Optical Wave Providers

Thu Sep 1 21:45:12 UTC 2016

(Speaking purely for myself, and thoroughly
demonstrating my relative ignorance on the
topic, but also opening up an opportunity
to become better educated...)

You may find that optical providers don't really
want to mix 1G/10G waves in on systems that
are running Nx100G waves on the fiber.  With
100G coherent systems, optical dispersion
compensation is no longer necessary, as
the DSP on the receiving side takes care of
it.  The 10G waves, on the other hand, would
need dispersion compensation along the run,
which increases the cost of building and
maintaining such a system, because they'd
have to peel off your 10G waves to periodically
do dispersion compensation, then add them
back in.  It's far more cost effective for long
haul providers to carry the traffic as native 100G,
and provide the lower-speed handoff to you at
the endpoints via ethernet framing or MPLS.

It's not so much a matter of "not enough people
owning fiber across the US" as "Oh geez, you want
us to run our system in an inefficient and uneconomical
mode?  Uh...maybe you could call those other guys
down the street instead."   I suspect that if you ran
an experiment by calling for quotes and availability
for 100G waves between your endpoints you'd find
more availability for 100G waves than 10G or 1G
native waves.

(I'm half hoping to get a flurry of replies telling me
I'm completely wrong, and then explaining the real
issues to me.  If nobody replies, it might mean I'm
not entirely wrong).

Thanks!

Matt

On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 4:08 PM,  <tim at 29lagrange.com> wrote:
> I have been looking at optical wave carriers for some long haul 1G/10G
> across the US. All to major cities and well known POP's.
> I am finding that there are not a lot of carriers who are offering wave
> services, usually just ethernet/MPLS.
> Particularly across the North west.
> Can someone shed some light on who some of the bigger carriers are and any
> challenges you have encountered with services like this?
> Who actually owns the fiber across the US?
>
> Thanks
>
> Tim
>