Fiber Buildings Offer High Bandwidth

Are you looking to increase your bandwidth connections from the low to medium speeds you can get delivered over twisted pair copper or fixed wireless, on up to the high speeds available only over fiber optic cabling? Would you like to do that while avoiding the often prohibitive construction cost of bringing in new fiber service? Then what you need is a fiber building.

In this case, a fiber building isn’t one that’s made out of carbon fiber construction or anything exotic like that. Fiber doesn’t refer to the construction materials of the structure itself. It refers to the type of telecom services already installed. A fiber building is one that already has fiber optic service brought in and operating. That’s why you often hear them referred to as fiber lit buildings. Lit means that there is laser light shining down those fiber strands and carrying digital payloads.

So, how do you find a fiber building? Peeking in windows after dark won’t work and will probably get you in trouble. You could start calling all the office and industrial buildings in the area and mark the lit building locations on a map. Or you can take the easy approach and use an automated online tool that will do all that legwork for you. It’s called the “Lit Building Locator.” You simply enter the street address of the building you are in now and you’ll get a map of lit buildings in the area and how far they are from you.

The most popular fiber optic bandwidth service being requested now is Metro or Carrier Ethernet. The beauty of Ethernet is that it is the same protocol that you are already running on your corporate LAN. That makes interfacing very easy. Fiber optic Ethernet services include Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) at 1,000 Mbps and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) at 10,000 Mbps. In some cases 40 Gigabit Ethernet is also available for the most demanding applications.

You should be aware that there is another type of fiber optic service that is also installed in “lit” buildings. This is the traditional telecom service called SONET for Synchronous Optical NETwork. Bandwidth services include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 at 2.4 Mbps. Higher speeds include OC-192 at 9.95 Mbps that is compatible with 10 GigE WAN-PHY and OC-768 running at 40 Gbps.

Which fiber service should you choose? There may or may not be a choice. Once a fiber service is brought into a building, competing services generally choose other buildings to light up. Any particular building may be lit for SONET or Ethernet. There is a service called Ethernet over SONET, including 10 GigE WAN-PHY, that can give you the protocol you want even if your building is set up to legacy telco standards. Another reason that customers are asking for Ethernet is that it tends to be less expensive per Mbps than SONET services, where available.

Are you looking for more bandwidth? Why not check for fiber buildings and see if yours or one nearby is lit? If close, you may be able to get a carrier to make the necessary installation with no or discounted construction costs if you will be ordering a high bandwidth level. Perhaps you can find other tenants and pool your request to make the installation even more attractive.



Note: Photo courtesy of Diego Silvestre on Wikimedia Commons.

Cheaper Optical Carrier Services

With business transactions becoming more and more electronic, there is a crying need for higher levels of WAN or Wide Area Network bandwidth. What usually stifles company ambitions is not that they can't make good use of faster digital network services. It's that they can't afford them. Or so they think.

Actually, there's been a dramatic reduction in the cost per Mbps of carrier services since many business leaders last got quotes and were so shocked and horrified by the results that they shelved the entire idea. It started with the bursting the famous "tech bubble" of the 1990's. Yes, back then bandwidth was jaw-dropping expensive and not all that widely available. But the collapse of technology sector growth resulted in an almost immediate bandwidth glut and prices did what you'd expect. They fell to a level that matched demand. So dire was the situation that for years conduits chock full of new fiber strands went unlit and unused.

That glut was gradually sopped up by an expanding economy, but costs have not returned to their earlier high levels as you might think would happen with a shrinking supply and increasing demand. The reason is that supply is not shrinking. It is expanding. It is expanding due to new companies entering the field and building out their own networks to the latest standards.

That's important because regional and nationwide fiber optic networks are incredibly expensive to deploy. All that fiber has to go in the ground, on overhead poles, or through unused pipelines. Plus the equipment that regenerates the signals as they get weak traveling hundreds and thousands of miles through the glass fibers, and multiplexes and demultiplexes the various services at each POP or Point of Presence, represents a huge capital investment. Once a carrier has installed a particular type of system, they want to pay it off and generate profits for as long as possible. They're not all that anxious to toss everything out in a "fork lift upgrade" and bring in all new technology.

This gives newer players an advantage because they don't have all that legacy equipment to amortize. They start fresh with the latest and most efficient systems. As as example, many competitive carriers have installed IP based optical networks while the telcos are still running TDM based networks designed for digitized telephone calls rather than packet traffic. With enough slicing and dicing, you can get any network to transport any protocol. But it's more efficient and less costly to match your network to the type of traffic you expect to handle now and in the future.

The result of an increasingly competitive marketplace for optical carrier services encouraged by a rapid growth in business demand for bandwidth to improve speed and efficiency is making for an attractive situation if you are the one buying the bandwidth. A further improvement in the process is the emergence of telecom brokers with sophisticated online comparison tools to gather rate information from many carriers and present them in an ordered list from cheapest to most expensive for the same service.

The best of these is the industry leader, Telarus, Inc., with its patented groundbreaking search tool called GeoQuote(tm) that you can access yourself through Gigapackets.com. This tool accesses the databases of a couple of dozen competitive carriers to generate accurate service quotes for lower speed services such as T1 lines in a matter of seconds.

Higher level services, such as SONET OC3, OC12, OC48 and OC192 fiber optic services or IP services, such as Carrier Ethernet to 10 GigE levels, and MPLS networks require some engineering input and may take a few hours. Telarus consultants usually have a good idea of typical costs for these services so you can get a budgetary figure quickly. Be sitting down when you ask. You may be shocked by the amount of bandwidth you can afford these days.