Telstra deal to expand U.K. services

Telstra has purchased the U.K. businesses of the once high-flying but now defunct PSINet in a bid to expand its suite of corporate IP services in the region.

Telstra has purchased the U.K. businesses of the once high-flying but now defunct PSINet in a bid to expand its suite of corporate IP services in the region.

The acquisition provides the Australian ISP with an additional 3,200 corporate and government customers in the U.K., including GMTV and the City of Sunderland. Telstra already supports Hilton Hotels and De Beers among its 5,000 U.K. corporate customers.

The PSINet deal represents Telstra’s third acquisition of network assets in the U.K. in the last nine months. Previous Telstra acquisitions include Powergen’s network infrastructure and Cable Telecom’s reseller channel.

The acquisitions are designed to improve the reach and capacity of Telstra’s IP network and services in the U.K., which is home to many European headquarters operations for multinational corporations.

“Telstra’s been active in the U.K. for 13 years. We never actually offered national services. Our focus was on city-to-city services for Australian-based multinationals,” says David Thorn, the managing director of Telstra Global Business Offshore.

“The acquisition of a national network platform allows us to support organizations that have more than one site outside the cities, such as Microsoft and Adobe, which have operations in the Western end of the U.K,” Thorn says. “Now Telstra can readily service those customers instead of handing them off to an alternative provider.”

Thorn says the PSINet acquisition is the final piece of the puzzle required to service U.K. customers because it includes managed data, security, hosting, storage and disaster recovery services. The acquisition also will speed up Telstra’s ability to offer VoIP services in the region, which Thorn says will be available before year-end.

The PSINet acquisition “significantly depends on our portfolio of services,” Thorn says. “We have sufficient capacity to take all the current PSINet traffic – which is all IP-based – and overlay it on our national transmission network, which will give us some immediate cost and control savings. But more important, this acquisition allows us to accelerate our offering of converged voice and data services.”

PSINet’s U.K. operations were previously owned by Israel Corporation Ltd., which purchased the assets in 2002. Telstra paid 50 million pounds in cash for the U.K. businesses of PSINet.