Depending on who you ask, the city of Boston will represent different things.

Some will think of Fenway Park and the world-famous Boston Red Sox baseball team, or the city’s equally well-known basketball outfit, the Boston Celtics.

For others, it might be the TV sitcom Cheers, or the Boston Tea Party, an act of protest against the British government seen as a key part of the American Revolution.

Over the years, the Massachusetts city has also built up a culture of defiance that often challenges the status quo.

It’s this defiance, argues James Jun, managing director and IP Core network architect at Towardex, that has now spilled over into the city’s Internet infrastructure battle.

“This defiant culture has now fully propagated into Boston’s Internet infrastructure, and there is now an open rebellion by telecommunications carriers against exploitative data center cross-connect practices—we’ve had enough, and the rent is too damn high,” Jun said in a lengthy LinkedIn post last year.

Dropouts drop in on interconnectivity

Jun’s firm, Towardex, is an independently owned network infrastructure provider that delivers dark fiber, blended bandwidth, and connectivity between data center facilities in the Boston area.

Founded in 2012, the company has built itself up as a connectivity hub for Internet networks in the city.

Jun and Gavin Schoch, both university dropouts, set Towardex up due to their frustrations at the inefficiencies of networking and Internet infrastructure in New England. Jun describes himself on LinkedIn as a New England interconnection specialist.

“Back in 2012, when the retail colocation was pretty strong in New England, a lot of customers were looking for a good well-peered, well-connected IP bandwidth provided for all of their colocation needs whenever they go between data centers,” says Jun.

“We wanted to create a network service for our data center customers that really caters to their performance needs.” The company claims to be the go-to provider in Boston, where it can help connect data centers with their tenants, supporting colos in the process.

Initially set up as a network provider, Towardex provides interconnection services for the largest telecommunications carriers, hyperscalers, enterprises, data centers, governments, and universities.

Meet me vaults

The whole premise of the company’s business is to facilitate interconnectivity, and it does this through the deployment of meet-me vaults, or as Jun describes it, a meet-me-street.

These meet-me rooms tend to be more common in carrier hotels and more standard colocation facilities, which allow for the exchange of data and traffic between different networks. They aren’t something that every data center will have, but are standard in almost all multitenant facilities.

The vaults, however, are designed to provide interconnection between different providers, such as telcos, as well as Internet and cloud service providers, with the data center but outside the facility.

Typically found at the outer edge of a data center, the vaults are buried a few feet under the ground.

Towardex’s meet-me vaults are known as its Hub Express System (HEX), which operates as a common carrier, a public utility system for fiber. The company says that HEX can provide open-access underground utility for Boston’s data center networks.

A typical HEX underground vault is generally a rectangular concrete box, explains Jun, who says they are 12 ft by 6 ft in length and width, and about 8 ft tall. Jun adds that a single underground vault isn’t large enough to host the volume of connections between many entities.

The HEX system spans about a kilometer span of urban cityscape, underneath the streets in an entire neighborhood, with huge conduit banks (24 to 30 of 4” conduits in largest sections) and a network of over a dozen underground vaults, all interconnected together with lots of physical pathways and high-count fibers, with no monthly recurring cross connect fees.

“Rather than doing “Meet-Me” in a single vault (which doesn’t scale), the HEX system transformed an entire street and neighborhood into a giant web of interconnected Meet-Me fabric,” says Jun. “The connecting parties are often separated by several hundred feet and are located in different vaults, connected by meet-me fabric fibers and conduits.”

Further explaining the importance of meet-me rooms and why they matter, Jun says they offer neutrality.

“Many carriers traditionally had difficult times working between each other, as they are often competitors,” says Jun.

“Meet me rooms were usually operated by data centers or real estate owners who are not telecom carriers and therefore remained neutral (not directly competing with their carrier tenants). This neutrality of meet-me rooms is quite possibly the most important tenet of the business, allowing competing carriers to meet and exchange Internet traffic between each other at a neutral meeting ground.”

