It’s hard to overstate the importance of fiber optics on the sort of web applications. From the Internet backbone and metropolitan networks, to the connections between hardware in the data center, and on its last-mile to a final destination, fiber has allowed data to move faster between one point and another. And this is all done on glass strands as thin as a human hair.
After a slump in US fiber installation following the Dot-Com crash, the 19 million miles of optical fiber installed in 2012 surpassed the amount in the year 2000 for the first time. Worldwide fiber installation is so rapid that producers of fiber optics are finding it hard to keep up with demand.
After buying the assets of Vermont-based TelJet Longhaul, including its fiber network and colocation facility, fiber optic network and colocation provider Tech Valley Communications now operates one of the largest and most dense fiber networks in Upstate New York and Northern New England with more than 190,000 fiber miles and 1,300 lit buildings.
Fiber optic networks promise to expand the delivery of hosted services as well as increase the overall capabilities of local businesses, making new business ventures possible.
“It used to be that in the manufacturing economy you would look for a building with a loading dock; now, you’re looking for fiber,” TelJet Longhaul president Greg Kelly says. He says a fiber link between a business and its off-premise infrastructure enables it to experience the efficiency of a hosted infrastructure without the network lags typical from a copper connection.
TVC has enabled customers to take advantage of new business opportunities without having to move. For instance, a Vermont company that provides iTunes encoding was able to avoid moving its 30-odd person operation to Boston because it could now get the network capacity it needed in Vermont.
Kelly says that even though many customers may lie outside of the typical metropolitan areas, network capacity is still vitally important. “In the medical, financial and legal industries, it’s required to have data backups,” he says. This, of course, creates huge volumes of data that must be preserved and updated constantly.
X-ray images, for instance, must be stored by all US healthcare providers. “It doesn’t matter where it’s done, the size of an X-ray image is the same,” says Kelly. “They still need the capacity in rural areas.”
He says real-time, offsite backup often requires 300 Mbps connectivity with the data center, and this cannot be done on copper. Since it owns both the network and four data centers, TVC has the ability to give new customers a 1Gbps or even 10Gbps circuit just for the first 30 days so they can backup their data.
Major metropolitan areas are also finding a need for high-capacity networking. This has even spurred the New York City Economic Development Corporation and its partners to launch a contest to provide local businesses free fiber build-outs, which can cost approximately $50,000 per business depending on location.
“Big cities have to build big Internets,” Fiber Optics Association president and fiber optics and communications consultant Jim Hayes says. He says that more online activity and high-bandwidth applications strangle bandwidth for everyone. For instance, online streaming events such as the NCAA basketball tournament’s Final Four round can bog down the country’s networks (and applications) because so many people are watching at the same time.
Hayes says it’s important not to forget that many of these applications are dependent on the limited capacities provided by shared networks. “If the cloud computing providers…don’t get to the point where they look at how those services are going to be delivered, they’re not going to be able to do their business,” he says.
The fiber optic Internet backbone that criss-crosses the US is equipped to transfer large amounts of traffic cross-country. And at a municipal level, cities like Santa Monica have built their own fiber optic network, known as Santa Monica City Net, thanks to some government assistance.
But it’s often the connection to the home or business where the bottlenecks occur.
“It’s sort of that last mile that gets you,” Hayes says. “Most of the bottlenecks are there; it’s where most of the problems occur. It’s also where the cost of fixing the problems is the highest.”
However, he notes that fiber isn’t the only option for last-mile delivery as long as it can provide between 40 and 100 Mbps, which is within the range of a short copper connection.
But, again, it needs to be able to accommodate for peak traffic. “If you don’t plan for peak traffic, you get congestion,” Hayes says.
There remains a bumpy but hopeful road towards greater bandwidth. After all, some buildings in New England were once equipped with lead cable before being switched to copper wiring in the early 20th century. Kelly says, “Since the late 80s, we’ve been migrating to fiber, and there’s nothing replacing fiber.”
In the meantime, those who are able to deliver online services via fiber optic connections are going to have an advantage over those who use lower-capacity technology, being able to deliver higher-bandwidth applications. And as fiber runs directly to more and more businesses and consumers, the increase in bandwidth will undoubtedly expand the opportunities for delivering hosted solutions.
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