CULPEPER HAS ITS FIBER

Published in Star-Exponent, Culpeper, VA by Nate Delesline III

About 100 technology experts and local officials gathered this month to mark another milestone in Culpeper’s increasing presence on the information superhighway. This ceremony formally ended a yearlong project to bring a stateof- the-art fiber optic network to the campus of technology company Terremark.

“This is a really, really important day for us,” Terremark managing director Norm Laudermilch told the group, which gathered in Germanna Community College’s Daniel Technology Center.

FiberLight, an Atlanta-based technology and communications company, managed the network design. Team Fishel, an Ohio-based utility engineering and installation firm, oversaw the construction element.

FiberLight CEO Mike Miller praised the project team for managing more than 500 easements on private property from the D.C. suburbs to Culpeper, coordinating with about a dozen local governments and keeping the $30 million project on schedule and on budget. “We look forward to serving the state and the community as we go forward,” Miller said.

The Culpeper Terremark campus, known within technology circles as the NAP of the Capital Region, opened last summer. The company provides critical information technology services to government and private clients.

“The completion of our optical network into Terremark’s NAP of the Capital Region represents a significant, mutually beneficial step for both companies,” Miller said. County Administrator Frank Bossio agreed, adding that, years down the road, the entire community could continue to reap benefits from this latest high-tech project.

With continued cooperation among technology firms and the support of local schools like Germanna, Bossio said Culpeper and the region could be poised to possibly become a Silicon Valley of the East. Ten years ago, he said, when community leaders envisioned Germanna’s Culpeper campus, no one was sure what the outcome might be.

“Today, what FiberLight and Terremark have done is mark our position - Culpeper’s position - as the epicenter of a whole new transition in terms of information and cyber security information assurance from Charlottesville all the way to northern Virginia and beyond,” Bossio said. Composed of so-called dark fiber, the 130-mile network links Culpeper to FiberLight’s nationwide fiber optic network. Dark fiber differs from other communications companies’ lit fiber in that FiberLight sells the unused cable instead of its services, a tactic that increases customer privacy.

In its initial configuration, the network’s capacity will be 138 terabytes. In non-technical terms, that means about 35,000 users could surf the Internet at 4,000 megabytes per second, which is about 1,000 times faster than the average local DSL connection, according to FiberLight officials. Terremark’s campus on McDevitt Drive is designed to accommodate five data centers and a 72,000-square-foot office building. Laudermilch said Wednesday that work on the second data center is ongoing and plans are pending to begin construction on the office building.