The first section of the HEX system opened in 2023 to telecommunications carriers at Somerville’s Inner Belt, where every telecom manhole is part of an interconnected cross-connection fabric, explains Jun.

“HEX was started because what we needed in Boston was a new and truly neutral meet-me system that is not tethered to a single private property,” Jun says.

To construct the HEX system, Towardex uses precast construction (concrete) to develop durable and scalable underground network facilities. The network is made up of watertight cable vaults that interconnect.

He adds that the entire utility is an open-access system, licensing out duct space to everybody for $1.54 per foot per year.

For context, Jun explains that this is significantly cheaper than what some of the data centers charge.

“An unnamed customer recently quipped that they’re eliminating more than $30,100 per month in potential meet-me room cross-connect fees and are moving those cross-connects over to the HEX system,” explains Jun. “To put this in context, at $350 month per each cross-connect charged by the data center, $30,100 per month is 86 connections.

“In the HEX system, this customer would pay a total of $1,475 per year (or ~$123 per month) in conduit license fees (which is largely from $1.54/ft/year price, plus additional fee for manhole space rental to place fiber equipment, etc.) to install a 288-strand fiber optic cable, which can support up to 144 connections.”

Tier 2 markets

The need for these vaults, according to Jun, is due to Boston’s status as a Tier 2 data center market in the US.

That said, Massachusetts is no slouch when it comes to data centers. A number of companies have data center facilities in and around the state and Boston, including Centersquare, Digital Realty, CoreSite, Equinix, Iron Mountain, TierPoint, Verizon, and tower company Crown Castle.

Meanwhile, Markley Group owns New England’s only carrier hotel and provides connectivity to more than 50 domestic and international network providers.

“A lot of these types of markets across the United States have a challenge where they develop, and different data center competitors start fighting with each other,” says Jun. “That creates some of the tensions and challenges for a lot of telecom providers and network tenants of those data centers.

“In the data center space, when a certain data center decides to become their own telecom provider, that data center could unilaterally refuse to renew a telecom provider license or colocation space, and that could create some issues,” says Jun.

During Towardex’s formative years, Jun recalls that the data center market in Boston became more competitive, to the point that it was impacting tenants.

Empower more data center companies to compete

It was at the point that the tenants were becoming affected by the situation with higher rents, that Jun remembers the need to push for something different.

“When the tenants started to get impacted, that’s where we saw the need to take this meeting room dominance away from these guys and put it underground,” Jun explains. “That is not to say to hurt or diminish the need for the connective data centers. That’s not our goal. Our goal is to empower more competitive data centers to be able to compete in the market.”

To achieve this, Jun says it was important to create an infrastructure that is based on the public rights of way that complements the existing data centers, which “forces these competing data centers to start playing nice.”

It’s for this reason that Jun says the company assessed how utilities are being used to drive connectivity.

In his words, the purpose of HEX is to create was to create an open utility system for everyone to use. The open element was important because Jun did not want to simply create another system “for the existing competitive telecom providers in the market that have the country on lockdown for themselves.”

He explains: “We wanted to create a truly open access system where anyone, even networks that are not from Boston, could come into the manhole and do their interconnections without any concerns of dealing with competitors locking up their cross-connects, or being locked out of conduits.”

Jun likens the HEX system to real-world airports, noting that, unlike data centers, the HEX system cannot discriminate against competitors, and must provide equal access to everyone on a competitively neutral and nondiscriminatory basis.

“As long as carriers are paying their fare/carriage fee to be in the system and are abiding by technical and safety rules, we cannot kick them out of the system. Conversely, data centers can, and often do, kick carriers out, for competition reasons,” he adds.

The system is underground and in the public rights of ways, adds Jun, noting that it’s also regulated.

Jun says that the two main principles of the meet-me vaults are to provide open access and to operate in a “pristine” manner that continues to guarantee the tenants’ access over time.

In a project charter set out by the company, Towardex outlined its hopes to “operate a new multi-cable, multiconduit fiber optic transmission system dedicated to promoting interconnection freedom, accessibility, network neutrality, digital equality, freedom of enterprise, and freedom of expression for all.”

