Reb, I should have thought of this before, but my mind was in the ocean. TCG used to have a program whereby they would install their high-capacity systems to customers who were off net on a temporary (sometimes permanent) basis using line of sight microwave. Annunziata acquired BizNet for this, among other, reasons at the time, after using someone else for an interim period, but that's neither here nor there.
The main point is that they were able to get users up and running months, even up to a year (when sticky situations having to do with easement- and ROW- disputes existed) ahead of time, at the T1 and T3, and even OC-3 rates if need be, that were being ordered.
Microwave is ok for T1, T2, T3 and up to 139 or 155 Mb/s (3 T3s) rates under normal conditions, and perhaps higher bit rates under special conditions, but it will not satisfy transport requirements for the types of streams and payloads that DWDM-derived flows yield.
Therefore, something like the LU OpticAir unit which is capable of supporting from 2.5 to 10Gb/s could be regarded here as something that was made to order for this type of "temporary fix" application. Then again, there were also customers who actually required a form of over the air transport for reasons having to do with redundancy and diversity, for disaster contingency (business continuation preparedness) purposes. Hey, the list gets longer...
In the expedite scenario, i.e. where the customer is eager to have their bandwidth yesterday, the more stringent parameters of the SLAs could be momentarily relaxed until the real thing (fiber) eventually got installed.
These are some of the reasons that I can think of for GBLX to be interested in this technology at the present time. Give me another day and I'll probably come up with a few more. Anyone else have others?
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
