Global Cloud Xchange Takes Aim at 100G in India, and Sells Yipes?

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, there was a bit of interesting network news from South Asia. Global Cloud Xchange has announced the deployment of a national 100G backbone across India as well as some recent M&A I must have missed along the way.

GCX, which is the international arm of the Indian telecommunications giant Reliance Communications, is deploying its ‘Cumulous Network’. The buildout will connect seven of the country’s largest cities and provide access to international destinations via the submarine cable landing stations in Chennai and Mumbai. RCOM’s data centers will of course be on-net from the get-go as well.

Buried in the press release was also some news that I apparently missed, and which I have yet to dig up details on even after the fact.

This announcement comes after the company announced a massive deleveraging of its assets through a wireless merger with Aircel, a tower divestment with Brookfield and most recently the sale of its Yipes business in North America.

Ummm, so who bought (or is buying) Yipes?  That’s the Ethernet business that Reliance bought for $300M back in 2007 and combined with Flag (and later Vanco) to create what was then called Reliance Globalcom.  Reliance has of course tried to monetize GCX or its underlying assets more than once over the years, and hence a sale of the Yipes business wouldn’t surprise anyone.  But I’m quite curious to hear the details.

[Followup] I found it.  Apparently there is no PR yet, maybe soon though.  But according to this filing GTT has bought Yipes or some portion of it for $28M.

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Categories: Ethernet · Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions