As the digital landscape continues to rapidly evolve, businesses need high-performance, scalable, and secure network solutions to support operations, growth, and innovation. Whether you’re operating a data-heavy enterprise, supporting government services, or building AI-ready infrastructure, your choice between dark fiber and lit fiber can have a long-term impact on performance and flexibility.
But how do you know which network solution is right for your organization? To help demystify the decision, think of it like choosing between driving your own car or taking public transit.
Fiber 101: The Basics
Dark fiber refers to fiber infrastructure that has been laid but is not yet “lit” with active equipment. Essentially, it’s an unused highway waiting for you to drive on it, but you need to bring your own equipment to make it go.
Lit fiber, by contrast, is a fully managed solution. The infrastructure and the service are bundled together, meaning the provider lights, manages, and maintains the connection. You hop on board and ride. It’s fast, reliable, and maintained by someone else.
Driving vs. Riding: An Analogy for Clarity
Let’s expand on the analogy of choosing dark fiber being similar to buying and driving your own car. With dark fiber, businesses receive full ownership over speed, route, and upgrades. If your business suddenly needs to go faster or reach new destinations, you can make it happen without waiting for approvals or scheduled upgrades. On the flip side, you’re also responsible for maintaining the engine (or network), understanding the traffic rules, and paying for repairs.
On the other hand, lit fiber is like taking a high-speed commuter train. With lit fiber, businesses pay for a service that gets them where they need to go with high reliability. You don’t worry about traffic, tune-ups, or planning the route. It’s plug-and-play and often the fastest way to get started with enterprise-grade connectivity.
Why Choose Dark Fiber?
Dark fiber is ideal for businesses that:
- Have internal IT resources to manage network equipment.
- Need to scale bandwidth rapidly and independently.
- Prioritize low latency and direct, private network control.
- Require enhanced security and data isolation.
Use cases for dark fiber include data center interconnectivity, disaster recovery, content delivery, network provider applications and AI/ML workloads that demand high throughput and responsiveness. As your needs evolve, you can scale from 10 Gbps to 100 or 400 Gbps on your timeline, not your provider’s.
With dark fiber, latency is lower because your data takes the most direct route without shared networks and unnecessary hops. And since you’re managing your own hardware, you get complete visibility and control over how your traffic flows.
FiberLight’s dark fiber customers range from AI cloud providers and financial institutions to school districts and rural municipalities. For example, we’ve partnered with the Hurst-Euless-Bedford ISD, serving approximately 23,000 students across 30 campuses with our dark fiber backbone. Our dark fiber network enables the HEB ISD to leverage additional bandwidth as needed, helping ensure that the district’s technology infrastructure is future ready.
Why Choose Lit Fiber?
Lit fiber services are ideal for organizations that:
- Prefer a turnkey solution with minimal management.
- Need quick deployment, predictable SLAs, and scalable service tiers.
- Lack internal network engineers to manage and maintain fiber infrastructure.
FiberLight’s lit fiber portfolio includes:
- Dedicated Internet Access
- End-to-End Ethernet Services
- Wavelength Services
- Cloud Connect
- Wireless Backhaul
- Data Center Connectivity
These managed services are designed to support business-critical connectivity with guaranteed uptime, redundant architecture, and performance metrics you can trust.
A recent example: Our Charlotte to Atlanta route features industry-leading 100Gbps and 400Gbps Ethernet wavelengths, along with state-of-the-art fiber assets. Lit services in these markets allow regional enterprises to plug into high-capacity networks without the heavy lifting of managing their own fiber infrastructure.
What to Consider When Choosing Between Dark Fiber vs Lit
When evaluating dark vs. lit fiber, consider:
- IT Resources: Do you have the expertise and equipment to manage your own network?
- Performance Requirements: Do you need extremely low latency or high-throughput custom routes?
- Security and Control: Do you require full ownership of data routing and access control?
- Growth Plans: Will your bandwidth requirements expand rapidly or unpredictably?
- Cost Structure: Are you comfortable with upfront investment and ongoing equipment management, or do you prefer an OPEX-friendly, service-based model?
Why FiberLight?
FiberLight brings more than 20 years of experience designing and operating both lit and dark fiber networks. Our nearly 20,000 route-mile footprint stretches across high-growth tech corridors, rural markets, and major metros—backed by a team of experts who know how to deliver.
Whether you’re driving your own route or riding with a managed service, we ensure that your journey is fast, secure, and ready for what’s next.
Explore our dark fiber and lit fiber services today and find the right fit for your network.