There are lots of national carriers in the US. A much smaller number of those carriers actually own the fiber cables. There are a handful (Zayo, Level3, CenturyLink, Windstream, Earthlink, Verizon) that have very large national, or semi-national foot prints. The carriers frequently trade and lease strands of fiber from each other to create a national network. Be careful on the commodity routes diversity wise. There are a lot of places with 20+ carriers in the same cable (or duct) each claiming to own the route. Jay On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 6:08 PM, <tim@29lagrange.com> wrote:

I have been looking at optical wave carriers for some long haul 1G/10G across the US. All to major cities and well known POP's. I am finding that there are not a lot of carriers who are offering wave services, usually just ethernet/MPLS. Particularly across the North west. Can someone shed some light on who some of the bigger carriers are and any challenges you have encountered with services like this? Who actually owns the fiber across the US?

Thanks

Tim

(Speaking purely for myself, and thoroughly demonstrating my relative ignorance on the topic, but also opening up an opportunity to become better educated...) You may find that optical providers don't really want to mix 1G/10G waves in on systems that are running Nx100G waves on the fiber. With 100G coherent systems, optical dispersion compensation is no longer necessary, as the DSP on the receiving side takes care of it. The 10G waves, on the other hand, would need dispersion compensation along the run, which increases the cost of building and maintaining such a system, because they'd have to peel off your 10G waves to periodically do dispersion compensation, then add them back in. It's far more cost effective for long haul providers to carry the traffic as native 100G, and provide the lower-speed handoff to you at the endpoints via ethernet framing or MPLS. It's not so much a matter of "not enough people owning fiber across the US" as "Oh geez, you want us to run our system in an inefficient and uneconomical mode? Uh...maybe you could call those other guys down the street instead." I suspect that if you ran an experiment by calling for quotes and availability for 100G waves between your endpoints you'd find more availability for 100G waves than 10G or 1G native waves. (I'm half hoping to get a flurry of replies telling me I'm completely wrong, and then explaining the real issues to me. If nobody replies, it might mean I'm not entirely wrong). Thanks! Matt On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 4:08 PM, <tim@29lagrange.com> wrote:

I have been looking at optical wave carriers for some long haul 1G/10G across the US. All to major cities and well known POP's. I am finding that there are not a lot of carriers who are offering wave services, usually just ethernet/MPLS. Particularly across the North west. Can someone shed some light on who some of the bigger carriers are and any challenges you have encountered with services like this? Who actually owns the fiber across the US?

Thanks

Tim