Upgrading to Fiber FAQ

By: John Shepler

The bandwidth solution you’ve had for years is running out of capacity. It’s worked well for you, but now you have no real choice but to upgrade to something faster, more reliable, lower latency, more consistent or all of the above. How about fiber? You’ve always had twisted pair copper or cable. Does fiber make more sense for the future and… can you afford it? Let’s look at some key questions and answers for making this decision.

What Can Fiber Do That Copper Can’t?
The real beauty of fiber isn’t necessarily what it will do for you today. It’s the virtually unlimited upgradability down the road that is unique to fiber. Every copper technology runs out of capacity at some level. Technology advancements have expanded copper’s capability and extended its life. However, technology advancements have also expanded fiber capacity beyond what most of us can fathom needing.

I Have a T1 Line Now and Love It. Can’t I just Add Another T1?
You bet you can. The process is called bonding. It makes 2 T1 lines act like a single line with twice the bandwidth. You can bond T1 lines up to 10 or 12 Mbps, which is about the entry level for fiber. One limitation is that you have to get all your lines from the same provider to bond them. A more serious limitation is cost. You may find that 10 Mbps fiber is a lot less expensive than 10 Mbps bonded T1.

What About Ethernet over Copper?
EoC is a competing technology to T1 and uses the same twisted pair copper. You can get higher bandwidths at lower cost than T1, but the technology is distance sensitivity. For 10 to 50 Mbps, you need to be geographically close to the office supplying your service. For higher bandwidths, say 100 Mbps and up, it’s rare to find EoC available. At 1Gbps, it’s pretty much fiber all the way.

Don’t Cable Companies Offer Fiber Bandwidth over Cable?
Yes and no. Yes, you can get hundreds of Mbps, perhaps even Gbps, bandwidth over the same coaxial cable that brings in hundreds of TV channels. This is relatively inexpensive service, but it is a “shared” bandwidth that varies with the number of users online. It’s strictly Internet access, not private line, and has no performance guarantees. For demanding business operations, the Cable companies offer competitive fiber optic service using their core transmission networks. This grade of service is similar to what you get from telecom companies.

OK, But Isn’t Fiber Hard to Get?
Not any more. The first fiber technology, called SONET, is a telephone company product and has been both expensive and limited in availability. A newer technology called Ethernet over Fiber is offered by a wide array of competitive carriers, including many traditional suppliers. Nobody is building out copper plant anymore. It’s yesterday’s news. All of the new network construction is fiber and there is a race among carriers to capture the business market

Where is Fiber Available?
Ethernet over Fiber and SONET are both readily available in major metropolitan areas. Fiber is also often available in suburban areas and smaller cities. There is a big push right now to replace T1 lines with fiber to increase the bandwidth of cell towers from 3G to 4G and, eventually, 5G. That is extending metro fiber networks out into the countryside where they haven’t been before. Eventually, fiber will be everywhere.

What About Now? Where Can I Get Fiber?
Your best bet is to be located in an already “lit” building. That means the building has fiber optic service installed and operating. Once the terminal equipment is in place, adding another customer in the same location is trivially easy for the carriers. If you can’t be in a lit building, you’ll need to be near enough that construction costs are minimal. It’s those long distance runs that need new fiber installed that get expensive.

Note: A popular option for companies that find fiber construction costs too much to consider is to locate their high bandwidth equipment, such as servers, in a colocation data center where multiple fiber options are readily available.

So, Where Are These Lit Buildings?
Lit buildings and nearby fiber optic services can be easily located using the Telarus GeoQuote search engine. This is a tool specifically developed to quickly locate existing fiber services. You can find out in seconds what’s available in your area with no commitment.

Great, I’ve Found Fiber Service. Will It Cost a Fortune?
You may be shocked to find how affordable fiber optic service is today. This isn’t consumer grade FTTH (Fiber to the Home). It’s a business grade service that is installed at commercial locations. Bandwidth generally starts at 10 Mbps, which is the same speed as traditional Ethernet. If you’ve had your T1 line for many years and haven’t negotiated a lower priced contract, you may find that you can get 10 Mbps fiber for about the same price. Yes, you’ll pay more for Ethernet over Fiber than today’s T1 lines or low cost business cable broadband, but you can also expect higher performance.

