Allied Fiber LLC said this week it has received financing from affiliates of Falcon Investment Advisors LLC and ABRY Partners . Falcon, a one-time Verizon Terremark investor, and ABRY, an investor in Grande Communications and Sidera Networks Inc. , are the only new institutional investors in Allied Fiber's Phase One buildout, a US$140 million debt and equity project linking dark fiber routes between New York, Chicago, and Ashburn, Va.

Why this matters
Even though Allied Fiber is a real estate and facilities play, the new money shows that some investors are still excited by the idea of expanding fiber capacity for existing carriers and easing bandwidth constraints on highly trafficked routes.

Allied Fiber is interesting, too, in that its appeal is that it helps existing networks expand quickly to offer more services to their customers. The company is led by Hunter Newby, formerly the technology brain behind Telx Group Inc. , and its strategy is not to compete with carriers, but rather to let them establish quick fiber capacity on highly trafficked routes by getting dark fiber and neutral colocation and interconnection facilities all lined up and ready to use.

For more
For more on Allied Fiber and other carrier efforts to ease capacity constraints with big fiber-filled ideas, check out the following:

— Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading