600 Mbps Ethernet vs OC12 SONET

Organizations requiring fractional Gbps bandwidth have traditionally turned to OC12 SONET fiber optic service. It’s still an excellent high speed option, but you should also take a look at 600 Mbps Ethernet service. You may be surprised how the two competing connections compare.

OC-12 (622 Mbps) is the next step up from OC-3 (155 Mbps) in the SONET optical carrier hierarchy. You’ll find this service readily available in Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) and as a dedicated Internet access connection for mid-size Internet service providers. Large organizations also have OC12 bandwidth connections, especially those with thousands of employees on-site or a need to support high bandwidth applications like medical image transmission or video production and distribution.

Not too many years ago, OC12 was considered a good choice for a carrier fiber optic core network. Now, most regional and national carriers have moved up to OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps or OC-192 at 10 Gbps. Long haul and undersea fiber lines are running at OC-768 (40 Gbps) and moving quickly to support 100 Gbps.

OC12 is most often deployed on a protected SONET ring topology, with two counter-rotating fiber rings. If something in one ring fails, either equipment or a cable break, the other ring will pick up 100% of the traffic within 50 mSec.

Note that an OC12 service is probably not the only traffic on a particular fiber strand. At 622 Mbps, OC12 comes nowhere near using available bandwidth of the fiber. SONET is designed as a Time Division Multiplexed (TDM) system that can easily add or drop common OC service levels such as OC3 and OC12. In addition to the electrically multiplexed services on the fiber, each fiber may also be optically multiplexed into a dozen or more wavelengths using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) equipment.

Carrier Ethernet over fiber is based on packet switching rather than time division multiplexing. Without the strict synchronized channels of TDM, Ethernet is far more scalable. You can order 600 Mbps Ethernet as a replacement for OC12 SONET. You can also order 500 Mbps if that is all you reasonably need. Even more importantly, you can start increasing bandwidth to 700 Mbps, 800 Mbps, 900 Mbps and 1 Gbps as business requirements dictate.

With SONET, the service provider will install a managed router as Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that includes an interface module specifically designed for the particular OC service level you have installed. The modules for OC3, OC12, and OC48 will plug into the same port on the router, but they are not interchangeable. You need to match the particular interface to the OC service level. That becomes important when you want to implement a service change. The provider will need to roll a truck to either swap out interface modules or completely replace the CPE router.

With Carrier Ethernet, your service provider will install a managed router that can support a particular port speed. For Ethernet over Copper, this is likely 100 Mbps. For fiber, you are likely looking at 1 Gbps, although you can often get equipment rated to 10 Gbps if you expect to be upgrading to that speed level in the foreseeable future. With a 1 Gbps port, you can order whatever service level you need between, say, 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps, in 100 Mbps or smaller increments. No equipment changes are needed as you change service levels within that range. You simply call your provider and tell them to increase bandwidth and you’ll see it happen within a few days, sometimes within a few hours.

Beyond scalability, Ethernet has a cost advantage over SONET in most situations. Sometimes the cost difference is dramatic, even half the cost, for Ethernet versus SONET of the same bandwidth. The one limitation that you’ll run into is that SONET has been around a lot longer and is more available than Ethernet over Fiber. Even so, competitive carriers have been aggressively building out their IP networks and may have fiber service closer than you think.

Do you require fractional Gigabit bandwidth services? If so, it is worth your while to compare 600 Mbps Ethernet to OC12 SONET for cost and availability. The same advice is true for other service levels from T1 copper bandwidth on up to 10 Gbps and higher.

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.

Fiber Optic Wavelength Services for San Francisco and Silicon Valley

AboveNet is expanding its high capacity fiber optic network services with new low latency wavelength services serving the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, including key locations in Santa Clara and San Jose, California.

AboveNet’s Core Wave solutions are based on ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer) technology. It offers dynamic wavelength add/drops of multiple protocols that include Ethernet, TDM, storage and video transport. This makes for an array of flexible service options, scalability and fast provisioning.

Compared to legacy network designs, Core Wave shows the path that all fiber optic networks will be taking in the future. Business needs are too dynamic to be straight-jacketed into a few single protocol service levels or difficult to modify equipment configurations. By basing their network on DWDM with ROADM and deploying services via wavelength, AboveNet can offer businesses whatever connectivity they need with the option to make changes and additions easily.

The beauty of wavelengths and ROADM is that you can manage traffic optically, without the need to do an optical to electrical to optical conversion process. This allows you to add a wavelength, drop off a wavelength or simply pass the wavelength (cut-through) without affecting it. The ROADM doesn’t have to know or care what protocol the traffic is on the wavelength because it doesn’t dissect the signal at that level. ROADMs give a whole new meaning to the idea of a “transparent” network.

