Int’l Bytes 11/15: Orange, CDNetworks, Interoute, Angola Cables

A look at some overseas news from Orange Business, CDNetworks, Interoute, and the South Atlantic Cable System:

Orange Business Services, the international arm of France Telecom, landed a major contract renewal with Merck. They’ll continue to provide the global pharmaceutical giant with IP VPN services across 180 locations in 60 countries. That includes everything from xDSL up to GigE. Orange will also be helping with video collaboration and business acceleration, and the integration of the 30 sites of Merck’s recently acquired Millipore assets.

The Korean-based CDNetworks continued to add far flung PoPs to its global CDN infrastructure, this time in East Africa. They’ve added a point of presence in Kenya, with the airline connectivity specialist SITA already on board. Kenya’s connectivity to the rest of the world has gotten a huge boost in recent years with all the new cables in the region, but real progress on consumer prices requires content to be hosted locally.

Interoute says its reinforced cloud played a key role in protecting UEFA Euro 2012 from DDoS attacks. A European company certainly can’t go wrong defending football against downtime. They managed it at 31,000 web pages per second, which is ever so slightly more than this web server manages (ok, so it’s like five orders of magnitude higher).  Interoute won the UEFA cloud contract a little a years ago.

And down in the South Atlantic, Angola Cables is bringing in some ringers to support its regional submarine expansion. They have brought in APTelecoms to handle the pre-sales for the South Atlantic Cable System, and picked Alcatel-Lucent for a 100G link to WACS. The former is planned for 2014, but then so is the similar South Atlantic Express of eFive so it’s hard to say what will happen in the end there.

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Categories: Content Distribution · ILECs, PTTs · Security · Undersea cables