How Much Bandwidth Makes Sense?
Many smaller businesses can get by with 10 Mbps Ethernet over Fiber. High tech or medium size operations will want 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet. Nowadays, Gigabit Ethernet is well within reason for companies that need highly responsive cloud applications or make extensive use of video. Municipalities and school districts often find that Gigabit Ethernet or GigE is exactly what they need at a reasonable price point.

How Easy Are Upgrades
Legacy T-Carrier (T1, T3) and SONET (OCx) services can take a long time to provision because each bandwidth level has a unique interface. Ethernet over Fiber is designed to be easily scalable. You install a port with the maximum speed you expect to need (usually 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps). Then you pick the bandwidth you want to start out with. Often a quick call to your provider is all it takes to increase or decrease bandwidth within hours or days. Some services even let you make the changes yourself through a Web browser.

What’s the Maximum Bandwidth Available?
It’s not likely you’ll ever run out. Gigabit Ethernet service is common. So is 10 Gbps now. In some locations you can get 100 Gbps business bandwidth. That level will become more widely available in the future, as more bandwidth intensive requirements demand it. If you are a really high bandwidth user or have special protocol or security requirements, you might consider wavelength service. Each fiber can carry dozens of wavelengths. Each wavelength transports up to 10 Gbps.

Are you interested in finding out what fiber optic service options are available for your business location and how much they cost? Get fast quotes with no obligation and complementary expert consulting to help choose the best option for your needs.

100 Business Locations and 1 Bandwidth Bill

By: John Shepler

If your business has grown from a single small operation to a nationwide or international enterprise, chances are that your network connections have grown in a piecemeal fashion over the years. Now you’ve got a major management problem handling dozens, hundreds or even thousands of individual contracts. Moreover, there’s that nagging feeling that you may be paying a lot more that you could be with an optimized solution. You’re probably right.

So, what can you do to get your arms around all this complexity? First of all, don’t try doing it all yourself. You are ill equipped to search out that optimum solution of providers and service levels. Chances are that you’ll sill wind up with too many bills from too many providers and not the best bandwidth connections. Instead, get support from a company that specializes in consolidating all your business bandwidth services.

UNSi (United Network Services, Inc.), formerly American Broadband, Inc. , is just such a company. Their specialty is managing broadband connectivity for companies with 100 or more locations. They can give you multiple types of connectivity matched to your location needs and consolidated in a single broadband bill. They specialize in optimizing bandwidth solutions, taking that monkey off YOUR back. You’ll wind up with more and better connectivity at a lower cost that what you’re paying now… and without the management headaches.

How does UNSI do this? It starts with their nationwide MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) network. MPLS provides the reliable high bandwidth core that can cost effectively carry network traffic of nearly any protocol with high security. Beyond their own network, UNSi and unique NNI (Network to Network Interface) capabilities that allow them to mesh with more than 150 other carrier networks to create a single expansive network. No matter where your business locations are, you’ll find a suitable connection via DSL, Cable Broadband, Ethernet over Copper, Carrier TDM or Metro Ethernet. A recent merger with Airband adds fixed wireless connectivity to the mix of options.

Other network assets include 18 strategic regionally located points of presence (POPs) serving over 155,000 lit buildings. Network operation centers (NOCs) are geographically dispersed to survive any foreseeable disaster.

What type of services are available? In addition to the core MPLS network that ties everything together and connections for each of your location, UNSi offers dedicated Internet access (DIA), cloud connectivity, managed services that include routers, firewalls, colocation, hosted monitoring and even managed LAN. A special service is called SIF or Same IP Failover. This is a disaster recovery and business continuity solution that provides automated failover between the primary MPLS/DIA circuits and a broadband backup circuit. The automated system ensures that the same customer IP range will operate over both the on-net primary circuit and the backup circuit. If the primary goes down, the system will switch seamlessly to the backup to ensure continuous operation.

Are you managing a single business location or hundreds to thousands located domestically or internationally? See if you can reduce your telecom management workload and save money in the process with network and bandwidth service consolidation.

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.

The Next Decade of Bandwidth - Part V

Wireless is the bandwidth service that gets most of the press these days, but there are big developments afoot in the wired world as well. We’ll wrap up our look into the next decade of bandwidth with what’s going on with copper and fiber optic services.

It’s no surprise that fiber optic networks are expanding. Some of this expansion is prompted by American Reinvestment and Recovery Act that appropriated $7.2 billion to expand broadband access across the country. Rural areas that have been largely ignored by commercial interests are especially targeted. With funds available for middle-mile fiber runs, competitive carriers are taking advantage of the opportunity to expand their networks.

