Telecom Ramblings

Two of the more dynamic companies in the bandwidth infrastructure equipment space generally report earnings in the first week and set the tone for the sector to come:  Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) and Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings).  Last quarter, Infinera led off with guidance that disappointed the street, while Juniper followed up with a nice quarter that allayed fears that it might spread.  So what’s up for Q4?  [Read more →]

Fairpoint has emerged from Chapter 11 proceedings, and is ready to face the world once again.  They’ll do so with just $1B in debt and a $75M revolving credit facility, having shed about $1.8B of their previous debt load along with all their previous shareholders.  The company’s new [Read more →]

With its impending launch of the vaunted iPhone in the wings, Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) still had to go through the motions and report their results for the fourth quarter of 2010.  Overall, a first look says their performance was roughly inline, though the pessimists amongst the media might see it as a hair below.  Overall revenues of $26.4B were down slightly from [Read more →]

There’s a fascinating article about how the Shetland Islands is putting in its next generation of fiber infrastructure.  It’s meant to connect to the new SHEFA2 cable, which is bringing a direct fiber connection to the island, replacing the existing microwave link that has simply not been able to keep up lately.  But the Shetlands have, shall we say, rather few people and thus fiber is hard to justify even with a government grant.  [Read more →]

More of those stimulus funds are being put to work finally.  Today Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) won a bit of that business from the North Florida Broadband Authority with a five year contract.  The NFBA hopes to expand broadband coverage across 14 under-served counties fom south and west of Jacksonville on to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.  They won this award back in February for wireless broadband and middle mile connectivity, and are now [Read more →]

The two international telecommunications giants Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings) and China Unicom (NYSE:CHU, news, filings) have taken steps to strengthen their relationship.  Each of the two has agreed to invest an additional $500M in the other, China Unicom via a price based on the prior 30 days of trading of Telefonica stock, and Telefonica via a purchase of China Unicom from third parties in the next nine months.  When complete, the deal will bring Telefonica’s ownership in China Unicom up to 9.7%, with China Unicom’s ownership in Telefonica reaching [Read more →]

Billionaire Carl Icahn is trying once again to buy out minority shareholders of XO Holdings (news, filings).  In an SEC filing yesterday, his vehicle ACF Industries Holding Corp has offered to acquire the common shares he doesn’t already own for $0.70 – which is actually below both the close yesterday of $0.75 and the $0.80 he last bid.  That price is going to satisfy absolutely nobody, especially given upbeat guidance and numbers in the fall.  Other than Icahn of course.  This could be the start of the final season of As XO Turns, but there are many episodes yet to go.  The first question to be resolved is [Read more →]

It will come as no surprise that the FCC’s latest network neutrality effort is being challenged in court.  Actually, I’m somewhat surprised it took this long – I guess all the lawyers spent a bit longer in the Caribbean over the holidays.  But it is just a little bit ironic that it is Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) that is making the challenge, because the rules the FCC passed are more than a little bit similar to the principles that Verizon and Google put down on paper a few [Read more →]

Private equity firm Pivotal Group announced yesterday that it has purchased telecommunication logistics company Global Capacity.  Global Capacity filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy back in June, and Pivotal has now taken control by paying $65M of the company’s debt.  They are finalizing the plan to emerge from bankruptcy, and a hearing has been scheduled – not that there is any doubt since Pivotal owns 100% of the debt now.  So now the question shifts to what exactly Pivotal has in mind. [Read more →]

Am I the only one that thinks Comcast has made a mistake here?  Everyone seems to be worried about how Comcast is going to stomp all over both sectors, while reducing choice for consumers.  But I think the whole idea of marrying content with the last mile and everything in between is just a bad idea that at best will flounder and at worst will make us all forget about the AOL/Time-Warner debacle.  My reasons: [Read more →]

There’s been lots of things going on this week in the international networking arena that I haven’t touched on yet:

Upcoming international network PacketExchange is taking a swing at the cloud.  Over at PTC (Hawaii… I’m jealous) they unveiled their new product: Network Infrastructure as a Service or NIaaS for short.  The idea is to package the network access one uses to communicate to and between cloud applications.  Sounds like a good plan, but isn’t this ‘aaS’ acronym stuff [Read more →]

Time to survey recent developments in the data center marketplace:

Interconnection and colo specialist Telx Group (news, filings) turned on the lights at its new Ethernet exchanges in Miami, Dallas, and Los Angeles this week.  Three months ago, they added their first five such exchanges, and are of course partnering with tndm for even greater coverage.  Telx filed to [Read more →]

Verizon’s Global Wholesale division has been busy this week.  I always find it a bit hard to cover Verizon’s, they’re so big it’s hard to isolate a particular storyline that doesn’t involve consumer wireless stuff.  But if I just think of it as MCI or uunet, it gets easier.

