Friday Roundup: Ritter, Windstream, Hurricane Electric, Mobily, Sparkle, Verizon

One bit of M&A, one bit of federal dollars, some subsea fiber, and a new PoP:

Ritter Communications is making an inorganic move in Louisiana. Their RightFiber division will be acquiring the fiber network of the City of Ruston. Ruston is about an hour east of Shreveport and a half hour from the Arkansas border and is home to about 22K people. RightFiber will invest in that network, reaching out to residential customers in addition to the business community it currently focuses on.

Windstream Wholesale has added some more depth to its California footprint. They have announced an expansion into Hurricane Electric’s Fremont 2 facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fremont 2 is a 208,000 square foot facility at the core of HE’s global IP network. Windstream has expanded westward to the west coast over the past few years, steadily adding infrastructure to complement their depth on the other side of the Rockies.

Mobily has tapped Sparkle for some significant subsea connectivity. The two have signed a Memorandum of Understanding under which Mobily acquires fiber on Sparkle’s subsea cable systems connecting Chania, Palermo, Milan, and Marseille. It’s a followup to the October announcement of a new low latency Europe-Asia path across Saudi Arabia, offering details on the Mediterranean leg of the project.

And Verizon has picked up a few more federal dollars. They have secured a 5-year agreement with the US Department of Agriculture under which Verizon’s wireless network will support 60K lines of service and will potentially support connected laptops as well. The deal is worth $21M in the first year.

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Categories: Datacenter · Federal contracts · FTTH · Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · Undersea cables