Dark Fiber Gives You Control

By: John Shepler

Higher and higher bandwidths are expected in business IT infrastructure. That includes the local networks and leased lines for metro and wide area bandwidth. It’s about more than that, though. Just as important are parameters such as latency, packet loss and jitter. Security is a major concern for all network operations. Finally, the ability to make changes, create workarounds and rapidly bring resources online are important to keeping network operations running smoothly.

Big Bandwidth Means Big Pipes
The need for increasing bandwidth has resulted in a mass migration from copper wirelines to fiber optic cables. Copper may still make sense to the desktop, but outside network connections need the capacity of fiber.

Fiber leased lines are available from 10 Mbps to at least 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps service becoming more readily available. They can be configured as point to point dedicated lines or dedicated Internet access. Many companies need some combination of the two. The Internet is essential to communicating with customers and suppliers. Direct lines to cloud service providers and between company facilities provide more consistent performance, lower latency and higher security.

Wavelengths are Like a Private Fiber Link
Fiber optic cables are said to have unlimited bandwidth. While that might seem like an exaggeration, in practice it is pretty hard to run out of bandwidth. Each cable has multiple fibers, sometimes as many as 100 in a bundle. Each of those fibers can carry multiple streams of non-interfering data through a process of wavelength division multiplexing.

There are two schemes. Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing can divide the fiber into a dozen or more laser colors called Lambdas, all traveling the same time. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing ups that count to 80, 96 or more separate wavelengths using more sophisticated equipment.

Note that each wavelength acts like its own fiber. It is unaware of other wavelengths on the same strand. When you lease a wavelength your data is not multiplexed with anyone else’s. You have exclusive use of all the bandwidth on that wavelength, which might be as high as 10 Gbps. Need more bandwidth? Lease another wavelength. Until the fiber bundle is fully loaded, you’ll never have to run more cable.

Dark Fiber Gives You Ultimate Control
What’s better than a wavelength? Having the entire fiber to yourself. That sounds great until you think about the cost of running your own fiber. It makes total sense on your own property, but what about connections across town or across the country? Unless you are in the business of providing carrier services, you’ll find trenching your own fiber to be cost prohibitive.

There is a way to get pretty much your own fiber. Lease an unused strand from a service provider. That’s more doable than you might think. Remember that it doesn’t make sense to go to all the trouble of burying a single fiber strand when you can bury a multi strand cable or even multiple multi strand cables for not much more cost. That way, a carrier only has to lay in the fiber once and have capacity to spare for decades.

These unused strands are called “dark” fiber because there is no laser light illuminating them. It could be your job to light the fiber. The carrier will simply give you access at each end of the fiber and the rest is up to you.

Clearly this beyond the capability of smaller companies, but they are likely well served by lit fiber options already available. Larger and more sophisticated IT organizations may be able to make good use of dark fiber for research labs, medical campuses, video content creation and transport, engineering & manufacturing, and other demanding applications.

Benefits of Dark Fiber
Owning exclusive rights to use an entire fiber is the next best thing to building your own. You do need to provide the termination equipment at each end and manage those resources. That may include your own DWDM equipment to generate multiple wavelengths for all the bandwidth you can reasonably use.

Without competing customers, there is no need for multiplexers to add and drop connections along the route. The fiber serves your locations only. The lack of unnecessary equipment in the line minimizes latency. Unlike the Internet there is no need for routers every so often to direct traffic. You not only have minimal latency, there is no reason it should vary from common carrier routing decisions, and no congestion as long as you are not overloading the capacity of the fiber or individual wavelength.

Security is another big benefit of dark fiber. There is no sharing of bandwidth among customers. This is similar to the old “nailed up” copper private point to point line. You need to trust the operator of the fiber, but don’t have to worry about the other customers. Of course, encryption on top of dedicated fiber gives you the most security you’ll get in point to point transmission.

Dark Fiber Availability
As fiber is being extensively deployed for Internet, cable television, and cellular towers, dark fiber is also becoming more and more available. Competitive fiber network operators and some cable system operators have lots and lots of extra capacity installed. They are more than happy to lease out unused strands when there are dozens sitting dark.

Do your needs demand the capacity, flexibility, and security that dark fiber offers? Find out what dark fiber options are available for your business locations.

Big Data Needs Big Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Bandwidth levels are growing almost exponentially. One of the major infrastructure build-outs underway is a move to 100 Gbps or 100 GigE wavelength service on cross-country and international routes. It seems that Gigabit Ethernet was introduced only a few years ago and thought impractical for all but the most demanding business applications. Now GigE is almost considered entry level in some quarters. What could possibly be behind this massive increase in bandwidth demand?

