Friday Bytes 12/7: FiberLight, LightPath, Telarus, Bandwidth, Fairpoint

Three weekends left before Christmas, which has nothing at all to do with the various interesting things that FiberLight, LightPath, Telarus, Bandwidth, and Fairpoint have been up to this week:

Atlanta-based FiberLight (news) pushed through a big refinancing earlier this week, announcing a new long term $105M financing agreement with CoBank. In addition to refinancing all their current debt, it will provide capital for fiber buildouts – especially the one in West Texas that is keeping them so busy these days. FiberLight still looks to me as if it’s Zayo’s ideal next target, but the improved balance sheet will give them more running room.

Up in New York, Optimum Lightpath got a marketing haircut and lost its Optimum, rebranding as simply Lightpath. The new name helps distinguish them from Cablevision’s Optimum brand name, reflecting the fact that they are a power in their own right in the NY Metro area. A little more separation, and maybe they’ll start building fiber in Pennsylvania and forget to tell the Dolans or something, haha.

The master agency Telarus (news) is deepening its presence with the cable sector, and in particular with Comcast this week. They’re now offering detailed real time metro Ethernet quotes within Comcast’s footprint. In October they unveiled a new service aimed at smoothing the process agents must go through to provision cable business services, and this is clearly another piece of that puzzle. Cable MSOs have been making big strides in the metro Ethernet market, so the effort will surely not be wasted.

Bandwidth had a busy week. Their inetwork division won another VoIP contract, as OneStream Networks will be using their infrastructure to consolidate its 9-1-1 and voice operations. And the parent company got back to its North Carolina roots by teaming up with Yealink to contribute complimentary cloud-based business phone service and hardware to startups in Durham’s American Underground.

And finally, in upper New England it was Fairpoint with a nextgen 9-1-1 win.  They’ve won a 5 year, $32M contract with the State of Maine covering 26 PSAPs.  As the current provider of the older 9-1-1 infrastructure, this won’t be a big stretch for them I’m sure, but a contract is a contract.

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Categories: Channel · Metro fiber · VoIP