While fiber is being trenched through the countryside to provide broadband delivery to Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) that serve sparsely populated areas, even more fiber is being routed through metropolitan areas to hookup businesses of all sizes. Government incentives aren’t needed here. Businesses hungry for increased bandwidth either foot the bill for hookups to metropolitan fiber networks or commit to service levels that justify carriers to “light” their buildings for fiber service.

Why the interest in fiber optic connections? It’s not just mobile bandwidth that’s straining at the limits. T1 lines may have been all the bandwidth a small or even medium size business needed to handle email, general web browsing and communication with its website servers hosted elsewhere. Now, 1.5 Mbps seems a bit quaint and inadequate for all the smallest operations. What drives business now is cloud connections, Software as a Service, video conferencing, hosted VoIP and other bandwidth demanding applications.

The transition from 3G to 4G wireless also means that cellular carriers themselves are strained for fast enough backhaul connections. T1 lines works great to connect towers that handled voice calls. When users expect 10 or 15 Mbps of broadband service, fiber optics look like the ideal solution. The cost of construction, once a show stopper, becomes another part of the upgrade investment that’s paid once and offers almost unlimited upgrades for future needs.

Cloud computing is a major attraction for many businesses who find that pay-as-you-go is much easier to justify than requisitions for million dollar data center improvements. No need for racks and racks of servers, the environmentally controlled building to house them, the backup power generators, or the round-the-clock technical staff to keep everything running smoothly. Outsourcing that to a cloud service provider gets rid of those headaches, but adds a new one. How to you connect to the cloud? Low bandwidth, high latency connections will bring your operations to a grinding halt. What you need now is high bandwidth along with low latency, jitter and packet loss as a backbone to your virtual servers on the other side of the country. That means fiber optic lines and probably two of them for redundancy.

Fiber technology hasn’t been static during this expansion. Until recently you had a choice of SONET services from OC3 to OC12 and perhaps OC48. That was it. Now, Ethernet over Fiber is coming on strong as a direct competitor. Carrier Ethernet more closely matches the LAN networks that feed it. It is more scalable to meet changing business needs. Best of all, Ethernet services tend to cost less, often considerably less, than equivalent SONET fiber optic services.

But, wait! The era of copper is far from over. Just when carriers were thinking about decommissioning their twisted pair copper to let it corrode in the ground or be sold for scrap, Bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper gain favor as business bandwidth options. While a single T1 line may be too constrained for many uses, multiple T1 lines can be bonded into a single larger bandwidth service up to 10 or 12 Mbps. Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology uses the same twisted pair bundles as bonded T1, but a more advanced modulation scheme. EoC bandwidth is distance sensitive, but can easily deliver 10 or 20 Mbps to most businesses and 30, 50 or even 100 Mbps for short runs. Continuing development incorporating wireless techniques such as MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) for crosstalk cancelation is pushing the limits of copper into the hundreds of Mbps and even to a fiber-like Gigabit per second bandwidth.

The next decade of bandwidth is likely to be dominated by massive fiber optic build-outs for fixed locations, such as office and industrial parks, along with copper solutions to bridge the gaps where fiber doesn’t yet connect. Wireless is clearly headed for a common 4G LTE nationwide infrastructure. Compatibility will be built into portable and mobile devices, perhaps as prolifically as WiFi is now. There may be some surprises in store, such long range and interconnected WiFi hotspots or whitespace transmitters as wireless competitors, high bandwidth satellites covering rural areas better than spotty fiber and cable construction, and the development of much higher microwave frequencies (60 GHz and above) and even infrared mesh networks as new service options.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this speculative look into what’s likely to happen in the next 10 years or so, as our appetite for higher bandwidth Internet and private network connections demand satisfaction. There are many good options available right now to support your current business needs. You may not even be aware of how much development has been going on in your area to increase service levels and reduce costs. This would be an excellent time to get competitive options and quotes for business bandwidth services.

See what's available now in the way of T-carrier and Ethernet copper, SONET and Ethernet fiber, fixed wireless and Hybrid Fiber Cable (HFC). Get instant bandwidth pricing up to 1 Gbps and fast quotes on other services.



This has been a 5 part series on bandwidth. If you’ve missed any part of it, you can access Part I, Part II, Part III, or Part IV to catch up at any time.

