Weekend Roundup 7/30: Neutral Tandem, Optimum Lightpath, CBeyond, Tinet, Level 3

July 30th, 2010 by · 3 Comments

It has been a busy news week, with a pile of earnings reports competing for attention with everything else.  Here are several items that went by on the wires that deserve a mention:

Neutral Tandem announced a set of initial participants in its Ethernet Exchange, which is going live this summer:  RCN Metro, Tinet, PAETEC, Deltacom, US Signal, Mosaic NetworX, Wilshire Connection, and ION.  That’s an interesting list which includes several good sized players, several of whom are testing out connections with multiple exchanges.  None of the really big ones have signed on yet, but they’re still in the development phase.

Optimum Lightpath, the metro Ethernet division of Cablevision, won a deal with Visiting Nurse Service of New York.  The non-profit health organization serves some 140K patients in New York City, and will save more than $150K annually by moving to higher bandwidth services and VoIP.  Optimum Lightpath has been on a tear in the education and healthcare segments of the NY marketplace.

Also in the realm of healthcare, CBeyond detailed its relationship with the growing Atlanta-based dental practice of Dr. Elizabeth Caughey.  This time though, they aren’t talking about T-1’s and VoIP alone, but rather web hosting services as well as data backup and security and mobile services.  Hmmm, if other SMB’s learn to leverage this much of the internet, they ought to be pretty close to rating a fiber connection as well, eh?

Tinet, the former international network of Tiscali, has added a low latency route between Europe and Hong Kong.  This isn’t your normal ‘hop on SEA-WE-ME-4’ or other combination of cables, but an actual terrestrial route crossing Russia and China, called the Transit Europe-Asia cable system.  I haven’t heard too much about that route, does anyone know how much shorter it might be?

And finally, Level 3 says it is providing services to Experior Networks, a service provider in Mojave County of northwestern Arizona.  Specifically, Level 3 will provide Ethernet wave, Ethernet private line, colocation, and high-speed IP, with which Experior will provide metro connectivity to its rural customer base.  I assume this is all out of nearby Las Vegas, because I don’t think Level 3 actually has much of anything in Mojave County, which is largely desert anyway.  Or perhaps they opened up a hut on the route between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City where it passes through or close to the top corner of the county.

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Categories: Ethernet · Internet Backbones · Metro fiber

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3 Comments So Far


  • Anon says:

    TEA is ~190ms London – HK vs ~320ms via India.

  • Frank A. Coluccio says:

    The TAE cable system has been in service for a couple of years now. The link below points to the minutes of an earlier status meeting (Nov. 2007). Some interesting insights there, related to international partnering and coordination:

    http://bit.ly/ciijBc

    • Anon says:

      TAE is a different system, essentially it’s a hodge-podge of around 11 national operators and there is no clear model to buy an end-to-end circuit. Turk Telecom for example continues to show this link on its maps, but to all practical intents and purposes it is impossible to buy on and cost-prohibitive even if you could.

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