Spread Adds a Merely Fast Lane, Plans Connection to DFT

Since opening the curtains on its ultra-low latency fiber build between the New York and Chicago metro areas, financial bandwidth upstart Spread Networks has been steadily filling out both its product portfolio and its metro footprint.  In the past few days they’ve done a bit of each.

On Tuesday they unveiled a Low Latency Wave service, where the difference from their Ultra-low Latency Wave service is basically the word ‘ultra’.  The new product features an SLA’d round trip latency of 15.9ms between 350 East Cermak and each of their endpoints in Carteret, Secaucus, Newark, and Weehawken.  That’s more than a millisecond slower than the other’s 14.75ms.  Not everyone needs the premium product, so it makes sense that they would come out with a discount product – it’s just that it’s still probably faster than the competition.  I assume that since the fiber is the same, the merely-low-latency product is simply using less optimized gear?

Then yesterday Spread added Piscataway to that list of New Jersey endpoints, announcing their intention to build out new fiber into the NJ1 facility of Dupont Fabros Technology (NYSE:DFT, news, filings), a giant building which just opened late last year.  Spread will be leveraging DFT’s 3-Lateral Underground Telecommunications Duct Bank (that’s quite a mouthful) and won’t be sharing fiber or PoPs with existing networks, thus ensuring a diverse route.  One wonders if they’ll be adding a few more endpoints back in Chicago or perhaps in Manhattan soon.

The other question in my mind for Spread beyond fleshing out the on/off ramps is whether they might take their business model to a new route.  Of course, that depends on just how the economics have worked with this one – seeing as we don’t actually know much since they’re private.  I’m curious if the revenue thus far has lived up to the hype the entire low latency market has gotten over the past few years.

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Categories: Datacenter · Low Latency