Telecom Ramblings

Bahrain’s Batelco may be poised to buy a controlling stake in Reliance Globalcom. Both companies have confirmed that such talks are underway, however nobody has signed on the dotted line just yet. The deal supposedly under consideration would keep Reliance as a minority owner. [Read more →]

TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) has been awarded a competitive multi-year federal contract to bid for services from the GSA’s GRITS II. With a potential value of $550M, the award simply gives them the right to bid on providing various services to agencies and organizations across the Southeastern US, specifically [Read more →]

India’s Reliance Globalcom says it is upgrading its transatlantic FA-1 South submarine cable system with the help of Ciena’s GeoMesh. That will mean 100GbE with OTN support will be on tap when complete. [Read more →]

Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) has formally opened the doors of its second downtown Seattle data center. SE3 is right next to SE2 within the Westin Building carrier hotel, boosting Equinix’s space in the Seattle metro area by 51,000 square feet and room for 1,000 cabinets. [Read more →]

Quite a bit of news this week from the alternative CDNs despite CompTel, with multiple items each from Level 3, EdgeCast, and CDNetworks plus the launch of CDN.net: [Read more →]

There was a bit of fiber consolidation up in the Pacific Northwest today. Fatbeam announced an agreement by which the regional metro fiber builder will acquire its way into the market of Tacoma, Washington. The non-profit EMAN Networks is selling them the 25 miles of network they have in the area.  [Read more →]

Still fressh off its IPO, CyrusOne has some big plans beyond mere colo space on its home turf down in Texas. They’ve apparently been building a statewide internet exchange fabric, hooking up their own facilities as well as other carrier hotels throughout the Texas Triangle cities of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. [Read more →]

Just after the five month mark since T-Mobile’s purchase of MetroPCS was announced, regulators have signed off on the transaction. Yesterday, it was the FCC giving the green light, and today the FTC has followed suit. But regulatory clearance hasn’t really been the question, now T-Mobile and MetroPCS will face the real test: the smaller carrier’s shareholders. [Read more →]

A quick Wednesday look at some news from the metro space from Alpheus, Sunesys, Windstream, and UNSI: [Read more →]

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

Choice quotes from insiders and outsiders at the Mobile World Congress last month: [Read more →]

Pacnet today announced a significant expansion of its data center footprint with a brand new facility in Singapore. Back in October, Pacnet and its new CEO Carl Grivner detailed a new plan to drive the company forward in which managed services and data centers would play a big role. Given that this buildout will cost $90M, clearly they are putting some money behind those words. [Read more →]

Let’s leave behind the main routes for the moment and look at sever interesting news items from much further away: [Read more →]

DukeNet says it has completed a significant network expansion taking it into new markets across four more southeastern states.  They’ve built out metro and regional networks in Birmingham, Huntsville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Nashville, Athens, Atlanta, and Richmond, Virginia, and are planning an expansion up to Ashburn.   [Read more →]

The wireless backhaul specialist PEG Bandwidth announced a major expansion of its footprint today. With a series of recently executed contracts in hand to power 4G expansion for four large wireless companies, they’re planning to add 1,500 new cell sites across 10 states to their network. [Read more →]

In South American enterprise bandwidth news, Venezuela gets little attention — slightly counteracting the outsized political crap we have endured for so long. So Level 3’s contract expansion with Grupo La Caridad was aptly timed. The poultry producer has expanded the availability of Level 3’s IP-VPN to its subsidiary Avicola la Rosita, thus facilitating the exchange of data across 33 locations throughout the country via both fiber and satellite. [Read more →]

Last week I posted maps of fiber-based networks in the British Isles alongside each other as a means to better understand potential consolidation in the European telecommunications market beyond wireless and the incumbents.  Today it’s time for a similar look at Scandinavia and the Baltics.  Once again, if one looks one can easily find at least a couple dozen, ranging from a token presence in PoP or two to deep local infrastructure: [Read more →]

Time for a Friday look at some of the news this week from the colo business from SubTropolis, Cyrus One, Colo Atl, Telx, and Interxion: [Read more →]

Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) surprised the markets yesterday with their fiscal first quarter results, and in a good way.  The networking vendor posted an adjusted profit per share of $0.12, far above the composite analyst expectations of a loss of $0.14.  Revenues were slightly higher than expected, but it was lower expenses and improving capex trends from carriers that meant the most: [Read more →]

After a difficult second half, Inteliquent (NASDAQ:IQNT, news, filings) finished the year by beating its revised guidance quite handily, with both revenues and EBITDA for Q4 more solid than expected.  However, the bigger question has been just where the company’s fortunes lie in 2013 in the wake of that December settlement with a large customer and the shift it portends in the company’s cost structure and future revenue levels.  Here are the company’s results and guidance in some context: [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) is going to be looking for some new leadership this year, as the company has just announced that its CEO James Q. Crowe  is planning to transition out of that role by the end of 2013.  The company’s board of directors has formed a transition planning committee to help identify the next CEO.  The exact timing of Crowe’s departure is subject to change “at the Board’s discretion in consultation with Mr. Crowe”, which likely means that it will happen whenever the new guy or gal is ready to step in. [Read more →]

Few segments of the telecommunications industry have been changing as rapidly as international interconnectivity, whether it be voice, IP/MPLS, Ethernet, or Sonet/SDH. As a carrier neutral independent exchange, Epsilon sees an opportunity to carve out some new territory. With us today to discuss Epsilon’s rapidly evolving interconnection and local access aggregation model is the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, Irwin Fouwels. [Read more →]

Time for a quick roundup of network-related news this week from Hibernia Networks, XO Communications, 24/7 MidAtlantic, and Earthlink: [Read more →]

Dan Rayburn has a thought-provoking article out today in which he describes the video CDN business as flawed, with its downside obscured by subsidization by Google/YouTube. He has a point, but I think it’s actually two separate points that deserve their own space. [Read more →]