Florida-based Internet service provider Joytel expects to expand service and offer higher bandwidth and better pricing as the result of an agreement with Allied Fiber – the company that set out several years ago to build a nationwide dark fiber network and now has completed the portion of the network connecting Miami and Atlanta.
“Allied Fiber is a game changer in terms of the economics in the telecom industry,” said Joytel CEO Mark Marques in an interview. “I’ve been looking for this product for the past 10 years.”
Few network operators offer dark fiber these days. Also differentiating the Allied Fiber offering is that the company allows network operators to tap into its network at any splice point along its network route. “In Florida, they’re spaced every 5,000 feet – less than a mile,” said Allied Fiber CEO Hunter Newby. The company also offers network operators the ability to co-locate in its regeneration sites located every 60 miles.
The Joytel Model
Joytel will use dark fiber from Allied Fiber to enhance backhaul for the broadband wireless and fiber-based broadband service that it offers businesses in smaller Florida markets that lack strong competition in the telecom market. Previously Marques said his only choices were to purchase a lit service from a cable company or to use wireless backhaul. Buying dark fiber from Allied Fiber is considerably more economical, enabling Joytel to bring higher-speed connectivity to locations that previously were uneconomical to serve or to which he could only afford to bring lower-speed backhaul.
Joytel is lighting the dark fiber it buys from Allied Fiber using equipment that supports up to 40 channels, each operating at 10 Gbps. For customers served over broadband wireless and backhauled over the fiber infrastructure, the company now can support connectivity at speeds of up to 600 Mbps for distances of up to 12 miles where line of sight is available.
“The maximum speed we could do before was maybe 100 megabits,” said Marques.
He also noted that in some cases Joytel is able to offer prices that are one quarter of what competitors are offering.
It would appear that other network operators in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets could see similar economics to what Joytel is experiencing if they operate near Allied Fiber routes. Newby noted that Allied Fiber also is seeing significant interest from content providers looking to distribute content from network points closer to end users compared to the approach they have used in the past.
“Gone are the days of only distributing out of major cities,” said Newby. “It doesn’t work. You can’t distribute to a mobile device in Florida through a data center in Virginia.”
Allied Fiber chose its next three routes based on feedback from customers, Newby said. Atlanta-to-Ashland, Virginia will come next, followed by Ashland-to-New York and New York-to-Chicago.
