Telecom Ramblings

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

Chinese telecom vendors now face the prospect of an investigation into state subsidies in the US as well as Europe, with a US vendor voicing complaints about the practice to a congressional commission. [Read more →]

Integra Telecom has continued its renewed interest in fiber investment over the last couple of quarters. They announced today that they have passed the 2,000 building threshold, adding 115 since January to hit 2013. And that reminds me, it’s time once again to update my metro fiber and on-net building statistics  page. [Read more →]

CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) has won a hefty federal contract under the Networx Universal program. They’ll be providing the primary managed data networking services for the Social Security Administration under a $233M task order. The SSA has 62,000 employees worldwide, which seems like a heck of a lot considering it’s main function is simply to [Read more →]

Here are some quick looks at developments amongst the growing cloud services segment, including items from Cbeyond, Savvis, Data Foundry, and TDS: [Read more →]

Tata Communications (news, filings) has launched a global low latency network connecting Asia, North America and Europe aimed at the industries most sensitive to latency in their connectivity. The financial vertical is the most visible segment of course, with high frequency traders still out there paying big bucks for fewer and fewer microseconds. [Read more →]

With its declining wireline business, we haven’t heard as much in the way of big bandwidth upgrades out of Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) as with other major backbones. But today they announced a pretty big one, jumping onto Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical platform. Ciena’s coherent optical technology will take their core network speeds up to 40G and 100G today, with an eye on 400G in the future. [Read more →]

Sidera Networks has been pushing data center connectivity hard lately in a bid to better serve the cloud revolution. Today they teamed up with Digital Realty Trust to deliver a dedicated high capacity, low latency ring. [Read more →]

According to the Wall Street Journal this morning, the Justice Department is ‘conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation’ into whether cable companies are trying to improperly crush OTT video. It’s not yet clear just where the real focus is, but if it’s not on Comcast’s recent exclusion of its own Xfinity video traffic from its bandwidth caps then these guys aren’t doing their jobs.  [Read more →]

Another acquisition by Cologix, a new product for Interoute, and then a contract each for QTS, C7, and Digital Realty: [Read more →]

While the headlines are filled with the data sharing aspects of the new pricing structure announced by Verizon Wireless yesterday, I think the key change is more subtle. Verizon’s new plan finally finishes admitting that basing its business model on overcharging for voice and messaging bits while complaining about how expensive it is to build out bigger data pipes was distorting the market to its own detriment. [Read more →]

Several interesting items from outside the US this morning that are worth a look from Level 3, Interxion, Savvis, and Interoute: [Read more →]

Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) must be starting to fill up those 100G transport pipes it has been slowly rolling out across its footprint. Today they announced plans to deploy Juniper’s giant PTX series MPLS switching platform as a next step in the evolution of their network architecture. [Read more →]

According to reports, America Movil has increased its ownership stake in the Dutch incumbent KPN to 7.3% already. Carlos Slim is obviously putting his money where his mouth is, having acquired some 6M shares yesterday in the open market at a price of €7.80. That’s below the €8 price he recently offered to take a 27.7% stake in the company, which KPN gave [Read more →]

Today’s roundup offers quick-takes on news already this week from Overture, inetwork, Colt, and CDGI. [Read more →]

Following Clearwire’s balance sheet moves over the winter, Sprint’s ownership stake in the company has fallen below the 50% threshold. The company says, therefore, it is reclaiming its full voting rights since it is no longer at risk of [Read more →]

The Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) opened a new front in its effort to build a global cloud presence. Today the company announced the imminent launch of a new enterprise cloud service that incorporates OpenFlow network virtualization technology. [Read more →]

China Unicom said in an announcement today that its second-largest shareholder, Telefonica, plans to sell more than a billion shares of the company’s stock back to the Chinese carrier’s parent company. The move comes just 17 months after the two companies increased their mutual holdings of each others stock, and probably reflects the shifts in [Read more →]

Following up its extensions to London and Toronto, sidera is adding additional submarine capacity to its network. They will be acquiring capacity on Seaborn Networks’ planned Seabras-1 system between the US and Sao Paolo, Brazil, planning to have in place the lowest latency route when it goes online in [Read more →]

A few quick-takes on news from overseas in the past day or two from Hibernia Atlantic, LION2, Pacnet, and Oi: [Read more →]

Ok, I’ve been asked enough times now to update my opinion about where XO goes from here, although I don’t think the situation has changed all that much. Given the astonishing length and duration of the comment thread on the Layoffs at XO post, it has been clear that there are strong feelings involved.  But Icahn will sooner or later make a move, and it still [Read more →]

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

This time last year, big-name web content providers such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo! supported both IPv6 and IPv4 for 24 hours to test the impact on service quality. [Read more →]

The UK telecommunications market has been very much in flux for a few years now, and today there was another twist. The UK mobile divisions of Vodafone Group (NYSE:VOD, news, filings) and Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings) have now announced their intention to formally join forces at the infrastructure level – a major redesign of their existing partnership.  [Read more →]

Japanese powerhouse KDDI and its colocation arm, TELEHOUSE revealed some big expansion plans for the Chinese colocation market. And I don’t mean just Hong Kong where they will be adding to an already active expansion project, but Beijing too this time with a new build.  The price tag of  the expansion will amount to ¥11B, or about $140M.    [Read more →]