* A glut of optical fiber drives enterprises to use this low-cost alternative
For years service providers have been using optical networking as the cornerstone of their long-distance networks. However, until recently enterprises have been slow to adopt optical networking mainly due to concerns about cost and complexity. But that situation appears to be changing.
During the 1990s, a wide variety of companies dug up city streets to put in fiber. With all that added capacity, many sections of the country now have an excess of fiber, which has resulted in falling prices.
As a result, more enterprises have begun to adopt optical networking. For example, roughly 18 months ago the New York Presbyterian Hospital dropped its service provider in favor of implementing its own optical network based on dark fiber. Dark fiber refers to optical fiber infrastructure that is currently in place but is not being used.
The hospital had exhausted its ATM based OC-3 network and was considering buying an OC-12 SONET network. However, it realized that with the growing traffic demands that it had to support, the OC-12 network would be at exhaust by the time it was implemented.
Akbar Kara, former director of core resources at the hospital and now chief technologist at Texas Lonestar Education and Research Network, commented that the cost of traditional network services increases as the speed of the service increases. For example, an OC-12 circuit costs more than an OC-3 circuit. However, with an optical network the cost of the service does not change as additional bandwidth is provisioned. Kara added that a customer-operated optical network provides virtually unlimited bandwidth and is capable of carrying storage and other network traffic. He also pointed out that when implemented in a ring architecture, an optical network is inherently resilient and affords the enterprise the greatest amount of flexibility.
The next WAN newsletter will continue the discussion of the use of optical networks by enterprises. We’ll discuss the availability of fiber and present another case study that describes the reliability, quality and complexity of optical networks.
