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.

100 Gbps Wavelength Service Open for Business

At a time when many businesses are discovering the benefits of Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, the upper limit of bandwidth available to business is, if anything, accelerating. Would you believe that you can now order 100 Gbps wavelength service up and down the West Coast?

That’s not just a small increment over typical 100 Mbps Ethernet. It’s a factor of 1,000x. How on earth can you use this much bandwidth... and where can you get it?

Oddly enough, what’s driving the demand for 100 Gbps bandwidth are the same factors that are establishing 100 Mbps as almost entry level. I say almost because many smaller businesses are just now becoming totally frustrated with their old dependable T1 lines. Today’s online activities drag along at 1.5 Mbps. You really need 10x or 10 to 15 Mbps to do much of anything productively.

Once you get beyond email, general Web surfing, inventory management and customer support, that 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service starts looking pretty attractive. What pushes the capacity of the line is video downloads and streaming, big data and cloud computing. It’s really the move en masse of businesses to the cloud that is generating the stampede to 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 GigE and now 100 Gig Wavelength.

What’s the cloud got to do with it? Pulling up stakes and moving your IT services to the cloud completely changes your network requirements. Ethernet has grown for decades on the model that all of your computers, servers, switches, routers, printers, storage and other assets will connect on a wired, copper or fiber, local network (LAN). Your WAN connection only needs to be big enough to support communications outside the company.

This was no big deal for most companies prior to Internet-everything and outsourcing to the cloud. T1 lines and DS3 bandwidth were plenty to support even mid-size companies. It worked because the vast majority of traffic stayed within the company walls. Only communications to and from remote sites, franchises, some customers and vendors needed to traverse the outside network (WAN).

That was good because the cost of telecom services prior to competitive deregulation was astronomical. In fact, the availability of lower cost bandwidth has been a driver in the rise of the Internet. It’s also been an enabler of relocating data center facilities to colocation centers as a cost savings measure. Once you start moving your servers off-site, it’s an easy jump to the cloud.

That’s really all the cloud is. Each cloud is a very large data center with infrastructure and perhaps software supplied and maintained by a vendor. You no longer need to invest in IT. You rent everything. Payment is by the “seat” by usage or as a monthly fee. No more capital expenses, no more long cycles to upgrade capacity, and no more round the clock staffing to keep everything working.

The only fly in the ointment is the shift in bandwidth requirements from the LAN to the WAN. Your traffic no longer zips around in-house. Instead everything goes to and from your offices over the WAN. All the heavy computing is out there in the cloud. So is the data. If you want to send a file, get a file or perform any process you’ll be doing it over the WAN.

Companies that didn’t take this into consideration are hurting. They’re the ones frantically shopping for higher bandwidth levels at reasonable prices. A slow WAN connection means everybody waits. While your employees are killing time waiting for the system, you are flushing money down the drain.

Fortunately, the cost of high performance bandwidth has been plummeting with the skyrocketing demand and entry of new regional and national fiber optic networks. There’s a mad scramble on now to light every building with fiber and ensure enough capacity in the system to prevent traffic jams. This is where Zayo comes in.

Zayo is a premier international provider of bandwidth infrastructure services with massive fiber optic capacity. This is the company that is establishing 100 Gbps Wavelength services, not just for carriers, but for businesses too. Their initial buildout is in the high tech corridor of the West Coast, from Seattle to Los Angeles. The latest rollouts are the ability to originate and terminate add/drop 100 Gbps service to Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Modesto and Los Angeles. There is a similar network on the Eastern Corridor that includes New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. and a path through Chicago that connects the East and West coasts.

Do you really need 100 Gbps Wavelength service? Probably not unless you are a content distributor, Internet service provider, cloud service provider, large corporation, government agency or massive organization dealing with the biggest of big data operations. Nevertheless, you should know that higher bandwidths are in your future and that fiber is well within reach of most company budgets.

Do you feel constrained by your current modest WAN bandwidth? Now is the perfect time to get a new set of competitive quotes for high speed copper and fiber connectivity just to see what new services are available and how low the costs have plunged since you last went for quotes.


Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.





Note: Photo of high speed traffic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Next Stop 100 Gbps WAN Bandwidth

Big data, cloud computing and HD video are pushing the limits of what we once considered high bandwidth private line and MPLS network connections. Gigabit Ethernet is now popular with companies that have high bandwidth demands. Some firms are moving to 10 GigE, as 1000 Mbps is no longer adequate. If 10 Gigabits per second is also a limiting factor for your business, the time has come to consider 100 Gbps bandwidth.

Most of the larger fiber optic carriers have been busy upgrading their core networks to 100 Gbps. They need this kind of backbone bandwidth to avoid having to install new fiber to meet demand. Few, however, have offered this capacity to their customers.

Zayo is changing the game. They are now offering 100 Gbps as a wavelength service between major cities. The 100 Gbps connections are located in key traffic aggregation points and IP nodes throughout the U.S. This makes the service especially attractive to content producers and large ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who have inherently high bandwidth demands.

Why choose wavelength service versus SONET or Ethernet transport? High bandwidth options is one reason. Another is the ability to specify protocols and security measures. Leasing a wavelength is the next best thing to leasing an entire fiber strand or deploying your own fiber optic cabling. Unless you are in the business of operating a regional or national fiber optic network, the cost of creating all this infrastructure is prohibitive. However, leasing a wavelength may well be within reason.

