Telecom Ramblings

One of the themes that emerged in yesterday’s news orgy about the LVLT/GLBC deal was that it may act as a catalyst for other deals in the sector to emerge.  Certainly we saw things snowball last year amongst the smaller metro fiber operators and CLECs, and it has seemed logical that 2011 would see it spread to the larger carriers.  Yet I don’t think there is yet that sort of momentum.  There’s less a need for a land grab here, and any deals will be much more opportunistic and driven by specific strategic needs just as Level 3 and Global Crossing had.  So it’s time to prognosticate.  Let’s look at a few of the larger potential strategic buyers out there and what might make sense for them: [Read more →]

NTT America (news) [a subsidiary of NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings)] is taking its efforts in the cloud space to larger customers with a new enterprise private cloud hosting environment.  Having long had an enterprise hosting business, NTT America has been one of the most active telcos when it comes to offering cloud services.  They got started back in late 2009 and fleshed out their offerings with VMware last summer.  Today’s enterprise cloud offering is also built using VMware products, and is aimed not only at the mid-sized customers but to large enterprises in need of a flexible approach.  The approach creates [Read more →]

One of the first questions that springs up in looking at this deal is whether Level 3 really ought to be taking on another integration after the well known troubles they went through in 2007-2008.  Actually, there are a number of reasons why this one should be much easier: [Read more →]

Rumors had been swirling for several days, but now it is official.   Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) is buying glbc for roughly $3.0B!  It’s a stock deal, with Global Crossing shareholders receiving 16 LVLT shares for every GLBC share they hold, which works out to $23.04 per share at the moment – a nice premium.  That means Singapore Technologies and Telemedia will be joining Level 3’s other major investors rather than cashing out.  Level 3 will also assume $1.1B in debt.  Over the past three years, I have speculated at length about the merger of these two networks.  It has always made a tremendous [Read more →]

Orange Business (news) [a subsidiary of France Telecom (NYSE:FTE, news, filings)] has expanded its Telepresence Community via an interoperability agreement with Tata Communications (news, filings)‘s Global Meeting Exchange.  The deal will allow customers of each carrier to conduct Telepresence meetings across the two combined networks.  Tata has been one of the most geographically expansive implementers of telepresence, with 33 public rooms across 17 countries and five continents, so the deal materially [Read more →]

Ever since AT&T outsourced the value added end of its CDN efforts to Cotendo, I have been trying to keep an eye on the small but dynamic challenger to Akamai in this corner of the content delivery market.  Today they opened up a new battle front with the introduction of their Cloudlet platform, which is billed as “the world’s first fully customizable, high-performance and globally distributed cloud application environment.”  And they seem to have some other carriers testing the waters as well.  First off, let’s look at what it means – minus [Read more →]

Competitive operator XO Holdings (news, filings) lost its top officer today.  Carl Grivner has announced his resignation as CEO, President, and Director after eight years, saying he intends to pursue other opportunities.  Grivner took over when Icahn bought the company out of bankruptcy after the last bubble, and has led it ever since.  He won’t be going far initially though, as he has agreed to assist the company during the transition as the board searches for a new CEO.  [Read more →]

I haven’t spent much time lately looking at the data center and cloud marketplace, so let’s take a quick look at some highlights of this weeks news:

Telx Group (news, filings) and CoreLink Data Centers have entered into a strategic alliance under which each will be able to leverage the other’s footprint to augment its own coverage.  CoreLink has [Read more →]

Pacific regional network operator and Indian giant Bharti Airtel are teaming up for a new $120M high speed network directly connecting Chennai to Los Angeles.  The network will leverage Bharti’s i2i cable between Chennai and Singapore, and then Pacnet’s EAC-C2C and EAC Pacific cable systems for the Singapore-Japan and Japan-Los Angeles legs.  Unclear from the PR and the coverage I have seen thus far is just how much they are actually building here, since these cables are already in place.  They will be adding capacity between Chennai and Singapore, but does that mean new [Read more →]

Seems like a week doesn’t go by without Chinese insurgent equipment provider Huawei being accused of something.  Today it’s corruption again, this time in Austria.  The business magazine Format has alleged that Huawei displaced Nokia Siemans and Ericsson for several contracts at Telekom Austria by doing improper things with a publicity consultant by the name of Peter Hochegger.  Allegedly this Horleggor fellow got 10% of any contract he helped secure.  At €60M or so in contracts, that was a heck of a windfall. [Read more →]

Two interesting releases from abvt recently:

This morning, AboveNet announced further reductions in latency in its London metro market.  Specifically, they are now claiming 225 microseconds from Slough to the City of London, one way.  Intra-London latency for the financial traders has been a very competitive marketplace over the last year, with various providers claiming top honors depending on [Read more →]

