RCN, Cross River Align For Expansion

Yesterday in the New York City metro area, two metro fiber operators teamed up to expand their reach. RCN Business and Cross River Fiber will be leveraging each other’s assets to stretch across the Hudson River. 

Cross River Fiber has spent the last several years building out brand new dark fiber routes in northeastern New Jersey (map left), hooking up the major data centers and financial nodes. Lately they have been expanding from wholesale into key enterprise verticals.

For its part, RCN Business has a deep footprint over in Manhattan and has been looking to bring it to a wider audience. They have been looking to bring more buildings on-net and even built out a new channel program this year.

By partnering, RCN and Cross River can tackle on the bandwidth needs of clients that do business in both areas, without having to build out from scratch in what are already pretty well fibered markets. RCN Business will be able to expand into New Jersey for the first time, while Cross River Fiber will be able to add fiber connectivity to the key colo facilities and larger enterprises of New York to its portfolio.  Most of their larger competitors span the Hudson on their own, so this alliance makes a lot of sense for both companies.  So would a merger of some sort some day, for that matter.

Of course, that also means they have to share the harvest a bit.  On the other hand, Cross River’s approach has generally come from the dark fiber side of things, while RCN Business has mostly focused on lit services.  So the overlap isn’t quite as large as it might otherwise be.

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Categories: Metro fiber