Facebook Enters Wholesale Fiber Business, Plans to Sell Unused Capacity on New Fiber Routes

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Facebook Enters Wholesale Fiber Business, Plans to Sell Unused Capacity on New Fiber Routes

By CircleID Reporter
March 06, 2019, 11:42 pm PST Views: 11,945 Add Comment

Facebooks says it intends to allow third parties—including local and regional providers—to purchase excess capacity on its fiber. “Unlike a retail telecommunications provider, we will not be providing services directly to consumers,” said the company in a recent post providing an update to its backbone network infrastructure. Kevin Salvadori, Facebook’s Director of Network Investments, says: “We will reserve a portion for our own use and make the excess available to others. This means you’ll start to see a Facebook subsidiary, Middle Mile Infrastructure, operating as a wholesale provider (or, where necessary, as a telecommunications carrier).”

Facebook’s entry into the wholesale fiber market is part of a larger trend says Data Center Frontier’s Rich Miller: “As hyperscale companies like Facebook continue to grow, the huge volumes of user data prompt them to add data centers. This leads to larger cloud campuses, with truly massive volumes of data moving between them. The volume of this ‘East-West’ traffic between data centers far surpasses the volume of data traveling to other campuses and the Internet—known as “North-South” traffic.”

Facebook’s latest fiber routes will connect data centers in Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina.

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By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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