And now for something completely different.  The dangers to fiberoptic cables are many, but the country of Armenia managed to get its internet taken down completely last week by one 75-year-old woman in the country of Georgia.  Scavenging for copper near Ksani, she apparently came upon a major fiberoptic cable owned and operated by the Georgian Railway Telecom company which supplies bandwidth to all three wholesale providers in Armenia: [Read more →]

Today in the South Pacific, New Zealand based Pacific Fibre took another step toward making its goal of a new submarine cable connecting the country directly with the west coast of the USA as well as over to Australia.  They have released their ‘Invitation to Tender’ to selected submarine cable supply companies, which I assume would include folks like [Read more →]

So much other news yesterday, let’s quickly catch up:

The highest profile win came over at intellifiber with a government win at NASA.  It’s a five year contract to construct, provision, and deploy a network for NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility out on the Delmarva peninsula.  In the past, the facility’s connectivity all went south through Norfolk, and Intellifiber will be adding a network path along the eastern shore of Maryland to the north and back to the [Read more →]

As promised earlier this year, 360networks has expanded its network northward from Seattle into British Columbia with a new connection to Vancouver.  Along the way they added nodes in the Washington communities of Everett and Bellingham as well.  The buildout is driven by a particular customer win, allowing 360networks to extend its recently added IP transit and Ethernet products into new markets.  The identity of that new customer was not revealed, although there seems to be a Vancouver node on the map of [Read more →]

I have alluded to this before, but today GlobeNet (news) [a subsidiary of Oi (news)] formally claimed title to the lowest latency route between key financial hubs in the US and Brazil.  Specifically, they’re talking about routes to BM&F Bovespa in Sao Paulo from the US centers in New York, Chicago, and Toronto.  And in fact they offered up a hard number for their NYC to Sao Paolo route: [Read more →]

Phoenix-based data center operator and manufacturer i/o has raised $105M in capital through a new round of financing.  They’re going to use the money for growth, specifically to accelerate their Data Center as a Service offerings and to fulfill orders from enterprise customers for their i/o ANYWHERE modular data center technology.  i/o recently opened their third location with i/o New Jersey, which is built upon that modular technology.  They have now also begun work on phase 2 of its giant i/o Phoenix facility using it as well.  But the most interesting bit in this press release was that they intend [Read more →]

Of all that was once Nortel Networks, only the patents remain and even that not for long.  Google has been selected as the stalking horse bidder for the entire portfolio, with an initial bid of $900M.  That’s not the end by any means, all it does is set the stage for an auction in June.  There will almost certainly be other bidders.  Nortel had over the years assembled some 6,000 patents, of which 2,600 are in the USA.  To put that in perspective, Apple claims 3800 or so, and MicroSoft says they have [Read more →]

A few recent developments in the metro fiber sector in the past few days:

PAETEC (news, filings) continued to move in the direction of fiber following its acquisition of Cavalier and Intellifiber today by making the full footprint available for its channel partners to sell nationwide.  That includes EoC, Ethernet, EoC, low latency routes, and custom network builds both in the longhaul and metro.  They also revealed the intention to add [Read more →]

tinet today launched EtherCloud, a new Layer 2 service that builds on the integration of its existing wholesale Ethernet business and the Ethernet Exchange launched by Neutral Tandem last year.  Those who connect to it gain both the ability to buy Ethernet and VPLS connectivity to endpoints offered by other participants, and to sell connectivity to their own endpoints in return.  Tinet’s approach seems to be to simplify the relationships potential customers must develop to gain the connectivity they need, as opposed to [Read more →]

As the recent controversial offer by Icahn for the remainder of XO Holdings (news, filings) that he doesn’t already own hangs in the balance, the company waited (as it always does) until the very last minute to file its Q4 anf FY2010 numbers.  The company had forecast some upbeat second half results back in October, and by and large they managed to fulfill those promises.  Revenues of $390.3M were up sequentially again, and EBITDA margins remained above 15%.  Here’s a quick table summarizing their results: [Read more →]

I was traveling on Friday and over the weekend, time to catch up.  The Qwest/CenturyTel deal wasn’t the only one to close:

California’s largest CLEC TelePacific (news) finished off its acquisition of NextWeb, after receiving regulatory approval.  NextWeb was Covad’s fixed wireless play, operating in California, Nevada, and suburban Chicago with 3,500 business customers.  The California and Nevada pieces fit in very well with their regional focus, but just what they’re going to do with the Chicago piece is an open question.  Perhaps there might be some further territorial expansion at some point?  They’d fit well with [Read more →]

It’s official, q is off the market.  The merger with CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) is now complete, and where there were two mostly rural ILECs there is now one big one.  Pro forma for 2010, the combined company had revenues of $18.6B, EBITDA of $8.1B, and adjusted free cash flow of $3.1B.  The combined company expects to continue its current annual dividend of $2.90 per share.  While of course the biggest part of the deal is the traditional ILEC business, I’m quite curious to see where they take the combined intercity [Read more →]