Service Product Offerings on a Middle-Mile Network

A statewide middle-mile network may consist of multiple layers of equipment and software to complete “handoffs” of data to and from last-mile providers, translate that data into light pulses sent over fiber-optic cable, and connect to the global Internet or cloud service providers like Netflix and Amazon Web Services. However, not every last mile-provider may wish to connect to a middle-mile network in the same way. Some may require greater capacity or seek greater control over services they create themselves and provide to their customers. Others may wish to connect their end-user customers to existing services and content providers. Thus, if a middle-mile network operator is to attract last-mile providers as customers, it must offer a broad catalog of service products to meet an equally broad variety of needs well beyond the services offered by a typical broadband provider. The different layers of a middle-mile network can be visualized literally from the ground up – starting with the medium over which the data travels to the equipment that sends the data and the software that governs that equipment and defines the networks that operate over it. There are 4 layers:

• "Transport" layer, which focuses on creating private networks; 
• "Network" layer, which enables different networks to exchange data; 
• "Optical" layer, which can turn data into light signals and transmit them;
• "Physical" layer, which is the fiber optic cable strands that enable the previous 3.