TOWERCO GOES INTO DATA CENTER BUSINESS

Network tower operator SBA Communications, has acquired the JaxNAP carrier hotel, a data center located in Jacksonville, Florida.

This acquisition aligns with SBA’s plan to establish a distributed computing network through its recently-launched SBA Edge Platform. The company intends to explore its tower assets and the two newly-acquired large data centers to power the establishment of Edge or micro data centers.

JaxNAP data center will now join the New Continuum Data Center in Chicago, which SBA acquired last year. The JaxNAP facility is a 280,000 square foot, 14MW data center which houses Jacksonville Internet Exchange and connects to a cable landing station that serves three international communications cables namely, the America Movil Submarine Cable System-1 (AMX-1), CONFLUENCE-1 and the Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS).

“One of the areas of growth we are pursuing is SBA Edge, where we are focused on using our existing tower assets to offer highly distributed local sites for edge data centers with the potential to provide low latency connectivity to wireless networks,” said Jeff Stoops, President and CEO of SBA.

“We currently have over 8,000 pre-qualified tower sites in the U.S. as locations where we can situate an edge data center with access to secure space, power and fiber. These tower edge data centers will provide co-location options for customers computing infrastructure with connectivity to a larger metro data center for internet, and for private network connectivity.”

American Tower is a rival wireless communication service provider that have also expanded its portfolio to include Edge computing services. Following the recent launch of American Tower Edge platform, the company has deployed Edge data centers at the base of its cell towers in Atlanta, Jacksonville, Denver, Boulder, Austin and Pittsburgh.

About two weeks ago, American Tower subsidiary Colo Atl also announced the opening of its new Edge data center located in the Ben Hill, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Atlanta. The new Edge facility spans 360 square feet of floor area, having 100KW of power capacity as well as 20 quarter-cabinet lockers.