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.

Finding Lit Buildings and Near Net Fiber Buildings

By: John Shepler

Fiber optic bandwidth service is becoming a staple of modern business. Yet, not everyone has it. Some businesses are just too small to make good use of the 10 Mbps+ bandwidth available over fiber and are happy to stick with T1 lines or lower speed Ethernet over Copper service. Some businesses remember the high prices they encountered when they last checked fiber service pricing and don’t know how much more affordable it is now. Many others could easily get fiber but don’t know that it is already in their building or right next door.

Fiber optic bandwidth isn’t the esoteric product it used to be. Now even consumers are demanding fiber to the premises (FTTP) to support high definition television and on-demand video. Businesses moving to the cloud are finding that the old connectivity doesn’t cut it anymore. Only fiber has the capacity combined with low latency, jitter and packet loss to give you efficient connections with your cloud services. If you are in the video production or distribution business or need to transport large volumes of medical images, then fiber is pretty much a given.

So, how do you go about getting fiber optic service for your business without breaking the bank? You start by finding out what’s readily available to you. If the building you are in already has one or more fiber optic lines pulled-in and connected then it is said to be “lit.” A lit building almost guarantees that you’ll be able to order fiber optic service. The hard work has already been done. What costs a bundle is the construction required to run the fiber optic cable from the carrier’s closest point of presence overhead or underground to your facility and hook up the termination equipment in the telecom room.

Unlike twisted copper pair, even a single optical fiber has tremendous capacity. Right now 10 Gbps is typical, although that can be multiplied using multiple lasers transmitting at different frequencies or wavelengths down the same fiber. This is called DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. If you like, you can generally lease an entire wavelength yourself. It’s an optical private line. You own the total capacity to use as you wish.

Most often, you’ll want a lower level service standardized under SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) or Ethernet over Fiber (EoF). These services can give you a fraction of the total capacity of the fiber at a small fraction of the cost. Bandwidth can be cost effective at as little as 10 Mbps for EoF and can easily be scaled up to 100 or even 1,000 Mbps and up to 10 Gbps.

One thing to know about lit buildings is that generally they are lit by just one carrier. That carrier will provide service to everyone in the building. You need to find out who that is and what services they have to offer.

What if no carrier has lit your building yet? Surprisingly, that’s still true for the majority of business buildings, even at this late date. In that case you want to know who has lit buildings closest to yours. Why? It’s because the cost of constructing fiber is a function of distance. It’s a lot cheaper if you only have to connect next door than if you have to reach down the block. It’s much less expensive than if the closest fiber is a mile or more away.

If your building is lit, then it is considered to be on network or “on-net”. If you are not receiving service, then you are “off-net.” As you can imagine, there is a clear price difference between facilities that are on and off-net. If you are off-net but close to a building that is on-net, then you are considered to be “near-net.” This is a good position to be in because it is generally very practical to get new fiber optic service into near-net buildings.

This all makes sense, but how do you know if you are on, off or near a fiber network and which carrier or carriers are involved? That’s a daunting task to do as an individual if all you have is a telephone and a copy of the Yellow Pages. Even a web search will give you some possible carriers, but not all of them, and it won’t tell you anything about your network status. Fortunately, there is a specialized search tool that specifically locates fiber optic services for any given location.

This is the patented Telarus GeoQuote software that you can access for free. You simply enter your business address and the system will search its database to provide you a map and list of nearby fiber optic locations. It’s all automated and can be accessed from any web browser anytime, day or night. There’s no obligation, but you do have the option of having a telecom brokerage consultant give you the latest competitive pricing for options that apply to your location. The one limitation is that this service only works for business addresses and is not for residential users.

Are you ready for a pleasant surprise? Go ahead and check your business location for available fiber optic services. Even if you’ve done some research on your own lately, you may well find options that you didn’t even know were available.

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.