Can You Use 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps Circuits?

By: John Shepler

The move to business software in the cloud increased the demand for high speed, low latency bandwidth. The introduction of AI ups the ante even more. What used to be considered high bandwidth may now be an impediment to getting work done. Fortunately, higher bandwidth circuits in the range of 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps are now readily available and at reasonable prices.

What Higher Bandwidth Offers
Why increase your bandwidth to 10 Gbps or above? Because you need it. Or, if you don’t absolutely need it, the improvement in performance and productivity justify the additional cost.

The amount of bandwidth you need is driven by the traffic on your WAN or point to point networks. As long as there is enough and the quality is high enough, the lines are essentially invisible. As soon as there are more packets ready to transfer than there is capacity to transfer them, trouble begins. Your circuit becomes congested. It shows up as increased latency, as packets must be buffered to wait their turn.

Response from the Internet and cloud slows down. Telephone calls have delays even to the point of sounding like you are on a two-way radio. Some packets might get lost creating garbled audio. Same for video. Two way conferencing gets jerky or frozen and may have missing pieces. Anything in real time suffers. Frustration by users increases. Workflow slows.

What Drives the Need for Higher Bandwidth?
Text messaging and email are now the least of the bandwidth drivers. Telephone audio might be if you have a large operation or a call center. Video for conferencing and watching online streaming is definitely a bandwidth driver. Don’t forget that more and more business processes are now being conducted in the cloud or at colocation data centers. The days of everything running on a server and some disk drives in the same building are gone for most everyone. At least some of what you do is processed remotely. That could be ordering, inventory, accounting, simulation and so on.

Replacing a sea of stand-alone PCs with a LAN was the first step. Now the LAN connects to a WAN and Dedicated Internet Access. The amount of traffic leaving the building is often more than what is handled strictly inside.

Don’t Forget About Big Data and AI
Data sets are becoming huge as more and more business and customer data is electronic. You don’t need more file cabinets, but you do need more disk space, including remote backup for safety.

AI is something new that consumes data and bandwidth like never before. As staffs are being encouraged to up their inference level and use as many tokens as they can to gain skill with AI models, the load on the connection circuits increases. Training can be even more of a overwhelming load as data bases have to be uploaded to the model. All of this is a demand on your network you probably didn’t see coming. But it’s here and it is only going to increase.

What Bandwidth is Available?
Most everyone needs Internet access and the best type for most business is DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. That is essentially a private line between your office and your service provider. Most of the congestion comes in the first mile when circuits are shared among many companies and residential users to save cost. Casual and undemanding users may not even notice the difference, but highly demanding businesses can easily see variations in performance throughout the day that are largely unpredictable.

Another form of private connection is direct cloud access, which connects you to your data center or cloud provider without going through the Internet. No sharing means faster and more consistent performance.

Dedicated private lines may also be leased to interconnect your facilities directly. This is like extending your LAN to cover multiple locations. Once again, no traffic sharing with other businesses and definitely no traffic sharing with the general public. Better performance and better security.

Is your network not keeping up with today’s needs? Increase productivity and future proof your connections with Dedicated Internet Access, direct cloud access, dedicated private lines, wavelengths and even dark fiber with bandwidth from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps and above.

Big Data Needs Big Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Bandwidth levels are growing almost exponentially. One of the major infrastructure build-outs underway is a move to 100 Gbps or 100 GigE wavelength service on cross-country and international routes. It seems that Gigabit Ethernet was introduced only a few years ago and thought impractical for all but the most demanding business applications. Now GigE is almost considered entry level in some quarters. What could possibly be behind this massive increase in bandwidth demand?

It All Started With Video
It is said that most of the world’s Internet traffic is now video. That’s right, not telephone calls, not file transfers, not even big graphics. Video alone is sucking up as much bandwidth as it can get. That’s not likely to change, either. SD video has migrated to HD video and 4K video is well on the way. How soon will the marketplace demand 8K video across the board?

Every increase in pixel density cranks up the bandwidth requirement to transport high quality images. Compression can help a great deal, but there’s a tradeoff between picture quality and depth of compression. Broadcasters and video producers really want to transport uncompressed video and leave the compression artifacts to be dealt with in the final link to the consumer.

Send In The Clouds
When cloud services meant taking all night to back up the day's files as a contingency to local storage, bandwidth levels weren’t too demanding. That’s all changed. The cloud is no longer just a non-critical backup service. It’s the main data center for many companies.

