CenturyLink may have sold off its data center business, but a new deal to establish a fiber connection to TerraCom’s primary location in Melbourne, Florida, shows that the telco continues to make a dent in the burgeoning data center interconnection business.
TerraCom’s facility is now directly connected to CenturyLink's 250,000-route-mile U.S. fiber network and 360,000-route-mile international transport network.
By building fiber into the data center’s meet-me room, TerraCom’s customers can get access to CenturyLink’s array of MPLS (multiprotocol label switching), optical wave services, Ethernet and/or other IP services to access the telco’s broader network.
Frank Huston, president of TerraCom Direct, said in a release that regardless of whether a customer has "local, national or global connectivity needs, we are capable of reaching virtually anywhere now that we are on CenturyLink's network.”
Driving network, service diversity
Now that this agreement is in place, TerraCom’s customers can get speeds from 100 Mbps up to 100 Gbps with direct fiber connections from TerraCom's Melbourne campus to a CenturyLink Point of Presence. Additionally, local-loop access charges are eliminated for the customer.
This fiber connection enables businesses to more easily access other TerraCom and CenturyLink solutions, including TerraCom Direct Cloud Solutions, the CenturyLink Cloud platform, or other business continuity and disaster recovery services.
CenturyLink's fiber connectivity into TerraCom’s facilities in Melbourne gives business customers a new gateway to connect with the many on-net CenturyLink data centers, service providers and business locations, enabling customers to implement a hybrid virtual and on-premise IT asset strategy.
Data center interconnection interest grows
While it may seem like a small deal to connect fiber to just one key facility, the agreement with TerraCom represents the broader fiber data center interconnection trend.
The telco is also seeing the data center interconnection agreements being driven by customer demand. CenturyLink told FierceTelecom in a previous interview that its cloud customers are asking for five to 10 different providers. This means that the telco has to be able to connect to various centers that support these services.
CenturyLink itself has been actively connecting data centers in recent years. Since 2012, the service provider has been extending more of its existing fiber network to a host of data center providers in its wireline territory.
Besides TerraCom, CenturyLink had previously established an agreement with CyrusOne to connect five of its data centers with its fiber network. The telco has connected CyrusOne's Austin III, downtown Cincinnati, Houston West III, San Antonio II and Sterling, Virginia, data centers.
In late 2015, the service provider announced it had connected its fiber network to a total of 300 third-party data centers.
Once CenturyLink completes its acquisition of Level 3 next year, the number of data centers it can connect into via a broader network will continue to expand.