Wave Broadband, a unit of Astound Broadband, said it has completed the purchase of commercial fiber services provider Digital West, a move that should expand its offerings throughout California’s Central Coast region. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.   

In a press release, Wave Broadband said all existing Digital West services, products, and customer support will continue without interruption and that Digital West will operate within the Wave region as part of Wave Business Solutions. The companies plan to commit resources toward enhancing products, services and value for Digital West customers in the future.   

Digital West is based in San Luis Obispo, California, and serves commercial clients, including carriers, small businesses, and medium-to-large enterprise clients.

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“The Central Coast is home to a fast-growing and dynamic business community, one which we believe can benefit significantly from the combined services and capabilities our companies provide,” Astound Broadband CEO Jim Holanda said in a press release. “Our resources will enable Digital West’s talented local team to connect area business customers over our combined network to more locations in California and across the country, leveraging our technology and capital to broaden Digital West’s service offerings and accelerate their growth.”  

Astound was purchased by Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners in November in a deal valued at about $8.1 billion. The company includes RCN Corp., Grande Communications, Wave and EnTouch Communications and has about 1 million customers in Northern California; Oregon; Washington; Chicago; Eastern Pennsylvania; Massachusetts; New York City, Washington, D.C.; and Texas.  

“During the past two decades, Digital West’s team has established a strong local heritage of providing exceptional broadband and connectivity services for thousands of businesses of all sizes, at every stage of growth, in a wide variety of industries,” said Tim Williams, Digital West founder and CEO. “With our new partners, we look forward to accelerating our growth, adding new offerings, and continuing to provide the high levels of service that business customers have come to expect from Digital West.” 

Comcast Business said it is working to bounce back from a voice service outage that hit customers on Wednesday.  

Comcast didn’t pinpoint the source of the outage, but said that service has been restored to most of its customers.  

“We experienced a service interruption today with our Comcast Business Voice and VoiceEdge Select services and we apologize,” an official said in a statement. “Our engineers began working to address the issue immediately and services have been restored for most of our customers. We recognize that some customers are still impacted and we expect the issue to be fully resolved shortly. We have every resource focused on getting everyone back online and apologize again to the customers who were affected.” 

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VoiceEdge is a cloud-based voice and unified communications platform that Comcast Business introduced in 2013.

At last check, the Comcast Cares Twitter handle had pinned a tweet updating customers about the outage:  

[embed]https://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/1004410077544046592[/embed]

Wave Broadband said it has raised an additional $125 million to continue an ambitious fiber buildout geared toward serving a growing number of enterprise customers on the West Coast, and is adding two new companies to the fold to help grow its commercial services business.

Wave, based in Kirkland, Wash., initially raised $130 million to start its fiber buildout last year.

The more recent financing, a $125 million add-on to the existing first-lien term loan, will fund the continued project buildout in Washington, Oregon and California, as well as future acquisitions.

Wave currently has more than 1,000 fiber construction projects underway to serve business and residential customers on the West Coast and its commercial services business is its fastest growing segment, growing at a 25% clip last year. According to Wave, new construction is adding more than 100 route miles of fiber each month to its existing network of about 5,500 route miles, serving markets from the San Francisco Bay area north to the Canadian border.

Separately from the financing, Wave said it has purchased two fiber businesses – Newport, Ore.-based CoastCom, and Vancouver, Wash.-based SawNet -- to expand its business offerings. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.  

CoastCom owns more than 250 miles of fiber in Oregon, while SawNet owns more than 100 fiber miles from Portland/Vancouver through the Columbia River Gorge. Wave will add those assets to its fiber network, along with CoastCom’s more than 150 business customers.  

“This financing enables Wave to accelerate the expansion our fiber network to meet the strong demand we are seeing from commercial customers for access to our network’s fast and reliable connections, backed by exceptional customer service,” Wave CEO Steve Weed said in a statement. “We are also very pleased to add CoastCom and SawNet to Wave, as their local fiber networks and business customers complement what we’re already building in Oregon and southern Washington.”

Wave has been placing a greater emphasis on its commercial broadband business for years – Weed said in an interview that it is on a path for business services to represent about half of total revenue. It recently launched Wave G Business service – a 1 Gigabit per second high-speed data offering – to provide symmetrical Gigabit Internet connectivity to companies often found on the ground floors of Wave G-serviced residential apartment buildings.

