Steadfast Connects to 5 of Top 6 Carriers, Renesys Baker's Dozen 2013 Report

I'm always a fan of the Renesys Baker's Dozen articles. It is a great review of the major global network carriers and how they've all been doing as far as growth, customer gains and losses, and any other major news. Their 2013 Edition is no different. It is an interesting read, but it is even more interesting because of the changes with the carriers we work with.

Overall, we connect to 5 of the 6 largest global networks, Level3, NTT, GTT, Tata, and Cogent. The only one we don't connect to is TeliaSonera (we had a connection to them in the past). This should show that we take great care in choosing our carriers, as many of these have made major strides in reach and growth over the past years, including GTT (formerly Tiscali and then Tinet) who went from #34 on the first list in 2006 to being #4 now.

That also hinted on the biggest news of the year, which was GTT purchasing the Tinet network from Inteliquent. GTT already owned the Mzima, PacketExchange, and nLayer networks, but now has the 4th largest network in the world, a quality Tier 1 network in Tinet (AS3257). We had decided to drop nLayer as it had become clear that GTT's focus had moved from building their network around nLayer to building it around the Tinet backbone. The longer term plan of GTT seems to be to integrate their other networks into Tinet's backbone and to rebrand that network as simply GTT.

One of our other carriers,Level3, has long been the number one network on the list, even before acquiring Global Crossing, but combined they are far and above the 2nd place network (NTT). In 2013, Level3 has finally been starting to make some moves to integrate the GLobal Crossing network into Level3. From talking with our own rep at Level3, we expect this to accelerate in 2014, which should give our customers even better access to the former Global Crossing users.

I hope this was informative as to how it affects Steadfast, but I do hope you all also read the full article.