Vtesse bought by Interoute in major fibre expansion
Acquisition adds 7,000km of fibre infrastructure to Interoute’s European network
Cloud services platform operator Interoute has bought fibre network and datacentre owner Vtesse for an undisclosed sum, adding over 7,000km of UK fibre to its existing 60,000km European network.
Vtesse, which provides metro and WAN solutions to a number of UK organisations including Lloyds Bank, Poundland, the AA and on the public sector side, DEFRA, connects 55 datacentres and 48 major towns and cities across the country.
Interoute hopes to use the acquisition to expand the scope of its cloud service, Interoute VDC, and its Enterprise Unified ICT portfolio, which comprises compute, network and unified communications services, within the UK.
“When you look at the options for European businesses wanting to take advantage of flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure, they are often limited to the public cloud providers who think Europe can be served by one European datacentre location connected by the public internet,” commented Interoute CEO Gareth Williams.
“This provides a highly resilient, secure low latency Cloud platform that businesses everywhere can benefit from,” he added.
Vtesse chairman and founder Aidan Paul characterised the acquisition as a means to give his existing customers access to a wider portfolio, and a supplier with international scope.
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Vtesse also operates its own 2,700 square metre datacentre in Hertfordshire, accommodating 877 racks at 5Kw each via a 5Mw power supply, which Interoute hopes to use as a colocation and disaster recovery back-up site for its own London facility.
In 2010 Vtesse was one of a number of network providers to complain over access to BT’s network through Openreach during the open phases of the BDUK project.
Along with Fujitsu, Geo Networks, TalkTalk and Virgin Media it claimed that the prices BT planned to charge for access to its ducts and poles was up to four or five times higher than its underlying costs, as Computer Weekly reported at the time.
All the BDUK contracts were subsequently awarded to BT after Fujitsu pulled out of the process in 2013.
Vtesse itself had had ambitious plans to provide connectivity to up to a million homes and businesses in rural broadband not-spots.
