Monday Roundup: 46 Labs, Tilson, Zayo, Versa, Nitel, Lumen, Corning

One M&A move plus three other bits of infrastructure ecosystem teamwork of note from the end of last week:

46 Labs has made a second inorganic move in just a few months with the acquisition of Impact Telecom from Lingo. The deal follows quickly on the purchase of Hypercube Networks in May, further enhancing 46 Labs efforts in the managed services arena at the enterprise and wholesale level. Hypercube gave them greater domestic capabilities, while Impact brings more international reach. The integration of these assets will likely take them some work, but clearly 46 Labs feels it has found a niche to attack.

Tilson has won a high profile network build contract out west. Zayo has tapped the infrastructure developer to design and build their new middle mile network in Nevada. Backed by federal and state grants, Zayo’s plans call for 800 route miles in the state, including east-west on I-80 and north-south on US-93. Tilson expects to begin construction in 2025 and will add further depth in Nevada where they are also working on an FTTx project in Las Vegas.

Versa has won another service provider over to its SASE approach. The NaaS provider Nitel has added Versa’s VersaONE platform to its portfolio. Nitel recently acquired WAN Dynamics, and this move continues to build on the managed network side of their business. They’ll use Versa’s technology to reach a broader array of enterprises than they otherwise might have.

And Lumen has made a deal to reserve 10% of Corning’s global fiber capacity over the next 2 years. Lumen expects to use the fiber to more than double the fiber network miles across their intercity network in response to demand from AI workloads. So much investment is going into AI-capable data centers that there must indeed be a parallel investment in the connectivity to and from those new facilities and also in the core they must inevitably connect to.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · Fiber optic cable · Managed Services · Mergers and Acquisitions · SDN