Telecom Ramblings

International network operator glbc announced two expansions yesterday.  First, the company is adding an additional 40 locations to its EtherSphere product line, which complements its MPLS IP VPN service with various flavors of layer 2 Ethernet including VPLS.  In North America and Europe, the additional Ethernet sites will be within key PoPs, while in China the expansion will go through the company’s partner [Read more →]

Privately held PacketExchange is being acquired by global network integrator gtlt (GTT).  PacketExchange operates a tier-2 international IP and Ethernet network, and itself acquired Mzima just last year.  This does seem to mark a change in strategy for GTT, which has traditionally been carrier neutral but will now own its own backbone, at least at layer 2.  PacketExchange also took a swing at the cloud earlier this year, unveiling a [Read more →]

XO Holdings (news, filings) has turned its attention overseas again, announcing today their intention to expand the company’s international services to include IP/MPLS IP-VPN nodes in Europe as well as access throughout Europe, Asia/Pacific, both Americas, and various US territories.  XO has been traditionally quite US focused, but this move is another step in a steady plan by XO to increase it’s international presence.  Back in 2009 XO added capacity on on PC-1 to increase their presence in Japan.  Then in 2010, they started up an international customer referral program.  This new effort though is obviously a bit bigger, in that [Read more →]

Level 3 won yet another European gaming company’s CDN business, announcing Frogster as a customer.  No, not the Frogstar from the Hitchhiker’s Guide lore, which was widely held to be the most totally evil place in the Galaxy.  And not the classic Frogger video game either, which is a good thing since I never liked it anyway.  Based in Germany and publicly traded in Frankfurt, Frogster operates two massively multiplayer online games, Runes of Magic and Bounty Bay Online, and has two more in the works [Read more →]

According to a report on Data Center Dynamics, Google has taken all available space at the key New York City colocation facility of 111 8th off the market.  They bought the 3M square foot building over the winter for $1.9B, taking charge of a facility populated by a who’s who of the datacenter and carrier world.  Equinix, Digital Realty Trust, and Telx all operate huge tracts of space there, and the facility is home to a very wide range of network operators. [Read more →]

Over on the Jobs Board, we have a new job posting from Kalamazoo-based Lynx Network Group, a wholesale and retail telecommunications service provider in the Midwest.  Lynx is looking for a Layer 3 Manager / Network IT Manager.  Last year Lynx along with several partners won stimulus funding for about 1,000 miles of fiber connecting various parts of rural Michigan.  Already underway, half of that buildout is expected to be done by the end of 2011, with the rest in 2012.  And of course part of that buildout means jobs, and this appears to be one of them.  You can find a link to the map of the proposed fiber route over in [Read more →]

Time to catch up on a few deals:

Optimum Lightpath continued its offensive in the education vertical by adding yet another New Jersey school district.  The 1,615 middle and high school students and 142 faculty of the River Dell Regional School District now have a 100Mbps Ethernet connection to the internet, replacing a paltry 3Mbps connection.  And by paltry, I mean [Read more →]

Telecom Ramblings wishes to know more about its audience.  This survey contains only three questions and will take less than minute.  Please [Read more →]

Another opportunistic fiber M&A happened today, but this time it was over in Europe.  euNetworks (news) is nearly doubling its weight with the purchase of LambdaNet from 3U Holdings.  LambdaNet’s network lies mostly in Germany, with a bit in both the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Austria.  That includes metro networks in Frankfurt, Munich, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, and Copenhagen – the last of which will be a new market for euNetworks.  LambdaNet also operates 25 [Read more →]

Northeastern regional and metro operator sidera added some more fiber to its network today by leveraging the new buildout by Allied Fiber.  Sidera will add dark fiber routes in New Jersey and Virginia.  Allied Fiber’s route brings diversity to Sidera’s paths through the mid-Atlantic region.  Meanwhile, Allied Fiber will have access to Sidera’s footprint between Piscataway and [Read more →]

There were several items of interest in the international arena lately.

TAT-14, the consortium-owned transatlantic cable, is finally going to get a big upgrade.  Mitsubishi Electric announced that it signed a contract to add 40Gbps DWDM capability, which according to the PR will increase the cable’s total capacity by a factor of [Read more →]

For some years now I have thought that the CDN world at some point would find a way to interconnect with itself.  By that I mean that until now, each content delivery network lives in isolation on top of an IP ocean, exchanging nothing directly with its neighbors.  Yet the idea of seamless caching and delivery across multiple cooperating CDNs is very attractive from a design standpoint, and I know that many on the bandwidth side have seen it in the future for a long while.  Just in the last few days though, I have heard the emerging name for this, the ‘Federated CDN’, start to make real noise.  [Read more →]

