Healthcare Industry Still Stunted in the Paper Age

05/22/2012 by Leave a comment

Healthcare Electronic Medical Records (EMR)Recently, TechCrunch posted an article on the Healthcare industry pertaining to its’ slower migration towards the electronic age. This week, in response, one of our Sunlight bloggers reflects on this curbed cycle.

In the early 90s, a major insurance carrier in NYC converted their paper files to WORM optical disk, reducing 3 floors of cabinets to 25% of the space. Each insured individual was given a unique barcode, printed on an insurance card. This way documents could be scanned in and associated with that patient’s barcode and additions could be made automatically, eliminating the need for paper handling. Read more of this post

Filed under Dark Fiber, Fiber Optics, Telecom, Bandwidth, Managed Services, Healthcare, Technology, Security, Reliability

Least Cost Alternative for your Private Fiber Wide Area Network

04/24/2012 by Leave a comment

You’ve compared traditional and Private Fiber WANs, choosing Private Fiber. Now you must decide between purchasing a managed private line Ethernet service or licensing dark fiber, which requires managing the services yourself. Dark fiber may be viable if your bandwidth requirements remain fairly stable for a period of years and you can leverage your existing network support resources. But, will it really cost less from a purely financial perspective? Each case is different.

One way to decide is to prepare a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis. TCO is a financial estimate of all direct and indirect product costs. Although useful for financial analysis, it doesn’t address the philosophical questions. TCO accounts for all capital expenditures (Capex) made at the beginning of a service period as well as the direct and indirect operating expenses (Opex) foreseen during the period.

Read more of this post

Filed under Business, Dark Fiber, Managed Services, Telecom, WAN, Wide Area Networks

The Juggle between Dark vs. Lit

04/10/2012 by 1 Comment

Dark vs. Lit FiberThere are not too many of us left. The Metro Dark Fiber providers are a dying breed in many markets across the country.

Through industry consolidation and evolving business plans, many of our peers have shifted their focus to lines of business that have taken them away from the model of consistently selling dark fiber to other carriers. This has opened up opportunities for those of us still willing to offer metro dark fiber to carriers; while at the same time, pressuring us to highlight our private line Ethernet offering to prevent high bandwidth enterprise customers from evolving away from our network. Read more of this post

Filed under Carriers, Customer, Dark Fiber, Managed Services, Telecom, WAN, Wide Area Networks

All Aboard the Dark Fiber Train

02/14/2012 by 1 Comment

When asked to describe a private fiber wide area network (WAN) and particularly dark fiber WANs, I like to use the analogy of a train system. In this analogy, you have:

  • Data or content being transmitted:  People or freight
  • A variety of speeds and protocols available:  Engine and car type such as freight, standard or bullet trains
  • Various nodes or destinations:  Stations
  • Distribution hubs:  ex:  Penn Station, NYC and,
  • A system of pathways and switches that the data traverses:  Railway tracks and switches

In a standard managed network, you have little control over anything but the content you are transmitting; and for various content types such as voice, data, etc. you need separate services. In our analogy, you must then purchase separate tickets for your voice passengers and your data cargo which will be loaded onto a local train, with everyone else’s passengers, to stop at each station on the route. This of course introduces opportunities for lost passengers, overcrowding, and nefarious characters looking at your laptop screen along the way. None of this is necessarily a bad thing; most systems do a fair job of weeding out nefarious characters and provisioning enough trains to handle the traffic at a reasonable price for the level of service. Read more of this post

Filed under Dark Fiber, Fiber Optics, Managed Services, Telecom, WAN

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.