Wavelength Services For The Enterprise

Once needed only by telecom carriers, wavelength services are now available for enterprise users. These higher bandwidth fiber optic services are needed by hospitals, medical centers, banks, financial institutions, service providers to government, video production and distribution houses, content delivery networks and research facilities. Every day more applications cross that threshold of needing faster pipes to transfer data. Should those faster pipes be wavelength services?

A wavelength or lambda is light at a particular frequency or color. This characteristic is generally expressed in terms of wavelength in nanometers rather than frequency in terabits per second. Just as frequencies can be multiplexed to create a broadband wireline service, wavelengths can be multiplexed to offer multiple paths through a single fiber strand.

The multiplexing process at the physical level for fiber optics is called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. There are two technologies available. CWDM or Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing creates anywhere from 2 to 20 independent wavelengths, with 16 being a standard. DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing requires more precise equipment to create from 40 to 128 or more independent wavelengths.

As you can imagine, having dozens of independent wavelengths per fiber optic core and perhaps 100 cores in a cable, the amount of available bandwidth is truly staggering. So much so, that carriers are leasing out entire wavelengths to companies and organizations that need high bandwidth conduits. Wavelength services are similar to point to point T1 lines in that you have exclusive use of the wavelength. While the wavelengths in any particular core may be leased by dozens of different users, any multiplexing on the particular wavelength you are leasing is up to you. It's a private line service, with the line being a particular wavelength of light.

What bandwidths are available on these wavelength services? Commonly available speeds are 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps. Other increments of 1 Gbps and 5 Gbps are also increasingly available. Need more than 10 Gbps? It's possible to get as much as 40 Gbps in some areas. Can 100 Gbps be far behind?

Another advantage of wavelength services is that they are not locked into a particular protocol. You can use your wavelengths to transport Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), Gigabit Ethernet, SONET OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, Fibre Channel, ESCON and Frame Relay.

Who's offering wavelength services suitable for large enterprise and other organizational use? Major competitive carriers such as Level 3, XO Communications and AboveNet have these and other fiber optic bandwidth services available right now. If you have a serious application that needs connectivity at this level, find out what wavelength services are available for your business locations.

10 Gig E WAN Comes To The Enterprise

Amazing as it sounds, 10 Gigabit Ethernet wide area network connections are now possible for business applications. Perhaps even more surprising are the number of businesses that can actually use this level of bandwidth.

Gigabit Ethernet is just starting up the growth curve for major corporations and high technology companies who's products and services depend on creating enormous data sets and being able to deliver them instantly to their customers. What kind of companies are those?

For anyone engaged in video production or editing, Gigabit per second pipes are no extravagance. Even short video productions chew up hundreds of Megabytes in a matter of minutes. Uncompressed high definition video can do that in seconds. It matters not if you have Terabytes or Petabytes of storage available if there is no practical way to transfer those productions in any reasonable amount of time.

Medical imaging is another high demand generator of data. MRI, CT, and X-Ray images create large files for each picture and image set. As the medical profession moves more and more from physical to electronic files, the amount of data will surely multiply and then multiply again. It's now possible to have a physician in Asia read a medical image from the U.S. during what is the middle of the night for us, but standard business hours in India or China. Being able to use medical consultants worldwide depends on having rapid communications for both text and images.

Scientific research and Engineering are fields that have moved away from notebooks and analog gauges to computer-aided drawing, manufacturing and modeling. Complex projects, such as new building design, collaboration on aircraft design, and drug research increasingly use faster and faster supercomputers. The faster computers generate data that much faster. Can you really expect to use yesterday's bandwidth solutions to maintain cutting edge productivity?

It is high bandwidth applications such as these that are driving companies and organizations to faster LANs within their operations and faster WAN connections outside. With Ethernet the common denominator among network protocols, it stands to reason that Carrier Ethernet solutions are a better match than the traditional SONET fiber optic services. They are also often cheaper. Competitive carriers with regional and nationwide networks optimized for IP services such as Ethernet and MPLS, are highly efficient at delivering high bandwidths over fiber connections. Gigabit Ethernet is often a given for any lit building. But 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gig E, is now emerging as a reasonable service to install for high volume and multiple users.

Do you have a high bandwidth demand that you can't meet or feel you are paying too much for? If so, check out the availability and pricing of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections for your business location.