The New Jersey Fiber Exchange, announced in January as a carrier-neutral data facility built at a global cable landing site, is launching its meet-me room facility within Tata Communications’s New Jersey cable landing site this week to let carriers connect to multiple subsea cables. The direct connection in New Jersey helps avoid the need for backhauling traffic to carrier hotels in New York City, which makes for more efficient traffic movement.

New Jersey Fiber Exchange (NJFX) is building a 64,000 square foot data center next to Tata Communications Ltd. ‘s global landing site, as it announced earlier this year as part of the NJFX-Tata partnership. The move is part of the growing trend of uniting data centers and colocation/interconnection facilities, driven by the rise in Internet-based video traffic and cloud services. It’s a major shift that’s part of the New IP and is affecting metro networks, in particular.

What makes this location unique, however, is the presence of the global subsea cables, carrying traffic from two continents — Europe and South America — that in the past would be backhauled into New York City to be connected to carriers. Now, the nine network operators who already have facilities at the New Jersey site can be directly cross-connected via the NJFX to international traffic, which can then be routed to any one of the many other interconnection sites, such as Chicago, Ashburn, Va., or New Jersey, says Gil Santaliz, founder and managing member of NJFX.

“We provide the carrier-neutral environment to be able to connect with each other,” along with the power and footprint typical of a data center, he explains. The cable landing station, which is literally where subsea cables touch dry ground, doesn’t have the kind of power facilities required for a data center and can’t provide the carrier-neutral interconnection to multiple carriers.

Direct connections to the subsea cable increases efficiency by eliminating the unnecessary movement of traffic to NYC, ahead of its original destination, Santaliz says.

NJFX expects to connect up to 200 carriers at its new facility, as well as provide data center space for caching data or content.

In this first phase, NJFX is allowing regional and national carriers to bring fiber in for interconnections with multiple subsea cables, Santaliz says. But going forward it will have a broader outreach to customers to do direct connections as well, and to connect with the broad range of subsea cables that come ashore on the New Jersey coast.

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading