Telecom Ramblings

There’s a new cable in the works between Australia and Southeast Asia. Privately held Australian submarine cable developer ASSC-1 yesterday announced the development of a new cable between the major cable hub of Singapore and Perth on Australia’s west coast. The system will span 4,600 kilometers and will have four fiber pairs and an initial design capacity of [Read more →]

What is billionaire investor Carl Icahn doing snooping around LightSquared’s debt? That’s what reports are saying, apparently he and Andrew Beal and David Tepper have purchased $300M of the prospective LTE upstart builder. Buying up debt at a company’s weakest moments is a common way for Icahn to [Read more →]

Almost ten months ago, Google finally picked Kansas City, Kansas as its 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home project, promising to start offering service in 2012. So where are they now? Stringing and laying fiber? Hooking up the first neighborhood? Actually, according to the Kansas City Star, they’re still trying to finalize the negotiation of pole attachment rights.  [Read more →]

So yesterday’s poll “What to Do About SOPA?” was just a little bit one-sided.  The score so far?  78% say kill it outright, 20% say try to fix it first, and 2% don’t know or don’t care.  What about passing it?  That would be zero, and it may be the most lopsided result I’ve managed to collect in the various polls I’ve put out there over the years.   [Read more →]

One would have hoped that by now cooler heads would have prevailed, but it looks like the heated rhetoric between LightSquared and the GPS industry is going the distance. Following tests by the Air Force Space Command in which they fared badly, the company says that the whole thing was rigged by [Read more →]

A few quick takes from across the sector: [Read more →]

It seems there are now two efforts to lay fiberoptic cable in the Arctic Ocean.  Yesterday a Russian outfit named ZAO “Polarnet Project” invited tenders for the supply of ROTACS, or the Russian Trans Arctic Submarine Cable System.  This system was also discussed in Monday’s guest post by Egor Drobyshev.  Like the Arctic Fibre plans, the Polarnet Project seeks to shorten the latency between Western Europe and East Asia by taking the same route that airplanes take – over the North Pole or nearly so.  But this one is through Russian waters.  Here’s a map of Polarnet’s route, cribbed from a PDF on their site: [Read more →]

Today you’ll notice many big websites are blacked out in protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  Big internet companies are angry with the legislation, which is backed by big media, because they think it will do damage to the the internet in all sorts of ways and because they weren’t allowed at the table to prevent those ways when it was drafted.    Instead of a blackout, I thought I’d run a quick poll to see what the telecom and fiber world thinks of all this: [Read more →]

Lots of submarine cable news lately, timed in part no doubt with the PTC meeting this week. Here’s a quick look at some more interesting items: [Read more →]

More organic TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) moves by tw telecom to start 2012: [Read more →]

The Marine division of Chinese vendor Huawei is having a busy January. In the past few days, they’ve begun a survey for one submarine cable, finalized a survey and begun manufacturing the cable for another submarine cable, and launched a third. Each of those is much more fun then banging heads with [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at some of the internationally-oriented news of today and late last week: [Read more →]

I had wondered when we would see something like this. At PTC this week, Carrier-neutral colocation giant Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) and wholesale IP, Ethernet and voice provider tndm have announced plans today to connect their respective Ethernet efforts. Customers of the Equinix Carrier Ethernet Exchange and the EtherCloud will be able to [Read more →]

This is a guest post by Egor Drobyshev, who writes about telecommunications in Russia.  It is translated from its original version in Russian here.  

It is obviously impossible to underestimate a value of The Silk Road, which had connected in the second century both East and West civilizations. It was the first transcontinental route [Read more →]

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

Broadband over powerline is dead. Again.

At least it is in the US, where BPL service provider International Broadband Electric Communications (IBEC) – backed by IBM – announced this week it was shutting [Read more →]

Yesterday I asked readers the annual January question of which US network operators were most likely to get bought this year, and while the poll will remain open for a few days yet let’s take a look at the trends thus far. [Read more →]

Another new job openings was posted to the  Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board this week, the first of 2012.  I have plans to change the jobs board over from the current limited, hosted system to something a bit more extensive, but that will be for next year.  Today’s job posting is another from sidera. [Read more →]

The start of the year has been a bit murky when it comes to telecommunications equipment vendors, with two pre-announcements from Acme Packet and Juniper citing spending delays by North American carriers. But there are bright spots too of course, here are a few nice contracts announced this week: [Read more →]

Ok, one last January poll – the inverse of last week’s poll, which I also asked last year.  Which of the same list of service providers is most likely to be a target of M&A in 2012?  Last year we only got one out of the top 10 – Global Crossing, which came in second and in fact did get bought by Level 3.  PAETEC wasn’t seen as a likely target last January, gaining just 3% of votes.  Consolidation seems likely to continue this year, but who will be the targets? [Read more →]

While there hasn’t been a PR on the subject yet, a helpful reader came across this little item detailing a 10 year DISA/DITCO contract worth up to $410.8M apparently won by Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) over the holidays: [Read more →]

Let’s take a quick look at some news on the international front: [Read more →]

Northeastern regional and metro fiber operator Lightower Fiber Networks (news) has deployed 100G gear and is offering the resulting wavelengths to customers across its footprint. That’s the first New England intercity deployment of 100G I have seen, or at least I assume the primary focus is the NYC-Boston route from various endpoints in each city.  [Read more →]

Well, that didn’t take long. Apparently, there’s already a rumor out there that two companies have bid for T-MobileUSA in the wake of AT&T’s decision to drop its attempt to buy the company. SNL Kagan quotes a source claiming that both DISH and Google have already submitted offers, and Gary Kim has chimed in with his thoughts.  [Read more →]