Warwick Valley Telephone announced that it is acquiring Hosted UC firm out of Philadelphis, Alteva for cash and stock valued at $17 million - $10M upfront. "At closing the Company will enter into employment agreements with certain of Alteva's key employees." WVT is going to integrate Alteva into its CLEC operation, US Datanet. Alteva is the second Broadsoft client in M&A activity announced this month.

"Pursuant to the Agreement, upon closing, the Company will purchase substantially all of the assets of Alteva, except for Alteva's employee benefit plans, organizational documents and insurance policies. The Company will only assume certain of Alteva's liabilities, including certain of its contracts, debt owed under specified capital leases and certain accounts payable."

It's ironic that telcos are buying into Cloud at the same time that they are also killing the Cloud. How are they killing the cloud? "The problem is that with cloud-based services being more consumer orientated, those bandwidth caps are proving to be useless. High bandwidth will apply to everyone, even if they are not file-sharing." I know that this is a B2B deal, but with all the home workers, tele-workers, solopreneurs, and SOHO, a lot of Cloud apps are accessed via consumer broadband and cellular -- both metered. Should be fun to watch those 2 things smash into each other.