Telecom Ramblings

This article was authored by Marc Einstein, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

The recent news that Myanmar will soon revamp its telecom market by offering two telecom licenses to either local or foreign players in H12013 will quite possibly be the wireless story of the year for Southeast Asia. [Read more →]

Time for a mid-week roundup of news worthy of a quick look, with items from Emerald Networks in the Atlantic, Level 3 in the channel, ADVA in the Balkans, Equinix in the cloud, and ChinaCache in, well, China. [Read more →]

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) kept up its pace of acquisitions this morning with the announcement of its intent to acquire the Israeli software maker Intucell. Intucell’s main product line is software for self-optimizing networks, which enable mobile carriers to ‘plan, configure, manage, optimize and heal cellular networks automatically, according to real-time changing network demands’. Sounds like SDN for wireless equipment. [Read more →]

It’s been a busy week for Zayo already, especially with European data center operators. Today they announced they have hooked up Volta’s data center on Great Sutton Street in central London, which will be of interest to the low latency guys. Zayo has been continuing on the path AboveNet had been following with its UK business and London metro fiber, if not accelerating things as they usually do.  [Read more →]

AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) made another spectrum grab today, this time with the acquisition of the spectrum plus 585,000 customers of Atlantic Tele-Network for $780M. In doing so, they finally made good on speculation a few years back that it was eyeing the pieces of Alltel that Verizon was forced to divest back in 2009/2010 by the FCC. [Read more →]

Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) kicked off the winter earnings season this morning with their Q4 numbers, which had good news, bad news, and nice big pension-related charge of $1.48 per share.  That’s even bigger than the $1.20 non-cash pension charge they posted in 2011 —  it’s not really non-recurring if it happens every year, right?  But anyway… [Read more →]

One of the bigger comeback stories over the past year or two in telecom and internet infrastructure has been that of Integra Telecom and its CEO Kevin O’Hara.  While many still think of the western regional network operator in terms of its traditional CLEC roots, the company has been taking new advantage of its deep fiber assets and is finally emerging as a fiber power in its own right. Kevin O’Hara recently sat down for a quick Q&A with Telecom Ramblings to talk about where Integra is at and where it’s going. [Read more →]

Two more interesting submarine cable news items yesterday from the Pacific.  Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) said that it has upgraded an unnamed but easily identified cable system linking Japan and California, while Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) has demoed 100G with SD-FEC. [Read more →]

Fresh off its renaming and refinancing last week, Hibernia Networks announced a major capacity deal with NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings). Hibernia will be providing 100Gbps of diverse capacity for the Japanese giant’s IP backbone, which Renesys rated as the second largest globally in 2012 last week behind only Level 3. [Read more →]

Just before the weekend, the CEO of France Telecom – Orange suggested that they’ve come to terms with Google and will be compensated somehow for the traffic the content giant sends to their network. Details remain rather scarce, but it comes after a few months of anti-net-neutrality rumblings I’ve been watching out of France generally and that advertising-filtering incident with Free a week or two ago. While it’s not clear just what has or hasn’t been negotiated, forced, volunteered, or whatever, exactly how is anything like this supposed to work for the rest of us? [Read more →]

The economics may still be borderline, but 100G upgrades plans are starting to sprout up all over the place. This week the USA’s largest cable operator and two submarine cable operators took the 100G upgrade plunge, although one of those cables will initially dabble at 40G. [Read more →]

CoreSite (NYSE:COR, news, filings) unveiled plans for a large new data center campus in the New York metro area this morning. The data center REIT is acquiring an existing 280,000 square foot building on 10 acres of land in Secaucus NJ. They plan to develop the property into a new data center campus, with that initial building going by the moniker NY2 – its sixteenth nationally. It will complement CoreSite’s other area facility at [Read more →]

Time to catch up on the news from the metro space, with two buildouts in Texas, one south of the border, and a couple of contracts on the east coast: [Read more →]

The effort to build fiber to and through the frozen north (or is that mostly frozen these days) is continuing to gain steam, and this time it’s not just Canadian steam. Some of Alaska’s more remote towns along the North Slope and Bering Sea will also get a big connectivity boost when the cable gets built with the help of Anchorage-based Quintillion Networks. [Read more →]

It has been a while since Hibernia Atlantic was limited to the Atlantic, as their transatlantic cable is accompanied these days by a whole lot of terrestrial fiber and penetration into the financial and media verticals. So the company’s decision yesterday to evolve its brand to reflect its current position in the bandwidth food chain shouldn’t be too big a surprise. The new name, Hibernia Networks, [Read more →]

It’s been just over a year now since the T-Mobile USA deal went down in regulatory flames, and according to the Wall Street Journal this morning AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) may finally be ready to step off the M&A sidelines again, but not on this continent. While it may be nothing more than a trial balloon at this stage, apparently they’re looking at the possibility of buying a European carrier partly as a means of trying out some new pricing and technology approaches. [Read more →]

One of the places that the impact of 100G technology is most eagerly awaited is under the Atlantic Ocean, where no new cable system has yet been turned up for a decade and 40G is now already carrying the load in some cases. But that has meant that 100G would first need to be able to handle longer distances (6,000+km) on older fiber, and today TE SubCom demonstrated it’s ready to do just that. [Read more →]

For 2013, the Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) story will come down to growth, and more specifically what rate of enterprise growth they can build up to. So the two enterprise contracts they’ve announced this week will hopefully be the start of a steady stream of similar deals. [Read more →]

In Europe Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) has been under siege for a while now, looking to sell assets and cut costs to relieve some of the financial pressure they have been under from the twin pillars of the European economy and the invasion of Huawei. But today they got some very welcome relief from the subcontinent, of the billion dollar contract variety. [Read more →]

According to an article by Kelly Teal over at Channel Partners Online, Earthlink laid off 495 employees last week. That’s not a minor number of course, as according to its earnings release the company ended Q3 with 3,264 employees and this RIF would therefore be about a 15% haircut. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick review of some colo and cloud news out already this week from Cologix, Amazon, Digital Realty, Terremark, and Interoute: [Read more →]

Last week’s annual reader poll examining which network operators are likely to get bought in 2013 was a lot less definitive than the its companion ranking the likely buyers the prior week. Just one company took more than 10% of votes, and there was a photo-finish for second with a large pack close behind them. Interestingly, only one of my own picks made the top 5. [Read more →]

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

Ovum reported on Jan 3 that “mobile broadband presents the single largest opportunity for telcos to gain back revenue.” It expects the sector to grow 19% annually until 2016. [Read more →]