September 23rd, 2007
Yes, a 200 mile, dedicated and direct broadband line!
The Asheville Citizen-Times reports- and Broadband Reports.com picks up on- the fact that:
Web hosting, remote storage and anti-spam technology solutions provider Netriplex Corp., is working with AT&T on what the companies claim is “the largest broadband line ever” (out of Asheville).
Update: Jonathan Hoppe, CTO of Netriplex, comments: I just wanted to jump in before everyone calls us crazy. We’re only stating that this is the largest connection to Asheville, NC. As one astute individual on the dlsreports site indicates, OC-768 is larger. I don’t think we’ll be bringing that to Asheville quite yet.
This line will run all the way from downtown Asheville, North Carolina to downtown Atlanta.
Going to MapQuest right now. BRB.
OK, that’s some 208 miles. Maybe a bit shorter because dog-leg highway routes such as the Google Earth screencap you see at the top of this post are not traversed.
“The project will benefit not only Netriplex, but also other local businesses that may want to pay to use the lightning-quick connection,” writes Citizen-Times reporter Dale Neal.
“Getting this size of pipe into our Asheville data center makes it equal in connectivity to our locations in Boston and Atlanta,” Neal quotes Netriplex CTO Jonathan Hoppe as saying.
Neal notes that Hoppe said the new line would be an OC-192 optical fiber, which can carry up to 10 gigabits per second of data. “That’s like downloading 10 copies of the Library of Congress, or the equal of 7,000 T1 lines with the capacity to serve 25,000 average businesses,” Hoppe added to Neal.
I am reserving judgement for now. I’d need to know cost-outs and operating performance issues before I comment on the practicality of such a deployment to others.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
