Int’l Roundup 1-19: PacketExchange, Telmex, KDDI, Orange, iBasis

There’s been lots of things going on this week in the international networking arena that I haven’t touched on yet:

Upcoming international network PacketExchange is taking a swing at the cloud.  Over at PTC (Hawaii… I’m jealous) they unveiled their new product: Network Infrastructure as a Service or NIaaS for short.  The idea is to package the network access one uses to communicate to and between cloud applications.  Sounds like a good plan, but isn’t this ‘aaS’ acronym stuff from just about everyone getting a bit tiresome?  Need a new buzzphrase for 2011 or something.

KDDI America is taking the plunge into Ethernet in the US in a big way.  They announced yesterday that they have joined all three of the major Ethernet exchanges:  CENX, Equinix, and Telx.  If they were just testing the waters, one would be enough – they appear to mean business, both as buyers and sellers.  It’s looking more and more like 2011 might be a breakout year for this segment.

Down in Mexico, Telmex is working on telepresence.  They’ll be leveraging AT&T’s telepresence solutions via the AT&T Business Exchange.  Nice to hear something positive out of Mexico that doesn’t involve guns and drugs these days.  I don’t follow Telmex that much, except to hear about what new monopolistic plans Carlos Slim has in mind.  But Latin America is starting to get really interesting.

Orange Business won a contract with Zumtobel, an Austrian based provider of lighting solutions.  This is another of their bread and butter international WAN optimization contracts for multinationals with facilities spanning the globe.  Lots of network outsourcings going on at that level these days as things get more and more complex.

And finally, iBasis has expanded its network deeper into the Asia/Pacific region.  Previously, voice traffic from Asia always nad to to through Amsterdam, even if it then went back to Asia.  Wow, now that would be latency – they must not have had much of a presence for intra-regional termination – though that may now change.  I haven’t watched iBasis much since KPN took over, I’ll have to keep a closer eye on them.

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Categories: Ethernet · Internet Backbones · telepresence