More Metro Fiber: Appalachia and the Gulf Coast

January 2nd, 2010 by · 2 Comments

As I promised, I have been using the slow news cycle of the holidays to hunt down more US metro fiber maps.  Today I have rolled out two pages for areas that in internet terms are largely well off the beaten path:  Appalachia and the Gulf Coast. Neither has all that much fiber outside of a few metro areas of course and there is quite a bit that I don’t have maps for, but overall I actually found more than I expected.  

  • Appalachia:  Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.  Actually I don’t have anything for West Virginia yet, but this is where it would go if I had it.  This is KDL’s home turf, but KDL is mostly regional intercity fiber – or at least I don’t know of very dense metro rings and couldn’t find maps.  Otherwise, Nashville has a wide selection of providers, with Zayo in Memphis and TW Telecom and Level 3 touching the major metros as usual.
  • Gulf Coast: Alabama, Mississippi, and New Orleans.  That mostly means New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Birmingham, with a bit in Mobile and Jackson.  Level 3’s depth in the region comes largely from the old KMC footprint via Telcove.  Likewise TW Telecom picked up much of its fiber in the area from Xspedius.  The major independent provider is Southern Light Fiber, a company that I have yet to learn more about than is on their website.

Remaining (perhaps not for long) are the Carolinas and rural Virginia and the Rockies.  Then it will be time to look for some international targets.

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Categories: Metro fiber

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2 Comments So Far


  • Anonymous says:

    Have you heard of any providers which have actually deployed ethernet to the cell tower to support 4G?

    • Rob Powell says:

      I don’t have specific information on it, but I suspect someone must have done it for Clearwire somewhere along the way, and also for Teliasonera’s LTE over in Stockholm. However, I’d also be very interested to hear from anyone with direct experience on the subject.

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