Cogent and Looking Glass ink $10 million dark fiber deal

In spite of a lackluster dark fiber market, Cogent Communications and metro data transport provider Looking Glass Networks are still plodding along. Today, provider Looking Glass revealed that it won a $10 million contract to build dark fiber networks that will be lit by Cogent in nine metro markets. Looking Glass will also provide laterals to buildings in those nine cities. (see Looking Glass CFO proclaims financial health, Aug 13, 2002).

“A lot of the current interest in dark fiber is driven by storage and Ethernet applications,” said Lynn Refer, CEO of Looking Glass. And according to Refer, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to sell into in the carrier space.

The deal announced today isn’t the first between the two companies. Cogent’s original contract with Looking Glass was signed in December of 2001, and this contract expands upon that.

For Looking Glass, signing an anchor customer creates a symbiotic relationship. In the provider’s Dallas expansion, for example, a couple dark fiber customers helped fund the build. “That way we are spending capital for a good reason,” Refer said.

The nine cities involved in the contract expansion are Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Looking Glass has won deals with a number of providers including Allegiance Telecom, AOL, Cogent, Equant, France Telecom, Verio NTT, Universal Access, and Williams Communications. It is also signing deals with large enterprises such as the Associated Press and large financial institutions, according to Refer.

Separately, today Cogent also revealed that it has signed on Merit Networks, which provides Internet connectivity to public universities in Michigan as a customer for its 1000 Mb/s service. Cogent will service 13 universities in Michigan as a result of the deal.