Howdy, over the past 4-6 months or so I have been attempting to find various means of interconnecting our main POP in a very small market (From a telecom options standpoint) in Ohio with one of the IX points in the US or at least a facility in another state/city which offers more options for us. It appears we have outgrown our market (we are beginning to hit the "We only offer DS-3/OC-3 in that market..." conversations..) and we will either need to move, or we will need to get creative. (option A is out..) I've found the willingness of the carriers with whom we've had long standing profitable relationships to work with us in achieving this goal well, lacking. We are currently ON NET with 3 major international telecommunication companies who seem very willing to keep pumping their transit into our facility but are not willing to allow us to use their network to cross-connect to other carriers or even to connect to their co-location facilities in other markets...?
It could be that I am approaching them with the wrong terminology, or it could be that I am going about this in the wrong way altogether. Does anyone else have experience growing a network out of your local market and success/horror stories going along with it? We aren't really interested in a second datacenter. We would just like to connect our current datacenter via a redundant fiber ring of some sort to an IX or a city which has more transit choices than Podunk. Also any advice on where would actually be a good place from Ohio (Chicago is an obvious choice...) to cross connect would be helpful as well, but I am mainly looking for opinions or thoughts on technical challenges of "doing it yourself" and trying to get telecoms to help. (it seems like it would be cheaper initially to buy backhaul from a telecom but in the long run to build it yourself, but I am not sure on maintenance costs..)
Thanks in advance.
-Drew