Fiber Optic Service FAQ, Part 2

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

Q: What types of services are available over Ethernet fiber?

A: The Metro Ethernet Forum has standardized three popular services that are of interest to business users. Ethernet Private Line or E-Line is a dedicated point to point connection between two business locations or from your location to the Internet. Ethernet LAN or E-LAN provides a meshed network service that interconnects multiple locations. Ethernet Tree or E-Tree is a one to many connection popular with companies that distribute content to many subscribers.

Q: How do you connect multiple location LANs together

A: E-Line and E-LAN can do this easily. E-Line is appropriate for two locations to connect as a single bridged network. E-LAN makes sense for 3 or more locations, even those located internationally. E-LAN can make many separate LANs work like they are one larger network.

Q: What is Ethernet over SONET?

A: Most Ethernet providers offer a “native” Ethernet that powers their entire network. If you are in a location that can only get SONET, some carriers offer Ethernet that runs over the SONET fiber. From your prospective, this is the same as any other Ethernet over Fiber.

Q: Can Ethernet carriers interconnect?

A: Yes. The equipment that does this is called E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface. It allows service providers to seamlessly transfer network traffic back and forth. This allows both carriers to expand their service footprints to wider geographical areas.

Q: What are low latency fiber routes?

A: Most fiber networks strive to minimize latency or time delay between locations. Those advertised specifically as low latency routes are specially engineered to minimize the fiber route length using the straightest path available. They also minimize equipment along the route that can introduce additional latency. Low latency fiber services are in big demand for financial companies that deal in high speed trading.

Q: What is Metro Ethernet?

A: Metro Ethernet or MetroE is a fiber optic network that connects business and other locations within a limited geographic region, usually a single city or metropolitan area consisting of city and suburbs. MetroE connections can also connect to other locations nationally or worldwide.

Q: Does Ethernet support telephone service?

A: Ethernet is a great choice for enterprise VoIP phone service. A specialized service known as SIP Trunking connects your networked telephones or IP PBX to a distant service provider. The higher the bandwidth, the more simultaneous conversations can be supported. Traditional analog phones are better supported with analog phone lines or ISDN PRI service over T1 lines.

Q: Is Ethernet over Fiber distance limited like Ethernet over Copper?

A: No. Fiber offers unlimited transmission distance at any speed you wish. Most service providers have regional networks that serve multiple states or offer nationwide service. Some carriers connect worldwide using undersea cable between continents.

Are you interested in what fiber optic bandwidth service can do for your business? If so, get get instant online pricing up to 1 Gbps and complementary consultation with a bandwidth expert if you wish.


You may also be interested in reading Fiber Optic Service FAQs, Part 1 and Part 3.

GigE Ethernet Private Lines

High bandwidth fiber optic connections have traditionally been handled by SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) services. GigE is now a strong competitor, offering high bandwidth, low latency and cost advantages.

GigE or Gigabit Ethernet MAN and WAN services match the bandwidth that many company LANs are running. This makes for a seamless connection to other business locations or the Internet. Cost considerations have previously dictated a speed bump for file transfers and access beyond the LAN. With cost reductions on GigE bandwidth services, it’s now practical to have WAN bandwidth equal to LAN bandwidth.

SONET is a telco technology available in a handful of bandwidth options. The closest levels to 1,000 Mbps are OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.244 Gbps and OC48 at 2.488 Gbps. OC-24 is not as common as the others, so that OC-48 must be used for Gigabit bandwidth service. That is one of the reasons for the often large discrepancy in prices for SONET vs Ethernet bandwidth.

Gigabit Ethernet private lines have become popular since new competitive carriers have entered the marketplace for fiber optic services. Not saddled with the need to support traditional switched circuit telco technologies, many of these operators have elected to build their fiber optic networks as IP-based from the ground up.

IP is becoming the long haul protocol of choice for a number of reasons. First, most of the traffic today comes from IP networks and is used by IP applications. At one time, telephone calls dominated worldwide telecom traffic. No more. The changing of the guard from voice to data has been going on for decades. Now the big bandwidth user is video. This can be video conferencing or downloaded video clips and programs.

Ethernet is the dominant protocol running on local networks today. It makes perfect sense to transport Ethernet without conversion in metropolitan and wide area networks. By operating all network connections as packet switched instead of converting back and forth to circuit switched protocols, the overall network is more efficient and capable of supporting Ethernet line service.

