Elsewhere in the world – Pacnet, Interoute, Colt, and Orange

I can’t bring myself to add more repetition on network neutrality today – suffice to say the FCC did what it said it would do and everyone else said what they said they would say.  So instead let’s take a look elsewhere in the world for interesting news.

Pacnet has announced plans to accelerate its upgrade of EAC/C2C, planning to add another 3.6TGbps to current inventories with completion in 2011.  This comes on top of 3.2Tbps they already finished adding earlier this year back in April.  The recession hasn’t made any dent at all in bandwidth demands in the Far East, so this doesn’t come as a total surprise.  But did they really just burn through 3.2Tbps in 6 months?  Wow.  Maybe they’re not counting that the way I think they are.

Interoute has extended its network into Russia with a new PoP in Moscow, in response to a surge in enterprise demand.  I imagine they won’t be the only European fiber backbone to extend further eastward in the next year or two. The new PoP is connected via diverse paths from Helsinki and Stockholm.  I’m curious at what level Interoute owns this part of its network, did they pick up some dark fiber or lease some wavelengths?  I don’t really know that much about the fiber infrastructure over there.

Colt Telecom Group reported its Q3 earnings yesterday.  Revenues continue to slide in slow motion to €400.1M from €401.2M in the prior quarter as voice revenues continue to fall faster than data revenues grow.  On the other hand, the margin profile continues to improve with the product mix, and thus EBITDA of €79.5M grew slightly.  Still, given Colt’s assets – a huge metro footprint with 16K on-net buildings – they really should be able to do better than this, shouldn’t they?  They’ve been treading water for so, so long.

And finally, France Telecom’s Orange Business Services unit won a nice €40M outsourcing contract from international hi-tech group Sagemcom.   The four year deal covers its entire IT infrastructure which hits 30 sites worldwide, and will consolidate applications within two datacenters near Paris.  Nice to hear something out of FT that doesn’t involve suicides – a subject I have had trouble figuring out how to write about.

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Categories: Financials · Internet Backbones · Undersea cables