100 Mbps Business Ethernet vs OC3 SONET Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Many high tech companies and large corporations got into fiber optic bandwidth service years ago. The service they chose was the one available: OC3 SONET. Since then, many have upgraded to higher speeds, also in the SONET family of service, or simply stuck with the OC3 that has been performing reliably over the years.

The entrance of 100 Mbps and higher Ethernet MAN and WAN bandwidth is challenging the dominance of SONET fiber service. Long time users are taking a closer look at the competition. Companies upgrading or ordering bandwidth the for first time are doing their homework before choosing one technology over the other.

SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) in the SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) became the core of most metropolitan, wide area and international networks over the last decades. It was originally developed as a massive telephone trunking technology designed to bundle hundreds and thousands of simultaneous phone calls for long distance transport. With the rise of computer to computer communications and the Internet, SONET services were the logical choice to carry data packets as well as voice channels.

What does SONET have going for it? It is a very mature and well supported technology understood by all of the telephone companies and most network carriers. It is highly reliable and can survive certain fiber cuts and equipment failures. There are a number of service levels available between 155 Mbps and 100 Gbps. Costs have also come down over the years to the point where even smaller companies can consider the entry level OC3 SONET service.

Why throw over a winning service for a newer technology like Carrier Ethernet? It comes down to cost, service features and scalability.

In case you haven’t noticed, just about everything that can communicate uses Ethernet. This includes nearly every corporate LAN, all PCs, printers, scanners, routers, network switches and wireless access points. That’s expanding now to telephones, televisions and any other equipment that is joining the “Internet of Things.” Why not an all-Ethernet world?

The brand of Ethernet that leaves your property is called Carrier Ethernet. It has been standardized by and industry group, the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), so that it works over long distances, has the operations and maintenance features needed for carrier operations and is compatible from provider to provider.

Let’s compare two very common bandwidth services: 100 Mbps Ethernet vs OC3 SONET. Both are provided over fiber optic strands and delivered to your organization at a specified demarcation point. For Ethernet you use a simple Ethernet copper or fiber patch cord to connect your equipment to the carrier’s demarc. OC3 requires a special interface module that plugs into a router to convert between the Ethernet on your LAN and the SONET that runs on the carrier lines.

This is one reason why SONET is losing ground to Ethernet. If your network and everything on it is running Ethernet, why do a protocol conversion from Ethernet to SONET and back again at the far end just to send Ethernet packets from point to point over to the Internet? There are inefficiencies associated with that conversion process. Plus, you need a specific interface module for each SONET level. An OC3 module won’t work for OC12 or OC48.

SONET has specific service levels, although you can sometimes get fractional or rate limited services below the maximum line speed. Ethernet is scalable by design. The carrier provides an Ethernet port with a maximum speed, typically 100, 1,000 or 10,000 Mbps. Your actual service level can be any speed up to the capacity of the port. You pretty much pay for the bandwidth you are actually using rather than the capability of the circuit.

Scalability can also save you money. A 100 Mbps or Fast Ethernet connection on a 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet port can be scaled up or down easily. With SONET you start out at 155 Mbps for the entry level OC3. That sounds like 50% more bandwidth and it is. However, many companies really need 50 or 100 Mbps but had to buy 155 Mbps because it was that or nothing. If your 100 Mbps Ethernet connection bogs down, you can call the service provider and ask for an upgrade to 150 or 200 Mbps and have it in a matter of hours or days. If you tap out an OC3 connection, you have to wait days or weeks for an upgrade to the next generally available SONET level of OC12 at 622 Mbps.

Besides being able to order just the bandwidth you need now while knowing that you can easily upgrade when the need arises, Ethernet service tends to be less expensive than SONET on a per Mbps basis. But how about the quality of service? Both can deliver your packets with high reliability, low latency, and rock solid bandwidth. SONET tends to have fewer “flavors” available. It’s usually a protected ring arrangement with symmetrical dedicated bandwidth and five-nines (99.999%) reliability.

With business Ethernet, you need to be aware of what you are ordering. You can now get Carrier Ethernet with the same redundant path protection as SONET to ensure that if one circuit fails, the system will automatically switch to the other path in under 50 mSec. You can also get the same 99.999% reliability, low latency & jitter, and symmetrical dedicated bandwidth that you’ve come to expect with SONET services. However, if your applications aren’t so critical and you are more interested in saving money than in having the ultimate in performance, be aware that you can also order Ethernet services with asymmetrical bandwidth, shared bandwidth and unprotected circuits. These flavors of Ethernet work well for general Internet usage and casual PC backup to the cloud and are considerably cheaper.

