North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Finding information about metro private line service in downtown SF

  • From: Bill Stewart
  • Date: Mon Nov 01 02:58:06 2004
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On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 19:32:15 -0700, Bill Garrison
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Calling SBC provided me with a rather clueless person telling me all
> about ATM, Frame Relay and other options I don't want.  
> To his credit, I believe I may have been defining what I want incorrectly.
> Since both areas are well within the same LATA (do people say that anymore?) 
> I am simply looking for some sort of private line service be it fiber or copper.

The answer is extremely dependent on how much bandwidth you want.
In some areas you can still buy dry copper and run whatever you want on it,
and in many areas you can also buy dark fiber and light it yourself,
but normally you're looking at having a carrier running some Layer 1 protocol
and maybe Layer 2 protocol on it.   Depending on the speed you want,
there are different protocols that are easy for various carriers to run.
("Significant" isn't enough detail....)

Most carriers find T1s pretty easy to provide; 
some find T3 or OC3 easy while others prefer Layer 2 solutions for
speeds above T1.
I'm not surprised by SBC's person proposing ATM and Frame; they use those
for a fairly wide range of speeds.  A number of carriers also use
Ethernets of various speeds (full or fractional), and some people will
sell you "transparent LAN service" that's really
a bridged Ethernet edge interface with ATM underneath.