150 Mbps Ethernet vs OC3 Cost

When DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps isn’t enough anymore, it’s time to take a look at higher service levels. So, do you make the jump to OC3 at 155 Mbps or take a look at competing Ethernet services? It can be worth your while to do the comparison. Let’s see why.

Once you start moving into higher bandwidth services, you are looking at fiber optic delivery. Yes, in rare situations you may qualify for 100 Mbps or higher Ethernet over Copper or fixed wireless microwave service. For these to work you need to be very, very close to the provider’s office and, in the case of microwave, have a clear line of site from your building to theirs. For everyone else, it’s fiber optic cabling. Fiber can transport Ethernet or OC3 equally well. So, how do you choose?

One big factor in your decision may be the cost of construction. If there is fiber running nearby, but not yet installed into your building, there is a certain one time cost involved in trenching the fiber and its conduit underground or bringing in the fiber cable overhead. Oddly enough, in densely packed downtown business districts, the cost of fiber construction can be higher than it is out in the burbs. Why? It’s because the available conduits may be all full or hard to obtain and the expense of tunneling under major roadways can be a deal breaker.

Don’t be discouraged by the possibility of high construction costs until you get competitive quotes for fiber optic service to your building. Each situation is unique. The cost for installing similar service to buildings across the street from each other can vary wildly. It’s also possible that you may get your installation for free or at a big discount. Some fiber providers are aggressively building out their networks. If they want your location, they may foot the bill for construction or at least part of it. The more bandwidth you need, the more attractive your situation is. If you are in a multi-tenant building, it could be worth your while to get together with other tenants and offer a much larger bandwidth requirement to lure potential service providers.

Another possibility is that your building is already “lit” for fiber optic service from one or more carriers. Let’s say that someone in your building is already leasing OC3 bandwidth from a telecom carrier. That carrier has already gone to the expense and trouble of bringing in the multi-strand fiber cable and installing termination equipment. They’ve hooked up the other end to their metro fiber network running nearby. How much trouble is it to also provide you with OC3 fiber optic service?

Not much trouble at all. Unlike copper cables, fiber optic bundles can support nearly unlimited bandwidth. It’s a matter of setting their add/drop multiplexers to bring enough bandwidth into the building and demultiplex it into separate services for each subscribing tenant. As you can imagine, the construction costs will be minimal, perhaps even complementary.

The same is true if there is already high bandwidth Ethernet over Fiber service installed in the building. The Ethernet service provider has done all the hard work. They can easily add you to the network rapidly and at minimal cost.

This may be the deciding factor. If one service is already installed and the other is not, the capital cost factor can outweigh other advantages. What if both services are in the building? Then it becomes a more level playing field. In general, Ethernet service is less expensive and easier to scale than SONET services, such as OC3. There is also a service called Ethernet over SONET that uses traditional SONET ring networks to carry the newer Carrier Ethernet protocol. That means a legacy carrier may well be able to offer you either OC3 or 150 Mbps Ethernet at an attractive price over already installed infrastructure.

How much will it cost you to get the high bandwidth business connectivity you require? Each situation needs to be evaluated on its own merit. You can get cost quotes for Ethernet services up to 1 Gbps instantly, with fast response on SONET or Ethernet over SONET services by using the Fiber Network Quotes service for US based locations. US to international destination quotes are also available upon request.

Get Your Building Fiber Lit For Free

There are some tremendous deals on fiber optic bandwidth these days. Many companies would dearly love to move up to Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps or even 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The one problem is that their building isn’t lit for fiber optic service yet. When they see the construction cost quote to bring in the fiber, the up-front cost is just too high in this economic environment. But, what if you could get your building fiber lit for free? Would that change your bandwidth plans?

It’s absolutely possible that you can upgrade to high speed fiber services without having to pay construction costs. The little known secret is that some competitive carriers see such an opportunity in the demand for higher bandwidth services that they are willing to put up money for construction costs themselves. One carrier is willing to build up to 1,500 feet of fiber if that’s what it takes to get you on their network.

Oh, but do you have to pay extra in monthly lease fees to get the free hookup? No way. In fact, you may be surprised at how much fiber lease costs have come down lately. If you haven’t gone out for quotes in a few years, you are dealing with pricing so obsolete that it’s a joke. You need to get a new set of competitive quotes right now.

Everything is pulling in the same direction now for fiber optic bandwidth. First, demand is increasing by leaps and bounds due to the increased use of video in business, including video conferencing. Business automation is making employees more productive than ever, but it comes with an increased need for bandwidth to connect to providers. Cloud services are adding additional pressure on WAN connections to provide response times similar to what you experience with a local data center.

