Friday Bytes 11/16: inetwork, ViaWest, Birch, Enventis, US Signal

It’s not just a Friday it’s the Friday before the work-shortened Thanksgiving week and folks are surely ready to bolt. Here’s a quick look at some of the other interesting news this week that I didn’t get to for one reason or another, including items from Bandwidth’s inetwork division, ViaSest, Birch, Enventis, and US Signal.

Bandwidth’s wholesale voip division inetwork won the 9-1-1 business of Integra Telecom. While Integra has been talking fiber, they’ve also been expanding IP and VoIP services to the enterprise, and inetwork’s 20 minute switch configuration for nomadic VoIP 9-1-1 made it an easy choice.

Also out west, ViaWest earned the industry’s first Tier IV design certification from Uptime Institute. This is for their Lone Mountain facility, which they plan to open soon with 74,000 square feet of raised floor space. The Tier IV designation certifies it’s ability to withstand unexpected events, whether internal or external. Given the still fresh memory of Sandy, it’s apropos even though no hurricane is likely to threaten Vegas of course.

Birch Communications has introduced a SIP trunking product aimed at the SME market. Like others with roots as a CLEC, Birch is moving to position itself for IP, managed services, and IT services. The new SIP capabilities will fit well into that model, giving them a place to migrate more traditional business voice services. Birch has been quietly acquiring assets and customer lists all over the place in recent years.

Up in North Dakota, Enventis won a 10 year, $1M contract with the West Fargo school district for WAN services. The relationship derives from the IdeaOne acquisition of course, which gave Enventis (via its parent HickoryTech) a deep metro fiber footprint in the Fargo metro area. The new deal spans 15 facilities with more in the future, and starts next summer.

And in the midwest, US Signal has added a new data center to bolster its cloud service capabilities. US Signal has been offering infrastructure-as-a-service and disaster recovery capabilities for a year and a half now. The company has interesting assets that I have always thought would make them an M&A target eventually, but instead they have simply worked on making organic headway.

 

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Categories: CLEC · Cloud Computing · Datacenter · Metro fiber · VoIP