Telecom Ramblings

Here for a Q&A today is the CEO of Cogent, Dave Schaeffer, who doesn’t really need much of an introduction.  Since the dot com bubble Cogent has followed a rather vocal and independent path, fusing a wholesale IP backbone, a metro-fiber fed enterprise data business, and simple but aggressive pricing.  He didn’t make many friends along the way, actually earning the title ‘the most hated man in telecom’ from Forbes in a profile a few years ago.  But two weeks ago, Cogent Communications (NASDAQ:CCOI, news, filings) posted a solid quarterly profit after several years of steady, disciplined growth, announced a new stock buyback effort, and appears poised to [Read more →]

National WiMAX protagonist clwr has been having some trouble stabilizing its top management team lately it seems.  Today the company announced the departure of its CEO and two others, an interim appointment, and two promotions – and that’s just at the CXO level.  The company’s CEO Bill Morrow has resigned ‘for personal reasons’, and the chairman of the board John Stanton will be standing in as interim CEO while they look for a new one.  Morrow had taken the helm almost precisely two years ago, taking over from Wolff in March of 2009 – perhaps [Read more →]

Optimum Lightpath (news) [a subsidiary of Cablevision (NYSE:CVC, news, filings)] took away another customer from Verizon in the healthcare vertical, according to an announcement today.  Jersey City based Horizon Health Center has revamped its voice and data services.  Their 5Mbps copper based infrastructure is now a 100Mbps fiber-based infrastructure complete with hosted voice, saving money and restoring [Read more →]

Yesterday at the OFC/NFOEC conference, Corning (NYSE:GLW, news, filings) unveiled the next generation of its LEAF non-zero dispersion shifted fiber.  The new version is optimized for longhaul applications, with an attenuation specification at $0.19db/km at 1550nm.  That corresponds to a 3dB per 100km over other NZ-DSF products, and means this new generation will be able to achieve [Read more →]

Pan-European network operator Interoute (news) did a little cloudy M&A yesterday, announcing the acquisition of Visual Conference Group.  VCG offers managed video conferencing and telepresence services from its home turf in Scandanavia, having been founded by former Tandberg personnel back in 2002.  Interoute’s plan is obviously to take that product and expand it to rest of Europe by leveraging [Read more →]

Another 100G deal for Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) today.  The research network Internet2 has partnered with the Maryland-based equipment maker to overhaul its backbone as part of that BTOP grant they got a while back.  The purpose of the grant was to support UCAN, or the Unified Community Anchor Network project, aimed at connecting up schools, libraries, community colleges, public safety organizations, hospitals, and other worthy locations to real bandwidth.  That’ll be 200,000 of them nationwide to be exact, or perhaps ‘inexact’ [Read more →]

Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) is in the news all the time these days, but almost entirely for its wireless business and the company’s rather public indecisiveness over Clearwire, WiMAX, TMobile, LTE, LightSquared, etc.  But there’s also that pesky wireline business that nobody ever talks about much even though it contributed $5.04B in revenue and $1.09B in EBITDA in 2010.  In all the speculation about Sprint’s future in the soap opera of wireless networks, the fate of one of the largest international fiber and IP backbones seems to get far less than its share of attention.  For instance, just what would happen [Read more →]

As the rollout of cloud services by telecoms continues, Indian giant Tata Communications (news, filings) is staking out some turf in Southeast Asia.  They have now launched their InstaCompute service in Singapore, aiming at customers across the region, e.g. malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Phillipines, and Hong Kong.  This follows their initial roll-out in India last fall, and they expect to move on from here to Europe, the US, and South Africa by the end of 2011.   Tata’s IaaS service appears to be [Read more →]

The news this morning has Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) in talks with Deutsche Telecom AG (ETR:DTE, news, filings) over a potential merger with T-Mobile USA.  And in other news, the sun rose this morning and is rumored to be likely to set this evening.  You’d think if a deal were to be had, they’d have made a bit more progress on it by now.  On the plus side, such a deal would make a bigger wireless carrier that is more able to compete with AT&T and Verizon in scale.  On the minus side, the two networks are incompatible as it stands, and to say that Sprint has been burned recently by integration troubles is [Read more →]

Alternative fiber operator Zayo Group (news, filings) announced an expansion of their Dallas footprint.  As I recall, Zayo’s footprint in Dallas originally came as a part of its second acquisition of wholesale assets from CityNet.  However, until now, Zayo had done very little with the asset.  A quick perusal of their public on-net building list revealed [Read more →]

Communications software specialist Broadsoft (NASDAQ:BSFT, news, filings) finished out its first (partial) year as a public company with an undeniably big fourth quarter.  Revenues  of $35.8M easily eclipsed both guidance and analyst estimates which were in the $31-32M range.  Adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.44 were at least a full dime above guidance and projections.  Now that we have five quarters of data, here’s a table showing the company’s quarterly results in context: [Read more →]

