some real advantages over traditional SONET optical carrier services. First of all, it’s Ethernet. Yes, the same Ethernet that runs on your local network but extended so that it can reach across town or even around the world. That makes interfacing easy and efficient. There’s also the cost factor.

Ethernet over Fiber typically costs a fraction of what you pay per Mbps for equivalent SONET bandwidth. A lot of this has to do with competition that has come into the market after deregulation of the phone companies. With SONET, you almost always have the local phone company involved in running the last mile connection. Ethernet has been adopted by newer competitive carriers who operate their own fiber networks, including owning the fiber. They can run a drop from their closest point of presence (POP) to your building and give you just about any bandwidth you require.

Not only are these carriers hungry for business, they have a much wider range of bandwidth options at their fingertips. Carrier Ethernet, as it is called, was designed from the get-go for ease of scalability. SONET has fixed bandwidth levels known generically as OCx. Each OC level has its own interface requirements and they don’t intermix. If you want to jump to the next level, the service provider will have to roll a truck and plug in a different module. They may also have some changes to make in their network to ensure they can deliver the contracted bandwidth.

Contrast that with Ethernet over Fiber. The interface to your equipment is called a “port”. A port has a maximum speed that it can run but no lower limit. You could install a 10 Mbps Ethernet port, but today’s practice is to install a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet port or a 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet port. With a GigE port, you can order, say, 200 Mbps now and know that you can ramp up to 500 Mbps or even 1000 Mbps with little more than a phone call. In fact, it takes just hours to a few days to increase your line speed. Compare that to traditional practice that can require weeks or months.

Installation is still a consideration. Many business locations are still not connected to any fiber optic carrier. That doesn’t mean they can’t be. Metro Ethernet Networks are expanding rapidly, especially in larger business districts. Even if you couldn’t get anything last year, you might have a couple of providers to pick from this year. You’ll almost certainly be served if your equipment is in a colocation center or you are renting cloud computing services. All of these data centers are served by multiple fiber optic bandwidth providers. That gives you the option of moving your demanding applications to where the bandwidth is readily available and then connecting back your facility with a lower but adequate speed service like Ethernet over Copper.

Another strategy is to get together with other tenants in your office building or park to woo a fiber carrier who might not otherwise think the investment is worth it. With multiple clients all ready to commit to fiber bandwidth, the combined capacity can lure service providers to run a drop to your facility where each customer can connect their equipment to the provider's edge router. You might even get a substantial break on construction costs or pay nothing at all if the commitment is high enough.

Are you interested in more bandwidth for your business? If so, check options and get free consultation on what’s available in high bandwidth fiber optic network services.

Fiber Optic Leased Lines for Business

Copper-based leased lines have been the go-to solution for connecting business sites and for dedicated access to the Internet. However, copper’s days are numbered as big data, HD video and a migration out of the corporate data centers and into the cloud accelerate. The era of fiber-everything is approaching. Fortunately, prices are lower and options greater than ever before.

Fiber optic leased lines have been employed for decades by major corporations and businesses, like video production and distribution, that can’t function without the bandwidth fiber affords. Nearly all of this bandwidth has been supplied by a telephone industry standard called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETworking.

SONET picks up where T-carrier stops. T1 is good for 1.5 Mbps and up to 12 Mbps when multiple T1 lines are bonded. T3, often called DS3, is a 45 Mbps service, although it can be rate limited to 10 or 20 Mbps to lower costs. DS3 stands at the crossroads between copper and fiber. DS3 bandwidth is most often carried on a multiplexed SONET service for most of the transport distance and then converted to coaxial copper connections at the customer site.

SONET fiber optic lines start with OC-3 at 155 Mbps. Like DS3, OC-3 can be rate limited to offer fractional OC-3 bandwidth at 50 or 100 Mbps. Most often it is leased as a full rate OC-3 service.

Other SONET service levels offer increasing bandwidth. OC-12 runs at 622 Mbps. OC-24 is a Gigabit service running at 1.2 Gbps. It is not widely offered. The next popular SONET service is OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. OC-192 steps this up to 10 Gbps. OC-768 is a 40 Gbps line service that has been popular as a carrier backbone but now offered to businesses in some areas.

Note the big gaps in bandwidth between the SONET optical carrier levels. If you need a Gigabit connection, you may have to order an OC-48 service even though it has twice the bandwidth you require. We’ll take a look at how Carrier Ethernet is far more scalable and can give you fine degree of granularity for selecting just the right bandwidth for your applications.

