Spread Completes NY/NJ Ethernet Routes

Low-latency fiber provider Spread Networks will this week announce that it has completed the final stage of its connectivity plan to datacenters in the New York and New Jersey metro areas with the extension of its Ethernet wave service to Equinix’s datacenter at 165 Halsey Street in Newark, NJ.

Officials say the route provides roundtrip latency between the facility and the 350 East Cermak Road datacenter in Chicago of 15.5 milliseconds—with an SLA guarantee of 15.75 milliseconds—and will be ready for clients immediately, subject to lead time of around two weeks for ordering and setting up cross-connects between clients and Spread within the facility.

The move follows the recent expansion of Spread’s Ethernet wave service to Savvis’s datacenter at 300 Boulevard East in Weehawken, NJ (IMD, Feb. 28), in addition to its other end-point in Secaucus—all three of which are “spurs off the main line between Chicago and Carteret,” says Brennan Carley, senior vice president of product marketing at Spread.

“This pretty much wraps up the picture in terms of significant exchange hosting centers in New Jersey. 165 Halsey is a major carrier hotel and access point for major exchanges,” Carley says. “We have been asked to connect to other locations­—such as 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan—but people with servers in those locations aren’t running ultra-low-latency strategies,” and hence aren’t the vendor’s main target audience, he adds.

No Need for New Fiber
Clients connecting to Spread at the 165 Halsey facility will have access to the vendor’s Ethernet wave connectivity but not its proprietary dark fiber, which Spread has only deployed for the long-haul route between Chicago and Carteret, and between its main datacenter in Carteret and Secaucus. “Between Carteret and those other locations, existing fiber was already as fast and as short as it could be, so there was no point for us to put new fiber in the ground,” Carley says.