When You Need Massive Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Most businesses do just fine with common bandwidth offerings from telco, cable and fiber service providers. Sometimes, though, your application just won’t squeeze through the pipe. You need more than typical WAN bandwidth. You need massive bandwidth.

How Massive Are We Talking?
Over the last few decades, mirroring the growth of the Internet, WAN bandwidth needs have multiplied from a paltry T1 level of 1.5 Mbps up to 10 or 20 Mbps for the smaller businesses, at least 100 Mbps for companies with many employees, to a now commonly expected Gigabit per second.

Those bandwidths levels are easily accommodated by most service providers. Copper twisted pair can bring in 20 Mbps or so. Cable broadband is good for at least 100 Mbps and pushing 1 Gbps in many areas. Fiber optic service easily delivers 1 or 2 Gbps and can readily scale to 10 Gbps. Where you might find yourself limited is in rural or underserved locations where your choice is still T1 lines, LTE or 5G wireless, or synchronous satellite broadband.

Massive bandwidth starts at 10 Gbps and goes up from there. Can you reasonably take advantage of 100 Gbps up and down? OK. How about 400 Gbps, 800 Gbps or even a full Terabit per second? Those are carrier level services, but not out of the realm of possibility for the most data or streaming intensive businesses.

Who On Earth Needs THAT Much Bandwidth?
What were absurd levels of bandwidth are now aspirational and may become common sooner than you think. One big driver is the move of everything digital to the cloud. When your data center was just down the hall, nobody worried about bandwidth. You can string as much fiber as you want above the ceiling tiles. Once you pay for installation, usage is pretty much free.

Not so much anymore. When the connection leaves your building you lose control. You’re not going to string any cable across town, much less across several states. For that you need to hand off your traffic to a carrier or service provider. This third party will then lease you the amount of bandwidth you need, or at least can afford, for a monthly fee. The carrier, not you, takes care of all maintenance and reliability between locations.

Some companies get a surprise when they realize that the 30 Mbps Internet connection that was more than adequate when the data center was on premises is now painfully slow when all the applications are in the cloud. One solution is to install a high speed direct line to the cloud service provider and keep the old Internet connection as-is. That solves the bandwidth problem and avoids business critical apps having to deal with the vagaries of Internet performance.

Another application that just won’t play on standard connectivity is content distribution. If you are sending massive amounts of content consistently, you may need to avoid the standard Internet and move over to a purpose built privately run network called a content delivery network. These are designed to handle continuously high levels of video or data without congestion.

Sometimes you only need massive data for a brief time. Say you have Terabytes of disk drives full to the brim and you want to send that to the cloud for safe keeping or to a customer who needs those design or simulation models on their system. Shoving it through a normal connection will take forever. Is there a better option?

Colocation and Cloud Data Centers
If there is one place that you’ll find massive bandwidth already installed and running, it is in cloud and colo centers. Both are massive facilities with nearly unlimited servers, disk drives and bandwidth connections from multiple carriers. The difference between cloud and colo is that cloud centers provide all of the equipment and service needed. A colo or colocation facility lets you bring in your own equipment and set up your own data center in their racks and cages. It’s like what you would have at home, but in a shared building with plenty of space, backup power, HVAC, security and even round the clock staffing.

Some colos will provide a direct fiber hookup between your company and any others located in the same facility. if you need to connect outside, you won’t have to worry about finding a service provider or paying hefty fees to bring in service from afar. They are already inside and serving other customers. You just get a hookup at whatever bandwidth you need.

More Exotic Massive Bandwidth Options
There really is no limit to how much bandwidth you can utilize these days, other than your budget. If you can afford it, consider these options:

Wavelength Services
Most fibers are now lit with DWDM or dense wavelength division multiplexing. That means multiple lasers feeding the same fiber, but on different frequencies or wavelengths. A wavelength can handle perhaps 10 Gbps and each fiber strand can handle perhaps 100 wavelengths. Combine them all and the total bandwidth is mind boggling.

Many carriers are now leasing entire wavelengths for your use. It’s like a fiber within a fiber. Some will combine multiple wavelengths to create 100 Gbps and higher bandwidths for you, or you can lease the wavelengths and multiplex them yourself.

Dark Fiber
The ultimate in bandwidth and control is had by leasing one or more dark fiber strands. Dark means that the fiber is in the cable but totally unused at present. You add the laser termination and multiplexing equipment at each end and “light” the fiber.

Dark fiber is as close to having your own in-house cabling as you can get outdoors. There is nobody else’s traffic to contend with. You decide how much capacity to press into service. Run out of bandwidth? Just upgrade your terminal equipment. Same fiber, more Gbps. You don’t have total control. The carrier still owns and maintains the fiber physical plant, including cabling and repeaters. The rest is up to you.

Are you feeling unduly restricted when it comes to bandwidth to efficiently run your business and take advantage of new opportunities? If so, look into higher bandwidth fiber optic services now. You may find them more affordable than you think.

13 Hot Business Bandwidth Options

By: John Shepler

You may think that your business has one or two options when it comes to bandwidth connectivity. If fact, you may have a baker’s dozen or more different technology options to choose from and multiple vendors for each. Of course, the closer you are located to a major business district, the more variety of services and providers you’ll have to pick from. Even so, there are often at least a few options available even out in the boonies. Let’s take a look at at thirteen hot business broadband options you should know about.


1. DSL - Digital Subscriber Line is a broadband service that is delivered over regular telephone lines. It may share a line with a phone or have a line all to itself for more bandwidth. Bandwidth starts at under a Mbps and goes up around 7 Mbps, depending on how far you are from the telco office. Both asymmetrical and symmetrical options are available.

2. Business Cable Broadband - This is very similar to residential cable broadband but designed to serve businesses locations. You often get static IP addresses and more responsive customer service. Bandwidths can range from around 5 Mbps on up to over 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. You can get just broadband, or a combination of broadband, telephone and television service. Once catch is that the cable has to pass by your location for you to be connected.

