Metro Bytes: FirstLight, Comcast, Granite, Integra, Colo Atl

Here’s a quick roundup of some of the interesting news from the metro from this week:

FirstLight Fiber says it has picked up an E-Rate deal up in New Hampshire.  They’ll be providing a 400Mbps connection to the Holderness School, a private school in Plymouth with 53 faculty and 280 students.  That may not seem to be too many, but it’s a boarding school for grades 9-12 and hence has students chewing up bandwidth 24 hours a day.

Comcast Business is on the move again, this time in Utah.  They announced an expansion of their fiber and coax network into the Sugar House business district of Salt Lake City, Utah.  The buildout is aimed at the district’s retail shops, including those at the Sugar House Center and The Commons at Sugar House.  Comcast continues to post big growth rates in the business markets side of the industry.

Granite Telecommunications hit a key fiber milestone recently.  They announced this week that they’ve lit their 100th shopping mall with their Granite Grid service, which they just launched in the Spring of 2014.  They plan to accelerate further, aiming at reaching 300 such locations over the next 12 months.

Also out in the western part of the US, Integra has expanded its offerings to include a new UC service.  They have announced availability of UC Cloud Voice across both their Electric Lightwave and Integra Business divisions.  The new product is powered by Mitel and is integrated with Integra’s Ethernet network.  In the last few years, Integra has been pushing to address larger customers with more complex needs as it pivots from an SMB-focused strategy to take better advantage of its fiber assets.

And Colo Atl has added a new internet backbone tenant.  Hurricane Electric has established its second PoP in metro Atlanta in the company’s colocation facility, which also operates the SNAP internet exchange.  HE has been adding PoPs and markets at a prodigious rate over the last few years.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Datacenter · Internet Backbones · Metro fiber