U.S. dark fiber provider Bandwidth Infrastructure Group is looking to solve a specific set of problems for customers in three key data center markets, offering up a freshly built set of assets designed to deliver lower latency and less loss than legacy networks.
Bandwidth IG got its start in June of 2019 and is still a pretty small company, with a team of just over 20 employees and less than 100 customers. It has metro assets in San Francisco, Portland and Atlanta, and serves both data center operators and the customers who occupy those spaces, including hyperscalers and other enterprise clients. Bandwidth is majority owned by private equity firm Columbia Capital, though SDC Capital Partners acquired a minority interest in late 2020.
The company is led by CEO James Nolte, who previously served as VP of sales for AGL Networks from 2004 until the company was acquired by Zayo Group in 2010. After that, he was SVP of sales for Zayo until April 2016. He told Fierce he was lured out of retirement by members of a private equity firm who approached him about tackling a new opportunity in the dark fiber space.
According to Nolte, Bandwidth’s main competitor across the markets it serves is Zayo, though the likes of Windstream and Astound Broadband also serve Portland. While he said it’s not looking to take on Zayo directly, it is interested in serving customers in the data center space who aren’t having their needs met by existing providers. Nolte pointed to signal loss and latency as two key problems it is trying to solve for clients.
“Signal loss and latency has been a problem that customers that we’re doing business with have noted is drastically different between the Zayo Network and our network,” he stated. “Signal loss is a problem for digital enterprises because the higher the signal loss, the lower the bandwidth across those fibers.”
He continued: “The issue that people are facing in those data centers is that they’re trying to leverage network that was placed about 20-plus years ago for far different use cases, and as a result of those use cases they’ve been experiencing a problem with network integrity.” By contrast, Nolte said Bandwidth’s network has been purpose-built to run as direct a path as possible between data centers to slash latency. And because it’s not trying to serve multiple use cases there’s less splicing in the network, which means there’s lower signal loss.
The cables Bandwidth has already placed in the ground have 1,728 fibers in them but Nolte said it also has additional conduit in every market it serves which can be used to pull additional cables as needed at “relatively low incremental expense to us.”
As a private company, Bandwidth doesn’t disclose financial metrics. However, Nolte said Bandwidth has been doubling its revenue every year since 2019 and expects that trend to continue. He added it has its eye on capturing potentially explosive growth from the rise of virtual reality services and the so-called “metaverse.”
“We see nothing but blue skies,” he stated. “If that [the metaverse] in the next five years does begin to come to pass…the amount of bandwidth that’ll be consumed is going to be exponentially higher than what we’ve got going on today. So we just see a lot of runway for this business.”