Tuesday Bytes: Orange Business, NetFortris, TIM, CenturyLink

On today’s news roundup are diamonds, a product launch, a merger, and an outage.  Did I mention the diamonds? 

Orange Business took its IoT technology after the shiny stuff today. They have teamed up with De Beers to create a new geofencing solution for offshore diamond mining. The idea is to monitor the locations of people and equipment, maintaining safe distances in a dangerous environment and enabling automatic cutoff if someone strays too close. The solution has been put to the test 150km off the coast of Namibia, and further development is underway to enhance the system.

NetFortris has unveiled a brand new UCaaS platform today, Comm-unity. Building off of the technology and talent they acquired in the purchase of Fonality a few years ago, they have rebuilt their platform from the ground up to leverage the latest containerization and microservices technology so as to better leverage the cloud and integrate with SD-WAN and other modern technologies.

The consolidation of Italy’s FTTx efforts has begun. TIM KKR, and Fastweb have officially combined their efforts into an entity to be called Fibercop. I wouldn’t get too used to the name, as it’s just the the first stage in an multi-stage effort that will culminate in a merger with OpenFiber and create a single last mile network across the country. Theoretically of course, there are a lot of hoops left to jump through first.

And for those who were hiding under a rock without wifi access yesterday, CenturyLink’s network suffered a major outage that took down sites around the world. This one wasn’t caused by fiber cuts like the one in April, instead this time a misconfiguration in one data center in Canada was propagated automatically through their network and efforts to revoke the announcements didn’t work. As a result, the outage extended some 5 hours and dropped global internet usage by a measurable percentage. Oops. I’d hate to be that one tech…

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Categories: FTTH · Internet Backbones · IoT, M2M · Mergers and Acquisitions · Unified Communications