Ziply, a fiber firm serving the northwestern US, has launched data center colocation services.
The company this week announced the launch of its colocation services at more than 200 facilities across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.
“The necessity for strategic colocation has never been more important due to the rise of data usage through emerging technologies like artificial intelligence,” said Chris Gellos, GM of commercial services at Ziply Fiber. “With our strategically located facilities, Ziply Fiber offers alternatives to expensive data centers, providing essential amenities and scalability, saving businesses time and money while ensuring uninterrupted operations and compliance with industry standards."
On the company’s site, it says it has around eight facilities that are currently “move-in ready” with the rest noting colocation is “available."
The firm said its “primary” facilities are equipped with a combination of UPS power systems and DC plants, back-up systems, and N+1 (or greater) redundancy.
The facilities are largely centered around Seattle, Portland, Kennewick, Boise, and Spokane, but stretch to locations across Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
In an interview with Fierce Network, Ziply said the 200 new sites utilize spare space in its old central office facilities that previously held large amounts of equipment for the company’s old copper network.
“There’s a differentiation between these structures that we own and operate versus an office complex where someone gets some carriers to install some facilities and they bring in some power,” Ziply’s Gellos told Fierce.
Gellos said Ziply already has a number of customers using its new colocation facilities, including a mix of small and medium business clients, enterprises and government users, and a ‘hyperscale company or two.’
Gellos told LightReading Ziply had previously offered a "limited" amount of colocation services, but the company's fiber buildout put the company in a position to take it further via a portfolio of existing, hardened telco buildings.
"As we upgraded the network over the past five years to the fiber optic networks that we operate today, it freed up a ton of space in our central offices," he explained. "The opportunity for us came out of the upgrading of our network, which freed up the space and allowed us to capitalize on these old telco buildings."
Ziply Fiber is a local Internet service provider (ISP) dedicated to bringing fiber Internet to Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. A subsidiary of private investment company WaveDivision Capital, the company was formed by former Wave Broadband executive Steven Weed in May of 2020 when it acquired the Northwest operations of Frontier Communications.
Its fiber network connects to data centers from major providers in its service region, including Sabey, Digital Realty, Flexential, H5, NTT, Vantage, Cologix, TierPoint, Evoque, and others.
Ziply’s network has its roots back in the General Telephone Company of the Northwest, Inc. which was founded in 1964. Later known as GTE Northwest, the company was acquired by Bell Atlantic and became Verizon Northwest. After being acquired by Frontier in 2010, it became Frontier Northwest.
Following the acquisition and rebranding to Ziply, the company said it would invest $500 million in improving the network and upgrading from copper to fiber, before raising another $450 million for further network expansion.
Frontier – which is being acquired by Verizon – previously announced a deal to let AT&T deploy equipment for its 5G network in its former copper central offices.
Fierce noted Lumen has also pivoted some of its old central offices to data center colocation, while Cogent has converted dozens of former Sprint switch sites to colocation facilities.
