FiberLight, a fiber transport company headquartered in Alpharetta, GA, announced the expansion of its growing fiber network with a new Charlotte, NC-to-Atlanta, GA route. FiberLight is establishing the new route in partnership with Flexential, a Charlotte-based colocation data center, cloud, and connectivity provider.
The Charlotte-to-Atlanta pathway adds more than 325 route-miles to FiberLight’s 17,000+ fiber route-mile network in Texas, the Southeast and mid-Atlantic markets. The new route aligns with the company’s strategic initiative to expand its lit fiber networks and build out dark fiber assets to meet the growing demand for high-bandwidth access.
“We expect to double our network over the next five years,” Bill Major, FiberLight CEO told Inside Towers at the International Telecoms Week conference this week. He added that FiberLight will build out its existing regional markets with both dark fiber and lit fiber services. He said FiberLight investors, UBS and Morrison & Co., are enthusiastic about funding the expansion.
While new routes provide an end-to-end connection between key points within a region and between regions, Major said his team looks for opportunities to offer fiber connectivity to facilities that the fiber backbone passes – towers, Enterprises, buildings with rooftop cell sites, data centers, municipal buildings.
He sees a big play for the company in wireless as the MNOs expand their networks, and require fiber backhaul at macrocells, rooftops, small cells and other structures. “We have good relations with all the wireless carriers,” Major says.
Fiber-to-the-tower with 10 Gbps connections is becoming the norm, especially for 5G deployments. Rather than providing fiber backhaul to each MNO on the tower, Major suggests that FiberLight can install a fiber terminal on the site, then sell a connection from that terminal to each wireless operator on the tower. He added that the company is striving to establish standards for fiber network design.
He acknowledged there are applications that FiberLight does not address. The company does not deploy fiber-to-the-home, nor does it offer long-haul transport on routes of 1,000 miles or more, suggesting that long-term return on investment is difficult to achieve. The other is small cells. Major says that FiberLight will provide the fiber route but prefers to let other parties install and operate the small cell nodes.
The Charlotte-Atlanta route offers customers additional resiliency and diversity and meets business specifications for faster speeds with critical high-bandwidth and low-latency. Connection speeds range from 1 Gbps to 400 Gbps for wavelength services, private Ethernet services, cloud connect, and dedicated internet access options. The company confirmed the new route is now carrying live traffic.
By John Celentano, Inside Towers Business Editor
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