Staff from Quantum Loophole (pictured) started trenching for the ducts that will carry 200,000 strands of fibre 43 miles (69 km) from Frederick county, Maryland, to Ashburn.
“We are building the largest medium haul fiber backbone that’s ever been created,” said Josh Snowhorn, founder and CEO of Quantum Loophole.
“And we are bolstering that with some pretty amazing cross-connect capabilities. Each property will have access to conduits and thousands of strands of fiber directly into the QLoop system to enable seamless, private and secure connectivity for all of our campus-wide customers.”
The beginning of work on QLoop came just a month after Quantum Loophole began constructing the data centre campus, which has already signed Aligned Data Centers as its first announced occupant.
The round-trip time between Frederick and the Ashburn, Virginia ecosystem will be under half a millisecond via QLoop, said the company.
It has “received all governmental approvals for its two crossings of the Potomac River”, said the company. Quantum Loophole will be constructing a network of conduits to connect Quantum Frederick’s two planned network centres on its Maryland campus, where it will install automatic, robotic cross connections powered by Telescent.
Quantum Loophole said: “When fully deployed, Telescent-enabled network centres will be capable of processing millions of cross connects from the QLoop to the on-campus conduits that deliver fibre to each data centre site on the Quantum Frederick campus, thus expediting time-to-market for customers and creating a private metro system on the Quantum Frederick campus.”
Quantum Loophole said it is installing all the QLoop conduits at once, so it can support future campus expansions and increase speed to market for customers without disturbing the land along the route each time.
An initial 3,456 strands of fibre will be available in the ducts, which can accommodate 6912 fibres.
