Souping Up the SuperNode

By Khali Henderson

At its late April Customer Business Xchange (cbx) meeting in New York, telx Group Inc. announced improvements to its 60 Hudson St. SuperNode and its intentions to acquire more floor space by buying 56 Marietta in Atlanta.

Hunter Newby, chief strategy officer for the neutral interconnection company, told attendees of the buy-sell meeting that telx would close of the deal to buy 56 Marietta in a few weeks.

At press time in early May, the deal was pending. 56 Marietta is a 160,000 square-foot carrier hotel serving more than 50 carriers and 250 telecom-related companies. Its meet-me room is a 25,000 square feet neutral interconnection facility. Telx’s New York address includes 45,000 square feet.

One of the enhancements to its SuperNode is the addition of the telx Brilliant Platform, which will provide logical interconnection at Layer 2. The company already provides physical interconnection for its customers via cross-connect. The Brilliant Platform is based on the Turin Networks Inc. Traverse 2000 Multiservice Transport Platform, which provides the ability for customers to connect over SONET, SDH and both Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet links. Its advanced bandwidth management system supports true any-to-any cross-connection abilities and end-to-end service provisioning.

Newby says the international gateway functionality provided by the platform is in demand particularly from Central and Eastern European carriers. “They virtually want to come into the United States,” he says. The platform provides translation of a range of international SDH interfaces and the North American SONET counterpart. Bi-directional interface conversions supported include OC48 to STM16, OC12 to STM4, OC3 to STM1 and DS3 to E3. Bi-directional virtual cross-connecting and mapping of SONET STS-1/Nc framed payloads to SDH VC3 or VC4 as well as VT1.5/2 to VC11/12 also are available.

The platform also supports Ethernet transport services for both carriers and enterprise users requiring IP connectivity for private lines, transparent LAN services and Internet access as well as voice over IP and IP video, which require higher QoS.

Connecting into the Brilliant Platform, telx carrier tenants also have access to the VPF, voice peering fabric, announced in November 2003 in concert with Stealth Communications Inc. The VPF is an Ethernet Fabric designed to enable complete transparency between buyers and sellers of VoIP traffic. Each member is listed on The VPF Web site and has the option to post, buy and sell routes. Participants can contact each other either offline or online to negotiate the pricing, terms and conditions between the parties. Settlement is done seamlessly within the framework of The VPF, which is neutral and is not a counterparty to any minutes-based transaction.

Similarly, in a separate announcement, telx says it will take its customer meeting online as e-cbx, an online RFP tool for buyers and sellers of network services.

Buyers can login to the e-cbx and select source routes, rates and services directly from carriers available through telx. Those same carriers are able to create and maintain their own profiles, update product lines with a click, and gain immediate access to a robust online communications marketplace. “e-cbx will speed circuit sourcing and provisioning,” says Newby, noting that with this service telx has solved both “network interconnection and people interconnection problems.”

Through a new partnership with the London Internet Exchange (LINX), Europe’s largest Internet exchange point, members of telx and LINX will both have access to e-cbx. The agreement announced in mid-April specified the 150-plus network providers at telx can establish a “virtual presence” at the LINX and LINX’s 140 ISP members can establish a virtual PoP at telx.

LINX Sales and Marketing Manager Vanessa Evans says at least 90 percent of Internet traffic exchanged between ISPs in the United Kingdom passes through LINX and about 50 percent of the world’s Internet routes are directly accessible from the exchange, which, uniquely, is a owned by its ISP and content service provider members.

In a press statement, Newby notes smaller U.S. ISP will be particularly interested in the option of avoiding the high costs of establishing a physical presence overseas. At the same time, it offers cost-effective transit across the Atlantic for members on both sides of the ocean, he added.

The company says both the Brilliant Platform and the e-cbx will streamline the ability for communications network providers connected within the telx facilities to buy and sell products and services.