Telecom Ramblings

Private Equity has found some more infrastructure to buy. The Montreal-bsed private equity firm Novacap is apparently acquiring Oxford Networks for a price tag of $50M. It is the second bit of fiber and network M&A news up in New England for the week, following Last Mile Solutions move in Boston.  [Read more →]

There has been a flurry of announcements this week from submarine cable systems around the world. Here’s a few quick takes: [Read more →]

Yesterday the judicial hammer finally came down on network neutrality. A federal appeals court has sided with Verizon and rejected the rules put in place by the FCC in 2010 to prevent carriers from discriminating for or against various types of internet traffic. But while plenty will be outraged by the decision, I doubt very much that there are many that are the least bit surprised by the outcome. [Read more →]

Some unique dark fiber has changed hands up in the Boston metro area. According to a recent announcement, Last Mile Solutions has purchased the dark fiber assets of Forest City Network Solutions. [Read more →]

Another submarine cable system on a unique route is getting some spending money. Ocean Networks, which is developing the South America Pacific Link, said yesterday that it has secured mezzanine funding for the effort. [Read more →]

We don’t spend as much time on the cable MSOs here on Telecom Ramblings as on other segments, but yesterday’s news was big enough to get my attention. It turned out that there was actual fire underneath all that smoke regarding bids for TW Cable. Indeed, Charter has a newly public bid on the table, and TW Cable doesn’t think much of it. [Read more →]

It’s time for a quick roundup of recent news from the metro: [Read more →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

There have been several interesting developments in colo and cloud infrastructure this week: [Read more →]

Time for a quick Wednesday roundup of news from the last few days from network operators, large and small. [Read more →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 →]

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 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 →]