Lighting up dark fibre with VoIP and IPTV

Not heard of dark fibre before? Back in the days of the dot com boom, before the bubble burst; infrastructure providers and start-ups across the globe were all spending millions laying fibre-optic cable to carry the huge amount of data that would be needed for a new ecommerce based society. Banks and investors where jumping over each other to throw money at the fibre laying companies and then it suddenly all went quiet. The bubble had burst and the anticipated growth/demand for capacity had not appeared.

For between 8 – 10 years a lot of these cables lay dormant under the sea bed and underground across countries; not being used because there was no need. Now demand has caught up, and in a big way. Using the Internet to make cheap and often free calls globally (VoIP) as well as the emergence of television being broadcast on demand via fibre-optic cable have caused these ‘dark fibres’ to be lit up.

Point Topic research firm “estimate that there were 209.3 million global broadband users at the end of 2005, up 56.2 million from 153.3 million lines on 31 December 2004.” Continued growth at this rate (37%) on a global basis will drive demand for higher capacity lines and fuel rumours of more transpacific cable being laid by telcos.
As reported by the register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/19/global_broadband/) early on Wednesday, In-Stat predict the level of broadband users to have spiralled to 400 million by 2010.

Rob Green Managing Director at computer support company Century Computing (http://www.CenturyComputing.co.uk) noted that “The use of VoIP by businesses is obviously helping to push the demand for more capacity and we have experienced a huge increase in enquiries relating to IP CCTV (CCTV carried via the Internet) and Video telephony/video conferencing applications over the last couple of months.”

It is essential that business users understand the need for a communication line that has QOS (Quality Of Service) attached to it. This ensures that important data like VoIP or video conferencing traffic is given precedence over less essential data such as web surfing and email traffic.

Green commented that “We [Century Computing] are working closely with the top communications line providers across the UK and Europe, to provide businesses with scalable infrastructure which will support their needs as their communications demands increase.”
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Century Computing Support Services Ltd are a computer support company located within the West Midlands; providing clients across the UK with hardware and software support, both remotely and with onsite engineers.

Contact: info@centurycomputing.co.uk for Media enquiries