AboveNet Invests In Seattle Expansion

National metro operator abvt has been expanding on multiple fronts for a few years now, and today they announced further investments in the Seattle metropolitan area.  AboveNet already has some 250 miles of fiber in Seattle, from Everett in the north to Tacoma in the south – as pictured below.  As part of this new investment, they will build a new direct route between downtown Seattle and the Sabey data center in Tukwila that will offer lower latency routes than currently available.   It will also extend to the new American Life data center, which I presume is this one.

Thus we see the low latency theme continuing to spread further afield from the Chicago-NY-London-Frankfurt axis.  This particular move is actually quite similar to last month’s Chicago expansion, in which AboveNet also put money into lower latency routes from downtown to the western suburbs. Only recently have these nanoseconds mattered enough that the optimal design of metro loops has changed materially, and AboveNet obviously intends to change with it.

They are also, of course, in the process of entering the new markets of Miami, Denver, Toronto, and several in continental Europe, and are returning a pile of cash to shareholders in a special dividend.  It must be nice to have enough cash flow to do all this with, eh?  Just over a week ago, I posted this Q&A with AboveNet’s CEO Bill LaPerch touching on much of this.

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Categories: Low Latency · Metro fiber