(Photo from C Spire website)
- The project will deploy a high-count fiber backbone with the capacity available to serve thousands of organizations, businesses, and communities along and near the corridor.
C Spire announced this week that the company is expanding its Mississippi fiber network with a new high-capacity corridor connecting Jackson and Olive Branch.
“AI is changing the scale and speed at which digital infrastructure must be built, and this expansion strengthens Mississippi’s position in that rapidly growing economy,” said C Spire President & CEO Suzy Hays. “This project represents a strategic investment in the infrastructure required to support the next generation of technology. While it is designed to support a long-term customer’s continued growth, it also creates opportunities to serve others along the route.”
The project will add a large number of fiber miles to this 200-mile stretch of C Spire’s network and deploy a high-count fiber backbone with the capacity available to serve thousands of organizations, businesses, and communities along and near the corridor.
Brad Carpenter, C Spire Chief Operating Officer & EVP, Business Technology, told Magnolia Tribune Thursday that the latest corporate investment is an extension of what the company has been doing in their footprint for decades.
“We have over 22,000 miles of fiber across the state of the Mississippi, Alabama, some in Tennessee. We connect businesses, governments, consumers. We’ve been doing that through our fiber backbone and then our wireless for many, many years, and we connect hyperscalers. We’ve been doing that for some time as well,” Carpenter said. “So, this is really just an extension of that. We’re primed with it with the fiber that we already have in the ground and our ability to operate on those terms.”
At a simple level, C Spire is connecting hyperscalers and data centers together in a superhighway of fiber capacity.
“Along this route we’ll have capacity to connect other businesses, other large enterprises as well, too, that might be interested in similar capacity needs,” Carpenter said. “Then on top of that, we’re operating that network, the physical aspect of it, monitoring it to ensure resilience and high uptime and exceptional customer experience, doing what we’ve always done at C Spire, continuing to invest in ensuring our technology and our network is future ready.”
C Spire’s investment aims to drive new opportunities for businesses, healthcare providers, educational institutions, and communities across Mississippi to innovate and compete in an increasingly digital world.
The new fiber corridor will connect Jackson, the state’s capital city, with Olive Branch, DeSoto County, and the greater Memphis market, a rapidly growing hub for logistics, technology and data center investment.
Carpenter said when you look at hyperscalers, data centers, and other economic development opportunities, the businesses coming into these markets have core utility needs, with electricity being one and connectivity being another. This is keenly important when considering the workloads of AI and cloud compute or private to public cloud compute and cybersecurity in this day and age.
“So, where we fit is living in our mission of improving our customers’ lives through technology,” Carpenter said. “This is putting that into action, putting our investments in connectivity and connecting areas within the state, within the footprint that might not normally be connected with high-speed broadband, and be able to take advantage of the technologies of now, but also the technologies that come in the next 5 to 10 years.”
Organizations with facilities or expansion plans in the corridor will be able to work with C Spire to evaluate available fiber capacity and connectivity solutions.
Carpenter confirmed that C Spire is working with multiple businesses and organizations in the announced corridor.
“If you look at the hyperscalers and the economic development activity in the footprint, we’re working with all of them,” he said.
Construction and service availability details will be announced as the project progresses.
As for the impact the investment will have on existing customers, Carpenter said this project is segmented from the company’s consumer base.
“If anything, it just continues to help because it adds additional volume, additional demands on us, demands on the network,” he said. “No adverse impact [to our current customers], only benefits that we can see in that will be able to bring technology to our business customers, to our government customers, to our consumers in ways that other providers are just not set up to do in our footprint.”
Carpenter said this latest project is a continuation of C Spire’s mission of improving lives through technology, “putting us in a position where we are ensuring our network is future ready and our customers are only going to benefit from this.”
“Being able to provide high availability, low latency connectivity to our customers and then also the technology solutions, whether it’s cybersecurity solutions, managed IT solutions, AI solutions that ride on top of that connectivity and being able to do that in a manner that delivers just an exceptional customer experience,” he added.
C Spire, based in Ridgeland, Mississippi, is the largest privately held U.S. wireless carrier, a leading fiber internet provider in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.
