Moncton isn’t called Hub City for nothing, and now it’s not just physical transportation, but virtual as well.
Fibre Centre is an internet network hub expected to generate jobs and business opportunities for the province.
Fibre Centre co-founder Hunter Newby says it is the equivalent of an airport as it is the physical building where major fibre routes come together before branching out around the world.
He says the networks that connect to Fibre Centre can be considered like Airlines that move information from one area to another.
“There are sort of like warehouses where the cargo is stored around the airport,” says Newby. “So they sort of have these buildings that hive around the airport and those buildings are like data centres where the servers go where the webpages and other data reside.”
Newby says that means both network operators and the average user in the area will see improvements to cost, and quality.
“And that usually comes in the form of reduced latency,” says Newby. “Which means say on a mobile device, you go to a webpage and you click on a link, that page renders faster because the data is stored closer to them and it’s stored in or very close to a facility like Fibre Centre.”
Newby says contrary to what many people might think, physical distance to the location of the data does have noticeable effect on quality and speed of service, and with a hub right in Moncton, the city and province is poised to benefit.
It is only the third hub of it’s kind in Canada, with others in Toronto and Vancouver.
The City of Moncton is Fibre Centre’s first official customer, and is offloading some of its data handling to the Centre, and hopes the move will spur both job creation and opportunities for both old and new business.
City of Moncton Director of Economic Development Kevin Silliker says “there are companies that look for this type of facility as a starting point in determining where to go next. We have effectively become a very viable option for an emerging market of firms that have more sophisticated connectivity needs.”
Newby adds Fibre Centre was built here because Moncton is in a strategic location as a major junction for vital intercontinental high speed fibre lines that accommodate the bulk of network traffic between North America and Europe.
