It’s time for a quick roundup of recent news from the metro: [Read more →]
Poll: Who Are the Most Likely Buyers of US Networks in 2014?
January 13th, 2014
Ok, last week’s poll tested Ramblings’ waters for M&A targets among US network operators, so now it’s time for the other side of the coin. Who do you think are 2014’s most likely consolidators of US network assets? As before, you can choose up to three: [Read more →]
US-Huawei security flap descends into farce
January 13th, 2014
This article was authored by John C. Tanner, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.
I was still wrapping up my holiday break when the news broke that US lawmakers are lobbying the South Korean government to stop a network deal between local cellco LG+ and Huawei Technologies. [Read more →]
Two Vendors Warn, Throwing a Dash Of Cold Water on Q4
January 10th, 2014

This week two alternative vendors for the telecom and internet infrastructure market pre-announced, lowering Q4 estimates materially. In the wake of Cisco’s weak off-schedule quarter, one wonders if Q4 is indeed looking like a tougher one than usual. [Read more →]
Dish Gives Up On LightSquared, Is T-Mobile Next?
January 10th, 2014

Yesterday Dish and its billionaire chairman Charlie Ergen publicly withdrew its $2.2B bid for the restructuring wireless challenger LightSquared. The move comes just as the trial starts into whether Ergen was buying LightSquared debt he wasn’t allowed to buy in order to swing the auction his way. [Read more →]
ION Finishes Up Its Upstate NY Buildout
January 9th, 2014

It’s time to close the books on another of the bigger and more successful BTOP projects out there. ION said yesterday that it has completed its $50M buildout into the various far corners of upstate New York plus a few in Pennsylvania and New York is complete. [Read more →]
Colo Roundup: CyrusOne, Cologix, Viawest, Telehouse, Net Access
January 9th, 2014
There have been several interesting developments in colo and cloud infrastructure this week: [Read more →]
Network Bytes: TWCBC, UPN, FiberLight, GTT, Level 3, Orange Business
January 8th, 2014
Time for a quick Wednesday roundup of news from the last few days from network operators, large and small. [Read more →]
Industry Spotlight: Riding the E-Rate Train With Fatbeam’s Greg Green
January 8th, 2014
Building fiber networks in third and fourth tier markets has never been easy. But by leveraging the federal E-Rate program and keeping a tight focus, the regional operator Fatbeam has been managing rapid growth up in the Pacific Northwest since its founding less than four years ago. With us today to tell us the how and why of Fatbeam’s approach to fiber networks is the company’s Co-founder and President Greg Green. [Read more →]
AT&T to Shake Up Wireless Traffic With Sponsored Data
January 7th, 2014
The OTT wars now have a fresh (but not new) battle front, as AT&T is going ahead and introducing a new service where content companies can pay for the data used by a subscriber’s usage. It is an attempt to directly link the world of content to the costs of the bandwidth required to deliver it, rather than depend on the consumer’s willingness to pay more. And if nothing else, it will surely stir up the net neutrality wars anew. [Read more →]
Allied Fiber’s CEO Applauds WSJ’s Coverage on Internet Giants’ Push to Control the Pipes of the Internet
January 7th, 2014

This Industry Viewpoint comes from Allied Fiber’s Hunter Newby via Jaymie Scotto & Associates.
Allied Fiber is the company actively deploying a nationwide system that connects subsea cables and communities with its own dark fiber and integrated network-neutral colocation facilities along its route every 60 miles. Allied’s CEO Hunter Newby sat down [Read more →]
TMobile Buys a Pile Of Spectrum From Verizon
January 6th, 2014
According to an SEC filing this morning, T-Mobile US has made another move to boost its spectrum holdings. They’ve done a deal with Verizon Wireless involving both cash and a spectrum exchange to give them more depth form future LTE expansion. [Read more →]
Poll: Which US Networks Are Most Likely to Be Acquired in 2014?
January 6th, 2014
Every year we ask this question. Ramblings readers are drawn from the most informed in the sector, and it’s always interesting to see what you all are thinking about industry consolidation. Which US-based network operators are most likely to get purchased this year? Cast your vote: [Read more →]
A year of spying
January 6th, 2014
This article was authored by Don Sambandaraksa, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.
Last year was but a taste of the abuse of power that the spy agencies of the Axis of Espionage has unleashed upon the people of the world. From PRISM and interception of Facebook, Google, Yahoo to TEMPORA tapping of [Read more →]
Ramblings Jobs: FirstLight Fiber
January 5th, 2014
The new year’s first job listing goes to FirstLight Fiber, which until this past September had been known as Tech Valley Communications. [Read more →]
Friday Poll: Is the Worst Over For NSA Spying Revelations?
January 3rd, 2014
We’ll do the annual network M&A buyers and sellers polls next week when everyone is back. For now, let’s see what everyone thinks of the NSA revelations and the telecom and internet infrastructure world. So the NSA has backdoors into a laundry list of equipment, has apparently helped weaken encryption standards, may have hacked into at least one submarine cable’s backoffice, routinely monitors traffic between the big data centers of the largest content providers out there, and has been tapping just about everyone’s phone at will — even the Skype ones. Is that it? Are we done now? [Read more →]
Friday Bytes: euNetworks, EarthLink, Open-IX, Juniper
January 3rd, 2014
Friday came awfully quickly this week, what with the New Year and all that. Here’s a quick look at some of the industry news that started the year, plus one from the week before that I hadn’t seen: [Read more →]
Trends to Keep an Eye on in 2014
January 2nd, 2014
After those M&A predictions from New Year’s Eve and before the first 2014 news starts to flow in, let’s talk about a few overall trends to watch in 2014 in telecom and internet infrastructure. Everybody’s got their own list these days, so I’ll just focus on a few: [Read more →]
Seven Telecom and Infrastructure M&A Predictions for 2014
December 31st, 2013
New Year’s Eve is upon us already, and that means it is time for a few bold M&A predictions for 2014. That’s despite the fact that I pretty much struck out with nearly all of last year’s predictions, but who’s counting. This coming year’s infrastructure markets seem to me to have a less certain path than usual, meaning it is harder than usual to eliminate possibilities. Nevertheless, a prognosticator must perforce prognosticate so here goes: [Read more →]
Holiday Roundup: Zayo, Level 3, LINX, and the NSA
December 30th, 2013
There have been a few interesting news items over the holidays that deserve a quick mention: [Read more →]
Looking Back at 2013’s M&As: International Edition
December 30th, 2013
In this final installment of Ramblings’ review of M&A activity in 2013, we look at the international stage. Indeed, that’s where the real action was in both raw size and media coverage, with wireless taking the stage in a big way. But there were also some interesting infrastructure deals around the world that shouldn’t be forgotten. [Read more →]
Looking Back at 2013’s M&As: Colo & Cloud Edition
December 27th, 2013
Following up on the network M&A article before Christmas, it’s time to take a similar look at consolidation within the colocation and cloud marketplace during 2013. Here is a quick look at the deals of the year, organized by the underlying trend they were a part of [Read more →]
Ghosts in the Machine: Virtualization and the Next Generation of Storage Architecture
December 26th, 2013
This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Stefan Bernbo, CEO and founder of Compuverde.
The boom of cloud services and the rapidly-growing demand for more storage has turned virtualization into a hot commodity. Virtualization, the name given to the practice of using a software program to mimic the functions of physical hardware, offers a wide range of flexibility and reduced hardware costs. These benefits are becoming too [Read more →]






