Written by, Frost & Sullivan
With contributions by, Florencio Bulanhagui, SVP of Architecture and Bill Lean, VP Carrier Wholesale and Solution Architecture

High-bandwidth needs to include availability, performance, reliability, security, visibility, and control. Wavelength services are experiencing fast growth by providing all these characteristics.

More than ever, the network serves as the key pillar supporting businesses’ digital transformation. High-capacity solutions empower winning IT strategies, that in turn enable the three key metrics used to define a successful digital transformation approach: customer satisfaction rates, increase in revenues, and cost savings. Governmental, commercial, and retail organizations all have growing bandwidth requirements. Be it the migration to public, hybrid, or multi-clouds, the massive deployment of video-based work collaboration tools, the need to constantly move ever-growing amounts of data, and the related data center connectivity needs, the bandwidth-intensive scenarios keep multiplying.

In essence, wavelengths are used for transmitting data across optical fibers as light signals. Customers migrating to the cloud include wavelengths in their network infrastructure. Wavelengths are also the best fit for interconnecting data centers, and they satisfy other bandwidth-hungry scenarios and applications as well, including Big Data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

An extensive range of demanding applications is pushing companies of all kinds away from low-bandwidth connectivity options and toward higher-capacity deployments, continuing a long-standing trend. In this area, wavelengths provide the high-reliability, low-latency, and low-interference network solutions needed by corporate applications with demanding performance requirements.

That is the case with healthcare institutions. Those with several hospitals, clinics, and imaging centers typically require a high level of security and control on their wide area networks (WANs), and they also have a high demand for dedicated connectivity services. In addition, these institutions are adopting wavelength-based services, driven by the huge bandwidth requirements from large imaging and radiology as well as electronic health records. “We have been asked to provide solutions for healthcare institutions that have a need to connect many of their facilities together across the metro area with dedicated high-capacity transport and we are finding that 400G services provide the right balance between capacity and cost for some of these institutions”, said Florencio Bulanhagui, SVP of Architecture at Summit Broadband, a leading fiber-optics telecommunications provider in Florida.

In a completely different business, but with very similar performance criteria, financial services (banking, insurance, and the like) consider control and security as critical. But, of course, the need for ultra-low latency networks to support business-related, time-sensitive applications (e.g., trading applications) is also behind the adoption of wavelengths.

In the case of the public sector, it can be compared to a company with many branches, only in this case, we are talking about multiple agencies that need high-bandwidth and cost-effective connectivity solutions. Additionally, different government levels need to enable secure, latency-sensitive, low-interference, mission-critical applications (of which emergency services are just one example).

Many more industries are increasingly using wavelength services. What they all have in common is that they increasingly require bandwidth infrastructure solutions to scale their networks to succeed in the digital world. Wavelengths deliver that, and much more:

• Scalable, high-capacity connectivity
• Support highly latency-sensitive and low-interference applications
• High reliability and availability
• Simplicity of use/upgrading
• Security features and high flexibility.
• End-customer visibility of performance through management tools
• Dynamic bandwidth options
• Cost-effectiveness

Doing more with less has always been the mantra for network teams. It’s no wonder that they go for wavelengths, as they provide significantly more bandwidth than alternative methods.