It All Started With Video
It is said that most of the world’s Internet traffic is now video. That’s right, not telephone calls, not file transfers, not even big graphics. Video alone is sucking up as much bandwidth as it can get. That’s not likely to change, either. SD video has migrated to HD video and 4K video is well on the way. How soon will the marketplace demand 8K video across the board?

Every increase in pixel density cranks up the bandwidth requirement to transport high quality images. Compression can help a great deal, but there’s a tradeoff between picture quality and depth of compression. Broadcasters and video producers really want to transport uncompressed video and leave the compression artifacts to be dealt with in the final link to the consumer.

Send In The Clouds
When cloud services meant taking all night to back up the day's files as a contingency to local storage, bandwidth levels weren’t too demanding. That’s all changed. The cloud is no longer just a non-critical backup service. It’s the main data center for many companies.

What’s sometimes forgotten is that your WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth becomes far more critical when key processes move to the cloud. Networking is much easier and cheaper when you’re talking about hundreds of feet within your own facilities. When you have to take that same flood of traffic and send it over a common carrier to get to your remote data center or cloud provider, line demands go way up. Remember, the WAN used to be just to link facilities and for communication with the outside world. Now it’s the main artery for everything you do.

What that means is that WAN bandwidth demands jump by 10, 100 or 1000 times. Other characteristics, like jitter, latency and packet loss, become huge factors in how well your cloud processes perform. If you scrimp in any of these areas, you may find yourself frustrated by underperforming processes and even losing productivity instead of gaining efficiency.

You Think the Internet of People Is Demanding?
Online business applications are generating more and more interesting and potentially useful data. Mobile apps with location services fall into this category. Pretty much anything that you do online has some potential value in customizing services or creating statistical data to improve marketing. That’s a flood of data that has to be handled by wireless and fiber connections.

Human generated big data is nothing compared to what we’ll be dealing with when the Internet of Things (IoT) gets rolling. For every person online, there will be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of “things” chatting wildly and generating volumes of data that would be useful if it could only get where it can be analyzed and put to use. That’s going to multiply the load on every communications channel.

Will they be able to handle it? Not with yesterday’s creaky links. Everything will need an upgrade. It’s in process now. Wireless channels are being expanded as fast as they can be rounded up and auctioned. Current 4G standards will become 5G and then 6G before you know it. But, what about terrestrial lines?

Fortunately, the bandwidth of fiber optic cables is nearly limitless from our current point of view. The 1 to 10 Gbps or so capacity of each strand can be multiplied by multiplexing dozens to hundreds of wavelengths. Wavelengths can be aggregated to create larger services of 100 Gbps and beyond. The build buildout now is 100 Gbps. Soon that will be 400 Gbps and then 1 Tbps, and it will happen sooner that we think.

Is yesterday’s bandwidth keeping you from becoming tomorrow’s high performance company? You should know that bandwidth prices have been falling almost as fast as demand has been increasing. The bandwidth upgrade you need may fit well within your budget. Want to find out? Get prices and availability on high performance fiber optic bandwidth services now.



Note: Products with the humorous theme "Big Data On Board" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

The How and Why of 10 Gbps WAN Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Big data keeps getting bigger. HD video will soon be supplanted by 4K and then 8K video. IT data centers are going dark, one by one, as applications move to the cloud. Where is the bandwidth coming from to handle the demand of ever higher bit rates in the MAN and WAN?

That bandwidth is coming from fiber optic carriers who realize that every organization is going to be upsizing its data pipes or falling behind competitively. A gigabit per second was considered massive bandwidth not that many years ago. Now it’s considered entry level for many medium size and larger companies. Even consumers are anxiously awaiting universal FTTH to satisfy their ever growing media demands. Is 10 Gbps unreasonable for high performance business applications? Not at all.

The next question is how do you go about acquiring 10 Gig bandwidth once you’ve made the determination that nothing less will get the job done. Here’s an overview of the 10 Gigabit Bandwidth Options available for businesses and other organizations.


Note that SONET at the OC-192 level is still a viable option for businesses seeking 10 Gbps bandwidth. It will continue to be a good choice for some time to come because the amount of installed base of SONET/SDH fiber.

However, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is coming on strong and should be looked at carefully as the service of the future. Carrier Ethernet-native networks and those running Ethernet over SONET have big advantages in scalability and ease of deployment compared to the rather rigidly defined SONET OC levels.

The trick is to get a service port installed that is capable of providing the maximum bandwidth you’ll need. If you are considering more than 1 Gbps service, then a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port makes a lot of sense. It will allow you to incrementally scale your service bandwidth from 1 to 10 Gbps without having new terminal equipment installed. The terminal equipment is most likely to be a managed router installed by the carrier as CPE (Customer Premises Equipment).

