Tuesday Bytes: Kao Data, Lightpath, Consolidated, Rakuten Symphony, Verizon Business

Some quick catch up from around the industry this week that doesn’t have to do with invasions, pandemics, or politics:

Kao Data is expanding its footprint again at its Harlow campus to the north of London. The UK data center operator has begun construction on a second 10MW facility there, a move which follows last month’s launch of its new 16MW location in Slough. The new facility, KLON-02, will offer 1800 racks within 3,400 square meters of tech space.

Lightpath’s expansion north into Boston has gone well enough for a bit more investment following last year’s inorganic move into the area. The metro fiber operator has opened a new office in Wakefield to help support the 30+ employees they have added in Massachusetts over the last year. The company has 150 route miles of fiber connecting 100 locations in the Boston metro area now.

Consolidated is taking its recently launched Fidium FTTH product into some new territory in Maine. With the help of an $18.3M grant from NTIA, they plan to expand their reach to the Rangeley Lakes Region the Blue Hill Peninsula, and the Farmington area, offering fiber connectivity to more than 22,000 homes. The move is also supported by the Connect Maine Partnership.

There was a bit of M&A in the telco cloud software space, as Rakuten Symphony has agreed to acquire Robin.io. Rakuten had been leveraging Robin.io’s technology in support of its virtualized cloud-native mobile network over in Japan, and obviously they liked it enough to bring it in house. Robin.io CEO Partha Seetala will join Rakuten Symphony and lead its Unified Cloud business unit.

And BlackRock is turning to Verizon Business for some private 5G. Verizon will be deploying a private 5G network at BlackRock’s new global HQ at 50 Hudson Yards in New York City. The high-speed, low latency connectivity will power the company’s trading floor, conference center, auditorium, and meeting rooms.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Datacenter · FTTH · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber · Software · Wireless