Network Roundup: Windstream, EdgeConneX, Neutral Path, Custom Connect, IFSC

TGIF and goodbye to another summer.  Here’s a quick look at other news from this week that’s worth a quick read first though:

Windstream has won another convert to the company’s SD-WAN and UC solutions. An unnamed ‘major building supplier’ has selected Windstream’s SD-WAN and UCaaS to hook up 3,500 employees across the US and Canada. They started out with a trial in four locations, extended that to 25, and now plan to transition the other 185 as soon as possible. With the purchases of EarthLink and Broadview as well as investments in metro fiber nationwide and an agressive push into SD-WAN services, Windstream is clearly betting on the enterprise opportunity.

EdgeConnex has added another internet exchange to its list of partners. Community IX is bringing its CIX-ATL exchange into the EdgeConneX’s Atlanta Edge Data Center, giving it a presence in six facilities around the Atlanta metro area. EdgeConneX’s facility spans 29,800 square feet and sits just outside of downtown, but more importantly is close to cable head ends and other eyeball network nodes. EdgeConneX has been actively seeking out local exchange partners in markets around the country for several years now.

Neutral Path has added another endpoint to its midwestern network footprint, which now spans some 2,000 route miles with 40 PoPs. They are now offering lit services between their 1523 Farnam location in Omaha to the Netrality carrier hotel at 1102 Grand in Kansas City. That complements the ccompany’s recent introduction of lit services to 350 Cermak in Chicago and gives them connectivity to the regional KCIX internet exchange.

Over in western Europe, Custom Connect has unveiled a new low latency route aimed at the financial sector. They have a new microwave link between the two Equinix facilities LD4 in Slough and FR2 in Frankfurt with latency as low as 4.572ms round trip. Custom Connect says that it is just the first step in a roadmap to lowering latencies across the company’s footprint.

And Ireland-France Subsea Calbe Limited has appointed a new Managing Director. Fergus Innes will be taking over the company’s business development activities as it prepares to build the IFC-1 cable system. Innes had of course been over at Hibernia Networks until its purchase by GTT earlier this year. IFC-1 will feature six fiber pairs on a 565km route from the southern Irish city of Cork to Lannion in the French region of Brittany, and will hook up Dublin with Paris without stopping in England first.

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Categories: Datacenter · Fiber Networks · Low Latency · SDN · Undersea cables