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.