Plans for My Metro Fiber and Lit Buildings List

In the next two weeks I am planning to update and enhance my metro fiber and lit buildings spreadsheet.  The purpose of the list has always been to illustrate who is out there and understand where they fit into the fiber ecosystem, and I hope that a few improvements will help with that goal.  First of all, I will add columns for average fiber count and ownership status (IRU, sheath, conduit).  Second, I intend to make the current version more generally available in a page off the top menu bar.  There are other things I’d like to do, but which seem out of reach for now.  For instance, it would be very helpful to know something about the types of buildings connected – some providers may have many small lit buildings, others may have fewer yet much larger ones.  However, there is no public information with which to analyze this and I’m not sure what information would suffice even if it were (number of tenants? square footage?) – I’m open to suggestions.

I don’t expect to have all information for all companies, the list is always a work-in-progress and I fill in what I can from both public sources and private communications.  But this time I thought I’d ask first.  If anyone out there has updated metro fiber and lit building information that they would like to get onto this list, please send it along!  I’m looking for any of the following:

• Route miles – metro only, not regional or longhaul.  I do realize there is some overlap there, but ambiguity is part of life.
• Fiber miles or average fiber count – again, metro only.  The idea is to judge potential depth since one can only splice so much.
• Lit Buildings – where buildings include the full range from carrier hotels through enterprise buildings all the way to cell towers.
• Ownership – Where in the food chain is each one:  Fiber IRUs?  Ownership of the fiber sheath?  Or everything including the conduit?  Most large companies are a mixture of course, I’m just trying to get a flavor.

The one item that everyone lists which I don’t is ‘markets served’, because the term is so poorly defined.  Does Optimum Lightpath serve one market (NYC metro area) or twenty (Long Island, Manhattan, White Plains,  Newark, etc.)  Fiberlight serves Tampa, St Petersburg, and Clearwater (amongst others) – is that one, two, or three markets?  It depends on where your viewpoint is and the numbers given by companies for markets served are often simultaneously accurate and wildly incompatible.

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Categories: Metro fiber