Telecom Ramblings

Charlie Ergen has apparently found the tipping point for the board of directors over at clwr. The latter has abruptly abandoned its majority owner Sprint’s side and is now recommending shareholders take the $4.40/share tender offer currently pending from Dish Networks. [Read more →]

CityFibre has tapped Level 3 to bring bandwidth to its UK metro networks and help enable the symmetric gigabit internet access offer they are putting together.  It’s a natural partnership, as Level 3 has regional fiber across the UK that derives from the Global Crossing deal that gets them into CityFibre’s second tier markets without worrying about much direct competition. [Read more →]

Time for a quick roundup of news from datacenter/cloud side of things: Colt moves on the Far East, Internap gets certified, Equinix lands another tenant, Interoute goes HD, and Sentinel gets more Carolina fiber. [Read more →]

Today, Infinera paired a key expanded customer deployment with a release of the vendor’s networking vision for the rapidly approaching ‘Terabit Era’. [Read more →]

Out in Japan today at Interop Tokyo, Cyan took several steps forward in their plan to take on the SDN world. The vendor has long had a software-centric approach to the network world, and has been building off of that toward a true multi-vendor SDN platform with its Blue Planet offering. [Read more →]

XO Communications has been delving steadily deeper into the cloud since Icahn took it private, and yesterday they added three new cloud-based services aimed at the enterprise. Their enterprise cloud computing, drive, and vault offerings put them up more directly against the likes of Amazon than they have been until now. [Read more →]

Time for a quick tour roundup from network operators and builders, with items from Alpheus, United Fiber & Data, EdgeConnex, BullsEye, and Windstream. [Read more →]

The only consolidator out there that has been competitive with Zayo in terms of raw number of deals since 2006 struck again yesterday. Birch Communications announced an agreement to acquire the client base, accounts receivable, and physical assets of Ernest Communications, bringing their total to nineteen in the past six or so years.  [Read more →]

The three wireless deals of the year now have another thing in common. Softbank has now sweetened the pot a bit in hopes of winning shareholder support for their deal and delayed the vote, much as happened recently with Sprint’s bid for Clearwire and for DT’s purchase of MetroPCS in April. And while I doubt they will make Crest Financial happy, they did bring the hedge fund Paulson & Co on board. [Read more →]

Three months after unveiling their Constellation project for 2013, TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) is preparing to fire it up, at least in prototype form. And along the way, they’ll be providing dynamic Ethernet connectivity to CoreSite’s Open Cloud Exchange. [Read more →]

So last week’s big political/tech news was about privacy and the fact that we apparently have even less of it than we thought we did. Revelations that the NSA has been playing fast and loose with the rules shocked the media, though I seriously doubt they were nearly as shocked as they made out. [Read more →]

I guess Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC, news, filings) is making good money off these network outsourcing contracts, because they keep racking them up. This morning they added MBNL, the joint venture tasked by Everything Everywhere (EE these days) and Three UK to run [Read more →]

This week could be yet another watershed moment in the ongoing M&A soap opera that is Softbank/Dish/Sprint/Clearwire.  And just to make things even more complicated, over the weekend the buzz was about Softbank’s Plan B should Sprint spurn their offer. Yep, they’re floating the possibility of a bid for T-Mobile USA. [Read more →]

As disclosed by Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) this morning, the IRS says it has convened an internal working group to study what constitutes “real estate” when it comes to classifying assets in the context of REITs. Equinix has been working toward a conversion of its business into a REIT, and based on the analyst and pre-market response, the wind has just shifted in an unfavorable direction. [Read more →]

This article was authored by Dylan Bushell-Embling, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has commenced a project to deploy a 100G optical network to support its online platforms, and has contracted ZTE for the rollout. [Read more →]

It’s been a busy few days for metro and regional fiber: [Read more →]

For the second straight quarter, Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) easily surged past both guidance and analyst estimates and posted quarterly revenues above $500M for the first time.  Forward guidance was also above the expected range.  Here’s their numbers in some context: [Read more →]

As a helpful reader pointed out, the rumored move by DT on GTS Central Europe was just the initial bit of information and apparently there’s actually an auction to be had. So let’s engage in a bit of idle speculation.  Who might fit the bill? Who would pay up for deep fiber in Eastern and Central Europe? [Read more →]

Here’s a set of quick takes on the international front from TI Sparkle, Level 3, Savvis, and Equinix. [Read more →]

Ok, it’s been almost a year since I updated my long-running statistics page summarizing the industry’s metro fiber route miles and on-net buildings. That’s long enough that a half dozen people have been either asking for an update or volunteering data in hopes I will get off my backside. [Read more →]

Time for a quick look around at the week’s initial news from competitive network operators: [Read more →]

As the wireless industry continues to prepare for the future deluge of data traffic in an era of smartphones and video, the subject of small cells has been coming up frequently as an important potential piece of the puzzle.  But beyond the fact that they’re cells and they’re small, most of the talk about them is quite general.  With us today to shed a little more light on the subject is Doug Wiest, EVP of Wireless at EdgeConneX.  EdgeConneX today announced a new small cell deployment contract in [Read more →]

With words like f there were any gloves still on, they’re definitely off now. Sprint says that Dish’s latest last minute bid for Clearwire is ‘not actionable’, while Crest Financial is demanding Sprint not interfere and that the special committee be reinstated to consider Dish’s bid.  By ‘not actionable’, Sprint means that in order to agree to Dish’s bid Clearwire’s board would [Read more →]