3. Fixed 3G and 4G Wireless - This is cellular broadband designed to support business applications. Specialized equipment gives you highly reliable signal. Since it uses cell tower signals, you can get service out in the country pretty much anywhere you can get cell phone service. This option is especially popular for credit card verification in temporary retail locations and construction job sites. Bandwidths are similar to a T1 line (1.5 Mbps) for 3G service and Cable broadband (10 Mbps) for 4G.

4. Satellite - Two way satellite transmission is popular with retail stores and any remote locations. Bandwidth has been similar to 3G, but is now available at 4G levels. You put a dish on the roof and you have broadband virtually anywhere. One limitation is that heavy rain and snow can interrupt service.

Note that these first 4 bandwidth options are the lowest cost you can find, but have some important limitations. They are shared bandwidth, which means your speed will vary depending on what other users are doing. Both satellite and fixed wireless have monthly download limits. Most are asymmetrical, which means that download speed may be 10x upload speed. This works well for typical Internet access, which is what they are designed for. Geosynchronous satellite has high latency (time delay) that makes it unsuitable for real time applications like VoIP. Service reliability and speed of repair typically fall short of what you get with dedicated telecom services.

5. T1 Lines and Bonded T1 - T1 has been the workhorse of business connectivity. The bandwidth is limited to 1.5 Mbps, now too low for many applications. Bonding T1 lines together can create a larger pipe up to 10 Mbps. Available just about anywhere you can get landline telephone service. Popular as a point to point service, Internet access or PBX telephone trunking.

6. Ethernet over Copper - The new competitor to T1. Uses the same telco lines as bonded T1, but a different transmission technology. Bandwidths range from 3 to 50 Mbps typically, with some installations capable of 100 Mbps or more. The tradeoff is distance. Bandwidth drops off as you get farther away from the telco office. Cost is usually lower than bonded T1, sometimes half as much. Can be point to point, point to multipoint or Internet access.

7. DS3 - A hybrid between fiber and copper. The service is delivered to the curb over fiber optic line but then connected via coaxial cable. Runs at 45 Mbps. This is a well established service that is available in many locations, but losing out to less expensive Ethernet copper and fiber services in many areas. Can be point to point or Internet access.

8. OC3, OC12, OC48 - These are traditional fiber optic services using SONET technology developed by the telephone companies. OC3 is entry level at 155 Mbps. OC12 takes you up to 622 Mbps. OC48 is 2.4 Gbps for businesses needing very high bandwidth. SONET is well established and available from multiple vendors within metro areas. Not generally available in rural areas. Point to point or Internet access.

9. Ethernet over Fiber - Like Ethernet over Copper, fiber is taking over from T1 lines and even DS3, this is the new competing service to SONET. Bandwidth is highly scalable between 10 Mbps and 10 Gbps, with 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps as popular service levels. Cost is generally lower than SONET and making changes is easier and faster. Also, EoF supports Ethernet services like E-Line and E-LAN. Can be point to point, point to multipoint or Internet access.

10. Microwave FIxed Wireless - Like 3G cellular, no landlines or fiber are needed. This is strictly a point to point wireless connection using licensed microwave band frequencies. Limited to line of sight from provider to an outside antenna on your building. High bandwidths of 100 Mbps are available, but generally only downtown in major metropolitan areas.

11. Wavelength Service - Gives you a dedicated “color” or independent channel on the laser beam. Bandwidth is typically 2.5, 5 or 10 Gbps. You can choose the protocol you want to run, including IP and TDM. Bandwidths of 40 and 100 Gbps are now becoming available for very demanding applications.

12. Dark Fiber - Have all the wavelengths to yourself when you lease an unlit fiber strand between two locations. The ultimate in bandwidth and flexibility, but you have to provide and maintain the terminal equipment on each end. For the most sophisticated users only.

13. MPLS Networks - Not an access service, but rather a way to connect many business locations in a regional, national or international area. Think of MPLS as a private version of the Internet. You have guaranteed bandwidth with class of service. Also, high security because there is no public access.

Note that all of the services from #5 on are considered professional telecom services that often come with service level agreements that guarantee performance. Bandwidth is dedicated, not shared, and symmetrical. If performance is more important than bargain basement pricing, these are the services you should be considering. If your needs are modest and you just want a connection to the Internet for email and Web access, then lower end options may well meet your needs.

Not sure how to choose the best bandwidth for your operation or how to find vendors for all these services? Get fast quotes on multiple bandwidth technology services for your business locations, plus recommendations from a bandwidth product specialist.

How You Can Benefit From Wavelength Services

By: John Shepler

What do you do when you have a need for high bandwidth, security and flexibility in your WAN connections? This may be the time to take a closer look at wavelength services.


What tradeoffs should you do to ensure that you’re getting the right bandwidth for your operation? Certainly, there is the protocol competition between the dedicated point to point line services provided by SONET/SDH and Ethernet over Fiber. Both will get your packets from point A to point B, but you may find that locations lit for EoF have access to much higher bandwidths for the same lease price or a cost savings if you don’t need a BW upgrade.

One important consideration is the protocol that you wish to transport. Ethernet is easiest to connect and most efficient over Ethernet WAN services. SONET/SDH is designed for TDM, but can also support packet switched networks. The waters have been muddied lately by the addition of Ethernet over SONET that gives you Ethernet services running on mature SONET fiber optic networks.

Another tradeoff worth doing is lit fiber vs dark fiber. Wavelengths are a lit fiber service. They are fully managed in the sense that the carrier provides the fiber path plus the terminal equipment that accepts and delivers your traffic. You don’t need to be concerned about the inner workings of the network because the carrier takes care of that for you.

The big advantages of dark fiber are improved security, since you are providing the terminal equipment at each end of the fiber, and the ability to create your own wavelengths. You’ll need to invest in the CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing) or DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) equipment. By doing that, you can have as many wavelengths as you wish, each running a different protocol. You can even multiplex wavelengths to create higher bandwidth pipes.

What is the right connectivity solution for your needs? Get expert recommendations on fiber optic wavelength services now.

Improve Cloud Performance With Direct Network Access

By: John Shepler

In the mad dash to the cloud, some companies are left wondering if they were better off before the upset the IT apple cart. Everything was running smoothly and business was humming along. It was the lure of cost savings or avoiding huge capital investment that made cloud hosted services look so good. Wasn’t performance supposed to improve, not decline, when you move to the cloud? Why on Earth didn’t it work out that way?

