Holiday Roundup: Xtera, Windstream, 123Net, Zayo

Here’s a few news items from just this morning back through the start of the holiday break, just to catch things up a bit:

Xtera has kicked off the new year with a new partner. They are working with Fortress Solutions, which will support their ability to repurpose and maintain legacy equiment and cables on subsea routes. Xtera was reborn last year and is looking to reestablish itself in the sector, especially on regional routes.

Windstream’s push into SD-WAN made some headway in 2017. They announced over the break that 500 mid-enterprise customers have purchased the solution across a wide range of verticals, validating their fully managed ‘as a service’ approach. They hope to further expand on that success this year, both in selling SD-WAN itself but also in selling other solutions over top of it.

Up in Michigan, 123Net offered up a progress report and forecast for 2018. They added move than 150 route miles in Detroit and Grand Rapids last year and had an automotive OEM pass 1MW of power consumed at its data center. This year they’ll be continuing to invest in fiber, fixed wireless, and VoIP, and will be implementing hardware from Arista at DET-IX that will make 100Gbps ports available to members.

And just before Christmas, Zayo unveiled yet more investments in its metro infrastructure up in Minneapolis. They are densifying their network there to boost their wireless backhaul capabilities in part in anticipation of Super Bowl 52, which last year generated 37.6Tbps of wireless data usage alone. Investing in Minnesota isn’t a new thing for Zayo, which now has more than 8,000 route miles in the state, with 5,000 or so in the Minneapolis metro area alone.

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Categories: Metro fiber · SDN · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables