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Fixed Wireless Access
Managed SDN & SD-WAN
Dark Fiber - Wavelength Service
Who is Offering Dark Fiber?
Find dark fiber providers who lease unlit strands demanding applications.By: John Shepler
Did you know that there is more than one type of fiber optic service you can lease? Most applications are satisfied with lit fiber services such as private point to point lines, dedicated Internet access or direct cloud access. But demanding applications are now making use of unlit or dark fiber. Could dark fiber be an asset to your company?
What is Dark Fiber?
Dark fiber is just the raw fiber optic strands you find in fiber cables being installed overhead or underground. They stretch from point to point, but don’t have any equipment connected.
Telecom carriers and private network operators install cables with dozens to hundreds of individual fiber strands. It’s more cost effective to install many strands instead of just a few so there is capacity available as demand for bandwidth increases. Consequently, most fiber providers have many strands sitting idle, waiting for traffic to increase enough to justify adding the laser transceivers, routers and switches needed to bring another strand into service.
What many potential users think is that if you want complete control of fiber, you have to install it yourself. That’s cost prohibitive over any distance. Actually, you can have pretty much the same result by leasing one or more strands of dark fiber that are already in place but unused.
Why Choose Dark Fiber?
With 10 Gbps and even 100 Gbps fiber optic service readily available, why go to the trouble of lighting up dark fiber? By doing so, you gain the option of using any protocol you wish or even multiple protocols on the same fiber strand.
How? You can divide the fiber bandwidth into multiple wavelengths or lambdas, each with a different protocol. Bandwidth becomes nearly unlimited and depends largely on the sophistication of the equipment on both ends of the fiber. You have the option to scale that bandwidth up or down at will. Latency is minimized and set by your own technologies. Security is enhanced, as you are the only user of this fiber strand.
Who Needs Dark Fiber?
Organizations with a compelling need for high bandwidths or unique requirements and have the ability to manage the system themselves may make good use of dark fiber. Network service providers, cloud centers, AI workloads, multi-site corporate networks, disaster backup and recovery, municipal operations, and wireless backhaul are typical users of dark fiber.
Who Provides Dark Fiber?
Traditional telecom operators, especially the larger companies, need to install and maintain massive amounts of fiber to support their own national and international traffic. 5G wireless has obsoleted even high speed copper connections, leading to fiber buildout to far-flung towers. That has made possible fiber connections and dark fiber strands in rural areas and smaller cities.
Cable companies have long switched from analog coaxial copper to fiber as their backbone networks. These companies install large fiber cables with many dark strands for future expandability. You might not guess cable providers would have dark fiber available because the drops to homes and businesses are still mostly DOCSIS coaxial copper runs. Behind the scenes, though, it is all fiber networking.
Private networking companies have multiplied in recent years. They often have no connection to traditional telcos and likely don’t even offer consumer phone services. Their networks do offer high bandwidth Ethernet over Fiber services on lit strands. They also have spare fiber available that remains unlit and may be available for lease. Some of these companies are aggressively wiring cities for fiber to the home (FTTH) and businesses, large and small, so they pass most locations that have never been near fiber routes.
Do you have needs that exceed the networking options you have now or would you simply like to see if a better deal is available? Find out what lit and dark fiber options are available for your business now.Find Fiber Optic Bandwidth Services Now
Optical carrier services, including Fast Ethernet & Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber, SONET, Wavelengths, Dark Fiber and other high speed low latency digital line services, including Managed SDN Software Defined Networking and SD-WAN, for commercial business and organizational applications. Find out what network services and pricing are available now for your commercial business building anywhere in the U.S. Simply call 1-888-848-8749 or use this handy form...
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