Telecom Ramblings

Apparently it isn’t just the US fiber market that is seeing a surge in M&A activity.  According to a report in the Financial Times today, UK-based Cable & Wireless is considering the sale of its international division.  And apparently, there is already a bidder out there – Pacnet apparently has put a $500M bid on the table.  If the rumor is true though, there are probably other bidders out there that would drive up that price.  But first, a bit of perspective from the company’s numbers. [Read more →]

As we saw with VoIP, Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA, news, filings) doesn’t move quickly but when it does move the momentum can be very impressive.  It is the mid-sized business market that is getting a lot of the MSO’s attention right now, and last month they formally announced Metro Ethernet services across twenty markets.  Today we learned that Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) and Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) are supplying the gear powering that effort.  [Read more →]

Here’s another fiber play by private equity, this time up in the Northeast with two providers that I haven’t run into before.  Boston’s Riverside Partners is putting money into segTEL, becoming its largest shareholder.  segTEL operates a fiberoptic network in the upper New England states of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine which by September is expected to exceed [Read more →]

It looks to me as if Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) has finally made up its mind about its 4G future.  Over the past year the company has been gradually turning around its 2G/3G business, but not-so private disagreements with clwr and persistent rumors about other options have made it obvious the company has been struggling to decide where to go from here.  Over the weekend, numerous reports have it that the company has signed a network sharing deal with LightSquared, and while not a week has gone by without [Read more →]

Over on the Jobs Board, we have three new job postings from Lightower, which operates one of the most extensive metro and regional footprints in the northeast.  That Lightower is hiring is another telling sign that last year’s metro fiber M&A binge was not about synergies but rather about assembling a platform for accelerating growth.  In 2010 and into the beginning of 2011, the company purchased Veroxity, Lexent Metro Connect, and Open Access, and then went and did a deal for NSTAR’s remaining fiber capacity as well.  After all that, they are looking for [Read more →]

Another week, another roundup to catch up with the stuff that I didn’t spot on my first troll through the news:

Remember that TAT-14 upgrade we heard about last month, the contract for which went to Mitsubishi Electric?  Well it looks as if TeliaSonera AB (ETR:TLS, news, filings) is the driving [Read more →]

Joining us for a quick Q&A today is Craig Hurley, Senior Product Manager at NTT America.  The telecommunications industry as a whole has spent the last several quarters rapidly positioning itself for the cloud computing revolution, and one of the most active of all has been NTT.  As a top internet backbone operator that has long offered managed hosting to the enterprise space, the company seems as ready as any out telecommunications company out there to benefit from the shift to the cloud.  They started off with a public cloud effort last year, but in April took the next step and [Read more →]

Northeastern fiber operator Sidera Networks is said yesterday that it will be providing connectivity out to ancotel’s facility out on Long Island.  This is the former LIDARC facility at 1025 Old Country Road in Westbury, NY that German-based ancotel purchased last summer.  It is their gateway to transatlantic and Latin American cable landings along the Long Island shore, and has connectivity through Brooklyn and Staten Island into New Jersey without setting foot in [Read more →]

Hibernia Atlantic is taking the next step toward construction of the first transatlantic cable in a decade.  They are beginning the deep sea submarine survey of the route the cable will take, with three ships taking part.  By surveying the ocean floor they can make sure the path is clear and provide data to Huawei, who will [Read more →]

Since opening the curtains on its ultra-low latency fiber build between the New York and Chicago metro areas, financial bandwidth upstart Spread Networks has been steadily filling out both its product portfolio and its metro footprint.  In the past few days they’ve done a bit of [Read more →]

Following up on my update to the metro fiber provider and on-net building list, here is a color-coded table showing the ratio of metro route miles to number of buildings connected.  I’m not implying a race to the top (or bottom) of this table, just taking a cue from the numbers when it comes to understanding who does what and why across the sector: [Read more →]

