What Is Dark Fibre?
Dark fibre is an unlit fibre optic infrastructure with no assigned service or traffic. Its fibre optic cables have not been put into service and can be leased or bought for integration into your business’s or institution's network communications system.
How Does Dark Fibre Work?
Integrated dark fibre gives your business autonomy over its own private communications highway, enabling you to optimise and make internal decisions about critical elements of its network. All you need to do is buy or lease the fibre-optic cables from a network provider and use them to create point-to-point connections using on-site transmission equipment. As part of the agreement, you are responsible for lighting, managing, and maintaining the fibre optic network, not the service provider. So, establishing an internal network team is vital to establishing your own business-specific protocols and maintaining and upgrading your system.
What Are The Benefits Of Dark Fibre?
Owning and operating a private fibre-optic network has numerous advantages and can be incredibly beneficial for optimising operations. Dark Fibre’s ability to reduce inefficiencies and increase effectiveness by allowing you to develop in line with your business’s specific needs and requirements is vital, particularly if you are part of a fast-growing industry. Aside from being more economical in the long run, with no need to depend on external contractors, you’ll appreciate having autonomy over the scale, security and capacity of your communications network for several reasons.
Heightened Security
In a world of GDPR, cyber-attacks and increasingly more sophisticated scams, the security of a business's systems, networks, and infrastructure is critical. Especially when according to findings from the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey, in 2022, 39% of UK businesses identified a cyber-attack, and 31% reported an attack at least once a week.
With statistics like these, you’ll be placing security at the top of your priority list, particularly if you are dealing with sensitive information that criminals can use to harm or steal from your customers or users. Dark Fibre offers an innovative solution to this problem by giving you access to your own independent cables that are unshared and totally private. Meaning that everyone, from customers to competitors to criminals, can’t access your network to record or monitor your data, adding an extra layer of security that can make all the difference.
Total Control Over Capacities and Scales
The efficiency and effectiveness of your business’s operations are critical to its success which is why having complete control of the capacity and scale of its communications network is beneficial. Fibre-optic cables enable DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing), which means that the fibres can be split into individualised wavelengths across the spectrum, allowing for more data signals and enhancing the system’s capacity for multiple data streams.
In short, they are limitless, giving you total freedom to decide which systems or services have access to it without sacrificing network speed or capability. A simple upgrade to your on-site transmission equipment is all that’s needed to boost your capacity, too! This can be particularly useful for start-ups or smaller companies that are growing quickly and need to be able to expand and adapt their bandwidth to their size, operations and customers’ needs.
Scalability Is Limitless
The sky’s the limit with dark fibre, as all that is required is regular maintenance of the transmission equipment, including occasional upgrades, to improve latency and increase a network’s bandwidth. With no need to rely on your service provider, changes can be made effectively, efficiently, and at the right time for your business. Giving you the autonomy to decide when and how much you invest in upgrades to your equipment and limiting the need for superfluous network-related purchases, as your bandwidth will always be able to work to scale.
Dark Fibre Solutions Made Simple With Glide
At Glide, we take your business personally and work hard to ensure you stay connected, using innovative, super-fast and reliable solutions to your connectivity problems. After all, we’re the market leader in utilities and broadband across student, residential and business sectors, making us specialists in establishing fibre-optic networks for all needs and purposes.
Interested in dark fibre solutions? We make finding integrated dark fibre solutions simple and straightforward. Already over 4,000 businesses trust us to lease them reliable, ultra-fast dark fibre cables that have helped them to optimise their operations and stay connected with their customers. From small businesses to corporate companies, our team is always on hand to help you manage your solutions from end to end, saving you time, money and energy better spent elsewhere. Contact our team at Glide to start utilising our 2,000 km of fibre internet for your business today.
