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For years the technical advantages of optical fibre solutions have been acknowledged, but take-up of dedicated fibre networks has been obstructed by cost. Could it be that for heavy users of data fibre is finally the cost-effective option, asks Richard Kennedy.

For the past 30 years optical fibre has been the medium of choice for data transmission. This is a mature and stable solution and, unusually, given the pace of technology change, it is unlikely to be supplanted in the foreseeable future.

Indeed, today fibre is the mainstay of the communications industry, with all but residential areas connected by fibre as the underlying delivery platform. And with domestic demand for bandwidth rising exponentially, the drive to get fibre into every home is becoming a national priority for some developed economies.

Yet dedicated fibre for enterprise or public sector networks is still a rarity. In this context dedicated means a totally private and secure network, with no capacity restrictions – attributes that top the wish lists of most large enterprises.

The hurdle to such an approach has always been a combination of cost and the prevalence of an outdated Telco service model. But times have changed. With enterprise bandwidth demand rising exponentially, a new approach to service delivery is now a priority.

But the economics of owning your own network have changed. With the benefits being increased stability and security as well as cost savings, more and more organisations are starting to consider taking control of their core data infrastructure.

Dedicated fibre

Direct access to fibre is still predominantly the preserve of the very few large and technically sophisticated enterprises that have demanded such provision from telcos to connect sites and data centres. These deals have traditionally been hard won, with few providers willing to relinquish assets they've come to regard as short-term cash cows. More often, telcos have insisted on selling their own inflexible service bundles and refused access to their underlying fibre infrastructure.

What this means in practice is that such providers dilute the longevity of the underlying infrastructure – the stable component – by bundling it with the short-term viability of network boxes. The result is that many businesses and organisations churn from one provider to another every couple of years in order to match business needs to the appropriate higher layer technologies.

However, with capex and opex always high on the corporate agenda, there's growing recognition among large end-users of data of the advantages of taking control of their own networks, rather than subscribing to the service limitations, uncertainty and disruptions associated with conventional providers. This means separating the deals associated with access to the fibre infrastructure from those associated with the technologies that light the network.

Fibre already connects most corporate sites. In fact where a new greenfield site is being developed - especially for technical space such as data centres - key to its success is its developer's ability to attract fibre providers for future-proofed service capabilities.

However, decisions about whether or not specific organisations will benefit from seizing the underlying fabric of a network for their own use come down to differentiating between those that just need a network, some capacity and some communications capability, and those businesses that require major data flows between core sites.

Data centres, media distribution hubs, head offices, call centres: these are the kinds of sites to which data must both flow and be extracted from, and from which the demand for connectivity between such sites is growing exponentially.

These connectivity motorways are the core networks for which direct access to private fibre infrastructure has started to become a reality. The growth of these routes is forecast to grow year on year, often encouraged by regulatory and business practice guidelines.

So the question becomes: how can these critical paths be congestion-free, cost effective and flexible enough to meet an organisation’s changing needs?

Cost-benefit options

The answer, of course, is not always going to be “build your own motorway”. There's a multiplicity of business scenarios out there, many of which can still be addressed through traditional telco products.

Nevertheless, many large organisations are at a tipping point. The limitations inherent in many off-the-shelf service packages - including costs and delays in increasing capacity and the costs and disruption of constantly changing providers - are coming to be regarded as serious impediments to growth. Without a new service model, this is a future of rising costs and diminishing returns over which many heavy data users feel they have no control.

These are the types of organisation that are likely to move towards full network ownership and the drivers are stability, security and savings. By combining a long lease on the fibre with a flexible equipment solution, businesses are able to align capital outlay with the value of equipment and operational service. Such an approach also results in significant scale economies for higher data usage, plus capex reductions as technology costs fall.

In short, this new model achieves the key break between throughput volume and the cost of consumption. This basic fact means that the cost of all change - including capacity expansion - is entirely marginal to the ongoing opex of the network.

Such predictability of cost removes a huge burden from future budgets and business development models, while ensuring that the underlying infrastructure is capable of delivering more capacity, scale and flexibility than any standard product purchase ever could.

Flexibility and control

Once the financial benefits are understood, the technical opportunities can start to be evaluated. Putting in place a simple platform that can support and sustain an organisation’s needs for business-critical applications over time ensures a great marriage of financial control and technical flexibility.

This said, it's worth emphasising that it is a significant change for most organisations to consider taking control of their core data infrastructure. Regardless of how this control is experienced – whether an organisation decides it has the skills to manage this in-house, whether their preferred integrator can deliver this value in conjunction with their applications management, or whether they want an independent specialist organisation to run it for them - the financial benefits for heavy data use organisations are tangible and clear.

In the final analysis, if a home in France will soon enjoy more capacity than a trading floor once enjoyed, surely some radical re-valuation of core data network service models is long overdue. And for service providers to simply assume the status quo with more products and more options is seriously to misjudge the market.