Summary Bullets:

• Verizon, Interoute, euNetworks, Colt, TSIC, and others, are examples of service providers that have lit fibre assets with 100 Gbps bandwidth and Ethernet at the core transport layer
• Video, mobility, cloud-based computing and storage, and rapidly growing SaaS take-up are pushing the need for high-capacity service
• There is an on-going performance versus cost challenge for buyers of high-speed service to consider

The desire for faster Internet does not have a ceiling, because it is linked to human impatience, which is limitless. From the perspective of business applications, bandwidth growth is driven by cloud storage, SaaS, enterprise mobility, high-powered cloud computing, and business video. To date, 100 Gbps Ethernet, optical transport, and DWDM wavelength announcements have largely been coming from the equipment manufacturer’s camp; but this is changing as more and more service providers start to expound upon the virtues of recently launched long haul 100G circuits as well as early readiness for 400G service.

We recommend that buyers of high speed services enter a conversation with suppliers to work out the economics of 40G and above services. There continues to be lively debate around the economics of for example 10 x 10G interfaces compared with a single ‘true’ 100G or ‘coherent’ 100G wavelength interface. There certainly seems to be a logical foundation to the view that native 100G is more cost-effective to manage and operate from the service provider perspective – but does this result in cost savings for the end customer?  Moreover whilst the infrastructure technically supports 100G connections this does not automatically mean that the customer end-point will support 100G end-to-end. There are also offerings in some markets that stray away from the traditional telecom operator offerings, such as Fujitsu UK’s 100G SaaS product. Customers in the UK can source what the company calls ‘true’ 100Gbps data as part of Fujitsu’s ‘Managed Wavelength Service’ service.