Another thing about SONET is that it is a TDM or Time Division Multiplexed technology. This means that the signal is a string of bits divided into small channels and carefully synchronized to communicate with other SONET lines. Why this arrangement? It is the telephony legacy of SONET. It was designed to be compatible with Bell’s T-Carrier standards that are also TDM-based. Each channel in a T1 line or OC-768 is 64 Kbps to support one telephone call. Of course, these channels can now be combined so that you can use the entire line capacity less overhead to transport your data packets.

Since SONET is not a packet switched protocol, you need a protocol converter to translate between TDM and Ethernet in order to get your network data from place to place. That is generally a plug-in module for your router. Each SONET level has a specifically designed module that is unique to that optical carrier level.

What SONET has going for it is a long history and extensive deployment worldwide. You don’t have to worry about the intricacies of protocol conversion or signal interfacing, as they problems were solved long ago. SONET is most popular when deployed in rings of two redundant fibers that can switch in under 50 Msec to keep the data flowing even when faults in the system occur. Most metropolitan and long haul fiber optic networks are set up in the SONET ring topology for reliability.

What now competes with SONET is Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). Yes, this is the familiar Ethernet protocol that runs on your LAN but extended for long haul transport. The extended protocol is called Carrier Ethernet.

The advantages of Carrier Ethernet include easy and rapid scalability, a packet oriented protocol directly compatible with nearly all company networks and edge routers, and a considerable cost savings compared with SONET. Typical service levels start at 10 Mbps, the standard Ethernet service level. Other popular options are 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE).

You aren’t limited to these particular service levels. You can pretty much pick any bandwidth you like as long as the Ethernet Port installed at your facility can support the maximum speed you require. Easy scalability also means that you can often simply call your service provider and request an increase in bandwidth. It’s likely to be available in a matter of days if not hours.

Ethernet over FIber was almost unknown even a few years ago but now widely deployed. If available at your location, you’ll find that the cost per Mbps is much lower than SONET, perhaps half the cost for the same bandwidth. This is why Carrier Ethernet is rapidly taking over the fiber optic transport market, although SONET prices have also been plunging in response to the new competition.

Does your company require higher bandwidths that you can get from copper wireline services? Are you using fiber now but wondering if you can get a better price? Do you have a new application and want to get the best deal on bandwidth? If any of these apply, get competitive quotes on SONET and Ethernet fiber optic leased lines available for your business location.

Business Fiber Optic Connections Nearby

Are you running out of bandwidth on your telecom connections? You’ve gone as far as you can with bonded T1 lines. Now you’re considering making the move up to fiber optic services. You’ve heard that those are really expensive and that you can get hit with construction costs on top of the monthly lease price. Is that really true? Is there such as thing as cost effective fiber optic connections?

A lot of what everybody knows about fiber optics is long out of date and may be preventing them from making a smooth and painless transition to unlimited bandwidth options. For one thing, there are options available right now that weren’t around even a few years ago. Pricing has also come down considerably due to competition and new technology. Let’s take a closer look at the fiber optic connections that are located nearby.

Before we start looking down fiber strands for a solution, have you considered the latest in copper technology? Copper is way more than T1 or DSL these days. Ethernet over Copper technology gives you up to 45 Mbps in many business locations. That’s as much as many businesses really need. It’s relatively inexpensive, highly reliable and is provisioned over multiple twisted pairs. Those pairs, by the way, are probably already installed in your building for multi-line telephone service.

Another copper service is cable business broadband. It’s not for everyone, but if you can benefit from shared bandwidth up to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload for Internet access, the price is right. It’s about the same as a T1 line.

Entry level fiber optic service actually starts with DS3 at 45 Mbps. Nobody thinks about DS3 being a fiber service. It’s delivered over two coaxial cables and often referred to as a T3 line. However, that copper cable only goes as far as the street at most. The rest of the path is over a multiplexed SONET fiber optic service.

It is OC-3 SONET fiber optic service that is fiber all the way. OC-3 was the first fiber optic service available to most businesses. It offers bi-directional 155 Mbps dedicated bandwidth for point to point or dedicated Internet access connections. OC-3 is part of the SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) family of traditional telecom services. Next up the line is OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps, OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

Competing directly with SONET is now Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). Ethernet over Fiber is a Carrier Ethernet service that is easily scalable so you can increase bandwidth incrementally. That means more intermediate bandwidth steps than SONET and fewer equipment changes. The provider installs an Ethernet port that delivers your service. This is almost always selected at 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps. You can get any speed service you want up to the capacity of the installed port. Many carriers are now routinely installing 1 Gbps ports so that start off as low as 10 Mbps and work your way up to 1 Gbps with only a phone call.

How about pricing and availability? It varies greatly, although you should know that there is a big competitive buildout underway nationwide. It’s not just the traditional telecom companies. There are new players with their own fiber networks that run IP at the core. They don’t have a legacy SONET infrastructure to maintain, so they’ll run Ethernet over Fiber right to your door.

