Telecom Ramblings

During Level 3’s earnings call last week, the company mentioned an acquisition if fiber in London they made in 2012. The deal wasn’t  big enough to make the news, and there apparently wasn’t enough revenue to be material in a financial sense – so it slipped between the news cracks. But it’s not often a deal goes by without a mention here, so it’s time to belatedly note that in August Level 3 acquired FibreSpan. [Read more →]

Glad to see there’s some hiring going on out there, though the telecom job market isn’t an easy one currently.  This week we have a new listing from Lumos Networks. [Read more →]

It’s Friday before a long weekend, if you take President’s Day off in the US of course.  Here’s a quick look at some news from afar before you go, including an expansion by NTT and three vendor contracts of interest: [Read more →]

This article was authored by Michael J Carroll, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

A break in a key submarine fiber optic cable linking Georgia to Russia caused problems as far away as Oman, web analytics firm Renesys claims. [Read more →]

QTS (news) has bought itself a giant facility in Texas, giving it an entry into the Dallas/Ft.Worth market. They’ll be converting it to data center space and bringing it online on phases, with the first tenants moving in the first quarter of next year.  [Read more →]

No US metro market has seen as many low latency elbows as New Jersey since the financial community started paying by the microseconds. Today one of the more comprehensive fiber builds to re-imagine the routes between key locations went online, as Hudson Fiber Network took its four new routes to Mahwah live: [Read more →]

Russia’s VimpelCom has become the latest network operator to decide that network operations are a good thing to outsource, and they’ve brought in Ericsson to do the job in a five year deal. [Read more →]

CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) reported earnings yesterday, with revenue of $4.58B and adjusted EPS of $0.67 each just a hair beneath analyst expectations. But that’s not the story. The story is that the nation’s #3 ILEC decided that it doesn’t like issuing a dividend as much as it used to, and would like to do something else with some of that cash. [Read more →]

With it’s REIT conversion still a long road ahead, Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) posted its usual solid quarterly report today.  The fourth quarter posed them no new problems, as they outperformed guidance and analyst estimates on all fronts after divesting their non-core markets to 365Main last quarter.  Here’s a quick table of their results and forward guidance in context: [Read more →]

Just ten weeks after allying with Akamai for CDN services, AT&T has released its new capabilities into the wild.  Today they announced that the new services are being offered to their U.S. business clients of all sizes.   [Read more →]

On yesterday’s conference call, tw telecom’s CEO Larissa Herda announced an ambitious new network platform that they will be putting together this year. Going by the moniker ‘Constellation’, the new platform aims to give enterprises the same sort of flexibility and speed they can get from cloud computing for their network pipes. [Read more →]

Zayo Group (news, filings) said yesterday that it is planning a metro fiber buildout in the Jacksonville metro area, with its full suite of bandwidth infrastructure services in tow. With the exception of the starter set in Miami they acquired from AboveNet, Florida has been the last densely populated area of the US that Zayo hasn’t significantly penetrated.  [Read more →]

Time for a quick roundup of news from managed network services providers, with a contract for Earthlink, a product enhancement for MegaPath, some funding for Birch, and a partner for Global Capacity. [Read more →]

As anticipated, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) posted its fourth quarter results this morning, and for once there was some good news on the revenue front.  The global fiber operator grew CNS revenues by 1.8% sequentially on a constant currency basis, powered by sequential global enterprise revenue growth of 2.2%.  Adjusted earnings per share were a couple pennies better than anticipated, but on the EBITDA line it took a rather large one time benefit to make guidance look good.  As always, here’s a chart of their numbers in the context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]

For the fourth quarter, TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) posted higher than expected revenues but came in lower than I had expected for both EBITDA and earnings per share.  Mostly this was due to some hiring they have been doing to put in place the personnel necessary to drive a higher growth rate, plus the effects of October’s balance sheet move.  The company boosted its sales force by 5.7% and added other support staff rather faster than I expected they might.  Here are their Q4 numbers in some context: [Read more →]

According to an article by Capacity this morning, Hibernia Atlantic has now halted all work on its Hibernia Express transatlantic cable project due to the uncertainty around its vendor Huawei’s status in the US market. It had been so long since we’d seen an update on the project that I suspected something of this sort was in the works. [Read more →]

The Swedish giant Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC, news, filings) announce this morning that they have won a $1B outsourcing contract in Southern Asia.  Reliance Communications will be outsourcing the operation of a portion of both its wireless and wireline networks to them over the span of a $1B, eight-year managed services agreement.   [Read more →]

Over the next 30 hours or so, two of the USA’s largest competitive fiber operators will feature their fourth quarter numbers: tw telecom and Level 3 Communications.  Given that Integra and Zayo didn’t offer up any negative surprises, the economic playing field is probably fairly stable.  Here’s a preview of what I expect from both companies’ numbers: [Read more →]

Ok, I’m back in the saddle again after a vacation in the wild side of China, and I see we have a new job listing this week from Zayo Group. [Read more →]

The privately held competitive fiber operators are posting the early financial numbers this year, with Zayo Group (news, filings) turning in a big EBITDA number reflecting integration progress in its fiscal second quarter.  It’s always a challenge to parse Zayo’s financials in light of their voracious M&A appetite, but here’s their numbers in some context: [Read more →]

I’ve been posting this week from Xishuangbanna, China down on the Myanmar border, and it’s been a blast – though I was a bit late yesterday due to a miscalculated trip that happened to pass through a forest fire (really). Lots of interesting news still out there I didn’t get to, here’s a Friday roundup as I head home: [Read more →]

The Southeastern fiber builder and operator FiberLight is undergoing a leadership transition, as longtime CEO Mike Miller is stepping down. Miller, who helped found the company 16 years ago and turn it into a regional fiber power, will be retiring from FiberLight to pursue other opportunities.   [Read more →]

For the recent few quarters, Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) has been posting better than expected earnings numbers.  They managed to mostly continue that string yesterday but the street was apparently looking for more.  First here are their numbers in context: [Read more →]