Thursday Roundup: Interoute, CityFibre, FiberLight, FirstLight

For this Thursday morning, a cloud footprint expansion, some fiber buildout news, and two executitve appointments in metro fiber worth noting:

And Interoute has added a new cloud zone in Switzerland. With a new VDC in Switzerland complementing their existing one in Geneva, they say they are the first cloud provider to offer dual-site cloud capabilities in the country. They already do that in the UK and Germany of course, but it’s interesting that their third choice is up in the Alps.

In England, CityFibre has offered an update on its rollout of fiber in Kirklees, which (for those who need to look it up like I did) lies just to the south of the city of Leeds. They’ve finished about 20% of the 72km fiber expansion since breaking ground in March, and expect to be providing its first gigabits to businesses and public sector sites in September. Their partner Abzorb will be selling capacity to the enterprise sector.  CityFibre is actively building metro fiber rings across a variety of UK markets.

With new CEO Jim Lynch at the reins, FiberLight is making moves to bolster the rest of its senior leadership. They’ve promoted John Schmitt to EVP and Chief Development Officer. He will be looking to expand the company’s product reach and further develop relationships with key partners. FiberLight is one of the few supra-regional fiber builders and operators not to participate in M&A over the past 5-10 years, although they’ve certainly been on the edges more than once.

And FirstLight Fiber has also expanded its executive team. They’ve appointed Jill Sandford as VP and General Counsel, a perch from which she will handle the company’s legal, regulatory, and human resources functions. The PR noted that Sandford’s experience at Zayo with M&A were of importance to the selection, which suggests that FirstLight’s own M&A appetite is not yet sated.   They bought New Hampshire’s G4 last summer of course.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Metro fiber