Is 5G Bandwidth Slicing The New Private Network?

By: John Shepler

The Internet is a wonderful way to connect… except when it isn’t. Oh, it works great for much of what we need: universal connectivity, rock bottom cost, and support for most applications. It’s when we need higher than usual performance or extreme reliability that our broadband connections can fall short. Latency, packet loss, and congestion can degrade interactive applications or make them impossible to implement. What to do? Switch to private networks.

What is a Private Network?
The Internet is what is known as a public network. It’s accessible by just about everyone, everywhere. All you need is an account at an ISP, cable company or cell phone provider and you’re connected with always-on broadband.

The beauty of this public network is that it has been built out over several decades so that it literally covers the world. Everyone has equal standing on the Internet. The average user’s traffic gets the same priority as a major corporation, research institute or any of the billions of “things” that are now connected online. This is what is known as network neutrality. The only preferences you can pay up for is a more direct connection to the backbone of the Internet and the amount of bandwidth you have access to.

All this equality sounds great, doesn’t it? Most of the time it serves everyone well. But, if you are trying to have a videoconference at the same time as everyone else is streaming a popular concert or engaged in an important phone call when the rest of the world is doing backups to the cloud, your connection may start to degrade. It’s much worse for high speed interactive gaming, remote surgery, high frequency stock and options trading, or control of an electric vehicle. These applications have a low tolerance for hiccups and delays.

The alternative to the public network is the private network. Your company LAN is a private network. It isn’t shared with every other company or consumers watching online TV. Chances are that it has all the low latency bandwidth you need all the time.

Now, extend that LAN across town or across the country. Can you do that? Yes, you can, but you won’t be building it yourself. Instead, you’ll contract with a network provider that offers private point to point connections. There will be other customers sharing their extensive facilities, but they won’t interfere with you. You will be guaranteed the bandwidth and other network characteristics, such as latency and packet loss, that you contract for.

Types of Private Networks
In the past, nailed-up twisted pair wires, T1 lines and SONET fiber were the way to go. Today, Ethernet over Fiber is the most popular along with MPLS networks.

Ethernet connections use the same protocol as your LAN, so they are easy to interface. You can also order direct point to point, point to multipoint, or mesh networks that connect multiple locations. Ethernet over Fiber offers bandwidths from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps becoming more common.

Some popular uses for these Ethernet services include direct connections to cloud providers, interconnecting multiple business locations, and content delivery.

MPLS networks are a specialized technology that offers connectivity over wide areas, including the entire country or even Internationally. MPLS uses its own unique protocol, making it more secure than IP networks. These are multi-user networks, but are managed so that each customer has the bandwidth promised at all times. MPLS networks with Ethernet on-ramps can give you tremendous coverage at less cost than multiple private lines.

5G Slicing as the New Private Network
More and more applications are portable and mobile these days. That means a wired connection just won’t do. Instead, we settle for wireless Internet services, usually over the extensive cellular networks. This started becoming popular when 3G networks were implemented and really took off with 4G LTE. It’s only continued at a faster pace with 5G networks.

The limitation with even 5G is that you are still dealing with Internet broadband and its foibles. Bandwidth is more limited than with fiber and congestion can bring your applications to a crawl during busy times in crowded areas. A feature designed into 5G offers a way around this for an extra charge.

5G slicing technology allows carriers to partition or “slice” off a part of the available bandwidth for private use. Everybody is clogged up on the freeway, but you get to zip along on your own private road. Pretty nice, right?

5G slicing can give you a more direct connection to the Internet for better performance or can remain as a private network or connection to a private fiber network. It’s like your LAN, but with the freedom of being wireless over wide areas.

On their own campuses, some companies are implementing private 5G networks to gain the same advantages. 5G slicing takes this a step further to give you connectivity anywhere you go. That includes moving vehicles as well as smartphones, tablets and all those “things” the need connectivity but don’t perform well on the Internet.

Issues with 5G Slicing
The implementation of 5G slicing is just starting to roll out, so you may or may not be able to find this service yet. One concern is how much slicing can there be if everybody wants a private piece of the spectrum. While 5G bandwidth, especially on the new higher frequencies, is more plentiful, there are practical limits to how much traffic can be carried over the air. This is why there is still a mad scramble to make more frequencies available for 5G, including some spectrum currently assigned to the military.

Another potential bug-a-boo is the old network neutrality issue. How can a network be neutral when you can pay up for a private box seat? For now, regulators seem to be OK with 5G slicing as long as the main core of the network used for Internet is not prioritized, or that some services aren’t being throttled for competitive advantage. As more and more of the wireless spectrum goes private, it remains to be seen how much pushback there will be.

Would private networking be an advantage for your business? Find out what bandwidth services are available now for your business locations.

