Friday Roundup: Integra, Fairpoint, EdgeCast

TGIF everybody. Before you go off to enjoy the weekend, here’s a few more quick looks at other news this week from across the sector:

The state of Washington and the University of Washington have awarded contracts to Integra Telecom for Ethernet services throughout the state. That puts them in a position to compete for dollars at schools, agencies, and institutions across the state, furthering their ongoing transition in focus from CLEC to fiber and Ethernet. I recently added Integra’s financials to my competitive telecom trends pages after finding more details on their new website, noting that their EBITDA margins are higher than I once thought at just under 28%.

Back in northern New England, Fairpoint made some Ethernet progress of their own. Five County Credit Union up in Maine is using their Carrier Ethernet services to power new video banking gear from uGenius. The setup lets customers go to a teller machine and interact via video with a real person, which takes rather more bandwidth than your usual ATM. Fairpoint has been digging its way out of the hole it put itself in a few years ago after a botched purchase and integration of Verizon’s lines in the area. This sort of deal can only help.  They also said they’re in the process of adding 1,100 route miles of fiber to their Vermont network.

The CDN provider EdgeCast gave some details on how it has helped the game developer Halfbrick with the Fruit Ninja game. The game’s recent expansion into the world of Facebook brought lots of new players and some pretty big scaling challenges. They went with EdgeCast to keep speeds up, and we know how sensitive gamers are about such things. Halfbrick is also using EdgeCast’s services to deliver their new Jetpack Joyride game.

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Categories: CLEC · Content Distribution · ILECs, PTTs