More Fiber in Charlottesville – Fiberlight

Fiber internet is good, so I hear (I live in Crozet, so have heard only rumors) …

I wrote about FiberLight in August of 2010 about the prospect of more fiber coming to Charlottesville. Internet is the new infrastructure.

This can only be good for the Charlottesville real estate market. More internet infrastructure qualifies as a “good thing” … particularly if it’s privately done.

My question: where in Charlottesville and Albemarle will they be laying fiber?

Via press release:


FiberLight Albemarle County/Charlottesville Network Featured In February 3 Event

(Charlottesville, VA) – FiberLight, LLC, one of the nation’s leading providers of mission critical, high performance fiber optic networks, announced today it will feature its newest high capacity fiber optic network, a 46-mile direct connection from Culpeper, VA to Albemarle County and Charlottesville, VA, during a special event on February 3. The new high-count, underground network will use enhanced fiber for lower latency and will provide a direct connection to Culpeper and Washington, D.C., home to FiberLight’s 500+mile multi-ringed, optical network.

The event, which is scheduled from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Thursday, February 3 at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville, will feature speakers from FiberLight, the University of Virginia, Charlottesville and Albemarle County. Michael P. Miller, CEO & Founder and a native Virginian, will talk about the importance of making private investments in the state’s next generation infrastructure. James Hilton, VP and CIO for the University of Virginia; Ann H. Mallek, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Albemarle County; and Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris will also speak during the event.
In 2010, FiberLight completed a 130-mile diversely routed network system, which provides underground capacity between Culpeper, Virginia, Ashburn, Virginia and Washington, D.C. The project, which took just over 12 months to complete, involved boring through some of the toughest terrain on the eastern seaboard including 44,000psi quartz infused granite.
“As a company, we believe it is of vital importance to provide state of the art fiber access not only to Albemarle County and Charlottesville, but to the growing business communities of Virginia,” Mr. Miller said. “At FiberLight, we are experiencing an overall increase in demand by enterprise, government, education, healthcare and high bandwidth application users seeking secure, scalable transport for the purposes of data replication, disaster recovery and connectivity to the Internet. With our state-of-the-art critical infrastructure, we believe we will be able to continue to meet the growing needs of this region.”
ABOUT FIBERLIGHT
FiberLight is a premier provider of mission-critical, high performance networking services including Ethernet, Wavelengths and IP, SONET, and Dark Fiber optical transport network solutions. Solutions are provided to telecom carriers, government, enterprise, content providers and web-centric businesses. FiberLight wholly owns its 500,000 fiber-mile network in key growth areas and offers robust metro networks in 21 metros within Georgia, Florida, Washington, D.C., Texas, Virginia and Maryland, as well as Wide Area Networking options at layer 1, 2 and 3 to major commercial hubs throughout the country. Visit FiberLight at www.fiberlight.com.

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4 Comments

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  3. Ben Jencks February 3, 2011 at 19:28

    Correct me if they’ve said otherwise, but it appears from FiberLight’s website and press releases that they’re a wholesale company, and won’t be providing any consumer-level connectivity. They might compete with BRI for large commercial connectivity, but they’re more likely to be a provider to BRI as far as residential/SMB internet goes.

    My guess is that this is unlikely to directly impact property values. It might attract someone who wants to build a data center nearby, or allow existing offices to locate more of their infrastructure locally, either of which could bring jobs and help property values, but I’m sceptical that this will have any more direct effects.

    Reply
  4. Jim Duncan February 3, 2011 at 20:06

    Ben –

    You’re absolutely right.

    They are carrier-neutral.

    I don’t know about property values. My inclination is that they will go up. More and better connectivity (I’m sure there’s a white paper out there somewhere) will lead to increased property values.

    But … if they lay more fiber, and BRI/Comcast/CenturyLink take it to more houses, and more jobs come here/are created/stay here because of the larger pipe, I think that our economy will improve.

    I’d wager that there are more buyers for properties with connectivity than there are for those without.

    Reply

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