TELEHOUSE America Takes On Transit

Moving to fill a gap increasingly left open by ISPs, TELEHOUSE America said this morning that it is now offering its own IP transit services. IP transit has long been a very tough neighborhood, and many network operators would rather focus on managed services, Ethernet pipes, and the like.

Telehouse isn’t taking on the largest wholesale transit networks though, they’re looking at the 10mbps to 500mbps range, i.e. under 1Gbps. They’re looking to use their scale to keep costs down, and thus offer an alternative to smaller bandwidth customers. It’s unclear from the PR whether Telehouse is actually putting a new global backbone in play, or simply offering blended bandwidth aggregated from wholesale providers and sold in smaller chunks – but I’m betting on the latter.

Not many data center operators offer IP transit directly, as it can be a bit awkward to be carrier neutral while selling transit. But in this case TELEHOUSE America clearly isn’t looking to compete with the big transit backbones out there who mostly play in the 1Gbps and above range these days anyway. Seems to me that it’s not about fighting for transit revenues, but about shoring up a specific soft spot in their ecosystem so they can better compete for the more colo and managed services dollars.

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Categories: Internet Backbones