Comcast’s 100 Gbps Core Network Supports Business

Major telecom carriers have been in the process of upgrading their core networks from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps over the last year. Comcast is the latest to make the move, fitting Ciena’s Wave Logic 3 interfaces to their current Ciena 6500 packet optical platforms. Why would a cable company do this and how can it benefit your business?

Comcast is best known as a Cable TV company or MSO (Multi-System Operator). They serve over 20 million residential and commercial customers in 40 states and the District of Columbia with video television, high speed Internet and telephone services. You may already know that Comcast broadband service is highly popular for home, home office and small business use. It comes in on a coaxial cable and is highly affordable. But did you also know that Comcast operates one of the largest fiber optic networks in the United States behind the scenes?

Many people think that cable companies still connect everything from their head-end towers and satellite dishes to locations around town using various size coax. That was true in the early days of analog TV cable systems and master antennas for large apartment buildings. The technology has long since moved on. Now everything is digital and the signals ride fiber optic cables most of the distance to your location. It’s that connection from the curb to your building that is still RG-6 coaxial copper wire.

Why? Because it works just fine and the cost of installation has already been paid. DOCSIS 3.0 modems offer broadband Internet in excess of 100 Mbps. That’s is well within the needs of most users. What’s really important to residential, home office and very small business users is low monthly cost combined with adequate performance. The shared asymmetrical bandwidth (higher download than upload speeds) and “best effort” performance is more than adequate for accessing the Internet and downloading documents, pictures and video.

Where HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) services run out of gas is when the need for bandwidth is high, dedicated low latency service is needed, symmetrical upload and download speeds are required, and an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is desired. These characteristics are common for traditional telecom services such as T1, DS3 and SONET fiber and the newer Ethernet services such as FastE at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps and 10 GigE at 10 Gbps.

What isn’t as well known is that Comcast operates an enterprise grade fiber optic core network to interconnect their many offices and provide high bandwidth connectivity to businesses. Would you be surprised to learn that Comcast operates a network that covers 147,000 fiber route miles? How about that business class services are available from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps? Their business class services include dedicated Internet access, point to point Ethernet private lines, Ethernet LAN service to interconnect multiple business locations and converged layer 2 centric VPLS to support voice, video and data.

Comcast, like other major fiber optic carriers, recognizes the increasing demand for higher and higher bandwidth services. What’s driving these speed increases is more use of HD video, big data files and a rapid move to cloud computing services. The cloud, especially, present new challenges for businesses used to having all their processing in-house and connected over the corporate LAN. Cloud service providers offer the opportunity to rapidly scale resources up and down, pay only for what you use during the month, and avoid both capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs. The tradeoff is that you now need much higher and very reliable bandwidth to connect your employees to the cloud.

Comcast’s upgrade to 100 Gbps fiber optic bandwidth meets today’s perhaps tomorrow’s needs for their own use and in support of small, medium and large companies. When even this massive capability fills up, the Ciena system they’ve chosen has an upgrade path to 400 Gbps. It’s likely that we’ll see even higher speeds at 1 Tbps and beyond sooner than anyone expects.

Are you running short on bandwidth and wondering how much you can afford as an upgrade? Get multiple competitive fiber optic service quotes for Comcast Business and other high performance fiber optic carriers now. It’s likely that you can turn up your WAN bandwidth at little or no increase over your current monthly least cost.

Fiber Maps At Your Fingertips

You’d like to move to higher bandwidth services, but you have no idea what that is going to cost. Horror stories of fiber optic construction costs abound. How can you tell if the cost of moving up from copper to fiber optic bandwidth services will be trivial or unacceptable?

The best thing you can do is get a set of competing quotes from many carriers that have facilities in your area. That’s going to take a lot of time and energy, isn’t it? Not if you approach it the right way. By going through a telecom broker, like Telarus, Inc., the effort on your part is next to nothing and you’ll have results quickly. Moreover, you get a comprehensive report that gives you pricing from all the important carriers in your marketplace.

Want to find out right this minute if there is fiber nearby? You can do this in a matter of seconds with just a quick click to the Ethernet Today Shop For Ethernet search box. All you need to do is enter the street address of your building, city, state and zip code and the system will automatically search the database and give you a map and list of buildings lit for Ethernet fiber optic service nearby.

Why Ethernet? The best prices for higher bandwidth services have changed from SONET services, such as OC-3, OC-12 or OC-48, to Ethernet over Fiber services such as 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet or 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). If you request pricing, you can also ask for equivalent SONET service prices so you can compare and see how much you are saving. In some situations, you may already be set up for SONET and happy with the arrangement. That’s fine, but you might as well get better pricing on your next contract.

