Fiber Makes the Upgrades Easy

By: John Shepler

Fiber optic bandwidth has long been a standard of business connectivity, especially for applications requiring extreme line speeds. The good news now is that fiber service is becoming available to more and more business locations. IT managers and other executives are increasingly faced with the choice of whether to continue embracing their legacy copper wireline services or make the upgrade to fiber optic service. Let’s see what helps tilt the balance in favor of fiber.


First of all, Fiber is the Future
You can easily read the signs that point in this direction. Fiber optic bandwidth has gone from being an extremely expensive option to being price competitive with copper on a per Mbps basis. Bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper will only take you so far in satisfying an accelerating need for MAN and WAN bandwidth. When copper runs out of capability, fiber is often the only solution.

Copper Asset Retirement
You’ll also notice the media stories of how carriers are either phasing out their copper assets or planning to do so. The change has been slow in coming because all that buried and overhead copper is already paid for. However, maintenance is not free. Corroding copper wires result in frequent truck rolls. Some of the justification for holding onto the copper plant is the preponderance of legacy analog phone lines plus T1 and ISDN trunks that use the same twisted pair lines. As carriers transition from circuit switched to packet switched architectures, those analog and TDM circuits start to fade away.

Ethernet over Fiber
The new juggernaut is Ethernet over Fiber. It’s a combination that meets a lot of needs. Fiber provides the bandwidth capacity. Ethernet offers its inherent support for IP networking. Ethernet also has some new standardized services available. E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service is becoming the easiest and most cost effective way to link multiple business locations in a meshed any-to-any communications architecture. The designed-in ease of scalability with Ethernet over Fiber is a huge boon for companies that want to minimize their costs in an uncertain business climate.

SONET, the Legacy Fiber
The legacy competing fiber service is SONET, a technology designed by and for the phone companies. SONET has predetermined bandwidth levels that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps and OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps. The terminal equipment is specific to these levels, so changes require truck rolls for the carriers to swap out customer premises equipment and perhaps make engineering changes to the network. Delays of weeks and months for system changes are not unusual.

Ethernet Scalability
Ethernet over Fiber doesn’t operate at fixed bandwidth levels. Instead, there is a maximum bandwidth capability determined by the installed port speed. Popular port options include 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps 10 GigE. The beauty of this arrangement is that you can install a Gigabit Ethernet port, but only order a couple hundred Mbps of initial bandwidth. When your line starts to reach its capacity, a simple phone call to your provider can double or quadruple bandwidth in a matter of hours or days. No hardware changes are needed.

Ethernet Cost Advantage
You should also be aware that Ethernet over Fiber usually has a cost advantage over SONET. Competitive carriers with their own IP core networks can completely bypass the incumbent telephone companies and give you point to point or dedicated Internet connections. You may well find that you can get twice the bandwidth for the same money that you pay now or cut your monthly telecom bill in half.

Cost Performance Advantage of Ethernet over Copper

Most businesses have some type of bandwidth connections for credit card verification, email, online searches, location to location data transfers, procurement, research and a host of other needs. These connections run the gamut from information services such as DSL, Cable, satellite and wireless, to telecom services like T1, DS3, OC3 and Ethernet over Fiber. The new player, with cost vs performance advantages you should consider, is Ethernet over Copper.

Why Ethernet over Copper? First of all, this is a protocol that most closely matches what is running on nearly all networks today. That is, Ethernet. Most other services were designed back in day when voice was king and the public switched telephone network dominated worldwide communications. That’s no longer the case. The world has not only transformed from analog to digital, but has also moved from telephone conversations to email, texting, video downloads and streaming, search and Websites.

Voice landlines are on the decline. While users increasingly choose cellular calls, businesses are transforming desk phones to enterprise VoIP and carriers are quietly converting their core networks from circuit switched to packet switched architectures. Even the next generation of smartphones may choose VoIP over LTE rather than continue the proprietary GSM and CDMA voice channels. All of this means an increasing stampede toward Ethernet as the universal networking protocol.

Using Ethernet instead of some other telecom protocol improves network efficiency since no conversions are required and interfaces are simpler. It also enables Ethernet strategies such as layer 2 switching vs layer 3 routing to connect geographically separate LANs on one large bridged network. This strategy works not only in the metro area networks, but also nationwide through metro networks and worldwide through Ethernet exchanges. We’re not far from the day when Ethernet will the common denominator and all networks will be IP over whatever’s at the core.

Now you know why it makes sense to run Ethernet rather than some other protocol, such as T-carrier or SONET. But why Ethernet over Copper?

The beauty of Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is that it makes good use of existing infrastructure to avoid construction costs. Business phone lines and T1 line connect using twisted pair copper wire bundles that are routinely installed for every business. Ethernet over Copper uses the very same installed copper. How this works is that the EoC provider installs the EoC equipment at the central office and compatible customer premises equipment at your location. In between, they simply lease the unpowered or “dry” copper pair that is already in place. In most cases two or more pair are utilized.

There’s a correlation between how many copper pair are connected and the speed of your line service. The more pair, from 2 to 8 typically, the higher the bandwidth. The modulation efficiency of this equipment yields higher bandwidths than you get from T1 lines and typical DSL or satellite links. A very popular entry level EoC service is 2 or 3 Mbps. That’s easily increased to 10, 15 or 20 Mbps in most locations. Even 50 and 100 Mbps over copper is not unheard of.

The one tradeoff is speed for distance. The closer you are to the telco office where your copper terminates, the higher that bandwidth you can achieve. In unusual cases, your location is extended more than 2 or 3 miles and EoC service won’t work. In those cases, you may still be able to get Ethernet over DS1 using the same transmission technology as T1 lines.

It’s true that you can get higher download bandwidths using Cable broadband or some wireless services. However, upload bandwidth on these services tends to be maybe a tenth the download speed. Ethernet is symmetrical, meaning that upload and download speeds are the same. This is important if you upload large files or operate on-premises servers.

Beyond technology, pricing is a big advantage for EoC vs T1 and even fiber optic services. Remember that Ethernet over Copper can deliver large bandwidths that delay or even avoid the expensive construction of fiber optic connections. EoC typically delivers twice the bandwidth of T1 for about the same price. At higher bandwidth levels, the cost savings is even more striking.

Could your business benefit from EoC service? Find out by checking prices and availability of Ethernet over Copper bandwidth for your business locations. Sorry, no residential service available.