Metro Bytes: USA Fiber, 8×8, Birch, CityFibre, NTT

Time for a quick metro catchup:

Northern Virginia has a new dark fiber operator.  Last week, USA FIBER revealed some new fiber infrastructure in the data center boomtowns in and around Ashburn.  The initial buildout is of a 7 mile, 864-count, underground core data center ring passing some 35 data centers.  That’s only a starting point of course, with further routes to be added in the future.  USA Fiber is led by industry veterans Ken Goff and Judd Carothers.

In the business VoIP space, 8×8 won an a very distributed multisite deal.  Regus is deploying the company’s enterprise communications as a service initially across its US and European footprint, with the rest of the world to follow.  That’s some 140 sites at first, out of an eventual pool of 2,500 business center locations in 106 countries that Regus has in all, from which they enable other businesses at various stages of development.

Birch continued chugging along its consolidation path, closing a customer asset acquisition deal with Sage Telecom.  The purchase is of only a ‘less-than-substantial’ piece of Sage, and will bring certain customers in the Southwest, Southeast, and Midwest into Birch’s domain.  Birch continues to roll up CLEC assets and customers into its empire, which since the Cbeyond acquisition has started to gain significant weight in both revenue and fiber.

Over in the UK, CityFibre has announced a key master services agreement with Vodafone.  The first contract under the agreement is for metro fiber in CityFibre’s York footprint, which stretches some 120km.  The relationship has apparently been in the works for two years, and we’ll probably see more to come in other metro areas in the UK.

And finally, the Japanese giant NTT renewed its cloud-based attack on the European enterprise markets.  This morning, they launched a new Disaster Recover as a Service solution via a partnership with Geminare.  They are offering DRaaS from four secure enterprise cloud locations in Europe out of 14 worldwide, and are kicking things off with a promotional launch trial.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber · VoIP