Location is everything when it comes to fiber optic services. The best situation is already being in a building that is lit for the fiber optic service you want. The bandwidth level isn’t important. What is important is that someone has already paid the cost of bringing in the fiber and getting it working. Fiber has so much bandwidth capacity that there is plenty for whatever your needs require, even if another tenant in the building is already connected to that carrier.

What if you want Ethernet and your building is only lit for SONET? Have a look at the cost figures, including any construction charges, and decide whether it is better to just stick with SONET bandwidth or have Ethernet brought in. Sometimes you can get what’s called Ethernet over SONET that has better pricing than the traditional OCx service levels.

Don’t despair if you aren’t in or next door to a building lit for fiber optic service. Carriers are more competitive than ever. One or more may well waive the construction fees to get your business. The chances of this increase dramatically if you round up other tenants in the building and all offer to subscribe to fiber services with a very attractive combined bandwidth.

Here’s something else. Even buildings too expensive to light with fiber can get bandwidths far above the traditional T1 lines that come in on telco copper. Today’s Ethernet over Copper technology bonds multiple pair to bring in bandwidths of 10, 20, 50 and even 100 Mbps. That’s done over already installed copper wiring, so construction costs are minimal to nothing. This much bandwidth is adequate for many, many businesses.

Are you at least curious as to what fiber optic services may be nearby? If so, instantly check for lit buildings near your location and then request the pricing and recommendations you need to get the best deal for the least cost.

Choosing Dark Fiber vs Lit Fiber Service

When your applications are demanding enough to require fiber optic transmission, you’re faced with a choice. Do you order one of the lit fiber services available for your business location or do you buy or rent dark fiber and create your own transport services?

The tradeoffs can be tricky, so you’ll probably want to set up a spreadsheet to compare the performance, cost and installation time for all the services you are interested in.

Installation time? By focusing strictly on cost, you can get caught in a situation where you’ll have the best deal possible... whenever they can get it installed. That can be weeks or even months if you have a particularly difficult situation. Will that meet your needs? If you do your planning well in advance, it just might. If circumstances conspire to demand an order of magnitude bandwidth increase immediately, availability may trump lease cost.

The dark vs lit fiber tradeoff is the classic own vs rent situation. Most companies choose to survey the marketplace for bandwidth services and pick the least cost solution that meets their needs. That process is made easy by using a telecom broker, like Telarus, Inc., that represents dozens of service providers. If you have enough competition for your business, you can get much better pricing than if you are eye to eye with the only telecom sales person for a hundred miles.

One characteristic of both dark and lit fiber services is that they are extremely location sensitive. There may well be accessible fiber running on your side of the turnpike and nothing on the other side, or vice versa. Some buildings have already been “lit” by a particular carrier while others remain dark. Those dark buildings may or may not justify the construction costs of bringing in new fiber connections depending on location and how much service is needed by the tenants.

Lit fiber falls into several major categories. The traditional telecom service is SONET/SDH with OC-3 as the lowest bandwidth of 156 Mbps. An OC-3 can also carry 3 multiplexed DS3 circuits at 45 Mbps each. It’s common for companies to order DS3 and have it delivered by fiber optic cables of much higher capacity. Other SONET levels are OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps.

The hot competition for fiber optic bandwidth is Carrier Ethernet. Ethernet tends to be both more scalable and lower cost than SONET where it is available. That availability is becoming more and more common, thanks to aggressive build-outs by competitive carriers and business demand for higher bandwidths at lower costs.

Typical fiber optic Ethernet service levels are 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 250 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps 10GigE. Lower bandwidth such as 50 Mbps Ethernet that competes directly with DS3 may be provisioned on either copper or fiber, depending on the carrier’s available equipment.

Coming on strong for higher bandwidth fiber optic connections is wavelength services. When you order a wavelength, you are getting a virtual fiber all to yourself. Of course, there are many wavelengths on the same physical glass fiber strand, but they differ in color and do not interact. Wavelength services may sense for 10 Gbps requirements, with the added advantages of low latency and high security. With an entire wavelength dedicated to your use, you can use a different protocol than other customers on the fiber. You may be running Ethernet while others are running SONET.

The ultimate in flexibility is dark fiber. By leasing a dark fiber run, you have all the wavelengths at your disposal. You’ll have to buy the termination equipment for each end, but then you’ll have the option to light up as few or many wavelengths as you want. You can run a different protocol on each wavelength and even operate with something non-standard or experimental. Usually it is the largest companies with the most complex IT requirements that go the dark fiber route.

What type of fiber optic service makes the most sense for your operation? Don’t jump to any conclusions until you get a complete set of prices and install times for fiber optic options available for your business location or locations.



Note: Light bulb photo courtesy of Ulfbastel on Wikimedia Commons.

