Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Reports are indicating that Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) has been taking a serious look at buying out Vodafone’s stake in Verizon Wireless. Sound familiar? It should, since the same rumor has bubbled to the surface every few weeks since winter began, or maybe since the decade began in some form. So what’s new? Besides the fact that Vodafone’s stock price is surging 5% in response, I mean… [Read more →]

Zayo today said it has completed its second 100G deployment, bringing big bandwidth to its Chicago-Memphis route in the form of both wavelength and Ethernet sales.  Their first 100G deployment was in the busy northeast corridor of course, between New York City and Washington DC.   [Read more →]

European cloud and colo demand must be looking pretty good despite the sustained economic headwinds. CenturyLink’s Savvis division is building out new space to bolster its square footage in London.  [Read more →]

This article was authored by John C. Tanner, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

And now, a random collection of golden quotes heard at last week’s Mobile World Congress: [Read more →]

Several interesting items lately in the metro space are worth a look: a fiber contract each for Unite Private networks, Fatbeam, and Southern Telecom, some EoC news from TelePacific, and a refi update from Earthlink. [Read more →]

Gulf Bridge International introduced some terrestrial diversity to its offerings over the weekend. They’ve added diverse land routes that will give them both greater reliability and lower latency. The undersea routes have long been vulnerable due to common routes through the Red Sea, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean. [Read more →]

There has been more and more talk lately about the potential for consolidation among European networks, and not just from me.  But it is my feeling that the sense of the assets out there is narrowly focused on the incumbents and on the wireless/spectrum side of things, and that for fiber we don’t really have a feel for who the players would be beyond a few names that get mentioned over and over.  So I went out and hunted [Read more →]