Some carriers offer protected waves. They're protected at layer 1/1.5 using a combination of OTN wrappers and optical switches. My experience has been that "wave" services are generally unprotected unless you request otherwise. They're also one of the few "lit" services where grooming clauses are not just well-accepted but often standard or even implied in the service definition (the service is defined as traversing a specific path/paths). Protection usually comes at a premium cost since you're essentially buying the same lambda (or ODU) along multiple paths.
Glass is glass. If you want protection, find more glass. I'm not even sure how you'd offer a protected "dark fiber" service without encroaching on the ability of the subscriber to light it to their pleasing.
Sure, you can light a pair and monitor it many different ways. However, as James has said already, most people who want dark fiber are going to want one pair of glass from A to Z with nothing in the middle at all that they don’t know about. For me, I would want to know exactly what you had in place ( full specifications , not hand waved ‘monitoring device’ ) , what wavelengths it used, how it functioned (fully passive, etc), along with some extensive tests to make sure I could do what I expected to without any interference or surprises, before I would come near a contract with you. From my point of view, any device on the glass I am leasing is essentially now part of my network, so I need to know everything about it. Others may have different standards of course, but that’s perfectly fine.
I would say personally though that if during due diligence, your NOC was nothing more than an answering service to someone else, which it kinda sounds like you want, I would personally not do business with that. Again others may have different standards, and that’s ok.
There are two different approaches to deploying the fiber monitoring hardware that is effectively in line with the “get your gear off of my fiber” argument. If the monitoring service is intended for a specific customer, the signal will traverse a customer-specific pair. This is pretty rare though, for a wide variety of reasons that have been mostly mentioned here.
The way this generally works then is that the provider reserves a strand or pair on the cable for monitoring purposes and uses the characterization data to make assumptions about the whole cable. This is pretty effective for “track down the precise location of a cut” or “why did this span just go from -18 to -30 for no apparent reason” and not necessarily the full gamut of characterization issues that can come up on other pairs of glass, which is still enough to meaningfully impact the part of MTTR that is under a provider’s control. For many of you consuming a dark fiber service today, this is the approach being used, so there’s no provider hardware touching your glass and certainly no lambda for your gear to contend with avoiding.
Luma Systems has built a SaaS-based optical monitoring platform enabling vendor-neutral DWDM Channel Monitoring and In-Service OTDR with a robust predictive analytics engine. We’ve met with many Nanogers over the last couple years but if you’re interested in learning more, please contact us offline.
Hello, Luma Systems has built a SaaS-based optical monitoring platform enabling vendor-neutral DWDM Channel Monitoring and In-Service OTDR with a robust predictive analytics engine. We’ve met with many Nanogers over the last couple years but if you’re interested in learning more, please contact us offline.