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.

Dark Fiber for Bandwidth and Security

The step up from copper-based bandwidth solutions to fiber optic connections is an important and necessary move for many companies. For others, it’s just not enough. Where do you go when the best service options on fiber optic lines don’t have the bandwidth or security features that you require? Dark fiber steps in where lit fiber falls short.

How can lit fiber service fall short of the mark? After all, It’s possible to get as much as 10,000 Mbps or 10 Gigabit SONET or Ethernet delivered to your door. In some cases, you can push this to OC-768 or 40 Gbps. The carriers themselves are upgrading their backbone networks to 100 Gbps.

All true, but some companies still have a need for more bandwidth, more control and more security. You get those things when you control the fiber itself rather than a service that runs on the fiber and is available to any paying customer.

What you may be looking for is called dark fiber. It’s dark because it hasn’t been “lit” with laser light yet. This is fiber that has been installed in the ground or on poles overhead but not pressed into service. There was a enormous fiber buildout in the late 1990’s that led to a fiber glut less than a decade later. The fiber was installed in anticipation of a major boom in Internet services that went flat when the tech bubble burst at the turn of the century.

Some of that fiber is still available for lease. Most, though, has been acquired and now more dark fiber is being installed. This time there looks to be no end to the demand for business bandwidth. Big data, health care automation, a move from local data centers to the cloud, and other advances are changing the landscape for business. There really isn’t any going back to the days of paper filled file cabinets or even software packages running on local PCs. We’re becoming more and more interconnected and both the size of data files and the necessary speeds of transmissions are increasing.

Carriers, financial institutions, research labs, video production companies and others who generate massive traffic may be interested in leasing dark fiber to connect two or more locations within a metro district or between cities. A number of large network operators have dark fiber assets for lease, including Zayo with fiber in the ground in many cities.

On campus, you might think about trenching your own fiber optic cable. Beyond that, you need to lease fiber from a company that is in the business of installing fiber over long distances. They invest by burying multiple cables with multiple fiber strands along the routes where they have permission to dig. You’ll probably be leasing one or two strands out of a hundred or more within the cable. Those will be your strands for the duration of the lease. You’ll need to install the equipment at both ends of the fiber run to transport your data.

The way to transport really massive amounts of data from point to point is to use Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) to send multiple laser beams at slight different wavelengths or colors through the fiber. Each beam is independent and transports anywhere from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps. DWDM might generate 100 or more separate wavelengths. Each wavelength can transport any protocol you desire independently of what any other wavelengths are doing.

Dark fiber security comes from the fact that you control the entire fiber strand. Only your equipment is connected to it. That gives any potential intruders no access points to tap into your data streams. If you need even more guarantees of security, you can always choose to encrypt your packets while they are traversing the fiber.

You don’t have to go all the way from SONET or Ethernet over Fiber to Dark Fiber. You can simply lease one or more wavelengths or go with a managed fiber solution where the fiber provider also installs and operates the termination equipment at each end. They are essentially expertly managing your fiber for you for a fee.

Do you have requirements beyond what common bandwidth solutions can accommodate? If so, find out what dark fiber assets and managed fiber services are available for the locations you have in mind.



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

Benefits of a Gigabit Ethernet Network Connection

The need for high bandwidth connectivity has sneaked up on some companies. That T1 line they ordered years ago turned into a DS3 connection and perhaps a move to OC3 fiber optic service. But it still seems like there is a bottleneck. Perhaps it is time to consider a move to GigE or Gigabit Ethernet.

One thing you should know about the other telecom services you’ve ordered over the years is that they are derived from telephone company technology. Yes, they’re reliable. Yes, they work just fine. But they weren’t designed from the ground up to mirror what you are running on your network today. As a consequence, you may have interface issues and you are probably paying a lot more than you would have to for the same connection speed.

The beauty of having Ethernet as your standard protocol both inside and outside of your facility is that there are no connectivity issues. It’s Ethernet all the way. You can use it like you use any other high bandwidth connection to transport voice, video or data packets from point to point. You also have the option to employ your Ethernet connection as a way to link multiple LANs together in one large bridged LAN. It’s a way to connect all your geographically diverse locations as if they were simply on different floors of the same building.

There was a time just a few years ago when Gigabit Ethernet running on a local area networks was as absurd an idea as ordering up a Gigabit Ethernet WAN connection. For one thing, Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet are relatively new services. For another, Gigabit Ethernet was considered a ridiculously large amount of bandwidth.

Nobody laughs at GigE anymore. They don’t even shake their head in disbelief. What they want to know is where they can get Gigabit Ethernet service and how much it will cost them.

