Get Ready For More Dark Fiber

Here's yet another 2014 prediction: dark fiber will be huge. Why? Well, LINX NoVA is now officially open for business. FiberLight announced this week that it reached an agreement to lease services on its dark fiber network to the London Internet Exchange, which announced late last year that it would launch LINX NoVA, its US debut. LINX is a 19-year-old nonprofit run by John Souter that wants to offer Internet service providers an open peering exchange through LINX NoVA.

LINX NoVA will be based at three data centers in Northern Virginia: CoreSite in Reston, DuPont Fabros in Ashburn, and EvoSwitch in Manassas. Modeled after LINX exchanges in Europe, the NoVA operation will create a public peering model for Internet service providers to exchange Internet traffic between their networks. Users will have to become members to use it and in return, they get lots of say over the rules and operation of the exchange.

Atlanta-based FiberLight has spent $200M since the late '90s building over 500 miles of an all-underground, fiber-optic network from Baltimore, through DC, and into parts of Northern and Central Virginia. (These passages provide a new meeting place for DC tipsters, freeing up parking garages for cars.) FiberLight chief development officer John Schmitt, far left, says growing demand for bandwidth has brought more interest to dark fiber. He's seeing more enterprises and non-traditional customers like LINX that require ultra-high dedicated bandwidth within a metro area become increasingly interested for its lower cost and long-term growth.