What type of fiber optic services is AboveNet making available in the San Francisco Bay Area? You have dedicated bandwidth at 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps, with both protected and unprotected options. Multi-protocol support includes Carrier Ethernet at 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE), SONET/SDH at OC-12 (622 Mbps) STM-4, OC-48 (2.5 Gbps) STM-16, and OC-192 (10 Gbps) STM-64. You can also transport the Fibre Channel FC-100, FC-200 and FC-400 standards for SAN (Storage Area Networks). The platform is scalable to 40 Gbps for future connectivity needs.

Core Wave is a MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) solution for point to point connectivity between business locations. AboveNet also offers long haul low latency 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps transparent bandwidth from their POP (Point of Presence) to enterprise locations in major metro locations. This fiber optic service bypasses the Local Exchange Carrier loops to keep everything on the AboveNet network and guarantee a full 10 Gbps connectivity. One application of this service, called eXpressWave Long Haul, is to securely connect a corporate data center and backup data center located in different markets. You can order express routing of point to point dedicated circuits with no local stops to your remote locations, as needed.

Are you doing business in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Silicon Valley, and require high bandwidth, high reliability fiber optic connectivity? If so, get quotes for fiber optic wavelength services from AboveNet and other competitive carriers serving this area of California. Similar services are also available in other locations nationwide, including low latency connections to international destinations.



Note: Photo of downtown San Francisco courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Ethernet Private Line Service With Granular Bandwidth

Our experience with private line service has always been with point to point dedicated telecom services, such as T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, and OC3 fiber optic connections. Now there’s a new service available that gives you all the advantages of traditional private line services with some improvements and better pricing.

This new network service is called Ethernet Private Line Service, or E-Line. That’s not just a clever marketing term. It’s the official name of the service as defined by the MEF or Metro Ethernet Forum. In other words, E-Line is a standardized Carrier Ethernet service with enterprise level performance in metropolitan and long haul networks.

Let’s take a look a what we expect from a private line service and see how Ethernet Private Line Service measures up. A typical private line is a permanent point to point connection. For that reason, it is sometimes referred to as a “nailed up” connection to differentiate it from a temporary switched service connection such as a telephone call. The private line is truly private. The company that leases the private line expects to have full time exclusive use of the circuit. If they are not sending traffic at the moment, the line idles while it waits for the next burst of traffic.

A very typical implementation of private line service is the T1 point to point connection. A T1 line offers 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth in both directions. It behaves as an empty pipe connecting two locations for voice, data, video or whatever digital service is needed. T1 point to point lines are used to connect branch offices to headquarters, transmit medical images from a clinic to a hospital, or even carry program audio from a radio station studio to the transmitter site. A special arrangement called a “tie line” allows you to connect to PBX telephone systems together.

Higher bandwidth uses of point to point telecom lines include video transport for production and television broadcast, connecting business information systems, engineering simulation and overnight file backups to remote data centers. You can usually get as much bandwidth as you need for your application. It’s just a matter of price.

What makes private line services expensive is that they must be specifically engineered to meet a particular need. If the link is only across town, it may stay within the footprint of one carrier. But if you want to connect two locations in different states or on opposite coasts, your packets may traverse many different networks to get from point A to point B. That runs up the lease cost and may take a considerable time to install. If you want to change the amount of bandwidth once your connection is in place, the process has to start all over.

Qwest, a major player in the business bandwidth marketplace, is offering a private line service based on the latest technology. They already have in place a core MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) network based on fiber optics using DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. That gives them the ability to offer 100% committed bandwidth and traffic engineering while being fully MEF certified.

The advantages of implementing E-LIne over a pre-provisioned MPLS 10 GigE backbone network are that implementation to connect your locations can be much faster and you can select from a huge range of bandwidth options between 5 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps. This is called granular bandwidth, something difficult or impossible to obtain with traditional telecom services. Those bandwidth options are scalable in the sense that you can generally change your bandwidth level quickly and easily with a call to your service provider.

Qwest calls their new low-latency Ethernet Private Line solution “Qwest iQ E-Line.” It allows for point to point or hub and spoke connections within or between any of their 16 markets that include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Mo, Los Angeles, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sunnyvale, Tampa and Washington DC.

Are you in the market for high performance point to point network services or would you just like to see if you can get more bandwidth for less money? Check pricing and availability for Ethernet Private Line Service now.



Note: Photo of network switches courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

AboveNet Core Wave Makes Dedicated Wavelength Bandwidth Available

What do you do when ordinary bandwidth is no longer up to the task? You go above and beyond with AboveNet’s Core Wave service. For demanding financial services, media, health care, retail and government applications, you really do have to get to the core of fiber optic transport. The very core.

