Metro Roundup 1-31: Axcess Ontario, Optimum Lightpath, Sidera, FiberLight

Several items last week that I didn’t get to but were worth noting in the metro fiber arena:

Axcess Ontario signed a master agreement with Iberdrola USA, under which they will supply dark fiber to Rochester Gas & Electric, hooking up 10 facilities in Ontario County, New York.  The name Axcess Ontario always confuses me as to whether it’s up in Canada, but it’s better than the company’s old mouthful of a name: Finger Lakes Regional Telecommunications Development Corp.  They’ve finished up their initial 200+ mile fiber ring now, having spent just $5.5M in the process.  The Iberdrola agreement may foreshadow further construction down the line.

Optimum Lightpath was rather quiet over the holidays, emerging with the announcement of a new contract with Budd Van Lines, a moving company based in Somerset NJ.  These days, national trucking companies of all stripes depend heavily on real time communications, and for Budd Van Lines, those T1 lines just weren’t cutting it anymore (ya think?).  So it’s on up to real bandwidth with metro Ethernet connectivity and voice services added in.

Further north, Sidera Networks unveiled a public sector deal with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.  Sidera of course has a deep presence throughout the Boston metro area, having the coverage inherited from the RCN buildout, allowing them to offer the MTBA substantial route diversity etc.  Sidera is also part of the OpenCape project up there, I looked around to see what might be up with that, but it looks like the project is still jumping through a few bureaucratic hoops yet.

And down in Virginia, FiberLight is formally unveiling its network extension down to Charlottesville this week.  The 46 mile route connects the city to the Culpeper loop FiberLight finished up last year, giving customers in the college town direct, lower latency connectivity to Ashburn and on to Washington DC.  FiberLight has been very active in this market for several years, I’d guess they have another project or two in the works as well.

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Categories: Metro fiber