What if you are going for the whole 10 GigE right from the start? That would merit a discussion on the cost tradeoff (if any) to have a 40 Gbps or 100 Gbps port installed right away. As outrageous as it may seem from the traditional perspective, 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet are real service options available today for many business locations. These are likely to become common bandwidth levels as more sophisticated applications move to the cloud.

Does it make sense to opt for wavelengths or dark fiber? It depends on what you’ll be using it for. If you need to be running multiple protocols through a point to point connection, managed wavelength service can be the right move. If you are sophisticated enough to install and maintain your own DWDM equipment, then you might get the best deal by simply leasing dark fiber to the locations you want to connect. For most businesses, though, dark fiber is beyond what they really need.

How can you tell what the best option is when there are multiple choices available? Make sure you are getting competitive quotes for as many different options and carriers as possible. It’s likely that there may at least several serving your location that you may be completely unaware of. You best choice is to work with a bandwidth broker, like Telarus, Inc., to get the best deal on 10 Gigabit or other bandwidth service.

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.

Private Networking With Wavelength Services

There comes a time in the growth of a company when standard telecom services just won’t get it done anymore. This is when the IT department starts contemplating buying or renting dark fiber to get the bandwidth, latency and control they need. There’s another alternative that should be considered, however. That’s managed wavelength services.

What’s a wavelength? It’s one color or lambda on a fiber optic strand. That’s right, fiber optic lines have more than one light beam running through them. Each color represents a different wavelength or frequency of laser light. Because they are different colors, these light beams will mix within the optical fiber strand but one will not interfere with another. It’s like they are completely different pairs of wires in a copper bundle or channels on a cable system.

Why have multiple wavelengths? It’s a matter of efficiency. The cost of the equipment to transmit and receive multiple lambdas is far less than the cost to trench or fly hundreds or thousands of miles of fiber optic cable. Each cable has multiple strands. Each strand has multiple wavelengths. Because of this, each fiber installation has massive bandwidth capability available for commercial use.

The technology that makes wavelengths possible is called DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. The “dense” designation means that many wavelengths are loaded onto the fiber with close spacing between them. DWDM terminal equipment must have precise and stable control of the grid of light wavelengths on the fiber. There is an ITU (International Telecommunications Union) standard for this so that equipment is common for the industry. There can be as many as 160 channels or wavelengths, all in the infrared C and L bands, on each fiber strand.

What carriers who own fiber assets are doing is offering entire wavelengths for lease to companies that need high levels of bandwidth. Integra Telecom is a good example of a company offering wavelength services on their metropolitan and long haul fiber optic network. One of the nice features of wavelengths is that you can pick your protocol. Integra offers traditional SONET Interface options of 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps. You can also get Ethernet Interface options of 1 GigE and 10 GigE.

What Integra is offering is called managed wavelength services. That differs from dark fiber, where you are responsible for all the terminal equipment on each end of the fiber, or unmanaged wavelengths where the carrier simply feeds a wavelength with the signals and perhaps interface modules that you supply. A managed solution means that Integra is responsible for providing the terminal equipment and monitoring the network 24/7 with surveillance and network alarms from their Network Operations Center (NOC).

What you get is a highly reliable, high bandwidth, low latency point to point optical wavelength service for long haul or metropolitan connections. Integra operates a 5,000 mile high speed long haul network with metro services in many major cities of the Western United States and connections to Chicago, New York City, Ashburn, VA, and Dallas. Within the 35 markets across 11 Western states, they operate a 3,000 mile metro access network that includes more than 1900 fiber-fed buildings. If your business is located in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah or Washington, you can benefit from the Integra best-in-class fiber optic network, including wavelength services.

What types of businesses are ideal for wavelength services? Companies needing business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, Ethernet transport and optical storage connectivity or data storage connectivity. If you have more than one data center, chances are you need the “big pipes” that wavelengths can provide.

Can your business do better using wavelengths than what you have now for telecom services? Get competitive quotes for managed wavelength services from Integra and other high performance competitive carriers to see for yourself.



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

WAN Computer Network Connections

Computer networks are often categorized as LAN, MAN and WAN. The LAN is your local network. You design and maintain it to meet your specifications. Or, you hire a contractor to do this. When you need to connect your LAN to another LAN across town or around the world, you enter the realm of the MAN and WAN. Here’s a quick look at what’s available in the way of metro and long haul connections.

