German Foreign Office Chooses Orange Business

Orange Business Services announced today that it has won a large contract with the German Foreign Office.   The 5 year deal involves wired connections to 180 sites worldwide, another 50 by satellite.  In addition to basic transport, other services such as VPN and Voice will be layered on top.  That’s a pretty hefty deal by anyone’s measure.  Orange Business had already held the precursor to this contract, which of course made it easier to keep.  But the new contract is almost double the size of the old one.

Orange Business services is the arm of France Telecom (NYSE:FTE, news, filings) that focuses on the multinational corporate market, it used to be called Equant.  One would expect that T-Systems, the international networking arm of Deutsche Telecom AG (ETR:DTE, news, filings) would be in line for this contract.  However the european market is definitely evolving, and the various PTTs are coming into greater and greater direct competition.  That will probably lead at some point to further consolidation.  As the world gets subjectively smaller, more and more large telecoms seem to be fighting over the same contracts.  One could easily have seen any of DT, BT, Telefonica, Teliasonera, AT&T, or Verizon Business win this one.

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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · Internet Backbones