I had an opportunity to chat with John Savageau, Managing Director of CRG West, about Apple (News - Alert) and Google’s entrance into the telecom market, as well as the future of the market as a whole.

 

Established in 2001, CRG West is a premier colocation and data center management company, operating carrier-neutral data centers in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Jose, Silicon Valley, and Washington, DC. Read more about them in this previously published article on TMCnet.

The carrier hotel has traditionally been a center for physical fiber interconnections and TDM interconnections.  During the past three years, we have started provisioning a far greater percentage of circuits supporting 100MB/1GB/10GB Ethernet connections, with a rapidly decreasing number of E1/T1, DS3, and other higher speed SONET/SDH connections.  The move towards Ethernet cross connections is not limited to ISPs and content providers, but is the dominant protocol interconnecting international PTTs.

What do you think the future of the market is?

Packets—lots of packets

What do you think of Google (News - Alert) and Apple entering the telecom market?

I think this is a great move, and a very logical move.  I would take exception to the simple term “telecom market” though, rather focusing on their move to acquire and manage transmission networks running IP as their communications protocol.  While perhaps playing with words, I would contend that Google, Apple, and MSN are developing true end-to-end packet networks designed to relieve the world of legacy telecom protocols and services.  Packet everything and everything pack – that is the mantra of next generation networks.  Think SRV, not E.164 or even ENUM.  Next generation communications, agnostic of the content, as long as the content can be sliced and diced into packets.  It is not a phone call, it is an interactive one-to-one audio session with applications sharing.  It is an audio/visual session using one-to-many interactive conferencing.  Google and Apple are far better positioned to build a bypass network than to try and migrate communications protocols to IP.

 

We focus on building data centers and meet-me-rooms based on what the community wants, without forcing the community into our philosophies.  We listen and adapt to the market, while still keeping as close to the cutting edge as possible to ensure we are able to continue riding an ever changing “future proof” wave.  We do not want to compete with our customers on network services or applications, rather we would like to focus on delivering the infrastructure needed for our tenants to lead and succeed in their industries.