Six Degrees acquires Datahop; fiberoptic datacenter network

The acquisition comes just seven months after Six Degrees came into being, fueled by $95 million in venture capital from Penta Capital. It's been on a buying spree since then: last week it purchased two cloud hosting firms in London; it acquired another back in February after securing a credit line of $39.5 million.

Its interest in Datahop is simple: the company has 200 customers and a network of high-speed fiberoptic cable linking datacenters in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris.

With it, Six Degrees is able to add most of London’s datacenters to the network, including the facilities of Telecity, Telehouse, Interxion, Level 3 and Iomart.

For those doing the math at home, that's a total of 37 points of presence, combining Six Degrees' 16 and Datahop's 21. The new network also connects European and American financial centers.

Six Degrees says it's planning to undergo a "multi-million pound upgrade" to its network in advance of a VPLS-enabled datacenter interconnect fabric that should give it multi-gigabit port capability for its converged voice, data and hosting services.

"Datahop’s technologies will allow us to deliver higher bandwidth, and a broader range of services to our customers," said Daniel Lowe, managing director of Six Degrees' managed data division. "Our ability to link people, places and clouds has been boosted significantly with the flexible service creation capability we now offer to the market."