by Jim Barthold - Wed, July 18. 2007

Qwest Communications, seeking to sate its normal core of enterprise customers and draw more positive attention from government agencies involved with the federal Networx upgrade, has quadrupled the capacity of its nationwide fiber optic network and tripled the geographic availability of ultra high-speed services to cover a nationwide footprint beyond Qwest’s 14-state serving area.

While the service is also intended to link to Qwest’s metro offerings within its 14-state serving region, “this is a nationwide service,” said Eric Bozich, vice president of national services. “Qwest operates a nationwide fiber optic network … and we use those fibers to provision all different types of services from SONET and traditional private line to Ethernet.”

The upgrade, which pushes up to 40 Gbps over private lines now and could reach 100 gigs when that becomes a reality, is a response to customer demand, Bozich emphasized, although it won’t hurt when pitching government customers.

“We didn’t do this because the government told us we had to. It’s very highly complementary but it isn’t necessarily just driven by that,” he said. “The customer list looks like banks and financial institutions and healthcare entities and all kids of technology content related companies. Those folks are more or less just grabbing this up.”

There is, apparently, no speed limit, especially as enterprises start storing more data electronically in diverse locations.

“Data is being replicated and moved around and the very large data center environments with all their storage arrays and server farms and so on are in there terabits and beyond, whatever that word is,” Bozich said. “That’s the size of data that they’re talking about and they’re using this type of network technology that’s affordable, available in the right places and really a saving grace.”