Telecom Ramblings

As suggested in reports over the weekend, Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC, news) announced this morning that it has agreed to purchase smaller cable rival Insight Communications.  The reported price tag is $3B, with which TW Cable will increase its customer rolls by 5%.  The nation’s second largest cable company will also boost its presence in the markets of Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio where Insight serves most of its [Read more →]

The content delivery arm of international fiber operator Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) added to its string of European victories with a win at the Russian video portal RuTube.  RuTube has been using their CDN services to improve the quality of its video delivery in Russia, Europe, and internationally.  Level 3 has found substantial success in the CDN market over in Europe, but I hadn’t realized their presence had taken hold so [Read more →]

Three more job postings have popped up on the Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board, two from Rochester-based metro fiber builder Fibertech and another from Northeastern regional operator Sidera Networks. The overall economy sure isn’t going that well right now, but this little corner over here [Read more →]

Telecom Egypt and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) have put 40G undersea technology to work in the Mediterranean.  The TE-NORTH Cable system’s 40G upgrade is now in service, hooking up Abu Talat, Egypt to Marseille, France with extensions to Cyprus.  That doubles the design capacity of the system to [Read more →]

Some other items from the datacenter space this week worth a quick look:

QTS (news) is expanding its Kansas City footprint by [Read more →]

TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) picked up an important state government contract expansion today.  The State of Texas has awarded the fiber operator a five year contract under which it will supply a comprehensive suite of network solutions to all state agencies and departments.  Texas and its capitol Austin have long been tw telecom strongholds, and the state government was [Read more →]

Time to step back from the domestic market, and take note of a fiber build off in one of the more remote places in the world.  Rostelecom is in the process of building fiber to 34 markets in the Trans-Baikal region.  Ok, markets might be a bit of a stretch there, as I see other reports call them ‘settlements’ or ‘agglomerations’ but still.  The Russian telecommunications giant is adding 450km of fiberoptics on the Amur highway, bringing Amur Oblast online.  If you didn’t know where that was until today, here’s a map from Wikipedia: [Read more →]

The once and future 800lb gorilla of the telecommunications equipment sector, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings), has done something it hasn’t managed to do in about a year: make investors smile.  Not a big smile, but still, a smile is a smile.  Fiscal Q4 revenues of $11.2B came in a few hundred million dollars above analyst forecasts, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.40 was likewise a positive [Read more →]

A quick look at some of the other news this week: [Read more →]

According to a report today over at CNET, Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) is planning to enter the cloud computing race later this year. They plan to leverage their existing data center footprint and their substantial enterprise customer relationships to kick start cloud-based ‘hosted collaboration services’.  Those will apparently start with [Read more →]

clwr has a new CEO, again.  The wireless upstart has promoted its Chief Operating Officer Erik Prusch to the positions of both President and CEO.  The current CEO, John Stanton, will return to his chairmanship on the board of directors as Executive Director.  The change comes five months after Stanton took over the job from Bill Morrow in an interim role, at which time Prusch was promoted from [Read more →]

Ok, earnings season is coming to a close except for the usual stragglers that will finish up shortly.  Time to check on what else went by that got missed: [Read more →]

The evolution of the Ethernet Exchange business continues, as we are seeing each of the early participants taking the idea in their own unique directions.  Today it was CENX’s turn, as they unveiled the expansion of their wireless backhaul offering, as well as a major customer in LightSquared for whom they will be helping the buildout of that 4G LTE network that is planned to start later this year.  For CENX, this means taking more of an active [Read more →]

In parallel with their Q2 earnings report this morning, tndm unveiled a new HD Voice Interconnect product. As they have done with VoIP in general, the company is seeking to connect up islands of HD Voice, which offers greater call clarity via a wideband connection.  The service requires a SIP interconnect, and then will connect via HD Voice if the desired endpoint supports it or else via regular voice as usual. Independent VoIP provider 8x8, Inc (NASDAQ:EGHT, news, filings) has [Read more →]

Fresh off last week’s surprising news that it will be acquired by Windstream, PAETEC (news, filings) offered up its second quarter results.  Revenues were perhaps a tad lighter than analysts had forecast, although that may have to do with the timing of the closing of the XETA deal.  More interestingly, the company saw another solid boost to its EBITDA margins, reflecting the integration synergies they are deriving from the Cavalier deal.  Here’s the usual quick table: [Read more →]

TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) is really picking up the pace when it comes to bringing fiber into new buildings.  According to their second quarter earnings report last night, the company added another 569 buildings to its network, giving them 14,311 in all now.  In the last twelve months, tw telecom has brought 2,035 buildings on-net, far and away the leader amongst competitive providers.  As for the financials, well as always you can set your clock by this company’s numbers.  Here’s a quick tabular summary in context: [Read more →]

Private equity firm ABRY Partners made another purchase in the internet infrastructure space to go along with Sidera Networks and Masergy.  This time they have teamed up with fellow Boston-based investment firm Berkshire Partners to purchase interconnection specialist Telx.   ABRY certainly has developed a well [Read more →]

It’s been several quarters of outsized results for Broadsoft (NASDAQ:BSFT, news, filings) now, following today’s easy beat of guidance and analyst estimates.  With both the VoIP and cloud sectors advancing, the communications software platform provider has been in a sweet spot lately.  Here’s a quick summary of their data in the context of the prior four quarters: [Read more →]

PAETEC (news, filings) is pushing its Ethernet-over-Copper product line to the limit.  In May they bumped up their capabilities to 100Mbps, but today they doubled that again, provisioning a circuit offering bandwidth in excess of 200Mbps.  The link is being used by a ‘prominent web marketing company’ to connect its latest datacenter to the Internet.  [Read more →]

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

This morning, Telecity Group, one of Europe’s leading provider of carrier-neutral data centers, and listed on the London stock exchange, announced its results for the first half of 2011 and also the acquisition of [Read more →]

Several weeks ago, XO Holdings (news, filings) announced its vehement opposition to the pending merger of Level 3 and Global Crossing, citing the combined entity’s likely outsized influence on the IP transit marketplace.  Today however, according to this joint filing with the FCC, XO no longer objects. Here’s the text of the letter: [Read more →]

Don’t look now, but this weekend might just see a strike break out on telecommunications land.  Verizon and its wireline employees are on the brink, with the current contract expiring at 12:01am on Sunday.  The CWA and IBE have already voted to authorize a strike, which would impact 45,000 Verizon workers on the east coast.  I’d like to think this one will be short or even that they could work something out at the last minute, but it could be that the situation is ripe for [Read more →]

When the summer started, abvt was apparently for sale and the bidding was fierce.  But as I suspected, nothing came of it (or has come of it yet) and the speculation has died down and the surge in stock price has ebbed.  So now we get back to business, which in AboveNet’s case is the business of rock-solid, high margin organic growth – as demonstrated by the company’s Q2 report this morning.  Here’s a quick summary of the relevant metrics alongside the prior four quarters: [Read more →]