Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Privately held communications service provider Avaya is planning an IPO, according to a recent S-1 filing. The company is hoping to raise some $1B, which will be used to [Read more →]

Now that World IPv6 Day is over and we are all supposedly one big step further along the path to a new internet protocol, let’s run a little poll. [Read more →]

The 100Gbps market is just getting started, and today another equipment provider threw its hat into the ring.  MRV Communications, which specializes in Carrier Ethernet and WDM transport, unveiled its plans for a standards based solution using coherent detection and DP-QPSK modulation which will be compatible with existing gear.  Unlike the ultra longhaul 100G solutions in or approaching the market today, [Read more →]

Several interesting items in the colocation world so far this week, let’s take a quick look: [Read more →]

Seeing as it’s World IPv6 Day, everyone is emphasizing the hard work they’re doing to help spread the world about the transition to must eventually become the internet’s new protocol – to do otherwise would be to suggest unpreparedness and technological backwardness.  And yet, moving to a new protocol has plenty of other ramifications beyond simply having enough addresses.  Interoute’s Mark Lewis offers up some straight talk about new security challenges in an IPv6 world: [Read more →]

Metro network operator abvt may be for sale, but that hasn’t slowed down their fiber building ways.  This week the company announce the buildout of its network into two substantial data centers.  In New Jersey, they added the brand new modular i/o facility in Edison, where things have been moving very quickly since it was announced just over two months ago.  And down in Texas, AboveNet has hooked up the Westland Data Center, better known by its more creative nickname – The Bunker.  Located 45 miles north of Houston and 60 feet straight down, the facility is a former [Read more →]

With its fiscal Q2 results today Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) finished off its first full year since its acquisition of Nortel’s MEN division, which doubled the company’s size and gave it a huge to-do list over the last year.  The company says it has achieved all critical milestones now, including the transition to the Ciena back office systems.  From here they hope to continue to optimize business operations and gain operating leverage, which sounds like [Read more →]

As it’s World IPv6 Day, it seems like a good subject for an industry spotlight.  Not long ago I caught up with Teri Francis, NTT America’s executive director of customer solutions for the Global IP Network Business Unit.  NTT runs one of the world’s largest backbones, ranking #4 according to Renesys in 2010 and given trends since is surely #3 by now and will likely be #2 when the LVLT/GLBC deal goes through.   The company has been pushing the transition to IPv6 for a decade now.  With no further ado: [Read more →]

Datacenter and interconnection provider Telx Group (news, filings) is making its move this week on the cloud, or more specifically on how clouds connect with their users, with each other, and with their own distributed components.  That’s a very hot subject right now with both network and datacenter operators, as optimizing and managing such connectivity is not a trivial problem when you try to scale this sort of thing.  [Read more →]

With all its recent restructuring news lately, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) could use a break.  So what better time for a big new product upgrade?  That’s Cisco’s medicine today, as it unveiled a new ASR 9000 router.  The new gear will deliver 96Tbps and promises up to 70% savings on operating expenses.  Embedded within is the company’s new nV network virtualization technology.   96Tbps is a lot of bandwidth to be needing in a single box, but [Read more →]

Since news broke that abvt has brought in JP Morgan to advise it on a potential sale, speculation has centered on who might buy them and for how much.  A recent note from BWS agrees with my thinking though: that they’re probably only going to sell if offered some serious money.  But I think another dynamic is on the rise as well: that AboveNet is increasingly well positioned to do the buying rather than the selling.   The line between hunter and prey can be [Read more →]

Rumored for months, Apple today unveiled the iCloud, which is designed to serve as the central hub for data and content downloaded from Apple for various devices.  The intent is to replace the PC as the place you go to synchronize everything, which has been annoying for quite a long time IMHO.  The iCloud is free, and updates will supposedly be daily over WiFi in order to not clog [Read more →]

On their corporate blog, Orange Business asks “Are the IT department’s days numbered?”    The idea is that with the rise of cloud computing and a proliferation of IT resources being offered as a service, will corporations even need an IT department?  Well, Orange Business isn’t exactly a neutral observer here, as they do big business in IT and network outsourcing, and their chief competitor is often [Read more →]

As longtime readers know, in addition to map links I keep track of metro route miles and fiber-fed building counts for all companies in the sector for whom I can find such data, which is most of the competitive providers but thus far not the ILECs and the cable MSOs (with one or two exceptions).  I last updated my list over the Christmas break, and thus it is time to do it again.  Thus if you know of fiber out there that ought to be on my list but isn’t, or of inaccuracies that could be corrected – please [Read more →]

Hmmm, I think they’re serious about this cost cutting thing.  clwr has signed with Telech to outsource its customer support.  Some 700 Clearwire employees will immediately switch companies, although Clearwire is keeping about 180 of them for the back office.  Most of the company’s 6M+ subscribers are wholesale through Sprint, and therefore won’t notice of course.  This follows Clearwire’s move a couple of weeks ago to outsource its network operations to Ericsson, which similarly moved [Read more →]

TGIF.  A few more fiber-network-related items this week to catch up on:

In Texas, regional and metro fiber operator Alpheus Communications expanded its Metrolocity offering, adding Ethernet peering capabilities.  They have 31 customers amongst the competitive wireless and wireline operators in the state, and the new service is available immediately.  Alpheus is one of the only fiber assets that was [Read more →]