Equinix has agreed to buy ancotel GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany in a deal that will further boost the strength of its network in one of the world's most important meeting points for Internet traffic and financial trading.

Packet-optical transport systems have gained rapid adoption and wide-scale deployment to support increased traffic and performance requirements for key applications globally. Scalability, performance, and economics have established these new systems as the metro building blocks of choice for wireless backhaul, business Ethernet, broadband backhaul, data center interconnect, and wholesale network initiatives.

The biggest buzzword at this year's Interop conference in Las Vegas was software-defined networking. SDN in general and OpenFlow in particular caused near constant debate in the convention center. IT analysts spread the fervor last week, with IDC estimating SDN to be a $2 billion market in four years.  With all of this hoopla, it's easy to forget that just a couple years ago, OpenFlow was a Stanford research project and SDN was an unchristened buzzword.

In its first-quarter results, the communications company increased the number of tech-dependent customers with higher average revenues per user, improved productivity in its sales force, and inked two dark-fiber contracts that will boost the number of customers Cbeyond serves with metro Ethernet, wrote Brett Feldman, research analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities.

In 2011, Columbus Business Solutions began providing Dedicated Internet Access, Metro Ethernet, International Private Line Connectivity, MPLS, Data Centre services, Business Voice as well as specifically designed Broadband, Video and Voice for Small, Medium and Enterprise customers (SME).

Cbeyond has put more fiber in its diet by establishing network relationships with FiberLight and Zayo, two arrangements that will immediately extend its reach into a larger set of buildings and SMB locations.  

tw telecom is addressing the challenge that competitive providers face in trying to expand their out-of-region Ethernet and network reach with its national Ethernet solution. Targeted at international carriers and cloud application providers--which typically don't own a lot of their own domestic network facilities--the new service allows these service providers to get access to what tw telecom says is thousands of enterprise customers and buildings via a single Ethernet connection. Having a single provider to get to multiple Ethernet connections means that these service providers don't have to seek out multiple individual External Network to Network Interconnection (E-NNI ...

Cbeyond has partnered with two fiber service providers – FiberLight and Zayo – so it may reach new buildings and SMBs throughout the country. The partnerships bring Cbeyond closer to reaching its goals of lighting 1,000 buildings by the end of 2013 and transitioning an additional 28 percent of access customers to Metro Ethernet by that same time; Cbeyond now provides 22 percent of its customers with Metro Ethernet via Ethernet-over-Copper. The arrangements mean Cbeyond's channel partners, who se

XO Communications' cloud-centric subsidiary Concentric Cloud Solutions may sound new, but the name dates back to the late 1990s as a fledgling web hosting company that eventually merged with Nextlink to form today's XO. By giving the brand new life, the new unit hopes to take charge of the relatively untapped SMB cloud services market, offering a suite of virtualization, content acceleration, and interactive contact center solutions. Led by XO alum Mike Toplisek, who is now the president of the new unit, Concentric will deliver its services via a mix of its own cloud technology and from partners such ...

Equinix (Nasdaq: EQIX) is bolstering its Asia Pacific data-center holdings by acquiring Hong Kong-based data center provider Asia Tone for $230.5 million. By purchasing Asia Tone, Equinix immediately adds five data centers and one disaster recovery center, in addition to one data center under construction in three markets: Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. Asia Tone's current customer base includes a number of existing Equinix customers.

The same week the Boston Red Sox celebrated 100 Years of playing baseball at Fenway Park, the team also announced its selection of Comcast Business Services to provide the team with 100 Mbps Metro Ethernet service.  

MegaPath is tapping into the potentially lucrative cloud services market with its latest Hosted Data Backup and Storage offering for SMBs and enterprises.  

The who’s who of Carrier Ethernet Europe gathered last week in Munich for the annual Light Reading Ethernet Europe.  Collocated with the MEF’s quarterly members’ meeting, this year’s event lived up to its billing as the premier Carrier Ethernet event in EMEA.

My schedule only allowed for a couple of brief visits into town which naturally included the requisite visit to the legendary Hofbrauhaus, for a few um-pa-pa’s, a very large stein of beer and some rockin’ pretzels.   

But the real highlight of the week was Carrier Ethernet.  In this post, I’ll recap a few ...

Vodafone believes C&W Worldwide's operations will help it strengthen its enterprise business in the U.K. and provide it with valuable network assets in the U.K. and internationally that will help reduce its reliance on others' infrastructure and thus help reduce its costs. C&W Worldwide has about 6,000 enterprise and carrier customers globally to which it provides a range of voice and data services, including IP, Ethernet and cloud services.

There's no sunshine in Munich this week, but that's OK with Ethernet Europe folks, who are mostly interested in clouds anyway.  Ethernet's role in enabling new cloud services ecosystems is a major feature of the first day of the annual event, which moved this year to Munich, in advance of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) meeting later this week. Four separate service provider keynotes and two panels will address the potential of cloud services but also the challenges in creating an on-demand network infrastructure to enable this next generation of services.