Wednesday Bytes: FirstLight, TDS, IQGeo, SSE Telcoms, GAIA-X

Some fiber, some software, and a developing ecosystem:

FirstLight Fiber announced more than another M&A yesterday. They also sold a chunk of dark fiber up in the Northeast. The fiber connects the cable landing station at Lynn, Massachusetts with Albany, New York, and the buyer was left unnamed but was probably one of the large hyperscale guys. Intercity dark fiber deals aren’t FirstLight’s main focus, and this one is one of the larger they have done.

TDS Telecommunications has tapped IQGeo to help it build out its fiber network. TDS will use 240 licenses for the IQGeo Platform and Workflow Manager software to help coordinate its construction tasks, both while online and offline. TDS is aggressively building out fiber across its footprint, which currently reaches 1.2M endpoints.

Over in the UK, SSE Enterprise Telcoms has expanded its 100G data center reach. They have hooked up eight new data centers and upgraded their presence at four others. The new locations include ASK4 in Sheffield, two AQL locations in Leeds, SCC and Six Degrees in Birmingham, DataVita and Pulsant in Glasgow, and Next Generation Data in Newport, while the upgrades were in the more traditional markets of London and Manchester.

And, the GAIA-X project took another step toward its goal by incorporating the nonprofit association GAIA-X AISBL. The idea is to create a ‘trustworthy and sovereign digital infrastructure’ for Europe. The founding members are 3DS OUTSCALE, Amadeus, Atos, Beckhoff Automation, BMW, Bosch, CISPE, DE-CIX, Deutsche Telekom, Docaposte, EDF, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, German Edge Cloud, IMT, International Data Spaces Association, Orange, OVH, PlusServer, Safran, SAP, Scaleway, and Siemens. I’m not sure exactly what that means yet, but I imagine we’ll be hearing more about GAIA-X going forward.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · Interconnection · Software