Wave Broadband has completed its fiber network backbone upgrade, connecting the San Francisco Bay Area to its three area data centers with 100G circuit support. This expansion makes the competitive provider a bigger threat to established data center players like Equinix as well as fiber-centric providers like Zayo.
By completing these updates, customers that need data center connectivity and hosting services have a new local carrier option via Wave’s data centers in Mountain View, Santa Clara and San Francisco, all of which support the surrounding Bay Area.
Derrick Hofmann, VP of data center services at Wave, told FierceTelecom that the data center business segment is becoming a bigger factor in the company’s business and wholesale units.
Hofman added that being able to provide a bundle of connectivity and colocation facilities will set it apart from other players.
“In Silicon Valley, the pace at which people move is so fast is that they rely on partnerships to deliver both the infrastructure and the network side of the business,” Hofmann said. “They are looking for that extra bit of service because the performance of the network and peering is really a driver for where they want to put their infrastructure, especially as things move to cloud-based services or even hybrid cloud environments.”
Already, the expansion is bearing customer fruit. Ones and Zeros Consulting, said that the “proximity of Mountain View makes it effortless to get to the servers when needed.”
100G is key
A key element of the network expansion for Wave and its customers is that the new network facilities can support multiple 100G circuits, a key requirement for business and cloud-centric companies that Wave counts as customers.
The service provider has been seeing a host of startups, application developers, retailers and SaaS providers purchasing its services.
“By combining Wave’s 100G backbone network infrastructure with the colocation service, we’re able to deliver sophisticated networking capacity,” Hofmann said. “We provide services to startups, financial, medical, cloud and software as a service companies and having a network that can provide the IP transit out to the internet with high performance is really important.”
Hofmann added that “100G backbone deployment that Wave has made in the Bay Area has helped facilitate that performance everyone is looking for,” Hofmann said.
Besides providing wholesale bandwidth and data center access, Wave has been ramping up its IP transit business. In all, Wave is connected to 65-70 data center providers on the West Coast.
“Being able to provide the data center IP transit and the data center to data center capacity is something we’re seeing huge uptick,” Hofmann said. “We have customers that are with other large competitors like Equinix or Digital Realty, but they’re also hosted with us and they like to have that direct data center to data center connectivity to keep their database and applications in synch.”
Focus on redundancy
As Wave enhances its fiber network, the service provider has focused on providing network redundancy. This initiative is taking place on multiple levels: powering, network and diverse paths into and out of buildings.
Having these elements in its data center facilities is a checklist item to even be considered as a provider for health care and financial companies to help them comply with SOC 2 and HIPAA.
“Everything that we build is done in a redundant fashion, whether it’s at the data center level and diverse paths out of the building,” Hofmann said. “We see a lot of companies that provide colocation that’s not truly colocation in the sense that it’s more of you can put some servers in our PoP.”
The same thing goes for the network side, where it must accommodate customers that either buy connectivity from Wave or other providers it hosts at its data center facilities.
“We’re able to provide customers with redundancy throughout the infrastructure,” Hofmann said. “We also have customers that want connectivity to other providers so having that redundancy as a carrier neutral facility provider.”