Global Capacity announced two more deals on Monday: one that expands its service footprint in rural areas and another landing a major customer, as the US wholesale service provider continues to push a growth strategy.

The partnership with Indatel gives that group of wholesale carriers access to the Global Capacity One Marketplace through interconnections in Chicago, Minneapolis and Dallas. It also adds Indatel's 80,000 route miles of fiber networks and 500-plus rural local exchanges to that marketplace, giving Global Capacity's wholesale customers a broad new range of access end points. (See Global Capacity Partners with Indatel and Granite Picks Global Capacity for Data Services.)

The Global Capacity One Marketplace provides an automated way for its wholesale customers to easily identify and connect with available access networks across the US, and the company is still very intent on growing that base, as it did last month with its acquisition of the MegaPath network services business. (See MegaPath Sells Networks to Focus on Services.)

Granite Telecommunications LLC , a successful voice aggregation company now making a bigger push into data, is now a customer of One Marketplace, as part of the second deal announced today. Granite chose Global Capacity to increase its service footprint for Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and private line services. (See Granite Still Reaping POTS Revenue.)

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"We are continuing to pursue our growth strategy," says Mary Stanhope, VP, product and marketing, for Global Capacity. "The Indatel deal is a lot like what we did earlier this year with NCTC and PEG. It lets them buy from us and lets us connect up more of rural America."

As workers get more mobile and data is pushed out to the edge of the network in data centers, more companies are looking for access to more diverse endpoints, including many in rural areas, she notes. What Global Capacity's One Marketplace does is make it easier for member carriers to quickly identify, price and connect to those endpoints.

Not all of Indatel's members are choosing to buy from the One Marketplace, although the majority are, Stanhope notes. One of the things Global Capacity was able to provide to Indatel initially was a professional services contract under which it provided a list of connected buildings and a pricing list for the Indatel member properties, so they could more easily become part of the marketplace and enjoy the benefits of having their on-net and near-net connections generate more revenue.

In Granite's case, the company is expanding its Ethernet and direct Internet access footprint through Global Capacity, giving the services provider a much broader array of access and fast competitive pricing of that access.

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading