Telecom Ramblings

According to a Reuters report this morning, the submarine cable unit of Reliance Communications has filed for an IPO — but not in the US, but rather in Singapore as was rumored two months ago. This is of course the FLAG group, which is part of Reliance Globalcom. It is not yet clear precisely what parts of Reliance Globalcom will go into the IPO and what parts won’t. [Read more →]

Some quick takes on news items that fell through the cracks during the week: [Read more →]

In a thoroughly unsurprising move, s has now formally ended its wholesale partnership with LightSquared. While LightSquared remains publicly committed to finding a way to use its spectrum, the FCC’s decision to revoke the conditional approval they had granted a year earlier has left them without many options. Sprint had given the company extra time, but is now formally giving up on the project and returning some $65M in prepayments they had received but not yet used. [Read more →]

The equipment vendor adtn decided not to keep the bad news to itself, and revised its first quarter revenue guidance. Two months ago, the company had projected revenues to remain roughly flat sequentially, or in the $170M range – which is where analysts had placed their bets too. But the company is now forecasting something more like $130-135, a shortfall of more than 20%.  Ouch. [Read more →]

For several years now, I have been tracking fiber-fed building counts for competitive operators, but for a couple years now I have been missing a recent datapoint for one of the largest metro fiber footprints out there, lvlt. The Global Crossing merger only muddied the waters further, because I never had any datapoints for them and Level 3 had to reconcile the two footprints first. They have now done so, and given me the new data point I have been seeking – a bigger one than I had expected. [Read more →]

TGIF everyone.  Here’s a quick look at some interesting news from the international markets this week: [Read more →]

After a decade or so of endless deliberations that only the FCC can match, the Canadian government has finally gone and done it. They have now announced the lifting of foreign investment limits on telecommunications firms, or at least the smaller ones with less than [Read more →]

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, iqnt 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 cvc, 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 lvlt, 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 vod 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 →]

dlr 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 csco. 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, lvlt 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 →]