European Roundup 10/10: GTS, Orange, Savvis, Megafon, Teliasonera

Here’s a quick look at some other news from the European telecommunications front:

GTS Central Europe is expanding its DWDM fiberoptic network to the east, hooking up Minsk in Belarus. The 600km expansion starts off in Warsaw and was made possible through the help of BelTelecom, the incumbent in Belarus. The route promises to be the shortest path to Russia from Western Europe, and has 80x100G worth of capacity to fill.  GTS has been quite vocal lately, upgrading its infrastructure to the latest tech and expanding into new markets.

Orange Business Services has won another of its bread and butter multinational corporate contracts, this time with a Turkish flavor. Orange will be providing Turkey’s Kordsa Global with Business VPN services to Istanbul and 10 other locations around the world, and taking over management of the company’s global IP network. Kordsa supplies nylon, polyester yarn, cord fabric, and single end cord production to the tire reinforcement and mechanized rubber markets.

Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] continued its European cloud offensive this morning with the launch of its cloud-based Symphony Database platform there. The service offers both Oracle and MS-SQL server environments, and debuted one year ago within Savvis’s US footprint. In Europe, they’re working out of Savvis’ Slough data center to the west of London.  They’re currently building their first data center in continental Europe over in Frankfurt.

Russia’s MegaFon followed through on persistent rumors and announced its intention to IPO in London. The Russian mobile phone giant hopes to raise $2-3B with the sale of 15-20% of the company. I haven’t followed MegaFon too much, as is the case with most Russian telecommunications and internet infrastructure firms. But the Russian side of things has been increasingly assertive lately so I’ll have to do some reading.

And who can figure out the strange saga going on with Teliasonera over the Uzbek scandal. This morning the company’s chairman reaffirmed the board’s confidence in CEO Lars Nyberg today, after the markets learned that the company is canvasing for a successor. Nyberg said recently that he’d resign if it were proven that Teliasonera paid a bribe to an offshore company to secure a 3G license in Uzbekistan. But the company says that with his contract up at the end of the year, they’ve been looking for the next leader for more than a year – so this is unrelated.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Fiber Networks · Wireless