The Southern Cross cable system, which has for a decade been the primary connection between the US and down under, has successfully trialed 100G.  The trial took place during the testing of 40G equipment aimed at the cable’s anticipated 2012 expansion.  They also said the 40G gear will take total network potential above 6Tbps, so presumably 100G would bring that above 10Tbps when the time comes although the number of wavelengths would surely [Read more →]

The New York Post has an article as of early this morning quoting sources who say that AboveNet has indeed managed to attract a binding offer from a private equity group – the terms of which aren’t yet known.  We know of course that there is an auction of sorts going on, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this were the case – although it doesn’t sound as if the fat lady has sung yet.   Last I heard, [Read more →]

Continuing its attack on the value added end of the CDN marketplace, cotendo unveiled a Mobile Acceleration Suite aimed at the burgeoning wireless content arena.  Handling wireless data loads is quickly becoming the most vexing problem of the technology industry for both wireless network operators, who are seeking to align the economics of customer usage and infrastructure build-outs, and content providers, who fight over eyeballs that are quickly lost when things slow down.  [Read more →]

Datacenter REIT CoreSite (NYSE:COR, news, filings) picked up a new customer to help fill out the 437,000 square feet they operate in Los Angeles.  International tier 1 IP carrier TeliaSonera AB (ETR:TLS, news, filings) is opening its latest PoP there as part of its efforts to serve the gaming community. Teliasonera is already in another of CoreSite’s facilities in the region as well as one in DC – apparently [Read more →]

Telefonica International Wholesale and Orange Business have teamed up for telepresence.  The agreement will enable each to offer telepresence sessions between their respective clients.   Both companies are part of Polycom’s Open Visual Communications Consortium, and the goal is an open environment for telepresence interoperability that will help the emerging segment make that final push past the [Read more →]

Yesterday we took a quick look at where the metro route miles are following my recent update to the metro fiber and lit buildings page, today we follow up with where the buildings are.  Now, when I put together this list, I tend to be very liberal with what constitutes an on-net building.  Basically, if it’s a man-made structure that consumes or produces bandwidth, and a company controls a fiber connection to it, then it qualifies.  That means towers and buildings served by dark fiber only thus far both make the list.  It also means that a ‘building’ can mean anything from [Read more →]

The colocation industry has been expanding internationally at a pretty good clip lately.  Today there were two such announcements. [Read more →]

While there may be data from a few stragglers still to come in, I have updated my metro fiber and on-net buildings list.  Along with updates from companies already on the list, there were several new arrivals. Domestically, data came in from Litecast in Baltimore and a bit earlier this year from Sunesys.  For the first time I have added data for international metro fiber operators, to the extent that I have initially been able to find data: [Read more →]

The New York Times had an interesting feature yesterday detailing developing plans by the US Government to help deploy shadow internet and mobile phone systems wherever other governments try to shut them down in an effort to silence dissidents.  That effort includes a prototype “Internet in a suitcase” which could be taken across the border and quickly set up into a wireless access node and thus give the good guys a route past the censors and shutdowns.  Liberation technology, they’re calling it.  But as Rob Frieden notes, we have more than a few places in the US that could [Read more →]

This is a guest post by Paolo Gorgò, who blogs over at both Nortia Research and Seeking Alpha.  If you might be interested in a guest post may contact the webmaster.

On Thursday Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) announced its intention to build a third data center in Amsterdam, Netherlands, located in the Amsterdam Science Park, one of the most carrier-dense [Read more →]

Since it’s Friday, let’s cover some hybrid telecom/racing news for once.  Forgetting the TMobileUSA dea for now, AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) won something that will surely finish a bit quicker.  They have won a WAN acceleration contract with the Formula One team Williams F1.  I’ve never really managed to ponder bandwith and formula one [Read more →]

Let’s catch up on some items in the regional and metro fiber arena from this week:

In East Tennessee, Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) has finished up the second phase of its broadband stimulus project, in which it was spending $9.4M in federal dollars to build another 131 route miles along a route from [Read more →]