Fiber Roundup 3-7: KDDI, XO, TWTC, Unite, and Capenet?

Several interesting items today and over the past few days:

KDDI America (news) [a subsidiary of KDDI (TYO:9433, news, filings)] is a company I didn’t hear much from until recently, but they have been on a US expansion kick lately.  Today it was out in California, where they expanded their MetroWave services into four facilities, two in the LA market (Telehouse and Equinix LA1) and two up in Silicon Valley (Equinix’s SV1 and SV8).  That and their participation in no less than three Ethernet exchanges suggest they’ve got some interesting plans yet to implement.

National competitive carrier XO Holdings (news, filings) took it’s second swing at the cloud.  This time it’s into the security business with an agreement with StillSecure through which they will offer a suite of cloud-based security services to their enterprise customer base.  Just last week they unveiled their cloud communications product.  Still no word on that buyout offer from Icahn, but it can’t be too much longer.

Meanwhile TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) picked up another of its bread and butter multi-site managed networking contracts.  Gehan Homes will use a set of converged services including voice, internet access, and IPVPN across their Texas footprint of Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio.  Steady organic growth as always, but I keep wondering when they’ll make an inorganic move.

Out in Indiana, Unite Private Networks finished off another of its own bread and butter network builds.  The 23 mile fiber network in Corydon will serve the Harrison School District as well as other local customers.  UPN has been making more noise ever since they got that capital infusion from Ridgemont, but I wonder if they’ll be widening their focus to larger markets down the road.

And finally, I read with interest some news from out on Cape Cod where some more of that stimulus money will soon be put to work building the OpenCape network.  CapeNet will be doing the design, build, and operate the network, starting in the spring of 2011 and completing within about two years.  Missing from this news was Sidera Networks, formerly RCN Metro, who had originally been tapped to build OpenCape’s network.  A little digging though turned up this item, saying that regulatory issues came up and that the contract would have to be rebid.  Apparently this time Sidera didn’t prevail.  CapeNet is a joint venture between the telecom engineering company Telecom Global and CapeNet Partners, which appears to be a local group of interested telecom professionals and managers.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Internet Backbones · Metro fiber