The big trick is to have your building “lit” by one or more carriers for fiber optic service. In multiple tenant business buildings there is enough opportunity to attract carriers to install service at little or no cost. If you are the only user, the bar is higher. Some providers are so aggressive that they’ll waive construction costs if you buy a reasonable amount of bandwidth and they don’t have to run the drop too far. Others will ask you to kick in at least a small portion of the construction expenses.

Monthly lease prices have plunged over the last decade for both SONET and the newer Ethernet services. Competition from peers and Ethernet vs SONET has driven fiber optic bandwidth costs down to a fraction of what they were during all the hoopla of the tech boom years before 2000. If you haven’t gone out for quotes in, say the last few months, your jaw will likely drop when you see how much you can get for your bandwidth dollar these days.

What’s the best way to get a reasonable suite of competitive quotes? Use a bandwidth broker, like Telarus, to get multiple fiber optic service quotes for your location. Their automated GeoQuote (tm) system is so fast that you can get quotes up to 1 Gbps instantly online with no cost or obligation. If you like what you see, an expert consultant will help you sort through the options at your convenience. Go ahead and give it a try now.



Note: Photo of fiber optic conduit spools courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

10 Gigabit Ethernet For Business

Is it possible that Gigabit bandwidth services aren’t enough to support your business? These days that’s entirely possible. The proliferation of video content and a migration to the cloud that’s picking up steam make old assumptions about WAN bandwidth obsolete. Today, 10 GigE connections are perfectly reasonable.

Just a few years ago, 10 Gigabit bandwidth was a basis for core transport networks. Now that speed is 100 Gbps. Even 40 Gbps is being left in the dust. Bandwidth levels at 10 Gbps are now available for both metro and long haul connections.

Don’t need a full 10 GigE right now? How about fractional 10 GigE? These are bandwidths between 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps. Fractional bandwidth services are much more available with Carrier Ethernet than SONET. Ethernet is designed to be more scalable. Rather than specific standardized WAN speeds like OC-48 or OC-192, you can specify many granular bandwidths up to and including the full speed of the installed Ethernet port.

What’s available in 10 GigE connectivity? The point to point private line is typical. This is an optical bandwidth connection from your premises to somewhere else in the country or around the world. 10 Gigabit connections are useful for connecting data centers for data mirroring and high speed backup. Geographically diverse data centers are desirable to protect against natural and manmade disasters that can take out an entire area. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and toxic spills fall into that category.

The newest application for a 10 GigE connection is likely to be the most popular one soon. This is the connection between your facility and the cloud. Cloud computing services offer extremely high performance. It’s so easy to scale resources in the cloud that before long you can find yourself with Terabit processing and Megabit connections. Somehow all that data has to go back and forth between your offices and your cloud service provider.

Amazon Web Services has defined a service called AWS Direct Connect as an alternative to using the Internet for accessing their cloud services. This is a private line connection using a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps port. The sheer size of Amazon’s cloud makes it logical that they would pioneer speeds of this magnitude. Other cloud providers are hot on Amazon’s heels, though, and it won’t be long before 1 Gbps is considered entry level and 10 Gbps is the standard way to connect to your cloud provider.

What about the Internet? The Internet has limitations as your path to the cloud. Latency and jitter are unspecified and uncontrolled. Bandwidth can vary when paths become congested. Companies are finding that for high performance applications the Internet is a bit too unpredictable. The more employees you have accessing the cloud, the more you risk productivity by using an indeterminate connection.

High speed Internet connections are a must for Internet service providers, content distributors and large e-commerce sites. The Internet is the only viable way to connect to the public at large. It will be a long time before individual users expect 10 Gig downloads, but large Cable MSOs and wireless service providers need that bandwidth level to divvy up among hundreds or thousands of users.

The same limitations that make the Internet unsuitable for cloud connections also make it unsuitable for massive content transport. Video content distributors have found that the only suitable way to electronically get their content to market is to bypass the Internet and connect directly to their customers, such as Cable and satellite networks. This has spawned the CDN or Content Delivery Network. The CDN is a private network that is designed to transport content at high speed to specific destinations. There is no public traffic on the CDN even though the content is meant for public consumption at the far end.

What does this mean to businesses? If you are involved in e-commerce, video production or distribution or Internet access services, you need a high speed connection to a CDN or the Internet backbone. This is where a dedicated 10 Gigabit Ethernet line can be critical to your operation. That’s true even if it is only a last mile connection.

Are you feeling constrained by the bandwidth limitations of your current service provider? It’s time to get prices and availability for 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to your business location.

