Telstra Expands Pacnet’s PEN

One of the essential questions to be answered for Telstra’s purchase of Pacnet out in the Pacific was just what their plans might be for Pacnet’s high profile SDN-powered platform.  Less than a week after closing the deal, Telstra has answered that question by immediately moving to expand its reach.

Pacnet had spent the last year or two putting SDN to work for real with its PEN platform, stepping into a leadership role in the industry by hooking up data centers and clouds across the APAC region with on-demand connectivity while most other network around the world were still testing ideas.  A month ago, they extended their network virtualization down into the optical layer via Infinera’s gear.

Telstra has taken the initial 16 PoP footprint that Pacnet had started with and added nine more using the reach of its own infrastructure, including new connectivity over to London and of course some depth in Telstra’s home turf in Australia.  As its horizons expand from down under, Telstra may be planning to use Pacnet’s head start with SDN to bootstrap its efforts to expand further on the international stage.

They might even find it timely to make an inorganic move or two on either side of the Atlantic, or perhaps under it.  If I were Telstra, and I wanted to really go global in a bigger way, what would I buy?  Something with transatlantic assets to match what I now have in the Pacific, some terrestrial fiber on both sides of the Atlantic but not too much SME baggage an international operator wouldn’t do as well with, and maybe some financial and media vertical penetration that might have good synergies with APAC assets.  Sounds an awful lot like Hibernia Networks to me.

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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · Internet Backbones · SDN