These days, it pays to be careful when reading headlines. PhonePlusMag has one today, “IPtimize Buys American Fiber Systems” which made me do quite a double take. You see, I don’t know much about IPtimize, but I know it is very small and trades on the pinksheets. The idea that they could go out and buy AFS, which should be worth something with 9 digits, just wasn’t reasonable. And of course, it wasn’t. AFS is simply selling off a small piece of the acquired IDACOMM business [I think] that it didn’t want: the commercial voice services division serving Reno, Las Vegas, and Boise. The idea for AFS I’m sure is to maintain focus on their core metro fiber and data business and IPtimize gains scale in its core business, so everybody wins.
But this sort of headline confusion happens all the time. Earlier this year, many headlines said that DG FastChannel bought Vyvx from Level 3 rather than just its non-core ad distribution division. And I still run into people that think Cogent bought all of Verio a couple years ago rather than a small slice of t-1 customers. One just has to be careful these days and actually read the articles…
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