I Want Fiber But Not Construction Costs

By: John Shepler

The first choice for business private line and Internet connections is now fiber optic bandwidth. Fiber provides a nearly limitless pipe with low latency, packet loss and jitter. Prices are better than ever… as long as you don’t get a giant bill for construction costs.

Why Fiber Has Construction Costs At All
Companies that have depended on T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper or business cable can be stunned when they receive a quote that includes thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in build costs to bring in a fiber line. Twisted pair copper lines rarely have such a charge because the telephone companies routinely install telco wire bundles to every business when the building is first built.

Fiber should have the same status, but we’re not quite there yet to the same extent. Unlike copper, fiber is often installed long after the building is constructed as a retrofit. That can mean running fiber bundles overhead on poles or tunneling under roads and sidewalks. It gets pricey. If the nearest fiber point of presence is miles way, it gets really pricey.

By the way, business cable can suffer the same fate. If the cable doesn’t run right up to your building, you can get dinged for one-time construction fees. These tend to be a lot less than fiber, although if the cable is miles away the bill can be eye-popping.

When YOU Don’t Have to Pay for Construction
Don’t assume that if you’ve never had fiber before, you’ll have a huge construction bill. There are many cases where the bill is zero. Why? Because the construction cost may have already been paid or even waived.

What you want to look for is a fiber-lit building. That’s a facility where one or more fiber service providers has already brought in a fiber bundle and termination equipment to make it operational. Lit means that the fiber has an active laser light shining through it and is capable of carrying traffic.

Fiber buildings were once rare, but now they are very common. As business bandwidth requirements increased, more and more competitive carriers established fiber optic networks and began competing to light buildings. Often the first provider to establish services gets all the business and makes that building unattractive to competitors.

Near Net vs On Net
The best situation is to have your building lit or on-net with a fiber company. The next best thing is to be near-net. That means a building next door or close by is lit and providing service. This is important because running a line from one building to another is relatively inexpensive. Your construction costs will be low or perhaps even waived if the carrier wants to be the provider for your building. If you have other tenants in the building, you can encourage this by all requesting service.

Other Options
If fiber really does turn out to be unaffordable, you aren't necessarily out of luck. In metropolitan areas, wireless microwave companies can give you fiber speeds without the wires. All you'll need is a small antenna on the building. Ethernet over Copper can deliver speeds as high as 30 to 50 Mbps over multiple twisted pair wires that are likely already installed. The available speed depends on how far from the telco office you are. Business Cable might also work. The newest DOCSIS standards offer hundreds of Mbps up to Gigabit speeds on a shared bandwidth basis.

How Do You Get The Best Connection Deal?
Ideally, you want to get quotes from many service providers, not just the phone company or the one fiber company that advertises locally. You are likely unaware of all the potential service providers. However, a bandwidth broker, such as Telarus, Inc, has contractual arrangements with dozens of providers nationwide and can get you a suite of competitive quotes. It takes only a few minutes of your time. Simply request a fiber optic service quote through the online form or call toll free: 888-848-8749. A bandwidth service consultant will gather quotes and help you chose the most appropriate service for your business.

Lit Buildings Have Near Infinite Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Among the many opportunities for locating your business, one group of buildings is special. These are the lit buildings, otherwise known as fiber lit buildings. Find one of these and your bandwidth woes will be over.

Lit Building Definition
What is a lit building? In this case, it’s not a building with all the lights turned on. The lit building meaning is that this particular facility is already “lit” for fiber optic Internet and, likely, point to point bandwidth service. The light this is referring to is the laser beam that shines down the glass fibers to transport digital signals at high speeds.

What’s So Great About Fiber Lit Buildings?
Pretty much every business today, from the smallest hamburger stand to the largest multinational corporation has a need to communicate electronically. Do you or any of your employees ever use a computer? Obviously, you have a need for connectivity. Even the smallest retail businesses have to process credit cards and likely need to place Internet orders, send and receive emails. and perhaps run a website. If you are not online, you are probably not in business.

Seems obvious, until you move into a new facility and find out there is no Internet in the place. If it’s a stand alone building or you are the first tenant in a strip center, office building or warehouse, you’ll be the one who has to order service and have it installed. It’s then that you find out that there are construction costs involved in bringing in the cabling and having the termination equipment set up and working with the provider. That’s all before you can plug-in your network.

Lit buildings take most of that grief away because the expensive and time consuming construction work has already been done. All you need to do is contract with the carrier who has lit the building to add an account for your business. Then just plug in your router to the termination point they give you and… Voila! … you are up and running.

What Services Are Available in Lit Buildings?
The advantage that fiber optic connections have over traditional landlines and even cable is that they can support nearly infinite bandwidth. Oh, there are technical limits to how many Gigabits or Terabits per second you can cram through a fiber strand, but they are pretty hard to breach. The modulation and multiplexing techniques are getting more sophisticated every day, leading to new upper limits on bandwidth through even a single fiber strand. A 10 Gbps service is no challenge. Now 100 Gbps is getting easy to come by. If that’s not enough to support an industrial park or office campus, fiber cables can bundle 100 or more individual strands that each operate independently.

