Montgomery Co. scores new fiber link to major Internet hub

Montgomery County will soon have a direct, fiber-optic link to the area of Virginia that some call “the center of the Internet.”

Florida-based USA FIBER is preparing to build a fiber link between Ashburn, Va. and Baltimore that will pass through Montgomery, offering the county’s businesses, federal agencies and research centers faster connection speeds, company president Judd Carothers said.

Ashburn, located across the Potomac River in Loudoun County, is home to dozens of data centers and serves as a sort of crossroads where the various networks that make up the Internet physically connect to each other. As much of 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic reportedly flows through Ashburn.

“We must have robust fiber networks to connect people with opportunities and move our economy at the speed of our ideas,” Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett said in a statement. Adding USA FIBER’s infrastructure to the market is “an important step for our community to serve our major businesses, research corridors and transit-oriented communities,” he said.

The cable system being constructed by USA FIBER will provide a “dark fiber” link from Ashburn to a Baltimore data center, meaning the company is only providing the infrastructure, not Internet service, Carothers said.

USA FIBER’s network will connect to the county’s existing fiber network, allowing customers or Internet service providers to contract with USA FIBER for a direct link to Ashburn, Carothers said.

“Montgomery County has expressed a need,” he said. “We’re filling that requirement in the marketplace.”

The connection will help make the county more competitive with Northern Virginia when trying to attract new businesses, said Mitsuko Herrera, project director of ultraMontgomery, a county initiative to expand broadband connectivity.

The county’s FiberNet system already connects 450 buildings, including facilities from Montgomery College and Montgomery County Public Schools, which stand to benefit from the USA FIBER link, Herrera said.

Eighteen federal agencies located in the county — including the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — could also take advantage of the link, such as by establishing backup network connections in case there’s a problem with their primary connections, Herrera said.

USA FIBER is in the process of constructing its new fiber conduit, and will begin boring under the Potomac in the first quarter of 2016; the link to Baltimore is expected to be complete by the fourth quarter of next year, Carothers said.