 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Lauren Oland here in beautiful Miami, Florida for Metro Connect USA 2022. Joining me today is John Schmidt. He is the co-founder of Dark Fiber and Infrastructure or DF&I. Welcome back to JSA TV John. Thank you very much. Always a pleasure. Well for our viewers could you tell us about DF&I and what you do? It's hard to imagine understanding the name but we're pure play creator and owner operator of just Dark Fiber and really conduit assets you know in metro markets. I'm not a long-haul builder. Right now our assets are in northern Virginia and Maryland. Okay well speaking of Maryland and and data center alley last week your team announced the completion of a new 65 mile fiber route between southern Maryland and Ashburn's data center alley. I want to make sure I got that route right for you so I'm reading it here. Could you give us an update on you know on that route? So that that piece is complete and you know one of the things that we always like to reiterate when we're talking to people is it's you know Baltimore and northern Maryland is obviously a wonderful destination but that has nothing to do with the thesis of the build. The you know it's a by product to be able to provide services in that region but the whole premise was to intercept all the traffic coming down the I-95 corridor that traditionally has gone through Washington DC a lot of expensive right away through that area you know it's it's relatively a circuitous route to end up in Ashburn. So what we did is we bypassed that completely did our own bore under the Potomac River and now provide you know very high-count dark fiber connectivity for all those assets. And that's just a piece of the puzzle for Ashburn. Just a piece. Right and in south Ashburn you're creating a dark fiber conduit fiber ring there so can you tell us more about that expansion and then what you have in the future for that area. So right now the assets that come in from Maryland terminate in the assets we built in and around data center alley we placed originally six duct and then an additional 22 conduits around connecting those major major cloud ecosystems and when we did that we get it gave us the ability to expand southeast and west after we got the northern the northern piece done. So right now actually in December we kicked off our route going south around Dulles Airport known as the Arcola area we're hitting Gainesville, Virginia, Manassas and coming back up and it's you know for us this is not the late 90s right you know we're not solving for a future demand and we say this all the time we're solving a supply issue. Anybody that looks at the network assets in the region will see the spaghetti of colors and say my gosh there's so much infrastructure here why would anybody else build but the reality is there's very little available for us for sale and lease right now a lot of the legacy assets are there and they've been gobbled up and customers are using them and there's new development happening at such a such a pace there's the asset to service that just simply doesn't exist. Well bypassing that that artery it's such a heavily trafficked artery so that's that's a solution for today and you know looking ahead to tomorrow what else do you have up your sleeve? Somebody told me a long time ago the better your idea is the less you talk about it but at the end of the day we are very open that we believe the network that is required to solve the demand right now just doesn't exist in the marketplace the architecture has changed customers are have zero interest in hitting old LSOs and serving offices the data center is the critical key and it's not yesterday's data center it's the ones that are being built so the whole topology needs to change and whenever we can pick those pieces that's where we want to play. Wonderful so where can our viewers go to learn more about DF&I and follow the latest developments? Pretty easy darkfiberandinfrastructure.com and we just running running gun. All right you heard them you know where to find them thank you so much for joining us John we appreciate you coming back thank you very much and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast happy networking.