Telecom Ramblings

Last week the hosting and cloud provider Rackspace revealed that it has been approached by multiple potential partners or acquirers and has hired Morgan Stanley to help it figure out its alternatives. The company’s star has fallen a bit in recent years, with bigger public cloud rivals like Amazon gaining scale advantages and squeezing margins.  [Read more →]

That AT&T was preparing to make a move on DirecTV was well known, but I actually thought they might not pull the trigger. I thought wrong, as over the weekend the two went public with the latest telecommunications and media mega merger. [Read more →]

This week’s new listing on the Ramblings Jobs Board comes from Lightower Fiber Networks in the northeast, joining three other listings still active. [Read more →]

In its second European acquisition in the past month, Zayo has bought itself some more fiber.  This time it’s an asset that has been for sale for a while, and which they always seemed to be the right buyer for: Geo Networks. [Read more →]

May’s network neutrality debate has been something of a circus already.  But there’s one thing that puzzles me.  As a former lobbyist and longtime player in all this, Tom Wheeler had to know that any sort of wavering on fast lanes would send folks into hysterics.  Yet somehow here we are.  Is there a deeper game going on here?  [Read more →]

The more I think of yesterday’s comments by the FCC’s Tom Wheeler about paid prioritization and fast lanes, the more I see the fingerprints of Apple. Remember the rumored Apple/Comcast discussions a couple months back about a separate pipe to the consumer? [Read more →]

So the FCC went ahead and voted to consider its chairman Tom Wheeler’s new net neutrality framework. But about the only thing anyone can agree on about it is that we’re going to be arguing about it for the foreseeable future.   [Read more →]

Today’s roundup looks at this week’s other developments in the datacenter space: [Read more →]

The global network operator GTT is accessing the capital markets, according to an announcement today.  They are looking to sell just over 4.45M shares, of which the 0.45M will be by several large shareholders.  Not including any over-allotments, the company expect to raise in the neighborhood of $37.5M in cash. [Read more →]

Hibernia Networks is upgrading its transatlantic cable system, and it’s switching to a new vendor to get the job done. They’ve tapped Ciena’s GeoMesh solution, including the coherent optics, ROADM, and packet-optical platform. [Read more →]

Yesterday we went through a few of the international announcements out there, today here is a look at a few of the US metro connectivity variety that are worth a look: [Read more →]

A little less than two months ago, Sunesys announced an aggressive expansion into lit services, both of the metro sort within their existing markets and on intercity routes between them.  Yesterday they revealed where some of that intercity bandwidth will originate, and it will come from a somewhat surprising source: Spread Networks. [Read more →]

The rumors have been building for weeks, so the latest one that has AT&T on the brink of a deal to purchase DirecTV for about $50B isn’t exactly unexpected. But I haven’t been able to get terribly excited about it so far. [Read more →]

With ITW underway in Chicago, there is lots of news out there from the international telecommunications industry.  Here is a quick look at some of the interesting expansions, upgrades, and trials going on: [Read more →]

As the various European-style peering efforts really start to get rolling in the US, the key will obviously be getting a critical mass of networks hooked up. DE-CIX’s New York internet exchange now has its first active interconnection customer, and it’s a biggie. They turned up service for Akamai yesterday at 111 8th Ave. [Read more →]

New York isn’t the only market getting some new interconnection options, as new IX is now springing up in Southeast Asia. The ENUM and IPX specialist XConnect and the Kuala Lumpur-based ICT solutions provider Extol have announced plans to launch the Asia Interconnect Exchange, or AIX. [Read more →]

On Friday, Zayo posted its fiscal Q4 earnings report, which for once was mostly about the organic side of things.  The company saw steady growth as usual, with rather stronger numbers on the infrastructure side than on lit services.  Here are a few of the company’s numbers in some context (now with intracompany revenues excluded): [Read more →]

This article was authored by Joseph Waring, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Just as telcos’ fixation with ARPU hasn’t led to improved profitability for the majority of mobile operators, the messaging and social media giants’ reliance on metrics such as monthly active users (MAUs) is a worrisome sign. [Read more →]

Two new job listings landed on the Ramblings Jobs Board this week from Michigan-based Lynx Network Group: [Read more →]

Right now it is Level 3’s North American enterprise sales that are setting the pace for the company. But this week they featured two deals of the international variety, one over in Russia and one down in South America. [Read more →]

TeliaSonera International Carrier has had two interesting announcements this week: a US metro expansion and a new global wireless data roaming effort.  They now have 24,000 route kilometers of fiber in their US network. [Read more →]

After the leak of Tom Wheeler’s proposed FCC net neutrality replacement and the commercially reasonable fast lanes it would supposedly allow, it was only a matter of time before the opposition overcame its initial stunned reaction.  It has become hard to separate the debates about interconnection/peering, the Comcast/TWC merger, and the proposed new rules.  The players overlap so much and it’s all the same infrastructure, so whatever the logical overlap the battlefield is becoming a shared one. [Read more →]

After a year of offsetting revenue trends with rising EBITDA, euNetworks is looking forward to some growth in 2014.  They’ve added some new metrics to their reporting and are now offering some forward revenue guidance as well.  Here are their first quarter numbers in some context: [Read more →]