Catching up on a few notable contracts announced this week that I didn’t get to:
TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) picked up one of its bread-and-butter contracts up in the Albany area. Pioneer Bank will be using their converged IP VPN and Ethernet solutions to hook up 16 locations across the Capital Region, by which they mean all or parts of Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady counties. No idea how many of those locations will be on-net with fiber, but I sort of doubt that TW Telecom has fiber to all of them. That said, you don’t take this kind of contract away from the ILEC without a substantial local presence, both in assets and people, which is what they do best.
Down in New Jersey, Optimum Lightpath (news) [a subsidiary of Cablevision (NYSE:CVC, news, filings)] added another notch to its belt in the education vertical, taking another school district from the incumbent provider – in this case AT&T. Bergen County’s Glen Rock Public Schools have chosen the company’s metro Ethernet services to upgrade their legacy T-1 based network which had shared a whole 3Mbps from a central hub. Hard to believe that an affluent suburb’s schools were on such an ancient connection, but they’ve got 100Mbps with integrated voice now. Optimum Lightpath has been making a real dent with school districts in the region.
Out in San Diego, cbey profiled a new SMB customer: Diego & Son. They had previously used a cable connection for their bandwidth, but the printing business is now using CBeyond’s voice, broadband, mobile, and security solutions, including data backup. Sounds exactly like the kind of customer CBeyond aims for.
Over in Ireland, Forward Emphasis International has selected Hibernia Networks (news) to add capacity to its network. They will be using it to support their CRM outsourcing solutions at their locations in Buncrana and Malin Head in the Republic of Ireland, as well as Belfast in Northern Ireland. Following last year’s fiber build on the island, Hibernia Atlantic has been making rapid strides in the Irish marketplace.
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Categories: CLEC · Internet Backbones · Metro fiber
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Rob, you would be utterly amazed to learn just how many school districts across the country (and libraries, and other institutions) are still sucking through thin straws, owing to the historical qualifying criteria under the USF’s e-Rate program for schools and libraries. I read recently that some of this is about to change, due to the inclusion of dark-fiber-derived lines (and potentially GigE pipes as well), which are now becoming eligible. However, I have not yet read the fine print governing such changes, so I’ll reserve comment concerning whether this has had anything to do with the release you cited.
frank@fttx.org
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