Aside from the NTELOS/FiberNet deal, there were several other interesting news items from companies with a substantial metro fiber orientation:
Optimum Lightpath, the metro fiber division of Cablevision, has now established a connection with CENX’s Carrier Ethernet Exchange. To the equation they bring some 4000 route miles of fiber connecting some 4000 lit buildings to date throughout the New York City metropolitan area. CENX boasts some 10M+ Ethernet Service Locations that can be accessed via its exchange, however I believe it is those directly connected by fiber that represent the most valuable to its development as a nexus.
US Signal is expanding deeper into the Ohio marketplace. The midwestern regional fiber operator is bringing its virtual Ethernet services into Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Dayton. Last fall they added about a thousand route miles of longhaul fiber to connect up major markets in the state, and they have also been moving to activate metro dark fiber loops as well.
Over in Europe, euNetworks has been named a supplier of connectivity for NYSE EuroNext’s SFTI Access Centres. The small European metro fiber operator has been quite aggressive in its approaches to low latency sensitive financial players. Their intercity footprint is well positioned for such business, lying largely between London and Frankfurt while hitting all the major markets in between.
And XO has introduced a new tool to estimate the savings that enterprises could achieve by utilizing their XO Enterprise SIP product, which enables customers to centralize and streamline multi-location voice networks. The tool factors in details that include the number of employees, network locations and intra-company long distance calls.
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Categories: Low Latency · Metro fiber · VoIP
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Interestingly, ConnectedPlanet quotes Nan Chen as saying Optimum Lightpath is a buyer as much as a seller of services through the exchange. Hmmmm
http://connectedplanetonline.com/IP-NGN/news/optimum-lightpath-cenx-072010/
Upon first reading this article yesterday it took me a moment to only begin to grasp its implications. Unless I’m all wet and totally misreading this article, the buying function places the exchange (or some other entity) in the position of a discriminating broker, taking its role beyond the rudimentary function of an Ethernet data interchange to the station of a market “specialist” category of the type we now have on the stock exchange floors, unless such capabilities are automated and performed dynamically at some point on the fly. Latency, jitter, dropped data frames/packets, etc., will need to be published by participants, and made accessible either publicly or on a blind intermediary basis, which means that participants who want to have any skin in this game may be required to disclose their actual performance capabilities, which is the kind of information that is usually held very closely, which would make complying appear anathema to most operators under ordinary situations. It will be interesting to see who plays, who balks, who brokers, and the implications of all of the above. Thoughts?
frank@fttx.org
Taking the metaphor a step further, one can already begin to see how the evolution of this space will include employing protocols in intermediate nodes such as BGP4, OSPF, IS-IS, etc., which are now commonly used at Layer 3, intermediating the role of specialized brokers for assessing route selections based on network ‘costs’ of all types, thus further opening the door for transit and backbone players, etc., relegating the original notion of existing exchanges to private peering points. I second your ‘Hmmmm”.
Correction: make that “disintermediating” the role of brokers, not intermediating. Rob, you need to incorporate a post-editor here for those of us who type ahead of ourselves 😉