Chances are that there is nothing wrong with your cloud services. They do exactly as advertised for other companies. Costs go down, performance goes up and you can’t run out of resources. You don’t have the wrong cloud, you have the wrong connection.

How can that be? It’s the same Internet connection we’ve refined over the years. Response is snappy, files transfer smoothly and it almost never goes down. We’ll at least all those things were true BEFORE we made the move.

I believe you. The Internet is a marvelous service. I wouldn’t be without it no matter where I am. In fact, I can’t do business without the Internet and you probably can’t either. What you need to know is that the Internet is good for some things and not so good for others.

What’s it good at? Connecting you to the endless sea of consumers in their homes and out & about. You’ll need a good broadband connection to enable your traveling and home workers. Email is ubiquitous. Certainly you must have that today, right?

Indeed you must. Those needs can only be met by great Internet service. It’s everything else that doesn’t belong on the Internet that’s getting you in trouble.

What would that be? Basically, anything that is real time or response sensitive. File transfers aren’t all that time critical, a few seconds or even a few minutes delay probably won’t matter as long as there are no errors in the transfer. Email? You wouldn’t notice anything but major delays. You might even appreciate less dinging from the mailbox. How about VoIP telephone, video conferencing or software as a service? Bingo! These are the applications that can be ruined by poor network performance.

The Internet was designed to be really, really good at making sure that files get from point A to point B without corruption. That doesn’t mean that packets don’t get mangled. There is a built-in mechanism (TCP/IP) that sends another copy of any packet that doesn’t arrive intact. It doesn’t matter how congested the Internet gets or how crummy the line noise is. Your files will get where they are intended to go in perfect shape… eventually.

That’s the problem. We are used to local networks that have all the capacity required and set up so that real time processes get priority. Being relatively small and internal to the company, there’s isn’t much of a problem with noisy lines destroying bits in a packet. As far as you are concerned, the network is transparent from your workstation to the IT data center. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were still so once you move to the cloud?

It can be. What you need to do is get off the Internet “superhighway,” as it is euphemistically called, and get a direct network connection to your cloud services. This direct connection runs via a private network engineered for high performance. This can be in the form of private lines, be they SONET fiber optic or Ethernet Private Lines. You may even need to engage wavelength services if your requirements are massive.

Another approach is to connect at both ends to a MPLS IPVN network. MPLS networks are a shared resource among multiple users but with traffic management unknown on the Internet. This gives you the performance of having your own private line, but at a lower cost.

What can you expect with direct connections to the cloud? Similar responsiveness to what you have with a local data center, even though the cloud data center is somewhere on the other side of the country. This means that employees don’t have to pause what they are doing to wait for the connection to catch up. VoIP phone calls through hosted PBX services maintain their voice quality and even support HD voice for greater clarity. Video conferences maintain their HD quality and lose the jerkiness. Even backup and recovery processes run faster and more smoothly.

You don’t have to give up performance to gain the cost savings and scalability of cloud computing services. What you need is a WAN (Wide Area Network) connection that supports the performance capability of the cloud.

Could you use a better connection in your business? Check out prices and options for direct cloud service connections and private lines now.

Lit Buildings Expand Fiber Optic Bandwidth in Houston

Houston, Texas, the fourth largest city in America, is a major center for healthcare and research, oilfield equipment and energy development, manufacturing, aeronautics, and home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Demand for high speed telecom services, especially fiber optic bandwidth, is high and rising every year. To meet this critical business need, Alpheus Communications is extending its Texas fiber network to light key buildings in the Houston business district.

What is a lit building? In this sense, it means having fiber optic service installed and turned up within the facility. The “lit” reference is to the laser light that carries the digital signals through the fiber. There is also such a thing as “dark” fiber. The dark variety consists of fiber strands that have been pulled into the building but not connected to any equipment.

The advantage of having already lit fiber available in your facility is that you can be connected quickly and easily at any bandwidth up to 1 Gbps, or even higher in some cases. The terminal equipment is already in place and running. Other tenants in your office building may already be connected for fiber service. It’s generally no trouble at all to add an additional cable and run it to your particular location. You may even have such wiring in place from when the building was constructed.

In addition to being guaranteed connectivity and having it provisioned rapidly, being in a lit building saves you the often huge expense of bringing fiber in when it isn’t already available. That process can involve trenching for new conduit or threading fiber cable through existing conduit underground. In some cases, the fiber is “flown” overhead on utility poles. There is nothing inexpensive about pulling in new fiber.

So, if there is considerable expense in fiber installation, then why is Alpheus lighting buildings on its own dime? The demand for high bandwidth levels is already there and expected to only increase over the next few years. The buildings that Alpheus has selected are already business centers that can make good use of professional bandwidth services. These are located at 1001 Fannin St., Two Allen Center at 1200 Smith St. and 601 Travis St. Once connected, these buildings will be considered “on-net” for fiber optic service.

Other buildings are expected to follow, with Alpheus making additional investments this year. They have a goal of connecting 100 buildings in Dallas and Houston to their fiber network. Beyond that, the core Alpheus network connects to more than 300 central offices and POPs (Points of Presence). This includes both fiber and copper connections.

Copper? Yes, indeed. Twisted pair copper bundles are already installed to nearly every business location. Fiber easily outperforms copper when it comes to sheer bandwidth. However, not every business needs a Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) connection. Many companies have been getting by with T1 lines running at 1.5 Mbps for years. Cloud services and other business applications are quickly rendering T1 service obsolete. However, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) offers much higher bandwidth using the same twisted pair copper wiring that now supports T1 and multi-line telephone service.

Entry level EoC service typically begins at 3 Mbps for about the same cost as 1.5 Mbps T1. That’s twice the bandwidth for the same money. It is easy to ramp that up to 10 or 20 Mbps at reasonable cost. Some locations qualify for 50 and even 100 Mbps EoC bandwidth. The catch is that Ethernet over Copper is distance limited. You need to be located fairly close to the telco central office to get the really high bandwidths. Even so, many companies are finding that they can get by just fine with EoC right now and put off the investment in fiber construction until necessary. With carriers lighting buildings at a rapid rate, that fiber may even be in place by the time you need hundreds or thousands of Megabits per second.

