-
Uniti will construct 70 new route miles of dark fiber in Huntsville, Alabama
-
The dark fiber is for an unnamed hyperscaler customer, someone who’s “heavily involved” in genAI
-
Uniti exec Greg Ortyl said the company is helping that customer connect key data center locations in the Huntsville metro and beyond
Uniti is cooking up a network expansion in the southeast U.S., and dark fiber is on the menu.
The company announced plans to construct 70 new route miles of fiber in Huntsville, Alabama – an expansion that will support a recently-signed 20-year contract with one of Uniti’s “strategic hyperscale customers.”
Once the expansion’s complete, Uniti will own 190 route miles of dark and lit infrastructure within the Huntsville market.
Greg Ortyl, president of wholesale and strategic accounts at Uniti, said he can’t disclose the name of the customer but noted it’s “one of the biggest hyperscalers in the marketplace…someone that is heavily involved in generative AI and needs the infrastructure to support that.”
If we had to guess, a quick Google search showed Meta operates a hyperscale data center in the city. Meta is a well-known player in the generative AI space thanks to its series of Llama large language models.
Uniti employs a lease-up fiber strategy, a model in which anchor tenants on its network yield a small percent on an initial basis, and then the company can lease to multiple tenants on each route for a higher yield.
In addition to offering wholesale dark fiber, Uniti sells other wholesale services like wavelengths, Ethernet and IP transit as well as enterprise services such as internet, managed networking and colocation.
Ortyl told Fierce Network Uniti is only delivering dark fiber to its customer, but the plan is to sell both lit and dark fiber in the Huntsville market, one of Uniti’s existing 30 enterprise markets.
Uniti is helping its hyperscale customer “connect key data center locations” in the Huntsville metro area, but it intends to go beyond that.
“The way that this hyperscale customer is designing its metro fiber infrastructure is that if and when they decide to deploy more data centers in the market, they can leverage that metro infrastructure to connect the new locations,” Ortyl said. “And further, the rings that we’re building there will allow them to intercept long-haul routes coming into the market.”
The long-haul routes would connect “all the large data center markets,” like Atlanta and Dallas. They’d also provide “diversity to smaller markets that connect and provide ring topology back to those larger markets.”
He added most hyperscalers typically look for three to five (or even more) long-haul paths out of a market.
History in Huntsville
Uniti first set up shop in Huntsville in 2007. At the time, the company acquired a federal government customer, and over the years it expanded its customer base in the city to include school districts, wireless carriers and even “a large biotech company.”
Huntsville “really is a great microcosm of our lease up strategy,” Ortyl said. And it helps having a local presence there for almost two decades.
“We acquired this first customer, we built some fiber to connect locations for that customer. And then we were able to light that fiber and start selling to other customers near that fiber we had built,” he said. “And slowly, organically over several years [we built] a larger, broader fiber network in the market.”
Hunger for dark fiber
Unsurprisingly, dark fiber and conduit are the products most in demand from hyperscalers, Ortyl said, given their need for fiber capacity.
However, as overall bandwidth usage increases, Uniti is finding more of its other customers seeking dark fiber. How much dark fiber they need depends on the industry.
“Typically if we’re selling dark fiber to a school district, it’s two, four maybe eight strands of fiber, whereas if you’re selling it to a wireless carrier, it’s typically you know 12 [strands],” he explained. “And if you’re selling to a hyperscaler, you’re well beyond that.”
So, as Uniti designs its dark fiber networks and deploys them, it needs to make sure it has enough strand count in its inventory to market to the various segments.
“Not just now and in five years, but 10 years from now,” Ortyl concluded.