Southern Telecom to build 75-mile dark fiber route for wireless operators, carrier hotels

Southern Telecom is on the network expansion trail again, announcing an agreement with Georgia Transmission Corp. to build a 75-mile dark fiber route between Winder and Hartwell, Ga.

Upon completion, the new route will give its growing list of carrier and enterprise customers another option for dark fiber services.

Southern Telecom has built out a 1,400 route mile dark fiber network serving the Southeast portion of the United States.

By building this new route in Northeast Georgia, Southern Telecom will be able to complement the service provider's existing carrier-neutral colocation sites and open access to dark fiber infrastructure in Alabama, Georgia and Florida that it built over the last 18 years.  

The new route will give it further metro network density to reach a wider array of carrier hotels, wireless towers, and enterprise customers in the central business districts of Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., Jacksonville, Fla., and Macon, Ga.

As a subsidiary of Southern Company, Southern Telecom has some potential advantages over new dark fiber provider entrants in the Southeast. In addition to providing dark and lit fiber services, Southern Telecom can offer customers other necessary network elements such as rights-of-way, dark fiber, conduit, colocation and other related maintenance services.

Atlanta is a major business and Internet hub, and competition for dark and lit fiber services has grown in recent years. So Southern Telecom is hardly alone in providing these services.

Southern Telecom will continue to face off with a number of other aggressive fiber providers, including Southern Light, which began building a 1,650 mile dark fiber network in December 2015 to connect 446 wireless tower sites in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida for an unnamed service provider customer. 

For more:
- see the release

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Southern Light sees dark fiber opportunities for small cell, macro cell backhaul applications
Southern Light to build 1,650 mile dark fiber network