Five College Net

In 2007 the Five College consortium of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst completed a fiber optic network stretching from Springfield, MA, up and around the five campuses. The 53-mile-long network furnishes virtually unlimited bandwidth for educational and research purposes to the member institutions of Five Colleges, Incorporated, which oversaw its construction. With its excess capacity in a region underserved by high-speed Internet access, Five Colleges, Incorporated created Five College Net as a for-profit venture to offer dark fiber to businesses and organizations in western Massachusetts.
 

Our mission at Five College Net is to provide our customers with state of the art, cost-effective network solutions using dark fiber optic networks with the capacity and speed to accommodate many resource intensive applications at high transmission rates. Five College Net provides enterprise customers and service providers in Massachusetts' Hampshire and Hampden counties with state of the art, custom built, carrier-neutral dark fiber optical networks. Five College Net also offers direct connectivity to carrier-neutral colocation facilities where customers can choose from a variety of networks and services.
 

Composed of up to 288 strands of single-mode fiber, the Five College Fiber Optic Network links customers in communities from Amherst, Northampton, Hadley, South Hadley, Granby, and Chicopee to the STCC Technology Park, a carrier-neutral facility in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts where our customers may choose from more than a dozen service providers.

Dark fiber offers a fast, secure, cost-effective alternative to traditional network models.  Five College Net customers are offered the flexibility of designing and building their own custom network with strands of dark fiber leased from Five College Net, giving them control over their own optics and carrying capacity.

Five College Net is made up of 53 route miles of SMF ITU-T G.652 compliant dark fiber capable of data transmissions of high speed and throughput. Our customers may adjust their own bandwidth by adding Layer 2 optical equipment onto the dark fiber infrastructure. Since our customers have direct connectivity through their private optical connectors, our customers are able to bypass the intermediary carriers.  Five College Net’s dark fiber is virtually free from outside interference, interception or interruption, giving our customers a secure network.

To learn more about the benefits of dark fiber networks and how Five College Net can help supplement your network needs, contact us for a quote on a dark fiber network.