Fiber is great if you can get it, especially for Ethernet service. However, bringing fiber to every building is almost near impossible, nor realistic, for any service provider.

While business fiber access to network services buildings now reaches 13.4 percent of U.S. buildings (according to research gathered from Vertical Systems Group), there’s still 86.6 percent of buildings with 20 or more employees that are not connected to fiber facilities. Clearly, service providers have no shortage of fiber route mile fiber connections. The real issue is the service provider’s ability to extend that fiber connection for Ethernet services into buildings. What often complicates matters is the expense to trench fiber and get access from a building owner into a particular building.

Lack of access to fiber facilities is what Vertical Systems Group says is holding up the growth of native business Ethernet services. “In both NFL and/or MLB cities, multiple service providers are all targeting the same thing,” Rosemary Cochran, principal at Vertical Systems Group said. “Everyone can tout how many million miles of fiber they have, but of course it depends on where it is. One of the impediments to Ethernet rollout is that there’s a big gap with fiber availability.”

The SME Disconnect
Penetrating tall shiny buildings with fiber to extend Ethernet and other high bandwidth services makes sense for service providers. Service providers can maximize those fiber and Ethernet investments because larger buildings house multiple large customers in one location.

But connecting only to the large building sites creates a problem even for the service provider’s large business customers since many of these same customers have remote sites that are far from any fiber connection.

“If you look at [the distribution of fiber] in large buildings versus small-to-medium buildings, which may in fact have some large customer remote sites, there's a huge difference if you're in a large building versus a small building," said Cochran. "That 13.4 percent then gets blown even more out of the water by the fact if you look at the building size."

Emerging Alternatives
To close the fiber disconnect loop for Ethernet services, service providers have various alternatives at their disposal. The most common alternative solutions include wholesale carrier arrangements and now Ethernet over Copper. Because every service provider will have customers that have sites that extend out of their traditional footprint, carriers will purchase fiber facilities and even Ethernet services from wholesale partners to extend their respective footprint.

Complete article on Telecommunications Online

A print version of this article can be found in the May 2007 Telecommunications magazine (Vol. 41, No. 5)