Telecom Ramblings

M&A rumors aside, cw is still on the move throughout its footprint. [Read more →]

According to multiple sources, metro fiber builder and operator FiberLight is reining in spending. A round of layoffs hit late last week (ugh), focused on sales and marketing. FiberLight had been one of the most aggressive builders around for some time, and has recently announced a major buildout in West Texas. That effort continues, but for about a year now the company has been quieter than normal and has obviously been undergoing an internal transition of some kind. [Read more →]

Fresh off its rebranding, Inteliquent (NASDAQ:IQNT, news, filings) closed out 2011 with a nice revenue push but higher spending as it prepared its new hosted UC product line.  Here’s a quick table of their Q4 results and 2012 projections in context. [Read more →]

Optimum Lightpath, the metro fiber arm of Cablevision (NYSE:CVC, news, filings), expanded its product set yesterday to include dedicated managed bandwidth. The new Private Fiber Service is aimed at the growing segment of the industry with a big bandwidth appetite that justifies owning dark fiber but no interest in operating such an infrastructure. [Read more →]

For Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings), the balance sheet work never ends, although it has been getting easier. Yesterday the company took another step toward erasing some very expensive money from the books. They have signed an agreement with major shareholder Southeast Asset Management to exchange $100M in senior converts for 5.4M shares of stock. [Read more →]

Several interesting bits of news from the data center front today worth a quick take: [Read more →]

South America is the home of this year’s submarine cable protagonists, without any doubt.  Today we learned of yet another giant cable aimed at bringing big bandwidth to the growing Latin American marketplace.  SeaBorn Networks is planning a brand new cable system connecting Miami directly to the commercial center of Sao Paolo, with a branch to Fortaleza where so many other cables also land of course.   [Read more →]

UK regulators gave Vodafone Group (NYSE:VOD, news, filings) more time to decide whether to bid for Cable & Wireless Worldwide yesterday, pushing back its deadline until March 29. That’s the same day Tata is due to make its own decision on a bid, and thus we are set up for a bit of a showdown. [Read more →]

One last look at some post-Q4 numbers, specifically the ratio of enterprise value (EV) to adjusted EBITDA across the sector. This ratio isn’t perfect of course, but it has more inherent comparability than other metrics, as it incorporates net debt (via EV) and alongside the capex/revenue plot gives a decent relative picture of the sector’s various operating models.  This plot incorporates not only data for the end of 2012, but includes a real time estimate as its last data point.  One can clearly see a recovery in valuation in progress, following the sharp drop in Q3. [Read more →]

The carrier neutral collocation business just keeps on growing quarter after quarter, and with all the movement toward cloud-based services across the globe it seems very unlikely that trend will change anytime soon.  With us today to tell us more about TELEHOUSE America’s position in this space and its plans for the future is Fred Cannone, Director of Sales and Marketing. [Read more →]

That the colocation business is expanding on all fronts right now is obvious, but the location chosen by Arizona’s Phoenix NAP came as a bit of a surprise. They will be opening a new node in Amsterdam, taking up residence in one of the five facilities there operated by Interxion.  The expansion is all about Phoenix NAP’s [Read more →]

Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR, news, filings) released the results of its survey of North American demand for data centers, revealing just how broad-based and unidirectional the sector’s expansion is right now. Ninety two percent said they will definitely or probably expand this year, while just four percent said they have no such plans. That’s up from last year, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not going to go up next year — you can’t get more than 92% of respondents to consistently [Read more →]

Two new jobs were posted to the Ramblings Jobs Board this week from Unite Private Networks and from City Fibre Holdings.  Additionally, the jobs board itself finally got a long-needed overhaul.  [Read more →]

The Dutch research network said today that it has successfully demonstrated a 100G ultra-longhaul DWDM solution from Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings). On a route between the SARA supercomputing site in Amsterdam and CERN to the south in Geneva, SURFnet introduced 100G single carrier optical interfaces into their existing infrastructure without any disruption. [Read more →]

Last summer, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) put a green foot forward by moving two colocation facilities in London and another in Amsterdam onto 100% renewable power.  Apparently that went pretty well, because they added another five today a bit further to the east.  [Read more →]

Yesterday Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings) launched a cloud computing platform aimed at Latin America called Virtual Hosting 2.0.  Latin America is of course Telefonica’s growth engine, while its Spanish incumbent and other European businesses are far less dynamic.  Telefonica is powering the new platform via five interconnected data centers spread across five countries in South America: [Read more →]

Yesterday the industry was abuzz with talk that Netflix was pitching a peace plan to the cable companies.  The idea was that Netflix would become just another piece of the cable bill, squaring off against the likes of HBO and backing off their direct OTT challenge.  Honestly, I found it hard to take seriously. According to FierceCable today, Comcast agrees with me.  [Read more →]

According to an article on BNamericas, Brazil’s state-owned operator Telebrás is making a big undersea move aimed at dramatically increasing the country’s international bandwidth choices by hooking up four continents. [Read more →]

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

If you’re looking for evidence of the growing role of women in the telecoms industry, look no further than the news that Russian OSS/BSS vendor CBOSS has been banned from the next Mobile World Congress by organizer GSM Association.

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Several interesting items today from the carrier neutral data centers: [Read more →]

Two weeks ago Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) preannounced its fiscal Q1 results, lowering guidance significantly to about $415M due to unexpectedly longer development cycles and seasonality and other such things.  Today they turned in the real number, $416.7M, but spiced things up with an upbeat outlook.  [Read more →]

Capital expenditures among competitive network operators was remarkably stable sequentially in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to my latest data update. With one exception, network operators held the rudder quite steady both on the fiber-heavy and fiber-light ends of the spectrum. This is another nail in the coffin of the idea that [Read more →]