Cross-connect

A cross-connect is a cable and nothing more: a fiber the operator runs from one customer's rack to a carrier's, a cloud's or another customer's, through a patch panel in the meet-me room. It is billed at installation and then monthly, and it is one of the most profitable lines in the business. Equinix counts several hundred thousand of them across its sites, and interconnection brings in roughly a fifth of its recurring revenue. For the customer, the cable replaces a link over the internet: low latency, no transit, direct access to AWS (Amazon Web Services) Direct Connect or Azure ExpressRoute. For the insurer, it creates a dependency the policy describes poorly. The customer relies on the operator for the physical continuity of the link, on the carrier at the other end, and on a patch panel shared by thousands of fibers. A patching error during maintenance, a cable tray crushed during works, and the service drops without any of the insured's systems being touched. That is contingent business interruption, or no cover at all if the wording requires an attack or the failure of a named provider. Colocation contracts also cap the operator's liability at a few months of fees, which limits subrogation. One caveat: two cross-connects to two carriers over two physical paths do give real redundancy, provided they share neither the same panel nor the same room.