USA Fiber unveils dark fiber peering platform targeting Ashburn, Va., carrier customers

USA Fiber, an emerging dark fiber provider, has introduced a dark fiber lease program targeting wholesale customers looking to interconnect with area on its new Ashburn, Va., ring.

Under the terms of the lease structure of the Dark Fiber Peer service, area service providers can purchase dark fiber services from an open platform that it said simplified how service providers exchange data between data centers in the market.

Ashburn has become a prime data center market, overtaking New York City as the largest earlier this year. USA Fiber said that the combination of a high concentration of data center customers and the largest IP peering market in North America creates an ideal market to debut a distributed dark fiber peering model.

A key element of the service is providing scale. Dark Fiber Peer enables a one-to-many ring drop architecture to access incremental data centers without needing to add additional pairs.

Ken Goff, CEO of USA Fiber, said in a release that its dark fiber design and pricing model "will enable more service providers to connect with each other and their customers in the Ashburn marketplace."

With the dark fiber peering platform, USA Fiber allows its customers to connect up to 35 data centers across a single fiber pair for a flat monthly recurring fee, regardless of how many destinations are enabled on the platform.

The company's presence in the Ashburn, Va. market is likely to shake up the now-growing dark fiber market that's seen a host of emerging players come to the market such as Lightower and SummitIG , which has installed 280 miles of underground metro and 170 miles of long-haul dark fiber, for example.

For more:
- see the release

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