Int’l Roundup: KPN, du, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Verizon

July 7th, 2015 by · Leave a Comment

Not much going on in the US fiber and telecom market early this week, so let’s look overseas for a bit of news:

KPN made an important, if somewhat overdue, move into the cloud business yesterday. They have purchased 100% of IS Group, a managed hosting and cloud provider focused on the Netherlands. IS Group did EUR25M last year and has 130 employees. The financial terms were not disclosed, but they are rather less important than the diversification possibilities they offer KPN.

Meanwhile, Nokia and Du have been busy playing with drones in the Middle East. No, not the sort that kill terrorists, but rather the sort that help maintain telecom networks. They tested the use of drones carrying smartphones with network testing applications in a proof-of-concept trial set up in the UAE’s Dubai International Stadium. Such a use for drones certainly does seem to be a more elegant, if less personal, way to keep abreast of coverage problems than ‘Can you hear me now?’

Just before the break, Alcatel-Lucent won a big contract in China. They signed comprehensive frame agreements with both China Mobile and China Unicom worth up to RMB4.3B and RMB3.59B, and will be helping the two with a wide range of upgrades, from routing and optical networking to SDN and NFV. Alcatel-Lucent has maintained a long term relationship with both companies, and clearly all that hard work is paying off as the Chinese market is not an easy one to penetrate.  Alcatel-Lucent is of course in the process of being bought by Nokia, although the closing of that deal is a long way off yet.

And this morning, Verizon Digital Media Services announced a global contract with LiveXLive.  LiveXLive is slated to go, umm, live later this year, streaming live music events from all over the world in HD video.  Verizon, of course, bought EdgeCast a couple years ago, the capabilities of which are surely helping power this deal.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Telecom Equipment · Wireless

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