Telecom Ramblings

The northeastern fiber operator Lightower announced a major metro expansion on its western frontier. That’s Chicago of course, the Midwestern footprint it picked up with the Sidera acquisition earlier this year. [Read more →]

Here’s a Wednesday look at some of the happenings in the metro and regional fiber world from this week: [Read more →]

Competitive service providers won a regulatory round yesterday, at least for five months anyway. Yesterday the FCC weighed in on AT&T’s proposed special access pricing changes, under which certain long term pricing discounts would be eliminated. In a document posted on the agency’s website, they said: [Read more →]

In the wake of Verizon’s announced purchase of Edgecast Networks, Akamai took a beating yesterday due to the extent of its reseller relationship with Verizon. Dan Rayburn does a great job of analyzing the downsides for Akamai, although I’m not really convinced that Verizon is ready for a wide-ranging offensive on the CDN marketplace. They might be of course, but they’re going to have to prove it and years will pass first. [Read more →]

Yesterday saw a significant merger announcement in the Australia fiber market. TPG Telecom has announced the purchase of AAPT from Telecom New Zealand for AU$450M. The deal will give them a national fiber backbone to supplement and expand their existing ISP business. [Read more →]

TE Subcom says it has begun work on the marine survey in both US and Irish territorial waters for Emerald Networks’ proposed transatlantic cable system. When complete, the cable will connect Long Island with Belmullet on the west coast of Ireland, terrestrial rings on both sides on the Atlantic, a key extension up to Iceland, and a future extension down to Portugal. [Read more →]

That’s the word according to TechCrunch over the weekend, although no official announcement is out there as of yet [EDIT: it’s official now]. But if they’re right, Verizon will be shelling out more than $350M to acquire EdgeCast and move much deeper into the CDN world than it has thus far. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick Friday look at some other news from the global telecom and internet infrastructure marketplace: [Read more →]

Peak, which shortened its name from PeakColo over the summer, is partnering with Telx in order to expand rapidly into two new markets. They’re deploying cloud nodes in Telx’s SCL2 facility in Santa Clara and its ATL1 facility in Atlanta. [Read more →]

Colombia has a new submarine cable landing to the east. GlobeNet announced today the completion of its subsea extension, bringing both direct connectivity to Miami and a lower latency path between Colombia and Brazil into play. [Read more →]

It’s been quite some time since we weren’t quite sure where the FCC Chairman was trying to steer the boat. But since he formally took over a month ago, Tom Wheeler’s agenda has seemed harder to get a handle on than past commissioners. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at some news from the fiber networking front: [Read more →]

The US may still be recovering from turkey and shopping, but Europe has plenty going on this week to look at: [Read more →]

Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) made a substantial inorganic move today, announcing an agreement to acquire Florida-based Prolexic Technologies for about $370M in cash plus the assumption of outstanding unvested options. Prolexic offers cloud-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection for data centers and enterprise IP applications. [Read more →]

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

Top 10 things heard at NetEvents Singapore cloud confab: [Read more →]

Whenever we transition into the Xmas shopping season, the jobs board generally slows down .  However, this week we do have a new listing from Walker and Associates. [Read more →]

The US is mostly out for the weekend, now trying to work off all that turkey with a bit of shopping.  But the globe does keep on turning, and so here is a quick survey of some news from around the world: [Read more →]

Before USA readers go off for the holiday weekend, here’s a little 400G, a trip to the dentist, and of course bandwidth to a volcano. [Read more →]

In another leadership transition announced in this short week, XO has found itself a new chief executive officer. Industry veteran Christopher Ancell has been appointed CEO, and will join the company after Thanksgiving weekend runs its course (December 2). [Read more →]

According to the New York Times and others today, the NSA spying revelations are reaching deeper into the network.  In other words, to get at the data Google and Yahoo may or may not have given them voluntarily, they may have been tapping into the fiber itself.  In particular they cite Level 3, but again without actually accusing them of, well, anything at all except maybe owning fiber.  But seriously folks, all this is mind-numbingly obvious. [Read more →]

The other big news this week that everyone is talking about of course is the possibility that TW Cable might get bought. The two suitors are said to be Comcast and Charter, with some even speculating the two could split up the assets in order to optimize their take and keep regulators from freaking out.  [Read more →]

Come next May, Level 3 will have a new Chairman to go along with this year’s newly minted CEO. Walter Scott will be retiring from the board of directors and his post as its chairman by simply not standing for reelection when the 2014 annual meeting comes around. The new chairman will be the board’s resident admiral, [Read more →]

In another sign of NTT’s campaign for greater international network depth, the Japanese telecommunications giant is taking on Spain. With the help of the regional fiber and quad-play services provider ONO, they are expanding deeper into the country, adding two new PoPs.  [Read more →]