Metro Bytes: Frontier, Cbeyond, Comcast, tw telecom

Here’s a quick roundup of some interesting news from the metro:

Frontier Communications will be helping out the trucking industry. They’ve been selected by Road Scholar Transport to improve its communications links between its headquarters in Dunmore, PA with its satellite locations in Mechanicsburg and Denver, PA, in Carlstadt, NJ, and in Leominster, MA. The upgrade includes a new centralized Mitel 5000 system — yes even truckers need VoIP.

With its acquisition by Birch pending, Cbeyond is continuing to expand its cloud presence. Yesterday they launched a cloud-based file storage and backup service aimed at the SMB. The transition to the cloud has been a difficult one, but there is no going back for service providers like Cbeyond. I’m curious to see how Birch approaches cloud services when it closes the deal and takes on a more national scope.

Comcast Business picked up a key hospitality industry contract late last week. They’ve been selected as a qualified vendor by Choice Hotels International, which operates about a dozen motel chains covering over 5,000 properties. That doesn’t get them into all those locations just yet, just the chance to bid for the various franchisees. But it’s certainly another major inroad made for the company’s rapidly growing metro Ethernet footprint.

And also late last week, tw telecom expanded into a new east coast market. They have built out their network into Richmond, Virginia, moving into QTS’s giant 1.3M square foot data center campus there. It’s the second new market on tw telecom’s expansion list for the year, with Boston, Cleveland, and Philadelphia still to come. I wonder if they’ll make it to those three before the Level 3 deal completes, making that piece of it all a bit moot.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Ethernet · Metro fiber · VoIP