Sidera Takes the Western Road to Ashburn For RagingWire

Data Center operator RagingWire has selected sidera to provide fiber connectivity to its new 140,000 square foot facility in Ashburn. RagingWire leased the space last May, expanding from its base in Sacramento which now features some 470,000 square feet. A key selling point for Sidera’s bid was its extra network diversity on the route between Ashburn and the New York metro area, which manages to offer bypass routes around the key regions of fiber congestion in both cities.

Sidera’s Washington DC bypass route derives from the former Columbia Transcom build that runs along utility rights of way fifty miles or more to the west of the usual I-95 corridor on the way toward new York. This fiber asset has traded hands frequently since its birth during the bubble. It was bought back in 2003 by NEON, which in turn was bought by Globix, which later turned back into NEON, then wound up being purchased by RCN and was of course spun off as part of Sidera when ABRY bought RCN. It’s nice to see it finally being put to good use.

But the old Transcom build didn’t go all the way to Ashburn, just to Rockville on the Maryland side of the Potomac.  After all, back in ’99 Ashburn was mostly trees.  Sidera is just now building a brand new extension that brings it all the way into Ashburn from the west, giving it a fully unique path on one of the most critical intercity routes of the global internet. It won’t just be RagingWire that will appreciate that opportunity for route diversity.

Sidera recently also brought fiber into Dupont Fabros’s new ACC6 facility nearby, and with Clint Heiden now driving its strategy the company is clearly on the move in northern Virginia. Elsewhere too probably, we shall see.

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Categories: Datacenter · Metro fiber