Metro Bytes: FirstLight, Integra, UNSi, COMLINK

With Comptel underway in Las Vegas, there’s a bunch of metro and regional network news to take a quick look at already this week:

Up in the northeast, FirstLight Fiber says it has upgraded its IP core network. From its Albany NOC and out into northern New England, FirstLight’s IP network uses a regional ring topology connecting its metro and regional customers with the various major transit backbones and peering points over redundant, low latency routes. Since rebranding from Tech Valley, FirstLight has been moving more aggressively to market its footprint.

Out west, Integra continued to build up the parts of its portfolio aimed at wholesale and large enterprise customers. They have now added 40G and 100G wavelengths alongside the 1G, 2.5G, and 10G options they had been selling, and added protection services via an alternate path and sub-50ms switching. That includes the new direct route they lit recently between Salt Lake City and Sacramento.

Down in Texas, UNSi has secured some deep Ethernet access via a new NNI agreement with Alpheus Communications. Alpheus combines fiber and central office connectivity to reach some 129,000 locations. With the NNI in place, UNSi can now leverage that depth when serving multi-location enterprises with needs in the Lone Star state.

And in the Great Lakes region, the recently rebranded COMLINK offered some interesting details on its recent expansion projects. They’re not minor, adding 1,500 new fiber miles across five states with 12 additional PoPs in Ohio and Indiana. They’re targeting the healthcare vertical with a HIPAA compliant offering and the Detroit metro area generally with a new office where they plan to add up to 15 new jobs this year.

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Categories: Ethernet · Internet Backbones · Metro fiber