Switch and Data today announced that it has expanded its interconnection facilities in New York City, adding 50% additional capacity at the 60 Hudson Street carrier hotel facility, to become the largest neutral interconnection facility in that city.

In addition, Switch and Data now offers interconnection services for both TDM and Ethernet-based networks between 60 Hudson St. and 111 8th Ave., the other prime carrier hotel in New York, said Ali Marashi, chief information officer.

“The real crux of what we are announcing is some expansion we have made in the New York market,” he said. “The New York market is a key market for us – we are committed to making large investments and growing that market. We are expanding our collocation at 60 Hudson – we will have 60,000 square feet of interconnection space in the Manhattan area.

We will be interconnecting the two carrier hotels – 111 8th ave. and 60 Hudson – be able to offer our customers network interconnection services.”

Switch and Data provides interconnection, collocation and peering services to a variety of service providers in NYC and in 23 other markets across the U.S., operating 34 different data centers.

The new offering makes it easier for service providers to interconnect their services in the key NYC market, said Marashi.

“They can come to us and through the simplicity of across-connect, there are 330 networks at their disposal through one virtual exchange between the two buildings” he said. “To the best of our knowledge, we are one of the first to bring it into the market and offer it to our customers as a service. They can get Layer 1 or layer 2 services without taking the care to provision it themselves.”

The New York market continues to be a critical one for interconnection, and Switch and Data added new Cisco Systems optical gear to facilitate the growth, Marashi added.

“We’ve seen growth in traffic in interconnection by traditional carriers -- IP and TDM – as well as a growing number of VoIP providers,” he said. “A key area of growth is in gaming. Now gaming is viewed as a real-time application – and performance is key. The eyeballs and the eardrums – those gamers need to reach the core of where those network-based games are being served and a cross-connect is the easiest way to delivery the highest performance possible.”

The impact of VoIP is just beginning, he added, as a new generation of service providers requires interconnection. “No single carrier owns all the end points,” Marashi said.