USA Fiber has established a new dark fiber route connecting the coveted Ashburn, Va.-to-Baltimore route by crossing the Potomac River, bypassing the crowded Washington, D.C., network path.
Set to go live for service next year, this fiber build poses a number of challenges as it requires the construction crew to bore under the Potomac River.
Upon completion, the dark fiber platform will cross the Potomac River at an unnamed right of way easement between Virginia and Maryland, enabling it reduce network latency on data traffic coming out of Ashburn that's destined for destinations in Maryland and northward.
Among the many destinations of this route are Max GigAPoP, civilian federal agency campuses in Maryland, and key sites for the Defense department and intelligence community, as well as traffic going to key financial centers including New York City.
"We are focused on placing new high count (multiple 864 count cables) in the market where there is real scale, latency and performance challenges," said Jeremy Latimer, VP of sales for USA Fiber, in an e-mail to FierceTelecom. "Our new route goes north out of Ashburn and is a bold build under the Potomac which has not been done in a very long time and never in the path we have secured."
USA Fiber said that this new route would be ideal for four main use cases: clients that need diversity and require bypassing Washington, D.C.; customers that need to refresh fiber infrastructure coming to end of life to maintain and grow the network for clients; the need to scale for future application requirements; and the need by clients to improve latency to create advantage for their platform or improve application performance.
But this is not a speculative build. The service provider said that it is currently working with a number of anchor tenants and has opened access to the route in a carrier neutral platform to allow existing federal contract holders to provide a new route for their customers.
Any client that resides in the Ashburn data center will be allowed to access this route, including a number of key Tier 1 telco and data center providers such as Equinix, Digital Realty, AT&T (NYSE: T), CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) and Dupont Fabros.
For more:
- see the release
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