Alpheus Communications is a high performance competitive carrier serving the DASH (Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Houston) business marketplace. They offer Metro Ethernet, private line, managed wavelength MPLS network, Ethernet LAN (E-LAN), Ethernet Line (E-Line) and both PRI and SIP telephone trunking.

Are you located in Houston or other business locations in the United States, or have connections to the US? If so, there are many high bandwidth, low cost copper and fiber optic network services available to connect your business locations together and to the Internet. Check pricing and features to see what is available at your particular location.


Note: Photo of Houston skyline at night courtesy of Bobby L. Warren on Wikimedia Commons.

Next Stop 100 Gbps WAN Bandwidth

Big data, cloud computing and HD video are pushing the limits of what we once considered high bandwidth private line and MPLS network connections. Gigabit Ethernet is now popular with companies that have high bandwidth demands. Some firms are moving to 10 GigE, as 1000 Mbps is no longer adequate. If 10 Gigabits per second is also a limiting factor for your business, the time has come to consider 100 Gbps bandwidth.

Most of the larger fiber optic carriers have been busy upgrading their core networks to 100 Gbps. They need this kind of backbone bandwidth to avoid having to install new fiber to meet demand. Few, however, have offered this capacity to their customers.

Zayo is changing the game. They are now offering 100 Gbps as a wavelength service between major cities. The 100 Gbps connections are located in key traffic aggregation points and IP nodes throughout the U.S. This makes the service especially attractive to content producers and large ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who have inherently high bandwidth demands.

Why choose wavelength service versus SONET or Ethernet transport? High bandwidth options is one reason. Another is the ability to specify protocols and security measures. Leasing a wavelength is the next best thing to leasing an entire fiber strand or deploying your own fiber optic cabling. Unless you are in the business of operating a regional or national fiber optic network, the cost of creating all this infrastructure is prohibitive. However, leasing a wavelength may well be within reason.

Wavelength services are created by a process called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. The idea is that each fiber strand can support much higher bandwidths if fed by multiple lasers instead of just one. Each laser is tuned to operate on a particular frequency or wavelength according to a standard international grid plan. The wavelengths all shine through the fiber simultaneously, but they do not interact. You can think of each wavelength as a separate fiber for most purposes.

How much bandwidth can a wavelength carry? By using simple on-off keying of the beam, a wavelength can transport up to 10 Gbps. For 100 Gbps you would have to combine or aggregate multiple beams or use a more advanced modulation scheme such as CP-DQPSK (Coherent Polarization-Multiplex Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Key) to transmit multiple bits per symbol. With a plug-in card such as the CIsco CRS 1-Port 100 Gigabit Ethernet Coherent DWDM Interface Module, a single wavelength can now transport 100 Gbps. There is standards work underway to extend that to 400 Gbps and eventually 1 Tbps.

Zayo offers wavelength services at 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps, 40 Gbps or 100 Gbps. Diversity and sub-50 msec protection switching is available to improve reliability to carrier standards.you can order single or multiple waves as needed to support your applications. Zayo has the ability to scale bandwidth capacity along their routes to 8 Tbps when such a need arises.

Companies interested in high bandwidth wavelength services are also often interested in low latency. Zayo offers low latency routs with up to 100 Gbps of bandwidth between Seattle, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia to key data centers and financial and enterprise locations. Their low latency routes also include a hop to London as well.

Zayo will continue to deploy their 100G wavelength service across major markets for through the first half of 2013. Their entire network includes 67,000 route miles serving 45 states and Washington D.C. with 10,530 on-net buildings that include 535 data centers, 515 carrier PoPs (points of presence) and 2,743 cell towers. They also offer colocation facilities with over 141,000 square feet under management.

Does your company need higher levels of bandwidth to maintain or improve productivity or support demanding applications? If so, there are fiber optic service options available for 100 Mbps up to 100 Gbps at attractive prices. Competitive quotes are available at no charge.

Eastern Tennessee Gets Lit for Business Fiber Optic Service

It is well known that Nashville, Tennessee is a major hub for many fiber optic network providers. As a major center for commerce in the South, there are many health care, publishing banking, transportation and, of course, music companies that need the high bandwidth you can only get with fiber optic connections. This need is becoming more and more important beyond Nashville, throughout the entire state of Tennessee.

This is why EarthLink, a major bandwidth service provider, has recently completed a major buildout of fiber assets that cover Eastern TN cities. It includes a 343 mile fiber route from Nashville to Knoxville, a diverse fiber route from Knoxville to Chattanooga and another fiber route from Knoxville to Bristol. There are network interconnection points in Cookeville, Oak Ridge, Cleveland, Sweetwater and Morristown. Major POPs are located in Knoxville, Morristown, Johnson City and Bristol.

EarthLink’s Points of Presence (PoPs) on the Eastern Tennessee Middle Mile Broadband Project can deliver up to 10 Gbps DWDM optical services. DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing is a technique used to multiply the bandwidth capacity of fiber optic links. Instead of using a single laser beam to carry the traffic, DWDM uses dozens or more lasers of different colors (wavelengths) to create independent high bandwidth carriers through the fiber strand. Each wavelength is an independent channel and does not interact with the other wavelengths on the strand. It’s like multiplying your fiber optic cable by 10x to 100x the capacity.

In addition to providing high bandwidth connections directly to businesses and universities, EarthLink has the capacity to offer fiber optic services up to 10 Gbps on a wholesale basis to Internet service providers (ISPs) that serve smaller businesses and consumers, especially in smaller communities. One of the big stumbling blocks to expanding rural broadband has been the lack of what’s called “middle mile” infrastructure. It is this middle mile backbone that EarthLink has deployed. Other ISPs connect to the backbone and then provide “last mile” connections directly to users. Some ISPs do this wirelessly and are known as WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers.

