Finding Fiber Lit Buildings

If you are looking for high levels of bandwidth at reasonable prices, the place you need to be is in a “lit” building. Let’s take a look at what makes a building “lit” and why that’s important.

The lighting we’re talking about with a lit building is laser light. It’s not lighting the building itself, but only the fiber optic strands that run through it. A building is said to be lit if there is fiber optic bandwidth service installed and running.

As you may suspect by now, if there is fiber optic service to the building and you own or are renting space in that building, you can almost certainly get fiber optic bandwidth services installed for your needs. Granted, there can be construction costs if only one tenant has fiber service and there is no cabling running to other rooms. That’s usually a solvable problem at a reasonable cost.

There’s a much bigger problem if nobody in the building has contracted for fiber optic bandwidth. Chances are, fiber cabling was never pulled into the building during construction or as part of any upgrades. Who knows where the nearest fiber even exists? It could be in the building next door or it could be ten miles away. If you are in the business district of a major city you probably aren’t far from the nearest fiber connection. Out in the boonies it’s much less likely that there is anything reasonably close. Oh, there may be long haul fiber conduit right under your feet. Those don’t count. You need to be near a termination point so you can hook into the fiber optic service.

Actually, there is now a quick and easy way to find fiber lit buildings in your area. It’s a Shop for Ethernet GeoQuote tool that maps out fiber point of presence in a given area. All you do is enter the address of your building and you’ll get both a map and the distances to the nearest lit buildings and the bandwidth capability at those locations. If you like, you can then put in a request for detailed pricing to support your applications.

The biggest variable in getting high bandwidth Ethernet line service is the cost of construction to install the fiber optic connection. This may be quoted to you as a non-recurring cost or it may be waived by the carrier depending on how close you are to where their fiber service is already installed. If it’s right next door, you could luck out and not have to pay anything. If it is miles down the road, the construction cost may be more than either you or the carrier wants to pay.

You can make your building more attractive to the carriers if there are multiple tenants all willing to commit to fiber optic service. By pooling your bandwidth requirements, the carrier will view your situation as a much bigger opportunity and be willing to kick in more of the construction costs than they might for just one user.

What if you are still too far away to make fiber construction practical? You’re not out of luck by any means. You will certainly qualify for bonded T1 service that can give you up to 10 Mbps. You may also qualify for Ethernet over Copper that can easily take that up to 20 Mbps and perhaps higher. Other services that might be available are Ethernet over Hybrid Fiber Cable and Ethernet over Fixed Wireless. Cable is the same type of cable that delivers Cable TV and can also provide 50 to 100 Mbps of business bandwidth. Fixed wireless systems can beam up to 45 Mbps to a terminal box mounted on the roof of your building.

Don’t count yourself out for increased bandwidth at reasonable prices until you get a complete set of prices and availability quotes for business bandwidth options. This is a highly competitive business, with new services becoming available all the time.