Wednesday Bytes: Altice, CenturyLink, Infinera

Here are three interesting items worth a look:

Altice is following through with plans for an IPO for its US cable and fiber assets. They hope to raise as much as $1.4B by selling some 46.6M shares for $27-31 per share, with the proceeds possibly going toward additional acquisitions. Altice USA consists of the Suddenlink and Cablevision assets thus far, and speculation is that they might take a swing at Cox, further consolidating the cable MSO segment. Via the Cablevision deal they also own LightPath, and I’m curious whether they might be interested in complementing that with more pure fiber assets as well.

CenturyLink has launched a managed enterprise service with some help of Cisco. Cisco’s Meraki technology is powering a combination of managed Wi-Fi, security, wireless, and SD-WAN services via a single cloud-based interface. It won’t be many more months before CenturyLink and Level 3 finish their deal and we start to see how they merge the companies’ various enterprise efforts.

Infinera has rolled out some new metro packet-optical gear. The XTM II is built for bandwidth-intensive cloud-scale applications and delievers services at layers 0-2. It adds 200Gbps wavelengths and a reduction in power per gigabit of 3.5x. Service providers are looking for more intelligence and bigger pipes out at the edge, the part of the network that has been getting so much attention lately.

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Categories: Cable · ILECs, PTTs · Telecom Equipment