EarthLink headquarters are located in Atlanta, GA. More than a regional carrier, EarthLink owns and operates 28,000 route miles of fiber, 90 metro fiber rings and 4 data centers to serve nearly all of the United States. Business connectivity services include MPLS networks, Internet access, data T1 and bonded T1 lines, full and fractional DS3, SONET full and fractional bandwidth at OC-3 (155 Mbps) OC-12 (611 Mbps) and OC-48 levels (2.5 Gbps), metro fiber Ethernet and SIP trunking. In addition, EarthLink provides other network services, such as managed security, hosted PBX, colocation and cloud hosting.

What’s driving the need for all this fiber optic bandwidth? Business technology has changed rapidly over the last decade or so. Small and well as large companies now find their business processes IT driven. The benefits have been wider communication, faster agility and higher productivity. Some industries, like video production and delivery, are inherently high bandwidth in nature. They can’t function without fiber level bandwidth. Many others are finding that the large cost savings they can realize by moving to the cloud comes with a new requirement. Where once lower speed wireline services could handle communications in and out of the company, the cloud makes all servers remote and requires fiber speeds to prevent productivity killing latencies.

How about your company? If you are located in Eastern Tennessee or anywhere else in the country, there are new fiber assets available at better prices than ever before. Get competitive quotes on fiber optic services for business to support your demanding needs.



Note: Tennessee map courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Fiber Optic Private Lines

Companies that need 50 Mbps or more of private line bandwidth find that their twisted pair copper options have pretty much topped out. Downtown in some major metro areas you may be able to get high bandwidth point to point wireless service. Most of the time, though, you’ll be looking at fiber optic options for private line services that have the bandwidth you require.

The traditional fiber optic service for metro and long haul networks is SONET / SDH. The term Synchronous Optical NETwork / Synchronous Digital Hierarchy is aptly applied. The heat of this technology is a highly synchronized Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) protocol that offers very low latency with a range of bandwidth options that can take you to 40 Gbps or beyond. This standard has been proliferated around the world by major telecom companies. You can often get SONET services at the bandwidth of your choice from door to door to all points on the globe.

I say often, because the biggest stumbling block with fiber optic transport is the last mile connection. Estimates are that no more than a third of US business locations are “lit” for fiber. This generally means that either you or the carrier of your choice will need to build out a last mile fiber link to get your building “on-net.”

It’s a prospect that isn’t as daunting as it used to be. Fiber bandwidth providers are aggressively building out their service footprints and are actively looking for attractive locations that will use their service. If you are willing to commit to significant bandwidth usage or can get together with other tenants for a combined offer, you might get a great deal on establishing fiber optic service.

You may find that you have several types of service to choose from. SONET is the legacy service and is at the core of many backbone networks. IP networks are newer and more closely match the protocol that your LAN is running. Ethernet Private Line (EPL) service offers highly scalable bandwidth from a low of 10 to 50 Mbps right on up to Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE. These bandwidth options are available in Metro Ethernet Networks and long haul Ethernet transport.

SONET bandwidth services start off with OC-3 running at 155 Mbps. The next level generally available is OC-12 at 622 Mbps. Then you can move up to OC-24 at 1.24 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps, OC-192 at 10 Gbps and OC-768 at 40 Gbps.

SONET is often provisioned in a protected ring topology. There are two fiber strands, each carrying the same traffic. If one strand fails for any reason, the other picks up the full load within 50 mSec. This makes for very high reliability data connections.

If you want even higher performance fiber optic private lines or wish to have more control over your services, you can order wavelength services. Each wavelength is like having a separate line all to yourself. They are typically offered at 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps bandwidth level.

Still not enough? How about your own fiber optic cable from point to point? Sounds nice, but who can afford that? You can by leasing dark fiber that is already in the ground. When companies bury fiber, they bury a lot of fiber at the same time. It’s not unusual to have over 100 fiber strands in one cable. You can lease one or more of those strands and connect them to your own termination equipment. If you light the fiber, you have the ultimate in security and can run any protocol you wish.

Are you in need of higher bandwidth to support your business needs? Have a look at fiber optic private line options to see what services make the most sense for what you are doing.




Note: Photo of fiber optic transmission equipment courtesty of WikiMedia Commons.

Ethernet and Colocation For Texas Business

The Lone Star State is a land of big spaces, big business, big data and the need for big bandwidth. Alpheus is a carrier with both Texas roots and a focus on the needs of Texas business. Let’s take a look at the services they offer to meet the needs of companies in banking & finance, energy, government, healthcare, information technology, legal and media sectors, among others.

With a Network Operations Center (NOC) in Houston, the Alpheus fiber optic network connects major cities in Texas. Their Texas regional network connects to Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Bryan, Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, McAllen, Harlingen, Corpus Christi, Victoria and Houston. Core network reliability exceeds 99.999% or “five nines,” the gold standard for telecommunications.

Alpheus serves both enterprises and carriers within their Texas footprint. Network services include Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Metro Ethernet, Private Line and Managed Wavelength. One of the newer services is Ethernet-Over-Local-Area-Network (E-LAN). This is a Carrier Ethernet service standardized by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) and used to bridge multiple local area networks so that they act as one much larger network.

If you’ve been trying to tie business locations together with traditional telecom services, you know that there is a transition between your network edge and the telco providers network. Usually this means a protocol conversion and specialized interface hardware. What E-LAN does is eliminate that transition by keeping everything in the Ethernet protocol from end to end. A simpler service called Ethernet Line or E-LINE provides a dedicated point to point Ethernet connection between two locations as a replacement for private line services such as T1, DS3 and OC3.

Alpheus Carrier Solutions include Metro transport with rates ranging from DS-1 (1.5 Mbps) to OC-192 (10 Gbps), Texas Long Haul for connecting from Texas Metro markets to virtually anywhere in North America at the same speeds as Metro Transport, Metrolocity Peering to cross-connect with other service providers with bandwidth speeds from DS-1 to OC-12 (622 Mbps), Ethernet services to 10 Gbps, and 2.5 Gbps managed wavelengths. Ethernet interfaces include 10/100 Mbps FastE, 1000 Mbps GigE and 10 Gbps Ethernet. Scalability is flexible from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps to match user requirements.

