My Two Cents on Dark Fiber in Tier 2 Cities

Fibertech is a dark fiber and lit service provider that has network in tier 2 cities east of the Mississippi.  They have eixisting network assets in Buffalo, Rochester, Binghamton, Syracuse, White Plains and Albany New York, a large footprint in Connecticut, Providence, RI and several cities in the Mid West.  More information on existing Fibertech networks can be found at www.fibertech.com.

 

Where Fibertech differentiates themselves from the rest of the pack is in their ability to custom build a network and lease it back to their customers.  This is great for enterprise customers that do not sit directly on a fiber carrier’s backbone but still want to utilize dark fiber.  For example a customer that is looking to connect a headquarters location to a datacenter. The headquarters location is 2 miles from existing fiber backbone.  From that point there is existing fiber to that connects to the datacenter.  Fibertech will build the 2 mile section and lease it back to the customer. This avoids the large capital costs required to build the lateral connection by rolling the cost into a monthly lease price. 

 

Fibertech is in the process of rolling out lit services in select markets.  The unique part about Fibertech’s offerings is that they do not utilize the local exchange carrier to provider service.  Similar to Abovenet, Fibertech utilizes their own fiber network from end to end and offers a fixed rate pricing schedule for near-net buildings.  The pricing schedule, which is very market competitive, provides a fixed price for service based on distance from network.

 

Personally I enjoy working with Fibertech.  They are a small enough company where you can get a decision back quickly on new custom builds but large enough to accept a fair amount of risk.  They will provide a budgetary price within a couple of days and tend to be less expensive when they come back with a firm number.  I have used Fibertech to custom build end to solutions, build laterals to connect to other provider’s networks and also to lease existing fiber in tier 2 metro areas.