Metro Bytes 11/16: Midcontinent, Zayo, UPN, Atlantic Metro

Here are several interesting items in the metro space lately that are worth a quick look:

Infinera won an expansion contract with Midcontinent. The upper midwestern cable operator will be using Infinera’s DTN to power its 6,000 mile fiber network, and in particular to expand into Minnesota and connect up some recently acquired territories. They’re also using the ATN edge platform to offer bandwidth to the enterprise. A nice regional victory of course, but we all await the DTN-X next year.

Zayo says it is expanding its footprint in Nashville. They plan to nearly double their footprint from 40 to 78 route miles in the metro area, bringing online the suburbs of Franklin, Brentwood, and Oak Hill. The new fiber should be in place by the end of this year. It’s not the first expansion in Nashville for Zayo recently, as last year their ZColo business expanded into the city as well.  The Nashville footprint came from American Fiber Systems, which Zayo acquired last year.  It was one of AFS’s smaller markets, and will benefit from Zayo’s more aggressive investment.

Unite Private Networks continued its string of school district contracts, but this time in a Tier 1 market with a larger customer. They have signed a fiberoptic WAN contract with the Dallas Independent School District. The buildout will consist of 300 route miles of fiber connecting 281 facilities, with the first phase complete within twenty months, or the summer of 2013. This is a bigger contract than we generally see UPN take on, though it’s probably what private equity firm Ridgemont had in mind when it invested in the company last year.

And back on the east coast, Atlantic Metro says its business continuity and disaster recovery business made short work of that Nor’easter a few weeks back with none of its customers losing data of any sort.  Given the extent of the power outages and downed lines of all sort, I’d say the internet as a weathered the storm pretty well as a whole except in the last mile.

 

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Categories: Metro fiber