Who to contact to connect Dark fiber 2

[fs483]

Hello,

I have a customer that has 2 offices in the same area, about 2km apart. I was thinking of connecting both office through dark fiber. Who should I contact other then the local ISPs/Telco ? I'm in the Laval (Quebec) area. What is "acceptable" price for the monthly service fee and the installation fee ? What questions should I ask ?

thanks
akwong

 

[franklin97355]

If the fiber is in place you would contact it's owner. If you plan to have fiber installed you need to find out who has the right of way and permits to run fiber between the buildings.

 

[fs483]

Well that's the thing, how do I find out if there's already fiber in place and how do I know who owns it ?

 

[skip555]

what would make you suspect there would be unused fiber in place ?

I would conntact the local Telco and clec's (or whatever they are called in your part of the world )

 

[fs483]

Nothing, just hoping there might be some ! Will be making some calls this morning... Thanks.

 

[fs483]

Ok, managed to get more info. My local telco is able to offer me 2 solutions to link up the 2 offices. First is a sDSL 5meg/5meg link and the other is a dark fiber 10Gb. I don't have the prices yet but at least it's possible. Office 1 will have the servers and about 15 users. Office 2 will have about 25 users. Then there will be a bunch of other offices in Quebec City, Toronto, St-Albans (US) and eventually Florida for a total of 10 users. The fiber or sDSL link will connect offices 1 and 2. Users will be accessing an application on servers of Office 1 through RDP. Now normally an sDSL 5meg/5meg should be enough. According to the application designer, it will require 56k of bandwidth per session. Currently each office has a separate DSL link because they aren't interconnected. However, I'm leaning more to having the fiber link installed and cancel all the voice and Internet lines coming into Office 2. Will a 10Gb link be enough to handle both voice and 25 concurrent users on RDP requiring each 56k of bandwidth going to office 2 ? I'm not sure how many voice lines they have at Office 2 right now.

Also, how many users can you put on a aDSL 4meg/800k if each user requires 56k ? Is it as simple as 800k/56k ? The Internet lines at Office 1 will have to be able to support 35 remote users. I was hoping to put in T1 or something but then again, a T1 is only 1.5Mb while the DSL they are offering is 5Mb/5Mb. The T1 is extremely expensive at over 1600$ per month. Now what is the difference between a T3 at 4.5Mb and a sDSL 5Mb/5Mb ?

 

[Sympology]

Firstly is that all you can get?
5mb or 10gb, seems tad extreme. Are there no 100mbs services? 10gbs is total overkill for what you need.

In therory 5mb should be enough.
Now to the VoIP / Ip Telephony, they are two different things. In simple terms, VoIP connects 2 (or more) PBX's together, usuing standard analogue or digital phones. IP Telephony is IP Phones, Softphones, etc. So you need to know what you need.
As a rough guide, VoIP uses about 6 - 64kbs dependant on quality required.
The problem is not often bandwidth, but latency, so you'll need QoS, wherever you have the IP, so if on PBX's you need PBX to PBX QoS, if IP Telephony, you need complete end to end QoS.


Hope this helps a little.

Stu..

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[fs483]

I was thinking 5mb wouldn't be enough for both data and voice. As for VoIP, yeah I didn't think of it originally. I guess either they keep their existing analog phone system and link them together through VoIP or the totally switch everything to VoIP (even the handsets) and then have the PBX reconvert it back to analog when the calls go outside the offices. I would be installing good Cisco switches on both ends but I wonder if it's possible to send 2 signals through the same fiber. The 2 signals being ethernet and digital signal between the pbx ? Again, not having any info regarding the PBX side complicates the matter.

 

[wires]

> Now what is the difference between
> a T3 at 4.5Mb and a sDSL 5Mb/5Mb ?

Technology and tariffs.

In the US most DSL tariffs describe DSL as a "best effort" service where there is no time frame for repairs and no Committed Information Rate. The notion is if it works great but the phone company is under no obligation to guarantee even basic connectivity. If you don't like the service you can usually "walk away" by mutual agreement.

On the other hand the much more expensive "T" type services have firm CIRs and repair time frames measured in hours.

 

[phannah]

You may want to look into Frame Relay, or some type of managed Internet service if you want to connect such a large number of sites to go. It sounds like for your budget, fiber is out of the question, consistering the costs to connect each node.

