Telecom Ramblings

This article was authored by Don Sambandaraksa, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Remember the cold war, the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union? Each side was amassing and developing more and more powerful nuclear weapons. Not that either side really expected that they would be used as one bomb was enough to destroy humanity. The point was never to [Read more →]

Has it really been 11 years since an undersea cable was built within Europe?  That’s what they’re saying as a new effort raised money today for one between England and Ireland, though perhaps that depends on whether Hibernia Atlantic’s Project Kelvin extension counts.   But regardless, Sea Fibre Networks will hook up landing sites in Dublin and Anglesey, which lies just 131km due east on the Welsh shore.  From there it will connect overland to London and onward from there.  Here’s a snapshot of their map: [Read more →]

Zayo is expanding organically innto Birmingham Alabama, according to a press release today. They will be adding 12 miles of fiber that will be the start of a metro presence in the central business district and out into Homewood and Lakeshore. The expansion should be in place by [Read more →]

It’s easy to get lost during earnings season in who missed what by a penny per share or whatever.  When you step back and take a look at a few competitive fiber operators results side by side, there is a common trend that has been very obvious this year.  Packet-based data products and services have been the source of nearly all the growth, and nothing else is even close.   [Read more →]

The economy may be sluggish, but if you’re in the data center business you probably wonder what all the hubbub is. Here’s another quick rundown of interesting items lately: [Read more →]

Data Foundry’s giant, brand new Texas 1 data center picked up a nice customer win today. Golden Frog will be using their high density colo space in Texas 1 to house a new cloud-based web service entitled ‘Dump Truck’, a personal online storage service for keeping all the media files and such we seem to accumulate these days. It’s not available publicly just yet, but will feature [Read more →]

tndm reported its Q3 earnings this morning, posting revenues slightly above expectations as their per minute voice pricing held steady and pricing pressure in the IP transit stabilized somewhat.  Earnings per share were below expectations, but mainly due to several one time events including a currency loss on an intercompany loan (i.e. Euros to Tinet I presume) else they would have been roughly in line.  Here’s a quick summary of the company’s numbers in context: [Read more →]

We have seen 100G trials all over the world over the past quarter or two, but today saw the first Transatlantic implementation of 100G. Hibernia Atlantic and Huawei successfully demonstrated coherent 100G on the 5,570km cable between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Southport, England. And beyond the successful demonstration, the two intend to move forward on commercial deployment next year. [Read more →]

Two interesting items over the last week or so from hybrid satellite/terrestrial operator Segovia, both in the federal [Read more →]

Bandwidth needs down in the Carribean have been growing steadily, and regional cable operator Columbus Networks has now upgraded the ARCOS-1 cable system.  Columbus has deployed additional Xtera gear to upgrade capacity on the repeatered segments, whereas they had already done so in 2008 for the unrepeatered segments. From the map, I’d guess the repeatered segments would be between [Read more →]

There was no let up in the torrid pace at which TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) has been adding buildings to its network during the third quarter.  According to the company’s  Q3 earnings report today, they added another 561  through September 30, meaning the past twelve months have seen 2,179 buildings brought on-net.  Overall, the company’s financial results went by like clockwork as usual.  Here’s a quick table: [Read more →]

tndm made a major move today, adding a completely new product category to their wholesale lineup. They will be leveraging Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) platform to offer a cloud-based unified communications product on a wholesale basis.  That means that alongside those tandem switches they’ll be running a cloud of servers too.  They won’t be targeting [Read more →]

This is a guest post by Paolo Gorgò.  If you might be interested in a guest post, then contact the webmaster.

Today, TeleCity Group, one of Europe’s three main players in the carrier-neutral data center offering, announced its intention to start paying [Read more →]

Since it announced its new DTN-X gear in advance of next year’s commercial sales, Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) has had a steady stream of big name trials and demos. Today it was Swedish telecommunications giant TeliaSonera AB (ETR:TLS, news, filings) taking the gear for a spin, but in California not in Europe. The two announced a Terabit optical transmission based on 500Gbps super-channels on a 1105km route between [Read more →]

The past few months have seen Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) all over the headlines on a weekly basis. It has seemed haphazard, but if one takes a step back and looks at it all as a package it’s really not. They’re playing hearts and they’ve spotted a chance to shoot the moon. Look at all their moves over the past few months as a group: [Read more →]

Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) has committed to putting true 100G to use on its PC-1 cable.  It was just last month that their subsidiary Pacific Crossing took Infinera’s 100G DTN-X solution for a successful spin, apparently it went even better than expected.  The upgrade will be in place by mid-2013, and is expected to more than triple the cable’s total capacity to   [Read more →]

Soon-to-be part of Windstream, PAETEC (news, filings) today announced their Q3 earnings report – the last time we will probably hear from CEO Arunas Chesonis in this format.  The company has been busy integrating the assets it purchased last year, including the Cavalier/Intellifiber footprint and its more recent purchase of XETA.  But the story this quarter was actually one of organic growth.  Here’s a quick table: [Read more →]

DragonWave (NASDAQ:DRWI, news, filings), a Canadian-based supplier of wireless backhaul products, has announced plans to acquire a piece of Nokia Siemens Networks. They will be acquiring NSN’s microwave transport business, including its OSS and other related systems for the sum of €10M in cash plus €5M in stock plus additional sales-based earn-out payments.  Additionally, DragonWve will become [Read more →]

Over in the UK, upstart metro fiber operator City Fibre Holdings shook the foundations of the national fiber scene yesterday. They appointed Macquarie Capital as an advisor to help it raise the capital for a truly major fiber buildout. They intend to invest £500M ($800M) in both new metro fiber networks and fiber-to-the-premises city-wide in markets across the country. [Read more →]

Northeastern metro and regional fiber operator Lightower Fiber Networks (news) is making a bigger play for the low latency market in the New York City/New Jersey metro area. The company has turned up an all-optical network linking 15 strategic locations together via unique point-to-point routes. They’ll be [Read more →]

Cogent Communications (NASDAQ:CCOI, news, filings), which operates both a top IP transit backbone and a substantial on-net metro footprint, checked in with its third quarter results this morning too.  The company reported revenues just under analyst expectations but up steadily sequentially, and EBITDA margins expanded nicely once again.  The company also maintained its foot in the positive earnings door with earnings per share of $0.01.  As usual, here’s a quick table of the more relevant numbers in the context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]

National tier-1 metro fiber operator abvt released its Q4 earnings this morning, turning in it usual solid performance.  Revenues were in line with expectations, while EBITDA and earnings per share had positive surprises.  The company also both raised and narrowed its full year revenue guidance and raised its EBITDA margin expectations.  Here are the company’s results in the context of the prior four quarters: [Read more →]