Monday Bytes: Altibox, Hurricane Electric, CenturyLink, T-Mobile

Here are a few items from late last week to wrap up before this week’s news gets fully rolling:

Scandinavia may be getting another submarine cable connection. Altibox Carrier and Xtera have begun construction of a new repeater-based cable between the UK and Norway. It will feature 8 fiber pairs between Stavanger and Newcastle, and should be in place by Q4 of next year.  That will provide diversity in routes not just between the UK and Scandinavia but onward to the USA.

Hurricane Electric has taken its global IPv6-native network deeper into Canada, or more precisely out to the eastern edges of Canada. They have added a PoP at GTT Halifax up in Nova Scotia. Unlike the more popular destinations of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, Halifax in eastern Canada is not an infrastructure node we hear about too often. But it too has a growing high tech workforce and a supply of enterprises in need of IP connectivity.

CenturyLink has boosted its security portfolio, introducing automated threat detection and response. The new feature derives from the company’s Black Lotus Labs and takes a more proactive approach toward intercepting malicious traffic and reduces the burden on the humans responding to incidents. It’ll be integrated with the company’s firewall and SD-WAN products later this year as well.

T-Mobile and Sprint have tweaked their merger agreement slightly. Softbank will be ‘surrendering’ some 48.8M T-Mobile shares, which changes the effective exchange ratio from 9.75 Sprint shares to 1 T-Mobile shares up to about 11.00. Softbank will get those shares back based on stock price milestones by the combined company. The two companies hope to get the deal done by April 1 following their recent win in court, though it certainly is a complex process so who knows.

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · Security · Undersea cables