 

[ISDNman]

Wires;

excellent point, This is requently overlooked.

I do believe that some Telcos offer various grades of xDSL. In some cases the same line and technology would et more or less support based on the "type" ordered. Some offer 24 hours support, but most (if not all) do not.

Businesses should order the "business grade line" so they can get the improved support.

Ask lots of questiosn and also have a look at dslreports.com

 

[fs483]

Thanks for everyone advice. So far, the approximate inital costs (need to be confirmed with rep) is about 3000$ per month for sDSL 5meg/5meg. Installation of fiber is quite expensive upfront but is paid off after one year. We are learning more and more towards the fiber. This project is starting to cost a heck of a lot of money. With hardware, fiber and software, it's costing over 300 000$. As for xDSL service, I always recommend business grade lines to my customers. The aDSL service isn't that expensive for a 4meg/800k with 1 fixed ip for 80-90$ per month. And so far we had 1 downtime in over 1 year and half and that was because of a upgrade that went bad by the ISP. I hope they maintain their level of service.

 

[MetroMan]

Hey Ak, we spoke a while ago... do you want to talk offline about getting your client they're own private fiber network...the investment is pretty small, and we are doing alot of theese small fiber WAN's in Laval....

Trevor.

Trevor Farren
Metrotech Telecom Inc.

 

[fs483]

Hi MetroMan,

Yes I remember. Customer is already dealing with Bell. All the prefeasibility evaluations are done and the customer is meeting with Bell either this week to close the deal. Customer wishes to have Bell do all the job. Sorry, maybe next time. Once this project is fully completed, I'm sure other ones like this one will appear on our doorstep (customer has lots of friends in the area) and I'll give you a call.

Thanks,

 

[rtccom]

Does your 2 locations have LOS or NLOS. I have had great success in using wirless for applications such as this. It's just the up front cost and no monthly fees after. I'm using the Alvarion gear and depending which equipment I use I get 24Meg or 72Meg. In urban / rural areas the OFDM works out well. There is the 1 big hitch......unlicensed 5.8Ghz can be an issues in some urban areas if other are using it too. I have been running Asterisks and my data on this pipe for 2 years now and not a problem for me yet. Something to think about anyways.

IT Technician

 

[fs483]

Actually another competing contractor wanted to put in wireless. We decided to do with fiber at a higher cost but "probably" with a better availability. The two buildings are about 1.5 km a part (walking on public streets). I guess it would be about half of that if you do a direct connection. I'm not sure but I think there's a few high buildings in between. I always wondered how reliable is the wireless solution. We have a lot of snow (heavy snow), rain and freezing rain in our area. How well does a wireless solution work in this environment. AT least with a fiber, we will have MAXIMUM availability except when the fiber is cut which does happen here. The customer also plans on adding more services onto this fiber later on.

Thanks
akwong

 

[rtccom]

Here in Indiana we get the same weather...in fact if you don't like the weather here...just wait 4 hour and it will change...lol But the Alvarion 5.3 and 5.8 VL series uses OFDM which to catch anyone up to speed means.

Othoganal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a technology that transmits multiple signals simultaneously over a single transmission path, such as a cable or wireless system. Each signal travels within its own unique frequency range (carrier), which is modulated by the data (text, voice, video, etc.).

Orthogonal FDM's (OFDM) spread spectrum technique distributes the data over a large number of carriers that are spaced apart at precise frequencies. This spacing provides the "orthogonality" in this technique which prevents the demodulators from seeing frequencies other than their own. The benefits of OFDM are high spectral efficiency, resiliency to RF interference, and lower multi-path distortion. This is useful because in a typical terrestrial broadcasting scenario there are multipath-channels (i.e. the transmitted signal arrives at the receiver using various paths of different length). Since multiple versions of the signal interfere with each other (inter symbol interference (ISI)) it becomes very hard to extract the original information.

OFDM is sometimes called multi-carrier or discrete multi-tone modulation. It is the modulation technique used for digital TV in Europe, Japan and Australia.

Alot of my subscriber antennas don't have line of sight but are recieving "bounced" signals off of flat surfaces such as buildings and still recieve maximum throughput. This technology with conerstone in which will see the WiMax evolve from.

IT Technician