AboveNet Core Wave Makes Dedicated Wavelength Bandwidth Available

What do you do when ordinary bandwidth is no longer up to the task? You go above and beyond with AboveNet’s Core Wave service. For demanding financial services, media, health care, retail and government applications, you really do have to get to the core of fiber optic transport. The very core.

Most telecom services are electrically multiplexed somewhere along the way. What multiplexing does is combine your bandwidth service with dozens, hundreds or thousands of others to fill the capacity of a fiber optic core network. But what if you have enough demand on your own to take all the bandwidth a service provider can deliver?

One answer is to become your own service provider. You do this buy building-out or buying fiber strands or even entire fiber optic cables. That’s what Cable TV MSOs do. So do major telecom service providers. But bandwidth is their business. It’s what they do to generate income. You aren’t really in the business of bandwidth. You simply want to use large amounts of bandwidth to enable your business processes. Does investing large amounts of capital in fiber infrastructure really make sense for your corporate mission?

Of course it doesn’t. What does make sense is to partner with a service provider that has already made the investment and has enough bandwidth capacity at their disposal to meet your current and future needs. AboveNet has that capability and now they are making it available to large organizations in major markets.

Let’s take a look at AboveNet Core Wave. It’s a high capacity bandwidth service for point to point connectivity in metro areas, like New York City. Right now you can get 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps service. The platform is scalable, so that when demand justifies it AboveNet can also offer 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps bandwidth services.

How are they doing this? The platform is built on a fiber optic network managed by ROADMs. A ROADM is a Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexer. This is the cutting edge of fiber optic networking. What a ROADM does is manage the traffic on the network optically. Each fiber transports not one, but many different light beams known as Lambdas or wavelengths. Each wavelength is said to have a different color, although these are in the infrared spectrum and not visible like the colors from a prism. A ROADM can manage dozens or hundreds of wavelengths in a process known as DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing.

Normally wavelengths have such high carrying capacity that they transport traffic for many companies. But Core Wave gives you the option of having your own dedicated wavelength. The wavelength is like a blank slate to be written on, so you are not forced into the protocol of the core network. AboveNet gives you the choice of Ethernet, SONET/SDH, or Fibre Channel for storage networking.

Are your bandwidth needs pressing the limits of conventional telecom services? If so, perhaps it is time you moved up to fiber optic wavelength services, like AboveNet Core Wave. Why not check pricing and availability now? There is likely more capacity available than you think.

Ethernet Is The New T1

You've been hearing about the rise of Metro Ethernet as a desirable access technology for businesses WAN connections. The key word has been "metro." Metro is short for metropolitan, which means larger cities with their larger, concentrated business districts. They've been the first target of competitive bandwidth providers with IP core networks and lower per-Mbps pricing. But you have to be located downtown or in a large suburb to take advantage of Ethernet WAN services, right?

Not for long. Hatteras Networks has just announced a line of repeater and line power modules that can enable service providers to deliver Mid-Band Ethernet up to 25 miles over ordinary twisted pair telephone wire.

Hey, wait a second. Hasn't this been the domain of T1 lines? You bet it has. The competitive advantage of T1 lines is that they can be deployed on two pair of ordinary twisted pair copper. That's the type of telco wiring that's been pulled into nearly every business for multi-line telephone service.

T1 lines are reasonably cheap and available just about anywhere you can get landline phone service. After all, T1 is just a digital service that runs on the same type of wiring as analog voice. The key to making T1 as popular as it is has been is the repeater or regenerator. This is a device that you install a mile or so down the line to boost the signal so it can go farther. As a digital repeater, the voltage of the signal is amplified and the shape of the digital waveform is regenerated or brought back to its original specs. When the signal leaves the regenerator on its way down the line, it looks just the same as it did when it left the original T1 router.

How far can you repeat a T1 signal in practice? About 25 miles is reasonable. That puts nearly every business, including those in rural areas, within reach of a telco office that provides T1 line service.

But now Hatteras has done the same thing for Ethernet over Copper or EoC services. EoC has been in demand in metro areas because businesses can get anywhere from 5 to 45 Mbps of bandwidth without having to pay expensive construction costs to bring in fiber optic services. The hitch is that your building had to be within a few miles of the carrier's POP or Point of Presence. Those are similar to a telephone company's CO or Central Office. But with this new repeater equipment, competitive carriers will now be able to offer Ethernet services far from their metropolitan POPs. It's the long-awaited high bandwidth solution for suburban, exurban and rural areas.

Carrier Ethernet services are still in the rapid growth phase. What you can get for your business depends on location and which competitive carriers have a service footprint in your area. Use the easy Etherent Building Services Finder to see what's now available in the way of high bandwidth / low cost Ethernet for business addresses.