WOW! Business is expanding its presence in the Chicago area by extending its fiber network into ByteGrid's Aurora, Ill., data center, giving its customers access to new colocation, data center and hosting capabilities.
Through this agreement, WOW! Business will establish a network point of presence (POP) in ByteGrid's highly-secure Aurora data center to service the Chicagoland area. The new POP will be connected to the WOW! network with a 480-count fiber.
This pact has benefits for ByteGrid and WOW! Business. ByteGrid's customers will be able to access WOW! Business services, while WOW! Business customers will be able to take advantage of ByteGrid's colocation hosting, data center and physical IT infrastructure solutions through its IT infrastructure ecosystem.
Another key element of this agreement is access to fiber facilities.
WOW! Business' recent purchase of fiber conduit in downtown Chicago's central business district will connect WOW! Business and ByteGrid to 38 buildings, providing access to thousands of business tenants. Under its plan, the service provider will fill about a one-mile length of empty fiber conduit with a 432-count fiber-optic cable.
Working in tandem with WOW! Business' sales team, Byte Grid can market their products at each of WOW! Business' on-net fiber buildings. Likewise, WOW! Business will be able to sell their customers a Tier 3 data center services.
"WOW! has a lot of buildings on net in the Western suburbs along the I-88 corridor, particularly in Naperville and Aurora where we are located and they're also making a big push in Chicago," said Bill Winsininski, Director of Midwest sales for Bytegrid, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "This strategic partnership has given way to a whole new host of products and services that we can offer our mutual customers."
Out of this data center in Aurora, ByteGrid offers a host of wholesale solutions, including rack space and cabinet space to megawatt solutions for the enterprise.
Winsininski said that ByteGrid will offer its existing and new customers in the Chicago and Aurora area a host of traditional data center and managed fiber-based services.
"The goal is to offer a blend for our customers in the retail side and also DIA services and other services that they can go directly to a carrier and cross connect to a meet me room," Winsininski said. "Larger deals come with an incumbent or who they dictate to us who they want to work with and we work with the carriers to provide direct fiber access or point-to-point connections or redundant paths."
One of the other benefits of this new pact is that WOW! could become a Disaster Recovery (DR) and data network replication element for ByteGrid's clients.
"WOW! Business brings low latency and diverse fiber paths to interconnect Chicago customers that were looking for Disaster Recovery and replication-type solutions," Winsininski said.
Tenants in these buildings will be able to access WOW! Business' network, voice and data services and ByteGrid's IT infrastructure and data center.
While service providers connecting their fiber into data center facilities is not new, such agreements are essential for competitive providers like WOW! Business and ByteGrid as they compete against larger incumbent players like AT&T (NYSE: T) and Comcast Business (NASDAQ: CMCSA).
For more:
- see the release
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This article was updated on April 9 with additional information from ByteGrid.