Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Multiple reports out of Europe have the likes of FT, DT, Telecom Italia, and Telefonica sitting down to discuss the pooling of their network infrastructure. EU regulators are said to be behind the concept generally, aiming to shift from many markets still so fractured by national boundaries into a more unified whole that would be more healthy overall. [Read more →]

I’ve been puzzling over what Dish’s endgame here is with its surprise competing bid for clwr, and I think the murky waters are starting to clarify, if by no other means than the process of elimination. [Read more →]

In a move that I did not expect, DISH has apparently made a competing bid for clwr. Yep, Clearwire says it has received an ‘unsolicited, non-binding proposal from DISH’ for $3.30 per share, attempting to take the prize away from Softbank/Sprint whose bid of $2.97 now stands in question. There are also options for a spectrum purchase and build financing. [Read more →]

Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX, news, filings) offered an update on the content delivery network it started work on last year, which goes by the name “OpenConnect”. It places caches deep within last mile networks in an effort to give them better control over both quality and traffic management in order to defuse some of the usual OTT friction. They seem to be making substantial progress in winning over last mile operators, and today claimed Cablevision as a new convert. [Read more →]

It looks as if the long discussed buyout of Vodafone’s 45% minority stake in Verizon Wireless may be back on the front burner. Yesterday, CEO Lowell McAdam went as far as to tell the Wall Street Journal that such a deal is currently “feasible” and that they would still love to own the whole business. He also said that Verizon’s growing wireline strength was making it easier to put together such a deal. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at three interesing news items from the vendors, including a new product from MRV, a 100G upgrade by NSN, and a submarine cable launch by Huawei. [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) gained another network operator’s support for the bit-mile peering concept, announcing a new agreement with xo this morning.  The long-term, settlement-free pact fits with the peering paradigm that Level 3 has been promoting while giving XO the [Read more →]

Several next-generation fiber operators have made the transition to positive earnings per share over the past few years (AboveNet, tw telecom, and Cogent), but none had further to go to achieve it than Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings).  But this year the numbers say that at long last it is likely Level 3’s turn to definitively end its long run of red ink. [Read more →]

The poll will remain open for a while yet, but enough results are in to call the election – as it were. Rambling’s readership is now much more of a common mind than a year ago about which companies are the likely consolidators: Zayo, Level 3, and CenturyLink.  Apparently, it’s much less crowded at the head of the buyers pack this year. [Read more →]

This article was authored by Dylan Bushell-Embling, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Global operator revenues tipped past the $2 trillion milestone in 2012, but future growth will be largely confined to a handful of segments, according to Ovum. [Read more →]

Everyone’s still cleaning out the cobwebs, but nevertheless, here’s a quick look at a few items from this week from TelePacific, Zayo, and the Yankee Group: [Read more →]

The steady drumbeat of expansion in the colocation space has had both an organic and inorganic component.  We start off the new year with a bit of the latter, as QTS is expanding its presence into Sacramento with the purchase of Herakles. [Read more →]

Birch Communications began the new year with another acquisition, its 17th since 2006. They have signed a definitive agreement to buy customers and network assets from Covista, which will expand its own hosted PBX and managed services reach in regions across the country. [Read more →]

Welcome back!  2013 has begun, and that means it’s time to take the temperature of the wireline M&A market in the US, just as we do every year at this time.   You saw me make a few predictions on New Years’ Eve, but now it’s time for the more general question: Who are the most likely consolidators of fiber networks this year?  You can pick up to three: [Read more →]

Now that the world hasn’t ended, the next long cycle of the Mayan calendar has begun, and everyone’s getting ready to listen to way too many versions of ‘Auld Lang Syne‘, it’s time for a few predictions about what’s ahead for telecom and fiber M&A in 2013. Not ‘things to watch’, ’emerging trends’, or other wimp-outs, but actual predictions that people can laugh at next December if they can outperform the modern attention span. After all, what’s a blog for if not to stick out one’s neck for no apparent reason: [Read more →]

Over the holiday week, DSLPrime put out an interesting piece looking at what may be the next great battle on the fault line of peering and network neutrality. It seems that China isn’t the only place you can’t watch YouTube these days, if you’re in France this December you may also be out of luck as Google and the French last mile providers are at odds and seem to be digging trenches. [Read more →]

magicJack VocalTec (NASDAQ:CALL, news, filings) ended what has been a very powerful year with a a flurry of holiday announcements, the least surprising of which was its now quarterly habit of pre-announcing its results. [Read more →]

In a surprise holiday announcement that has turned my earlier review of the 2012 US fiber M&A market into premature ramblings, Lightower Fiber Networks and Sidera Networks announced this morning their intention to merge. Berkshire Partners is behind the deal, in which both companies will be acquired for some $2B and then merged under the leadership of [Read more →]

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

ITEM: The US FCC has approved a plan for allowing spectrum sharing in the 3.5 GHz band for small cells.  The band in question (3550-3650 MHz) is currently used for US Navy radar operations and covers 60% of the US population. [Read more →]

Netflix got some coal in its stocking from the same place lots of people had presents delivered from this Christmas. On Christmas eve, the Amazon cloud’s elastic load balancer services ran into trouble at its US-East node, and Netflix’s streaming went down across much of North America alongside various other web properties that depend on it. [Read more →]