Dark Fibre is unused fibre optic cables you can ‘light’ to create your own network. Learn how Dark Fibre can benefit your business if you’re looking to future-proof your connectivity.
- What is Dark Fibre?
- How does Dark Fibre work?
- What are the benefits of Dark Fibre?
- Is Dark Fibre worth it?
- Dark Fibre solutions for your business
What is Dark Fibre?
A Dark Fibre network, also known as unlit fibre, refers to fibre optic cables with no service or traffic running on them – an unused point-to-point connection. It’s called ‘dark’ because the cables aren’t lit by a light signal.
Dark Fibre gives you maximum control and flexibility to create your own high capacity network with almost limitless scalability.
Build your Dark Fibre network nationwide
Total control, near limitless capacity
How does Dark Fibre work?
Network service providers install some fibre optic cables with no data transmission equipment attached. Instead of purchasing a managed service like Ethernet or Optical Wavelengths to connect your business, you can buy or lease Dark Fibre to create your own private network.
With Dark Fibre, you decide the services you want and deploy and manage the equipment required to set up your network, and you’re responsible for maintaining it.
What are the benefits of Dark Fibre?
The main advantage of Dark Fibre connectivity is that you have complete control over your network. Here’s how it can benefit your organisation.
Customisation
Choose your own networking equipment, protocols and specifications to suit your business needs. For example, you can use Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) to maximise the number of channels on each fibre.
Scalability
Scale up your bandwidth and data transmission speeds as your business grows. Dark Fibre is completely unused optical fibre, offering almost limitless capacity.
Low latency
You have exclusive access to your Dark Fibre, so you’re not competing with others for bandwidth. Since you control the network, you can take measures to minimise latency as required.
Security
You own or lease the Dark Fibre infrastructure, so no providers or users have access. You can also implement your encryption to further enhance security.
Reliability
As you create the network, you can build in redundancy to make your network as resilient as possible. And if faults occur, you can tackle them immediately without waiting for network providers to troubleshoot.
In short, Dark Fibre offers high capacity connectivity with almost limitless scalability to future-proof your network. However, it comes at a cost.
Is Dark Fibre worth it?
Designing and implementing your own Dark Fibre network requires considerable upfront investment in equipment and expertise. Once your network is up and running, you’ll need significant in-house IT resources to maintain it. And if it goes down, only you are responsible for fixing it (unless the fibre breaks).
However, Dark Fibre can make sense for organisations that need total control over their network and almost limitless bandwidth.
Do you plan to massively scale up your network capacity over the long term? Do you need to implement specific networking configurations or security measures? Do you need complete control over your network to minimise latency or build in redundancy?
If so, Dark Fibre may be worth considering. While initial deployment costs can be high, Dark Fibre can be a cost-effective way to future-proof your connectivity over the long term.
Dark Fibre solutions for your business
At Neos Networks, we’re helping businesses nationwide transform their connectivity with Dark Fibre across our UK-wide network.
If you’re looking to upgrade your network to meet the exploding demand for bandwidth, get in touch. We’ll be happy to design a Dark Fibre solution to help future-proof your connectivity.
Build your Dark Fibre network nationwide
Total control, near limitless capacity
