Written by Laura Barnett, Contributing Writer, Data Center POST
As requirements in the IT and telecom industries expand and change, maintaining a healthy and agile enterprise network is becoming an increasingly challenging task. With so many options on the market, finding a network strategy that’s right for your business and that provides proper nourishment to your operations can be less than straightforward. However, as your business grows, there is one key nutrient it should be utilizing: fiber.
We’ve all heard that fiber promotes benefits for your body, but what about for your business? For so many organizations, a fiber-rich approach offers a host of advantages, including scalability for ensuring healthy function into the future, cost-effectiveness for keeping expenses nice and trim, heightened control and more. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a fiber deficiency can keep your business feeling sluggish with latency and downtime, resulting in harmful side effects.
Similar to how there are several types of dietary fiber, there’s an assortment of different fiber optic strategies out there. Lit fiber and subsea cabling both have their place in the world of network health, but dark fiber has recently emerged as the latest and greatest in terms of keeping businesses fit for a long, robust life. When it comes to creating and maintaining a system that supports your unique requirements and provides everything your business needs to thrive, dark fiber is a critical supplement
So, how exactly can dark fiber strengthen your network physique? Let’s dive into a few of the benefits:
Dark Fiber Helps You Slim Down in All the Right Places
When it comes to network costs, bigger is certainly not better. The larger your payments are, the harder it is for you to easily keep pace with a rapidly-scaling industry, especially while bandwidth requirements are expanding. Traditional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have cost structures that make you pay according to data usage, meaning the more you use the more you pay. This isn’t very practical for businesses that need more than 1Gbps. Dark fiber’s fixed payment system and virtually unlimited room for bandwidth growth effectively keep your payments fit and trim.
Dark Fiber Keeps You Running Smoothly
With more and more business architecture and applications moving to the cloud, dark fiber is the perfect way to supplement your cloud and big data capabilities. Network resources can keep you from fully expressing the benefits of a cloud environment, but dark fiber provides a boost of reliability, scalability and speed (allowing straight point to point connections without excess traffic stops) to support your operations. DC BLOX is one business that currently employs dark fiber to keep their data center connections quick and capable for their customers. The high-speed fiber optic network that interconnects DC BLOX’s strategically-placed data centers enables a host of use cases, facilitating IoT applications, business continuity, disaster recovery and beyond. With dark fiber, the only kind of backup you’ll be experiencing will be your lightning-fast backups to the cloud.
Dark Fiber Offers Reduced Risk of Debilitating Side Effects
Not only does dark fiber help protect you by allowing for speedy cloud backups, thereby safeguarding business critical data, it also provides augmented redundancy and privacy for extra reassurance. Unlike traditional ISPs, dark fiber offers you a private network, allowing your data to stay off the internet and under the control of a single entity. Plus, underground marked communications conduits help to physically guard your system against weather events or other outages from third-party damages, keeping you on your feet and out of harm’s way.
Dark Fiber Allows For Complete Control
Because you won’t be sharing your network with other businesses, you can have total control over how you build your own physical network and how that network functions. Equipment, connection settings, protocols and features can all be tailored to suit your current and future needs. ZenFi Networks offers dark fiber as a part of their dedication to providing innovative, creative and best-in-class network solutions to support their customers, allowing for custom-designed pathways that turn the challenges of network densification into successful strategies for a connected world. ZenFi Networks has built a million and a half feet of fronthaul fiber in New York City alone, enabling clients to leverage a truly 5G-capable and highly accessible infrastructure to control their business growth into the future. Nobody knows you better than you do, so dark fiber makes sure you can implement exactly what you need where you need it.
Why The Fiber Gap?
Even with this host of benefits on offer, there simply aren’t enough people who are reaping the benefits of dark fiber. Many organizations are afraid of upfront costs or upkeep, but the risks that come from a lack of fiber can be far more damaging. Of course, any change to your business lifestyle can be intimidating, and a professional should be consulted when looking for a new strategy. FiberLight is an expert that can assist you as a trusted partner for designing, building and deploying a custom dark fiber strategy that will keep your business in peak performance condition. The company’s 14,000 route miles of fiber in the U.S’s most rapidly-expanding metros (Dallas, Houston, Tampa and more) offer up to 100Gbps of bandwidth to keep you flexible and agile.
It’s time to fill in the fiber gap and give your business the support it needs to grow and flourish. Ask your provider today if dark fiber is right for you.