Yesterday the international networking giant unveiled upgrades to its transparent LAN services, including extra bandwidth, combined [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) is moving deeper into the CDN space, offering a new service called CDN Site Transformer, which integrates website optimization technologies from Strangeloop.  Strangeloop – hmmm, sounds like it ought to be a metro fiber operator someplace…haha.  The idea behind the new service is that there are bottlenecks slowing down delivery of websites that are not addressed by optimizing the network and caching the data close to the recipient.  The website’s code itself can get [Read more →]

Ethernet exchange protagonist CENX (news) has found itself a datacenter partner in newly public CoreSite (NYSE:COR, news, filings).  This is more than a simple transaction for space and power, the two are collaborating on many levels.  CoreSite had considered building its own exchange capability, but chose this route instead in order to maintain focus on what it does best while partnering with one of the leaders.  They already offer interconnection and peering services alongside colocation, and some sort of foray into [Read more →]

There have been interesting developments in the submarine cable marketplace lately:

Reliance Globalcom is using Ciena gear to add 40G capabilities to the cable linking the UK, Spain, Italy, and Egypt.  That would be the former FLAG cable, 6,400km of fiber that lies between Reliance Globalcom’s Atlantic and Asian systems.  The upgrade gives them a future 100G upgrade path as well.  Reliance is said to shop the FLAG assets last year, I wonder if they’re still [Read more →]

International network operator glbc has added substantial muscle to its wholesale wavelength offerings, according to an announcement this morning.  At the top of the list is the 40Gbps services across their networks in the US and in continental Europe.  The company has of course been leveraging 40Gbps links on some routes for its IP network for a while, but they are now selling such wavelengths to customers as well, both in the [Read more →]

Content delivery provider Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) took a bit of a break from the content side of things, and got its hands dirty with a bit of IP transit work.  The company announced that the Arizona Internet Exchange, which it is backing, is now open for business.  Limelight is based in Arizona, which I actually did not know until today, and therefore has a vested [Read more →]

When they actually buy the fiber, you know the network is probably going to get built.  Today Corning announced that its Australian division has been awarded the contract for that fiber and other gear.  The deal could be worth up to AUS$1.2B over the full term, with an initial purchase commitment of AUS$400M.  That’s real money, meaning that [Read more →]

Rumors have been trickling out of Global Crossing since late last week that there has been a round of layoffs at the company, including but not limited to several comments left on this site.  There has been no official word out of the company on this subject just yet, but it does appear that something is going on.  How many?  I’m hearing 3% or so, i.e in the neighborhood of 150 people.  Where?  [Read more →]

ftwr has picked up another pile of fiber, working out an agreement with Zayo’s dark fiber division, Zayo Fiber Solutions.  FiberTower will lease some 2,500 miles of dark fiber for the long term and has options for additional fiber leases.  They will use all that fiber to fill out their wireless backhaul coverage, obviously, however there was no mention, however, of the [Read more →]

Time to catch up on the rest of the fiber-related news this week:

Hibernia Atlantic had two notable announcements.  First, they announced the further reduction of latency across their Global Financial Network.  They reduced the NJ/Toronto routes to 9.5ms, and also sped things up in the NJ metro area.  They also have that new transatlantic link in the works of course, but a solid footprint on land is critical regardless.  Secondly, [Read more →]

So last week we ran two polls about the M&A potential in 2011, the first one picking likely buyers, and the second one picking likely targets.  Readers of this site tend to be very knowledgeable on this subject, as they are often sitting in the front row if not on stage when they happen.  So who won the somewhat dubious honor of leading each list? [Read more →]