Thursday Bytes: 123Net, Crown Castle, Orange Business, BroadSoft, Ufinet

Some metro news, some global items, and an M&A in LATAM to consider:

123Net has added some more fiber to its footprint up in Michigan. Teaming up with the nonprofit M-1 Rail Consortium, they have put 3.3 miles of 144-count fiber along the QLine idn downtown Detroit. The route spans the full length of the new streetcar route, stretching between Campus Martius and the Fisher Building. 123Net will be using the fiber to hook up buildings along Woodward Avenue to its network.

Crown Castle is shifting its management team around in anticipation of the closing of the Lightower purchase. Current SVP and COO James D. Young will be shifting over to lead the company’s fiber solutions as SVP and COO – Fiber. Meanwhile, Robert C. Ackerman will move over from his current position as Area President and take on the role of SVP and COO – Towers and Small Cells. The move is effective immediately, and there’s already plenty to do with the integration of those other fiber assets Crown Castle has acquired lately – FPL Fibernet and Wilcon being the most recent.

Orange Business has picked up a couple of interesting international contracts. The company’s Flexible Engine public cloud platform, developed in concert with Huawei, has been picked by Borgward Group AG. Borgward will use the technology to host the company’s overseas websites, specifically in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Italian bicycle security startup Sherlock will be using Orange Business’s technology in an IoT anti-theft solution. The bikes will have an embedded SIM card enabling them to be tracked.

The Australian provider Optus Wholesale is teaming up with BroadSoft for cloud communications. Optus will be providing UC as a Service based on the BroadCloud platform that will be hosted in Equinix’s data centers. BroadSoft has been rumored to be looking at its strategic alternatives lately.

And finally, there was an infrastructure M&A in Latin America last week that slipped past without much notice.  Spanish-based wholesale operator Ufinet Telecom has acquired IFX Networks.  IFX operates an IP backbone spanning the LATAM region over which it offers a suite of cloud and network services.  The combined company will combine fiber and managed services across both Latin American and Europe.  Q Advisors LLC acted as financial advisor to IFX for the transaction.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · IoT, M2M · Jobs · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber · Unified Communications