Tuesday Roundup: Consolidated, Astrape, and a Power Outage

A couple interesting announcements plus a major power outage:

Consolidated Communications’ wholesale division is making a move deeper into data center connectivity. They have added both reach and capacity to complement the company’s infrastructure in Upper Midwest, Texas, and Northern California. The company has also added a new route connecting Montreal and Boston. Meanwhile, on the retail front, Consolidated’s Fidium expansion reached Franconia and Lancaster NH as well as Lincoln ME.

Astrape Networks has raised some cash to fund it’s plans to ‘re-invent datacenter traffic’. The Dutch startup has completed a €7.9M seed round from PhotonVentures, Join Capital, and Brabant Development Agency, and Shift Invest. They hope to fuse AI with next generation optical-electronic switching to optimize networks. The company says its technology enables networks to handle 50% more traffic with double the utilization rates and reduced energy consumption.

And of course the big news yesterday was the power outage across southwestern Europe. Most of Spain and Portugal plus parts of France and Italy saw a huge blackout, and that knocked out much of telecommunications as well. Backup power systems kept some things online but they only go so far, and people in the region report quite a surreal, disconnected day. Everything is interconnected until it isn’t.  The reason given for the incident so far is that unexpected temperature swings somewhere in central Spain caused the grid to destabilize, which then propagated like crazy. We haven’t reached the point where we talk about keeping this from happening again, but I’m sure that’s coming.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Datacenter · Energy · Fiber Networks · Wireless