To stay apace of growing demand for wireless backhaul and enterprise services growth, Idaho-based Syringa Networks expands its regional optical network capacity by 40X.
by Sean Buckley
Telecommagazine.com
Mon. June 29, 2009
 

Idaho-based rural network wholesaler Syringa Networks faced not only technical challenges in making its recent network upgrade, but also environmental issues that are unique to the geography it serves.

Spanning the Southern Idaho area, Syringa had previously had to place optical amplification equipment on Galena Summit, a mountainous stretch in Idaho that’s closed much of the year.

“The reason our upgrade took until April this year to get done was due to avalanche threats in Galena Summit,” said Greg Lowe, CEO of Syringa Networks. “Once that specific piece of electronics was removed, our network became much more accessible year-round, so there are advantages to having fewer amplifiers.”

By upgrading its Eastern optical ring with ADVA’s FSP 3000 platform, which incorporates Raman amplifiers, Syringa Networks reduced the amount of amplification points from 29 to 21. What’s more, the incorporation of Raman amplifiers enables the platform to transmit signals over longer distances thus reducing the amount of amplification points in a network.

Formed by 12 independent phone companies in 2001, Syringa Networks emergence was driven by the need to effectively bring higher-speed connectivity for its mainly rural partners.

Syringa Networks Founding Members

• Albion Telephone Company
• Cambridge Telephone Company
• Custer Telephone Cooperative
• Direct Communications
• Farmers Mutual Telephone Company
• Filer Mutual Telephone Company
• FairPoint Communications
• Midvale Telephone Exchange
• Mud Lake Telephone Cooperative
• Project Mutual Telephone
• Rural Telephone Company
• Silver Star Communications

Syringa Networks formation mirrors the efforts of other rural telcos to get necessary long-distance and metro optical transport capacity. Other notable examples of rural telcos banding together to get necessary capacity in areas relatively unserved by large carriers include Iowa Network Services and the Empire State Independent Fiber Network. (see New York RLECs Band Together).

Since its inception, the service provider has invested more than $50 million in building out its own network. Through this ongoing network investment, Syringa Networks, while continuing to focus on its member companies, has seen its sales increasingly shift to the needs of other carrier and large enterprise and government customers.

In parallel with its ongoing network investments, the company’s owners created two main charters: serve the member’s needs and make the member’s revenues an ever-decreasing percentage of overall revenue.

“Today, our member’s revenue is only approximately 1/3 of our overall revenue, which means we have gone out and acquired quite a bit of business on our own,” Lowe said.


Keeping up with demand

At the outset, Southern Idaho might not be the most obvious place where one would find a lot of optical network capacity—an aspect, something that Lowe admits, is just a reality of the area of operating in a region like Southern Idaho.

Large service providers such as AT&T and Verizon tend to concentrate their efforts in the large cities where they can get the biggest return on their investment.

“If you look at Southern Idaho at large, it’s not overly equipped with fiber,” he said. “And it makes sense because most of the regional or national companies work in NFL markets or metros so there’s not a lot of impetus to put bandwidth out to these rural areas.”

Despite the remote nature of the Southern Idaho market, Lowe is quick to add that businesses and government are starting to consume more bandwidth. “In Southern Idaho, things are starting to happen that are requiring a lot of bandwidth,” he said.

A key pain point for Syringa Networks in growing carrier traffic has been its East ring, which extends from Boise to Henry, Idaho, and was running a 4X 2.5 Gbps optical DWDM ring. This ongoing demand required Syringa Networks to upgrade the ring with ADVA’s FSP 3000 to include 40X10 Gbps capability.

Currently, Syringa Networks has one OC-192 SONET ring and they are getting ready to light another wavelength. One of the 10 Gbps connections is a 12 X GigE connection, which will allow it to put IP bandwidth into the rural communities it serves.

With six of those lambdas already lit, Syringa Networks now can now start quoting 10 Gbps wavelengths. In fact, it has three different quotes out with unnamed potential customers for 10 Gbps wavelength services.

“The ring has actually allowed us to vastly improve what we can offer,” Lowe said. “We have been monetizing this investment from the second we finished the upgrade in April.”

Wireless backhaul rises

A key area of growth for Syringa Networks' wholesale services set is wireless backhaul.
Wireless backhaul has been a good fit for the operator because many of the wireless operators that pass through Idaho go right along Interstate 84.

“If you were to lay our fiber network over interstates, we’re a natural solution for grabbing these cell towers that go right up the interstate,” Lowe said. “And when you get into some of these rural communities, it’s the only way to get to these towers so we have been doing a lot of work with carriers bringing fiber to the cell towers.”

Currently, the operator has been delivering dark fiber and related services to cell towers. Depending on where the towers are located, the services could range from anything as low as T1 circuits and as high as a DS-3 (something that’s becoming common for Syringa Networks) to one tower and even beyond.

Of course, there’s the question of providing Ethernet for wireless backhaul. The ongoing increase in wireless data and multimedia is requiring wireless operators to look at new alternative technologies to traditional T1 circuits.

While every wireless operator’s needs vary, in most situations Syringa Networks is delivering a fiber connection to the tower to carry traditional TDM-based services with the ability to migrate to Ethernet when the operator is ready.

“The transition in this case is not a light switch, the transition is parallel and then full conversion,” Lowe said. “When we put a node out at the tower to terminate our service that node can handle TDM and Ethernet, and then of course we have the fiber that’s brought back into a core ring where we can do either.”

IP is the driver

Along with wireless backhaul, Syringa Networks is seeing similar demands from the R&D community in Idaho Falls and the cable industry.

On the R&D side, the Idaho Nuclear Laboratory is also requiring increasing bandwidth needs.

“In general, Eastern Idaho between Idaho Falls and Pocatello and flip over to Wyoming into Jackson—that whole area is getting a lot more active,” Lowe said. “The last piece of that is if you drew a triangle between Boise, Idaho Falls and Salt Lake City, you just get a natural pocket of activity.”

All of this bandwidth demand is being driven by one common element: IP. Cable operators, in particular, have become a major consumer of wholesale bandwidth, especially anything IP-related. Area cable operators have been leveraging Syringa’s wholesale bandwidth capacity to expand their growing base of IP service sets to businesses and residential customers.

“The real growth is coming around anything that needs IP bandwidth; it’s just exploding,” Lowe said.

During the last 12 months, Lowe said that Syringa has tripled the amount of IP services it delivers. Given this demand, the service provider will have to upgrade its network again this year.

In tandem with its growing DWDM optical network, Syringa Networks recently lit up a Cisco-based MPLS network.

Consisting of P routers that are housed (Boise and Idaho Falls) and PE routers (Arco, Haley and Twin Falls), the MPLS network, says Lowe is “the next evolution of some of the enterprise and other customers that need that capability.”