Metro Bytes: Comcast, UPN, HE, Ribbon, Quintillion

Five regional and metro deployments from this week’s news worth catching up on before heading out (or inside these days) for the weekend.

Comcast Business had two interesting announcements this week. They are supplying metro fiber, Ethernet, and VoIP services to Marlette Funding, an online lending business with locations in Wilmington DE and Fremont CA. And the California Department of Technology has awarded a CALNET NextGen Services contract to Comcast Business, which will enable the division to serve educational institutions and other public agency locations.

UPN is expanding its footprint in the Dallas metro area. They have extended their fiber into the DFW VII facility of Stream Data Centers in Garland, Texas. DFW VII is located on Lookout Drive and features 138,132 square feet of space fed by dual 40MW dedicated utility feeds and potential expansion to 400,000 square feet of space. UPN has been expanding its Dallas footprint steadily for several years now.

Hurricane Electric has found yet another global data center to expand its IPv6-native backbone into. They have deployed a new PoP at NJFX in Wall NJ, the cable landing station colo campus down on the Jersey shore. It’s the company’s 11th in the greater New York City area, and allows HE to interconnect directly with networks coming ashore via the four submarine cables there connecting to both Europe and South America.

Ribbon has won an IP/optical transport deal out in the foothills of the Rockies. Eastern Slope Rural Telephone is using the vendor’s Neptune and Apollo solutions to upgrade its network with a path to 200G. Eastern Slope serves eastern Colorado, and its previous network was nearing its end-of-life and was reaching its capacity limits anyway. KGPCo helped facilitate the deal.

And last, but not least, yet definitely coldest, the city of Nome, Alaska is getting some better bandwidth. Quintillion and GCI are teaming up to bring gigabit internet speeds to both Nome and Kotzebue by the end of 2021. Both Nome and Kotzebue sit along the Bering Strait, a few dozen miles from Siberia. Quintillion is suppling connectivity via its subsea cable, while GCI is handling the terrestrial pieces.

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Categories: Cable · Datacenter · Internet Backbones · Metro fiber