Alpheus Waves and Gigabit Ethernet services offer 3 levels of protection. Load sharing consists of two interfaces with two physically diverse unprotected connections. Your provide the protection switching. Network protection is configured to protect against network outages but not client issues. Unprotected services are just that. There is no network or client protection.

Alpheus operates four Data Centers with colocation services available. These are 777 Walker (2 Shell Plaza) in Houston, 1905 E. 6th Street in Austin, 2323 Bryan in Dallas and 307 & 309 West 7th St. in Fort Worth. The Austin and Houston data centers are SAS 70 Type II Audio Certified for critical operations that need to meet that requirement.

Colocation solutions include full and half cabinets, private cages, relay racks, flexible power configurations and the Alpheus Tier 1 regional fiber optic network with connections to over 75 carriers. “Remote Hands” service is a way to let Alpheus engineers perform simple troubleshooting and maintenance tasks, plus lend a hand when emergencies pop up. Remote Hands include server & equipment reboot, equipment and card testing, secure cabling connections and removal of customer equipment.

Is your business located in Texas and in need of connectivity or colocation services? There are excellent options available to you for a simple inquiry. Get competitive quotes from Alpheus and other top tier carriers for bandwidth services and equipment colocation and see what works best for your situation.



Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

10 Gigabit Bandwidth Options

Metropolitan and wide area network speeds are on the rise. Undersea cables are being upgraded from 10 to 40 and soon 100 Gbps bandwidths, with terrestrial fiber runs moving to 100 Gbps now. Likewise, major corporations, healthcare providers and video content producers are starting to feel the squeeze of too small network connections. Fortunately, there are more options and better pricing available today than ever before.

There are several practical solutions to increasing your MAN or WAN bandwidth above the Gigabit per second level and up to 10 Gbps. Let’s see what we can do with SONET, Ethernet, Wavelength and Dark Fiber.

SONET is the telecom fiber optic standard invented by Bell Labs for the telephone industry. It was originally deployed to transport thousands upon thousands of simultaneous telephone calls between switching centers. SONET has evolved to carry data as well as digitized phone calls. As it turns out, voice traffic is in the minority now.

SONET stands for Synchronous Optical NETwork. That describes how it is designed. This is a tightly synchronized time division multiplexed system intended for switched circuit implementation. There are specific service levels associated with SONET levels. These are designed as OC or Optical Carrier levels. The lowest generally available is OC-3 at 155 Mbps, followed by OC-12 at 622 Mbps.

The next level OC-24 takes you to the Gigabit level at 1.24 Gbps. OC-24 isn’t as commonly deployed as the next level, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps. OC-48 is becoming the new high bandwidth standard for organizations that need high speed private lines or dedicated Internet connections. OC-192 is the 10 Gigabit service level, running at a line rate of 9.95 Gbps. From there you jump up to OC-768 at 40 Gbps. You’ll recognize that as a backbone network bandwidth for fiber optic carriers. OC-768 isn’t generally required at the corporate level just yet.

Notice that there are fairly wide gaps in the service levels between SONET OC levels. If you need 2 Gbps, OC-48 service at 2.5 Gbps makes sense. However, if you need 3 Gbps, you have to go all the way up to OC-192 at 10 Gbps. In some cases, you can find fractional OC-48 service at a better price. This is simply OC-48 that is throttled to provide only the 3 Gbps or other bandwidth you need. There might not be much cost savings, since OC-48 is a standard service level and fractional SONET services are a special order, if available.

Carrier Ethernet is a far more scalable service than SONET. It does have industry standard service levels, such as 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps 10 GigE. Most service providers will allow you to scale your service in small increments up to the maximum capacity of the installed port. With a 10 GigE Port, you can easily get 3 Gbps, 9 Gbps or bandwidths in-between. Since Ethernet networks were designed with this scalability in mind from the beginning, service level changes are fairly automated and can be made in a matter of days, if not hours, with no equipment changes needed.

Wavelength services are offered for high performance latency sensitive applications. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) splits the fiber optic laser beam into dozens of individual wavelengths or colors that act as independent private lines. There is no interconnection between wavelengths. A wavelength is dedicated to your needs and carries your traffic exclusively. Typical speeds available are 1 GigE, 2.5 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 10 GigE and 40 Gbps. Note that both SONET and Ethernet protocols are available over individual wavelengths.

Dark Fiber gives you the ultimate in flexibility. It is simply a glass strand between two of your locations. You can run any protocol you like at any speed you want over as many wavelengths as you care to deploy. Bandwidth is nearly unlimited, but the catch is that you have to buy, install and maintain the transmission equipment that feeds the fiber.

Have your requirements reached the point where 10 Gigabit bandwidth services are a reasonable consideration. The good news is that there are multiple carriers eager to bid for your business between 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps or beyond. Get competitive quotes for Gigabit and 10 Gigabit level fiber optic services now. You may be surprised how affordable these high bandwidth services have become.

Wavelength Services vs Dark Fiber

Fiber optic services are popular for high bandwidth metro and long haul connections. They typically start about 100 Mbps and go on up to 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and occasionally 100 Gbps bandwidths. But what if you find that fiber optic bandwidth services are too restrictive for your needs? There are a couple of alternatives. One is leasing dark fiber routes and the other is wavelength services. Let’s see how they compare and why you might find one more attractive than the other.

Fiber optic bandwidth services are standardized, packaged services that offer either SONET or Ethernet connectivity from point to point. You may think of them as private line services, but chances are that you are not the only customer riding on the fiber strand. At lower bandwidths, such as OC3, you are probably being electrically multiplexed with other users to create a much larger bandwidth signal that is more cost effective to transport. If you are using a 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps service, you are still sharing the strand with other users but optically multiplexed using wavelengths.

One problem with these pre-packaged fiber optic services is that they generally limit you to a particular protocol and speed. If you change your mind, it can be time consuming and costly to change or upgrade your service. For this reason, some companies have decided to become their own bandwidth providers by leasing dark fiber and lighting it up with equipment they own. This gives you the ability to have multiple protocols running on the same fiber at whatever bandwidth makes sense. When you want something different, your own engineering staff reconfigures or changes out the equipment one each end. There’s no waiting around for carrier personnel because you are the carrier. The dark fiber is just an empty pipe, as the name implies.