What’s sometimes forgotten is that your WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth becomes far more critical when key processes move to the cloud. Networking is much easier and cheaper when you’re talking about hundreds of feet within your own facilities. When you have to take that same flood of traffic and send it over a common carrier to get to your remote data center or cloud provider, line demands go way up. Remember, the WAN used to be just to link facilities and for communication with the outside world. Now it’s the main artery for everything you do.

What that means is that WAN bandwidth demands jump by 10, 100 or 1000 times. Other characteristics, like jitter, latency and packet loss, become huge factors in how well your cloud processes perform. If you scrimp in any of these areas, you may find yourself frustrated by underperforming processes and even losing productivity instead of gaining efficiency.

You Think the Internet of People Is Demanding?
Online business applications are generating more and more interesting and potentially useful data. Mobile apps with location services fall into this category. Pretty much anything that you do online has some potential value in customizing services or creating statistical data to improve marketing. That’s a flood of data that has to be handled by wireless and fiber connections.

Human generated big data is nothing compared to what we’ll be dealing with when the Internet of Things (IoT) gets rolling. For every person online, there will be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of “things” chatting wildly and generating volumes of data that would be useful if it could only get where it can be analyzed and put to use. That’s going to multiply the load on every communications channel.

Will they be able to handle it? Not with yesterday’s creaky links. Everything will need an upgrade. It’s in process now. Wireless channels are being expanded as fast as they can be rounded up and auctioned. Current 4G standards will become 5G and then 6G before you know it. But, what about terrestrial lines?

Fortunately, the bandwidth of fiber optic cables is nearly limitless from our current point of view. The 1 to 10 Gbps or so capacity of each strand can be multiplied by multiplexing dozens to hundreds of wavelengths. Wavelengths can be aggregated to create larger services of 100 Gbps and beyond. The build buildout now is 100 Gbps. Soon that will be 400 Gbps and then 1 Tbps, and it will happen sooner that we think.

Is yesterday’s bandwidth keeping you from becoming tomorrow’s high performance company? You should know that bandwidth prices have been falling almost as fast as demand has been increasing. The bandwidth upgrade you need may fit well within your budget. Want to find out? Get prices and availability on high performance fiber optic bandwidth services now.



Note: Products with the humorous theme "Big Data On Board" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

Do You Still Have Broadband?

By: John Shepler

If you’ve had the feeling that Internet broadband speeds have been accelerating lately, you’d be right. Broadband service was an amazing improvement on dial-up access when it was first introduced and then quickly took over. For a lot of years a few Mbps seemed plenty fast enough. Then 10 Mbps became the benchmark to shoot for. Now businesses are moving quickly to 100 Mbps and beyond, while the FCC is codifying 25 Mbps as the threshold where broadband begins. What does this really mean and what does it portend for the future?

What Does The New Standard Represent?
Official broadband standards have never been a leading indicator. They are set after a technology is well proven and the need clearly demonstrated. The move from 4 Mbps to 25 Mbps is quite a jump and it tells you something important about where bandwidth requirements are going. Is 25 Mbps the end of the road for awhile? Not likely and here’s why.

Few individuals and fewer businesses are going to pay up for higher line speeds for simple bragging rights. Something is driving the need to upgrade and then upgrade some more. The big factors are the move from local to remote resources and the nature of content itself.

The Rapid Growth of Computing Requirements
Remember message boards? Digital communications used to mean ASCII text transmissions. No need to press up against the speed of light just to get a few KB of characters to a distant server. It was the text-based model of computing that prompted Bill Gates to declare that 640K of RAM was plenty for the original PC, because who could possibly need more? Well, nobody did when the migration was starting from 64KB 8-bit processors. In just a few years, 640 KB was a joke. How long before 640 GB becomes a limitation? Probably sooner that any of us think possible.

Processor speeds have bumped up against some practical manufacturing limits, but the way around that is multiple processors. Memory, both RAM and Disk (now solid state), are sill growing. Bandwidth? Why is anybody surprised that WAN bandwidth requirements are going up when processing capability and memory are steadily increasing?

What's Next?
Computers always seem on the verge of not being able to keep up with us because of the functions we ask them to do. Text? That’s kids stuff. Photos? Easy. HD and 4K video? That’s more of a challenge. Will 4K be fully deployed before 8K starts to take over? What then?

