Allied Fiber Plans Revolution in Backhaul
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System changed the way Americans traveled and transported goods, allowing high-speed travel and plenty of on-ramps for anyone with a car. Similarly, Allied Fiber wants to change the way cellular signals are backhauled by constructing a nationwide, dark-fiber system with accessibility to any entity with a need to backhaul communications.

The 11,548 route-mile network will be built in six phases, using several major railroads and right-of-way owners, including Norfolk Southern Railway. The finished network will form a ring around the perimeter of the United States.

Currently under construction, the first phase will link New York, Chicago and Ashburn, Va., at a cost of $140 million. Possible users of the network include everything from large international and domestic wireline and wireless carriers and network operators to small rural carriers, cooperatives and cable television companies to meet the growing demand for bandwidth.

"We created this system to address the numerous backhaul and capacity issues that exist in the marketplace today,” said Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber. “The [fiber-optic] infrastructure in the United States is dated. In the route itself there is a substantial lack of route diversity. The fiber is also out-of-date. It lacks the new optics that are available today for ultra-long-haul infrastructure.”

Michels Communications, Henkels & McCoy and Adesta will build phase one, which is scheduled for completion by fourth quarter 2010. The whole system should be completed in two years.

“Data centers need fiber, mobile towers need fiber, teleports need fiber, and so on, but the results are the same. Dark fiber for lease with neutral collocation and open access brings more choices, which leads to competition and that brings better quality, customer service and pricing,” Newby said.

The business model for fiber-optics has been adversely affected by consolidation among the carriers in the last seven years, according to Newby.

“Fiber as a product is not available readily to lease to other network entities because the carriers that own the fiber have no incentive to lease those facilities out,” he said. “It creates a choke-point.”

Allied Fiber solves that dilemma by positioning itself as a neutral-host provider of fiber-optics. It does not compete with the carriers that will be accessing its network.

Another critical issue is physical access to the fiber-optic network. Currently, long-haul networks between the cities do not have any access points where companies could build on a lateral basis.

Like on-ramps to one of President Eisenhower’s freeways, Allied Fiber’s network will have a multi-duct design that allows for intermediate access to the long-haul fiber duct through a parallel short-haul fiber duct all along the route. Wireless towers and rural networks will be able to gain access to the dark fiber anywhere between major cities. In addition, the Allied Fiber neutral collocation facilities, located approximately every 60 miles along the route, accommodate and encourage a multi-tenant interconnection environment integrated with fiber that does not yet exist in the United States on this scale.

The Allied Fiber network will connect local, regional, national and international wireline and wireless networks to major telecommunication hubs and Internet backbones throughout the nation.

The all-access, physical layer of the network treats competing systems equally in a common-carrier-neutral infrastructure, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs.

Fiber to the Tower

Allied Fiber will offer a fiber-to-the-tower (FTTT) product, which takes a dedicated portion of the entire fiber in the duct and makes it accessible every 1 to 2 miles, an even shorter distance basis than short-haul.

“FTTT supports lateral construction to existing towers from the greatest vantage point possible, by having multiple proximate options for access, thus making it easier to route the fiber to where the towers are located,” Newby said.

Wireless towers may even be developed on the railroad right-of-way in order to have fiber directly accessible to the tower without the need for any lateral construction.

The first phase of the system will provide a combined 648 dark fibers, 19 700-square-foot collocation facilities and 300 tower sites all integrated into one system from one provider, creating a new standard for interconnection. Phase two will add nearly 1,600 optical miles, stretching from Ashburn, Va., to Miami. The network will head to the northwest in phase three, from Chicago to Seattle, more than 2,200 miles, and from there it heads south to Los Angeles in phase four. The network will cross the South in the final phase, from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and Jacksonville, Fla.

The new 432-count, long-haul cable coupled with the 216-count, short-haul cable will be a composite of single-mode fiber (SMF) and nonzero dispersion shifted fiber (NZDSF). By having a high fiber count and being network neutral, Allied Fiber is able to offer dark fiber and offer it at lower unit costs.

The company is currently accepting customer agreements for fiber and collocation in the all-access integrated interconnection facility network.