The Chicago Southland Fiber Network (www.csfn.us) consists of 60 miles of fiber optic backbone and lateral infrastructure linking south suburban municipalities, public safety sites, community colleges, economic development fiber optic access sites, and two major Cook County anchor locations – Markham Courthouse and Oak Forest Hospital. This infrastructure provides backbone connectivity to the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association (SSMMA) communities along the I-57 and other key sites in the corridor, establishing access to high capacity Internet services.

This enables access to the Illinois Century Network (ICN), which is used for education and public institutions. Dark fiber resources for both public and private entities provides point-to-point of multi-point network and data applications.

Urbancom.net operates the network and provides commercial services to network customers. At the head-end of the network is Urbancom.net’s headquarter in Oak Forest, Illinois, which provides multi-homed backbone connectivity to major peering points. Initial peering points connect directly to Chicago’s major peering point at 350 E. Cermak Road, Chicago IL datacenter and to the Latisys Data Center location in Oak Brook IL. Additionally, Urbancom.net will have peering connections to the iFiber and NIU Net, DeKalb DATA Network, Illinois Rural Health Network, Aurora OnLight and the Illinois Century Network (ICN).

As part of the project, Urbancom.net has upgraded the data center facility in Oak Forest to a Tier III+ level, which accommodates more than 50 high density server cabinets for both governmental and commercial co-location of servers, cloud computing, and disaster recovery support.

Urbancom.net CEO Ed Urban commented at the recent Southland Economic Development conference that he is pleased with the high level of support provided by former Governor Quinn for the project which he believes will be an economic boom to Chicago’s south suburbs.