Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Just as the company is about to complete its merger with CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings), q picked up a big win in the government sector.  DISA/DITCO, which handles this sort of thing for the Department of Defense, has awarded the company a contract that could be worth in excess of $100M for IP services.  Under the deal, Qwest’s Governemt Services group will be the sole provider for the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and other agencies.  [Read more →]

Yesterday we saw Cox Business land the contract for a large fiber buildout in Rhode Island for OSHEAN, but apparently Sidera Networks also won some business for the project.  Sidera, which used to go by the name RCN Metro, will be handling part of the buildout across the border into Massachussets.  Specifically, they will help bring fiber to universities in Bristol County, which is that part of Massachusetts along [Read more →]

And the winner is…. Kansas City!?  Yep, the lucky winner of Google’s Gigabit FTTH project is Kansas City, Kansas.  Nope, not the one accross the river in Missouri that has 2.1M people as well as its very own NFL team.  It’s the one with just 145,786 people according to the 2010 census, and is only the third largest city in the Kansas City metro area.  A cynic might suggest that [Read more →]

Three technology and data giants, Dell, Equinix, and Rackspace, teamed up today for the launch of an OpenStack cloud demonstration and test environment.  OpenStack is a collection of open source tech for scalable public and private clouds that was originally founded by RackSpace and NASA.  The geographically dispersed demo and test environment will help speed the deployment of OpenStack proof of concepts. [Read more →]

Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) is bringing its European 100G experience back across the Atlantic.  Today they have announced plans to deploy the latest technology on selected segments of their US backbone by the end of Q2.  The lucky routes include Chicago to New York, Sacramento to Los Angeles, and Minneapolis to Kansas City.  Really, they need 100G on a north south route across the great plains?  Not exactly your usual bottleneck there, but hey what do I know.  Perhaps the key there isn’t overwhelming traffic, but rather a route on which they are comparatively [Read more →]

Pan-European service provider Interoute continued its cloud offensive today by nabbing German-based stationer Pelikan as a client.  Pelikan has been selling stationary, pens, and pencils since before Otto von Bismarck unified the country – 172 years according to their PR.  But that long history isn’t holding them in the past, as this upgrade involves moving their IT infrastructure into the clouds. [Read more →]

Cox Business has won a large regional and metro fiber buildout in the state of Rhode Island.  The fiber buildout derives from the $21.7M BTOP award won by OSHEAN last year – OSHEAN is the state’s research and education nonprofit networking entity.  The buildout will take 48-strand cable through some 350 route miles and pass through 38 of 39 of the largest cities in the state.  Here’s a quick map: [Read more →]

Financial bandwidth upstart Spread Networks (news) added another reseller to its portfolio today.  Managed service provider CFN Services will be offering the company’s low latency wavelengths to the financial community, effective immediately.  Spread just announced a reduction in the latency of those waves, down to 14.6ms (14.75ms SLA’d), and I noted yesterday that [Read more →]

Fresh off the announcement of its first ever dividend, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) is going on the M&A warpath again.  This time the target is privately held software provider newScale.  The California-based newScale’s products deliver a service catalog and portal for IT organizations to deploy cloud services.  Cisco will use the technology to fill out its cloud portfolio, giving it more depth in what it can sell to enterprises.  Having a ready-made self service portal makes sense in that capacity, and buying an existing [Read more →]

As if there were any doubt about Sprint’s feelings on the subject, Sprint has formally announced its opposition to the purchase:

AT&T and Verizon are already by far the largest wireless providers. If approved, the proposed acquisition would create a combined company that would be almost three times the size of Sprint in terms of wireless revenue and would entrench AT&T’s and Verizon’s duopoly control over the wireless market. The wireless industry moving forward would be dominated overwhelmingly by two vertically integrated companies with unprecedented control over the U.S. wireless post-paid market, as well as the availability and price of key inputs, such as backhaul and access needed by other wireless companies to compete.

[Read more →]

There’s this interesting article out of Taiwan today detailing an unorthodox use for submarine fiber, though I think they got the terminology wrong.  At least, I don’t think one can prevent earthquakes with optical fiber, not even with the latest equipment!  Early warning of earthquakes and tsunami though, that makes sense and it appears to be what they are doing. [Read more →]

Upstart intercity financial network operator Spread Networks (news) has taken out the hedge clippers again, cutting another millisecond off of its low latency wavelength offering between the New York and Chicago metro areas.  The new SLA’d number is 14.75ms, down from the 15.75ms they have been touting over the last six months, with measured performance of 14.6ms.  The new number applies to all four [Read more →]

Several more items from across the Atlantic to start the week:

European network operator Interoute added another notch to its belt, winning a deal to enhance the VPN network of EuroSport. The pan-european TV channel will see its 12 site MPLS network expand to 20 sites with better QoS and twice the capacity, all for a similar budget. Can’t argue [Read more →]

As if it weren’t foggy enough in London, Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] this morning took its cloud services to the whole government sector in the UK with their Government Wide Service platform.  Aimed at what has been called the ‘G-Cloud’, Savvis’s offering is designed to supply a pre-built, accredited platform that eliminates upfront capital costs and reduces deployment time.  The GWS had already been powering the UK Home Office, but they have a second taker already. [Read more →]

Ok, it’s not that bad yet, but MicroSoft just spent money to acquire a pile of IP addresses from the remnants of the Nortel bankruptcy.  Now that ICANN is out of addresses to give out, it is only a matter of time before market forces determine just what one is worth.  MicroSoft paid $7.5M for 666,624 addresses, which means the first volley sets the value at $11.25 each.  But it was opportunistic, surely they didn’t need it?  Interestingly, if such a value becomes a liquidly tradeable item, then the total value of its market is known.  There are 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses, so at $11.25 each the entire supply would be worth [Read more →]

In a poll on Monday, I asked whether the FCC and DOJ would approve the AT&T/T-Mobile USA deal.  A majority of readers said yes.  But as one commenter noted, that’s not the only question to ask here.  After all, many of us are a tad cynical when it comes to the goings on in DC.  Now that some of the dust has settled, instead of asking what they will do let’s now ask what they should do: [Read more →]

As it’s Friday, let’s take a bit of a break from the string of technology and corporate progress, and recognize a philanthropic effort from within our own ranks.  On April 18, Global Crossing’s John Legere plans to make his seventh run in the Boston Marathon as part of the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge Team, which raises money to help fight humanity’s long running battle with cancer.  Proceeds go to [Read more →]

A quick look at recent news across the Atlantic:

euNetworks (news) and MESH GmbH have partnered up to deliver cloud services to the enterprise.  euNetworks obviously brings its metro and intercity fiber to the table, which will add high bandwidth connectivity to MESH’s IaaS platform for both private and hybrid clouds. A strong network is essential to any [Read more →]