An Ignoble Experiment

Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) reported that a switch in South Florida experienced a failure on Sunday afternoon, interrupting service to about 30,000 local business and residential lines in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and surrounding areas.

After working through the night to repair the switch, the telco said the switch is "slowly coming back online."

While service has been slowly coming back on line in areas such as Miami, those that are still without service are, not surprisingly, reporting long hold times of one to two hours on customer service lines. One of Windstream's business customers in Fort Lauderdale, in a post on Windstream's Facebook page, threatened to "switch to AT&T."

Another Facebook post said that service has been returning in phases with full restoration expected by 12:30 pm ET.

Scott Morris, senior consultant, corporate communications for Windstream, confirmed with FierceTelecom the service restoration time and the estimated number of customers affected by the outage.

Update: Facebook users are reporting outages well beyond the Miami area, stretching from Atlanta to St. Louis, Mo. A user said that one of Windstream's customer service representatives told her the outage is "across the Southeast. At this time there is no ETA." FierceTelecom will try to confirm the extent of outages with Windstream.

For more:
- see Windstream's Facebook page

2. VTel debuts 1 Gbps symmetrical FTTH service for $35

By Sean Buckley

Comment |

Vermont's Vtel has entered the 1 Gbps fiber to the home (FTTH) symmetrical speed race, serving up a $35 a month offering for rural consumer and business customers.

Made possible by $94 million in broadband stimulus grants from the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the NTIA, the service provider has upgraded existing copper infrastructure that was put in place in 1890 with 1,200 miles of new fiber.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, about 600 residents have subscribed to Vtel's 1 Gbps service. It will be available across the telco's entire footprint over the next few months.

Ultimately, VTel's FTTH network will provide 1 Gbps services to over 15,000 customers throughout southern Vermont.

Michel Guité cites Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) FTTH network project--which started in Kansas City and is now slated for Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah--as an inspiration for its project and others that want to develop their own 1 Gbps FTTH plans.

"Google has really given us more encouragement," Guite said in the Journal article.

After being initially turned down for a federal grant to fund the ambitious project in Vermont, VTel secured the funds in its second application following Google Fiber's announcement.

Vermont has never had the best broadband track record. Proving the business case for high-speed broadband has been difficult, and efforts from the state's incumbent telcos have been slow to emerge.

FairPoint (Nasdaq: FRP), which acquired Verizon's legacy phone lines in 2008, has been expanding the reach of its broadband network in Vermont. Last August, it allocated $6.6 million to extend broadband DSL service to 19 rural communities in Vermont, including Chelsea and Washington. However, the 7 Mbps or higher speeds that FairPoint will deliver in those towns won't come close to what Vtel is going to offer.

For more:
- see the release
- The Wall Street Journal has this article

Special Report: Comparing broadband pricing: where do AT&T, Verizon, Cincinnati Bell and others stand?

3. Telecom New Zealand boosts data center, cloud offerings with $82.5 million Revera purchase

By Sean Buckley

Comment |

Telecom New Zealand is purchasing privately-held data center provider Revera for NZD 96.5 million (USD 82.5 million) as a way to deepen its foothold in the cloud and data center service segments.

Under the terms of the agreement, Revera will retain its brand and be run as a separate business, providing additional cloud and data center services to Telecom New Zealand's Gen-i services unit.

"This acquisition adds a respected brand that deepens our IT services portfolio for business customers, particularly with regards to Cloud services," said Simon Moutter, Telecom New Zealand's CEO, in a release about the acquisition. "Both Gen-i and Revera will be better positioned to respond to evolving customer needs in the areas of big data and cloud computing."

When the deal is complete, the two companies will look for ways to develop combined offerings for both of their respective customer bases.

Both companies bring a number of elements to their offerings for New Zealand businesses. For one, they will have a broader base of data centers. Revera opened its fifth data center last year in Upper Hutt's Alexander Industrial Park, Wellington, which Gen-i can leverage to deliver new cloud services.

At the same time, Revera will gain investment, growth and development in its core platforms and its cloud-focused service offerings, additional capacity in Auckland, and broader sales reach.

Telecom New Zealand said it expects the acquisition to be completed in May.

For more:
- see the release

Read more about: Acquisition, Telecom New Zealand
back to top

4. Eve Griliches, Jim Hintze find new roles at BTI Systems

By Sean Buckley

Comment |

BTI Systems has beefed up its management team by hiring two telecom industry veterans, Eve Griliches and Jim Hintze, to head up new cloud and software-defined networking (SDN) initiatives.

Griliches (Image source: ACG Research)

Griliches comes from ACG Research, where she served as the research firm's managing partner with a particular research focus on the optical networking market.

As BTI's new director of solutions marketing, she will help drive more awareness for BTI's cloud and data center offerings, including its new SDN-based Intelligent Cloud Connect platform. In addition to her broad research experience at ACG and earlier at IDC, Griliches held a number of product management positions at Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERIC), Nortel, and Bay Networks/Wellfleet.

Hintze, who will become BTI's new vice president of business development, will focus on expanding its roster of partners and new customers for Intelligent Cloud and its other optical hardware platforms. Like Griliches, Hintze previously served senior management positions at companies that span both the equipment and service provider industry, including Frontier Communications (Nasdaq: FTR), Fujitsu Network Communications and AT&T (NYSE: T).

These appointments come at a time when BTI is trying to establish a greater presence in the emerging SDN and cloud services space. In February, BTI secured $10 million in new funding from Bain Capital Ventures to expand its operations and fund product development initiatives around its Intelligent Cloud Connect offering.

Although SDN and cloud have become new growth targets for BTI, the vendor has been gaining momentum in the emerging Packet Optical Transport Systems (P-OTS) segment of the optical networking industry, winning a number of contracts with Tier 2 telcos and CLECs, including Consolidated Communications (Nasdaq: CNSL), Frontier Communications and CBeyond (Nasdaq: CBEY).

For more:
- see the release

Read more about: BTI Systems
back to top

5. Frontier's West Va. middle mile project nearly complete

By Sean Buckley

Comment |