Tuesday Bytes: Wilcon, Equinix, RCN Business, TWCBC

Here’s a quick rundown of some news from the metro and undersea spaces from the start of the week:

Southern Californian fiber operator Wilcon is doing some gaming this weekend. They’re partnering with eSports Arena for a live video game tournament October 2-4 in the downtown Santa Ana district of Los Angeles. eSports Arena has a 15,000 square foot space with 64 gaming consoles and 120 gaming PC stations. Wilcon has some 3,000 route miles of fiber across the region, and last year expanded from just dark fiber into lit services.

The planned FASTER transpacific cable has a key ally on land on both sides of the ocean. Equinix says the cable will be backhauled into four of its IBX’s on both the west coast and in Japan. FASTER has 6 fiber pairs planed with an initial design capacity of 60Tbps, and is backed by a consortium that includes Google, China Telecom, China Mobile, KDDI, Singtel, and Global Transit. It is scheduled to be operational in Q2 of next year.

Back on the east coast, RCN Business has introduced a higher speed connection option for New York City SMBs. They’ve deployed 330Mbps internet service across their market. That’s via their HFC reach of course, while they have direct fiber connectivity for higher speeds to larger customers.

And Time Warner Cable Business Class has unveiled a new online tool for its carrier customers. The new portal will enable wholesale customers to search across the MSO’s nearly 1 milion on-net and near-net buildings. TWCBC has more than 43,000 fiber-lit buildings, with DOCSIS service extending to nearly a million. That’s an asset that Charter will surely play to the hilt if its purchase of the company is successful, just as Comcast would have.

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Categories: Cable · Datacenter · Metro fiber · Undersea cables