The M&A speculation storm that has surrounded Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] doesn’t seem to be letting up.  Today a rumor circulated that they had hired Qatalyst Partners out of San Francisco to advise them.  That seemed reasonable enough, but Savvis CEO Jim Ousley quickly poured ice water on the idea: [Read more →]

Several interesting items today and over the past few days:

KDDI America (news) [a subsidiary of KDDI (TYO:9433, news, filings)] is a company I didn’t hear much from until recently, but they have been on a US expansion kick lately.  Today it was out in California, where they expanded their MetroWave services into four facilities, two in the LA market (Telehouse and Equinix LA1) and two up in [Read more →]

It has now been just short of a year since Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) acquired Nortel’s MEN business out of bankruptcy, which is time enough to expect to see signs of either success or failure in the aggressive purchase.  With their first fiscal quarter 2011 results, it does seem as if things are still going pretty well in Maryland.  Ciena reported revenues of $433.3M, which topped its own guidance of $410-430M and easily outdistanced analyst estimates that were just above the midpoint of that guidance.  That 4% sequential growth follows a 7% [Read more →]

Amongst the more independent, unique fiber assets out there is the western regional footprint of 360Networks, much of which derives from the former Touch America buildout.  Lately the company has been expanding beyond the wholesale transport and VoIP it has favored and into the IP and Ethernet marketplace.  With us today for a quick Q&A is Rick Coma, senior vice president at 360Networks.  With no further ado: [Read more →]

Fridays are slow news days, so let’s catch up on some news on the cloud and datacenter front:

Way over in Chongqing, China, Pacnet has been making some friends.  The Asia Pacific networking specialist has signed on to the city government’s plans for an international cloud computing hub.  Centrally planned Chinese government projects are rarely small, and indeed they have dedicated 10 square kilometers to it of which 3 are reserved for the buildout of datacenters.  If it happens, the deal would make Pacnet Business solutions the first foreign JV to operate in the new Special Zone with a data center holding at least 1,500 racks.  But Chongqing?  I mean, [Read more →]

Ok, several people have asked why I haven’t commented on the National Broadband Map yet.  It was, of course, unveiled a week or two ago to great fanfare, and has generally gotten good reviews.  Or at least as good as is possible for such an endeavor.  Despite my own predilection toward maps in general, and maps related to fiber and bandwidth more specifically, I haven’t been able to get real excited about it.  Here are my top 3 reasons why it’s great, and my top 3 reasons for why it’s not: [Read more →]

With one of its signature multi-PR blasts this morning, Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) launched itself into the packet optical arena.  They unveiled their new their Converged Supercore, which aims to put them right in the thick of things with Ciena and Alcatel-Lucent.  The idea is, in their words, to combine ‘the inherent efficiency of MPLS, the simplicity of switching and integrated optics to deliver unmatched network scale with fewer network elements.’  It’s a different approach in a rapidly [Read more →]

I missed it on Monday, but FPL FiberNet has made a rather interesting move westward into Texas by purchasing the longhaul network assets of Grande Communications.  The thing about the fiber divisions owned by energy companies is that they tend not to make moves outside their home turf, except I guess for FPL.  Actually, I did hear a casual rumor last fall that there was something happening with FPL Fibernet and Texas, but I had been looking at [Read more →]

Competitive provider cbey closed out 2010 with a fourth quarter that was a bit lighter than expected due to lower average revenue per customer.  Revenues of $116.2M were up sequentially from $113.5M in Q3, but adjusted EBITDA remained flat at $18.0M while loss per share expanded to $0.07 from $0.02.  EBITDA margin therefore fell again to 15.5%, giving back a bit more of the gains [Read more →]

Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) is moving further into the enterprise telecom space with yet another M&A transaction.  They have purchased yet another company, STS Telecom, adding to their purchases of Deltacom and the pending deal for One Communications.  STS Telecom serves SME customers in Florida and Georgia, which also happens to overlap nicely with that Deltacom footprint.  That Earthlink is still on the prowl is a given.  They clearly have [Read more →]

The Carrier Ethernet marketplace saw some M&A yesterday, as Overture Networks and Hatteras Networks announced their agreement to merge.  The two occupy different but complementary niches in the Ethernet market.  Overture spends its effort on Ethernet over TDM and fiber, while Hatteras has focused on bonded copper pairs.  Following the completion of the deal in a few weeks, the combined company will keep the Overture name.  Financial details were not disclosed, but analysts suggest the total revenues are probably [Read more →]

Interoute and Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) took another step into the 100G era with a successful demonstration of the latter’s 5x100Gbps photonic integrated circuits.  The coherent 100Gbps channels were transmitted on fiber with 20x10Gbps of live traffic.  The route was from Amsterdam to London and then back again, totaling 940km with a 210km unrepeatered undersea segment across the North Sea in the middle.  The demo, went off without a hitch, naturally, else [Read more →]