Workers laying cables along a railroad in Virginia for portion of Allied Fiber's future network

Workers have been digging dirt and laying duct along miles upon miles of railroad tracks for several months now for what will soon be the first phase of Allied Fiber's new dark-fiber network that will link three major data center and telecom hubs on the East coast and in the Midwest of the US to each other and to multiple intercontinental cable systems.

Allied announced it has secured full funding for the first phase and closed all right-of-way deals necessary to lay the infrastructure. The company's CEO Hunter Newby said the new network will open a lot of sites for data center developments that were not considered before because they lacked fiber infrastructure. Newby first announced the project publically at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Seattle in August 2009.

"Every single one of these ducts and short-term ducts are lateral interconnection points for new data centers to be built," he said in an interview. "There are a lot of land-development sites on the route where there's a lot of power but no fiber. We want to try and help coordinate the efforts of those looking to build sites."

The carrier-neutral network's first phase will connect New York, Chicago and Ashburn, Va. Its total cost is about $140m. The integrated system will provide combined 549 dark fibers, 19 interconnection facilities - one about every 60 miles along the route - and 300 tower sites. Size of the meet-me rooms will range between 700 square feet and 2,000-plus square feet.

Allied's news release cited TeleGeography, saying demand for trans-Atlantic bandwidth has grown at 47 percent per year between 2004 and 2009. Analysts expect demand to continue growing until 2015, doubling about every two years. The company also cited a prediction by In-Stat, which said the last mile of the backhaul network will need 90,000 Gbps to support worldwide cellular and WiMAX networks.

Users of the new network will include operators of intercontinental submarine cable systems, international and domestic wire-line and wireless carriers and network operators, including smaller rural carriers, cooperatives and cable TV firms. Newby said about 25 percent of the long-haul cable has already been pre-sold.

Allied plans to connect to submarine systems that link the Atlantic, Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific. Express routing services will be provided through the US.

"The people that we're taking to are the usual suspects," Newby said about submarine cable operators the company is targeting. They include Apollo, GlobeNet and Tata among others. "We have plans to meet them at the landing stations in New Jersey. We're also trying to figure out something a little bit better than that, (which) will bring them to a carrier hotel."

Corinthian Capital and a number of affiliates are funding the first phase, slated for launch early in the fourth quarter. Companies building various sections of the system are Michels Communications, Henkels and McCoy and Adesta.

Much of the network is being built along railroad tracks operated by Norfolk Southern and other railroad companies. Fiber ducts are convenient to build along railroad tracks because their operators own the right of way, which significantly reduces the amount of permits infrastructure builders have to secure. Norfolk Southern also already has empty fiber ducts along portions of its railroad system which it leases out to cable companies.

Allied's multi-duct design allows for intermediate access to the long-haul cables through a parallel short-haul duct along the route. The system consists of 432-count long-haul cable and 216-count short-haul cable. It will be a composite of Single-Mode and Non-Zero Dispersion Shifted fibers.

Second phase of the network will connect Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tenn. The company has already secured duct from Chattanooga to Miami, although no clear timeframe for phase two has been determined. It will be based on take-up of the first phase and demand for the second phase.