Troy Cable will be among the Internet Service Providers across the River Region that will benefit from the Montgomery Internet Exchange (MIE), which is the first Internet exchange in Alabama and the fourth in the Southeast.

The MIE was announced at a news conference Wednesday at the RSA Dexter Avenue Building in Montgomery and is causing quite a stir around the River Region and across the state. The Montgomery Cyber Connection has the potential to fuel economic development, research and innovation for the entire state.

Jake Cowen, general manager of Troy Cable, an Internet Service Provider, said the Montgomery Internet Exchange will speed content to those in the River Region by storing it closer to home rather than pulling it from exchanges in other part of the country.

“What the Montgomery Internet Exchange means for Troy Cable is that the content provider will be closer and will provide faster service,” Cowen said. “Troy Cable will not have to go to other states to get our content.”

Cowen explained rather than having to go to Montgomery, Birmingham, Huntsville and Atlanta to pull its content, the content provider will be in Montgomery.

Troy Cable currently has content providers in Atlanta and Dallas.

“ An ISP always wants to have two content providers in the event one of the providers goes down,” Cowen said. Although that is unlikely, Cowen said it could happen. He cited an incident when the Atlanta content provider went down. Not long after Atlanta was back up, the content provider in Dallas went down.

“If both content providers had gone down at the same time, that would have been trouble,” Cowen said.

He added that Troy Cable might keep both the Atlanta and Dallas content providers along with the MIE.

The Montgomery Internet Exchange will speed content delivery to those in the River Region at the speed of light. Additionally the MIE will benefit from a partnership with Akamai Technologies.

Cowen said Akamai, which is a global leader of content delivery network services, will store servers at the RSA Datacenter in Montgomery.

According to the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce, Akamai chose to locate in Montgomery because of the global significance of the new Cyber College at Air University and because of local public and private partnerships in support of the military.