Today, the need to provide higher communications speeds (bandwidth) for smart phones, tablets and portable computers, and Wi-Fi portals, has dramatically increased in all related sectors.
This insatiable high bandwidth demand and the ensuing intolerance for slow download and upload speeds has also impacted the home entertainment sector. In it, having higher bandwidth for access to the Internet and video downloads is a top concern of the apartment complexes’ tenants.
Employees of corporations within multi-tenant buildings are also emphatic in their complaints about slower bandwidth to the point that many corporations are vacating buildings that fall short of today’s minimum bandwidth expectations.
This was not the case in 2011, when our company, SPADA Innovations, Inc. (SPADA), was talking up the need for higher bandwidth infrastructure to Commercial developers. At that time, nobody seemed to care.
Fast forward to 2016 and bandwidth demand is moving to critical levels. Commercial developers are facing unrelenting pressure from modern day tenants. They expect to move into buildings that have the necessary infrastructure to readily support bandwidth geared to satisfying their present and future business needs.
This voracious need for bandwidth is growing at such a fast (dare I say, exponential) rate, that it is quickly rendering a large segment of the existing commercial buildings in the United States obsolete. Very close attention must be paid to this problem because based on the bandwidth demands we are seeing at the present, five years from now, developers could be looking at multi-Gigabit bandwidth demands as the norm.
If the commercial real estate sector is not ready to support that speed increase, it will be facing massive vacancy rates and a mad rush to solve a problem that by its complex nature requires proper foresight, strategic planning and a well thought execution across large portfolios of impacted properties.
Meeting the Demand with GPON
Today, the need for higher bandwidth is being satisfied by the increased deployment of high bandwidth fiber optics. The ideal means for propagation is via the use of Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON). GPON was initially deployed in the United States in the mid 2000’s as a “Fiber to the Home” play for Verizon, with it’s FiOS home entertainment triple play solution.
In the late 2000’s GPON started gaining a frustratingly slow traction as a “Fiber to the Desktop” solution in the commercial sector. This slow adoption rate was primarily prompted by an IT Industry that was clearly adamant to stick to the slow, expensive and energy wasteful copper networks that may have worked at the time, but do not have any workable future as the demand for bandwidth ramps up.
It is an indisputable fact that copper DOES have a bandwidth limit. The closer bandwidth demand gets to that limit, the larger the diameters of copper cables gets, the shorter the length of the cables gets and the more expensive a copper network infrastructure is.
Here is a copper-cabling snapshot: 1 Gigabit speeds can be sent through a copper cable length of 330 feet needing amplification after that distance is exceeded. That is where we are today and those copper networks are being rendered obsolete as we speak.
Beyond 1 Gigabit up to 10 Gigabits can be sent through a copper cable length of 165 feet, which means cutting the distance in half and using even more and expensive amplification.
Beyond that, copper is no longer feasible. The usable transmission length of copper cables moving speeds beyond 10 Gigabits of bandwidth is 30 feet. The way we are going, in 5 years we may be pushing up to 10 Gigabits out to the devices and in 10 years or sooner we may be going well beyond that bandwidth realm.
Most existing commercial office buildings today ARE NOT equipped with the copper infrastructure necessary to provide more than 1 Gigabit bandwidth per port to their tenants. They need to be upgraded. Pure economic and common sense calls for an upgrade to last more than 10 years or the building is truly not future proofed on top of the fact that the upgrade is expensive, cumbersome and energy wasteful.
GPON is based on a robust single mode fiber product with bandwidth that can support multiple Terabits (1000 Gigabits) of information speed as the future requires and cables transmission distances without amplification are up to 20 miles!
GPON brings a huge difference in communication range and speeds with great quality of service and an encrypted signal for added cyber security protection. That is why today network infrastructures are migrating to GPON.
We see it in the home entertainment sector where all the major players are on or on the way to rapidly adopting GPON (does Google Fiber ring a bell?). We also see it in the hospitality industry, where most hotels built today are being put together with GPON networks. GPON is also the ultimate path for obsolete commercial office multi-tenant buildings.
SPADA is keen on developing innovations related to GPON. As founder of this San Diego based company, I envisioned creating an outfit that would focus on providing a future path to critical high bandwidth solutions for the commercial sector.
Our company embraced GPON as its mantra at a time when everybody was pushing copper based networks and nobody cared about fiber and its superior communication speeds. We were preachers of bandwidth sermons that fell into deaf ears.
For cyber security reasons related to the capacity to effective isolate tenants from each other within a commercial office building, GPON as originally designed per its global standard requires a patent pending security method developed by SPADA.
This method will be delivered as a software application for routers, and provides the full isolation required between the tenants within the building to prevent malicious access of information between them. We refer to this highly innovative method as the SPADA GPON Gateway.
Our ultimate goal is to make the SPADA GPON Gateway Application accessible to all interested parties in order to facilitate the use of GPON across the commercial office multi-tenant sector. Our strategy is to enter into agreements with interested internet service providers across the United States where commercial office multi-tenant buildings must be future proofed.
These agreements will arm them with SPADA GPON Gateways Apps that will allow them to securely, efficiently and cost effectively service their tenants bandwidth needs via the use of GPON for years to come.
Joseph L Vilella is president and CEO of SPADA Innovations, Inc. For more information or comments related to this article you may contact Vilella via [email protected] or [email protected].
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