Monday Bytes: Reliance, Equinix, Xand, Interoute, Vonage

With the first big heat wave of the summer mostly over in North America (we hope), here’s a quick look at some interesting news already this week from Reliance, Equinix, Xand, Interoute, and Vonage:

India’s Reliance Communications is indeed pushing ahead with its plans to IPO its submarine cable unit in Singapore under the name Global Telecommunications Infrastructure Trust. They have now set a price range of $1.09-1.32 per unit, with 642.2-757.6 million units up for sale – or about $700M-1.0B in all. That will translate to a yield of 9.5-11.5% based on information thus far. Reliance is raising the money to help cut its overall debt load, after trying various paths to monetization over the past several years.

Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) has won some more business in the financial vertical. They’ll be supplying connectivity to BATS’ secondary data center in Chicago out of 360 E. Cermak, which will act as backup to its primary facility in Weehawken, NJ. BATS is also planning to open a PoP at Equinix’s NY5 facility later this year.

Xand Holdings has brought in Keigh Markley as its Chief Operating Officer. The northeastern data center operator is busy adding 6Mw of power and 25,000 square feet of raised floor space to its footprint. Xand was purchased by ABRY Partners last fall.

Interoute is also adding to its management team, bringing in Regis Castagné as General Manager for France and Switzerland. The focus is on both the company’s cloud-based services, such as Video as a service and virtual data center, and its fiber network.  Like other nextgen providers not so dependent on legacy voice and messaging services to consumers, they’ve found continuing traction across Europe despite the macroeconomic headwinds.

And Vonage (NYSE:VG, news, filings) says it has been granted two new VoIP-related patents. 8,213,594 is titled “Method and Apparatus for Placing a Long Distance Call Based on a Virtual Phone Number”, while 8,194,843 is titled “Method and Apparatus for Busy Override in an Internet Protocol Based Telephone System”, both of which seem relatively straightforward. Vonage, which has slipped steadily from media favor over the years, now describes itself as “a leading provider of communications services connecting individuals through cloud-connected devices worldwide” which is a lot of words to replace a single acronym (VoIP). https://newswire.telecomramblings.com/2012/07/vonage-granted-two-new-patents/

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Categories: Datacenter · Undersea cables · VoIP