Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

The first contract PR of 2013 for Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) was a high profile one over in Europe. The NATO Communications and Information Agency has brought them in to install and maintain an IPVPN for the NATO-Russia Council Cooperative Airspace Initiative, a.k.a. the NRC CAI. [Read more →]

Before the week gets started, let’s catch up a bit on the items last week that I didn’t get to from Zayo Group, XO Communications, Wave Broadband, and DQE Comunications : [Read more →]

Ok, last week we looked at who will be 2013’s buyers, now it’s time for the other end of the sword for this Friday’s poll.  Of US-based network operators, which are most likely to get bought out in 2013?  Again, you can pick up to three: [Read more →]

After that trip through Chapter 11 two years ago they’re still a bit behind their fellows, but FairPoint Communications (news, filings) has been working hard to catch up on multiple fronts. Yesterday they detailed their progress and future plans for building out Fiber-to-the-Tower to support growing wireless data demands, following up on their planned investments they discussed a year and a half ago. [Read more →]

Time for a quick look overseas, with moves by CDNetworks and Equinix in Japan, Seaborn in the Atlantic, and Interoute in the Alps. [Read more →]

Even before it went public many in the industry have watched magicJack and its over the top marketing campaigns with suspicion, and since the reverse merger with Vocaltec the public markets have remained doubtful.  Yesterday one bear, Copperfield Research, finally declared open war and took its case against the company public.  They aren’t pulling any punches and the stock took a tumble yesterday in response.  [Read more →]

Lots of varied news from the colo and cloud sector this week, here’s a quick look at items from CoreSite, IO, Phoenix NAP, Viawest, and Digital Realty: [Read more →]

The Southeastern metro fiber builder and operator FiberLight has been busy working on a large Texas expansion for a year now, but this week the project more than doubled in scope.  With additional anchor tenants in place, FiberLight announced Monday that it has added 4,500 regional and metro route miles of dark fiber to its buildout plans, bringing the total planned footprint to above 9,000 route miles in Texas alone. [Read more →]