PEG Bandwidth: Content owners, cable operators are driving demand for 100G in Tier 2 and 3 markets

PEG Bandwidth has found that demand for its fiber-based higher speed services, including its 100G service, to wholesale and business customers in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets is being driven by the sheer demand for new bandwidth.

While a number of traditional telcos and cable providers have focused on providing 100G services to large metro markets, PEG Bandwidth is finding similar demands in smaller markets like Peoria and Champaign, Ill.

The service provider recently completed a 100G route from Peoria to Chicago via Bloomington and Champaign. Along this route, it can deliver services to a number of other smaller Tier 2 communities that have never been able to get access to these services.

"I was reading an article recently about how it's hard to believe that there can be a demand for 100 Gig in Central Illinois, but you'd be amazed at folks like the content providers and the cable companies that need to connect their franchise footprints or large independent phone companies that need to get a lot of data back to the Internet," said Greg Ortyl, senior VP of sales and marketing for PEG Bandwidth, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We feel like it's a niche that is underserved and that's our mantra of bringing high speed connectivity to small markets and connecting them back to the larger markets where they can hit the Internet drains."

Ortyl added that it plans on announcing similar 100G builds in the coming months.

However, he could not reveal what markets would be the first to get these capabilities.

"In the future, we're planning on having 100G rails across most of our network in the coming months," Ortyl said. "You'll continue to see the progression of that 100 Gig system deployment as we roll it live and make it available to our customers."

Similar to other emerging competitive providers like Tower Cloud PEG has continued to enhance its reach into a number of new customer segments.

Initially founded launched as a wireless backhaul provider, a segment whose bandwidth demands continue to rise, has been seeing its overall wholesale revenues continue to rise. In particular, it is seeing growing interest from a host of cable operators, ILECs and data center providers whose thirst for fiber has grown due to the rise of cloud services.

Today, the main requirements from smaller providers and businesses tend to be between 1 Gbps Ethernet and 10 Gbps wavelengths, while 100G demand is from large cable operators and content providers.

"We started as a backhaul company and have begun to morph into more of a full service carrier and our wholesale business has grown tremendously throughout 2015 and we have some aspirations for 2016," Ortyl said. "We're making great progress with some of the regional ILECs, the cable companies and data centers and expect to see the growth and upgrade our network from 10G to 100G as we see the demand."

Despite branching into new market segments, the service provider continues to see bandwidth demands rise in its traditional wireless backhaul business.

The ongoing rollout of 4G LTE continues to drive a number of its wireless customers to ask for higher bandwidth speeds.

"We're seeing tremendous uptick in bandwidth upgrades from our wireless customers," Ortyl said. "Just their bandwidth increasing from 100 Mbps to 200, 400 and 500 Mbps has resulted in us having to upgrade our core backbone and that's what's driving these 100G rails."

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