Thursday Roundup: Sparkle, Empire, Connectbase, Virgin Media, Brightspeed, CDM

Lots of interesting news from around the industry to catch up with before Easter:

Sparkle has lined up a new partner over in Europe. EdgeNext, which offers global CDN services as well as edge cloud services in Asia, will be leveraging Sparkle’s IP transit services to expand its way into the European marketplace. EdgeNext operates 1,500 edge nodea in 290 cities worldwide, but especially in Asia, from the Middle East through India to Southeast and East Asia. After the European deployment, they hope to replicate the process in South America and Africa. /

Empire Fiber Internet has found some new territory to expand into. They are moving into the Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, targeting some 35K homes and businesses. Empire has expanded southward from its New York base into multiple Pennsylvania communities over the last few years, and the Lehigh Valley is a logical extenion of those efforts. 

Connectbase has brought in a new partner over in the UK. Virgin Media Business Wholesale has joined the company’s ecosystem. They are looking to expand their wholesale customer base, offering connectivity across their UK national fixed infrastructure. Virgin Media O2 is putting £2B into its network in 2026. They will be offering DIA, Ethernet, and high capacity services via Connectbase, with Ethernet-over-FTTP on the horizon. 

Brightspeed says it now passes 3M locations across its 20-state fiber footprint. That’s up another million in a year as the continue to invest in the last mile. Meanwhile the company also says it hit 60% competion in Virginia, where they can now reach 122K homes and businesses. Construction is underway in Rockbridge County, which covers a chunk of the Shenandoah Valley. 

And there was a bit of interesting consolidation in the data center infrastructure space. Compu Dynamics Modular has bought a majority stake in R&D Specialities. CDN is looking to add engineering and manufacturing capabilities for the pre-fabricated, modular technoligies demanded by AI. The scale of the buildouts of new data center shells out there mean we have to fill them in a scalable way as well, and R&D Specialties focuses on the control panels, modular electrical systems, and data center modules that do that sort of thing. 

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Categories: Content Distribution · Fiber Networks · FTTH · Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · Telecom Equipment