Fiber Buildings Offer High Bandwidth

Are you looking to increase your bandwidth connections from the low to medium speeds you can get delivered over twisted pair copper or fixed wireless, on up to the high speeds available only over fiber optic cabling? Would you like to do that while avoiding the often prohibitive construction cost of bringing in new fiber service? Then what you need is a fiber building.

In this case, a fiber building isn’t one that’s made out of carbon fiber construction or anything exotic like that. Fiber doesn’t refer to the construction materials of the structure itself. It refers to the type of telecom services already installed. A fiber building is one that already has fiber optic service brought in and operating. That’s why you often hear them referred to as fiber lit buildings. Lit means that there is laser light shining down those fiber strands and carrying digital payloads.

So, how do you find a fiber building? Peeking in windows after dark won’t work and will probably get you in trouble. You could start calling all the office and industrial buildings in the area and mark the lit building locations on a map. Or you can take the easy approach and use an automated online tool that will do all that legwork for you. It’s called the “Lit Building Locator.” You simply enter the street address of the building you are in now and you’ll get a map of lit buildings in the area and how far they are from you.

The most popular fiber optic bandwidth service being requested now is Metro or Carrier Ethernet. The beauty of Ethernet is that it is the same protocol that you are already running on your corporate LAN. That makes interfacing very easy. Fiber optic Ethernet services include Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) at 1,000 Mbps and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) at 10,000 Mbps. In some cases 40 Gigabit Ethernet is also available for the most demanding applications.

You should be aware that there is another type of fiber optic service that is also installed in “lit” buildings. This is the traditional telecom service called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. Bandwidth services include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 at 2.4 Mbps. Higher speeds include OC-192 at 9.95 Mbps that is compatible with 10 GigE WAN-PHY and OC-768 running at 40 Gbps.

Which fiber service should you choose? There may or may not be a choice. Once a fiber service is brought into a building, competing services generally choose other buildings to light up. Any particular building may be lit for SONET or Ethernet. There is a service called Ethernet over SONET, including 10 GigE WAN-PHY, that can give you the protocol you want even if your building is set up to legacy telco standards. Another reason that customers are asking for Ethernet is that it tends to be less expensive per Mbps than SONET services, where available.

Are you looking for more bandwidth? Why not check for fiber buildings and see if yours or one nearby is lit? If close, you may be able to get a carrier to make the necessary installation with no or discounted construction costs if you will be ordering a high bandwidth level. Perhaps you can find other tenants and pool your request to make the installation even more attractive.



Note: Photo courtesy of Diego Silvestre on Wikimedia Commons.

Fiber Optic ISP

Not so long ago, Internet service came through the telephone as a collection of audible beeps and squeaks. That evolved into dedicated landline and wireless broadband. The next step has already been taken by the largest companies. Now, medium size businesses are also looking for a fiber optic Internet service provider.

Fiber optic Internet service for residential users is the domain of Verizon’s FiOS. Google will soon enter the market on a test basis with a new benchmark of performance: 1 Gbps. But business broadband connections have moved past the Gbps upper limit, with 10 Gbps service becoming more common for major organizations. The technology is proven. The question is how much bandwidth do you need and where do you need it?

The key to fiber optic levels of telecom service is the “lit” building. That’s a location where fiber optic cable has been pulled into the facility and connected to terminal equipment. Once the fiber is lit by a service provider, the building is considered to be “on net” and able to select from a wide variety of service options. This facility can also be a jumping off point to provide fiber optic service to other nearby buildings. The most expensive and time consuming aspect of fiber optic service is the initial fiber construction.

What types of fiber optic bandwidth services are available? They typically fall into two categories. The first is traditional SONET / SDH telecom services. These are the original telco standards for voice and data over fiber optic strands. The most basic service is OC-3 or Optical Carrier, level 3. This is a 155 Mbps bandwidth service based on the same TDM or Time Division Multiplexing technology as copper based T1 and T3 lines. In fact, DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps is most often delivered as part of an OC-3 signal that can transport 3 of these DS3 services.

The SONET standard fiber optic services include OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps, OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps. This highest levels are most often used by carriers, themselves, as their backbone networks.

The other category of fiber optic service is Carrier Ethernet or Metro Ethernet. Ethernet services are standardized at the same levels seen in LAN networks. These are 10 Mbps standard Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps GigE, and 10 Gbps or 10 GigE service. Intermediate service levels are generally available, as Ethernet is readily scalable.

How do you decide between SONET and Ethernet Internet connections? Both are reliable, proven technologies that can deliver the bandwidth you desire. What often differs is availability and price. The best approach is to get a complete selection of fiber optic service quotes from a telecom broker and compare pricing on the services available for your business location. You may be surprised at how affordable the higher bandwidths have become.