Allied Fiber launches ambitious plan for carrier-neutral network

Allied Fiber today announced an ambitious plan for creating a neutral nationwide dark fiber and co-location network.

The network is envisioned to have several unique features that could help address a range of telecom industry needs, said Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber. The two-year-old company’s plan calls for providing increased capacity for cell towers, enabling international carriers passing through the U.S. to avoid congested traffic exchange points, minimizing the distance between network access points and rural service providers, and creating new low-latency routes between New York and Chicago.

“What we’re doing has not been done before,” Newby said.

One innovative aspect of the company’s plan is to install a long-haul fiber duct with 432 fibers next to a short-haul duct system with 216 fibers. Every 60 miles along the route Allied Fiber plans to install neutral co-location facilities.

Newby explained what would happen in the case of a rural carrier seeking connectivity to a high-speed data backbone. The carrier, he said, would “build a trench of the shortest distance possible to our short-haul duct and we will cut the duct and insert a hand-hold box and do a fusion splice between their local fiber and our short-haul fiber.”

From there the small carrier’s traffic would travel to Allied Fiber’s nearest co-location point, which would normally be no more than about 30 miles away, where the small carrier would be able to connect with a nationwide backbone operator. A similar approach could also be used to provide connectivity to remote cell towers. All connections will be sold as dark fiber to other carriers, which will be responsible for lighting the fiber. Carriers will be able to install their own transport equipment, excluding servers, in Allied Fiber’s co-location facilities.

Allied Fiber’s long-term goal is to construct a network that would ring the U.S. using rights of way owned by Norfolk Southern Railway. Construction of the first phase -- linking New York, Chicago and Ashburn, Va. -- is already underway at a cost of approximately $140 million.

Newby referred to the first phase of the network as a “template” for what the company wants to achieve nationwide. “We will build subsequent phases built on the cash flow of this [phase,]” Newby said. “The demand will come from the market saying, ‘We want this here or here.’”

Newby expects demand to be strong because although lit and managed fiber services are widely available, he said no one is offering dark fiber today. He also believes the Allied Fiber network architecture, with the closely spaced co-location facilities, will have strong appeal to backbone providers, which will see it as a way of generating revenue from remote regions. “They will already have optical equipment in our meet-me rooms and can easily do a drop and peel off 10 gig,” he said.

Meanwhile, Allied Fiber hopes to lure international carriers passing through the U.S. by interconnecting submarine cable landing points along the East and West coasts, thereby adding a higher level of reliability by bypassing potential points of failure in carrier hotels.