Friday Bytes: Cox, Integra, QTS, tw telecom, Level 3

As we enjoy the turning of the leaves, at least where I am, here is a quick rundown of other news from this week that I didn’t get to:

Cox Business has completed a big metro fiber buildout for the Navy out in Southern California.  They’ve added some 40 miles of network to hook up 165 Navy sites in San Diego County, everything from barracks to fire stations, hotels, residential housing, and ships in the harbor.  It’s a 5 year contract covering both internet and residential video, definitely the sort of thing a cable MSO with a big metro fiber presence certainly excels at.

Also out west, Integra has boosted its relatively young wavelength business with some bigger, faster pipes.  They’ve now established dedicated, low latency 100G express routes aimed at carriers and the cloud. The upgrade is between the major metros in their western US footprint, i.e. Seattle, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Sacramento.  Integra recently had a change of leadership, and it’s interesting that the first organic expansion PR under the new, if interim, CEO is of this type.

QTS has a new, aromatic tenant for its cloud hosting division.  Crabtree & Evelyn has picked their managed hosting environment to support their cloud-based application.  They didn’t mention just what the application was, but the retail world as a whole seems to be quite happy with the possibilities enabled by cloud revolution.

tw telecom’s list of expansion markets entered just keeps going and going.  This week’s move was in Minnesota, where they announced the expansion from Minneapolis into St. Paul, and out into the western suburbs, Anoka County, and Washington County including the St. Croix Valley.  I wonder if they’ll get through every new market announcement before the Level 3 deal closes.

And speaking of Level 3, they added another cloud to their Cloud Connect ecosystem.  They’ll be offering direct access via VPN to HP’s Helion Managed Cloud Service, which debuted last December.  HP was one of the companies rumored to be looking at Rackspace, though nothing materialized out of that – yet at least.  The connectivity services will be in place in North America sometime this quarter, with the rest of the world following in the first half of 2015.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Fiber Networks · Metro fiber