Disruptive Telephony

When I look out my office window and see a bucket truck driving by with a guy up in the bucket attaching what looks like fiber optic cable to the polls, my reaction as a networking geek was naturally:

• who is stringing new fiber?

Followed, of course, by "that's kind of a cool way to ride around town" (probably literally cool, today).

My initial thought was that it was upgraded wiring from either Fair Point Communications, our local phone company (who bought out Verizon's landline business up "he-ah"), or Time Warner Cable, who owns the cable franchise for Keene, NH.

It turned out to be neither, but rather someone new.

I walked out and met the crew up the street when they happened to be reloading connectors into the bucket. One of them said this was new service for "SegTEL". He said SegTel was a private company who had been recently bought out by someone and was planning to provide high-speed Internet access to businesses.

As I walked back to my house, my immediate reactions were:

• Cool! Will there be a plan I can afford as an individual?
• Will they offer IPv6?

To my surprise, SegTEL appears to have no functioning website! I did find that it has been acquired by Tech Valley Communications in New York, whose announcement of the acquisition completion in January included this bit:

segTEL was founded in 1998 and provides fiber optic telecommunication services to carrier, wholesale, and large enterprise customers throughout New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. segTEL has unique and extensive expertise in providing customized fiber optic loop, backhaul and transport services to Top-25 wireline and wireless carriers. All segTEL staff will continue their current operational activities with the combined company.

SegTEL was/is apparently located in Enfield/Lebanon, NH, about an hour north of me. In reading through TVC's news page it seems TVC received a substantial private equity investment in 2010 that made all of this possible. A Business Review article adds a bit more context to the acquisition. They also have some interesting links on the TVC news page about the growth of fiber.

An NTIA document refers to 10Gbps and 1Gbps Ethernet offerings (I'd take it!) and an FCC document from September confirms the transfer to TVC. It seems, though, that SegTEL and TVC both have been primarily targeting other service providers and large enterprises, not individuals. (Which does make me wonder why they were stringing the fiber through our very residential neighborhood.)

Sooo... given that a big fat fiber cable is connected to a pole that is literally about 25 feet away from my server, will I be able to play with a big pipe? Or will it be priced out of my range? (Probably!) And, important to my role, will it support IPv6?

And SegTEL or TVC folks, should you read this... you've got a willing beta tester for your new service offering! ;-)

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