Uncorking the bottleneck: IP Networks thinks Gig - For Starters

Admittedly not every customer has a need for gigabit or multi-gigabit bandwidth. But when it comes to enterprise customers demanding those types of capacities, it could be that carriers with a SONET infrastructure may be at a disadvantage. At least that's the way a large federal customer, which prefers not to be identified, sees it.

The Bay Area research facility which previously had been using a number of OC-3/12 SONET services for Packet-over-SONET and ATM traffic, has made the migration to Ethernet. It started out with four Gigabit Ethernet connections and, in a few weeks, expects to upgrade those to a 10-GigE connection. Among the applications it is considering using the connectivity is real-time, uncompressed high-definition video.

"There are other research networks, both national and international, that already have 10-GigE in place. You can get 10-GigE in the London and New York metros but in the San Francisco area it's mostly SONET. Only a handful of vendors in this area have a 10-GigE offering," says a representative of the agency.

In this customer's case, the selected carrier is IP Networks, a start-up that has built a 285-mile metro network to offer high-octane connections. Gary George, founder and CEO of IP Networks, says he'd just as soon start out with offering customers a gigabit of connectivity and move them up to 10-Gbps networking as soon as they are ready to do so.

IP Networks' play is to provide high-speed connections quickly--meaning in a few weeks, not months--and at competitive prices. "We can bring up a gigabit service in less than 30 days, including the fiber installation. In fact we're doing this right now for two marquee organizations who are starting out at one gigabit and will probably go to 10 Gbps in the next 90 days," says George.

Although the amount of last-mile fiber that IP Networks has pulled is hardly impressive--it can be measured in a few tens of miles--IP Networks claims to have an advantage over the competition because many of its network nodes are located within a spitting distance to prospective customers. For instance, the carrier claims to have almost finished installing last-mile fiber up and down San Francisco's financial district. "The majority of service providers don't have the fiber capability that we have; they're still hooked up with copper or they may have fiber going through, say, a WorldCom POP," notes George.

According to the agency representative, "There are only a handful of carriers that have Ethernet-based rings. Sure, you can get an OC-48 if you've got the money, but Ethernet-based hardware is an order of magnitude less expensive than SONET. And there's definitely a market for GigE and 10-GigE services. There are other research groups that have accepted 10-GigE as their backbone infrastructure."

COPYRIGHT 2003 Horizon House Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group