Wednesday Bytes: Southern Telecom, UPN, CenturyLink, Birch, MEF

Here’s a quick look at a few items from the first half of the week – a couple buildouts, a new service, a federal contract extension, and a new hire:

Southern Telecom is on the move down in Georgia. With an agreement with Georgia Transmission Corporation in hand, they say they will be building a new 75 mile underground fiber route between the town of Winder, which lies just northeast of Atlanta, and Hartwell further to the northeast near the border with South Carolina. The new route takes Southern Telecom into some new territory off of its main intercity and metro reach in the state along the corridor between Atlanta and Jacksonville, Florida.

Meanwhile, Unite Private Networks is adding to its reach in Texas.  They are now offering their full suite of services at Infomart Dallas at 1950 N. Stemmons Freeway, building into the building’s meet-me room.  UPN built out its fiber network in Dallas a few years ago, starting with a project for the Dallas Independent School District and moving on from there.

CenturyLink managed to nail down some more government work earlier this week. They secured a three year extension with the GSA’s Networx program beyond the original expiration next Spring. The extensions are aimed at smoothing the transition from Networx to the new Enterprise Infrastructure Services vehicle. It seems like yesterday that Networx itself was the newest federal contract nova on the horizon.

Birch is expanding its portfolio with a new managed service. They have announced the availability of a new Service Alert Monitor platform aimed at providing customers with real-time detection of interruptions in voice, data center, or internet services. Birch says it has further built-in automation projects in the pipeline as they roll out new technologies across their network. Birch has been relatively quiet on the M&A front for a few quarters now, with a growing organic focus. Is the roll up complete? I’ll bet they have a few more targets left to shoot at.

And in the standards world, the MEF has hired itself a Chief Technology Officer and is planning another new project at Layer 3. Pascal Menezes, formerly a Principal at Microsoft Skype for Business, will be taking the CTO slot as the organization continues to push beyond Carrier Ethernet into the no-man’s-land between SDN, NFV, and LSO that it has labeled the Third Network. Their latest project, however, is about standardization of attributes for Layer 3 IP services, which would be something parallel to the CE2.0 framework.

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Categories: Ethernet · Federal contracts · Managed Services · Metro fiber