E-Line, short for Ethernet Line service, is a layer 2 connection service that can tie together LANs at two different locations as if they were one bridged LAN. This has the advantage of putting everyone in the company on an equal footing regardless of where they happen to be located. The PC in New York is right next door to the printer in Seattle and the server in Dallas as far as the network is concerned.

You can order Ethernet private line services in a wide range of bandwidths, although the standard network speeds of 10, 100, and 1,000 Mbps are popular. Even 1,000 Mbps 10GigE connections are now available in many major markets. Unlike SONET, your Ethernet bandwidth can be easily scaled to the maximum limit of the installed port. That offers the advantage of being able to order, say, 200 Mbps today and scale it up to 500 Mbps tomorrow and 1,000 Mbps next year. As long as you have a GigE port installed, these bandwidth changes can often be accomplished in a few hours or days with only a phone call to your carrier. No truck rolls are necessary because the same equipment is used.

What can you use GigE Ethernet private line bandwidth for? How about medical image transmission, scientific simulations, CAD/CAM files, and video production? If you are moving your data center to the cloud or anticipating such a move, you may well need a GigE connection to your service provider to avoid lags in using your high performance applications.

The price of bandwidth as high as a Gigabit per second have dropped dramatically over the last few years, especially with the availability of Gigabit Ethernet MAN and WAN connections. Get pricing and availability for GigE Ethernet private line services now and see how affordable it has become.

Low Latency WAN Options

Many companies have added low latency to their list of requirements for WAN (Wide Area Network) connections. Why has latency suddenly gained such importance and how do you get low latency?

Latency is the time it takes for packets to get from one place to another. The latency on your LAN probably isn’t a worry. The latency on your long haul WAN connections may well cause you big problems. For some specific applications, minimizing latency is the holy grail of networking.

Latency and bandwidth aren’t directly related. You can have low speed connections with very minor latency. You can also have screaming Gbps connections with horrible latency. What drives latency is distance, network architecture, and equipment design.

Here’s an example of a network setup where you can’t do much about latency. Consider television remote broadcasts. These are the ones where a van with a satellite dish on top parks at the scene of a news event. It really doesn’t matter where in the world the van and the studio are located. The TV signal is going to have a considerable latency or time delay. You see the effect all the time. If the anchor and the field reporter don’t wait a second before they respond to the conversation, they’ll talk right over the top of each other.

Why is this? It’s because the signal is being sent from the truck dish to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit at 22,236 miles above the Earth (mean sea level) and back down to another dish at the studio or network headquarters. That means the electromagnetic waves have to travel a minimum of 44,472 miles up and then back down. In practice, the distance is longer because the signal isn’t going straight up and down. Now, consider that the speed of all signals in space is 186,000 miles per second and you have at least a quarter second delay one way or a half second round trip. Any equipment in the path or additional landline connections only makes it worse.

This is why satellite broadband works great for one way TV broadcasts but terrible for VoIP conversations. One way streaming is unaffected by latency. Two way anything is definitely affected. Data file transfers aren’t terribly bothered by going through a satellite because the latency is often small compared to the transfer time. But video conferences can be awkward and real time gaming is an exercise in frustration.

The point is that if you worry about latency, stay off geosynchronous satellite connections. Even your landline and undersea connections are affected to the tune of at least a millisecond per 186 miles simply due to the speed of light. Actually, you’d never even get that minimum latency value because light slows down in copper wires and fiber optic cores. The electronics that switch and route your path will also each add a small amount of latency to the total.

So, what differentiates a low latency connection from one that doesn’t concern itself much with latency? What you want is short paths between locations and a minimum of equipment in between. That suggests private networks, not the Internet. The Internet is designed for universal access and self-healing in the event of problems. Latency is an afterthought at best.

Many of today’s top MPLS networks are engineered to minimize latency. There are relatively few label switches to route the traffic and the networks have sufficient bandwidth to prevent congestion that backs up data flow and makes latency worse. You’ll want a network that has fiber runs as direct to your locations as possible to minimize path length. If MPLS will do the job, it has definite cost advantages and can give you mesh network connections so that all sites can easily communicate.

