Wednesday Bytes: ShenTel, Towerstream, FirstLight, Huawei

I’m still on the road this morning, and will be tomorrow as well, so I’m still catching up a bit.  Here’s another roundup of some news from yesterday:

Yesterday saw an M&A move in the Virginias. ShenTel has entered a definitive agreement to buy NTELOS, which provides wireless services to 297,500 retail customers across the region. ShenTel is paying $208M in cash while assuming $431M in debt. ShenTel also did a parallel deal with Sprint to expand its affiliate relationship with Sprint into NTELOS’s territories.

FirstLight Fiber says it has secured an expanded line of credit with its lenders. The additional resources from GE Capital and Webster Bank will be used to further drive the company’s fiber expansion projects in the upper Northeast.

Out in Chicago, Towerstream has added a key high rise tower to its on-net footprint. They’ll be able to provide 100Mbps access to tenants at 680 North Lake Shore Drive, a 2.2M square foot building built back in 1929. And of course, from the rooftop they’ll be able to offer services to the surrounding area.

And Huawei Marine has finished an upgrade of the WACS submarine cable system. WACS now has 100G capabilities on both the Portugal-London and Portugal-South Africa legs, the latter covering 11,450km. It was only put into commission three years ago with a theoretical maximum of 5.12Tbps, although they didn’t mention just how far Huawei’s SD-FEC and other technologies increased that number.

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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber · Undersea cables · Wireless