Lightower upgrades metro Washington, DC, fiber-optic network

Fiber-optic network services provider Lightower Fiber Networks says it has completed a 400-mile expansion of its metro Washington, DC, fiber footprint. The new fiber cable infrastructure will offer increased density between key cities, commercial centers, and data centers in the region, the company asserts.

The build out is in direct response to the tremendous demand in the region for high-performance bandwidth, driven by the growth across industries like enterprises, educational institutions, government, wireless, social media, and cloud services.

Lumos says that Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia are home to some of the busiest and densest data centers in the world, and the fiber expansion therefore came as the result of significant demand for bandwidth in the region. In addition to the requirement for bandwidth to support cloud-based applications, data storage, and backup, much of the global Internet traffic that lands on the East Coast from transatlantic fiber-optic cables runs through the area, Lumos says.

"DC is home to world-renowned universities, health care organizations, multinational organizations, law firms, the federal government, military agencies, and so much more," explained Rob Shanahan, CEO of Lightower. "With traffic volumes growing so quickly in the DC metro area, we invested heavily here in order to connect more locations and ensure that we are prepared to serve the growth that we are seeing. This is an aggressive build that delivers on the need for more high-performance bandwidth, and comes at a time when organizations rely on networks more than ever before to connect with the world and participate in it."

Lightower says the new fiber infrastructure will enable it to serve the following cities, towns, and counties:

• Washington, DC
• Montgomery County, MD (Bethesda, Silver Spring, and others)
• Arlington, VA
• Culpeper County, VA (Culpeper and others)
• Fairfax County, VA (Alexandria, Centreville, Fairfax, Herndon, Reston, and others)
• Fauquier County, VA (Warrenton and others)
• Loudon County, VA (Ashburn, Sterling and others)
• Manassas, VA
• Prince William County, VA (Gainesville and others)
  

The infrastructure supports a wide variety of services at data rates up to 100 Gbps.

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