We normally think that when something is in high demand, the price goes up not down. Just the opposite is happening in the network bandwidth market. Why? Increased demand has encouraged competitive carriers to build-out their regional, national and international fiber networks. Many have embraced new service options, such as MPLS networks and Carrier Ethernet. What every competitive carrier wants is more customers to connect to their massive core networks. That means getting more buildings on-net.

What on-net means is that your particular building is on the network of a particular fiber optic carrier. If you are on-net, that carrier has fiber strands coming into your building and terminating in equipment that the carrier provides. From there, they can connect you and other tenants in the building, if there are any, to whatever speed and format service you require.

Many carriers don’t want the aggravation of butting heads with competitors in the same building. Instead, they’ll try to find nearby buildings that aren’t already lit and get in there first. Once established, it’s easy for them to sell and keep customers. Fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited, so scaling services up and down is no trouble at all. Do you need to move up from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps? You might be able to make that happen in a matter of hours if you already have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed. Just call the carrier and tell them you want a speed increase. They can likely do that without having to change out any equipment at all.

It’s a real land-rush situation for competitive carriers, since something like 12% of business locations are already lit for fiber service. You are in the majority if you don’t already have fiber optic bandwidth. But if you are close enough to a carrier point of presence, you may be able to get those fiber services cheaper than you ever thought possible. Why not see what opportunities are available and then decide how much you can upgrade and still stay within your budget? Get instant online fiber optic prices for Carrier Ethernet from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps now. Other services will be quoted promptly, including construction costs if any. You may be in a better spot to get affordable fiber service than you ever thought possible.

EoC and EoTDM Complement Fiber

Traditional telecom services have large bandwidth gaps in service levels, especially when you compare what is available for smaller businesses and what the large corporations install. You may be slogging along at T1 lines rates of 1.5 Mbps, while the big corporate campus across the street has 100x to 1000x the bandwidth. It’s the difference between copper and fiber, or at least it used to be that way.

Newer technologies, namely Ethernet over Copper (EoC) and Ethernet over TDM (EoTDM), have expanded the range of bandwidths supported on already installed copper infrastructure. It’s now a smooth scale of steps between T1 and Gigabit or higher speeds.

Integra Telecom is one competitive carrier who has embraced the concept of augmenting their fiber optic network with Ethernet copper-based solutions. Integra is a major telecom services provider in eleven states, primarily in the Western US. Their 10 Gbps IP fiber backbone connects major cities throughout these states and also to Chicago, New York, Dallas and Ashburn, Virginia. It totals 5,000 miles of long haul and 3,000 miles of metro fiber.

From there, Integra is aggressively lighting new buildings for fiber service. Just during the first half of 2011, they had expanded their lit buildings by 20 percent or 300 new buildings. Even the most casual observer can see that fiber-based bandwidth is the future. Business automation, cloud connections and video transport are gobbling up Mbps and Gbps about as fast as they are deployed. But what do you do in economically constrained times to provide higher bandwidth levels to every business that needs them?

The answer is a two-pronged approach of complementing fiber network resources with copper-based last mile connections. Traditionally, this has meant T1 lines with DSL as a low end option. T1 provides excellent availability and rock solid bandwidth, albeit at 1.5 Mbps. Many businesses get around this limitation by installing multiple T1 lines bonded together to double or triple the bandwidth. This is a solid technical approach, but the upper limit is typically around 10 or 12 Mbps and the cost is a simple multiple of T1 cost times number of bonded lines.

Another hitch is that most competitive metro and wide area networks are now IP based. Previously the public switched telephone network was dominant using telco standards like TDM for digital transmission. Businesses today have IP networks in-house and often wish to connect them to other IP networks through Ethernet services such as E-Line and E-LAN. It would be ideal to keep everything on IP networks.

Integra Telecom recognizes this and bases their fiber/copper strategy on IP standards. The core network is already IP for metro and long haul connections. Where copper connections are needed, they are made using Ethernet over Copper or Ethernet over TDM.

The copper involved is the very same twisted pair copper that is already installed into nearly every business for multi-line telephone service and T1 data lines. That pretty much guarantees that businesses in the service footprint can get connected to the network one way or the other. Ethernet over Copper uses specialized equipment and multiple copper loops to deliver Ethernet bandwidth from the fiber network to the business LAN. Ethernet over TDM is similar, but uses T1 line technology to transport the Ethernet signal.