The difference between the MAN and the WAN is largely a matter of degree. The MAN is a Metropolitan Area Network. As the name suggests, MAN services are limited to a particular city or city and suburbs. It’s the right connectivity for companies that have multiple offices in the same city, a main facility and a remote data center across town, a factory or warehouse in an industrial park plus some satellite offices. Hospitals and their associated medical centers are good candidates for MAN service, especially higher bandwidths for medical image transmission.

A difference between the LAN and MAN is that you own your LAN and buy services from the MAN. A Metropolitan Area Network is typically privately owned and offers services to numerous clients. The network operator manages bandwidth and security to ensure that every customer feels like they have the network all to themselves.

Most MANs are organized as SONET rings that encircle the metropolitan area. A SONET ring is actually two fibers with the same traffic running in opposite directions. One is the primary service and the other is the backup. This is done to ensure reliability. If one fiber or its associated equipment experiences a failure, service is automatically switched to the other fiber in the ring within 50 milliseconds. SONET has designated service levels at OC-3 (155 Mbps), OC-12 (622 Mbps), OC-24 (1.24 Gbps), OC-48 (2.49 Gbps), OC-192 (9.95 Gbps) or OC-768 (39.8 Gbps). You may also be able to get DS3 service multiplexed onto an OC-3 service for transport across town.

Newer metro networks may offer Carrier Ethernet instead of SONET. Ethernet is highly scalable from as low as 1 Mbps on up through 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Popular MAN service levels are 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 1,000 Mbps or GigE. An advantage of Ethernet is that changes in service level can be accomplished faster than with traditional SONET. You can also get layer 2 Ethernet connectivity, such as E-Line and E-LAN, to connect your LANs at other locations into one large bridged network. The MAN itself may have an IP core or be running as Ethernet over SONET to use existing facilities.

Think of the WAN as a very large MAN and you probably won’t be far off. WAN networks may also have SONET rings or IP core networks. They are certainly fiber optic based and often with so many strands that you can lease wavelengths or even dark fibers. Many WAN networks are structured as MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks for flexibility. A MPLS network has inherent security due to a propriety routing technology that is not IP. MPLS networks can transport any protocol by encapsulating the packets within the switching labels.

WAN networks may have a regional, national or international footprint. Some are designed with low latency paths that are especially important for financial trading. WAN networks may also peer with other networks of similar size to share traffic. The newest wrinkle is the Ethernet Exchange that exchanges Ethernet traffic without having to first convert it to SONET.

How do you connect to a WAN network? Often you can pick the connection that is both readily available and lowest in cost for your particular application. These range from T1 lines to Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber, and SONET last mile connections. In some cases, fixed wireless access is also available. The mix of copper, fiber and wireless access should accommodate just about any need.

Do you have a need to connect your LAN to another facility across town, or to locations in other states or countries? Compare prices and availability of various MAN and WAN connectivity options to meet your requirements.

Managed Hosting in Clouds and Colos

When it comes to hosting, you have all sorts of options. Most individuals and smaller companies opt for shared hosting. It provides decent performance at a rock bottom price. Once you get too big for shared Web hosting, you’ve got a decision to make. Do you do it yourself or opt for a managed solution?

There was a time when you needed the savvy to run your own web server to even get a site up and running. Now that Linux and Windows hosting has become so common and standardized, there are lots of places to get hosted. Even larger companies that insisted on maintaining control by buying their own servers and rack mounting them in their own temperature controlled data centers are taking a second look at colocation and clouds. Why? It’s mostly about cost but also about resources.

One of the big resource bottlenecks today is bandwidth. Certainly, carriers have kept up with offerings at GigE, 10 GigE, OC-768, wavelengths and dark fiber. What they haven’t done is provide universal access. While competitive fiber optic networks are expanding their service footprints every day, the majority of business locations still aren’t lit and aren’t likely to be in the near future. Ethernet over Copper bridges the gap for some. Speeds are up to 200 Mbps now. EoC is distance limited, however, so that your best chance for service is in a downtown business district.

Move to a colocation facility or cloud service, however, and your bandwidth issues may be over. They may not be if you need a high bandwidth pipe between your facility and the cloud. But if most of your bandwidth demand is coming from Internet users rather than in-house users, colos and clouds look pretty attractive. Cloud providers locate with the same facility at major carriers to ensure themselves of almost unlimited bandwidth. You can do the same thing by packing up your high bandwidth demand servers and shipping them to a colo facility. The best deals are where multiple carriers have established points of presence and are willing to bid for your business.

Another attraction of colocation is jettisoning the capital investment and operating costs associated with running your own data center. The colo has high security, backup power, environmental control and a tech support staff available 24/7. You need to provide the same things. Economy of scale favors the colocation company with its much larger facility and lots of customers to amortize the cost.

