Zayo Heads to Reno Again, From the North This Time

Zayo has unveiled some new longhaul dark fiber plans out west. With a webscale customer in tow, Zayo will be building a new fiber network between Reno, Nevada and Umatilla, Oregon.

The route will hook up with another recent longhaul project Zayo built between Portland and Umatilla in Oregon, thus connecting Portland with Reno. It’s a route that isn’t exactly on the tip of the tongue, passing through Prineville, Oregon and frankly not much else along the way (no it’s not actually on that map to the left yet). But the purpose is pretty clear, other than giving Reno some bandwidth love.

From Portland all routes have generally headed south to Sacramento and the Bay area or south and east to Boise and Salt Lake City.  By going south from central Oregon, Zayo will be creating a new bandwidth corridor along the west coast that adds North/South physical diversity to the heavily traveled Seattle-Portland-Sacramento-San Francisco corridor.  Additionally, it hooks up with another Zayo longhaul expansion from a couple years ago between Reno and Salt Lake City, so it arguably creates a new diverse path between the Pacific Northwest and Utah as well.

So it’s all about diversity here, driven by the webscale companies desires for a less brittle design to the nation’s bandwidth out west than was envisioned 20-25 years ago in the dot com boom.  And as for the webscale customer in this case, I believe Prineville is home to a big Facebook data center as I recall, and an Apple one too.

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Categories: Fiber Networks