CenturyLink said it has lit up a fiber-based symmetrical 1 Gbps offering for multi-tenant unit office building in the Houston area, a launch that brings more commercial services competition to Comcast, the city's incumbent cable operator.

CenturyLink  said platform will offer a range of IP-based services, including multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), optical wave service, Ethernet and VoIP. More than 300 data centers and thousands of business locations are directly connected to CenturyLink’s 250,000-route-mile U.S. fiber network and its 300,000-route-mile international transport network, the company said.

“Access to super-fast, reliable business broadband service is a determining factor for many companies when leasing office space,” said Laura Bacon Morgan, Houston MTU fiber program manager at CenturyLink, said in a statement. “CenturyLink consults with office building landlords and leasing agents who want to attract sophisticated, technology-driven business tenants. A business can quickly activate Internet service that meets or exceeds its connectivity requirements in a building that is pre-lit with CenturyLink fiber.”

Houston is the latest city to join CenturyLink’s 1-gig mix. Last May, the company announced it had made 1 Gbps FTTP services available to about 500,000 U.S. business locations.

Comcast Business, the commercial services arm of the cable giant, is going after large enterprises full bore, forming a new unit specifically targeting Fortune 1000 companies and forming agreements with cable companies across the country to provide managed services to big business customers with locations nationwide.

The new Enterprise Services unit, branded Managed Enterprise Solutions, will offer a full suite of managed enterprise products including broadband, Ethernet, voice, router, security business continuity and WiFi. To meet those goals, Comcast said it has purchased a managed service company and has signed network agreements with other cable operators to further support national accounts.

Headed by former SpaceNet Inc. CEO Glenn Katz, Comcast said the new unit has already signed large customers from several industries including financial services, banking, hospitality and retail.

“We’re committed to expanding and enhancing our offerings for businesses of all sizes, and having the expertise, tools and portfolio in place to deliver customized service packages to nationwide enterprises is a key part of our growth strategy,” said Comcast Business president Bill Stemper in a statement. “Large companies need a provider who can help them manage complex networks, develop business continuity plans and integrate cloud-based applications. Our entry into this segment of the market will introduce new innovation and choice.”

Business services have been the fastest growing segment for most cable operators and Comcast is no exception. According to Comcast, business services grew 22% in 2014 and has an annual revenue run-rate of more than $4.5 billion. But so far most of the revenue has come from small and medium sized business. With the creation of Managed Enterprise Services, Comcast can tackle larger enterprises with locations outside of Comcast’s cable footprint.

According to a recent report from IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based IT industry analyst firm, the U.S. market for managed services is expected to increase from $29 billion in 2014 to $52 billion in 2019.

"With its national network reach and end-to-end service delivery capabilities, Comcast is well positioned to serve the outsourced network management needs of large business that require increasing network capacity to serve expanding multi-site requirements," IDC research vice president Melanie Posey said in a statement.

While network agreements with cable operators like Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Cablevision Systems will help expand Comcast’s business services reach, the cable giant also recently purchased national technology deployment and managed services firm Contingent Network Services to help larger enterprises outsource their day-to-day network operations. Comcast purchased Contingent, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company but will continue to operate under its own brand name, in late August.

“Contingent’s mission is to provide clients with high-quality, cost-effective network and deployment services wherever and whenever needed for reliable communications across an enterprise, and we couldn’t be more excited for them to join our team,” Katz said in a statement. “By joining forces with Comcast Business, Contingent can further expand their reach and take advantage of Comcast’s extensive fiber and hybrid fiber coax network to give enterprises the optimal network experience to meet their business and technology requirements.”

Comcast Business said it has landed a deal to provide an Ethernet-powered upgrade for the Hilton San Francisco Union Square hotel, a site that touts 1,919 guest rooms and 130,000 square feet of meeting space.

Via the upgrade, Hilton San Francisco Union Square is getting two Internet circuits of 500 Mbps two dedicated 1Gbps circuits, upgradable to 10Gbps, Comcast said.

