Zayo is ramping up its regional fiber network buildout play, announcing that it plans to extend its long haul dark fiber network between Salt Lake City and Sacramento.
Upon completion, Zayo will add over 800 route miles to its long haul network, which currently spans more than 16,000 route miles across the United States and Europe. The project is currently under construction and is set to be completed in the fourth quarter.
This latest network expansion will serve as a complement to Zayo's existing long haul network and will provide additional connectivity between major West Coast data center markets, such as Los Angeles, Seattle and the Bay Area, and other data center markets throughout the U.S.
Over this network route, Zayo will offer its suite of dark fiber, wavelengths, Ethernet and IP services.
Building this route reflects Zayo's focus on constructing regional networks that address new customer opportunities in specific markets. In December, Zayo conducted a similar buildout between Omaha, Neb., and Dallas, where it added a 1,000-mile intercity dark fiber route, passing through Tulsa and Kansas City.
The Omaha-to-Dallas build was helped by Zayo's previous acquisition of FiberLink in 2013, a deal that gave the service provider an additional 1,200 route miles that stretched from downtown Chicago through Des Moines and Omaha to downtown Denver.
While Zayo has been aggressively building out long-haul fiber routes, Robert Powell, founder, chief editor and CTO of Telecom Ramblings, observed that builds like Salt Lake City to Sacramento reflect the idea that service providers are addressing actual customer needs versus the speculative buildouts that took place in the 1990s.
"The market's fear of building longhaul fiber has been dissipating over the past couple of years, although nobody is even remotely thinking about the sort of national fiber blitzes we saw in the late 90s," Powell wrote. "What we're seeing now is specific routes targeting specific needs and driven by immediate and measurable demand — healthy stuff at last."
For more:
- see the release
- Telecom Ramblings has this post
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