Choosing a fiber service provider is among the most critical decisions a business will make. Today’s enterprise networks manage core organizational workloads — from routine internet usage across multiple end points to business-critical applications that manage data, drive profitability or enhance customer experience.
As reliance on technology and digital transformation initiatives continue to increase, so do the expectations placed on a business’s network infrastructure and network capacity. How can you determine if a fiber service provider and its network are up to the challenge?
Is the Fiber Service Provider Operating a Legacy Network?
Whether data moves over a coaxial cable or fiber connection — transmitted using electricity or light, the race to obsolescence for legacy telecom infrastructure in the United States accelerates with nearly every connectivity advancement.
Too often, legacy service providers operate with what’s considered a maintenance mindset. To keep the network operational, they may address known problems or patch holes periodically. But many of these providers are not investing in growing and upgrading their networks.
Service providers in a maintenance mindset are prone to obstacles that often consume time and resources. Perhaps there are multiple layers of legacy infrastructure due to one or more acquisitions or increased network latency and inefficiencies because of such consolidations.
The result is the same: an outdated legacy network that can slow down a company’s productivity considerably — even bringing services to a screeching halt. Network outages can have a fatal impact on a business. According to Avaya, 77% of companies lose revenue when internet downtime occurs.
And when the need to upgrade is imminent, enterprise businesses utilizing legacy network circuits often find the length and expense of the upgrade process to be prohibitive. Given the sheer scale and complexity of a legacy infrastructure upgrade, it is not uncommon for a business to accept its subpar connectivity over an upgrade’s certain disruption to the operation.
Is Greenfield Deployment Better Suited to Your Network Infrastructure Needs?
As fiber networks have emerged as the leading choice for enterprise businesses, greenfield deployment fiber service providers — those who are building network infrastructure composed of new, original fiber and equipment — are seen as nimble and forward-looking. New fiber networks are stronger, faster and more resilient with a level of versatility and sophistication that is unmatched when compared to legacy connectivity options — including other fiber networks.
These purpose-built networks deliver maximum scalability to accommodate future connectivity advancements — offering enterprise businesses a network for the next 30-plus years rather than settling for what’s been the status quo for decades.
Specifically:
- Age: Select fiber service providers are designing and building thousands of route miles of new fiber annually. The network infrastructure being built today is laying the foundation to accommodate the network capacity and technology that is on the horizon, such as 400 Gbps, 800 Gbps and even 1.2 Tbps backbone capacity.
- Equipment: Innovations in equipment elevate the quality of the mechanisms that transport data. When compared to the fiber and equipment used 30 years ago, the equipment produced today has the benefit of decades’ worth of technological advancements. From the splicing and testing equipment used to the pole attachments and pipes in the ground, today’s equipment is designed to accommodate increasing bandwidth requirements and maximize throughput — making it technologically equipped to scale as demand rises.
- Efficiency: Increasingly, enterprise organizations understand how network latency can impact their network and why high bandwidth low latency network connections are critical to business operations, data replication and the use of real-time applications. In some instances, greenfield network providers offer the advanced technology and equipment to deliver connections with less than 5 milliseconds of network latency — maximizing the efficiency of the connection.
- Documentation: Last, but certainly not least, service providers that are investing in greenfield deployment have the ability to precisely catalog where their routes are located, track how their networks are built and record how they are being enhanced, creating institutional knowledge with each install or improvement.
When evaluating the benefits of a new fiber network compared to a legacy option, legacy networks can’t keep up. To learn more about the differences between legacy and greenfield networks, download “Greenfield vs. Legacy Telecom Infrastructure: The Pitfalls of Connecting with a Network Provider in Maintenance Mode.”