The capacities were necessary, they said, to provide the bandwidth needed to support guests’ social activities including streaming video while “meeting industry standards to support up to 6,000 guests online at the same time.”

“One of the essential amenities we offer to our guests is Internet and our goal to support as many users with as much bandwidth at the highest speed possible at any given time is made possible by using Comcast Business’ Ethernet,” said Pejman Parvazi, Area Manager for Information Technology at Hilton Worldwide. “We have been impressed with Comcast’s ability to address our needs and provide the potential to grow while offering reliable support. It is important for us to deliver high quality amenities to our guests.”

“Reliable and efficient solutions are critical to the hotel industry in today’s digital environment,” added Ted Girdner, Vice President of Comcast Business for Comcast’s California Region. “Hilton San Francisco Union Square is providing access to information, and we’re pleased to provide a solution that enhances the hotel experience for all its guests.”

In the second quarter, business services revenues at Comcast rose 20.4%, to $1.2 billion. Comcast said it has achieved a penetrate rate of 25% for small businesses, and is approaching 10% for mid-sized businesses.  

As we pointed out earlier this week, cable’s dabbling in the cellular and mobile sector – the Sprint “Pivot” partnership and Cox’s failed attempt to build its own network, among them -- has not produced stellar results. Although the potential for MVNO partnerships could offer some help on the mobile front, it’s becoming clear that cable’s going to hitch its wireless wagon to WiFi.

But that doesn’t mean cable isn’t making a decent sized buck from the cellular carriers, as several major MSOs have built tower backhaul businesses that are helping to stoke the growth of their broader commercial-focused service business.  

Time Warner Cable’s Untangled blog took a closer look at its own cellular backhaul efforts this week, showing how it's providing the “wire behind wireless." After getting that initiative off the ground in 2008, TWC currently connects close to 20,000 towers to fiber across its footprint.

“When you think about a cell tower backhaul and how we execute cell tower backhaul, we’re the underlying fiber network that carries the data, voice and even video traffic that’s coming directly from your mobile device,” Thane Storck, GVP of carrier services, at TWC, explained. “Companies like Time Warner Cable are truly the backbone of the wireless industry.”

While that has become increasingly important with 4G, those efforts will likely become amplified when carriers begin to deploy faster5G wireless networks.

As explained in the video below, TWC is using a ring-in-ring architecture for cellular backhaul, which ensures redundancy.

WOW! Business, the commercial services arm of Internet, video and voice provider WideOpenWest, is introducing its new 110-Megabits per second high-speed data service in three new markets  – Augusta, Ga.; Charleston, S.C.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Panama City, Fla.

The rollout brings to 10 the number of Southeast markets with the service and the total number of areas with the capability to 16, including six markets in the Midwest.

The 110 Mbps service, delivered by cable modem, complements the expanding WOW! Business service lineup of Internet, voice, data and cloud computing services. The new faster Internet service is intended for businesses that have outgrown their current plans and require more bandwidth to meet their needs. In addition, with the new speeds, WOW! Business will not require businesses to bundle voice to receive the best pricing. Download/upload speed tiers of 8/1 Mbps, 15/2 Mbps, 30/5 Mbps and 60/5 Mbps are also available.

“We’re nearing the completion of our rapid expansion of high-speed Internet service in the Southeast and Midwest and are already seeing an excellent response rate from single and multi-location businesses in a variety of market segments,” said WOW! Business senior vice president Brad Cheedle in a statement. “Unlike many other providers, we’re listening to our customers and delivering the flexibility and high level of customer service they want and expect without requiring businesses to purchase a bundle that includes voice or other products.”

WOW! Business provides IP-based network, data, voice and cloud services for small and mid-sized business, enterprise, government and wholesale customers. The company owns and operates more than 40,000 miles of local fiber-optic and coaxial networks in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest which, along with its data centers, provide customers with scalable, low-latency access to national carrier backbones.

“We’re simplifying our high-speed Internet product set with new plans that double the download and triple the upload speeds, giving businesses more and better options to help them improve productivity and increase customer satisfaction,” said WOW! vice president of product management Steve Gorman in a statement. “The new higher speeds also allow businesses to more efficiently use the WOW! Business cloud infrastructure for offsite data backup and recovery, IaaS and our other cloud computing services.”