Metro Bytes: Wave, UPN, Great Plains, Integra, EarthLink

For your Friday news catchup, here are five quick takes on news from the metro and regional fiber worlds:

Wave Broadband has made another inorganic move up in the Pacific Northwest. They’ve acquired the Seattle ISP known as ReallyFast (not exactly a subtle branding effort there!). Wave has been consolidating various assets in the region over the last few years, acquiring Spectrum and Black Rock Cable. The acquisition of ReallyFast gives them even more customer depth in Seattle, both on the residential and commercial fronts.

Unite Private Networks has completed another of its bread and butter E-Rate buildouts in the education vertical. They hooked up 15 facilities for the Fountain-Fort Carsen School District 8 in Fountain, Coloradi, just to the south of Colorado Springs. UPN has a presence all along Colorado’s Front Range of course.

A few days after finishing an expansion underneath the Missouri River into South Dakota, Great Plains Communications says it has also finished off multiple fiber routes between Cheyenne and Denver. The three redundant routes pass through Nebraska for greater diversity, and also offer connectivity on to the east.  Great Plains is clearly looking to improve its links between the home turf and other neighboring markets.

Integra has added some new faces as it continues to rekindle the Electric Lightwave brand as its wholesale arm while tightening the focus of Integra Business. Scot Oslund is joining Electric Lightwave as vice president, premier channel, while Christopher Camut, lately CEO of Ajubeo, will take over as president of Integra Business. Integra has also brought in Jason Koenders as their CTO.

And last week, EarthLink shook up its management team again. Their CFO, Bradley Ferguson, will shift to operations as EVP and Managing Director, Small Business and Consumer. The new CFO will be Louis M. Alterman, who shifts over from EVP Strategy, Operations, and Transformation. Gerard Brossard will be the new EVP and Managing Director, Managed Services and Information Technology. And the EVP of Managed Services, Michael Toplisek, will be leaving the company after a transition period — I’m sure we’ll see that name again before long. What does it all mean? What EarthLink was doing still wasn’t getting the job done, so they’re doing something else. Beyond that I don’t know the back story yet. I’m still wondering if they’ll follow through on monetizing their dark fiber in the coming months.

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Categories: CLEC · Jobs · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber