- Quincy, Washington is a data center hub because it’s uniquely suited for AI
- It includes data centers from Microsoft, Sabey, NTT and others
- Ziply has more plans for data center rings, especially on its new Northern Lake long-haul route
Bell Canada purchased U.S.-based Ziply Fiber about a year ago for $5.1 billion (CAD $7 billion), and since then it’s been on a mission to expand its fiber footprint.
Now, Ziply Fiber has announced the completion of a fiber ring in Quincy, Washington, to connect multiple data centers. The data center business in Quincy is being driven by factors that make it suited for AI, including abundant hydroelectric power, a cool climate and direct access to high-capacity fiber infrastructure.
Chris Gellos, general manager of Ziply’s commercial business, told Fierce that the Quincy campus includes data centers owned by the likes of Microsoft, Sabey, NTT, CyrusOne and H5.
“It's a desirable location,” said Gellos. “Part of our strategy is being able to provide access and transport to existing data centers. Now that we have the ring, we have them all connected.”
If one of these data center owners is transporting traffic from another of its regional data centers, it might not want to pass the traffic through a competing data center. Conversely, Ziply has also connected all the data centers in Quincy to each other, so that traffic can pass from one to the other and not have to go back and forth from the internet backbone if that’s desirable.
Gellos said the Quincy ring is similar to a ring it owns Hillsboro, Oregon — another area with a high concentration of data centers.
Ziply is laying 874 fiber strands for the Quincy ring. “AI has really changed the game with respect to the amount of bandwidth we see customers now requesting,” said Gellos. The company has tripled its sales of wavelength services over the last year.
Not only does Ziply provide two paths to each data center for redundancy, but it also has a policy to never subscribe a fiber span to over 40% of its capacity. That way, if there's ever a fiber cut, it can offloaded traffic from the cut circuit onto the existing circuits without any customer impact. “So that's something that we are super proud of,” said Gellos.
That would have been useful in this week’s fiber cut near Newark, New Jersey, that caused massive flight delays on the East Coast.
Ziply’s pedigree
Ziply came into being in May 2020 when it purchased network assets from Frontier in the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Now as part of Bell Canada, Ziply has expanded its footprint across other states as well.
In April, Ziply announced that its new Northern Link Route had gone live. Northern Link is a 2,100-mile, long-haul transport route connecting sites in Oregon, Washington, Montana and North Dakota with sites in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois.
Gellos said, “I think when you look at the cities that you see us stop off at on our Northern Lake route, our intention is to further build into data centers and rings along that route. We are constantly looking at where we can build into data center clusters and serve transport needs.”
In addition to its long-haul fiber commercial business, Ziply also has a robust fiber-to-the-home (FTTP) business. Its parent Bell Canada has formed a joint venture with the private equity firm PSP Investments. The JV is called Network FiberCo, and it’s helping Ziply accelerate its last-mile deployments with the aim of eventually reaching 8 million total fiber passings.
Read more about Ziply here:
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