Friday Bytes: FirstLight, PS Lightwave, Lumen, GCX

The first week of 2021 is now in the books, and and I’m already tired of the general news.  But in telecom and internet infrastructure the world keeps on chugging.  So here’s some catchup on some other interesting news from this week:

FirstLight Fiber has picked up an interesting new contract in the education vertical up in New England. The Massachussetts Higher Education Consortium has picked FirstLight as a supplier to its 2,000 member organizations, which include libraries, K-12 schools, universities, and other educational organizations. FirstLight hopes that the award will lead to a pipeline of wins from that pool of potential customers.

There was a bit of interesting M&A this week down in Houston, Texas. PS Lightwave has announced the acquisition of VirtualTone, a provider of UC to the business market in the Houston metro area. PS Lightwave will bring that technology in-house, expanding their business services further up the stack. PS Lightwave operates 5,500 route miles of fiber in the Houston metro area with some 1,600 on-net locations.

Lumen has found itself a CDN partner over in Japan. They are teaming up with J-Stream, pairing their global CDN infrastructure platform with J-Stream’s regional depth and local knowledge. The two will work together to meet rapidly growing demand in the Asian content delivery business, which will only see higher growth as 5G starts to arrive in force over the next few years.

And Global Cloud Xchange has officially kicked off its new, independent life. The global network operator successfully emerged from the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process it had entered after the slow-motion implosion at its parent company, Reliance Communications. It was almost 14 months ago that the company announced plans not to sell the company but to emerge intact. CEO Carl Grivner will now have the job of making it all work.

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Categories: Financials · Internet Backbones · Undersea cables