Why EoTDM? One tradeoff with EoC is that you can get a very wide range of bandwidths but over a limited distance. The closer you are to the central office that connects to your copper telco lines, the higher the EoC speeds available. EoTDM is not distance limited. T1 technology was designed for extended distances experienced by some customers who are located in smaller or more rural population areas. Integra has installed EoC equipment in 120 COs and EoTDM in nearly 300 COs throughout their Western service area.

Are you ready to move up to higher bandwidth levels, but stymied because you’ve been told there’s no fiber available? That may be old information, as carriers are aggressively building out their fiber assets. Even if fiber is not an option, you may be able to get bandwidth from 2 or 3 Mbps to over 100 Mbps on copper based connections to the fiber backbone. Check prices and availability of copper and fiber network services for your particular business locations.

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.

Is Metro Ethernet Available?

You’re looking to initiate or expand bandwidth for your company. What type of service should you go with? Metro Ethernet is in the news these days. You may have heard that it offers more bandwidth for less money than traditional telecom solutions. But, is Metro Ethernet even available?

There’s a quick way to find out. Use an Ethernet service finder to get a map of the lit buildings near you. What’s a lit building? No, that doesn’t refer to how many lights are on in the offices. It refers to the presence of fiber optic service to that building. Lit means that the service is turned up and active with laser light shining through the fiber. There’s also such a thing as dark fiber, which is just the fiber optic cabling installed but not connected to anything.

Why are lit buildings important? Because those are places where you can get fiber optic service quickly and easily. All the hard work of digging trenches or attaching new fiber cables to utility poles has already been done. It’s just a matter of connecting to an almost limitless supply of bandwidth available through the fiber.

If you are in or can readily move to a lit building you can almost certainly get Metro Ethernet service at an attractive price. You might even decide to share a high bandwidth connection with other tenants to get an even lower price that comes with high volume usage. But what if your building has no fiber optic service yet? Is there any chance you can get Metro E?

There certainly is. If the building next door has fiber coming in, chances are high that you can get the same service. Most of the hard work has been done already in getting fiber strung from the carrier POP (Point of Presence) to the telecom room in the facility. It’s not that big a deal to extend fiber next door. In fact, you may pay little or nothing to get your building lit if you require a reasonable level of bandwidth.

What if there is no fiber anywhere nearby? That’s a little more tricky. It depends on where you are and how much bandwidth you require. You may not realize it, but Ethernet can be delivered on twisted pair copper telco cables as well as fiber. Not every business requires Gbps data pipes. In fact, two of the most popular Metro Ethernet services are 3 Mbps and 10 Mbps. Both of those easily qualify to be brought in on existing copper cable. You can be several miles from the nearest point of presence and still get Ethernet over Copper. Speeds up to 45 Mbps are available, but you’ll need to have a carrier POP much closer for those higher bandwidths.

Is Metro Ethernet available out in the boonies? Probably not. That’s what the “Metro” part implies. Even so, you may be able to get something called EoDS1 or Ethernet over DS1. That services uses T1 lines to bring in Ethernet service. Alternatively, you could simply order a T1 line or multiple bonded T1 lines to meet your bandwidth needs no matter where you are located.

Ready to see if Metro Ethernet is available for you? Simply enter your business address (not for residential locations) in to the Shop For Ethernet WAN Search box and have a look at the map results. You’ll see just how close you are to a lit building. Then get availability and pricing for Ethernet and other telecom services from our Telarus consultants. Your location probably qualifies for more services at lower prices than you expect.

Fiber Plus Copper Equals High Bandwidth

We’re bandwidth hungry and getting more so by the day. Both businesses and consumers are finding themselves frustrated by their inability to take advantage of all the latest technologies due to bandwidth limited connections. Productivity vendors and content providers are in the same fix. They’re having a hard time delivering everything they can produce simply because the demand for transport and last mile bandwidth has exceeded the supply.

This situation is reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer. For several decades you just couldn’t get enough processor speed, RAM memory or hard disk capacity. Cheap RAM, huge disks and multi-core processors have pretty much eliminated this bottleneck. Well, not completely. You still find yourself having to upgrade your machines every few years to keep up with the demands of applications, especially video. But today’s limitations on progress are more related to the size of the pipe than the size of the machine.

Seems like the solution is pretty obvious. All we need to do is replace our outmoded copper infrastructure with fiber optic bundles and we’ll have all the bandwidth we can use.