If latency is your number one priority, you’ll do even better with direct private line connections especially designed to minimize latency. These fiber paths are as close to a straight line as you can get and there is little in the way of electronics to slow things down. The one hitch is that these connections are primarily found between major international destinations, especially those like London, Frankfurt, New York and Chicago that are financial trading centers. High speed financial trading is the number one application driving the deployment of ultra low latency fiber optic services.

Do you have a business need for lower latency connections or even a critical need to minimize latency on long haul links? If so, get availability and pricing on Low Latency Fiber Optic Networks to check your domestic and international options.

Low Latency Fiber Network For Orange County

Businesses are demanding more bandwidth at lower latencies to support demanding applications such as financial trading, business process automation, cloud computing & storage and medical image transmission. This is creating an opportunity for new fiber buildout, like the one underway in the Los Angeles Metro area.

AboveNet, a major provider of fiber optic networking services in the US and Europe, is launching what they call a large “feeder ring” to connect office buildings, data centers, and carrier hotels to an existing fiber optic backbone that now serves the business districts of Irvine and Costa Mesa in Orange County, California.

Fiber optic connectivity has become the new battleground for competitive service providers as well as incumbent telcos. A major push has been the transition from legacy SONET/SDH to Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE and 40 GigE, MPLS networks, dark fiber and wavelength services. Networks are becoming more IP oriented, at the expense of traditional switched circuit TDM technologies. This plays well with the dominance of Ethernet networks in business and the move to converged voice, data and video networks.

Cloud services have opened up a further need for increased bandwidth. When companies had on-site data centers for their servers and storage, most traffic was contained within the building or campus LAN. Special links served overnight tape backup at offsite storage centers. Once computing and disk resources move to a colocation facility or a cloud services provider, there is a corresponding increase in WAN bandwidth requirements. With everything “out there,” a much higher portion of traffic leaves the company LAN.

AboveNet and other carriers are in a major push right now to expand their fiber optic network footprints in the US and abroad. Especially important are low latency networks to Europe and Asia to interconnect financial markets and major international businesses. Private networks require an enormous capital investment and the Internet is unsuitable for high performance, secure connections. That’s creating an opportunity for companies that specialize in metro and long haul fiber optic networks to jump in and fill the need.

Some services that are seeing more demand are IP transit to connect with the Internet backbone for companies that don’t have networks large enough to do their own peering, Ethernet Private Line and LAN services, global MPLS networking, and wavelength services that offer both very high bandwidth capacity along with flexibility of protocols.

Competitive pressures have also reduced the cost per Mbps for nearly all leased line services. This is true for even the ubiquitous T1 lines, but even more so for Ethernet connections of all types. Ethernet availability has expanded to such an extent that it is often far less expensive than T-Carrier or SONET in most metro areas. Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE WAN connections are now routinely ordered by larger business and organizations.

Is your company bandwidth starved or simply looking for better prices on existing network services? See if you can do better by checking prices and availability for fiber optic bandwidth.



Note: Orange County, CA photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

What Makes High Frequency Trading Work

You’ve heard about computerized securities trading and what’s called high frequency trading. There was a lot of talk about this related to the “flash crash” last spring. But like it or not, we are in the era of automated stock trades. Some are initiated by human traders. Others are triggered by algorithms pre-programed to wait for certain conditions and then place the buy or sell orders automatically. Now, CBS News has gotten an inside looks at the machinery that makes this all possible. Watch “Robot Traders of the NYSE” and see if your jaw doesn’t drop.



Did you catch the part about how they had to equalize timing for all traders to keep the system fair? Once they started up this 3 football fields size data center, it turned out that where your servers were located physically in the infrastructure determined how fast you could get your trades to market. Yes, just the length of the cabling and whatever routing equipment was involved gave near-end locations an edge over far-end locations. How much can this really be? It was only microseconds, but in high frequency trading microseconds count.

The NYSE leveled the playing field by equalizing the access time to 65 microseconds for all players. Now, no one has an advantage... or do they?

