Roller Network

We regretfully must announce the cancellation of the Advanced Business Broadband service we previous mentioned.

In summary, we were working with Straight Path to lease spectrum which we would use to operate this service. It turned out that Straight Path was in trouble with the FCC and was fined $100M (yes, million) in early 2017. Straight Path never followed through with the lease to us in late 2016, which led us to the first announcement. In order to avoid fully paying the FCC fine they were given a few options, one of which was to sell their licenses. We have since learned that the buyer is A&T. Update: Verizon outbid AT&T.

We are clearly disappointed with this outcome. This left us with no choice but to make assumptions based on what little information we have been able to obtain externally. Since it seems highly unlikely that AT&T Verizon is going to turn around and start leasing spectrum instead of using it for themselves, and the lack of communication with Straight Path, this firmly places our plans into the “canceled” category.

UPDATE: We received notices from Verizon that the 39GHz leases we do have will be terminated in September 2018, so that’s the end of that.

We have some new and exciting network changes in progress for this year. We’ll provide progress updates as we normally do, but here’s the quick summary of what’s happening.

• A new 10G port for AS11170 to Hurricane Electric will be turned up once their POP comes online. TahoeIX will also gain a separate 10G peering to AS6939.

• A new 1G peering connection to SFMIX in San Fransisco. Roller Network will gain a direct connection to the San Francisco Bay Area with many new peers. We at AS11170 will openly peer at TahoeIX and SFMIX.

• Hurricane Electric will also become an option for all colocation customers on a carrier neutral basis through cross connects. Like other carriers, colo customers can contract directly with Hurricane for services.

• Our connection to Charter/Spectrum AS20115 will be disconnected at some point this year. We could not reach an agreement to retain it because our current assigned account manager failed to engage us appropriately when placed in a position of competing against the multiple carrier options available at our facility. This is an unfortunate departure from the cooperative/assistive approach our old account manager held with us. We have lowered localpref on AS20115 prefixes accordingly.

We’re excited to bring new connectivity options from Hurricane Electric to Reno and look forward to implementing these changes. Although we are a carrier neutral facility, we will encourage customers who are not previously familiar with Hurricane Electric to give them a look as a new entrant into our local area.