The trick to having multiple protocols on one fiber is called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. It’s somewhat akin to the idea of electrical multiplexing in that many different signals can share the same transport mechanism. However, technically it is quite different. WDM uses multiple wavelengths or colors of laser light that are separate enough in frequency to be distinct. All of these colors, also called lambdas, exist in the infrared portion of the light spectrum that is seen as nearly transparent through glass fiber.

Think of WDM as shining a whole rainbow of laser beams down a fiber optic cable where they are detected separately at the other end. Each beam is independent of the others. One color doesn’t care that it is running Ethernet and the next color up is carrying SONET or ESCON. They don’t see each other and don’t interfere.

Since WDM is an established technology running on just about all carrier fiber optic networks, there is no reason why you can’t just lease an entire wavelength instead of a service running on that wavelength. That’s fairly easy to do these days because many networks have excess wavelength capacity available. You can have your own wavelength running a high bandwidth Ethernet service (10 GigE) or 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps SONET.

Why lease a wavelength instead of dark fiber? For one thing, you may not need the entire capacity of the fiber or all those wavelengths you can create yourself. There’s considerable capital cost in purchasing the WDM systems for each end of the fiber that you can avoid by just leasing the wavelengths you need by the month. Capital expense and network management then become the service provider’s problem.

Dark fiber may not be available for the entire route you have in mind or you may be planning to install your own fiber in a particular area. Until it is ready, you can make good use of existing capability by leasing wavelength services as long as needed.

Dark fiber, wavelength services, Gigabit Ethernet or OCx SONET. Which is right for your needs? Get comparative pricing and availability of fiber optic services now to do a good trade off analysis.



Note: Photo courtesy of Sandia National Labratories.

WDM Wavelength Services Offer Expandability

If your need is for high bandwidth, security and flexibility, you should take a look at wavelength services. This is more than the typical fiber optic bandwidth service. It’s almost like owning the network facilities yourself.

The thing about fiber optic transmission is that it offers almost limitless bandwidth. That’s a foreign concept to anyone who’s been tied to copper wireline services. It’s also an odd notion for those who pick a fiber optic service level and sign a contract for it. If you order OC3 SONET service, what you get is a line that runs at 155.52 Mbps with a payload of 148.608 Mbps. You don’t have to fill the pipe continuously, but the capacity is there all the time. If you need more bandwidth, you only recourse is to add an additional service or upgrade to something like OC12 or Gigabit Ethernet.

What you are using with fiber optic services is not the entire bandwidth of the fiber. In fact, you may be totally unaware that your signals are multiplexed with lots of others all traveling on the same fiber strand. If there is only one laser beam with a single color or wavelength shining through that fiber, it likely has a capacity of at least 10 Gbps. Chances are, though, that there are many different color beams all riding simultaneously down the fiber. They don’t interfere because they are different colors of light, called Lambdas, all in the infrared region of the spectrum. Each Lambda or wavelength has a carrying capacity as high as 10 Gbps. You can think of these as equivalent to individual high capacity lines. If the fiber optic strand were made of copper, each wavelength would be a separate pair of wires.

What if you could lease a wavelength instead of a copper wireline or a fixed bandwidth service on a fiber optic cable? The wavelength doesn’t care what modulation or data pattern you use. It’s just a pure light beam of one wavelength. There’s no fancy footwork required to convert between one protocol and another just to be compatible with what’s running on the line. That opens some interesting possibilities. You could use your leased wavelength to carry Gigabit Ethernet or Fast Ethernet, SONET OC3, OC12 or OC48, Fibre Channel, or ESCON.

Need to transport a variety of high bandwidth protocols? OK. Just lease multiple wavelengths and give each protocol its own Lambda. The won’t interfere. In fact, they won’t even known the other wavelengths exist.

This type of network transport is no longer a pipe dream. All you need to do is lease WDM Wavelength Services from a fiber optic network carrier such as AboveNet. What AboveNet has done is install a base of dark fiber in many metropolitan areas. It’s called dark because it hasn’t already be put into service with a particular fiber optic service in mind. It’s like a blank canvas ready to become any work of art. AboveNet “lights” the fiber as needed using WDM equipment to create their wavelength services.

WDM stands for Wavelength Division Multiplexing. It’s the technology that creates multiple wavelengths on a single fiber strand. This is a standardized process that ensures there is enough separation between the wavelengths that they won’t interfere and that different brands of networking equipment will work together. There are two flavors of WDM: CWDM or Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing and DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. The difference is that DWDM squeezes more wavelengths, up to 160, onto a given fiber but at a higher cost than CWDM.

Is this affordable? AboveNet says that their CWDM service becomes competitive at the OC-3 service bit-rate. If you can use more bandwidth than that, you’ll save money with CWDM. Typical applications include connecting corporate headquarters with branch offices and data centers, or connecting multiple hospitals and medical centers for exchange of medical images and other health service records.

Has your business or organization become limited by the network services available? Perhaps it’s time to move up to wavelength services. Find out by getting prices and availability of fiber optic wavelength services for your locations. Complementary consulting by bandwidth experts is also available for serious applications.



Note: Image of light spectrum from prisms courtesy of Marcellus Wallace on Wikimedia Commons.