Not all trading is executed on the New York Stock Exchange or on computers collocated within the NYSE facility. You could be trading other exchanges in New York, New Jersey or Chicago. You may need to access an overseas market from the US or vice-versa. What many broker dealers, investment management firms and hedge funds have done is collocate to a commercial facility, such as the ones that Telx operates close to major financial districts. Telx focuses on ultra-low latency connections to speed transactions to market. Through a partnership with Tata Communications, Telx offers colocation facilities in Canada, South Africa, Europe, UK and Asia. Telx and other carriers also now offer line services designed specifically for the lowest latency possible.

Do you have a requirement for unusually low latency facilities or connections? Find out what’s available in International International Low Latency Data Networks now.

The Need for Low Latency Networks

When we think of network performance, we tend to think of bandwidth. After all, bandwidth equals speed. The faster your network runs, the faster your can transfer files from place to place. The faster those data transfers go, the more work can be done. That can also translate into bandwidth equals productivity. But there is another characteristic of network performance that is getting attention as of late. That is the matter of latency.

What is latency? It’s the time delay in the network. In other words, how long it takes to get a packet from node to node. You might be inclined to think that latency has something to do with bandwidth, but they are quite different characteristics.

Here’s an example. Suppose we are transmitting a data stream up to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. One application is video feeds from the other side of the world. You see them on the TV news every night. Have you noticed that there is a slight delay in the connection? The TV anchor has to wait a second for the reporter to reply or they’ll talk over the top of each other. That pause is latency. It has to do with how long it takes for the signal to go up to the satellite and back down to the far location.

Now, how much do you suppose that it would speed up the television feed if we doubled the bandwidth? The answer: Not at all. As long as you don’t have packets waiting in a queue because of insufficient bandwidth, doubling, tripling or making the bandwidth 100x won’t speed up the circuit at all.

Why? Because the radio signal traveling thorough space is already at the speed of light. The Einsteinian limit of 186,000 miles per second sets the threshold on how low latency can be between point A and point B. You can’t make the signal go faster, but you can sure make it go slower.

Signals traveling to satellites in space go slowly enough. If you have a satellite Internet connection, you know that quite well. VoIP is impossible unless you want to use your connection like a walkie-talkie. Only one person can talk at a time and then wait for the other to reply. That’s called half-duplex. We’re used to full duplex, where two people can talk at the same time and still hear each other without interruption.

Low latency was inherent in the analog telephone system. There was very little but wire connecting two telephone sets. It takes maybe a millisecond to go a hundred miles. The same is true for TDM (Time Division Multiplexed) circuits such as T1 lines. You lose a little in the conversion process, but the synchronized channel propagates as fast as the signal can travel in copper wires or glass fibers.

So, what slows things down on the Internet? It’s all those routers between source and destination. Each one adds some milliseconds or fraction thereof to the process. Get a dozen or more routers between you and the other end of the transmission, and you’ll notice the latency building up.

Sometimes latency is important and sometimes it isn’t. The Internet was designed for things like scientific data file transfers and email. Neither of these applications is going to be much affected by a few dozen or hundred milliseconds of latency. It wasn’t until real-time interactive applications came along that anyone really took note of the latency issue.

What is latency sensitive? VoIP telephony for sure. Even so, 100 ms is considered quite workable for phone conversations. That same 100 ms can be a real annoyance to real-time gamers who might find the small but noticeable lag between action and reaction to be annoying. But 100 ms can be the difference between profit and loss in high speed financial trading. With new financial centers being built and traders increasingly using computers to automatically place their trades, the subject of networking latency has become a hot topic for very high speed networks.

So how do you decrease the latency on your network? First, forget the Internet or anything modeled after it. The Internet was designed to be self-healing, so it will route your packets any which way it can to get them to their destination. The lowest latency networks have high speed fiber in as straight a line as possible between locations. There is also as little equipment as possible between end points. Signal regenerators may be needed, but switches and routers need to be minimized. Whatever switching and routing equipment does exist has to be designed to minimize latency by running as fast as possible internally and doing a few functions as absolutely necessary. The more you process a signal, the longer it takes.

If low latency it essential to your operation, you need to specify that. Just saying that you want a 10 Gbps connection will guarantee you bandwidth, but not necessarily the lowest latency possible. Many major carriers are sensitive to the needs of financial trading and other businesses where network latency makes a difference. They offer special low latency network connections designed specifically for those needs.

Do you have a low latency requirement for your business? If so, be sure your say so when you check high bandwidth network service prices and availability for your locations.