In a sense, that’s what’s happening. Nearly all carriers have embraced fiber optic IP networks and are expanding their fiber footprints as fast as they can. But to think that we’re going to completely retrofit a century and a half’s worth of copper build-out with fiber optics on a one to one basis is just fanciful. Even today there’s no standard that mandates fiber optic service for new homes and businesses as a utility. You can bet that every building gets universal phone service delivered over twisted pair copper. But how many have a multi-fiber bundle terminated on the premises?

Someday fiber optics will be the default for voice, data and video. Copper will be for power. But today’s reality is that most bandwidth will be delivered to homes and businesses over standard copper telco wiring. Fortunately, technology has come to the rescue with new modulation techniques to squeeze higher and higher bandwidths from already installed copper wiring.

For businesses, the hottest bandwidth service right now is called Ethernet over Copper. It is becoming the upgrade of choice by companies who have tapped out the capacity of their T1 lines but can’t afford the construction costs to bring in fiber connections. The new terminal equipment combines the capacity of multiple copper pair to create a single wide bandwidth Ethernet service from carrier to user. The bandwidth is anywhere from 1 to 50 Mbps over a distance of a few blocks to a few miles.

That’s a considerable increase for many small businesses, although medium and larger companies still need to pony up for fiber to get the 100 Mbps to Gigabit Ethernet connections they need. But what about the consumer and companies that have a crying need for higher bandwidth but don’t have the budgets yet for fiber?

AT&T is pursuing a solution for residential users called FTTN or Fiber To The Node. This is a hybrid arrangement that uses the high bandwidth of fiber to get close to a neighborhood and then leverages the value of the already-installed telephone wiring to carry the signals into the home. It’s a way to jack up the speed of DSL way beyond what copper can carry all the way from the central office. How fast? AT&T is reportedly going to start trial service at 80 Mbps next year. That’s faster than the speedy 50 Mbps broadband service offered by Cable’s upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 modems and even Verizon’s FiOS. Of course, both fiber and Cable have room to increase their speeds as competition demands. But perhaps AT&T can also push the envelope to 100 Mbps and beyond.

FTTN advances can benefit business, too. In metropolitan and suburban areas, carriers establish POPs or Points of Presence where they can connect to their fiber networks. From there they can “light” buildings with fiber service or provide EoC or Ethernet over Copper. The more fiber services there are in a particular area, the more options you have for both fiber and copper bandwidth at reasonable prices with minimal or no construction costs. Knowing where the high bandwidth services are already installed can also be a strategic advantage. If you are looking to relocate anyway, it just makes sense to find a location that already has the network services you’ll be needing. Use the Lit Building Finder to see what fiber optic bandwidth services are nearby.

Ethernet Point of Presence Locator

You’ve been hearing about lower cost bandwidth options and wondering if you can get more Mbps for less money. The question is, “how can you find out?” What you need is an Ethernet Point of Presence Locator.

What’s that and what’s a point of presence? Ah, these are the keys to getting a better deal on business bandwidth.



Point of Presence, or POP, is a location where carrier services are located. For instance, a major competitive carrier may well have a central office located in your city. Within this facility is termination equipment for the carrier’s metropolitan and long haul fiber optic network. In other words, this carrier POP is like a station where you can get on and off their high speed voice and data network.

The same carrier may have POPs that aren’t part of their office facilities. Many carriers have POPs within colocation centers. Those are public facilities that specialize in housing server equipment for business users. They offer rack space, security, fire suppression, back up power and bandwidth. The bandwidth is provided by however many carriers choose to establish carrier POPs in the colo facility. Because your equipment is located within feet of the carrier POP, construction costs to provide you with bandwidth are little to nothing.

So, you’re looking around and don’t see any colocation centers or carrier central offices anywhere near your building. Does that mean that you are out of luck? No, not at all. There may be all sorts of POPs that aren’t readily apparent. The most prevalent example is the “lit” building. Lit means lit for fiber optic services. To light a building, fiber optic cabling and termination equipment must be installed and turned up. That’s generally only done when there is enough demand by one or more clients in the building for high bandwidth services. But once a building is lit, it can be used as a jumping off point to provide services to other buildings nearby.

The beauty of finding a lit building and its associated Point of Presence is that construction costs are minimal if you are next door to such a facility or within a short distance. The big cost of providing fiber optic bandwidth services is having to trench the fiber cable underground or suspend it overhead on utility poles for miles and miles. Bandwidth, especially Ethernet bandwidth, can be quite affordable if you don’t have to bear the capital expense of extensive fiber construction.

