Big Bandwidth Comes Down Market

 
Enterprises Find It’s Time to Reconsider High Cap Services & Take Advantage of Better Prices on Higher Performance Networks

Sticker shock on big ticket items is different in retail products than in business services such as telecommunications. With a high priced retail item, you still might glance at an advertisement, pass by a store in a mall, or check online for a deal or discount.  Conversely, once you’ve received a quote for business telecom services and found it to be out of the budget or not aligned with your needs, you often go for a few years or more without even considering it again. So it is with high capacity fiber services like Ethernet, wavelengths and even dark fiber – but it’s definitely time to check your options again and take advantage of upgraded networks and services at surprisingly affordable rates.

Once reserved for the Fortune 500 and large multinational conglomerates, fiber based bandwidth services and high cap dark and lit fiber networks are not just for big companies any more. In fact, now that the bubble and burst are nearly a decade behind us, some of the big ideas and broken promises in connectivity of that era are now actually starting to come to fruition. The last mile has extended to reach many small- to mid-sized businesses, and there are more providers than ever to choose from for high speed and high bandwidth services outside of the local exchange carrier.

Take well known carriers such as AboveNet, Lightower, Sidera, and an MSO like Comcast. They’ll light an office building and then offer affordable high bandwidth services like GigE to all the tenants once they’ve installed one customer. That wasn’t really happening three years ago. The prices are now much more market-based, not construction and return based. The carriers aren’t recklessly spec building, but they’re also not going to the other end of the spectrum and building the entire cost of a connection into one customer’s quote.

Over time, carriers have realized that there is considerable demand for bandwidth downstream – and that if they connect one customer in a location, they can reach several more with a smart marketing strategy and realistic pricing. The other positive change is that many carriers that wouldn’t offer dark fiber before are opening up and provisioning dark fiber on their network, an option that was rare just a few years back. Ultimately, more competition is good for customers – and has been particularly good for enterprise customers in office parks everywhere looking to get a variety of options for more bandwidth at great rates.

Take the time to research what’s in your building or get a map of all the carriers near your locations – it’s definitely worth a second look.

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