Holiday Roundup: Zayo, Level 3, LINX, and the NSA

There have been a few interesting news items over the holidays that deserve a quick mention:

The pure cloud provider Ajubeo has teamed up with is fellow Boulder-based infrastructure provider Zayo for the bandwidth needed for its expansion plans nationwide. Zayo’s fiber will hook up Ajubeo’s cloud nodes with the necessary network PoPs, starting with Denver and New York but moving on to Southern California and Florida.

In Northern Virginia, LINX NoVA formally launched its interconnection platform at EvoSwitch in Manassas. The first member networks, one of which is IX Reach, have started exchanging traffic, bringing the Open-IX project to life in the DC metro area with European-style peering and traffic exchange. Now the journey toward critical mass begins, let alone the type of scale they’ve got over in London.

Level 3 has followed through and completed the redemption of its 6.5% converts due 2016. Less than $1M of that was paid in cash rather than stock, as the stock has been trading well above the conversion price. For once Level 3 has a lot to look forward to in the new year, with actual profits hopefully being the first order of business. The interest expense saved with this and all their other refinancing moves in the past few quarters should help them move solidly into the black soon.

And Snowden’s NSA-spying revelations about the world’s internet  continue to trickle out.  According to Der Spiegel, they’ve got a whole list of back doors into devices from a variety of vendors at their fingertips, including those of Cisco, Juniper, and yes Huawei.  And not only that, they had already tapped into SEA-ME-WE-4 using a ‘website masquerade operation’ to gather layer 2 information and circuit mapping details, with plans to do the same elsewhere.  It’s sad when the government thinks it better to use the flaws it finds in our infrastructure rather than like actually helping to fix it and make it more secure.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Financials · Internet Backbones · Internet Traffic