So, if they are not visible to the naked eye, how do you find these lit buildings? Fortunately, you have access to the Ethernet Building’s Point of Presence Locator. You simply enter the address of your building and get a map of nearby lit buildings in seconds. You can then get prices for bandwidth services you are interested in. It’s quick and easy, so give it a try. You may be surprised by how much fiber optic capability is hiding right next door or down the street.

Ethernet Over Copper Can Be A Steal

We all like a good deal on anything telecommunications related. But some of these Ethernet prices can make you feel like you are getting away with something. Are you wondering just how good they can be? Go ahead, take a second and inquire about Ethernet prices for your business locations.



Why are Ethernet service prices so attractive right now? What’s happened is that technology has changed almost overnight. Yesterday the traditional telco services were all that you could get. Today, there are competitive options that change the whole value proposition.

Ethernet over Copper is a major game changer. You may have heard that Metro Ethernet service was available, but when you last checked you found that it was only available over fiber optic cable. That’s a big negative if your building isn’t already lit for fiber optic service. Construction costs can make Ethernet over Fiber prohibitively expensive.

Well, that was then and this is now. A couple of things have changed. First, that fiber you couldn’t afford to have installed a few years ago may be a lot less expensive now. Competitive carriers have been building POPs or points of presence in most major cities and suburban areas. More and more buildings have been lit for fiber optic service. What that means to you is that the nearest fiber connection may be closer than you think. It might even be next door.

But even if fiber isn’t available, you can get Metro Ethernet bandwidths of 10 to even 50 Mbps delivered over ordinary twisted pair copper wiring. That’s the same telco bundle that comes into your building now. That means little or no construction costs. The carrier will provide you with a router designed to interface with the Ethernet over Copper connections. You just plug-in with a RJ-45 cable and you’ve got higher bandwidth.

What’s more, Ethernet services are often dramatically less expensive than their legacy telco counterparts. You may find yourself saving half or more on your next telecom services lease. The higher the bandwidth, the better the savings.

Of course, location is still important. The range of available services and number of competing carriers depends on your business address. But you only need a minute or so to request a list of Ethernet services and prices for your location. You wouldn’t be the first to think that these prices are a steal.

1,000,000 Miles of Metro Ethernet Fiber And Growing

If you’ve been thinking that Metro Ethernet is just some little niche service that probably won’t catch on, here’s an eye opener. XO Communications alone has about a million miles of metro fiber and more than 3,000 fiber-fed buildings on net. That’s not even counting all the Ethernet over Copper delivered to buildings that aren’t yet lit for fiber. Oh, and that’s just one carrier.

Metro Ethernet and its long haul equivalent called Carrier Ethernet are no niche services. This is the future of telecommunications. Why? Because the whole world is transitioning from switched circuit TDM communications to packet switched IP networking. It’s happening faster than you might think or experience in your everyday telecom usage. You may currently be connected to the Internet by a T1 dedicated Internet connection. It’s a telco-based legacy service based on TDM channels. Yet once your packets are transported to the carrier’s point of presence, they are passed to an IP-based Internet backbone. Protocol conversion circuitry makes this process transparent to the end user, so your last mile connection can be just about anything.

This suggests that it would be more efficient to keep everything in the Internet Protocol from the computer on your desk all the way to the servers you are communicating with. That’s a correct assumption. Now that Ethernet in the WAN (Wide Area Network) is becoming as available as Ethernet for your LAN (Local Area Network), it is more efficient and generally less expensive to keep it Ethernet all the way.

How much less expensive? You can find that out with a quick check for Metro Ethernet prices and availability. The Ethernet Buildings site makes that as easy as it could possibly be. You simply enter your building’s address and check the map that comes up.



Even if your building isn’t already lit for fiber optic service, you may still have the options of getting service via Ethernet over Copper or wireless service. XO Communications owns 28-31 GHz spectrum in 75 markets specifically for this purpose. Other carriers also want to compete for your business and they are rapidly deploying their own Ethernet solutions nationwide.

Have you been missing out on the opportunity to save considerably on your monthly telecom lease costs? Well, there’s no time like the present to check your options. It only takes a few minutes and may save you as much as 50%. Can you think of a better way to spend the next few minutes? If not, check Ethernet service availability for your business location right now.