40 Gbps Bandwidth Available For Business

XO Communications has upped the ante on business bandwidth options by making two 40 Gbps network services available in all major metropolitan markets of its nationwide fiber optic footprint. Listen to Randy Nicklas, Chief Technology Officer of XO Communications, explain the advantages of the new 40 Gbps wavelength and IP transit services:



You may listen to the interview without leaving this page by using this built-in audio player:


Clearly, we’re entering a new and exciting era of very high bandwidth applications for businesses as well as service providers, such as Cable companies. High speed financial trading demands the lowest latencies possible. You snooze for a millisecond, you lose. This pushes the requirements for both transport speed between cities and also minimal time delays going through the routing and switching equipment. Content delivery networks may be less latency sensitive than the financial trading networks, but they have an insatiable need for bandwidth. There is no upper limit in sight as of this writing. Surely 40 Gbps is just a incremental level on the way to 100 Gbps and beyond. Why? Because everybody wants the video they want to see when they want to see it, and high definition video has massive bandwidth demands. Every Internet user on Earth couldn’t possibly send enough email, visit enough web sites, or update their software often enough to match even the current demand for video transport. This is why Cable TV companies and other video distributors are moving away from the public Internet to privately run content delivery networks to meet their demands for bandwidth and stability. Is your company involved in video production or distribution, or perhaps financial services? If so, you certainly have demands for high levels of wide area networking bandwidth at reasonable prices. Other business users may not be pushing the technology limits just yet, although getting the best prices on fiber optic bandwidth is equally important. For all of these situations, you can find highly competitive fiber optic bandwidth pricing from XO Communications and other top tier providers through our GigaPackets bandwidth service and Telarus expert consultants.

Wavelength Services For The Enterprise

Once needed only by telecom carriers, wavelength services are now available for enterprise users. These higher bandwidth fiber optic services are needed by hospitals, medical centers, banks, financial institutions, service providers to government, video production and distribution houses, content delivery networks and research facilities. Every day more applications cross that threshold of needing faster pipes to transfer data. Should those faster pipes be wavelength services?

A wavelength or lambda is light at a particular frequency or color. This characteristic is generally expressed in terms of wavelength in nanometers rather than frequency in terabits per second. Just as frequencies can be multiplexed to create a broadband wireline service, wavelengths can be multiplexed to offer multiple paths through a single fiber strand.

The multiplexing process at the physical level for fiber optics is called WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing. There are two technologies available. CWDM or Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing creates anywhere from 2 to 20 independent wavelengths, with 16 being a standard. DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing requires more precise equipment to create from 40 to 128 or more independent wavelengths.

As you can imagine, having dozens of independent wavelengths per fiber optic core and perhaps 100 cores in a cable, the amount of available bandwidth is truly staggering. So much so, that carriers are leasing out entire wavelengths to companies and organizations that need high bandwidth conduits. Wavelength services are similar to point to point T1 lines in that you have exclusive use of the wavelength. While the wavelengths in any particular core may be leased by dozens of different users, any multiplexing on the particular wavelength you are leasing is up to you. It's a private line service, with the line being a particular wavelength of light.

What bandwidths are available on these wavelength services? Commonly available speeds are 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps. Other increments of 1 Gbps and 5 Gbps are also increasingly available. Need more than 10 Gbps? It's possible to get as much as 40 Gbps in some areas. Can 100 Gbps be far behind?

Another advantage of wavelength services is that they are not locked into a particular protocol. You can use your wavelengths to transport Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), Gigabit Ethernet, SONET OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, Fibre Channel, ESCON and Frame Relay.

Who's offering wavelength services suitable for large enterprise and other organizational use? Major competitive carriers such as Level 3, XO Communications and AboveNet have these and other fiber optic bandwidth services available right now. If you have a serious application that needs connectivity at this level, find out what wavelength services are available for your business locations.

Fiber Optic Bandwidth Options

What do you do when the size of your business or the demands of your applications exceed the bandwidth you can get with T1 lines or even multiple bonded T1 lines? That's when you move up to bandwidth solutions delivered by fiber optic transport. OK, but of the available options which one do you pick?

Not long ago the only fiber optic bandwidth options were based on SONET, the Synchronous Optical NETwork technology pioneered by the phone companies for their own use. SONET picks up where the T-Carrier technology leaves off. T-Carrier includes T1 and T3 lines. T1 is 1.5 Mbps over twisted pair copper and T3 is 45 Mbps over coaxial cable. SONET expands these services to OC-1, OC-3, OC-12, OC-24, OC-48, OC-192, OC-256 and OC-768.

The base rate is OC-1 at 51.84 Mbps. That's the fiber equivalent to T3 over copper. But in practice, OC-3 at 155.52 Mbps is the lowest OC or Optical Carrier service level generally available. If you want T3 equivalent service, you order DS3 service at the same 45 Mbps rate at T3 and it is delivered on an OC-3 or higher fiber optic carrier.

Here's something that may surprise you. The T-carrier and SONET technologies are highly compatible even though one is intended for copper and one for fiber. That's because they were both designed to carry digitized telephone calls on 64 Kbps channels, each designated as DS0. Because of this compatibility, a long haul T1 line will likely be carried part of the distance by multiplexing it with many others on a fiber optic backbone between cities.

A big advantage of SONET is its reliability. SONET is generally deployed as two redundant rings. If one fails, the other takes over the full traffic within 50 milliseconds. This protection mechanism gives SONET services a high availability.

A newer technology and one that is on the ascendancy is Carrier Ethernet. Also referred to as Metro Ethernet when used within a metropolitan area, Carrier Ethernet is being aggressively marketed by competitive carriers who have deployed IP based backbone networks without the legacy of telephone technology to support. These carriers will run a fiber optic drop from their nearest Point of Presence, or even use Ethernet over Copper technology to deliver up to 50 Mbps for a few miles.

Carrier Ethernet is offered in a variety of bandwidths, including the familiar standards of 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. These are all switched Ethernet services that are compatible with corporate LANs and used to extend your network across town or across the country. Because it is offered by competitive carriers with their own network connections, Carrier Ethernet generally enjoys a substantial cost advantage compared with SONET services.

If your bandwidth requirements are even larger than GigE, you may want a wavelength service. You contract for an entire wavelength on the fiber optic network, all for your own use. The bandwidth of a wavelength is often 2.5 Gbps or 10 Gbps. Beyond this, you need to get multiple wavelengths or "dark fiber" that you light yourself using your own equipment.

With all these different options, how can you be sure you are getting the best deal? The fast and easy way is to use a telecom broker who has access to the offerings of many carriers using a variety of technologies. You'll get a list of options and recommendations on what is most cost effective for your business. To do this, simply call the toll free number or enter a simple online quote request using our GigaPackets fiber optic bandwidth service.