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Network connectivity, secure data transport and business enablement solutions for your organization.
ARTICLE
Should you Choose Dark Fibre or Wavelength for your Business Network Connectivity Needs?
Zia Shahid
Zia is Acronym's product manager for connectivity services. He steers the network connectivity initiatives taken at Acronym, helping provide connectivity solutions to enterprises and wholesale segments.
In a world where milliseconds matter, choosing the right network solution can make or break your business. From lightning-fast telecommunication apps to mission-critical data transfers, modern businesses require robust, scalable, secure and cost-effective connectivity choices to meet the evolving business needs. Dark fibre and wavelength are two key options that offer the speed and reliability to keep you ahead of the competition.
Determining the optimal high-performance network solution starts with understanding these two choices and how each aligns with your business’s needs.
What is Dark Fibre?
Given that Ontario is home to the busiest freeway in North America, highway traffic is a perennial hot topic in our province. It’s also a good analogy for understanding dark fibre.
Dark fibre networks are unused strands of optical fibre that connect two locations or points, but that currently have no network traffic or other services running over them. They are independently built or leased, much like privately deployed and managed highways. Such networks give organizations unparalleled security and control, making dark fibre an optimal fit for enterprises and industries with high data demands or that require full autonomy. These include healthcare, finance and the public sector.
Key Features of Dark Fibre Networks
Highly Tailored and Scalable
When you build your own highway, you have full control over everything from the number of lanes to speed limits. Similarly, dark fibre allows you to build a network customized to your current and future needs, with infrastructure that enables bandwidth scalability and capacity without relying on external carrier limitations.
Unlike standard telecommunication services, which require working within set packages, dark fibre solutions give you full control and flexibility to architect a network that truly meets your needs for speed, latency, security, and other requirements.
Financial Certainty
Similarly, building or leasing your own road (aka network infrastructure) gives you control over the financial aspects of running and maintaining it. From maintenance to upgrades, you can determine and plan for network-related investments and expenditures rather than being tied to vendor pricing changes.
Resilience and Security
Full ownership and control over physically defined paths and dedicated point-to-point fibre connections provide complete visibility into the data flowing across your enterprise’s dedicated private network. Dark fibre can also be used to create redundant network connections, acting as a backup in the case of failures in the primary network. This gives your organization full control in mitigating risks related to security, downtime and more.
What is Wavelength?
If dark fibre is analogous to a highway you build and own, the wavelength is more like a multi-lane highway that’s built, fully operated and maintained by an external network provider. Essentially, it’s a dedicated service that offers bandwidth over optical networks.
Demand for bandwidth continues to grow at a rapid pace—in Canada, bandwidth grew by more than 30% CAGR from 2019 to 2023. The explosion of apps and workloads related to supporting remote work, cloud-based services, streaming video, IoT, and 5G wireless technology has created unprecedented demand for high-speed networks—and for managed network services that can offer ultra-fast, low-latency connections without the internal technical lift.
Key Features of Wavelength
High Network Capacity
Wavelength solutions use advanced optical technology (ROADM and DWDM) to enable ultra-fast data transfers, making them ideal for large file transfers, seamless video streaming, and other bandwidth-intensive applications. These services deliver high-speed, reliable connectivity without the complexity of managing the infrastructure yourself.
Ability to Flexibly Scale
Building and managing your own network requires planning with future capacity needs in mind. With wavelength services, you can easily scale by leveraging your provider’s network—adding more capacity as needed without major investments. Each wavelength can be adjusted to support different data formats and protocols, ensuring your network evolves with your business.
Enhanced Security for Sensitive Data
As data privacy and cyber security threats continue to grow, organizations handling confidential or classified information require robust security measures. Wavelength services offer dedicated, point-to-point connections, ensuring data remains isolated from the public internet and unauthorized access. This makes it an ideal choice for sectors such as government, military, financial institutions, and healthcare, where regulatory compliance and data integrity are paramount. Additionally, encryption can be applied at the optical layer, adding another layer of protection against cyber threats while maintaining high-speed performance.
Low-Latency and High-Performance Connectivity
In industries where milliseconds make a difference, such as financial trading, cloud computing, and AI-driven applications, network latency can be a critical factor. Wavelength technology minimizes delays by utilizing direct optical transmission paths, reducing the number of intermediary routing points and signal conversions. This results in near-instantaneous data transmission, supporting real-time applications such as high-frequency trading, remote medical diagnostics, and ultra-responsive cloud services. The combination of low latency, high bandwidth, and superior reliability makes wavelength a preferred solution for organizations requiring uninterrupted, high-speed communication.
Dark Fibre vs. Wavelength: Factors to Consider
One thing is clear—meeting ever-growing bandwidth needs requires new high-performance network solutions. But the choice between dark fibre and wavelength comes down to your business needs, resources and other considerations.
How to decide? Here are the key factors to consider.
1) IT Resources vs. Need for Control
As a connectivity service backed with SLAs, wavelength allows you to hand over all the work of maintaining and supporting your network to an external provider. But it also means working within their standard offerings and configurations. Meanwhile, dark fibre is highly customizable, but it also requires technical expertise and ongoing support to build and maintain.
2) Scalability and Control
Dark fibre gives businesses full control to design and expand their networks as needed, offering virtually unlimited scalability. However, this flexibility comes with the responsibility of managing, maintaining, and upgrading the infrastructure. Wavelength, on the other hand, provides on-demand scalability within the service provider’s network, allowing businesses to increase bandwidth without the complexity of managing physical infrastructure.
3) Cost Structure: CapEx vs. OpEx
Dark fibre requires a steep capital investment (CapEx) upfront, as businesses purchase or lease dedicated fibre and are responsible for its operation and maintenance. This model offers long-term cost predictability and control. In contrast, wavelength services operate on an operational expense (OpEx) model, where businesses pay for bandwidth as a service. This allows for predictable and cost-efficient scaling without the burden of infrastructure ownership, making it a more flexible and manageable option for many organizations.
4) Security
Across industries, network security is paramount. However, due to compliance regulations and other needs, some organizations and sectors require an even higher degree of privacy. While wavelength operates on dedicated channels and remains isolated from the public internet, dark fibre provides full exclusivity with its private infrastructure.
The Network Your Business Needs with Acronym Solutions
Choosing between dark fibre and wavelength depends on your business’s security, scalability, and control needs. Acronym Solutions can help assess your requirements and tailor the right high-performance connectivity solution for your organization.
Visit our Network Connectivity Solutions page to learn more about finding the optimal approach for your business.
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About Acronym
Acronym Solutions Inc. is a full-service information and communications technology (ICT) company that provides a range of scalable and secure Network, Voice & Collaboration, Security, Cloud and Managed IT Solutions. We support Canadian businesses, large enterprises, service providers, healthcare providers, public-sector organizations and utilities. We leverage our extensive network expertise to design and build customized, fully scalable solutions to help our customers grow their businesses and realize their full potential. With more than 20 years’ experience managing the communications system that enables Ontario’s electrical grid, Acronym is uniquely positioned to understand the mission-critical needs of any business to deliver the innovative and reliable services that respond to the changing demands of businesses, and support rapid growth and digital transformation initiatives.