Most telecom services are electrically multiplexed somewhere along the way. What multiplexing does is combine your bandwidth service with dozens, hundreds or thousands of others to fill the capacity of a fiber optic core network. But what if you have enough demand on your own to take all the bandwidth a service provider can deliver?

One answer is to become your own service provider. You do this buy building-out or buying fiber strands or even entire fiber optic cables. That’s what Cable TV MSOs do. So do major telecom service providers. But bandwidth is their business. It’s what they do to generate income. You aren’t really in the business of bandwidth. You simply want to use large amounts of bandwidth to enable your business processes. Does investing large amounts of capital in fiber infrastructure really make sense for your corporate mission?

Of course it doesn’t. What does make sense is to partner with a service provider that has already made the investment and has enough bandwidth capacity at their disposal to meet your current and future needs. AboveNet has that capability and now they are making it available to large organizations in major markets.

Let’s take a look at AboveNet Core Wave. It’s a high capacity bandwidth service for point to point connectivity in metro areas, like New York City. Right now you can get 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps service. The platform is scalable, so that when demand justifies it AboveNet can also offer 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps bandwidth services.

How are they doing this? The platform is built on a fiber optic network managed by ROADMs. A ROADM is a Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexer. This is the cutting edge of fiber optic networking. What a ROADM does is manage the traffic on the network optically. Each fiber transports not one, but many different light beams known as Lambdas or wavelengths. Each wavelength is said to have a different color, although these are in the infrared spectrum and not visible like the colors from a prism. A ROADM can manage dozens or hundreds of wavelengths in a process known as DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing.

Normally wavelengths have such high carrying capacity that they transport traffic for many companies. But Core Wave gives you the option of having your own dedicated wavelength. The wavelength is like a blank slate to be written on, so you are not forced into the protocol of the core network. AboveNet gives you the choice of Ethernet, SONET/SDH, or Fibre Channel for storage networking.

Are your bandwidth needs pressing the limits of conventional telecom services? If so, perhaps it is time you moved up to fiber optic wavelength services, like AboveNet Core Wave. Why not check pricing and availability now? There is likely more capacity available than you think.

Fiber Optic DWDM Up to 100 Gbps Per Wavelength

The incredible growth of bandwidth demand continues unabated. Odd, perhaps, in these soft economic times. It’s the proliferation of video and especially high definition video that has dramatically increased network bandwidth requirements, including metro and long haul WAN networks. Now a new benchmark has been achieved at 100 Gbps per wavelength in DWDM or Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing fiber optic systems.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we were hearing of the move from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps channels. Alcatel-Lucent is offering a new upgrade module that operates at both 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps using a single optical carrier. It’s available in their 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS).

What does it take to achieve such speeds on existing fiber that was intended for 10 Gbps transmissions? After all, you can’t exactly rip up all that installed fiber and lay new cables just to up the bandwidth. Also complicating the design is that in wavelength division multiplexing not all wavelengths will be scheduled for simultaneous upgrade. What’s needed in an upgrade that won’t interfere with existing 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps signals nor demand larger amounts of rack space and power.

Alcatel-Lucent has met these design goals with a new electro-optics engine that depends heavily on digital signal processing and better modulation and detection techniques for the optical signal. It starts with a change from amplitude shift keying (ASK) to phase shift keying (PSK). With a constant amplitude, the signal has better resilience against non-linear effects in the fiber. Both two-phase-state and four-phase-state coding schemes can be used to load more information on the signal. They then double the bit rate again without increasing the symbol rate by adding PDM or polarization division multiplexing on the same signal.

As you probably guessed, transmitting more information on the same wavelength has a price. That price is sophistication of the electronics. Coherent detection uses a local oscillator mixed with the optical signal to produce interferences that give an output of phase, amplitude and polarization to the digital signal processor. Some heavy duty number crunching allows the DSP to compensate for linear distortions in the fiber while it recovers the bit information.

Alcatel-Lucent proved all this out last fall during a field trial in Spain, by transmitting 112 Gbps per channel along with 40 Gbps and 10 Gbps channels on a 1088 km link between Madrid and Merida via Seville, as described in their technology white paper, “Next-generation Electro-Optics Technology with Coherent Detection”.

Ciena has a competing system, the OME or Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 that also runs at 100 Gbps. These two companies should set the standard at 100 Gbps... at least for awhile. You know that whenever there is competition, there will be the competitive spirit to take things to the next level. What is that? 200 Gbps? 500 Gbps? 1 Tbps?

Service providers worldwide are in a scramble to provide higher speed services at lower costs. Prices have dropped so much in the last few years that you can probably afford more bandwidth than you think. Why wonder when you can get high bandwidth fiber optic service quotes quickly and easily. It only takes a minute to inquire, so why not take that minute right now?