The new web will need a new network

It’s been more than a decade since the large construction of fiber networks crisscrossing the world in response to the first web boom, and since then, the Internet has grown to become interwoven with every aspect of our daily lives. Billions now have a web connection, from either a mobile phone or a fiber to the home connection, if not both. Now the fiber boom is back, but the next generation network isn't just more fiber; it’s an entirely new type of network that fits what we now expect the web to do: Be smarter and be everywhere we are.

To do that, Allied Fiber is building a new kind of fiber network that combines not just network materials, but also data centers, to bring connectivity at competitive places over more and more of the country. Within the next three weeks, Allied Fiber will order its fiber cable, and six months later, the network will begin taking traffic. The premise is radical in that founder Hunter Newby has envisioned a way to bring terabyte connections across a certain swath of America by building out a new type of infrastructure, and leasing it out to other providers.