Network Bytes: euNetworks, Gateway, Lumen

Two expansion projects and one bit of M&A:

euNetworks has built another of its Super Highway longhaul fiber routes. They have completed work on a new 247km link between Frankfurt and Strasbourg, which is a piece of the key FLAP-D loop that underlies all of western Europe’s network infrastructure. Two of the three ILA sites are newly construction, and low attenuation fiber allows for a lower cost per bit. This is the sixth such route that euNetworks has overbuilt with modern infrastructure in the FLAP-D ecosystem, and there are still a few more bits to go I think.

Gateway Fiber has found a new market up in the Northern Tier to extend its FTTx reach into. They have officially started construction in Bismarck, North Dakota. That’s the state capitol, of course, but it’s also a city I don’t recall ever having the opportunity to mention in the context of fiber networks. Gateway is already in Fargo, a couple hundred miles to the east. They expect to start turning up customers in Bismarck in the second half of this year.

And Lumen has made an interesting inorganic move to better address the interconnection marketplace. They have announced an agreement to aquire Alkira, which focuses on a cloud-native, carrier-agnostic networking platform aimed at hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Lumen hopes to bring Alkira’s cloud-native control plane in-house, a move which emphasizes how key software is in running today’s network infrastructure.

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