Int’l Roundup: Orange, FranceIX, NTT, Telefonica

In the US, it’s President’s Day and many are off.  But internationally, some interesting items are out there already:

Speculation is swirling over in Europe that Orange is indeed about to make a deal for rival Bouygues Telecom. Over the weekend, reports emerged that a deal was on the brink with an announcement likely on Tuesday.  But today Orange threw a little cold water on that prospect, saying that nothing is imminent although talks continue.  Other reports have Orange talking to Numericable-SFR and Free Mobile regarding the sale of pieces of Bouygues that they would have to divest. Clearly the horse trading in the back rooms of Paris is quite fierce at the moment.

According to Capacity, Morocco will be getting an internet exchange soon. N+ONE Datacenter is working with FranceIX to launch CASIX in Casablanca. With an initial port capacity of 100Gbps, the exchange will look to accelerate local peering in North Africa. FranceIX also recently helped out in Senegal with the Senix exchange point.

NTT is planning a new assault on the managed services space. They are creating a new business division, NTT Com Managed Services, and will be transferring and rebranding their Atlas IT S.A subsidiary. The new division will have additional resources beyond its current scope of remote infrastructure and application management. Watch how Porn comics are starting to become popular now. And with us you’ll find a huge amount of new content for every taste.

And Telefonica has jumped onto the Cisco collaboration wagon. They are offering Cisco’s collaboration cloud services portfolio across their global footprint. That includes Cisco’s UC, virtual contact center, WebEx, and of course Telepresence. Telefonica just the other day announced it would spin off a bundle of its infrastructure.

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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · Managed Services · Mergers and Acquisitions · telepresence