Wednesday Bytes: Telia, Comcast Business, Windstream, ASN

A new PoP, a service expansion, a certification, and some subsea work:

Telia Carrier keeps on adding depth to its North American footprint in response to customer demand. Today they announced yet another new PoP, this time down on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. It’s an expansion of a relationship with MDC Data Centers that got them into McAllen earlier. The carrier has also been expanding its footprint to the south within Mexico since 2018.

Comcast Business is adding to its portfolio to expand its support for remote workers. They have teamed up with Cisco Meraki to expand their Teleworker VPN solution. The new capabilities combed with their existing Managed VPN Aggregation services can provide an enterprise-grade VPN gateway at business locations. Businesses can then outfit remote employees with a device for managing secured connectivity via the Cisco Meraki cloud platform.

Windstream Enterprise’s SD-WAN now has a key stamp of approval. The service provider has attained MEF 3.0 certification for its VMware-powered SD-WAN service, one of the key pieces of the company’s enterprise portfolio. Spirent performed the certification process, ensuring adherance to the growing industry standard.

And according to Capacity, Alcatel Submarine Networks has kicked off construction of the Africa-1 subsea cable system. The new cable hooks up Marseille, France with Mombasa, Kenya via new terrestrial routes across Egypt and under the Red Sea with multiple landings along the way. It also envisions a branch over to the Middle East and to Pakistan, as well as a possible extension down to South Africa. When complete, it will feature 8 fiber pairs spanning some 10,000km.  As currently planned, the RFS date will be in 2023.

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Categories: Internet Backbones · SDN · Undersea cables