We’ve been talking about the Hurricane Electric POP for a long time now… too long really, but often some of the most difficult things to achieve are the most rewarding.
In summary, a lot of time was spent trying to make Zayo work because at the time, only Zayo could provide an east facing wavelength (cost effectively anyway) to give the HE POP east-west diversity. While the status quo locally has been to backhaul things out of California, doing so increases exposure to the risk of California earthquakes impacting connectivity in an undesirable way. For disaster planning an east facing path is extremely desirable.
The good news is that during all of the time spent working on Zayo, a second option, Verizon, actually improved and is now able to offer an east facing path option to Denver instead of the originally planned Salt Lake City. This is what’s in process now: Zayo is out and Verizon is in. Salt Lake City is out and Denver is in. It’s still going to take a bit more time for Verizon to do the thing they do for long haul, but statistically speaking the number of successful Verizon orders at our facility is significantly higher than successful Zayo orders, so we have a higher confidence level that this is the light at the end of the tunnel.
Hurricane Electric will bring 1Gbps and 10Gbps access ports and PTP transport to their other POPs at prices never seen before in Reno, plus peering at TahoeIX with their famously open peering policy that has made Hurricane Electric one of the top peered networks in the world. Roller Network will be the first neutral colocation facility in Reno a to have a carrier POP* – a real one with peering – not “backhauled bandwidth” or transport to a “city with a router” (for example, all AT&T here goes through a router in Sacramento). We here at Roller Network are excited to be the catalyst for this step away from the status quo.
*Yes, we know there are other bigger fish nearby, but Rollernet is actually in Reno, NV in Washoe County. The others are not, so when we say “Reno” we truly mean within Reno city limits, not somewhere nearby that will never be in Reno. We’re technically correct, the best kind of correct.