Meet-me rooms are hugely beneficial, allowing for the fast and secure exchange of data and other traffic. The rooms enable telecommunications and network service providers to interconnect equipment, and can be great in terms of cost savings and security improvements. But without free cross connects, meet-me rooms can really ramp up costs and put the brakes on growth.
In this article, we’ll explore meet-me rooms in detail, explaining what they are and how they work. Then, we’ll talk through the difference that free cross connects makes in the use of meet-me rooms, and let you in on some of our predictions for the future of meet-me rooms globally.
What is a Meet-Me Room?
A meet-me room is a space you’ll find in some data centers. It allows for communications companies to exchange data with other carriers and internet service providers in the facility, and enables customers to cross-connect.
Meet-me rooms are usually fairly small, secure spaces, with cabinets and racks of hardware ready to facilitate quick data transfers. The rooms allow for physical connections between ISPs and organizations. In doing so, they reduce the distance traffic needs to travel and keep data within a colocation facility.
ISP hardware in meet-me rooms enables more direct routing and networking, with cross connects joining ISP hardware and customer servers. Hardware can be connected to customer servers via cross connects, for enhanced security and efficiency.
What to Look for From a Meet-Me Room
Meet-me rooms vary in design and layout across data centers. But if you’re considering a new data center and want to know what to look out for, there are a few things to think about.
Make sure that the meet-me room in question has space for new carriers, first and foremost. Its ability to house new providers is crucial for sustainability in the long term. A good meet-me room should also include:
- At least 45U cabinets, capable of accommodating infrastructure for network providers and carriers
- Cooling units to regulate temperatures inside the facility
- Ideally two power options: AC and DC. Some meet-me rooms will only have one power option, but they should have room for more carrier infrastructure if so.
The Benefits of Meet-Me Rooms
Data centers with meet-me rooms provide a number of unique benefits to their customers. These range from better control and security to potential cost savings. Not only that, meet-me rooms provide data centers themselves with long-term growth potential.
Control and security
A meet-me room provides unparalleled levels of control for customers. It allows data centers to guarantee the security of connections, and it’s great for business continuity.
Enhanced security is assured thanks to controls on unauthorized access, as well as the additional protection that generator and battery backups provide.
More options for customers
The longevity of a relationship between a customer and their chosen data center depends largely on the amount of choice that data center can provide, and meet-me rooms are key to this.
Meet-me rooms allow for a huge range of options for customers to choose from, allowing them to access the best carrier balance with plenty of room for all the equipment they need.
Cost savings
The costs of distributing traffic can be minimized with meet-me rooms, as customers can get away without paying for things like local loop communications fees. The high-bandwidth connectivity provided by meet-me rooms also helps to reduce costs in the long-term.
Potential for future growth
Meet-me rooms allow a data center to grow and expand in line with changes in demand, helping to future-proof a facility. These improvements in opportunities for growth are largely down to the increased connection options that such rooms provide for customers.
We’re Rethinking the Meet-Me Room
The vast majority of meet-me rooms are structured like a paywall, meaning customers have to pay individually for every connection they need. This can have a massive impact on businesses that are ready to scale. It can even lead to network operators stuck in facilities they couldn’t leave if they wanted to.
At TRG, we’re rethinking this approach. We believe a meet-me room should be a true interconnection hub, not a toll booth.
The meet-me room at TRG is free to use, with no per-cross-connect pricing and no artificial barriers. This means that carriers have to compete on actual service quality and pricing, not on the ability to extract margin from connectivity fees.
Our dual entries intro dual meet me rooms, along with milspec armored core fiber cabling with corning high bend radius provides ultra reliability, helping to make our colocation more reliable than elsewhere.
The Long-Term Play: A Carrier-Dense Future
By eliminating fees on cross connects, we’re building something bigger: a data center ecosystem where interconnection is frictionless.
The more networks we attract, the more valuable our facilities become – not just for colocation, but for edge deployments, peering agreements and cloud interconnection.
This matters for the industry, because the future of data centers isn’t just about power and cooling. It’s about connectivity. The industry has spent decades nickel-and-diming customers on cross connects, and that’s a huge mistake.
By making connectivity a free, frictionless feature, we unlock:
- Faster network expansion
- Lower costs for customers
- Stronger data center ecosystems
This isn’t just a competitive differentiator. It’s a paradigm shift. And in time, the whole industry will begin to move in this direction. Get in touch if you’d like to hear more about our meet-me rooms and the difference free cross connects can make.
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