Wavelength services are created by a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. The idea is that each fiber strand can support much higher bandwidths if fed by multiple lasers instead of just one. Each laser is tuned to operate on a particular frequency or wavelength according to a standard international grid plan. The wavelengths all shine through the fiber simultaneously, but they do not interact. You can think of each wavelength as a separate fiber for most purposes.

How much bandwidth can a wavelength carry? By using simple on-off keying of the beam, a wavelength can transport up to 10 Gbps. For 100 Gbps you would have to combine or aggregate multiple beams or use a more advanced modulation scheme such as CP-DQPSK (Coherent Polarization-Multiplex Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Key) to transmit multiple bits per symbol. With a plug-in card such as the CIsco CRS 1-Port 100 Gigabit Ethernet Coherent DWDM Interface Module, a single wavelength can now transport 100 Gbps. There is standards work underway to extend that to 400 Gbps and eventually 1 Tbps.

Zayo offers wavelength services at 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps, 40 Gbps or 100 Gbps. Diversity and sub-50 msec protection switching is available to improve reliability to carrier standards.you can order single or multiple waves as needed to support your applications. Zayo has the ability to scale bandwidth capacity along their routes to 8 Tbps when such a need arises.

Companies interested in high bandwidth wavelength services are also often interested in low latency. Zayo offers low latency routs with up to 100 Gbps of bandwidth between Seattle, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia to key data centers and financial and enterprise locations. Their low latency routes also include a hop to London as well.

Zayo will continue to deploy their 100G wavelength service across major markets for through the first half of 2013. Their entire network includes 67,000 route miles serving 45 states and Washington D.C. with 10,530 on-net buildings that include 535 data centers, 515 carrier PoPs (points of presence) and 2,743 cell towers. They also offer colocation facilities with over 141,000 square feet under management.

Does your company need higher levels of bandwidth to maintain or improve productivity or support demanding applications? If so, there are fiber optic service options available for 100 Mbps up to 100 Gbps at attractive prices. Competitive quotes are available at no charge.

Zayo Lights Denver With Expanded Fiber Optic Network Services

Zayo Group, a major provider of fiber optic bandwidth infrastructure, has metro fiber networks in the Denver and Colorado Springs metropolitan business districts. Now they are expanding their fiber assets to span the entire Front Range of Colorado that includes the Denver metro area plus Colorado Springs, Boulder, Longmont, Loveland, Greeley and Fort Collins. For Colorado based businesses, this means another 521 miles of fiber to support research and development, technology, education and energy, among other major users. That will bring Zayo up to 900 route miles of fiber optic networking in the Denver area.

What sort of fiber optic services are available to businesses in the Denver area? Pretty much everything you can use from metro connections to Internet access, right on up to wavelength services and dark fiber.

Zayo can offer you classic TDM and SONET based services from DS3 (45 Mbps) right on up to OC-192 (10 Gbps). You can get these configured as point to point private lines, hub/tail arrangements and dedicated ring configurations. There are options for both logical and physical protection with fast failover.

Zayo is also set up to offer you the newer Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) services with speeds that range from 100 Mbps (Fast Ethernet) up to 10 Gbps (10 GigE). These are also available as point to point private lines, but go on to include point to multipoint configurations. These Ethernet services include end to end QoS (Quality of Service) options to prioritize voice, video and private data network traffic. This gives you the ability to converge your network for cost savings and higher productivity.

Does your company need Dedicated Internet Access (DIA)? Who doesn’t? Zayo offers line speeds ranging from 10 Mbps on the low end on up to 1 Gbps. This runs on a fully redundant MPLS network with Service Level Agreements (SLA) available from 99.9% to 99.99% uptime. Choose from Scalable GigE and 10GigE interface options. You also have the ability to connect end to end on Zayo’s nationwide network.

If standard fiber optic line services aren’t quite enough to meet your needs, you can opt for wavelength services over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). Options include 1, 2.5, or 10 Gbps in single or multiple waves. Choose a dedicated point to point data transport solution with defined or undefined routes, single path or dual path, or flexible topologies.

For the ultimate in bandwidth and security options, Zayo can provide you with dark fiber. Since you are leasing entire fiber strands exclusively, you have complete control of the traffic on your piece of the fiber network. This offers stronger security that you can achieve with shared networks. It also gives you complete protocol flexibility and rapid scaling for speeds up to 400 Gbps.

While this particular buildout covers the Denver, Colorado area, Zayo Group provides both nationwide and international connectivity with over 61,000 route miles of fiber, 9,000 buildings and 2,400 cell towers on-net, and 136,000 square feet of colocation space. Their network covers 45 states plus Washington, DC, as well as London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Toronto and Tokyo.

Do you have connectivity needs in Denver or other metropolitan areas that require fiber optic speeds? If so, you should know that there are more options available at lower prices than ever before. Get competitive quotes for fiber optic services that meet your business requirements from Zayo and other high performance service providers.


Note: Photo of Denver skyscrapers courtesy of Sasha Bruck on Wikimedia Commons.