MASS Effect

HEX links in with the Massachusetts Internet Exchange, otherwise known as MASS IX, which was launched by Jun and Schoch in 2015.

The exchange is distributed, neutral, and enables public peering, cloud connectivity, and data center interconnections throughout New England. It’s currently present in more than six data centers in the Boston metro.

Connections into MASS IX are available for member utilities of HEX, Towardex says, and this allows fiber providers to sell access into MASS IX natively from their network, bypassing legacy carrier hotels and without the hassle of cross-connect fees.

“The MASS IX currently captures most of the data centers in Eastern Massachusetts around the Boston Metro,” says Jun.

“There’s a build happening for MASS IX to extend it to the rest of Massachusetts, but that’s an ongoing project. For the most part, most of the network services that we provide are focused on Boston.”

More openness

Challenges to interconnectivity come in all shapes and sizes, and Jun says one problem his company is trying to solve with HEX is access to manholes.

“Access is a real challenge in a lot of these large manholes, so we wanted to solve those challenges and maintain our manhole systems in a pristine way,” he says, with the aim of making it easier for tenants to access their conduits safely and without fear of damaging other cables.

Other infrastructure, such as utility poles and underground conduits, can also be difficult to get to, Jun says. “The principal problem with the utilities in general across the country is that nobody could find access to the manhole or conduit system,” he adds.

“So when a new carrier comes into Boston and they want to start interconnecting onto the streets, everybody that owns conduits doesn’t want them in there because they see this newcomer as a potential competitor.”

Jun believes there is a better way. “Our goal was to create a large network with tons of conduits with over 24 to 34 conduits, lots of pathways, and it’s regulated, low cost, affordable rent in big manholes. Let’s network them all together.”

Jun says Towardex has the ability to open up this entire system to everyone that comes into the market.

“The previous way utilities operate in Boston is that if you’re a telecom provider trying to come in, the existing telecom guys will do everything in their power to ensure you don’t get in,” he says. “We’re the opposite of that.”

Towardex states that all tenants of the HEX system can easily license conduit space to run new cross connect cables between themselves. According to the company, HEX also allows the data center’s colocation customers to become their own dark fiber provider and run their interconnections out in the streets without being subject to cross connect fees.

Taking HEX beyond Boston

Jun, a native Bostonian, is aiming for total network domination in his home city.

“Our goal is to continue our current role as a network provider in Boston, where we are essentially the facilitator for all of the major network deployments that are happening in Boston,” says Jun.

“So we’re going to continue that model to help our customers deploy and come to Boston, and really promote Boston as a global city for Internet traffic.”

That said, long-term the goal is to expand beyond Boston and Massachusetts, and into other US Tier 1 and Tier 2 markets, adds Jun.

“Long term, we’ll take a look at how we succeed with this HEX model, this underground meet-me system, and think about if there is a need for a system like that in other markets, and if there is, to what extent.”

Jun is confident that HEX can be implemented in other markets, but only if it’s a good fit for that particular metro area.

“The reality is that not everywhere needs a system like this,” he explains. “Just like Internet exchanges and meetme rooms, there has to be a compelling business case and a market challenge that we’re trying to solve. But there are definitely markets out there that would certainly benefit from a system like this.

“When a market is suffering from competitive problems and there’s a demand for a lot of fiber, that’s when a system like HEX could come in to ease that. It really depends on each individual market landscape,” he adds.

For now, these future expansion plans are being considered, says Jun, though he does note that some additional partners would be needed to help this become a reality.

Whether the expansion into the other markets happens sooner or later isn’t a concern for Towardex. Instead, the opportunity to drive interconnection is the key goal.

“We started this company as network engineers because we love the Internet,” he says.

“The best part about the Internet is interconnection because the word Internet is all about interconnected networks.

“If there’s no connection, there is no Internet, and that’s not only challenging but the most satisfying part of being in this space.”