Regional Roundup: Integra, Alpheus, CENIC, Earthlink, ColoAtl, Telarus

Here’s a set of quick takes on news of regional and channel interest, with items from Integra, Alpheus, CENIC, Earthlink, ColoAtl, and Telarus:

The western regional operator Integra Telecom continued its transformation from a CLEC with some fiber into a fiber operator with some CLEC revenues by taking its portfolio all the way down to layer 1. Yep, Integra is now offering dark fiber for both metro and intercity routes. Initially it will be in and between the markets of Boise, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Spokane, with plans for expansion elsewhere. Integra’s fiber derives primarily from the acquisition of Electric Lightwave back in 2006, and it’s nice to see them finally putting it to work.

Down in Texas, Alpheus continued its expansion plans for the enterprise market by opening a new data center in downtown Dallas. The new location has diverse fiber connectivity with a 200Gbps pipe, and will allow them to expand their colo, disaster recovery, redundancy, and other managed service capabilities across the region.

On the west coast, CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop have upgraded the Pacific Wave Network to 100G. The peering facility serves the research & education market on the west coast and on the Pacific Rim. They’re using Ciena’s coherent technology across the Internet2’s infrastructure too hook up their major peering locations.

In Appalachia, Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) finished a stimulus-derived 500 route mile network buildout in the underserved area of eastern Tennessee. If that sounds like a distinctly un-Earthlink-like project, that’s because it was a Deltacom build that they’ve been finishing up. The third phase added five interconnection points in Cookeville, Oak Ridge, Cleveland, Sweetwater, and Morristown, TN.

A couple hundred miles to the south, the Georgia Technology Center is now open, offering vendors opportunities to showcase new technologies to network operators. It’s in Colo Atl’s facility, which has been generating more than its usual share of news items this year.

And from the channel world, the master agent extraordinaire Telarus finally launched its new partner relationship management system, called Sabiona. They’ve been working on it for four years now, piecing together a fully functional CRM that is specifically tuned for the telecom channel. Many providers have lately been looking to the channel to help with the next phase of telecom and data growth, and Telarus hopes it now has the right infrastructure in place to fulfill those expectations.

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Categories: Channel · CLEC · Datacenter · Metro fiber