(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In a series of announcements released last week and this week, Phoenix NAP (www.phoenixnap.com) the operator of a 160,000 square-foot data center recently built in – as the name would suggest – Phoenix, Arizona, revealed the first three carriers that have signed deals to bring their networks into the facility’s meet me room, Level 3 (www.level3.com), AboveNet (www.abovenet.com) and AGL Networks (www.aglnetworks.com).
Phonix NAP says the announcements, and more specifically the carrier arrangements, commence the second stage in the development of the facility’s meet-me room – the first stage of which the build-out. And they put the company on the road to its objective of providing a major network access point in Phoenix.
“An integral part of our strategy was to first build out the meet-me room, to allow carriers to come in early,” says Jordan Jacobs, the facility’s director of operations. “And the second was to gather the carriers, allowing them to intersect, forming the free peering exchange. We really have completed the first part of that set, in the build-out of the meet-me room. But having Level 3 and AGL and AboveNet, those are the first steps in phase two of the plan to really make it a NAP. As additional carriers join, the strength of that room just will be enhanced.”
Phoenix NAP president Ian McClarty says the facility is currently negotiating four other similar agreements, and he expects to be ready to reveal them by the end of the year. As more carriers join the meet-me room, it will approach a kind of critical mass where the peering opportunities begin to outweigh the opportunity to provide colocation customers located in the facility as a priority for carriers.
Long-term, there is capacity for a large volume of connections into the facility.
“There’s access for about 14 cages in there,” says McClarty. “There’s also access for a lot of half-racks, quarter-racks, third racks and single racks in the facility for smaller providers. The reason we did that was to make it very easy for even the smallest carriers, up to the largest carriers, to be in the facility.”
And while the company expects to have the right early mix of carriers on board by the end of the year, there is no end in sight to the expansion, and the physical limits of the meet-me room, as they exist today, do not spell a hard top to its growth.
“We’re always going to be out looking for other carriers,” says Jacobs. “We’ve internally talked about a possible meet-me room expansion if it ever needed to be. If we filled up this meet-me room absolutely full of carriers, we’d simply build another one and interconnect them. There is no point in this where we’re satisfied that it is 100 percent complete. “
According to McClarty, the negotiations to bring carriers on board sometimes have the company incurring some of the cost of actual fiber into the building, a process that can – anecdotally – sometimes cost the carrier as much as $500,000.
“There’s definitely a cost that we’re willing to incur,” he says, “because we’re definitely respectful that there are substantial costs on their side. We put in our own meet-me vault in the facility. We may trench out to their vaults. We may offer them so much space and power for free, so many cross connects.”
And while the potential for proximity to a peering and carrier hotspot is a kind of selling point for the colocation and data center side of the facility, the scope of the data center – and a significant amount of available power – is similarly a unique selling point for the network peering point. Jacobs says the facility attempts to break the mold for network access points in a couple of ways, particularly in its decision not to make the meet-me room a profit center.
“Our goal was never to make our meet-me room a profit center,” he says. “It was to make it a service to our customers. Traditionally the profit center for these types of facilities are in the cross connects. They charge exorbitant rates for cross connects, and that makes the interconnection make less sense. Sometimes it’s actually cheaper for the providers to back-haul somewhere else. We’ve thrown that completely out and are offering the providers free cross-connects.”
The greater goal for the facility, says the company, is building a resource that lives up to the role it envisions in the Phoenix market.
Jacobs says having carriers peering in Phoenix on a larger scale could bring the location’s profile up as a destination for data, which is part of the reason the company has invested in connecting its facility to as many other facilities in Phoenix as it can.
“We’re really trying to add value to the Phoenix market as a whole.” Says McClarty. “Not just to our facility, but to the other facilities.”
