The European division of Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) continued making headway in the past two days, adding two interesting deals. Today’s announcement was for yet another blended IP and CDN services contract for the gaming industry. The independent development studio Crytek GmbH will be leveraging Level 3’s HSIP for dynamic game-related content and CDN services to support their various websites, popular videos, patches, and other media. The ability to bundle those continues to win Level 3 deals like this.
Meanwhile, Level 3 also made inroads in the Middle East via a strategic long term agreement with Saudi Telecom (STC). The deal will give Level 3 and its customers enhanced connectivity to much of a region where it has not historically paid much attention, while of course offering Saudi Telecom greater connectivity across both Europe and the USA. Additionally, Level 3 is providing STC with multiple 10Gbps ports at various PoPs. The Middle East sure is hopping these days, both in terms of politics and bandwidth.
Saudi Telecom brings to the table both submarine capacity via Marseille and terrestrial capacity via the new JADI route (Jeddah-Amman-Damascus-Istanbul). The astute reader will notice that I do not have a map of their network in my collection – I haven’t found one yet. There might be one buried in there in Arabic, but I haven’t managed to penetrate that deeply.
Update, a kind reader provided this link which has a variety of STC maps, one of which I have added to the left. I don’t see one of the JADI route yet, but nevertheless I’ll have to add STC to my maps pages.
In an further update, Level 3 announced a short while ago that it intends to sell $300M in senior notes due 2019. They will use it to refinance a piece of that 2014 debt. This is not a surprise, where there is a debt window there will be a Level 3 refi – it’s like a law of physics or something.
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If the telecoms between Western Europe and the Pacific can squash the fears of instability, they have a lot of long-haul potential.
JADI obviously provides a redundant route around the Suez. STC can take this route with their existing network and provide redundancy to the Red Sea entirely through the Persian Gulf.
The Turks appear to have a non-Russian route all the way to China.
Sure these are all piecemeal and therefore don’t support the lowest of latencies or the highest of throughputs (both compared to fresh longhauls), but it is better than going around the continents through the ocean and does provide redundancy.
Squash fears of instability? I’d say that at the moment they’re going in the wrong direction!
ttt