Thursday Roundup: Level 3, Hurricane Electric, NTT, BT

Four network updates from around the world that are worth a quick look:

Level 3 will have a different hand at the helm for a few months. CEO Jeff Storey is taking a temporary medical leave of absence following successful heart surgery. (Ouch! Let’s all wish him a speedy recovery!). He expects to be back at least on a limited basis in about two months. In the meantime, longtime CFO Sunit Patel will serve as interim CEO.

Hurricane Electric added yet another node to its network in what has been a steady worldwide expansion.  They have added their second PoP in the Baltics in two weeks with their first foray into Latvia.  The company has extended its IP backbone into Latvia State Radio and Television Center in the capital of Riga.  Last week they expanded into Vilnius in nearby Lithuania, can Estonia be far behind?

NTT has been steadily expanding both its cloud services and its European reach for several years now, and got some good news today that helped both simultaneously. NTT Europe has now won a spot as supplier on the G-Cloud 7 framework in the UK. They’ll be able to offer cloud services to the country’s public sector organizations, covering IaaS PaaS, and specialist services.

Meanwhile, regulators in the UK are fine tuning their demands for an overhaul of BT’s OpenReach. While they have backed off demanding an actual sale for now, they are pushing hard for substantially greater independence for the division. That would mean more unbundling, opening up their poles, tunnels, conduits etc for competitive fiber builders. BT’s purchase of EE may have been cleared, but the combination of wireless and wireline may give regulators reason to pay much closer ongoing attention to the wireline side.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Fiber Networks · Government Regulations · Internet Backbones