I am by no means an expert when it comes down to networking, hence the reason why I'm asking this.

My question is: How would a provider (let's take HE.net as an example this time around), run fiber to a peering point such as PAIX or MAE-West (shown here) (http://he.net/netmap.html) from their data center? How does this process work? Would HE.net have to manually dig up the ground so they can lay the fiber, or do they lease existing fibers?

How much would it cost these days to run your own fiber to a peering point, datacenter, etc...?

This concept has always boggled my mind, as I'm not quite sure how it works.

Don't worry, I'm not interested in starting up my own datacenter, (just in case soemone asks :D)

Any help/comments would be appreciated! :)

I believe they would lease existing connections. I don't remember the exact terminology, but I believe its called brown and black fibers, am I correct?

sounds correct...but i'm not sure

Good idea would be to own a railroad company... then lay fibre illegal under people's property... wait, someone already did that! Doh.

Dark fiber is normally the term.

It's very costly to lay fiber so some companies bury extra fiber when they lay their own fiber and lease some of their 'extra' dark fiber out to other companies. They usually burying them in multiple ducts and sometimes in multiple trenches for redundancy if they can afford it. The company using the fiber then attaches their equipment on the ends of the fiber or lease the equipment to specs depending on how much bandwidth they want.

yeah.. more than likely they'd use some of the dark fiber. I don't think you have to pay people to lie fiber through there property as long as you stick close to the road using the utility easement. Isn't HE's facility actually in MAE West though..??

Originally posted by neil
yeah.. more than likely they'd use some of the dark fiber. I don't think you have to pay people to lie fiber through there property as long as you stick close to the road using the utility easement. Isn't HE's facility actually in MAE West though..??

I believe that they own 2 of their own DC's. They use MAE West B/W.

Hrm.. I thought I read somewhere that they had space for the data center actually inside mae west. Like they some how leased an annex or something. :)

My city owns a 26 mile fiber ring that encircles the city. I think they own the physical ring, but a 1" piece of fiber has MANY pairs (like 60 pair) of which they only use about 1% of one pair. They have cross connects (not sure if that's the right term) at several points around city, and I think they will lease pairs of dark fiber out. Dark means they are only providing a piece of plastic, just like you only leasing a 4' square section of ac'd and heated concrete in a carrier neutral DC. Your just getting a pipe, no light. It's up to you to get light in and out at the cross connects. And yes, burying fiber is VERY expensive.

I only know these things because I managed the installation of fiber in the 911 call center I used to work in.

If you ever see the bottom cable on a phone pole that seems to have a big loop on itself, it's there so it can be un-looped, run down the pole, cut in half, spliced into a loop that will then be trenched in the ground and into your building. But only if you're lucky enough to have fiber on a pole outside your office.:D

Originally posted by neil
Hrm.. I thought I read somewhere that they had space for the data center actually inside mae west. Like they some how leased an annex or something. :)


http://www.he.net/news/article1.html

Doesn't say anything about MAE-West, but that HE.net designed it from the ground up.

*shrugs*

We laid our own fibre from our datacentre to BT's peering point in the UK.

It was easier for us, as we owned most of the land between the datacentre and the peering point, and my friend owns a contracting company who done the work.

We only had to dig across 1 road and 1 extra property.

We laid the fibre ourself's and got a contractor to terminate all the cores ready for us to light up.

Because of the way BT operate thought, we had to go from fibre to electrical back to fibre again at the peering point. Doh!