That clwr is looking for ways to cut costs and thus improve its operational position by any means necessary is not a secret.  I suppose I should have expected them to take a page from the book of their largest shareholder, Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) and outsource network operations to Ericsson, but it hadn’t yet occurred to me.  But that’s exactly what they did according to [Read more →]

Ok, back in March when Google announced that the lucky community to get its 1Gbps FTTH present would be Kansas City, Kansas, I gave them a bit of a hard time for picking the smaller one to deploy fiber in while getting the marketing boost of the bigger one’s name.  Well, I’m not saying they listened to me (actually, I’m sure they didn’t), but apparently the Google guys have now decided to expand the project to the other side of the river as well. At least now we know what the other 1000 communities needed to to to get some Google-love.  Yep, just [Read more →]

Northeastern fiber operator Lightower also announced a network expansion yesterday, unveiling a new route crossing the Hudson River.  That makes six such crossings for Lightower, increasing even further its network depth in the Hudson Valley. The new route, which I believe shows up on the clipping of Lightower’s network map below, crosses the Hudson to the south of the Tappan Zee bridge between the counties of Westchester and Rockland.  It crosses the Hudson at a narrower point and will help reduce latency [Read more →]

Zayo says it is both expanding and adding capacity to its Memphis network.  That network derives from its purchase of Memphis Networx, which was one of its earliest purchases back in 2007.  Zayo plans to increase its coverage to 425 route miles with connectivity to more than 350 enterprise buildings and an increased fiber count, adding a total of 20,000 fiber miles to be added  and extending [Read more →]

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece today entitled “The Internet Of Things: How Will We Trust A Word It Says?” which makes the future sound rather scary.  The key question posed is this:  “what are the security issues surrounding an internet of 50 billion devices, 48 billion of which are going to be cheap remote sensors of some kind?”  The WSJ then went on to look at the possibilities for malicious activity against corporations by deliberately injecting false data, but the first thing that hit me was the privacy thing and a book I read a while back called ‘The Transparent Society’ by one of my favorite [Read more →]

Fresh off its IPO over the winter, European colocation specialist InterXion (NYSE:INXN, news) posted its first quarter results along with a variety of expansion projects. In Stockholm, they will be adding an additional 1.5MW of power, which will allow them to expand their current footprint by 25%.  Apparently they are also using seawater cooling there to enhance efficiency.  In Vienna, they will be adding 1,300 square meters, while in Dublin the order of the day will be another 1MW and a [Read more →]

XO Holdings (news, filings) had finished off 2010 with two quarters of solid revenue growth and higher EBITDA margins, but saw a sequential decline in both in the first quarter of 2011 driven by churn in long distance voice services.  Actually though, while they don’t say much on the subject of seasonality (or anything else really), Q1 pretty much always looks like this for XO so it didn’t surprise me to see EBITDA margins beneath 10% again.  Over the same quarter last year, XO saw improvements across the board – though nothing spectacular.  Here’s a quick summary of their numbers in context: [Read more →]

With all the noise this year about how cable MSOs are taking share in the business marketplace, the fact that Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA, news, filings) had yet to enter the Metro Ethernet marketplace in force might have seemed odd.  Well if so, those days are now over.  Today the big daddy of the US cable industry formally unveiled its Metro Ethernet product line in 20 markets across the country.  The higher bandwidth offering will take them further into the M end of the [Read more →]

VoIP rarely gets the headlines these days, but Microsoft’s blockbuster purchase of Skype has brought to the fore a not particularly new yet increasingly important phenomenon.  The New York Times ran a piece entitled “Skype-Style Calls Force Wireless Carriers to Adapt” which framed the challenge facing wireless carriers, which despite the last year of press doesn’t have much directly to do with network neutrality, and here’s one response from the eternal voice of VoIP, Andy Abramson.  Specifically, it is the fact that for wireless carriers:

Mobile Data + VoIP = Revenue Loss [Read more →]

I have finally updated my competitive telecom trends graphs both with new data and also with some new technology that makes them easier to read and interact with.  Enhancements include: 1) the ability to hide/show each company’s data interactively, 2) display of the numerical value when hovering over a datapoint, and 3) valuation projections that include the current stock price.  I am still tweaking the style, let me know if you have any ideas to help improve the presentation.  First up, let’s take a quick look at how EBITDA margins have been evolving recently: [Read more →]

Zayo Group (news, filings) continued to roll on forward according to its Fiscal Q3 earnings report, which came out last night.  While it is privately held, Zayo generally issues more public information on the state of its business than most (or perhaps all) private companies in the sector. This is one of those rare quarters where Zayo’s numbers don’t have to be read in the context of an acquisition, since the last one they did closed two quarters prior and they finished most of the integration work for AFS last quarter.  Here’s a quick look at their numbers (to be updated later when the CC supplement comes out): [Read more →]