The 16-year-old Indiana Fiber Network has rebranded itself as Intelligent Fiber Network, part of the company’s effort to position itself for future growth, including outside of the state of Indiana.
This year the company announced a multi-year, multi-million-dollar network upgrade across Indiana to increase capacity, improve stability and add operational and network efficiency. The hardware upgrades started earlier this year, with additional phases to start in the first quarter of 2019.
In April, we reported that IFN, which is owned by 20 small telcos in the state, had begun a multi-million dollar project to increase capacity and enhance reliability. At the time, the IFN network had about 15 points of presence (POPs) and the upgrade was designed to fortify those POPs, using a hierarchical design, turning some of the POPs into an aggregation layer.
IFN expects to spend as much as $100 million over the next five years in Indiana alone, adding to its more than 4,500 route miles of fiber-optic cable in 456 Indiana cities and towns.
The company’s customers include telecommunications providers and business direct customers such as hospitals, schools, financial institutions and government facilities.
“From 5G to IoT, high-speed connectivity is changing the way industries across the world operate,” said Jim Turner, IFN president and CEO, in a prepared statement. “Every sector of the economy – agriculture, manufacturing, health care, government services, education and telecommunications – is adapting this technology to serve their customers more effectively and efficiently. To enable these industries’ increasing demands for bandwidth, IFN must continue to evolve as well and encourage new and old partners alike to embrace today’s disruptive technologies.”
