International Bandwidth Roundup 11-3: Telstra, Teliasonera, Hibernia

Here’s a quick look at several international items that hit the wires yesterday:

Down in Australia, they are still haggling over the NBN and probably will be for years yet.  But yesterday Telstra stirred up a new hornets nest when it pegged the value of the network it has already agreed to sell to the government at AU$16B – saying that the often quoted $11B was a post-tax number.  It’s really a bizarre negotiation isn’t it, where the agreement to sell comes before an agreement on price?  If that weren’t odd enough, even if they agree on a price it doesn’t settle it.  Any deal must still satisfy the ACCC, pass a vote by Telstra’s shareholders, and then actually get a new law passed in parliament.  The report therefore managed what may be one of the most obvious statements of the year:  “Accordingly, there can be no guarantee at this time that the transaction will progress to completion.”  But on the other hand… they’ve gotten this far, perhaps there’s simply no turning back.

Teliasonera International Carrier, the international arm of the Swedish telecommunications giant TeliaSonera AB (ETR:TLS, news, filings), has been selected as a preferred supplier of IP solutions for The Quilt.  The Quilt is a nonprofit that promotes advanced networks amongst its members in the research and education community, helping to aggregate their buying power amongst other things.  Teliasonera has been steadily building its North American IP transit presence for several years now, and I expect when Renesys’s blog updates its rankings this winter they may have moved up a notch or two.

And Hibernia Atlantic announced that its Global Financial Network has experienced an increase in the number of financial firms and exchanges utilizing its services for transatlantic connectivity.  Those include ACTIV Financial and several Canadian exchanges.  A little over a month ago, the company unveiled plans for a new transatlantic cable that it expects to give it a latency advantage, but that won’t be ready for a couple years yet.  The company obviously wishes to emphasize that its current offerings are also on the cutting edge and getting traction in the near term as well.

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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · Internet Backbones · Undersea cables