Connectivity is more important than ever, and quality connections are becoming increasingly accessible. Yet it is not always easy for businesses large and small to know which connection they need, let alone the difference between two seemingly similar options.
“Belgium is lagging behind in terms of fiber,” says Gilles Verschueren, Business Development Manager at Eurofiber. He made no bones about it during the round table on network and connectivity, organized by ITdaily. “For a long time we had a good network compared to other countries, but now we are rather in the process of catching up.”
Kristof Spriet, Connectivity Expert at Proximus NXT, agrees. “The Belgian network met the demands of consumers and businesses for years. Now, however, we are approaching a tipping point. That is why we are currently investing significantly in fiber optics.”
Partner and competitor
Several parties are enthusiastically investing in fiber today, while others have been doing so for years. Sitting around the table were Marc Vandeputte, CTO of Arcadiz, which has been providing high-performance connectivity between data centers for years, Mirko Montorro, Sales Manager and Partner at Easi, who helps translate clients’ connectivity needs into solutions, and Freek Pauwels, General Manager of Citymesh Integrator and an expert in combining connectivity solutions into a single entity. Just about all attendees are customers and competitors of each other.
This implies that they agree on many things. For example, there is consensus on the need for quality connections for companies large and small, and everyone notices that customers in the market still generally lack the necessary knowledge to make the right decision entirely on their own. All present recognized their role as guides and supporters in a customer’s journey to the right solution.
Speed, capacity and availability
Opinions are a little more divided on exactly what that solution might look like. Vandeputte and Arcadiz work mostly with large customers with very high requirements. He denounces the way connectivity is marketed. “Often only the price and speed are advertised,” he notes. “And that speed is then incorrectly expressed in gigabits per second, which is in fact the capacity.”
For example, companies see two connections over fiber with 10 Gbps capacity, with one being more expensive than the other, and don’t always understand the difference. “To other parameters it is further searching,” Vandeputte notes. “For example, the real speed, or latency, is more important in many cases. When you connect two servers in two separate data centers together in a high availability cluster, they execute all write jobs simultaneously. So you have to add the latency directly to the write time of the hard disk, and it’s much more important than the capacity.”
True speed, or latency, is more important in many cases.
Marc Vandeputte, CTO Arcadiz
Availability is another important factor. “Everyone offers SLAs(Service Level Agreements) with 99.99 percent availability,” Vandeputte said. “But then you notice in the fine print that that 99.99 percent applies to truly professional lines all the time, and for other fiber solutions only during business hours.”
A private cable or a shared connection?
Verschueren agrees with that distinction, but notes that it is not always easy to explain to customers. “We lay fiber and offer customers their own fiber. They can choose what capacity they need, and get it guaranteed since they are not sharing their line with anyone else.”
Spriet is listening to the precise needs of customers with Proximus NXT. “Our nationally available guaranteed fiber connections, are now being expanded by offering GPON fiber over our own fiber network,” he says. Those solutions are also marketed as professional and suitable for enterprises, but there is an important difference between them and the connections the experts at Eurofiber and Arcadiz are talking about.
“We are already reaching 38 percent of buildings today with our GPON fiber network,” Spriet said. GPON stands for Gigabit Passive Optical Network and uses the same fiber cables as other solutions, with the important difference that the connections are shared.
We already reach 38 percent of buildings today with our GPON fiber network.
Kristof Spriet, Connectivity Expert Proximus NXT
This has advantages and disadvantages. Verscheuren feels that such connections resemble glorified consumer solutions, and while Spriet does not dispute that the GPON network has drawbacks in terms of redundancy and latency, it does have an advantage. “GPON is rolled out in a very planned way. The investment is large, but the cost is lower than a dedicated fiber line.”
Take what you can get
According to Pauwels, the discussion is sometimes beside the point. “The question is not always which connection is the most suitable, but rather which provider can offer what at a given address. In the past the offer was limited, but now there are many solutions with advantages and disadvantages. The starting point in Belgium is rather ‘who can offer me what’.”
So Pauwels and Citymesh approach connectivity differently. “We try to bring all layers of connectivity together,” he says. “That goes from IoT networks like Sigfox, public and private 4G, 5G and wifi, and wired connections. We bring those together in one tunnel to start serving the customer. The customer knows they are relying on different connections, but doesn’t really notice it during use.”
The customer knows they are relying on different connections, but doesn’t really notice it during use.
General Manager Citymesh Integrator
Good enough is good enough
That’s more in line with how customers experience connectivity, according to Montorro of Easi. “Indeed, customers used to have two dedicated fiber lines coming in at different points. Now they have two SD WAN devices on a site, and wonder aloud what the SLA for one dedicated line is still worth.”
Montorro offers a bit of a headwind regarding the importance of pure professional connectivity for everyone. “What end user today doesn’t get by with the speed and capacity of a coax, GPON or other shared lines, except for their headquarters, data center or very large sites? I do see that the idea is beginning to live here and there that so many expensive lines are not always necessary.”
What end user today is not getting by with the speed and capacity of a coax, GPON or other shared lines?
Mirko Montorro, Sales Manager and Partner Easi
When Montorro looks at the needs of his customers, he finds that they are increasingly daring to settle for so-called glorified consumer solutions when combined together through, for example, an SD WAN solution.
Customer needs first
That doesn’t apply to everyone, of course: those who connect data centers or build high-availability clusters as Vandeputte describes view connectivity differently. Moreover, Montorro notes that the clapper sometimes swings too much the other way. “I see customers preferring provider A over provider B because they think one offers a better solution or more bandwidth than the other, while both providers use the exact same cable and therefore deliver the exact same quality.”
Connectivity is a complex issue today anyway. For every organization, the right solution may be different. Some companies may be able to do without Internet for a while during a breakdown, and settle for the low-risk of a shared fiber line with coax as a backup, for example, or they may consider a 5G connection as a redundant solution.
Others see the Euros evaporating as soon as the connection goes down for a few seconds, and want physical redundancy where fiber connections leave on either side of the build and never run down the same street. Some need only the speed and capacity of a coax; others require latency as close to 0 ms as possible.
The right questions
Guidance is necessary, and Arcadiz, Citymesh, Easi, Eurofiber and Proximus NXT are only too happy to take up that gauntlet. For a good conversation on the ground, however, some basic features are important:
- Is your fiber shared, or just yours?
- You know the capacity (Gbps), but do you know the speed (ms)?
- How redundant are your solutions?
- What when something goes wrong? When and how quickly does your connectivity partner spring into action?
- Where are your buildings located? And what solutions are available at all?
Armed with that knowledge, it’s already a lot easier to have the right conversation and implement the most suitable solution for your business. Most suitable in any case does not mean cheapest.
This is still a bit difficult in the Belgian country, Verschueren notes in closing: “The Belgian finds it difficult to pay a professional price for a professional connection. The Dutch find it much more logical to make that distinction for their business.” A Dutchman who opens the wallet faster than a Belgian: the roundtable has something to think about afterwards.
This article is part of a series following the roundtable on connectivity organized by ITdaily. Read more here.