TGIF. Between Metro Connect and the blizzard, there’s been a lot of news this week that I didn’t get to. Here’s two international items, some vendor M&A, and two metro networking expansion items to review before the weekend gets rolling:
NTT is jumping into the M2M/IoT pool at last. They’ve added a secure, global mobile M2M service under their Arcstar brand. Basically, they handle the crossing of borders when it comes to mobile connectivity, so enterprises rolling out M2M solutions don’t need to do wireless deals in each country individually or handle the security of the connections between them. And of course, it hooks up to their cloud services as well. NTT has been very carefully assembling its nextgen cloud-focused portfolio for years now, and M2M is just the latest step.
Telefonica is boosting its managed security services via a partnership with FireEye. They’ll be bundling FireEye’s Mobile Threat Prevention in with their existing offerings, enabling them to isolate and analyze the behavior of suspicious content by running it in a virtual environment and then intervening when they find malicious stuff. Telefonica has had many pans in the fire right now, including the proposed sale of O2 in the UK and the purchase of dark fiber down in Florida.
CommScope is about to get substantially bigger and gain some international scope. They did a deal this week to buy most of TE Connectivity, the former Tyco division that makes fiberoptic cables and network gear. TE Connectivity also has a subsea fiberoptics operation, but that division isn’t part of the deal. Whether that division will continue on its merry way or there is another shoe yet to drop is an open question. CommScope will be paying about $3B, gaining annual revenues of about $1.9B, which will boost their top line to around $5B annually.
Back in the USA, Zayo has polished off a new dark fiber route just out side of Manhattan. The 38.3km buildout connects the NYSE data center in Mahwah to 755 Secaucus Road. That’s half a kilometer shorter than originally planned, courtesy of some key rights of way, giving them a leg up of latency not just on that particular route but to other key facilities nearby on both sides of the Hudson.
And WOW! Business has made a key purchase of conduit in Chicago: one mile of empty fiber conduit along Wacker Drive. But that one mile of conduit filled with 432-count fiberoptic cable will bring some 38 downtown buildings on-net, making it potentially one of the cornerstones of their infrastructure in the Windy City. WOW! Business has become increasingly aggressive in the region lately, with a 1,200 mile wireless backhaul expansion reaching some 500 cell towers in the works as well.
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Categories: IoT, M2M · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber · Security · Telecom Equipment
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One thing WOW wasn’t aggressive on is pricing. Their lit transport was one of the highest quotes I received for a particular route.
They had to be aggressive enough to win 500 cell sites in Chicagoland going up against the likes of Comcast, Zayo, Fibertech and others…just saying.
I don’t think FiberTech has a Chicago footprint? At least not on their web site.
Comcast, Zayo and others were all markedly less than WOW. My request was in the Chicago metro. Zayo had 10GigE cheaper than WOW had GigE.
Comcast obviously had the coverage, but perhaps vs. Zayo.. maybe it was all suburban where Zayo’s density is very thin compared to an MSO.