Smaller companies may find that they can’t afford an around the clock tech staff nor the investment required to build or expand an in-house data center. A move to a nearby colo center can get them the facilities they need for a monthly fee. But why stop there? Perhaps it makes even more economic sense to forget about having your own hardware at all. Why not pay as you go on everything?

This is the appeal of everything-as-a-service. Hedge your bets by renting rather than buying. You can do that at many colocation centers now. They’ll put a server in the rack for you and keep it maintained. It’s just like having your own hardware except that when you don’t need it anymore, you just walk away. Need a bigger server? Don’t buy one. Simply upgrade your colo service.

The cloud does the colo one better. The cloud philosophy is “why commit to any particular hardware at all?” Why, indeed? In the cloud all services are virtualized. You don’t need to know or care what they’ve mounted in the racks. What you are concerned about is how many instances of virtualized servers you need at the moment. If you find that your demands fluctuate, you can increase or decrease the number of servers or amount of storage almost instantly. The well of resources to tap is nearly unlimited.

The problem now is how to sort out the options. Shared hosting is nearly a commodity these days. Get competitive quotes for colocation and cloud hosting services for your IT operations and then compare with what it costs you to provide the same value in-house.

Choosing Dark Fiber vs Lit Fiber Service

When your applications are demanding enough to require fiber optic transmission, you’re faced with a choice. Do you order one of the lit fiber services available for your business location or do you buy or rent dark fiber and create your own transport services?

The tradeoffs can be tricky, so you’ll probably want to set up a spreadsheet to compare the performance, cost and installation time for all the services you are interested in.

Installation time? By focusing strictly on cost, you can get caught in a situation where you’ll have the best deal possible... whenever they can get it installed. That can be weeks or even months if you have a particularly difficult situation. Will that meet your needs? If you do your planning well in advance, it just might. If circumstances conspire to demand an order of magnitude bandwidth increase immediately, availability may trump lease cost.

The dark vs lit fiber tradeoff is the classic own vs rent situation. Most companies choose to survey the marketplace for bandwidth services and pick the least cost solution that meets their needs. That process is made easy by using a telecom broker, like Telarus, Inc., that represents dozens of service providers. If you have enough competition for your business, you can get much better pricing than if you are eye to eye with the only telecom sales person for a hundred miles.

One characteristic of both dark and lit fiber services is that they are extremely location sensitive. There may well be accessible fiber running on your side of the turnpike and nothing on the other side, or vice versa. Some buildings have already been “lit” by a particular carrier while others remain dark. Those dark buildings may or may not justify the construction costs of bringing in new fiber connections depending on location and how much service is needed by the tenants.

Lit fiber falls into several major categories. The traditional telecom service is SONET/SDH with OC-3 as the lowest bandwidth of 156 Mbps. An OC-3 can also carry 3 multiplexed DS3 circuits at 45 Mbps each. It’s common for companies to order DS3 and have it delivered by fiber optic cables of much higher capacity. Other SONET levels are OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.2 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps.

The hot competition for fiber optic bandwidth is Carrier Ethernet. Ethernet tends to be both more scalable and lower cost than SONET where it is available. That availability is becoming more and more common, thanks to aggressive build-outs by competitive carriers and business demand for higher bandwidths at lower costs.

Typical fiber optic Ethernet service levels are 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 250 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps 10GigE. Lower bandwidth such as 50 Mbps Ethernet that competes directly with DS3 may be provisioned on either copper or fiber, depending on the carrier’s available equipment.

Coming on strong for higher bandwidth fiber optic connections is wavelength services. When you order a wavelength, you are getting a virtual fiber all to yourself. Of course, there are many wavelengths on the same physical glass fiber strand, but they differ in color and do not interact. Wavelength services may sense for 10 Gbps requirements, with the added advantages of low latency and high security. With an entire wavelength dedicated to your use, you can use a different protocol than other customers on the fiber. You may be running Ethernet while others are running SONET.

The ultimate in flexibility is dark fiber. By leasing a dark fiber run, you have all the wavelengths at your disposal. You’ll have to buy the termination equipment for each end, but then you’ll have the option to light up as few or many wavelengths as you want. You can run a different protocol on each wavelength and even operate with something non-standard or experimental. Usually it is the largest companies with the most complex IT requirements that go the dark fiber route.

What type of fiber optic service makes the most sense for your operation? Don’t jump to any conclusions until you get a complete set of prices and install times for fiber optic options available for your business location or locations.



Note: Light bulb photo courtesy of Ulfbastel on Wikimedia Commons.