Here’s a quick look at some interesting news from the European theater in the past day or two:
Opposition to America Movil’s bid to buy the 70% of KPN that it doesn’t already own has already started to coalesce in the Netherlands. This time the KPN board of directors hasn’t gotten involved yet, rather it’s Foundations, the internet foundation that represents KPN owners, employees, and customers that is raising red flags. Apparently the foundation *could* exercise a call option that would trigger the issuance of new shares and thus dilute the holdings of a hostile bidder — an institutional poison pill or something. It’s not clear exactly what they’re objecting to yet, but this could get interesting real quick…
Broadsoft (NASDAQ:BSFT, news, filings) is expanding its cloud PBX offering to Europe via inorganic means. Yesterday they announced the acquisition of HIPCOM, which provides hosted IP communications services over in the UK. HIPCOM already uses BroadSoft’s BroadWorks software and its expertise will be leveraged to expand the BroadCloud PBX into the UK faster than BroadSoft otherwise could have managed solo. The deal will add $1.6M in revenue to its full year 2013 results.
And Hurricane Electric continued the global expansion of its IP backbone with the addition of PoP in Romania. They’ve moved into NXDATA-1 in Bucharest and are now offering everything from 100Mbps to 100GigE, and have hooked up at the InterLAN and RoNIX internet exchanges in the city. Last week they added two new Canadian PoPs, l month they moved into both Copenhagen and Madrid, and they’re promising further expansions in the coming weeks and months.
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Categories: ILECs, PTTs · Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · Unified Communications · VoIP
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