The reason for this change of attitude is that computer applications are sucking up bandwidth like it is an infinite resource. It’s the way that microprocessor clock speed just couldn’t get high enough or that RAM memory was always about half what you really needed. Multiple core processors and lower RAM prices have allowed computers to keep up with demanding applications such as video processing. It’s networks that are now under pressure.

You may already be running Gigabit Ethernet on your LAN. Many PCs, peripherals, switches, routers and network appliances come with 10/100/1000 Mbps Network Interface Cards standard. GigE gives you the network throughput you need to efficiently transfer files and run real time simulations and processes without creating time wasting bottlenecks. Now, what about connections that leave your facility?

If you need to transfer medical images or do video production, a Gigabit Ethernet connection may at the low end of what you’ll be needing. If you’ve consolidated data centers and need to access files remotely from a large facility, GigE is no luxury.

Fortunately, Gigabit Ethernet WAN connections are readily available in metropolitan areas. Downtown in major cities you may even have two or more carriers bidding for your business. What’s important is that you have or can easily get a fiber optic connection to your building. GigE is way beyond the capability of copper-based facilities and most wireless services.

Can you get Gigabit Ethernet at a reasonable cost? It’s more affordable than ever and competitive carriers are more inclined to bring in fiber service by aerial line or underground. See if you have fiber facilities already in your area. Check now to find fiber optic services at or near your business location. If it’s on the map, you may be in luck.



Note: Photo of Gigabit Ethernet switch and cables courtesy of J. Smith on Wikimedia Commons.

Video-Film Production Bandwidth

Video and film production is increasingly a digital process, often with contributions from multiple sources in diverse geographical locations. While "sneaker-net" or postal services can be used to transport content from place to another on tapes and disks, rapid production schedules really cry out for electronic transfer. But how do you do that and what are the costs involved?

The key characteristic of digital transport services is bandwidth. This is the transmission rate in bits per second, although in practical terms it's quoted in Mbps or Gbps. The thing you need to know about bandwidth is that, in general, the higher the bandwidth, the higher the price. I say in general because some newer services, such as Metro Ethernet, can be priced lower than traditional services for the same bandwidth.

How much bandwidth do you need? That depends on how big the data files are that your process generates. Video clips or streaming video intended for watching on Web browsers is orders of magnitude smaller than high definition video intended for digital cinema.

There is also a tradeoff between how fast you need a file delivered and the required bandwidth. If you desire real-time high definition broadcast quality with no compression, you're looking at requirements for fiber optic services in the Gbps category. If you are satisfied with overnight transfer of compressed standard definition video programs of less than an hour's length, you may be able to get by with a much lower cost T1 or bonded T1 line in the Mbps category.

So it comes down to these tradeoffs: real time transfer, say for on-air broadcast, versus file transfers that can take minutes or hours. Also high definition versus standard or even lower grade definition. Finally, uncompressed versus compression by, say, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4.

There are a few standard digital interfaces used in video, film and television broadcast that have been standardized by SMPTE, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. They are based on the SDI or Serial Digital Interface that is standardized in professional video equipment. The standard definition interface is SD-SDI per SMPTE 259M. This requires a bandwidth of 270 Mbps. The high definition interface is HD-SDI per SMPTE 292M. It requires a bandwidth of 1.485 Gbps. Another emerging standard is dual link HD-SDI or a pair of SMPTE 292M links, standardized in SMPTE 372M. This dual link requires 2.97 Gbps. Finally, SMPTE 424M is a 3G-SDI serial link that also requires 2.97 Gbps.

While these standard signals were developed primarily for interconnecting professional video equipment using coaxial cable, there is now equipment available to transport those SMPTE standard signals over private or leased fiber optic lines over long distances. Studios, production houses and cinemas can be interconnected using equipment such as Optiva cards from Emcore or Ekinops video transport modules.

In addition to the interface hardware you'll need transmission services, most often leased lines. Depending on your location, you may be able to get SONET or Gigabit Ethernet fiber optic line services. If you don't need real-time transmission or are able to use compression to reduce your bandwidth requirements, you may be able to get by with Ethernet over Copper or DS3 service.

What will work best for your application and how much will it cost? Find out by discussing your needs with one of the expert Telarus bandwidth consultants available through our Gigapackets bandwidth service. This is a brokerage service offering services from a dozen or more carriers. It's available free of charge to serious business users.

10 Gig E WAN Comes To The Enterprise

Amazing as it sounds, 10 Gigabit Ethernet wide area network connections are now possible for business applications. Perhaps even more surprising are the number of businesses that can actually use this level of bandwidth.

Gigabit Ethernet is just starting up the growth curve for major corporations and high technology companies who's products and services depend on creating enormous data sets and being able to deliver them instantly to their customers. What kind of companies are those?