You might think that software is getting less sophisticated because of the relatively small size of downloaded apps compared with some of the huge software packages that used to come in fancy cardboard boxes. That’s an illusion. The real power of of the apps we use is in all of the back-end processing that is going on at some remote server. Now everything is being tied to locality (with GPS) and highly personalized. A lot of this personalization is subtle and automatic. The system watches your behavior instead of you having to manually input a bunch of parameters.

Big data was a big bottleneck when it had to be handled locally. Just how much of a database can you put on a PC and how much grief is it going to be to keep up to date and accurate? Enormous data bases in equally enormous data centers can present a wealth of opportunity. The way the investment in gathering and managing all this data makes sense is to keep it simple for the end user. That doesn’t mean the system is simple. It just means that you and I are only dealing with the tip of the iceberg when we access these systems.

Big Data, Big Support Required
Big Data and sophisticated business applications have driven IT to a new architecture: The Cloud. The cloud pools all the processing and memory you can possibly use in a system that allows individual tenants to scale resources up and down at will. What you don’t need right now can be used by someone else. The resources they release can be put to work on your growing applications. As long as there are sufficient resources above and beyond what everybody needs at the moment, the system appears to be infinitely expandable.

What often isn’t infinitely expandable or even seems that way is bandwidth. The WAN connection, be it a dedicated line or Internet connection, has become the new bottleneck. Think of those clouds as enormous lakes full of data and you are getting your share through an old garden hose.

The way businesses are going to continue accelerating productivity is to let the machines do more and more of the work. Paper pushing is already a thing of the past in most clerical operations. Manually filling out forms is as obsolete as standing at a drill press or using a scythe to cut grain. Make no mistake that performance will continue to increase and probably accelerate. If you don’t make it happen, competitors will. That means more and more sophisticated processing, more mobility, and more data to present in simple, usable formats, more flexibility in manufacturing (think 3D printing) and larger data communication channels.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough
In the long run, we have no idea how many Gbps or Tbps or Pbps will be needed. Right now, we can make some good estimates on what’s needed immediately and what that will grow to over the next few years.

Single digit Mbps connectivity has had its day. The only place T1 lines are still appropriate is for simple point of sale terminals and remote locations where there really isn’t any better solution. Bonding T1 lines can take you to 10 or 12 Mbps, but that’s just a stopgap. You’ll be needing more in the future.

If the consumer threshold for broadband is 25 Mbps, then that seems like a reasonable amount for businesses too. Granted, most business users aren’t creating or consuming a stream of HD movies all day. But they are accessing cloud applications, doing desktop or conference room video conferencing, sharing large files among business locations and running the phone system in the cloud. Remember that one consumer or a family is using that 25 Mbps. Your business demands per person may not be as consistently high, but you have lots of them on the same line. Productivity is also more of an issue when you are paying people. You don’t really want them sitting around waiting for the computers.

That argues for at least 10 Mbps for really small operations and 25 to 50 Mbps more commonly. Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps used to be expensive and hard to come by. Now it’s reasonably priced and readily available. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for a medium size office to have 100 Mbps broadband… especially when that 100 Mbps may not cost much more than the 1.5 Mbps T1 line you budgeted for when you first got broadband many years ago.

Larger companies or sophisticated operations creating video content or doing 3D printing on an industrial scale can easily justify Gigabit Ethernet. So can school districts and anybody else with hundreds of simultaneous users.

How about really big companies? The new threshold may well be 10 Gbps Ethernet or 10 GigE. That service is readily available in metro areas and 100 GigE is starting to deploy nationwide on some carriers. This is where the upper end will be soon. Can Tbps service be far behind? It’s in development now.

Ethernet is the Way to Go Now
Note that all of these recommended services are Carrier Ethernet based. That’s where the industry is going for ease of interfacing and rapidly scalability. Like cloud resources, connectivity changes will be on-demand as well.

How is your company doing for broadband? Feeling the squeeze as you try to get more packets through the old lines? Feeling put upon now that the FCC has declared your connection as below broadband standards? Not to worry. Faster fiber optic bandwidth connections are plentiful and now cost much less than you might think. This is a good day to make a broadband upgrade.

What’s to Become of Data Centers?