The range of services available spans pretty much everything you can ask for. Most popular is Ethernet over Fiber, which is directly compatible in nearly all LANs. Bandwidth is easily scalable from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and beyond. Many carriers are now giving users portal access so they can adjust service bandwidth at will. Traditional SONET services like OC3 to OC48 may also be available. These can even be demultiplexed to provide traditional T1 line or ISDN PRI phone service. SIP trunking for VoIP and direct cloud connections are generally a standard offering.

Why NOT Go With Fiber?
Fiber is a truly transparent bandwidth transport in the literal sense of the word. It’s future proof and easily scales to meet your needs as your business grows. The only hangup may be that fiber is often not the least expensive solution for very small businesses and tight budgets. For that, the service of choice is business cable broadband. As long as the cable passes your location, you can probably get hooked up with 1000 Mbps of asymmetrical shared bandwidth at a bargain price. Many times there isn’t even a construction fee. Also, availability of cable is completely unrelated to whether the building is already lit for fiber.

Are you considering a move? Before signing a lease, make sure your bandwidth needs will be met now and for as long as you’ll stay there. Check for lit building fiber optic services and cable broadband availability now, to be sure.

Swap Your Old T1 Line For Fiber

By: John Shepler

Your faithful T1 line has provided constant reliable service for years, perhaps decades. Now it’s getting a little long in the tooth. The 1.5 Mbps T1 offered amazing bandwidth at the dawn of the Internet era. Today it’s just plain sluggish. You know you need an upgrade, but how much is that going to cost? Would you be shocked to know that you might trade up for the same money? It’s true!

Why You Need to Make a Change
Let’s face it. You’ve run out of bandwidth. T1 still works well for small retail stores and other applications for POS credit card verification, email, small text files and very casual web browsing. Cloud services, video streaming, remote backups and large file transfers will crawl if they even work acceptably.

More of the Same Won’t Help
There’s nothing wrong with the line. It just doesn’t have enough bandwidth. You can bond a second T1 line or even a third to double or triple bandwidth, but you’ll also be doubling or tripling your costs. Unless you are in a remote location without other options, there is a better approach.

Fiber is the New Copper
Truth be told, the cost of T1 lines and most other telecom services have come down steadily over the years. If you are happy with your T1, you might be able to get the same service for half the cost you once paid.

Even better, the cost of fiber optic lines has plummeted over the same period. If you checked into fiber when you started your business and found it either wasn’t available or cost a small fortune, you are in for a pleasant surprise. Deregulation and the demand for higher and higher data speeds has resulted in a fiber building boom. The field is highly competitive and carriers are rushing to “light” buildings with their lines before someone else becomes established.

What this means for you is that fiber optic service is now commonly available. The latest offers are Carrier Ethernet which is also called Ethernet over Fiber. This technology is directly compatible with nearly all local area networks and replaces the older, more expensive SONET fiber service. SONET is the one you remember as costing a fortune.

Fiber for the Price of T1
Technology marches on. It’s been true for several years that you can upgrade your T1 line to a new technology called Ethernet over Copper and get at least twice the bandwidth for the same cost using the same twisted pair telco lines that supply your T1 service. Today, you can get several times the bandwidth using Ethernet over Copper. Same cost.

How about fiber? The latest competitive quotes I’m seeing offer entry level 10 Mbps x 10 Mbps fiber optic bandwidth for roughly the cost of a new T1 line in select areas. It is highly likely that you could get this level of fiber service for the same price as a T1 contract you’ve had for a few years or more.

Fiber For the Future
The nice thing about Ethernet over Fiber is that it is future proof. If your provider installs a 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps port, you can upgrade to those speeds any time, but only buy the speed you need right now. You may find the cost of Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet at 1000 Mbps really quite affordable and well worth it for the productivity improvement.

Are you frustrated by the inability of your T1 line or business DSL to keep up with your online needs? Now would be a great time to see what you can get in the way of a fiber optic bandwidth connection. You may be amazed by what is available today.

Fiber Optic Service FAQ, Part 3

Here are more frequently asked questions and answers about fiber optic service for your business You may also be interested in the first and second lists of fiber FAQs.

Q: What is a lit building?

A: This is a building that already has fiber installed and “lit” for service. Usually only a single carrier lights each building. If your building is lit, you can easily get bandwidth services from that carrier.

Q: What are wavelength services?

A: A wavelength or Lambda is a particular color of laser light that carries the signal through the optical fiber. Early fiber systems used only a single light beam. Today, multiple beams travel the same fiber strand using a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. You can lease an entire wavelength for your exclusive use if you wish.

