Friday Catchup 1/6: CenturyLink, BT, Telefonica, Sprint

January 6th, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

A quick look at a few items from the big guys before you leave for the weekend:

CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) announced an interesting contract with True Religion, which to my surprise turned out to be a premium denim jeans retailer and not a megachurch. Their 110 domestic stores plus others in Canada, England, Italy, and Hong kong are now securely interconnected with headquarters. CenturyLink’s success in such deals indicates they are having some success in melding together the Qwest and Savvis assets as they aim their efforts toward the enterprise space.

Meanwhile, British Telecom (NYSE:BT, news, filings) showed up in the news outside of the UK a second time this week, boasting a major contract extension with Bristol-Myers Squibb. Under the multi-year managed services contract, the pharmaceutical maker is outsourcing its WAN and LAN needs, remote access, voice, security – the works basically. BT will be managing it globally through 2017, having first signed up Bristol-Myers Squibb six years ago.

Over in Spain, it seems that Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings) is feeling a need for speed. The company has apparently been busy testing out 400Gbps links over its DWDM infrastructure, presumably this means either 10x40Gbps or 4x100Gbps – details weren’t given. Using the Ericsson MHL 3000 and some 280km of fiber between Granada and Jaen, they tested the ability to send such signals on fiber carrying other customer traffic.

And Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) kept up its 4G-LTE buildout drumbeat, unveiling the first four markets in which they will go live.  Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, and San Antonio are expected to see LTE service by the end of the first half.  Now that most of the theatrics with Clearwire and their own plans for the future are over, the folks at Sprint have to be eager to get down to the more enjoyable side of things – which for an engineer like me means building stuff.

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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · Internet Backbones · Wireless

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