Massachusetts Company Takes Bandwidth Needs Into Own Hands -- Moving to the Future with Dark Fiber

EBSCO Publishing extends Carrier Class Fiber to its Ipswich Headquarters to allow for increasing bandwidth needs and future expansion.

Ipswich, MA (PRWEB) April 17, 2008 -- Searching for information has moved online in the past decade and companies providing online services face an increasing need for bandwidth. Companies requiring a lot of bandwidth have an option -- dark fiber. These expandable fiber-optic lines, once lit, can provide companies with virtually unlimited bandwidth. EBSCO Publishing (http://www.ebscohost.com) (EBSCO) is one Massachusetts company that has turned to dark fiber.

As the provider of the largest collection of premium research databases, EBSCO Publishing offers a search system used by millions of researchers worldwide. When faced with the challenge of staying ahead of bandwidth demands, the company decided to take matters into its own hands, building out a fiber network for its use.

EBSCO is the provider of EBSCOhost®, a search system enabling universities, libraries, schools, hospitals, business and government agencies to access more than 200 EBSCOhost research databases. The company's data centers handle searches 24 hours a day/seven days a week from institutions around the globe -- up to 70 million page views per day -- one of the most-used subscription-based sites on the Internet. EBSCO's bandwidth needs have increased 30 percent per year and that growth rate is projected to continue into the foreseeable future.

The company had been using commercial fiber services to connect to multiple Internet Service Providers (ISP) at peering points in Boston. When its bandwidth needs grew to be in excess of 600 mb/s, (megabits per second) EBSCO decided that building out its own dark fiber ring was the best means to address current and future connectivity and speed requirements.

Michael Gorrell, EBSCO's chief information officer, says "Having our own dark fiber allows us to provide exceptional service and response times for our customers, and we can now better control our quality of service and our costs going forward."

EBSCO Publishing worked with the town of Ipswich, AccessPlus Communications (http://www.accesspluscom.com/pages/1/index.htm) of Byfield, and Lightower (http://www.lightower.com/) to extend the existing Lightower fiber network to Ipswich. EBSCO uses the fiber to peer with several ISPs in Boston.

Douglas Norton, president of AccessPlus Communications says there are not many corporations that need this type of bandwidth. These are lines typically reserved for the actual carriers. "Typically this need comes when a company has a high focus on Internet-based services and, in Massachusetts, those that require this type of bandwidth are generally located in Boston so the circuit they need is relatively short. EBSCO's location meant a larger, more significant system. In this case, the EBSCO circuit is over 110 route miles."

The project also routed the lines in such a way that if the town of Ipswich chooses, it can tie its municipal buildings and schools into the lines, giving town departments and facilities high speed Internet access. EBSCO Publishing President Tim Collins says, "This project was able to solve our connectivity issues while also helping Ipswich. Given our long-standing relationship with the town, we were pleased to be able to offer Ipswich a unique infrastructure improvement that they'll be able to benefit from in the future."

About EBSCO Publishing

EBSCO Publishing is the world's premier database aggregator, offering a suite of more than 200 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). The company's product lines include proprietary databases such as Academic Search™, Business Source®, CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Literary Reference Center™, MasterFILE™, NoveList®, SocINDEX™ and SPORTDiscus™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as ATLA Religion Database™, EconLit, INSPEC®, MEDLINE®, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher's Index™, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com.

EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.

# # #