When considering new or replacement fiber optic services, telecom companies, including telephone companies and competitive service providers (CLECs), are the usual suspects. While most bandwidth providers operate their own core networks, they often lease “last mile” connections from these telcos, particularly for SONET services, which originated in the telephone industry.
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However, cable companies, or MSOs (Multi-System Operators), present an alternative. These providers bypass telco infrastructure entirely, having built their networks from scratch to deliver television signals to homes and businesses. In fact, most cable systems have undergone two major overhauls: initially using large coaxial cables for combined TV signal transport, and later upgrading to fiber optic cable for neighborhood distribution while retaining smaller coaxial cables for final connections. This system, known as HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax, utilizes the familiar 75-ohm coaxial cable and F-type connector commonly associated with cable TV. What many people overlook is the extensive fiber optic infrastructure working behind the scenes. Larger cable systems manage thousands of miles of fiber optic cables, often containing over 100 strands, spanning cities and even connecting them. Consequently, national cable companies boast nationwide fiber optic networks.
While television remains the primary content delivered through cable fiber, telephone, internet, and point-to-point data traffic also share this infrastructure. The digitization of television blurred the lines between video and other data transport, essentially making it all about bits and bytes. Capitalizing on this, cable companies have started offering their capabilities to businesses, with low-end services delivered through broadband coaxial cable. Popular choices include shared bandwidth internet access tiers, offering download speeds up to 100 Mbps and upload speeds up to 10 Mbps. These services, priced competitively with T1 lines, can support significantly more internet users and often feed Wi-Fi hotspots for businesses like restaurants, hotels, and retail stores.
However, many businesses, particularly larger ones, require the stability and assurances that shared bandwidth services, even at attractive prices, cannot offer. Their needs include robust symmetrical bandwidth and guaranteed performance parameters for latency, jitter, bandwidth, packet loss, and availability, especially when connecting multiple business locations and cloud services.
Cable companies are actively pursuing this premium business segment, leveraging their unique advantages. One key benefit is complete diversity from the telecom system, ensuring redundancy for business continuity. To safeguard against outages, a redundant connection is crucial, but connecting to the same central office as the primary line undermines redundancy. This is because a single incident at the central office could sever both connections. Similarly, a cable break can disrupt both connections if both fiber strands run within the same bundle.
These vulnerabilities are mitigated by utilizing both telecom and cable company fiber services. Their independent infrastructures eliminate shared points of failure. Of course, geographically diverse business locations offer additional protection against larger-scale disruptions.
So, what fiber optic services can cable providers offer? Typically, they provide MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) compliant 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps Ethernet over Fiber. This includes point-to-point private lines, dedicated internet access, and MPLS networks for interconnecting multiple locations, whether within the same metro area or spread across the country. Many cable companies maintain NNI (Network to Network Interface) agreements to facilitate seamless traffic exchange between different systems.
In terms of interface, cable systems often provide a choice between copper and fiber handoffs at the building’s demarcation point. One common setup involves the cable company installing a Gigabit Ethernet port regardless of the contracted bandwidth. This allows for seamless bandwidth upgrades with a few system adjustments, eliminating hardware changes until a 10 GigE port becomes necessary.
To determine if cable system fiber optic services align with your business requirements, it’s recommended to obtain competitive quotes for fiber optic network services tailored to your specific needs.
Note: Photo of fiber optic conduit spools courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