For anyone engaged in video production or editing, Gigabit per second pipes are no extravagance. Even short video productions chew up hundreds of Megabytes in a matter of minutes. Uncompressed high definition video can do that in seconds. It matters not if you have Terabytes or Petabytes of storage available if there is no practical way to transfer those productions in any reasonable amount of time.

Medical imaging is another high demand generator of data. MRI, CT, and X-Ray images create large files for each picture and image set. As the medical profession moves more and more from physical to electronic files, the amount of data will surely multiply and then multiply again. It's now possible to have a physician in Asia read a medical image from the U.S. during what is the middle of the night for us, but standard business hours in India or China. Being able to use medical consultants worldwide depends on having rapid communications for both text and images.

Scientific research and Engineering are fields that have moved away from notebooks and analog gauges to computer-aided drawing, manufacturing and modeling. Complex projects, such as new building design, collaboration on aircraft design, and drug research increasingly use faster and faster supercomputers. The faster computers generate data that much faster. Can you really expect to use yesterday's bandwidth solutions to maintain cutting edge productivity?

It is high bandwidth applications such as these that are driving companies and organizations to faster LANs within their operations and faster WAN connections outside. With Ethernet the common denominator among network protocols, it stands to reason that Carrier Ethernet solutions are a better match than the traditional SONET fiber optic services. They are also often cheaper. Competitive carriers with regional and nationwide networks optimized for IP services such as Ethernet and MPLS, are highly efficient at delivering high bandwidths over fiber connections. Gigabit Ethernet is often a given for any lit building. But 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gig E, is now emerging as a reasonable service to install for high volume and multiple users.

Do you have a high bandwidth demand that you can't meet or feel you are paying too much for? If so, check out the availability and pricing of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections for your business location.

What Can GigE Bandwidth Do For You?

Gigabit Ethernet has been steadily making its way into local area network connections. NIC (Network Interface Cards) that were standardized as 10/100 Mbps are now more and more becoming 10/100/1000 Mbps. LAN backbones have been moving to 1 Gbps and even 10 Gbps. If your company is a heavy user of high technology digital processes, you're likely in the Gigabit Ethernet or GigE category right now. What you really need is a way to extend your high bandwidth data transfers out or your local network and across town or across the country at some reasonable cost. Now you can.

What type of companies can benefit from GigE WAN (Wide Area Network) connections? Those with large number of employees, huge customer bases, or applications that generate massive amounts of data. An obvious example is corporate information systems that handle accounting data, documentation, email and human resources for thousands of employees. Even when data was primarily text and numbers, these systems had to process, store and transfer enormous amounts of data. Now that pictures and graphics are more prevalent in the corporate databases, storage and bandwidth demands have multiplied.

Your need for connectivity with the outside world may include ways to interconnect multiple locations within a metropolitan area into a "virtual" corporate campus. Or, you may have a primarily location but a remote data center that handles overnight backups. In these cases, a Gigabit Ethernet MAN or Metropolitan Area Network connection could fit the bill.

It isn't always the largest companies that have the highest bandwidth demands. Hospitals and Medical Centers may be large or modest in size. But if they are generating radiological images and need to transfer them instantly or as close to instantly as possible, a GigE WAN connection is no extravagance.

Other organizations that are heavy data generators include video production houses, especially in high definition. HD television, movies, commercial advertising and the like can suck up as much bandwidth as you can provide. So too can engineering firms who are generating large architectural drawing packages or system simulations. It takes high performance computing equipment to generate the data in the first place. Transferring it in real-time requires bandwidth way beyond what normal business applications demand.

If your need to to share data between facilities in different cities or create an Extranet that includes key customers, you may find yourself bumping up against the limits that even a DS3 connection gives you. That's 45 Mbps, once considered a large amount of bandwidth. A logical upgrade is to move to SONET fiber optic carrier services. OC-3 offers 155 Mbps, OC-12 will give you 622 Mbps, OC-24 doubles that to 1.2 Gbps and OC-48 tops out at about 2.5 Gbps. These are classical fiber based telecommunications services, but they are definitely old school. Especially when it comes to pricing.

The new option is Carrier Ethernet. As the name implies, this is the same Ethernet as you deploy on your local networks. It's available now in speeds that range from classical Ethernet at 10 Mbps on the low end, Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, and Gigabit Ethernet or GigE at 1,000 Mbps. Pricing from competitive carriers with regional and national footprints is a fraction of what you'll pay for the equivalent SONET or T-Carrier bandwidth.

What level of bandwidth makes economic sense for your company? Find Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and GigE services available near your location now.