How can fiber save time and headaches as a business grows?
The biggest thing is that it’s massively scalable. Whether you’re buying a 10 Mb product or a 100 Mb product, your provider installs a 1,000 Mb fiber optic pipe, which is then throttled down to meet your needs. Then when you need more bandwidth, you can easily get more. It’s already installed.
With copper-based services, you can add T-1 lines and go from 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps to 4.5 Mbps, etc. You can keep adding T-1 lines, but at 6 Mbps, you now have four plugs going into your equipment. Then the technician from the phone company has to show up on site, sometimes add another card, add another cable, schedule that work, then you have to make sure your equipment has enough plugs to take that second, third and fourth T-1 cable. And sometimes you have to buy another card, and those parts aren’t cheap.
With a fiber optic product, the customer doesn’t have to change out ports, schedule time for a technician to come out or buy new equipment. It’s very convenient. You just pay an additional monthly rate for the added bandwidth, but there is no additional installation fee and no additional equipment you have to buy to accept that circuit because you’ve already got that circuit. And bandwidth only gets more economical as you buy more.
That bandwidth can also be increased on a temporary basis. For example, if a business wants to pull everything off from an old data center and push it down to a new one, it can increase its bandwidth so it doesn’t have to physically move its servers. That way they don’t have to change interfaces.
How can using fiber help keep a business up and running 24 hours a day?
First, many fiber customers have a dedicated number just for them that goes to engineer level people, not to a traditional call center. Also, if it’s 3 a.m. and your DSL modem is broken, good luck getting help. But if your fiber breaks down, you’re going to be able to talk to someone right away who has the ability to remotely access the box at your location to run diagnostics to try to figure out what the problem is and what is the quickest way to find resolution for you.
In addition, boxes are monitored 24-7 and alarms go off at the provider if it loses contact with the box at your business. Then troubleshooting begins immediately. Very often, the provider knows before the customer does that it’s having a problem.
How can fiber make a business’s connection more secure?
Security is a relative statement talking about which data transport is better than another, as the major two factors for transport security are physical security and monitoring. Physical security is important, no matter which broadband product is chosen by a customer, so the customer needs to make sure that their switches are physically inaccessible to others.
It’s pretty easy to come in, pull the connection from the customer switch and tap off of that if it’s easy to get to. But with fiber, the provider and the customer are directly connected, so if someone pulls that fiber from the switch facing your network, the provider gets an alarm. At that point, it’s going to be pretty obvious that someone installed a line between the two and that line can be halted.
CHRIS HIBBS is the senior manager, engineering, for InsightBusiness. Reach him at (502) 410-7357 or [email protected].
