STRUCTURED CABLING
Is This The
xxxxxxx Start of a Revolution?
Dark Fibre
By Simon Mewett, Group CEO, C4L
Introduction
Simon Mewett
investigates the pros and
cons of dark fibre.
In February this year London hit the
headlines, when a creative firm in the
heart of Tech City – the new
world-leading tech cluster; revealed it
was quicker to courier a file to a client
on a USB stick than to share it over
their internet connection. Yikes! As
the UK’s digital economy continues to
grow, delivering the latest technology
infrastructure is critical to alleviate
pressure on the network and ensure that
all businesses have the tools they need to
grow. For the UK today, this means fibre
connectivity. This can be provided either
over ‘lit’ Ethernet services from your
service provider, or by buying dark fibre.
What is Dark Fibre?
Essentially, dark fibre is optical fibre
infrastructure that is not in use. When
fibre optic cables are laid, many
companies will plan and overestimate
the amount of infrastructure cabling
required in order to future proof their
networks. Data is transported over
optical fibre networks by passing light
through the cables – if there is no data
being transported then the fibre is
‘dark.’
Fibre was rolled out through the
Margaret Thatcher era because copper
was getting too expensive, coupled with
the fact that optical fibre technology
had advanced so much. A lot of the
original fibre was dug in the 1990s
and many service providers spent
billions on building out fibre networks.
Some companies failed to generate the
business that they had anticipated and
this forced a number into bankruptcy
or Chapter 11. Many other service
providers purchased the fibre,
enhancing their networks at a fraction
of the cost. Now with dark fibre, a
client can expect to get high levels of
performance, a highly secure network
and superfast speeds. There are many
benefits of using ‘dark’ networks. They
have higher capacity, which can scale
to 100Gbps on a single port, or use
DWDM to scale up to 88 ports with
standard equipment
Faster Speeds
Every year bandwidth speed
expectations go up by 60 per cent, so
how much capacity does dark fibre
have? Ulti X][ K]8