Metro Bytes: Comcast, Global Capacity, TelePacific, Birch, Zayo

Here’s a quick rundown of news from the metro this week:

Comcast Business has announced both a contract win and a product expansion this week. In Utah, Comcast picked up Perpetual Storage, Inc as a metro Ethernet customer. PSI will be using Comcast’s network to hook up its DataVaulting services. And by vault, they mean the data center they have carved into a solid granite mountain. Meanwhile, Comcast is taking its SIP Trunking solutions into the Minneapolis/St.Paul metro area. The expansion lets them offer UC and other voice-related products to large enterprises there.

Global Capacity added some new fiber to its diet in the DC metro area. They have lit a new 54-mile metro ring that will hook up their PoPs in Level 3’s McLean and Equinix’s Ashburn locations. Since acquiring Megapath’s wholesale business, Global Capacity has been getting deeper into the infrastructure layer with an access business of its own. The integration has been an ongoing project this year, but the company seems likely to have a restored M&A appetite by the time winter rolls around again.

TelePacific has been steadily ramping up its foothold in Texas ever since buying the Telwest assets there. This week they brought in Mike Winton to lead the company’s sales invasion of the state capital Austin. I had thought TelePacific might add bulk in Texas via further M&A, but they have taken a very organic route so far.

Birch may yet be privately held, but they put out a quarterly update on their financial progress this week. Sales were up 112% over the same quarter last year, although of course that outsized number does include a full quarter’s worth of Cbeyond revenues that weren’t there last year. Birch cited metro fiber and cloud services as key sources of growth, and the fact that Birch is still talking up metro fiber remains interesting.

And just this morning, Zayo’s zColo division is opening a new data center in Minneapolis.  It’s their second site in the area, and consists of 5,000 square feet of space in the 511 Building data center downtown.  The new facility is aimed at fostering interconnection with Zayo’s and other networks in the area, thereby avoiding the need to backhaul everything to Chicago.

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Categories: Cable · CLEC · Ethernet · Financials · Metro fiber · VoIP