Demystifying Dark Fiber

Dark fiber is not the mystery it once was. The black magic is gone. Equipment vendors and new technology have made it a much simpler process to build and manage a layer 2 network and the word is out. The transport business is also growing as result for just as those that once bough leased lines now seek their own fiber there are others that once only bought IP transit and are now leasing layer 2 transport. This is a very natural progression of people moving up the learning curve (and down the stack as it were). 

We all know the story of the people that said that "no one will ever need more capacity that a T1". 10G waves and 10GE is commonplace today. The public Internet has its own issues with security and reliability. In a recent article by Micheal Healey in Information Week about Cloud Computing these comments were made:

"The two biggest weaknesses of cloud computing are reliability and security," says one respondent. "Is the service going to be available 24/7? What happens when the Internet fails in a crisis? If there is a rush on the service, will the service collapse in a political or market crisis? Will our data and other information be compromised? How will we know if it has been compromised?"

No one has all the answers.

What if the Internet fails in a crisis? Maybe some people are shocked by the assertion. Well, guess what? The Internet does fail! The failures mainly have to do with physical layer issues first and then routed layer 3 network congestion. This reality is causing IT managers to wake up and look for layer 2 transport with inherent security and guaranteed throughput. 

The next step is to ask the ISP's and transport providers for their physical layer fiber network path maps - if they even have them, or will provide access to them. Only then will the buyers know their true diversity, redundancy and probabilty of a complete outage. When thinking about Business Continuity Planning, start there.
 

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That's correct, one needs to know the fiber routes in order to establish diversity. How many times however, have carriers refused to provide direct routing in order to preserve their network security?

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