Dark Fiber

TMCnet Editor

The next 12 months hold a lot of promise for underground telecom players, literally underground. 

 

In 2009, Allied Fiber (News - Alert), the groundbreaking work got well underway, as the company began building new ducts along the Norfolk Southern Railroad Right of Way from New York to Chicago and executed several agreements with buyers for long-term fiber IRU’s.

 

“Our fiber infrastructure will help change the broadband landscape for both wired and wireless networks that serve regions all along our fiber route,” Hunter Newby (News - Alert), founder and CEO of Allied Fiber, told TMCnet, for a special end-of-year Q&A. “New fiber builds are happening worldwide! We hit the market at the perfect time and now most people are catching on to what we were saying a year ago. The economy will recovery in our sector since the demand for mobile data services is there, will be there and continues to grow.”

 

What else is on the horizon for 2010?

 

The full exchange follows.

 

 

TMCnet: Looking back at 2009, how did your company do this year?

 

HN: Outstanding! Given that this was a “corporate building” year as an idea of this type and size takes time to create we managed to also begin building new ducts along the along the Norfolk Southern Railroad Right of Way from New York to Chicago and also executed several agreements with buyers for long-term fiber IRU’s. We are really primed for an excellent 2010 as a result of our investment and the response from the market.

 

HN: We started at the best possible time! No one else was even remotely thinking about doing anything like what we have done. Most of the people in the investment community considered Allied Fiber to be “contrarian” given the financial markets and a (false) belief that there is “already enough fiber out there for everyone.” Then in October AT&T and Verizon (News - Alert) announced they were spending $18 billion and $17 billion respectively to bring “fiber to the tower” to support fiber-based Ethernet backhaul transport service for the exploding wireless data usage and their LTE (News - Alert) rollouts in 2010.

 

New fiber builds are happening worldwide! We hit the market at the perfect time and now most people are catching on to what we were saying a year ago. The economy will recovery in our sector since the demand for mobile data services is there, will be there and continues to grow.

 

HN: Big Stuff! Not just for Allied Fiber, but for the whole country! Our fiber infrastructure will help change the broadband landscape for both wired and wireless networks that serve regions all along our fiber route.

 

HN: Our industry, narrowly speaking, is dark fiber, colocation and towers. We are setting a trend by integrating these three elements in a way they have never been before. We are providing neutral dark fiber, open to anyone on a long, or short-term lease, that intersects at Allied Fiber owned and managed neutral colocation facilities along the route where the short-haul fiber to the Allied Fiber managed wireless towers intersects with the long-haul fiber between the major carrier hotels and data centers in the United States. This has never been done before on such a scale and it is exactly what the country needs.

 

Our industry in a broad sense is all of communications hardware, software, networks and applications. Networks of all kinds and the vendors that support them will benefit from the assets we are creating and many application developers will innovate and continue to expand their current innovations to more people in the country as a result. This is truly exciting and we hope it puts the US back on top in the world in terms of communications network infrastructure design, use and overall innovation.

 

HN: Execution! Every great idea is useless without it. We fully intend to execute on our plan and hope and expect everyone else that we are working with to do the same. There are many challenges, known and unknown, that we will deal with. The more prepared we are to deal with the ones we know will put us in a better position to deal with the ones that come up.

 

Technologically we are in great shape as we are using the latest and greatest fiber and structures which is what the market needs, so we do not foresee any issues there. The biggest challenge will be financing the growth of the business in a logical, sound manner. Many people across the country will want what we are doing in there area when we have begun only in a selected region to start. We cannot go everywhere and will only go to the places that make financial sense over the course of time. This will be a difficult situation and one that takes time to assess as opportunities develop and requests come in.

 

HN:

1. Building dark fiber to wireless towers

2. Intermediate short-haul fiber to long-haul fiber for rural networks, cable companies, schools, hospitals, etc.

3. New, diverse long haul fiber from and between the sub-sea landings across the United States

4. “Shorter distance” fiber routes that enable low-latency routes for financial trading companies looking for an advantage over the competitors using slower (longer) routes