Q: Why would you lease a wavelength rather than just buying bandwidth?

A: Leasing a wavelength gives you high bandwidth dedicated to your use. Typically each wavelength supports 10 Gbps. You can decide whether to use SONET, Ethernet or some other protocol over the wavelength because the service does not share traffic with other users.

Q: What is dark fiber?

A: This refers to fiber strands that have been installed but not lit for service. Most fiber optic cable has dozens or hundreds of fiber strands all bundled together. Carriers that have extra strands they aren’t using will often lease them to other carriers or businesses that need the capacity.

Q: What’s the advantage of dark fiber?

A: Bandwidth is nearly unlimited and security is high because there is no traffic on the fiber strand other that what you provide.

Q: What protocols does dark fiber support?

A: Anything you can generate, including SONET, Ethernet, Fibre Channel and others. By using Wavelength Division Multiplexing, you can assign a different protocol to each wavelength and they won’t interact.

Q: Why wouldn’t you select dark fiber?

A: You’ll need to provide the termination equipment at each end, which can be rather expensive. On wavelength and other bandwidth services the carrier does this. Also, there may not be any dark fiber available on the route you have in mind.

Q: How does fiber support cloud services?

A: Cloud communications are bandwidth intensive. All the traffic that used to run to your in-house data center now goes over a WAN (Wide Area Network) connection to the cloud. You need high bandwidth and low latency connections for this to work properly, just what fiber is good at.

Is fiber bandwidth service the right solution to your business needs? Compare costs and service options for the fiber optic service options available for your business locations.


You may also be interested in reading Fiber Optic Service FAQs, Part 1 and Part 2.

Looking For A Lit Building?

If you are in the dark about where to get higher levels of business bandwidth, what you should be looking for is a lit building?

Sure, you can wait until dark and then look to see which buildings are illuminated, but that’s not going to get you the kind of lit building you’re looking for. What you need is one that is on the receiving end of telecommunications laser. In other words, you want to find a building that is “lit” for fiber optic service .

What difference does it make if the building is lit or not? It makes all the difference in the world when it comes to bandwidth. We’ve become accustomed to being able to just call up and order T1 line service without giving any thought as to how it would be provisioned. The technicians just show up one day and wire up the demarcation point. The reason is that nearly every building is automatically wired for telephone service. Businesses usually have multi-pair telephone cables brought in to support two or more business phone lines. T1 is a telco technology that uses the same twisted pair cable that connect analog telephones. So, you might say that businesses are pre-wired for T1 service.

That makes PBX telephone, dedicated Internet access, and point to point data connections easy to come by as long as you only need the bandwidth a T1 line can provide of 1.5 Mbps. You can also order multiple T1 lines to get 3, 6 or 9 Mbps as long as you have extra copper pair available. But what if your business needs bandwidths of 10 Mbps or more?

Ah, that’s where the power of light shows its value. Fiber optic bandwidth is nearly unlimited. In fact, you’ll run out of money before you run out of bandwidth capacity. A single fiber can support at least 10 Gbps. There are almost always multiple strands of fiber within a fiber optic cable. Beyond that, you can split the laser beam feeding each fiber strand into multiple colors, or lambdas, with wavelength division multiplexing. Each wavelength gives you the equivalent of a whole new fiber. We’re talking terabits per second at least.

If you have fiber optic communications service provisioned to your building, it’s pretty easy to turn up the bandwidth to whatever you require. Sometimes all it takes is a phone call. But what if you go into the equipment room and find only copper wiring as far as the eye can see? Then what?

This is where the next best thing to having a lit building is being near one. The reason is construction costs. Generally, the farther you have to build-out fiber optic service, the more expensive it will be. It’s a one-time expense, but the costs can easily be prohibitive. It might just make more sense to move your whole business than pay to have trenches dug or cable strung on poles for miles.

So, do you have to be right next door to a lit building to get your building lit at a reasonable cost? That sure helps, but you have options even if the nearest service is way done the road. Remember all that copper? If you only have to deliver high bandwidth services a few miles from the nearest lit building, a technology called Ethernet over Copper (EoC) can transport 10 Mbps bandwidth. In fact, within a mile or so you might extend that up to 45 Mbps. That’s as much as many businesses really need. For longer stretches, Ethernet over DS1 (EoDS1) bundles twisted pair capacity using T1 technology to give you 10 Mbps to many more locations.

You should also know that you don’t always have to pay fiber optic construction costs. The carrier may well bear that expense, as long as they have enough service commitments to justify the investment. This is something to consider if your business is located in a large office building or industrial park. By getting together with other businesses who have the same need for bandwidth, you may be able to convince a provider that it is worthwhile to light your building.

So, do you know where the lit buildings are in your area? You can find out in seconds by simply using this fiber optic service lit building finder. Just enter your building’s address and see what shows up on the map.