USA Fiber has established an interconnection agreement for its core fiber with Montgomery County, Md., and its FiberNet network, deepening its presence in buildings and fiber miles throughout the state.
Both FiberNet and USA Fiber will gain benefits from this agreement.
By interconnecting its new Ashburn, Va., to Baltimore core fiber route to FiberNet, USA Fiber will get access to over 450 buildings in Montgomery County and FiberNet's network, which consists of about 570 route miles, including 130 miles that are underground.
Having already built out fiber to key buildings and campuses in the county, FiberNet will be connected by to USA Fiber's route that it under construction. The two service providers said that this agreement will foster a number of new research, workforce development and technology growth opportunities for Montgomery County-based local education and agencies.
Montgomery County's move to interconnect its fiber network with USA Fiber is part of the ultraMontgomery program, a key element of County Executive Ike Leggett's Six-Point Economic plan.
As part of its ultraMontgomery program, Montgomery County will connect fiber constructed with federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grant funding to USA Fiber to provide economic development opportunities for Montgomery County and its businesses.
Access to dark fiber is only one element that FiberNet's customers can use.
Existing and new FiberNet clients will be able to connect into nearly 35 area data centers, all of Ashburn's cloud platforms, and hundreds of service providers. In addition, the agreement provides the county's federal agencies that are looking for shorter, lower latency, direct connections to Ashburn data centers a great alternative for disaster recovery and cloud first initiatives.
While the interest in dark fiber has prompted a number of new players to emerge, USA Fiber says what sets it apart is its approach.
Judd Carothers, president of USA Fiber, told FierceTelecom that by bypassing the crowded Washington, D.C., network path by crossing the Potomac River underground it can reduce network latency on data traffic coming out of Ashburn that's destined for locations in Maryland and northward.
"From a security perspective and the ability to create robust inventory perspective, that allows us to future proof the crossing," Carothers said. "Our crossing is the most direct route into Montgomery County, into Silver Springs, and into Baltimore as opposed to traditional routes that were part of the initial deployments in the late 1990s with traditional 160 high fiber count, fiber light networks."
Carothers added that it allows it customers scale their network facilities that are dedicated to their own unique needs.
"We create a 100 percent, unique, diverse, secure, and fiber-rich low latency crossing to enable all of the consumers in Maryland direct connectivity into one of 35 destinations in Ashburn," Carothers said. "We allow people to scale on their terms because we're providing a true medium and they get the dark fiber from any of their head ends in Maryland directly into Ashburn without using any shared or optical backbone other than their own network."
For more:
- see the release
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