Roundup of Contracts: An Air Force Base, a Health Network, and Norwegian Football

In the past week or so, there have been several telecom and data contracts awarded that I found interesting, but which I didn’t actually manage to write an entire post on.  Sometimes it can be difficult to get excited by PR, and August is the toughest month in which to write.  But it’s been a decent week when it comes to announced sales and in this economy we should keep a close eye on things, so here is a quick roundup of contract activity lately.

q won an interesting contract from The Colorado Hospital Association and the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council for the Colorado Telehealth Network. The network will hook up some 400 urban and rural facilities across the state in what looks like a credible effort to spread telemedicine.  Now, there probably isn’t any provider out there that could actually do this deal but Qwest, when you get beyond the big cities in Colorado there isn’t a great deal of competition for the ILEC.  Nevertheless, it’s going to be 100Mbps – real bandwidth – and it will no doubt be quite welcome out there.

TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) will be hooking up Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas with a five year contract worth $1M.  That’s not a big number but this sort of contract is TW Telecom’s bread and butter.  It’s not huge, and it’s not sexy, but the revenues are sticky and they add up.  Installation will be complete by October of this year.

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) won a nice regional European CDN contract this week, a multi-year contract with Schibsted ASA for the streaming of Norwegian Footbal League matches.  It’s a reminder that the European CDN market is not really a market, but a pile of regional markets each with a different language and different content to distribute.  Level 3’s extended presence in Scandinavia is still somewhat new, having lit dark fiber just a year or two ago in the area.  This week Level 3 also announced a contract expansion at Telekenex, a provider of managed voice and data services that I have heard of but know little about.  The additional products Telekenex will be buying include private line and Ethernet services.   Promising signs for Level 3’s effort to push back churn?

Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) and Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) pulled down  joint win at Hong Kong based e-commerce platform provider QuestNet. The two companies will help accelerate application performance and improve security, and will help QuestNet with its expansion plans in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Thailand.   I know little about QuestNet, however the whole area is almost guaranteed to be high growth over the next decade so a foothold there can’t be a bad thing.

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Categories: CLEC · ILECs, PTTs · Internet Backbones