Zayo lights Northeastern ‘express lane’

Zayo Bandwidth has stitched together networks from three different acquisitions to light a new optical network in the Northeast that the company claims will offer lower latency because it takes an especially direct route.

Zayo plans to light the new network, connecting Chicago, New York and Washington DC, this summer. The network includes two routes: a 100 Gb/s direct connection between the three cities, and a separate 100-Gb/s network that makes stops in other markets along the way.

“One set of routes is a milk-run route, which picks up tertiary cities, and the second set is a true express route,” said John Scarano, Zayo’s cofounder and chief operating officer.

Zayo plans to light the Chicago-to-New York segment in June and start selling wholesale and retail transport services over it the same month. By the end of August, the company plans to double the capacity of its existing 400-Gb/s link between New York and Washington DC, with half of the new 800-Gb/s capacity devoted to the “express” route, and the other half to the “milk run.”

“We’ve established one of the shortest point-to-point routes -- Chicago to New York, Chicago to DC -- that are physically installed in the ground,” Scarano said.

The express route, which comprises roughly 200 linear miles of fiber, including slack coils, is perhaps 10% to 20% shorter than average routes between these cities, Zayo said. And the shorter distance could reduce latency by 2 to 5 milliseconds, Zayo said, which is why financial services firms have expressed interest in it.

“That’s huge when you’re about to hit ‘Enter’ on your computer to effect a sale or purchase transaction of stock or other equities,” Scarano said.

Zayo constructed the new routes by combining the networks of three companies it acquired last year: CityNet Fiber Services, Indiana Fiber Works and PPL Telecom (a Pennsylvania utility subsidiary). The company, which made its public launch only last year, has been racking up numerous fiber network assets around the country in a bid to serve the network transport needs of mainly second- and third-tier markets.

To light the new Northeastern routes, Zayo is using optical equipment from Infinera, which it has already deployed elsewhere and which was already deployed in two of the three networks Zayo combined to form the new routes -- CityNet and PPL Telecom.

Zayo also plans to keep using Infinera gear to expand throughout New Jersey, West Virginia, Tennessee and Indiana in the third quarter.