Even a decade from now, about 60 percent of the mostly suburban enterprise customers in the US won't have Gig-E as an option, some insiders say.
"Maybe it will take another round of Wall Street mania to give telecom [companies] a few billion dollars for those suburban locations to be hooked up," says Darren Kelly, senior director of metro enablement at Level 3 Communications.
Still, advances in Gig-E technology are delivering mind-boggling savings to enterprise customers: Businesses already wired with optical fibre could get up to 10 times more bandwidth for their money. A financial-services customer with 10 office locations recently wired by Metromedia Fibre Network is now paying US$6 per megabit, instead of $57, says Otto Chan, MFN's senior vice president of enterprise services in North America.
Level 3 will introduce a wide area network Gig-E product in June that will allow businesses to buy Ethernet-based point-to-point long-distance at a fraction of the cost of traditional dedicated connections.
Carriers that are building metropolitan networks that enable Gig-E and other broadband activity in major cities--such as Level 3, MFN and XO Communications--as well as those that lease networks, such as Telseon and Yipes Communications, can't say enough about what has become known as the Gig-E Revolution.
"I think that it [Gig-E] is a true category-killer, going against the common data services sold today in the metro," says John Curran, vice president of Internet technology at XO. "Fibre-based Ethernet services are simply a less expensive way to move data around than private-line, frame relay or ATM [Asynchronous Transfer Mode]. Customers looking at renewing or expanding such networks would be wise to get an Ethernet quote for comparison."
Customers concur
"We have a 50-megabit-per-second pipe into Exodus [Communications], and we originally wanted a DS-3 [45 Mbps], which a carrier promised to deliver in nine months. And then Telseon was able to get us a 50-Mbps pipe in nine days," says Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing at Riverstone Networks. Riverstone's networking gear supports many Gig-E deployments, including Telseon's.
Gig-E services, however, hit a wall when businesses that are not connected to fibre-optic networks come calling.
Metro equipment vendor Ocular Networks, recently moved to a new office minutes away from Dulles Toll Road in the highly wired Northern Virginia corridor, only to find that installing one 3-Mbps Ethernet line would cost the same as two T1 (1.5-Mbps) lines. And true Ethernet connectivity would take up to six months to materialise.
"We were told that fibre doesn't come to our building, and we would have to sign a three-year connectivity contract if we were to order it," says Doug Green, Ocular's vice president of marketing. Ocular ended up wiring its 150 employees to the outside world with four T1 lines.