Is SONET or Ethernet the best choice for your business bandwidth needs? Get free consulting help from a bandwidth expert who can also get you the best pricing from multiple carriers who offer services for your location. Also get instant online quotes for many bandwidth services up to 1 Gbps.

Why Carriers Are Transforming Copper to Fiber

Alchemists of the ancient world spent centuries searching for the philosopher’s stone. This is a legendary substance that could turn lead into gold. They never found it. Today’s network carriers may well have found a modern equivalent to the philosopher’s stone. It’s the near magic of converting copper into fiber.

Telecom service providers aren’t really after a chemical process to make them rich. They have something even more lucrative. Their version of transmutation involves the wholesale replacement of century old twisted pair copper wiring with the latest in multiple strand fiber optic cabling.

There are untold tons of copper in the ground. Not just the ore, mind you. The copper that makes money for carriers is the refined variety that is drawn into small diameter wire and coated with colored plastic for insulation. The wires are then joined into pairs so a complete circuit can be formed. They are twisted into a spiral to cancel out interfering signals from other pairs and outside influences such as AC power cabling. Collections of twisted pairs are bundled into cables called binders and then buried or flown overhead on utility poles.

The installed copper is referred to as an asset by the companies that own it. These are almost always the ILECs or Incumbent local Exchange Carriers. They are the legacy of the old Bell System that developed the technology and installed the infrastructure in the first place. Copper assets have been the basis of telecom profits for more than a century. So, why turn your back on this valuable resource?

Copper’s glory days are in the past. For more than a dozen decades, copper wires carried most voice and data signals. Data came first, in the form of the telegraph. Voice soon followed with the invention of Bell’s telephone. Even television used copper for signal transport, although using a different type of cable called coax. It’s still the most popular way to connect cable television to homes and businesses. What’s replacing copper? Fiber.

Fiber optic bundles long ago replaced copper cables as undersea cables. They also form the core of nationwide data networks and long distance telephone service. What’s left is the arduous job of abandoning or pulling out all that old copper still used locally and replacing it with the latest in high efficiency fiber optics.

Make no mistake, converting copper to fiber is an expensive process. Verizon has been a leader in FTTH (Fiber to the Home) using passive fiber optic cables to replace old telephone wires. Once installed, the fiber becomes the telecom connection to that location and the copper is decommissioned. Despite the advantages of fiber over copper, this conversion process has not spread like wildfire across the country. It costs a lot to install the new fiber and network interface boxes.

The buildout cost is becoming less of an issue all the time. This is especially true for the copper installations in business locations. Businesses are willing to spend a lot more in monthly lease fees for their bandwidth connections than consumers. They are also faced with the new reality that high bandwidth is critical for the growth of their businesses.

Business demand is one major impetus in the transformation of copper to fiber MAN and WAN connections. Bandwidth demands are skyrocketing and copper is limited in how much it can transport. T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 connections at 45 Mbps are most popular legacy telecom services. DS3 itself depends on fiber optic transmission to the curb, where the final run into the building is accomplished with coaxial copper. T1 uses those twisted pairs originally installed for telephone service. It was specifically designed to be compatible. The good news is that T1 is almost universally available. The bad news is that it no longer has the bandwidth to support modern business processes. A couple of decades ago 1.5 Mbps was all you needed even in larger companies. Now that’s considered entry level at best.

A couple of technical advances are extending the life of the installed copper assets. One is T1 line bonding. You can connect two T1 lines so they act like one line with twice the capacity. Add more lines and multiply the bandwidth. The practical limit to this is 10 or 12 Mbps. Another technology is called Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This uses the same twisted pair copper as T1 but with a different modulation scheme that offers higher bandwidths but distance sensitivity. You can easily get 10 to 50 Mbps, but need to be fairly close to the telco CO for higher bandwidths.

What’s fiber got to offer? How about bandwidths from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps? Cloud computing, video, big data and content distribution need those higher bandwidths that only fiber can easily provide. This requirement is only going to increase in the future. This is why Verizon recently took advantage of the “opportunity” to replace their old copper with fiber in lower Manhattan following the water damage from Hurricane Sandy. It future-proofs their network while opening up a market for higher priced higher bandwidth services.

Is your business being stymied by too low bandwidth? Check availability of Ethernet over Copper and Fiber Optic services for your business location. You may be surprised by the increased availability and lower cost of higher bandwidth metro and WAN services.


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