Ethernet Transport

Dark fiber from VPLS provides your business with their own private, dedicated fiber connection between your offices, or your office and the closest data center or POP. Dark fiber is a pure layer 1 solution – there is no middleman facilitating this point-to-point connectivity. This allows your business greater deployment flexibility, as you will be in charge of deciding what equipment and optics to use at either end. Further, if/when the business needs change, your team can make network changes without any coordination efforts with the provider.

Wavelength division multiplexing, typically offered by VPLS in the form of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), allows multiple signals to be carried on a single fiber optic cable instead of just one signal. This mouthful-of-a-technology translates to a more cost-effective solution than dark fiber for interconnecting your locations, while still providing your business with the same point-to-point connectivity and bandwidth capabilities. Although waves provide less flexibility in equipment and optic selection, cost and availability make a wave connection an enticing choice for inter-site connectivity.

MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) allows VPLS (our company name, not the protocol) to virtually connect two of your business’ locations together, even over a vast distance, as if they were directly connected or just a single hop away. Like our other transport services, MPLS guarantees fast, low-latency connectivity for your mission critical applications, but between places where a dark fiber run or wave connection is not available or cost prohibitive.

MPLS is commonly referred to as MPLS VPN because it connects your locations over a private, virtual link that runs through our VPLS network backbone. Unlike a VPN tunnel established over broadband, MPLS from VPLS requires no VPN configuration on your end and ensures your connection will always perform to defined SLAs – a must for latency-sensitive applications like voice and video.