Telecom Ramblings

International fiber operator Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) reported its Q1/2011 earnings this morning, fresh off its long-awaited announcement of the Global Crossing deal three weeks ago.  That deal has taken center stage since, however it won’t close until much later in the year, and Level 3 has unfinished business on the organic growth front to handle first.  The first quarter is traditionally lighter, however in their fourth quarter call Level 3 indicated they expected to manage a bit of sequential growth nonetheless, and in fact they posted solid revenues of $929, including $728M in core network services, which bested street estimates – and my own as well of course.  Communications adjusted EBITDA of $225 was also a sequential improvement.   [Read more →]

Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) took another step into the cloud yesterday with the acquisition of Clickability.  Clickability is a software-as-a-service provider of web content management tools, meaning they enable their customers to create and manage their website content via their specialized software and distributed server infrastructure.  Limelight will take that offering and integrate it alongside its traditional CDN business, video platform, and the [Read more →]

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) formally introduced its containerized data center product today. That the company was moving in this direction surprises no one of course, and the containers are built to incorporate the technology of Cisco’s Unified Computing, Unified Fabric and Unified Network technologies.  The units consist of a forty foot weatherized ISO container design that can hold as many as sixteen cabinets with room for 44 rack units each, built on open architecture.  The full [Read more →]

On Tuesday before the market opens we will hear from the internet backbone duo of Level 3 and Global Crossing, who of course announced their intentions to get hitched a few weeks ago.  Since that deal seems rather unlikely to fall through, it seems appropriate to preview earnings for both companies at the same time.  The two share some common features when it comes first quarter results, namely  a) slower sequential growth due to a seasonally strong Q4, and b) higher cash usage due to seasonal expense trends.  This year, both companies are also projecting a stronger overall growth trend.  But of course they are not yet joined at the [Read more →]

Amazon today finally offered up a detailed failure report itemizing what went wrong last week when its Elastic Compute Cloud went down and took a chunk of the internet with it.  It’s quite a read.  That is, it’s quite a read if you can get through all the definitions and jargon.  Data Center Knowledge does a pretty good job of simplifying it a bit, but let’s make it a bit simpler.  [Read more →]

Sometimes the reports are all spread out, and sometimes they clump together.  This quarter it’s the latter, so it’s time for a quick look at a few more reports from yesterday:

Internap Network Services (NASDAQ:INAP, news, filings) had a bit of a rough quarter, as revenues declined sequentially again to $59.4M and normalized earnings turned negative with the loss of a penny per share.  The company guided toward sequential improvement in Q2, something that analysts seem to have hoped for a bit earlier.  Internap also announced an expansion into [Read more →]

Bandwidth equipment manufacturer Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) filed it’s first quarter numbers yesterday.  Revenues declined sequentially to $92.9M from $117.1M in the prior quarter, which roughly matched composite analyst expectations and reflected as always the lumpiness of this business.  The company’s non-GAAP earnings per share dipped to a loss of $0.04, which was nevertheless better than the loss of $0.07 that they turned in during the same quarter last year and had been projected to repeat.  Here is a quick table of their results in the context of the prior four quarters: [Read more →]

What with all the earnings reports flooding in lately, let’s take a quick look at other items that might otherwise get drowned out:

Unite Private Networks continued to rack up fiber builds for lesser known school districts and municipalities.  Ohio’s Elyria City and Perrysburg Schools both [Read more →]

Embattled US #3 wireless provider Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) reported another quarter of sequential growth, ahead of analyst expectations of a drop.  Revenues of $8.313B were indeed a hair higher than last quarter and up 3% over the same period last year, while loss per share improved to $0.15, clearly ahead of composite expectations which Yahoo Finance had pegged at a loss of $0.21.  The market [Read more →]

Carrier neutral colocation provider Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) easily bested guidance and analyst estimates for the first quarter of 2011, raising guidance for the full year as well.  As one might expect, the market is responding favorably after hours.  In addition, Equinix announced further expansion plans, including yet another major data center facility in the NYC metro market, which will give them eight, and more space in Chicago and Frankfurt.  Here is a quick table of the company’s numbers in context: [Read more →]

Content delivery giant, or leading cloud optimization provider as they like to be called these days, Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) reported its first quarter earnings today after the market closed.  While they managed to beat both their own guidance and analyst expectations on both earnings per share and revenue, the stock is down 10% after hours.  Traders apparently aren’t happy with the forward guidance company management gave on the conference call.  Here’s a quick rundown of the numbers in context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]

Well, put me down as surprised – I didn’t think Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] would actually sell.  But then, I didn’t think that CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) would offer $40 per share either, and that’s exactly what they did.  And thus we have a deal.  Today, CenturyLink agreed to purchase Savvis for approximately $2.5B in cash and stock, plus the assumption of net debt of about $650M. This follows much speculation over the past two quarters about the next big cloud M&A by a telecommunications company, in which Savvis has been [Read more →]

