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How long will it take to build fiber optic connectivity to your office? 5 things to consider while you wait.

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It’s easy to get angry with a carrier while you’re waiting to have fiber built out to your office. Fiber optic construction is very complex. You easily spent a full work week gathering quotes, going over the details with sales engineers, beating them up on pricing, and making a decision. Now you’re in limbo land and every day without answers makes you feel more and more neglected.

Some carriers are better than others with communicating the details of installs with customers. Give us a shout here and we’ll walk you through your best options. Below are the top 5 things to consider for your fiber optic build out.

  1. Permits and Rights of Way
  2. Proximity to existing splice points
  3. Landlords
  4. Type of Build – Aerial or Terrestrial/Boring required
  5. Geographic barriers

Permits and Rights of Way – Permits can make or break your build out. No work is being done without a permit so your carrier will need a good relationship with your local municipality. Moratoriums/Embargos on streets during holidays will halt your project. Here is a link to near future embargos in NYC

Proximity to existing splice points – Closer fiber builds are always advantageous as less equipment and manpower need be deployed. It’s tough to get the KMZ files from carriers without an NDA or a strong relationship. Let us know if you need help by contacting us here.

Landlords – Landlords can delay the process and some landlords are easier to negotiate common space for carrier equipment and riser access to extend the service. If the customer is also the building owner it can really streamline the process by cutting out a crucial step. Unfortunately, carriers have a harder time justifying a build out to a customer that is not in a multi-tenant office building because there is less future upside from additional customers.

Type of Build – Aerial or Terrestrial/Boring required – These factors are out of the control of the carrier but it’s awful not to be in the loop on your project. You’ll want to know if your build out will be aerial or terrestrial. Most builds outside of a city are composed of both. Having to do directional boring will cost time and money. In the city, every street has its own regulation and some may allow for a micro-cut while others require a complete street repave. Obviously the latter is more time consuming.

Geographic barriers – Whether train tracks, lakes, mountains, protected streets lined with cobblestones, other construction projects, or a host of other unfortunate events these circumstances can keep your fiber from being delivered. Geographic hurdles are not easy to overcome and keep many rural areas from having connectivity. In an urban environment it can be as simple as being too close to the UN or some other important building.

Why you’ll continue to wait – Whether a UCaaS solution, a cloud based CRM, a growing workforce, VDI, or whatever, you’ll need more bandwidth yesterday! Fiber Optic Ethernet has greater capacity, is far more scalable, and resists corrosion by weather. You’ll want to plan around your build out and stay in close contact with your carrier. Keep in mind, being proactive is key to make sure your fiber optic build out stays on schedule. If you’d like help on a future project, give us a shout by clicking here

Why is the right connectivity at your data center so important?

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The adoption of cloud based and hybrid environments have data centers changing their strategy. Recently both Verizon and CenturyLink sold off portions of their data center business. With the rise of companies like Amazon Web Services, data centers are looking for other ways to add value to their customer. Data Center alternative bandwidth and connectivity, including diverse paths and points of entry is crucial.

Most data centers are now selling a cloud environment they built to profit from their additional capacity. Whether traditional a traditional power, ping, and cage or a cloud environment, the right connectivity is crucial.

Some data centers were able to charge a premium for their ability to reduce latency through geographic proximity for certain industries. Today’s customers want to know how much per meg for bandwidth, where’s the nearest IP router, and how many diverse paths do you have? All of these are essential but with all of the carriers available at the data centers, how do you know you’re getting the best price, on the most diverse route, from the provider who actually owns the right to service the wire? After all a 30 year IRU goes on the balance sheet as an asset and you’re in IT not accounting… and certainly not legal.

Some data centers don’t have many options and there are Tiers that regulate diversity in power, bandwidth, cooling, etc. Geography and Right of Ways can dictate a data center’s ability to be diverse. Data Center operators do their best to get the right pricing but a mistake can be crucial, locking them into a price for a long term… Long enough to no longer be competitive and shift with the market’s rates.

It’s my opinion that carrier agnostic data center operators provide the most value to the client. In addition, carriers that build out on spec rather than waiting for orders are typically more progressive and have tools to give them an edge on their opponents who are also selling bandwidth.

Today’s carriers are going as low as twenty-five cents per meg in data centers although some operators are still locked in at rates between $3-7 per meg wholesale. Those rates make solutions like AWS make more sense even though your bandwidth costs in an AWS environment can fluctuate from month to month. When other soft costs like travel to and from the data center and downtime associated with swapping out parts, running cross connects, etc., are factored in, that high bandwidth cost can really alter a company’s strategy.

It’s always helpful after getting your bandwidth turned up, to do a trace route to determine the path redundancy and ensure you get what you ordered. It’s relatively easy to cancel a newly installed circuit in a data center but that’s for a customer. The data center itself will typically eat the cost of construction or guarantee a long enough term for the build out to make sense for the carrier. In my experience that always worked out best when said data center works with its anchor tenant to establish a mutually beneficial arrangements for the customer, carrier, and data center.

Dedicated Internet Access and Cloud Availability in Rural America

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Access to solid internet connections are crucial to America’s rural communities. Agriculture is positively impacted by the IoT, helping to enhance nature’s ability to produce more sustainably with less harm to the environment. Economies of these rural communities are positively impacted by the increase in job availability to its residents. Internet access allows remote employees to work from anywhere using VoIP, Salesforce.com, Office 365, etc.

In Western North Carolina’s Polk County, there are very limited options. Windstream is the LEC and Charter the local MSO/cable provider. They don’t provide access everywhere, especially for smaller businesses and residential customers.  Some have even taken it upon themselves to petition Charter for service. Fiber optic connectivity is available to larger mid-market companies in the area and the more that they order fiber optics, the more available it becomes to others close by. Pangaea is a non-profit ISP that sees the value in bringing Internet to these communities, and is doing a great job building out their network.

The Tryon Daily Bulletin had an article on October 19th where Keith Conover, the Technical Assistance Director of the NC Department of Commerce stated that there were a lot of options to get broadband in rural areas. While this is true for businesses with larger orders, it isn’t as true for small businesses and residents. That said the more businesses moving to the area ordering and ordering fiber increases the chances to get more access for the rest.

There are very few fiber routes, especially long haul, nearby. Recently, we’ve received quotes from both AT&T and Windstream for fiber optic dedicated internet access in Mill Spring, so it is certainly available for businesses. The article above mentioned requesting Windstream reuse some of its old infrastructure. In reality, the value resides in the Right of Ways, not the infrastructure. It would probably be more cost effective to deploy new fiber optic network, like Pangaea is doing, than to resurrect old infrastructure.

Right of Way and permitting are the long poles in the tent when it comes to building out fiber optic networks and providing service to end users. VoIP can have a huge impact on the revenue requirements to satisfy financial hurdles, however, the FCC does allow carriers in rural areas to restrict number porting, in turn, limiting competition.

Getting better access and competition in rural areas like Polk County North Carolina is a bit of “chicken or the egg” scenario in that we need more businesses to come to the area in order to extend high speed availability while the availability of high speed internet is what will attract businesses to the area. Although I disagree with Keith Conover’s statement that there are a lot of options for residents in the area, the same can’t be said for businesses. They have options and if done correctly can have an impact on their bottom line as well as that of the greater community.

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/porting-keeping-your-phone-number-when-you-change-providers

http://www.tryondailybulletin.com/2016/10/19/polk-commissioners-starting-a-committee-survey-for-broadband-service/

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