Both large scale colocation centers and traditional in-house company data centers are being challenged by cost and technology. Here’s a quick graphical look at what’s going on right now in this infographic courtesy of David Vellante on Wikibon:


Your Data Center Options
Are you thinking that it may not make sense to invest in a new data center or continue running the one you have now? There are a wide range of options available from colocation at a major commercial data center to cloud hosted services to choose from. Call now toll free at (888) 848-8749 to speak with a product specialist who can recommend everything from WAN connectivity up to complete IT outsourcing or describe your data center needs for quick quotes on appropriate services.

100 Mbps Fast Ethernet for your Business

By: John Shepler

Are you feeling the pinch of too little bandwidth to support your more sophisticated business applications, such as cloud services, big data, VoIP telephony, video conferencing or simple video downloads? It’s a good time to take a look at making the move to 100 x 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet service. Let’s have a look at a quick video on Fast Ethernet:


Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps is just one option of many offered by Carrier Ethernet providers. You can get bandwidths as low as 10 Mbps or as high as 10 Gbps to support you business needs. What’s even better is that you have the option to order the bandwidth you need today with an easy upgrade path when you need more. By installing a port that can handle your anticipated needs, you can pay for what you need now and add bandwidth incrementally with no more than a simple phone call.

Learn more about Ethernet bandwidth options for your business with free consultation and instant online pricing.

How Can You Cope With Big Data?

Just how big is this big data we keep hearing about? Let’s have a look…


Are you feeling vulnerable to an avalanche of big data that could bury your company or would you simply like the resources to take advantage of this cornucopia of information? Make sure you have the infrastructure and connectivity. See what cloud and connection services are available for your company location now.

A Graphical Introduction to Big Data

Scratching your head, trying to figure out what all the hoopla is about Big Data? Perhaps this handy infographic will help...



Now, are you feeling a bit short on bandwidth to handle your own “big” data, cloud services, backup and recovery or file transfers? Upgrading is less expensive than you think. Get instant pricing on affordable copper and fiber business bandwidth now.


Thanks to Wikibon Infographics for this infographic on Big Data.

Big Data Makes Big Push For 100 Gigabit Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Just a few years ago the notion that businesses and government agencies needed 100 Gbps WAN bandwidth seemed absurd. Why, the provider’s core networks ran mostly at 10 Gbps, with some moving to 40 Gbps to handle high traffic levels from many simultaneous customers. Today, those same customers are expecting their service providers to give them the option of 40 Gbps and even 100 Gbps connectivity.

What could be causing this massive increase in bandwidth requirements? Two words: Big data. Big Data offers big opportunities to enhance business processes and mine databases, but it consumes big processing, big storage and big bandwidth. Big storage and big processing have been the focus of cloud computing providers as well as data center expansions. Big bandwidth is now the last piece of the puzzle to be put in place to create an integrated solution.

Where is all this bandwidth going? Some of it goes to interconnecting multiple business locations. Other connections go to remote data centers for disaster backup and recovery. Some is needed to communicate with customers and suppliers. In the case of content producers, large amounts of bandwidth are needed to transport that content to the local service providers, like cable companies, or directly to the end user. The latest wrinkle is the rapid rise of cloud computing solutions. Putting those cloud resources to best use is proving to require massive increases in bandwidth.

The reason that cloud computing needs big bandwidth is that most of the traffic that used to be carried on the LAN now needs to be carried through the WAN. The enterprise data center with all its processors and disk drives is generally located in proximity to the users so that the organization can have control of the network connections. This has the dual benefit of minimizing costs because there are no traffic fees and increasing security because the entire network is under local control.

The cloud changes this equation. Processing and storage is moved to a remote data center and most of the local data center facilities go dark. The local network still connects all of the PCs, printers, SIP telephones, switches, routers and other devices. Some servers may still stay local. But the big data processing is done elsewhere where there are enough compute resources to crunch all that big data into more bite size pieces. The issue is how to get all that data to and from the cloud.

What happens when you skimp on WAN bandwidth? The cloud keeps running at full speed, but its inputs and outputs slow to a crawl. Think of a WAN connection as a pipe, as it is sometimes called, and you can visualize how too small of a pipe keeps the flow (of data) at a trickle. The local experience is that the system isn’t very responsive and interactions can become unpredictable. There can be big congestion delays where nothing happens on the screen for long periods of time. What’s worse, you don’t know if you’ll have a result in half a second, half a minute or who knows how long? That’s a productivity killer if there ever was one.

