Overview

China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile do not lease dark fiber, and the reason is commercial rather than technical: a carrier sells circuits, which are priced by bandwidth and billed every month, while leasing bare glass hands over capacity it could otherwise resell. The supply therefore comes from specialist fiber operators — regional resource holders, data centre operators, and organisations with their own ducts and wayleave — and we source from them on your behalf. You lease fiber pairs between two of your own sites, typically two data centres or two offices, and light them yourself: your transceivers, your DWDM, your protocol. Pricing follows distance rather than bandwidth, which is why a 100 Gbps pair can cost less than the equivalent leased circuit — going to 400 Gbps is a change of optics at each end, not a renegotiation. Dark fiber is a domestic resource: cross-border traffic leaves China on DPLC plus IEPL, which we arrange as one end-to-end service.

Key features

Dark fiber pairs sourced from specialist operators — a category the big three carriers do not offer
Priced by distance rather than by bandwidth: capacity upgrades are optics, not contracts
Connects two of your own sites — data centre to data centre, data centre to office, or office to office
Metro routes as standard, with inter-city long-haul available through our operator network
Complete optical-layer control: your transceivers, your DWDM, your choice of protocol
Physically diverse paths sourced from multiple independent fiber operators
Full lifecycle management: operator sourcing, contract negotiation, IRU or monthly terms, SLA enforcement, fault resolution

Why choose Dark Fiber

Access a product the big three carriers do not sell — our operator relationships make it available
Distance sets the cost, bandwidth does not: 10G, 100G, and 400G differ by a transceiver swap at each end
Significantly lower TCO than P2P leased lines at 100 Gbps+ — you are leasing glass, not a service
Complete protocol freedom — nothing is imposed on what runs over the fiber
Physical-layer security: dedicated fiber with no shared infrastructure and no carrier equipment inline
One provider across both legs — domestic fiber plus the DPLC/IEPL segment that carries traffic out of the country

Use cases

Data centre interconnects at 100 Gbps+ where leased line costs become prohibitive

Two offices or a campus pair needing guaranteed bandwidth without per-megabit pricing

High-frequency trading platforms requiring deterministic latency at the physical layer

Research and education networks needing dedicated, high-bandwidth optical infrastructure

Content delivery and media production moving large datasets between facilities

Solutions using this product

Private Site-to-Site Connectivity

End-to-end private connectivity between your China sites and the rest of the world, built from two circuit types that work together: DPLC for the domestic point-to-point legs between Chinese cities, and IEPL or MPLS for the cross-border leg. Both are Layer 2, so your own routing runs across the whole path, and both are uncontended, so latency, jitter, and packet loss stay stable through the evening peak instead of degrading with the public internet. We source from China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, and alternative operators, then choose the combination that fits your route, bandwidth, and budget — and we hold the carrier relationships, so you sign one contract and escalate through one path. The same point-to-point capability covers routes that never touch China — two overseas sites, or a data centre and an office outside the mainland — on the same Layer 2, uncontended terms.

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Dark Fiber

Overview

Key features

Why choose Dark Fiber

Use cases

Solutions using this product

Private Site-to-Site Connectivity

Interested in Dark Fiber?

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