Telecom Ramblings

On Friday one of the more interesting stimulus projects got completed way up in northern New England. The Maine Fiber Company has finished construction of the ‘3 Ring Binder’ project, hooking up those everpresent anchor institutions across the state. [Read more →]

The news over the weekend seems to be that twtc is for sale and that ctl is close to making the deal happen. The rumor is in the Denver Post, but seems to have originated with the DealReporter website. Does it make sense? Yes, it might – but it also might be [Read more →]

We have another new two job listings on the Ramblings’ Jobs board this weekend from a familiar source.  The northeastern fiber operator Lightower Fiber Networks listed another two positions.   [Read more →]

alu said this morning that it will be building a network for Ghana’s National Information Technology Agency and its e-Ghana project. The buildout consists of a new 600km fiber backbone, a national state-of-the-art data center facility to support it, and three years of network management starting in November 2012. [Read more →]

Various reports yesterday said that Vodafone expects the integration of its newly purchased Cable & Wireless Worldwide assets to cost as much as £500M ($800M+) over the next four years. That’s definitely not chump change, in fact it’s nearly half of what they paid to buy the company in the first place. [Read more →]

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

Here’s what the future of the Internet looked like to AT&T in 1983.  One word: videotext! [Read more →]

Here’s a quick rundown of data center news in the past day or two from Internap, IO, FiberMedia, Stackpop, and Global Capacity: [Read more →]

According to Commsday this morning, the Australian communications minister Steven Conroy recently said that if prices don’t come down the NBN will build its own cable to the US. The $40B NBN project certainly has the firepower to build a cable if it wants to, but their current project list is surely long enough to keep them busy for a long time without [Read more →]

Various reports say that eqix is now housing a direct link to the Southern Cross Cable Network. The direct connectivity makes it easy for customers to connect from SY1 to its Seattle IBXs, amongst others. The proximity to SCCN was crucial to Equinix’s choice of location when entering Australia. [Read more →]

There’s a new network route connecting western Russia with Germany and its main Frankfurt hub. Russia’s MegaFon has teamed up with Latvia’s Lattelecom and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom to create the “Baltic highway”. [Read more →]

Here’s today’s roundup of network operator news: an M&A for Ritter, a new product for Integra, and customer wins for Earthlink and Level 3: [Read more →]

In the wake of the New York Times’ broadside on the energy habits of the data center industry and the many responses from around the internet, let’s take a poll of Ramblings’ readers and see where things stand: [Read more →]

According to a detailed article over on the Wall Street Journal, the advent of smartphones has seen telecom spending by families go up sharply at the expense of things like cars, clothing, events, and eating out. That wireless carriers have succeeded in getting a greater share of family spending sounds great for the sector, but there’s a lot of conflicting trends going on here don’t you think? [Read more →]

Some quick takes on news from network operators this morning: contracts for Lightpath and Hibernia and a refinancing and confirmation of guidance by Level 3: [Read more →]

With European telecom and internet infrastructure valuations still way down, there’s another outside buyer looking to take advantage, this time from the southeast. According to Reuters, Turk Telekom’s CEO Tahsin Yilmaz said today that it has allotted up to €300M toward expansion via M&A.  [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at some of the data center news out already this week from two European internet exchanges, Savvis, Equinix, and tw telecom: [Read more →]

The Swedish-based telecommunications giant TeliaSonera has taken my advice and will opt for raising data prices rather than attempting to charge for OTT VoIP usage. Ok, maybe it wasn’t my advice they listened to (haha) but still, it’s nice to see that they decided not to go any further down the path they had laid out earlier this year. [Read more →]

The Ethernet vendor overture has poached a Ciena executive to take its helm going forward. Mike Aquino has joined the company as President and Chief Executive Officer, with current CEO and co-founder Jeff Reedy staying on as [Read more →]

If you ever wanted to read about how data centers are single handedly destroying the planet through intentionally wasteful design and greedy, unrestrained, unnecessary consumption all driven by the voracious demands of modern consumers, well now’s your chance. That’s the New York Times’s take over the weekend, which you can of course read online on the device of your choosing and thereby help waste yet more energy.  [Read more →]

We have another new job listing on the Ramblings’ Jobs board this weekend, this time from a different angle than most listings we’ve had in the past.  The research firm OTR Global is looking for a [Read more →]

It didn’t take long for the hypothetical cable/CLEC merger machine to make its first move following the FCC’s recent relaxation of the rules. On the west coast late this week, Wave Broadband and Black Rock Cable announced their plans to merge, bringing together a triple play footprint and a dense metro fiber business under one roof. [Read more →]

A few datacenter and cloud quick takes before everyone goes off for the weekend: [Read more →]

Late yesterday, iqnt announced that its CFO, Robert Junkroski, and its President and COO, Surendra Saboo will be stepping down as of October 1. Both will remain on hand for a month to help with the transition, and the company plans to identify a new CFO but doesn’t currently intend to hire a successor to Dr. Saboo.  [Read more →]