Telecom Ramblings

Yesterday the northeastern fiber operator Lightower announced plans to expand their network in the city of brotherly love and the fictional home of Rocky Balboa.  Yep, Philadelphia is getting some more new fiber, specifically downtown in the area surrounding Broad St., Market St., JFK Blvd. and Chestnut Ave. This makes two providers that are making moves in Philly, as tw telecom entered the market for the first time just last month.   [Read more →]

Rackspace may be distancing itself from consolidation in the cloud space, but Cisco managed to find a target to beef up its own efforts.  The router giant entered the space back in March with its Intercloud strategy, and today announced its intention to purchase Metacloud. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at some interesting news items from this week: [Read more →]

One of the bits of summer speculation that seemed destined to happen isn’t going to, at least for now. Rackspace yesterday called off its review of strategic alternatives, named Taylor Rhodes as its CEO, and plotted an independent course. [Read more →]

Some may see the content delivery world as commoditized, but then again some just see further opportunity. The upstart CDN Fastly is one of the latter, and today they announced a big new funding round of venture capital. [Read more →]

For the past half-decade or so, low latency connectivity has been a big focus of the key financial vertical, both through fiber and the air.  Serving bandwidth to the high frequency trading segment has been as rapidly evolving an environment as they come, and NexxCom Wireless has been evolving right along with it.  With us today to tell us where NexxCom’s wireless links will speed off to next is Jay Lawrence, Chief Executive Officer of the company since 2012. [Read more →]

According to Reuters, France’s incumbent telecommunications giant may be about to make an M&A move to its south. Orange is said to be readying a purchase of Spain’s alternative fixed line operator Jazztel in an effort to boost its prospects there, a move that analysts have expected for a while. [Read more →]

Not a lot of big news this Monday morning, but some smaller items are worth noting: [Read more →]

This morning, Netflix is taking its OTT video into perhaps the most hostile territory yet: France. But what we aren’t yet seeing is any of the public spats about interconnection that have marked the content/eyeball divide in the US for much of this year. [Read more →]

After a slow Labor Day stretch, we have a new job listing on the Ramblings Jobs board this weekend. [Read more →]

For this fall Friday let’s see what’s going on with the vendors: [Read more →]

So T-Mobile’s latest campaign is to take better advantage of WiFi, quickly hopping on the bandwagon with the new iPhone’s capabilities in the unapologetically aggressive, quick-footed manner that T-Mobile has specialized in since John Legere took over. All I can say is that it’s about time somebody did. [Read more →]

Here are a few quick-takes on news from the metro and regional fiber space: [Read more →]

Zayo picked up a high profile video transport contract today in the sports vertical. They are teaming up with the National Basketball Association for the transport of live broadcast and other video feeds for all NBA games in the upcoming 2014-2015 season. [Read more →]

The latest European IX foray into North America is by AMS-IX, which this morning announced plans to expand to the west coast. The Amsterdam-based internet exchange company has opened a new PoP at Digital Realty’s 365 Main Street facility in San Francisco. They’ll be calling it AMS-IX Bay Area, and will be seeking to replicate their successful model over in Amsterdam where they see nearly 3Tbps of throughput. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at some of the news from the colo business from the first part of this week: [Read more →]

The New York metro area got itself a new alternative metro connectivity provider today. ZenFi Networks has launched, headed by the former founder and CEO of the NYC metro fiber specialist Lexent Metro Connect, Ray La Chance. [Read more →]

The communications operator MetTel announced a key acquisition this morning, joining what has been a busy week already on the inorganic front.  They’ll be purchasing Thrive Networks, the IT solutions arm of the office retail giant Staples. [Read more →]

Integra Telecom announced a leadership change yesterday, bringing in Robert Guth as interim CEO and President. Guth will hold down the position while the company looks for a more permanent replacement. [Read more →]

There’s big news in the managed connectivity business today, as Global Capacity has made a big inorganic move. They’ve announced plans to acquire of the Network Services business unit of MegaPath.  [Read more →]

2014 has been filled with news of large-scale strategic and financial transactions such as Level 3’s $7 billion acquisition of tw telecom and Zayo’s impending IPO, but a small deal that almost flew beneath the radar has definitely piqued our interest. We sat down with Bank Street Group’s James Henry (JHH), Richard Lukaj (RSL) and Peter Beckett (JPB) to discuss Crown Castle’s acquisition of 24/7 Mid-Atlantic Network and the implications of that transaction for the bandwidth infrastructure sector. [Read more →]

In a transaction that has been submitted to the Maryland Public Service Commission but which doesn’t seem to have made it into the news yet, a national tower company is making a relatively small but very interesting move into the fiber business. Crown Castle has apparently agreed to purchase 24/7 Mid-Atlantic Network. [Read more →]

Seaborn Networks took another big step toward making its US-Brazil submarine cable system plans into reality by bringing on a big name as a foundational customer. None other than Microsoft has entered into an agreement for network capacity on Seabras-1. [Read more →]