Tuesday Roundup: Seaborn, EarthLink, Birch, Equinix, CyrusOne

Here’s a quick roundup of other news from yesterday:

Seaborn Networks took another of the many necessary steps in building a new submarine cable yesterday. They have received a guarantee for a credit facility from Coface, the French Export Credit Agency. Seaborn is preparing its Seabras-1 Brazil-US submarine cable system, and will use the buyer credit to help move things along. Alcatel-Lucent will be building the system based on its 100G coherent technology, with a target date of 2015.

EarthLink further expanded its cloud portfolio this week with the launch of a private cloud hosting service. The service aims at enterprises that want to move to a virtualized environment but do it while without leaving their on-premises security and privacy bubble. EathLink has been steadily building out its managed IT and cloud services for several years now, although the process hasn’t been an easy one for the legacy telco side of things.

Birch Communications is expanded its focus to include larger enterprises. They’ve launched a new enterprise sales channel down in Georgia to be led by Paul Masters, who led Ernest Communications until its recent acquisition by Birch. Birch has been rolling up small CLEC and IP/MPLS assets around the country at a steady pace, and they’re putting those resources to work in some new places.

Equinix has renewed the leases underlying five of its data center locations around the country with Digital Realty Trust. The new leases, which cover properties in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington D.C., add on another 15 years plus two 10-year renewal options, all negotiated at market rates. Equinix is in the process of becoming a REIT like Digital Realty, but of course that’s just a title and they still have quite different and complementary business models.

And down in Texas, CyrusOne is helping Travis County ITS with an upgrade of its data services. The county is moving its production data center environment out of a basement and into CyrusOne’s Austin Met Center II facility. Travis County ITS supports 43 county departments with 20 lines of business.

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Categories: CLEC · Datacenter · Undersea cables