12 Feb TELECOM CHANGES
The telecom world is ever changing as technology changes. The companies are changing as well. In this past year, WCI Telecom was purchased by Integra Telecom. Comcast had a bid in to buy Time Warner Cable, but did not go through and that is a good thing (Net Neutrality). Charter Cable now has an offer on the table to buy Time Warner Cable and that will create competition with Comcast. Cbeyond was bought out by Birch Communications and Time Warner Telecom was purchased by Level 3.
What this all means, I don’t know, but the deals were done for a reason and we will see how it all shakes out. Integra is trying to light up their dark fiber assets because they are trying to get away from the T-1 business for the more profitable fiber product. Level 3 bought TW Telecom to get into the retail space, because they are traditionally a wholesale model who sold to carriers. Birch purchased Cbeyond, but more interested in using Cbeyonds growing cloud server business. Charter is trying to purchase Time Warner Cable to expand their footprint.
Businesses are going to the cloud more and more and with that, they need more bandwidth. So what are the telco’s doing? They are starting to provide higher bandwidth for less money, but it depends on where you are. We have clients paying $650 for 500Mbps of internet speed, and if you’re not in the right area, you may pay that for a T-1 or 1.5Mbps.
Comcast is coming out with a cable product that will provide 50/50Mbps, but we don’t know what the cost is going to be, but it should be out in the next quarter. They have also started offering Sip trunks (voice lines).
There is another company in the telecom game, Optima Cloud Services, also known as NPI. Just like Century Link, Integra, TW Telecom, we provide fiber, EOC, T-1, cloud phone system, cloud back-ups and microwave internet.
If you have any questions about anything in this article, please give us a call at 253-852-1543.