As promised earlier this year, 360networks has expanded its network northward from Seattle into British Columbia with a new connection to Vancouver. Along the way they added nodes in the Washington communities of Everett and Bellingham as well. The buildout is driven by a particular customer win, allowing 360networks to extend its recently added IP transit and Ethernet products into new markets. The identity of that new customer was not revealed, although there seems to be a Vancouver node on the map of Tinet that I don’t recall seeing before… Could be a coincidence and may predate this particular build though.
I hadn’t realized before that 360networks crossed the border already in two other places: Oroville WA and Cut Bank – Sweet Grass up in Montana. But those two are, dare I say, in the middle of nowhere bandwidth-wise, whereas I’ve always wondered why more carriers don’t seem to pay much attention to the route north of Seattle. That it is 360networks expanding northward seems appropriate given the company’s pre-bubble history in the Canadian marketplace that came to an end with the sale of the former Group Telecom assets to Bell Canada. For the company’s western regional footprint, service to western Canadian markets seems like a logical fit though, depending on the current state of Canada’s telecommunications regulatory environment.
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Categories: Internet Backbones
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There’s not much to the regulatory environment to restrict them from providing deregulated services (pretty much any data services). To be a Canadian carrier (i.e. if they want access to rights-of-way) then they can do what some other foreign carriers do and incorporate a subsidiary in a province that does not require the director(s) to be Canadian.