Lightower Adds New, Strategic Potomac River Crossing to Network

BOXBOROUGH, MA--(Marketwired - Mar 7, 2017) -   Lightower Fiber Networks, the premier provider of all-fiber, high-performance networking solutions delivered over its own network, announced the availability of a newly constructed, all-fiber Potomac River crossing near Ashburn, VA. Wholly owned and operated by Lightower, the crossing serves as a strategic route that bypasses the greater Washington D.C. area, allowing for superior network connectivity to data centers, cloud providers, and other service locations in northern Virginia, including the Ashburn area.

This geographically-diverse route was specifically engineered to serve locations in the Ashburn area, including all major data centers and cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Office 365. The Potomac River crossing also complements Lightower's unique Transcom route, which runs between New York City and Washington D.C., and is geographically diverse from the I-95 corridor. Customers using the Transcom route from the north can now connect directly to the new Potomac River crossing for optimized latency and added network diversity to Virginia.

Lightower owns and operates a dense, all-fiber network in the greater Washington D.C. region, which when combined with the new Potomac crossing, offers customers the ability to customize the geographic routes of their network to the Ashburn area. This ability to design networks to exact specifications is an important feature for customers operating critical applications in the enterprise, research, education, carrier, and government sectors. In particular, the new crossing will provide federal government customers with a new option that is diverse from current providers for high-performance, secure bandwidth. Lightower previously announced the award of a U.S. Government Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) 070 contract. 

"Lightower is committed to continually expanding the Lightower Network through strategic builds and unique route expansions," said Phil Olivero, Chief Technology Officer of Lightower. "This new Potomac River crossing was a complex project to build, and one that adds significant value for our customers with service locations in Ashburn. This route is perfect for groups who are looking to diversify their routes, gain latency advantages, and strategically bypass the D.C. area. This build is another example of Lightower's aggressive strategy to bring our all-fiber, high-performance solutions to the organizations and areas that need them."

Customers utilizing the new route can directly link to Lightower's existing network throughout the Ashburn area, including all-fiber connectivity directly into all major data centers and cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. All Lightower services and solutions are available on the new route, including Ethernet, wavelengths, and dark fiber. Construction is complete and the route is available now. 

Lightower has expanded rapidly over the past seven years throughout the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and Northeast, most recently with the announcement of its North Carolina network expansion. In 2014, Lightower completed a 1,100-mile network expansion blanketing Virginia, as well as a 400-mile network expansion throughout the Washington D.C. area. To learn more about Lightower Fiber Networks, please visit www.lightower.com or call 1.888.LT.FIBER. Follow Lightower on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Lightower Fiber Networks
 Lightower Fiber Networks is the premier provider of all-fiber, high-performance networking solutions delivered over our own network, enabling award-winning customer support and service reliability. Lightower delivers customized solutions to thousands of customers in health care, financial services, media and content, cloud infrastructure, carriers, government, education, and other large enterprises. The Lightower Network extends over 33,000 route miles throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, providing dense connectivity to over 22,000 service locations including 275+ data centers and 7,000+ wireless towers and small cells. For more information, visit www.lightower.com or call 1.888.LT.FIBER.