Wednesday Bytes: Windstream, LightRiver, AT&T, KDDI, Everstream

Plenty of interesting items out there still as we drift toward Christmas.

Windstream has officially completed another route out west. They are turning up a high capacity fiber route connecting Salt Lake City with Portland and Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. The company has been steadily fleshing out its western assets for several years, something I always thought they’d do eventually, albeit via inorganic means. The connection feeds into Windstream’s new hub in the Westin building in Seattle and complements the new route they are in the process of lighting between Portland and the SF Bay Area.

LightRiver has unveiled another upgrade to its NetFLEX software. Their 4.3.0 platform release adds additional levels of service complexity as well as features like alien waves, spectrum-as-a-service, 5G sliced transport, and network-as-a-service. LightRiver’s position within the industry enables it to serve as a focal point for multi-vendor automation across a wide range of networks and technologies. They have put substantial effort into turning that experience into operational SDN expertise over the last few years.

AT&T and KDDI are teaming up for a bit of connected car technology. The two are working together to hook up Mazda vehicles in the US via 4G LTE connectivity. Via KDDI’s platform and AT&T’s national wireless network, the technology will enable lucky Mazda vehicles to run their own WiFi hotspots and access a variety of premium content. Not yet part of the arrangement is 5G, but I’m sure that’s somewhere in the plans once it gets deployed widely.

And Everstream has this morning offered an update on its 2020 expansion projects. They have invested $300M in their network this year, some $50M more than originally promised. With those resources they constructed some 2,000 route miles of fiber including new metro infrastructure in Chicago and St. Louis as well as densification across multiple other Midwestern markets. They also acquired fiber assets in the Rocked Fiber and LightBound deals and in a transaction with Uniti. Next up I presume we’ll learn how much of that momentum they plan to carry over into 2021 and what form that might take.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · IoT, M2M · Metro fiber · SDN · Software