Oct. 7, 2002 -- LayerOne Holdings, Inc. will offer free colocation space to customers who purchase connectivity from any tier one provider located in LayerOne's facilities, the company said Sunday.
LayerOne's promotion follows a similar offering last week from Cogent Communications, which is offering a free rack to bandwidth customers in newly-opened data centers in three cities.
LayerOne said its offer of a free cabinet of colocation space in Chicago, Dallas and Miami is available to customers who purchase an Internet connection and also purchase $500 a month in services from LayerOne.
The offer is a 60-day promotion, rather than a permanent policy, according to LayerOne vice president of sales Jerry Blair. But customers who accept the offer will receive a free cabinet for the lifetime of their bandwidth contract.
That offer closely tracks the structure of last week's promotion by Cogent as it opened data centers it acquired from PSINet.
Dallas-based LayerOne provides interconnection and infrastructure services to communication service providers. The company's facilities in Chicago, Dallas and Miami have over 30,000 square feet of colocation space, with connectivity providers including Aleron, AT&T, Broadwing, Cable & Wireless, Genuity, Global Crossing, Level 3, Qwest, SBC, and UUnet.
Alexander Muse, the CEO of LayerOne, said the promotion is intended to drive additional business to LayerOne's bandwidth partners. It also offers opportunities for LayerOne, which offers cross connections between providers and buildings, along with multilateral peering, circuit SLA monitoring, proactive circuit trouble resolution, AC & DC power, and "remote hands" support services.
"Many of our customers are smaller regional ISPs who utilize our services to integrate their local access provisioning," said Muse. "For example, here in Dallas there are more than 20 providers of local access services. Eighteen of these providers are in our facility, so our customers can shop each local access loop to each provider for the best rate."
"This can save even the smallest ISP thousands of dollars per month," Muse added.
LayerOne was founded in 1999, and briefly filed for bankruptcy last year, primarily to shed leases in markets where it no longer planned to offer services. The company emerged from Chapter 11 in August 2001, and has been experiencing net revenue growth of 5 percent monthly. Muse said February 2002 was LayerOne's first profitable month.