Dark Fiber, Colocation, IP Transit, Service Provider and Other Industry Leaders Converge at Telecom One-on-One Event

The partly cloudy summer Thursday in Manhattan was a day for deals to be made, for buzzwords like "colocation," "dark fiber," and "data center" to fly out of the mouths of small startup telecom execs, and for established service provides to make their presence known.

And the second floor of Battery Gardens, an upscale restaurant that sits next to the dock for the Staten Island Ferry station in lower Manhatan, provided the perfect backdrop Telecom One-on-One, a semi-annual netorking event for telecom industry professionals, sponsored by Jaymie Scotto & Associates.

For 24/7 Fiber Networks, the trek from Balitmore to New York to attend the event was an exellent opportunity "to get our name out there," Christopher Morris, chief operations officer of 24/7 Fiber Networks, a dark fiber provider, told TMCnet.

Compared to a company like Allied Fiber (News - Alert), "they’re doing nationwide what we’re doing in the mid atlantic," Morris explained.

Today, the company, which is centralized in the 111 Market Street carrier hotel in downtown Baltimore, finds its biggest customers are wireless carriers, service providers, financial institutions.

"Like it or not people have to come to Baltimore to get to D.C. and Northern Virginia," Morris told TMCnet. "We’re looking to meet anyone who wants to get fiber or services in the Mid-Atlantic area."

Though 24/7 plans to expand to the New York City area soon "there hasn’t been a huge demand to connect from here to there, but the reverse is true. A lot of people dow there want to get to here, and we can fill in the gap for them."

Susan Vandament, director of business development for XKL, a company started by a co-founder of Cisco (News - Alert), also spoke at length about dark fiber --- or rather, lighting it.

XKL hooks up enterprises and carriers with devices shaped like pizza boxes that light wholesale dark fiber -- a much less-expensive approach than leasing lit fiber from an operator.

‘The mission statement is to light the network path to independence," Vandament told TMCnet. "We focus on lighting dark fiber, so enterprises can have their own independence. And in doing it, we make all the devices that light dark fiber."

XKL (News - Alert) targets a wide array of customers in all vertical markets. The common link? They’re IT folks who want the speed and prowess of super-fast networks, but don’t want want to pay expensive costs of lit fiber.

Any company that needs a lot of bandwidth -- from an online gaming house to a financial trading house -- is a potential customer.

"The cost savings is when you put your own equipment on the fiber and then light it," Vandament said. "Once you pay for the hardware, you own it."

For Ivo Pascucci, sales director, Americas, for Tinet, the focus was on speed, and reducing latency. Formerly the carrier arm of Tiscali (News - Alert) Group, Tinet dubs itself "the only global carrier exclusively committed to the IP/MPLS wholesale market."

Tinet recently announced it acquired capacity on the Transit Europe Asia network -- which runs from Stockholm to Hong Kong and allows a packet of data to travel faster from Europe to Asia.

"There are cetrain customers that are very sensitive to latency," Pascucci told TMCnet. "And if they’re sensitve to latency, this route would give them an advantage. Financial customse, traders have only a few miliseconds for trade exceution, and being faster helps them. Faster is always better."