Mini-backbones bulk up

In late 2005, equipment vendors scarred by the capacity glut of the post-bubble days were pleased to report soaring traffic growth among the nation's backbone network providers, which forced the need for major capacity upgrades to already-big pipes.

Those calls for more capacity were later echoed in the country's more rural climes among its many state and regional backbone providers, which are either widening their pipes or building new ones. For some providers, high-speed Internet traffic is raising the roof of the tent; for others, it's mobile data or video. Each carrier, with its own economic profile, finds its own preferred technology solution. But they all head generally in the same direction. Up. More. Faster.

“We may be a Tier 2, Tier 3 provider, but we're still dealing with exponential demand for bandwidth,” said Max Huffman, chief operating officer for the Missouri Network Alliance (MNA), a backbone wholesaler. “It appears to be unquenchable.”

To some, the pace of bandwidth demand increases has been a surprise, which complicates the task of future-proofing this time around. “We want to watch how fast people shift from T-1s and DS-3s to OCs, GigEs and wavelengths,” said Judy Reed Smith, CEO of research for consulting firm Atlantic-ACM. “There's a lot more hype than reality in the big-pipe movement.”

MISSOURI

When the MNA started building a dense wavelength network in late 2002, its designers figured 2.5 Gb/s waves would suit their needs for a long time to come. But demand caught up with that design sooner than expected. In fact, late last year, MNA sold its first 2.5 Gb/s OC-48 service to a single customer.

Formed by 14 rural telcos in late 1999, MNA manages more than 1600 route miles of fiber on five Sonet rings throughout the state. When parts of its original OC-48 Sonet network “ran out of gas,” MNA built the WDM network on top of its Sonet add/drop multiplexers (ADMs), using gear from Movaz Networks (now Adva Optical Networking), Huffman said. This year, the carrier used the optical amplifiers it replaced in its busiest Sonet ring and moved them to more rural rings in the north to upgrade OC-48s there that were also filling up. MNA is still running 2.5 Gb/s on its busiest ring — 375 miles of fiber, including Columbia, Jefferson City, and the carrier's biggest market, Kansas City — but the next wavelength lit on it will be 10 Gb/s.

Though the spread of high-speed Internet service is adding to MNA's traffic flow (broadband subscribers grew nearly 40% last year among MNA's members), the real driver of its capacity upgrades is mobile data, as wireless backhaul needs swell from the T-1 and DS-3 level to the OC-n level, Huffman said. “They're adding more T-1s to those cell sites as they go to 3G.”

Nearly half of MNA's 15 members are in various stages of launching video service, but Huffman isn't overly worried about the capacity needs those services will entail. It provides transport for one of its member/customers that has a shared digital video headend. MNA moves that MPEG-2 video over OC-12 pipes; when it becomes MPEG-4 video, MNA will transport it through a parallel GigE network that spans five of MNA's six rings. Last year, MNA migrated from an Ethernet-over-Sonet system with shared packet rings to a carrier Ethernet technology that enables much quicker failover times. GigE cards in the Sonet ADMs handle the video, and customers share the same payload.

“It's a one-time hit,” he said. “Once I put it out there for the first member, it's there. If all fifteen take it, my investment is not that much more. It's a card at the edge.”

As for funding, MNA has been profitable for more than three years. It leases fiber from members and non-members and sells capacity to both. But the majority of its revenue comes from non-members. (For example, its first OC-48 customer was a non-member incumbent carrier.) And about 40% of its revenue comes from the wireless carriers that are driving its traffic volumes.

MID-ATLANTIC

Last summer, when Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative (MBC) bought two strands of dark fiber from XO Communications from Atlanta to McLean, Va. (near Washington), it provisioned 200 Gb/s along the 800-mile East Coast route. “We went out of the gate as big as we could get,” said Tad Deriso, general manager for MBC.

The carrier has already lit one 10 Gb/s circuit across the entirety of that long-haul network for one customer and a 2.5 Gb/s link for another.

The central ring in MBC's network is an OC-192, but those on either side of it are OC-48. The carrier hopes to upgrade its Eastern ring to OC-192 in the third quarter. It's seeing “big demand” for resilient packet rings — Sonet-like Ethernet services, Deriso said. Demand for DS-3s is up, and prices are down, he said. “DS-3s were running $12,000 or $15,000 a month before we came along. Now you can get them for $3,000 to $5,000.”

While MBC's rings are built on Nortel Networks' Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 platform, it built its long-haul network using Infinera's integrated photonics switch, which lowers the cost of optical networks by putting some of the functions of optical components on silicon. Though XO, an MBC supplier, and Level 3 Communications, an MBC member, are both Infinera customers, MBC was actually tipped off to Infinera by another regional backbone provider: CityNet, whose network spans Ohio and many of the states surrounding it.

“It's a very simple system to operate,” Deriso said of Infinera's switches. “We don't need four or five network engineers tuning lasers. My eight-year-old could provision the circuits.” MBC picked Infinera gear last August; the network was up and running two months later.

Like the rest of MBC's network, the Infinera deployment was funded largely by Virginia's portion of a multibillion-dollar legal settlement won by 46 states against the country's largest cigarette manufacturers in 1998. The Virginia Tobacco Commission has committed some $34 million to MBC's network. This year the carrier expects to receive another $6 million in cigarette money.

MARYLAND

One of the country's newest regional backbone networks began construction last November in Maryland, where the state is hoping to spur broadband competition in rural markets. The ultimate mission of the Maryland Broadband Cooperative (MDBC) is economic development-to make it easy for businesses to sprout in rural areas by bringing them not just network capacity but enough capacity for a choice of service providers. The state is springing for roughly a third of the network's projected $30 million cost. One of its senators helped bring in another $2 million in federal funds.

In order to bring revenue in as soon as possible, the network is being built first in rural areas — connecting markets such as Pocomoke and Wallops Island near the state's remote lower shore before reaching toward metro hubs like Annapolis. “We're working from the ends toward the center,” said Patrick Mitchell, executive director for MDBC. “We're trying to light up every segment as we build it.”

From day one, the company witnessed the same acceleration of bandwidth demand seen by its elder peers. MDBC's planners originally set out to build an OC-48 network, but along the way, prospective customers began showing up in growing numbers. About four months into construction, MDBC made the decision to move to an OC-192. “We were getting so many calls,” Mitchell said. “With the capacity people were asking for right off the bat, I was like, ‘I don't want to have to go back a year from now [to upgrade the network].’”

Perhaps the biggest milestone the company has seen so far was the extension of 192 strands of fiber across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a massive construction spanning more than four miles to cross the Bay's mid-section, joining the state's eastern and western portions. “That was huge,” Mitchell said. “That was the key to the whole thing. We needed a more perfect route to the shore.”

This year and early next, MDBC will work to connect markets in the southernmost portions of the state and link them all via that Bay Bridge fiber. The subsequent phase of construction, ending in 2009, will connect markets in the northernmost parts of the state. All the while, MDBC's planners are watching the progress of Mid-Atlantic Broadband as a guide since it had a few years head start. And since Mid-Atlantic's network roams neighboring states, Mitchell said, “Eventually, I hope we'll meet up with each other one day.”