Two resellers merged: GLOBALINX Purchases TMC for 'Robust' Agent Channel. GLOBALINX is an IP reseller. TMC is a TDM reseller. Should be interesting to see how the Bell-heads work with the Net-heads, since the thinking is way different (and so is the approach to sales).

LightYear buys the assets of SETEL. SouthEast, a Pikeville, Ky.-based CLEC, filed for bankruptcy in September of 2009, mainly due to bills owed to the ILEC. Sources tell me that a court case over disputed UNE's resulted in a multi-million dollar back billing which forced the BK protection. The Business Journal has details of the asset purchase. According to Yahoo, SETEL had 33,000 customers and revenue of $37.5M.

CLEC's forced into BK is not that unusual. Another KY based CLEC, Win.net, also filed BK last year. The largest debtor was the ILEC. CommPartners was recently forced into bankruptcy protection due to ILEC bills. Honestly, in some cases it's the CLEC business model. In other cases I have seen, the order for a UNE goes into the system as Special Access and the CLEC gets billed a hundred times what they expected and termination liability coupled with late fees and billing penalties pushes the CLEC over. I still maintain that the billing department for an ILEC is a revenue stream. They bill in error on purpose and hardly ever fix it. In fact, account execs I know at the ILEC don't even want to spend time fixing it. So what does that tell you? Telecom is broken.