STRUCTURED CABLING
Vertical Demand
Fibre is a strong choice; for businesses
who upload large amounts of data
or regularly download large files.
It provides a large capacity at an
affordable price point and is accessible
for most companies. This makes a great
solution for businesses of different sizes,
and small home-based retail units will
see as many gains as a large warehouse
system. While Ethernet or ADSL pose
significant advantages, for immediate
upgrade projects where cost efficiency is
key, fibre is a strategically sound choice.
Challenges
A client will lease unused strands of
dark fibre optic cable to create their own
privately operated optical fibre network
rather than just leasing bandwidth.
However, the dark fibre network is
separate from the main network and is
controlled by the client rather than the
network provider. Therefore, buying
dark fibre is not like buying most other
telecom services because it’s more like a
physical asset than a service. The fibre
itself must be maintained and repaired
when there are problems like fibre cuts,
and these outages are typically much
longer than other services, so you should
be careful to negotiate acceptable SLAs
for these repairs. If you need diversity or
restoration in your network, you should
be especially careful before buying dark
fibre. Many carriers use the same rightof-way when they construct their routes,
so you’ll need detailed route maps to
validate your diversity. When you are
buying a leased line or service, there is
usually some smart technology deployed
to deal with failovers, but with dark
fibre, because you are in full control
of that asset, considerations have to be
made for failover and backup. One of
the things that C4L work very hard on
with our dark fibre network is to ensure
that all available paths are resilient and
do not cross, where possible. We do that
for our customers, so you should do this
to protect yourself. Dark fibre can be
the right solution for many of today’s
high-bandwidth enterprise connectivity
needs, but make sure you go into it with
a full understanding of its advantages
and disadvantages. Remember, dark
fibre is a point-to-point technology,
designed to connect 2 locations such as
office to office, or office to data centre.
This said, many companies enquiring
are still surprised to hear that there
are no Internet services automatically
on it. You’ll still need to get Internet
connectivity from your provider and run
this as a separate service.
How Do I Get Dark Fibre?
Ultimately, the positives can outweigh
the negatives both in terms of cost
and complexity. It used to be that
only service providers or data centre
operators had dark fibre, but not
anymore. Nowadays, dark fibre
networks can be set up in a variety
of ways, including dark fibre rings,
point-to-point or point-to-multipoint
configurations. There are a handful
of dark fibre providers, all with
different areas of coverage, different
fibre routes, different costs, different
diversity, with different strengths and
weaknesses. To ensure you have the
right option, you need to compare all
of them for diversity, shortest routes,
cost comparison, and sometimes splice
together multiple networks to get the
right solution. You can do \