Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Viatel’s European network business, VTLWaveNet, seems to be waking up from its long post-bubble slumber.  Last month they lit their French routes south of Paris, and this week they took the effort further by lighting their Geneva-Bern-Zurich route and adding a new route from Zurich south to Milan.  [Read more →]

Earlier this week, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) reported reasonable earnings but a depressing near term future, and promised a major cost savings effort to save $1B in annual costs.  We all know what that means.  Yep, top management will probably have to forgo their bonuses to show solidarity with the several thousand employees they will be downsizing.  Now is the toughest time for those employees, as they know [Read more →]

A bit of catchup to do now:

Down in Texas, regional and metro network operator Alpheus Communications has joined the IPv6 bandwagon, having implemented the new protocol across its fiber footprint.  I’m still figuring out how to get Ramblings on that bandwagon of course.  As for Alpheus, this time last year there was talk it was up for sale, at one point said to be in [Read more →]

Following its new presence in Zurich, euNetworks (news) extended its financial bandwidth business even further south across the Alps into Milan, Italy today.  That gives them low latency connectivity from the other financial markets in their footprint, including 8.81ms to London, 4.71ms to Frankfurt, and 1.98ms to Zurich.  euNetworks also reported earnings this morning, as it continues to put in place all the pieces of a European version of the metro-fiber-driven business we have seen take off in the past few years here in the US.  Here is a quick tabular summary of their results in context: [Read more →]

Ok, I admit it.  That was a really bad title, but I just couldn’t resist.  Another week, another high profile CDN win for Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings).  HBO selected them to provide streaming of content for their new HBO GO mobile app to various devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, as well as select Android devices.  As you might expect, HBO GO gives HBO subscribers access to 1,400 titles worth of premium channel content they would otherwise have only been able to see at home.  The app has the potential to drive some serious bandwidth if people use it, as HBO saw over 1M [Read more →]

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that both Sidera and FiberLight are for sale.  Of course Ramblings’ readers knew about Sidera already, as I broke that news last week.  As for FiberLight, they are owned by the Thermo group and have been since 2003.  I’m certain that they’d sell if they got the price they want, however Thermo has made sure FiberLight has the funding to expand and I suspect their price won’t be cheap.  But those aren’t the only rumors I’m hearing right now.  Actually, it’s quite chaotic on the rumor front, much like it was last year around this time – there are lots of assets in play.  Here are a few rumored deals that seem to be popping up the most: [Read more →]

The world of bandwidth down under continues to evolve rapidly.  Today Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) announced that it has been commissioned by a subsidiary of Leighton Contractors Telecommunications to build a new submarine cable between Australia and Singapore.  The obviously named Australia-Singapore Cable will, unlike most other cables in the region, land on the west coast of the continent at Perth.  The route will traverse 4,800km and pass through Indonesia’s Sundu Straight.  From Perth terrestrial fiber will connect it all the way over to Sydney.  I’m still looking for a [Read more →]

The competitive metro provider with the most buildings on-net, TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings), posted its first quarter results today.  Revenue growth accelerated at a higher rate than in the past and bested estimates at $332.5M, while earnings per share fell sequentially as expected to $0.08 due to seasonality in costs.  Capital expenditures remained high, and the company continued to expand its on-net footprint very aggressively.  Here is a quick tabular summary in the context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]

tndm reported earnings this morning, posting revenues of $66.4M that easily surpassed composite analyst estimates while earnings per share came in on target at $0.24.  I’ll be keeping closer track of Neutral Tandem given the fact that they now own and operate Tinet and its international backbone, and with their EtherCloud and other plans they seem to be evolving into a more complicated company.  More on that after a quick table of results: [Read more →]

So ever since Om broke the rumor on Sunday, the word was that Skype was about to get bought by a big internet powerhouse.  Some said the buyer was Facebook, some said Google, but it turned out to be Microsoft.  The pricetag was a whopping $8.5B, and it obviously takes Skype’s IPO off the table.  But does it make any sense at all?  [Read more →]

euNetworks (news) added a new node to its dedicated finance network today with the launch of ultra-low-latency connectivity to Equinix’s ZH4 IBX in Zurich, Switzerland.  The ZH4 facility just opened its doors last May, and is on the same campus as ZH1 and ZH2 but with 2,300 square meters in total space.  On the financial end, the route gives trading companies direct access to the SIX [Read more →]

The Wall Street Journal has an article this morning detailing a growing challenge to the reign of Telecom’s (and the world’s) richest man, Mexico’s Carlos Slim, and América Móvil, which he controls.  A few weeks ago, Mexico’s antitrust regulator actually worked up the mojo to fine his Telcel subsidiary $1B for monopolistic practices.  Then last week, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that Telcel couldn’t ignore [Read more →]

This weekend was an birthday of sorts for this website.  Three years ago Saturday I wrote my first article on Telecom Ramblings, which happened to be a financial model for Level 3.  I never imagined that I’d still be here 1,946 articles later, let alone that so many people would be reading them, responding to them, and helping me make sense of it all.  Thank [Read more →]

Over on the Jobs Board, we have a new job posting from the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER).  KINBER will be coordinating the construction and management of a state-wide fiberoptic network in Pennsylvania, or PennREN.  It’s a beneficiary of a piece of the stimulus funding awarded over the last two years aimed at hooking up universities, schools, hospitals, etc.  In particular, KINBER is looking for [Read more →]

Time to catch up on the bits of news that got past my radar or left me otherwise speechless:

Alongside yesterday’s earnings report, PAETEC (news, filings) announced its intention to build a new datacenter facility in McLean, VA as part of its efforts to [Read more →]

TelePacific expanded its asset base with not one but two M&A announcements today. While I wonder now and then if Telepacific might be an acquisition target itself at some point, they are clearly on [Read more →]

Back in February there was a report that pan-European network operator Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) was eyeing MarketPrizm with an eye toward a greater presence in the financial vertical.  Well it took a few months but such a deal did in fact take place, as yesterday Colt announced a binding agreement to purchase a majority stake in MarketPrizm, whose current owner Chi-X Global will stay on as a minority shareholder via its Instinet subsidiary.  Colt hopes to leverage [Read more →]

As promised, three very different fiber network operators reported earnings today, and all three bested revenue estimates.  Here is a quick summary of each with some comments: [Read more →]

In the first quarter, Clearwire added nearly 1.8M net subscribers, of whom 1.6M were of the wholesale variety.  That’s more than the 1.5M added in Q4 and brought their total to approximately 6.15M subscribers, and they now forecast ending 2011 with approximately 9.5M subscribers.  That would correspond to adding just over 1.1M each quarter from here, which suggests additional upside if they continue anywhere near their Q1 pace.  [Read more →]

High end IP and colo provider Internap Network Services (NASDAQ:INAP, news, filings) took another big step into the cloud, unveiling a high performance on-demand cloud computing service.  With dual hypervisor support for VMware and OpenStack environments, as well as the cloud storage service they announced earlier this year, Internap is following a path that has to have been beckoning for a long time.  I expect there are more [Read more →]