Long Distance Dark Fiber

Thu Mar 10 05:15:12 UTC 2011

Good Evening all.  I got an odd and somewhat crazy request from our
development group for a long haul OC48 connection for testing (they
specifically said from their office in Utah to the east coast and back)
with minimal jitter.  They need to be able to run their own framing Sonet
and WDM - don't ask me why, it doesn't make sense to me.  It would seem to
me that the last requirement would require a dark fiber?

So I've got several questions.

One, is there any provider that would provide us such a beast for only one
month?  I realize that the fact this is long haul OC48 would make the cost
astronomically high, and then throwing on the one month would make it even
more expensive....

Two, is there any good way to simulate such a long distance link?  I know
such equipment exists for smaller links, but I haven't yet found anything
that'll do OC48 fiber.  I'm sure the cost would be high for the equipment,
however I'm betting it is *much* lower than the long distance link.

Three, could we sanely encapsulate their framing into GRE (or some other
such technology) and send it over an IP link and get SLAs to minimize the
jitter?

Offlist responses would be greatly appreciated.