As often happens during the height of earnings season, a fair amount of non-financial news got drowned out, slipped past my nets, or just left me briefly speechless. Here are a few of the tidbits I didn’t mean to bypass this week:
The Columbus III undersea cable has chosen Xtera gear to upgrade capacity on its 7000 miles between Florida and Portugal. This cable is a bit off the beaten path for transatlantic traffic which usually takes the shorter northern route. With traffic growth in other regions like South America, southern Europe, and Africa outpacing that of the traditional northern US and European hubs, the Columbus route offers advantages to that traffic. The cable was originally built for only 8×2.5Gbps, but the upgrade will use Xtera’s 20-Gbps DPSK equiment and will take the cable to 160Gbps and can accomodate 320Gbps in the future. That’s still an order of magnitude below the larger transatlantic cables, but a pretty big jump nonetheless.
TowerCloud has raised $20M for expansion. TowerCloud is a privately held wireless backhaul firm operating out of Florida (Orlando and Miami) that I have run into before. It was started by executives from Progress Telecom after the buyout by Level 3 led by CEO Ronald Mudry, and rumor had it back then that they were going to be leasing some of the Telcove Spectrum – but then they fell off my radar for a while. The additional $20M in private equity funds will go toward expansion into new markets, initially Atlanta.
Telehouse continued its American offensive, adding a partnership with Akibia. The deal will allow Telehouse to offer 24/7 hardware maintenance and system support to its colocation customers. They have been putting together a full portfolio of managed services, and will be holding a “Breakfast on Broadway” event on 11/19.
Alcatel-Lucent has extended its 7750 SR series with two new service routers. The new gear is designed to sit further out on the network in smaller communities and thus expand the addressable market. This is one more step along Alcatel’s intended path, the “High Leverage Network” architecture. No doubt we will see more related gear appear over the next few months.
And finally, metro fiber specialist Fiberlight announced a deal with international IT services firm Atos Origin. Fiberlight will provide transport services between multiple locations in the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area. Texas is a region in which it has been putting quite a bit of emphasis on this year, purchasing fiber in Waco and bringing more facilities on-net.
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Categories: Datacenter · Metro fiber · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables · Wireless
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Rob,
What do you think happens long term with XO? Is Carl going to take it private? Just wondered what your thoughts are on them. I really appreciate your work and I read your blog everyday.
Thanks,
Ted James
Thanks for the words of encouragement!
As for XO… Icahn is already trying to take it private, so he clearly will if he can. The question is whether the courts will step in on the side of minority investors or not. And that IMHO is anybody’s guess right now.