Tuesday Bytes: CenturyLink, ADVA, Interoute, LINX

I’m on the road again this week out at the Telecom Exchange LA. If you are too, come say hi. In the meantime, here’s a few quick takes on news from the start of this week:

CenturyLink and Infinera have teamed up to bring big bandwidth into the Super Computing 2016 event this week. They are delivering 2.5Tbps to SCinet’s vewue in Salt Lake City, leveraging Infinera’s DTN-X and of course CenturyLink’s fiber backbone. With plans to sell its data center business and to buy Level 3, CenturyLink is clearly pivoting toward fiber in a big way.

ADVA Optical Networking landed a regional network operator as customer this week. 186 Communications is deploying ADVA’s FSP 3000 across its 1,000 northeastern US fiber network. 186 Communications’ network spans most of New Hampshire, reaching into Maine and Massachussetts as well.

Over in Europe, Interoute has finished off some balance sheet work. Their Finco subsidiary has lined up a new €275 senior secured term loan facility at EURIBOR+3.75% and due in 2023. They’ll be using those funds today to repay €240M in senior secured notes due 2020. The refinancing will give them some additional flexibility going forward, and probably save a few euros as well.

And Workonline Communications says it is seeing growth in demand for African peering. They’ve been working with LINX in London, which now has 25 African service providers exchanging traffic. Workonline Communications is based in South Africa, but this is the first time I’ve run into them. I’ll have to keep an eye out.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · Financials · Telecom Equipment