I’ve been asked now by several people whether there’s a rumor out there about TW Telecom and some sort of imminent M&A.  I think the talk I’ve heard thus far is mostly derived from the surge in their stock price since the middle of last week which took them above $20 again for the first time in a long while, as opposed to word of an actual deal on the table.  Thus far I would stress that I haven’t heard anything beyond that unspecific rumor of there being a rumor.  But I really wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was something at the root of it, so this seems like as good a time as any to ramble a bit on the subject. [Read more →]

Later this week, Hibernia Atlantic will take the wraps off a further expansion of its Global Financial Network (GFN).  A new offering, called Hibernia Secure, bundles multiple protected low latency paths per destination.  It’s not merely backing up one fast circuit with a much slower backup circuit, but rather with one or more often two routes that also offer very low latency – thus ensuring that even the outages are plenty fast enough.  That raises the ante a bit in the low latency marketplace, which has continued to evolve rapidly since bursting [Read more →]

Today we are joined by Clint Heiden, who was until recently President at Intellifiber Networks and is now President of PAETEC Fiber Services.  PAETEC purchased Intellifiber as part of the Cavalier transaction last autumn, and has since expanded the unit’s scope.  They’ve added in the former McLeodUSA assets, national accounts, and fixed wireless services as well, aiming at transforming the once fiber-light CLEC into a fiber power in its own right.  With no further ado: [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced early today that the company’s Vyvx division has been selected by no less than six national broadcasters in the US and Canada to provide coverage of that minor little shindig happening across the Atlantic later this week.  I say minor because we’ve sort of abolished royalty over here and I’d personally rather watch a Teletubbies marathon or some other more entertaining British production.  But that’s just me and I’m in the minority — it’s certainly going to be a a gigantic [Read more →]

So many cable projects these days hooking up far flung corners of the planet with vast amounts of capacity.  There have been the New Zealand to Los Angeles effort by Pacific Fibre, and the recently proposed Brazil-Africa cable too.  Then there are all those cables to Africa going on.  Key in such cases is obviously strategic interests by national governments.  But there have been much smaller projects to even more exotic destination also, and Alcatel-Lucent has picked up two such contracts this Spring already.  [Read more →]

If you haven’t already noticed, Amazon’s EC2 cloud has had a rather trying few days.  That’s the thing about public clouds.  Even if they’re far more reliable than hosting services of the past, when they go down they take down everyone at the same time.  Then it becomes a very public debacle.  So what you have is a statistically more reliable internet that seems more vulnerable nonetheless.  This won’t be the last time this happens, and Amazon won’t be the only one hit.  ‘Nuff said? [Read more →]

The other day I said I’d make an attempt at vaulting Telecom Ramblings into the IPv6 world.  The idea being that it is somewhat hypocritical for someone as technically oriented as me to complain of the slowness of the transition to IPv6 without ever having considered my own part in it or lack thereof.  After all, I have a static IPv4 address via which you are reading this right now.  Why isn’t this available on IPv6, even the way Google does via ipv6.google.com?  What precisely is stopping me?  And while we’re at it, just what is it needs to be done?  Do any of the journalists writing stuff about IPv4 exhaust and impending doom actually know?  As far as I can tell, the important links in the chain are: [Read more →]

Yesterday we saw AT&T report it’s first quarter results after losing iPhone exclusivity, and today it’s the turn of the newly iPhone-enabled Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings).  And Verizon, like AT&T, turned in a largely unsurprising report.  Revenues of $26.99B and earnings per share of $0.51 either met or were  slightly above expectations, depending on one’s point of view.  During the less than two months the iPhone was for sale, Verizon Wireless  apparently activated [Read more →]

Before everyone goes off for Easter weekend, here’s a quick rundown of some recent fiber news:

Northeastern fiber operator Lightower Fiber Networks (news) has completed its buildout up into southern New Hampshire.  The fiber buildout was first announced in January of 2010, and spans 65 miles while hooking up sites in Salem, Manchester, Merrimack, Nashua, and other towns along the way. Lightower has been expanding aggressively both organically and inorganically over the past year or two, and they seem likely to continue to continue on that path this year.  There are probably fewer [Read more →]

You gotta love the predictable headlines this morning accompanying AT&T’s solid Q1/11 earnings release.  CNBC has “AT&T Earnings Solid Despite Loss of iPhone Rights” and AllthingsD has “Sharing the iPhone With Verizon Doesn’t Kill AT&T”.  As if the company’s $124B annual revenues and gobs of cash flow were going to evaporate overnight?  It’s only been less than two months…  Even if it were going to happen, it would be hard [Read more →]

Fresh off its big M&A announcement earlier this month, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) today let everyone know that it is one of the backhaul powers behind the LTE rollout of none other than Verizon Wireless.  Level 3 is supplying both backbone infrastructure and cell-site backhaul to the US wireless giant to help prepare for the coming wireless data wave.  Unlike the exaflood which has never yet materialized in an actual form worthy of fear, I don’t think anyone doubts that [Read more →]