To date it has been focussed on its home US market where it now serves 16 major cities, as well as the UK where it has just marked its 10th year of operations.
Abovenet said it is looking for enterprise and carrier customers with a need for high bandwidth connectivity.
“We are already in the business of serving customers with high bandwidth needs in 16 US metro markets, plus London,” said John Donaldson, managing director of Abovenet UK. “Based on our own market analysis and through talking to customers, as well as through our relationships with carrier-neutral data centres, we identified other markets where there is growing demand for such services. Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam ticked all the boxes.”
As well as major financial services markets, Donaldson said all three cities are the European headquarters of many US companies: “It’s not just financial services we’re looking at, but those focussed on content, film and post production too,” he said.
He said Abovenet is already “in implementation phase”, with the new metros and the accompanying long-haul ring expected to be in place by the end of the year.
“We want to show success in these markets first, as they were top of our customers’ lists,” he said. “But there were other cities on the list as well, so I’ve no doubt we’ll be looking at those at some point too.”
“Ovum’s recent research found that European markets are indeed moving towards high-bandwidth Ethernet requirements, with more enterprises now investing in this type of infrastructure to conduct business competitively,” said Ian Redpath, principal analyst at consulting firm Ovum. “Abovenet’s focus on high-bandwidth services and strategy of offering their capability in more key markets in a seamless manner will resonate with these target customers.”
