Wednesday Bytes: Windstream, Ciena, HE, EdgeConneX

We’ve had a bit of a flurry of M&A news and speculation lately, but here’s a quick look at some of the other news from the sector from the first half of the week:

Windstream continued its 100G network expansion to the west. They’ve deployed some more Infinera gear to take their network upgrade out to Denver, Colorado. They’ve put 500G in place to the Mile High city from both Dallas and Chicago, starting from their PoP at 910 15h street. They plan to have 100G service in 44 markets across some 121,000 miles of fiber by the end of the year.

Ciena has been tapped for ESnet’s new network. They’re supplying their packet-optical platform and chipsets to boost the research and education network’s capabilities up to 400G. ESnet is the Department of Energy’s network, hooking up some 40 labs and supercoputing facilities as well as research partners worldwide. It now carries some 34 petabytes per month, and has seen traffic go up by a factor of 10 every 4 years. They deployed a 100G network back in 2011. By my math, that’s 4 years and only a factor of 4 – someone’s going to need yet more bandwidth before too long.

Hurricane Electric’s ongoing network expansion yielded another PoP up north this week. The IP backbone provider has opened a location at Wolfpaw’s data center in Edmonton, Alberta. Edmonton may be a key Canadian city, but it’s not a market that many US-based carriers tend to reach directly. The fact that the independent-minded HE is up there now shows just how broad their network is getting.

And EdgeConneX has some numbers to share on the improvement one sees in video distribution when putting content out at the edge. Conviva has put out a white paper where they found a 12-20% improvement in re-buffering rates across multiple publishers using EdgeConneX-enabled streams versus a peer network without edge localization. Conviva specializes in OTT video optimization, while EdgeConneX continues to build out its edge data centers in the US and now also Europe.

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Categories: Content Distribution · Fiber Networks · Internet Backbones · Telecom Equipment