People to cloud communications is critical for high employee productivity, but machine to machine communications can be more important. It’s the machines that generate data at a rate humans can’t possibly equal. Those machines might be data banks, sensors, machine tools, video cameras & displays, server farms and so on. What’s important is that they are not constrained by the capacity of the communication channel.

tw telecom is one of the latest carriers to announce that it has introduced 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps business Ethernet services in the 75 metro markets that it serves. These services are in addition to the 2.5 and 10 Gbps bandwidth options that have been in place for some time. Traditional fiber optic technology offers up to 10 Gbps on a single fiber strand or one of several wavelengths that share that strand. Bonding multiple wavelengths using DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) increases that carrying capacity up to 40 or 100 Gbps with a single connection to the user.

Who needs 100 Gbps bandwidth? Right now it’s only the largest corporations, financial institution, research labs or government agencies. But how long ago was it that DS3 at 45 Mbps was considered big bandwidth and OC-3 entry level fiber at 155 Mbps was plenty for most enterprises? Today 100 Gbps is on the cutting edge of technology. Tomorrow that level might be considered par for the course or even entry level for many businesses.

Would your organization’s productivity benefit from a bandwidth increase? You may not need anywhere near 100 Gbps, but you should know that fiber options from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps are readily available and more affordable that you imaging. Get fiber optic bandwidth options available for your business locations.

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.

Dark Fiber for Bandwidth and Security

The step up from copper-based bandwidth solutions to fiber optic connections is an important and necessary move for many companies. For others, it’s just not enough. Where do you go when the best service options on fiber optic lines don’t have the bandwidth or security features that you require? Dark fiber steps in where lit fiber falls short.

How can lit fiber service fall short of the mark? After all, It’s possible to get as much as 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit SONET or Ethernet delivered to your door. In some cases, you can push this to OC-768 or 40 Gbps. The carriers themselves are upgrading their backbone networks to 100 Gbps.

All true, but some companies still have a need for more bandwidth, more control and more security. You get those things when you control the fiber itself rather than a service that runs on the fiber and is available to any paying customer.

What you may be looking for is called dark fiber. It’s dark because it hasn’t been “lit” with laser light yet. This is fiber that has been installed in the ground or on poles overhead but not pressed into service. There was a enormous fiber buildout in the late 1990’s that led to a fiber glut less than a decade later. The fiber was installed in anticipation of a major boom in Internet services that went flat when the tech bubble burst at the turn of the century.

Some of that fiber is still available for lease. Most, though, has been acquired and now more dark fiber is being installed. This time there looks to be no end to the demand for business bandwidth. Big data, health care automation, a move from local data centers to the cloud, and other advances are changing the landscape for business. There really isn’t any going back to the days of paper filled file cabinets or even software packages running on local PCs. We’re becoming more and more interconnected and both the size of data files and the necessary speeds of transmissions are increasing.

Carriers, financial institutions, research labs, video production companies and others who generate massive traffic may be interested in leasing dark fiber to connect two or more locations within a metro district or between cities. A number of large network operators have dark fiber assets for lease, including Zayo with fiber in the ground in many cities.

On campus, you might think about trenching your own fiber optic cable. Beyond that, you need to lease fiber from a company that is in the business of installing fiber over long distances. They invest by burying multiple cables with multiple fiber strands along the routes where they have permission to dig. You’ll probably be leasing one or two strands out of a hundred or more within the cable. Those will be your strands for the duration of the lease. You’ll need to install the equipment at both ends of the fiber run to transport your data.

The way to transport really massive amounts of data from point to point is to use Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) to send multiple laser beams at slight different wavelengths or colors through the fiber. Each beam is independent and transports anywhere from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps. DWDM might generate 100 or more separate wavelengths. Each wavelength can transport any protocol you desire independently of what any other wavelengths are doing.

Dark fiber security comes from the fact that you control the entire fiber strand. Only your equipment is connected to it. That gives any potential intruders no access points to tap into your data streams. If you need even more guarantees of security, you can always choose to encrypt your packets while they are traversing the fiber.

You don’t have to go all the way from SONET or Ethernet over Fiber to Dark Fiber. You can simply lease one or more wavelengths or go with a managed fiber solution where the fiber provider also installs and operates the termination equipment at each end. They are essentially expertly managing your fiber for you for a fee.

Do you have requirements beyond what common bandwidth solutions can accommodate? If so, find out what dark fiber assets and managed fiber services are available for the locations you have in mind.



