Why Greenfield Fiber Builds Are More Sustainable Than Legacy Networks
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States a grade of C- in its 2021 Report Card For America’s Infrastructure. The mediocre mark comes amid a $2.59 trillion shortfall in infrastructure spending.
Even if we only focus on telecom infrastructure — and the country’s $80 billion investment in our telecom infrastructure in 2018 — the more modern category of broadband connectivity still is struggling to meet the needs of today’s users.
With an ever-present focus on the future, greenfield fiber builds are emerging as a more sustainable option when compared to upgrading legacy networks. Today’s greenfield fiber telecom network service providers — defined as those actively building and densifying new fiber infrastructure — understand that business requirements have evolved.
Enterprise organizations rely on their network to manage business-critical applications, transfer information across multiple office locations and perform data storage and replication. Greenfield fiber providers offer robust, sophisticated networks designed to meet the needs that modern enterprises demand.
No More Patchwork
Built 30 or more years ago, legacy networks carry a history rich with multiple layers of infrastructure. Often, these accumulated assets are due to one or more acquisitions. Legacy connections also are susceptible to latency problems and inefficiencies because the network assets have been patched together over time.
To keep the network operational, service providers may address known problems or patch holes periodically. However, many of these providers are not actively investing in growing and upgrading their networks.
Such legacy infrastructure is prone to obstacles that often consume time and resources, and these inefficiencies — along with their band-aids — are not sustainable long term. These decades-old networks simply cannot support an enterprise’s technological needs today without a significant and intensive investment of capital and time.
Their legacy equipment may be two or three generations older than what is available on the market, and struggle to keep pace with demand. Plus, the repairs and patchwork can increase the risk of packet loss over time — resulting in errors or missing data.
Sustainable for The Future
Service providers that are building and investing in new fiber infrastructure today are constructing high-quality fiber assets that are both reliable and operationally sound. These greenfield fiber providers are prepared to deliver purpose-built networks with maximum scalability and sustainability to accommodate future connectivity advancements — designing their networks for the next 30-plus years rather than settling for what’s been the status quo for decades.
Although some businesses are content to maintain a 100 Mbps network connection, that is simply not sustainable for complex, fast-paced organizations whose day-to-day operations rely on a stable, high-capacity connection. Instead, greenfield fiber providers are building the network infrastructure needed to accommodate the bandwidth capacity and technology on the horizon that will require 400 Gbps, 800 Gbps and even 1.2 Tbps backbone capacity.
Increasingly, organizations are discovering how network latency can impact their enterprise network architecture and why a low-latency network is critical to business operations, data replication and the use of real-time applications. Greenfield fiber providers deliver new networks with technologically advanced equipment that allows customers to fully realize the advantages of a high-capacity fiber network — enabling businesses to be who they want to be and grow into what they want to become.
For example, with the improved fiber and equipment assets used in a new fiber network build, greenfield fiber providers can offer customers a streamlined upgrade process — even activating a capacity upgrade within minutes over the phone.
Telecom Fiber Network Mindset
Today’s businesses require high-capacity, low-latency connectivity options more than ever as business traffic continues to skyrocket. With greenfield deployment, fiber service providers are investing in new fiber infrastructure — a sustainable option to support the demands of these businesses, their enterprise networks and servers and our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
When compared to the benefits of a new fiber telecom network for an enterprise customer, legacy networks can’t keep up. When a new fiber network also is packaged with a network service provider equipped with experienced, tenured professionals, local teams, and an engrained sense of accountability, legacy providers simply can’t compete.
Want to learn more? Review our latest executive brief, “Decoding Connectivity Infrastructures: Legacy vs. Greenfield,” to see how your network connection compares.