Lumos adds Dept. of Energy’s Jefferson Lab as customer on Hampton Roads-Norfolk fiber route

Lumos Networks is seeing significant uptake by enterprises of its latest mid-Atlantic fiber route, Norfolk/Hampton Roads, Virginia: the route contributed 20 percent of direct new sales in the first half of 2016. And new customers are continuing to come aboard, with Jefferson Lab, a Dept. of Energy research facility, signing on.

Jefferson Lab chose Lumos to provide diverse connectivity for the facility that guards against network outages. According to the lab’s network manager, Bryan Hess, because over 1,500 scientists worldwide need access to the lab to conduct research of the atom’s nucleus, “We needed additional high-speed internet connectivity to ensure our facility is accessible even during planned or unplanned outages of our primary link. Lumos Networks provided a diverse physical path for that service.”

With the Virginia area market continuing to be a hotbed for both fiber-based network routes and data center activity, Lumos has sped along with its latest buildout. The provider recently completed this 270-route mile dense fiber build in the Norfolk/Hampton Roads market as part of a larger, 822-route mile expansion in the state.

The 822-mile buildout, underpinned by a fiber-to-the-cell site (FTTC) contract with a major, unnamed wireless operator, began in November 2015 and was completed this spring, several months ahead of schedule, underscoring the importance of network builds in the area.

Lumos connected the first data center, EdgeConneX, to the Norfolk/Hampton Roads route in April. The provider also said at the time that the route would help increase its enterprise addressable market by $135 million, an increase of 60 percent versus its core markets.

The route is part of Lumos’ overall ambition to become a go-to provider in the Virginia market.  "A key attribute of our strategy is selling Enterprise on top of our fiber-to-the-cell networks, and we are executing on this real-time," CEO Tim Biltz said in March.

And the company sees more opportunity down the road. “We see strong end market demand trends from both of our Enterprise channels: Enterprise direct and Carrier End User, which is our wholesale partnership program,” Biltz said in a release Tuesday. “Our sales force has benefited from activity across many of our key industry verticals, including data centers, healthcare, government, education, media and financials. We are also excited about the potential demand activity generated from multiple undersea cables that are expected to land in Virginia Beach, within a half mile of our network, over the next 18 months.”

For more:
- see the release

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