What is a cross connect in a data center?
A cross connect is a direct physical cable between two customers' equipment inside the same data center, run through the facility's meet-me room rather than over the public internet. At Colo Solutions in Orlando it is how a customer reaches a carrier already in the building — AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, Zayo or Cogent — usually within days, with lower latency and no third-party network in the path.
| What it is | A direct physical cable between two parties inside one facility |
|---|---|
| Where it runs | Through the meet-me room |
| Carriers reachable at Colo Solutions | AT&T, Verizon, Lumen (CenturyLink), Lumen (Level 3), Spectrum Enterprise, Zayo, Cogent, Smart City Telecom, DACS-NX |
| Internet exchange | DACS-IX South has a point of presence in the building |
| Versus an interconnect | A cross connect is within one facility; interconnection is the broader category, including between facilities |
The short version
A cross connect is a piece of cable. That is genuinely all it is — a fiber or copper run from your cabinet to someone else’s, patched through the facility’s meet-me room.
What makes it valuable is what it replaces. Without one, traffic between you and a carrier leaves the building, crosses somebody else’s network, and comes back. With one, it never leaves the room.
Why it is faster and more reliable
Three things follow from staying inside the building:
- Latency drops, because the distance is meters rather than miles and there are no intermediate networks adding hops.
- Fewer parties can break it. A direct cable has no third-party network in the middle to have an outage, a routing change, or a congestion event.
- It is private. Traffic on a cross connect does not traverse the public internet at all, which matters for regulated workloads and for anything where you would otherwise be building a tunnel to get the same property.
Cross connect vs. interconnect
The terms get used loosely, so it is worth being precise.
A cross connect is the physical link between two parties in the same facility. An interconnect is the broader idea of networks joining, which includes cross connects but also links between different facilities, and arrangements at internet exchanges. Every cross connect is an interconnection; not every interconnection is a cross connect.
What this depends on — and why the building matters
A cross connect is only useful if the party you want to reach is already in the building. This is the part that cannot be bought later.
Colo Solutions occupies what became central Florida’s de facto telecom hotel: the building sits at the intersection of multiple fiber routes, and carriers consolidated into it over decades. Nine networks have equipment in the meet-me room — AT&T, Verizon, Lumen (CenturyLink), Lumen (Level 3), Spectrum Enterprise, Zayo, Cogent Communications, Smart City Telecom and DACS-NX — and the DACS-IX South internet exchange has a point of presence here too.
So adding a carrier here is a patch cable and a cross-connect order. In a facility without that density, the same request is a construction project with a lead time measured in months.
What to ask a provider
- Which carriers are physically in the building? Not “which can we arrange” — which already terminate there.
- What does a cross connect cost, and is it recurring? Most providers charge a monthly fee per cross connect.
- How long does provisioning take? In a carrier-dense building this should be days.