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

Transforming the WAN Into The Smart WAN

We often think of WAN connections as dumb pipes. Perhaps even the “series of tubes” that Senator Ted Stevens envisioned as a model for the Internet. Data goes in one end and comes out the other. Does it need to be any more sophisticated than that?

These days it truly does. The move from predominately in-house data centers and simple file transfers over the LAN to cloud hosted systems, VoIP telephony and video content has changed what we need from the WAN. Level 3 calls this the Smart WAN. This short animated video illustrates the difference...



Clearly, if you’re sitting in line at the bank drive-through, watching people load their transactions into those plastic carriers and shooting them through the vacuum tubes to the tellers, and start thinking, “Hmmm. That’s not a bad model for my WAN network,” you could be in serious need of a Smart WAN upgrade.

It all starts with a smart pipe to replace dumb pipe technology. Instead of just cramming everything down the same conduit without regard to content, you need put some method into the madness. That means CoS or Class of Service. CoS recognizes that some packets are more sensitive than others to vagaries of the network. Most sensitive is anything operating two-way in real time. VoIP telephony will fail when it encounters the least blockage or delay in the WAN. Video conferencing has a similar sensitivity to network characteristics.

What CoS does is assign different classes or priorities to different packet streams. Brute force file transfers go to the bottom of the list. It is important that the files get from point A to point B intact, but a little delay here and there won’t make any difference. The same is true for email and most messaging. Interactive business applications are a step higher. If you are interacting with SaaS in the cloud and expect it be as responsive as if it were running on the servers down the hall, your network has to make these interactions transparent. Bandwidth constrictions and latency can raise employee frustrations to a fever pitch, if not kill productivity completely.

Enterprise VoIP on converged IP networks offers major cost reductions and added productivity features for businesses that can make it work. The Hosted PBX model adds another layer of sensitivity because the WAN gets involved in handling voice traffic as well as data. Latency, jitter and packet loss wreak havoc with voice communications. Just because convergence works on your LAN doesn’t mean that sending the same traffic down a dumb pipe will give an equally good result.

Now consider having the same set of services expecting the same quality for multiple business locations, including headquarters, branch offices, retail locations, warehouses and factories. Clearly, some intelligence needs to be injected to the WAN network to ensure that every location has the same connectivity and quality of service as every other.

Has your company grown beyond the capability of simple, dumb WAN connections to ensure quality and reliability of service? If so, it’s time to consider a Smart WAN upgrade for your network operations. You may even find that this improved performance comes at equal or less cost that what you have now.

Handle Big Data With Big Bandwidth

We are said to be entering the age of big data. Just what is big data, why is it different than any other type of data, and what are the ramifications of having big data on our networks?

Big data is exactly what it sounds like. It refers to datasets that are so huge that they overwhelm normal database management tools. We’re not talking megabytes or gigabytes here. Those are easily handled by off the shelf tools. Big data is terabytes, petabytes, exabytes and zettabytes. If you don’t know what those are, just know that each named step up in size represents an increase of 1,000 times.

Where is all this big data coming from? It’s not the sort of thing you generate typing on your PC. Big data comes from computer generated simulations, process and financial modeling, research projects and sensor data acquisition and processing. Computer animation and video processing in high definition and beyond can spit out terabytes faster than you know what to do with them.

What is all this big data going to do to your network, especially your WAN network? Check out this video from Level 3 Communications to get a feel for what’s on the way and how you can deal with it...



As you can see, WAN bandwidth is likely to be the big choke point for big data. It’s because we’re used to dealing with relatively small files and modest applications such as video conferencing and VoIP. We're also used to handling incremental growth in bandwidth needs by scaling up bandwidth services we are already using.

Big data is going to change that. Instead of incremental change, we’re talking step changes. Bonding more T1 lines or moving up to a DS3 service isn’t going to do the trick. You’ll need fiber, and likely a fiber optic solution that has a lot of room for growth.

Fortunately, there a lot more fiber options available today than even a short while ago. These include Ethernet over Fiber to 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps and even 40 Gbps. Carrier core networks are now moving to 100 Gbps as quickly as they can. Other options include wavelength services over Dense Wavelength Division Modulation (DWDM) at up to 10 Gbps per wavelength and dark fiber that you can light yourself.

Are you feeling the pinch of too little WAN bandwidth right now, or see it coming in the near future? If so, this is a good time to check out your options from carriers that have the capacity to support your big data network needs. Get competitive fiber optic bandwidth options and prices for whatever capacity your business needs.