About a year ago I heard a stat that One Wilshire had 40 Gbit/s of utilization on their Fast Ethernet cross connects. Honestly this number floored me for a few reasons:
- an average circuit will run at 30% utilization, this means that CRG had approximately 1,300 Fast Ethernet circuits run at the time. Or in revenue numbers, been $65k/month in fast ethernet cross connect fees.
- Fiber cross connects are the overwhelming majority of installed circuits at any carrier neutral site. I couldn’t say what the exact ratio is but based on my personal experience Fiber to Ethernet is something on the order of 20 to 1. This would mean One Wilshire was billing $2.6/month in fiber cross connects.
- One Wilshire is a relatively inexpensive location for cross connects, other facilities are way more expensive and could be billing way more.
While the largest revenue items for a given facility will most certainly be floor space and power, those also carry the highest cost of goods sold. With cross connects the facility bears a one time charge for the materials and labor (which is usually billed to the customer as an installation fee) and after that there is almost zero expense ongoing to service the cross connect. The margin is nearly 100%.
Like I said, the real money is in the cross connects.
Those are really crazy numbers. (Even if 20*65k = 1.3M, not 2.6)
-ask
Actually it’s 1300 * 20 * $100 = $2.6MM
Fiber Cross Connects are more expensive monthly so it’s not just the ratio increase for the amount of runs, but also the increase in the unit cost.
From the pictures they had in Wired the meetme room looked like mostly ethernet though. Or are most of the One Wilshire cross-connects outside the meetme room?
It’s actually deceiving because the fiber is run via interduct or the fiber trays and is not exposed. So the exposed wiring that you see is only Cat5/6 and Coax.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxclark/2326644359/in/set-72157604099267387/
And most of One Wilshire has been converted to datacenter space – and all of that cross connect runs via the MDF/IDF that was put in place. There is a crazy amount of cable running through the walls here.