The State of Delaware and IPR announced the launch of the Wilmington Network Access Point located in Wilmington at the 1201 N. Market Street office building.
The access point will provide connections from Wilmington to Philadelphia, Georgetown, Del., and Baltimore via more than 400 strands of dark fiber.
This new statewide network facility is a result of a $3.5 million grant from the State of Delaware Infrastructure Fund, the first of its kind in the state. The state sees the dark fiber as a way to bring more technology-based businesses to the state while tying together its operations.
“This will not only provide residents of Delaware, whether individuals or businesses, with price-competitive bandwidth in the future, but will also enable state government to connect its offices throughout Delaware,” said Tami Fratis, CEO of IPR. “And the most important aspect to all of us is the fact that the Wilmington NAP will help attract new businesses evaluating the pros and cons of relocating to Delaware. That’s because this facility will effectively reduce the overall cost of network access to all businesses in Delaware.”
IPR conducted the ribbon-cutting ceremony to launch the Wilmington NAP prior to its corporate board meeting. The launch of the Wilmington NAP is a large focus for IPR, as well as its partners — Sunesys, Fibertech Networks, the City of Wilmington and McConnell Johnson Real Estate. Sunesys and Fibertech Networks are the providers building this fiber capacity; both were chosen due to their carrier-neutral relationships.
Fratis said the “Wilmington NAP” will be a catalyst in enabling Delaware to compete with larger urban areas (Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.) in attracting businesses, individuals and jobs.
“No matter whether someone is an employee of a large organization working in a home office, a small entrepreneur working in their garage, a lawyer for a global law firm or an office for a large corporation, there is a need for significant bandwidth to access global data through the fiber infrastructure being brought in to the Wilmington NAP,” Fratis said.
Meantime, IPR has added capabilities to the Wilmington NAP, including a 10GB (Gigabyte) lit services from two additional fiber providers – Windstream and Comcast Business. The lit fiber services are in addition to those carriers that IPR has already brought in to provide clients with lit fiber services (Zayo Bandwidth, Verizon Business, Verizon and Level3), all within IPR’s Wilmington center.
According to a release, IPR and its partners will conduct a series of marketing and educational events to put the Wilmington NAP on the “map” for those businesses seeking a Tier III+ data center facility & cloud solutions with the largest amount of data center space and highest amount of network bandwidth available in the Mid-Atlantic region.
