Glossary for routing, transport, and interconnection

Colocation Customer equipment placed in a shared network facility with power, support, and interconnection options. Cross-connect A physical connection between two parties in a meet point or colocation environment. Transport Private connectivity between locations, facilities, meet points, IX ports, or cloud paths. Metro lateral A custom route segment connecting a customer location into a larger network path or hub. Hardened last mile A planned premises access route with documented entrance, cabinet handoff, route, access points, and interconnection targets. Splice point A planned place where fiber can be joined, branched, repaired, or connected to another route segment. Access point A planned handhole, cabinet, pole, splice case, or facility point where the fiber route can be reached later. Meet-me point A planned location where networks, providers, or customer routes can physically hand off or interconnect. Carrier diversity Use of separate carriers, routes, entrances, handoffs, or upstream paths to reduce single-path dependency. Redundancy A design that keeps service working through a planned second path, provider, handoff, entrance, route, or routing option. Lateral redundancy A second local path, entrance, conduit, pole route, or provider path between a customer site and the larger network. Protected route A route designed with a planned backup path, optical protection, routed failover, alternate entrance, or dual handoff. Unprotected route A single working path where interruption usually waits for repair or manual reroute. 100G / 400G path A high-capacity private service planned around optical transport, handoff speed, route, and growth. Private WAN A private multi-site network using transport, routing, optical services, or a custom backbone. Paducah IX A regional exchange ecosystem in Paducah where participating networks can connect and exchange traffic. Server hosting Regional server capacity with connectivity, support, and proximity to interconnection options. Expansion site A network-adjacent site planned for edge, cloud-adjacent, content, processing, or backbone growth. Cloud exit path Private connectivity used when moving selected workloads from public cloud into owned, hosted, or colocated infrastructure. ASN Autonomous System Number. A public routing identifier for a network that controls its own routing policy. BGP Border Gateway Protocol. The routing protocol networks use to exchange reachability information. Two-transit design Using two IP Transit providers or handoffs with BGP policy so the network has more than one upstream Internet path. IP Transit Carrier-grade Internet connectivity where routes are exchanged with an upstream network. DIA Dedicated Internet Access. Business Internet with clear bandwidth, static IPs, and routing support. Dark fiber Fiber strands reserved for use but not lit until optical equipment is connected. Wavelength A lit optical channel delivered over fiber, often 10G, 100G, or 400G. IRU Indefeasible right of use. A long-term right to use fiber, route segments, or capacity. NNI Network-to-network interface. A structured handoff between two networks or carriers. IX Internet Exchange. A switching fabric where networks interconnect and exchange traffic. Type II / Off-Net Partner-carrier access for locations outside the direct Quad State Internet fiber footprint. DCI Data Center Interconnect. Private connectivity between data centers or colocation facilities. Private backbone A private network spine connecting sites, carriers, cloud paths, and interconnection points.