Telecom Ramblings

Tomorrow before the market opens, three very different competitive network operators will report earnings, here’s a quick preview of what to expect:

AboveNet: abvt is coming off a year of organic growth in which it entered several new metro markets both in the US and in Europe, and investors will be looking to see if they can maintain the pace they have set for themselves.  Some extra capex from 2010 was delayed and will probably show up in an elevated [Read more →]

A recent report by Cowen and other tidbits from the grapevine say that Sidera Networks and its northeastern metro and regional fiber footprint may be up for sale again.  ABRY Partners bought the former RCN Metro division just last year as part of the larger RCN acquisition, and had separated out the metro fiber assets and said it intended to use them as a consolidation platform – and in fact bought the LIFE assets out on Long Island to start the ball rolling.  What’s changed since then? [Read more →]

As promised in an interview here last month, paet has upgraded its Ethernet-over-copper (EoC) footprint from 15Mbps per fiber pair all the way up to 100Mbps.  To power those speeds, PAETEC is leveraging nextgen carrier Ethernet edge and aggregation tech from Overture Networks. The company’s EoC offerings have reportedly been seeing [Read more →]

International backbone and IP solutions operator glbc reported Q1/2011 earnings today, three weeks after the long anticipated announcement of its intended purchase by Level 3 for $3B.  Global Crossing had finished off 2010 with a fourth quarter of strong revenue growth, and had forecast an uptick in organic growth for 2011 overall though not sequentially due to non-recurring items in the UK for Q4 plus the usual seasonality.  In the first quarter they posted revenues of $661 and EBITDA of $84, which lagged composite analyst expectations, but didn’t surprise me much while the company maintained its full year guidance. Here is a quick table of their numbers in the context of prior quarters: [Read more →]

International fiber operator lvlt reported its Q1/2011 earnings this morning, fresh off its long-awaited announcement of the Global Crossing deal three weeks ago.  That deal has taken center stage since, however it won’t close until much later in the year, and Level 3 has unfinished business on the organic growth front to handle first.  The first quarter is traditionally lighter, however in their fourth quarter call Level 3 indicated they expected to manage a bit of sequential growth nonetheless, and in fact they posted solid revenues of $929, including $728M in core network services, which bested street estimates – and my own as well of course.  Communications adjusted EBITDA of $225 was also a sequential improvement.   [Read more →]

llnw took another step into the cloud yesterday with the acquisition of Clickability.  Clickability is a software-as-a-service provider of web content management tools, meaning they enable their customers to create and manage their website content via their specialized software and distributed server infrastructure.  Limelight will take that offering and integrate it alongside its traditional CDN business, video platform, and the [Read more →]

csco formally introduced its containerized data center product today. That the company was moving in this direction surprises no one of course, and the containers are built to incorporate the technology of Cisco’s Unified Computing, Unified Fabric and Unified Network technologies.  The units consist of a forty foot weatherized ISO container design that can hold as many as sixteen cabinets with room for 44 rack units each, built on open architecture.  The full [Read more →]

On Tuesday before the market opens we will hear from the internet backbone duo of Level 3 and Global Crossing, who of course announced their intentions to get hitched a few weeks ago.  Since that deal seems rather unlikely to fall through, it seems appropriate to preview earnings for both companies at the same time.  The two share some common features when it comes first quarter results, namely  a) slower sequential growth due to a seasonally strong Q4, and b) higher cash usage due to seasonal expense trends.  This year, both companies are also projecting a stronger overall growth trend.  But of course they are not yet joined at the [Read more →]

Amazon today finally offered up a detailed failure report itemizing what went wrong last week when its Elastic Compute Cloud went down and took a chunk of the internet with it.  It’s quite a read.  That is, it’s quite a read if you can get through all the definitions and jargon.  Data Center Knowledge does a pretty good job of simplifying it a bit, but let’s make it a bit simpler.  [Read more →]

Sometimes the reports are all spread out, and sometimes they clump together.  This quarter it’s the latter, so it’s time for a quick look at a few more reports from yesterday:

inap had a bit of a rough quarter, as revenues declined sequentially again to $59.4M and normalized earnings turned negative with the loss of a penny per share.  The company guided toward sequential improvement in Q2, something that analysts seem to have hoped for a bit earlier.  Internap also announced an expansion into [Read more →]

Bandwidth equipment manufacturer infn filed it’s first quarter numbers yesterday.  Revenues declined sequentially to $92.9M from $117.1M in the prior quarter, which roughly matched composite analyst expectations and reflected as always the lumpiness of this business.  The company’s non-GAAP earnings per share dipped to a loss of $0.04, which was nevertheless better than the loss of $0.07 that they turned in during the same quarter last year and had been projected to repeat.  Here is a quick table of their results in the context of the prior four quarters: [Read more →]

What with all the earnings reports flooding in lately, let’s take a quick look at other items that might otherwise get drowned out:

Unite Private Networks continued to rack up fiber builds for lesser known school districts and municipalities.  Ohio’s Elyria City and Perrysburg Schools both [Read more →]

Embattled US #3 wireless provider s reported another quarter of sequential growth, ahead of analyst expectations of a drop.  Revenues of $8.313B were indeed a hair higher than last quarter and up 3% over the same period last year, while loss per share improved to $0.15, clearly ahead of composite expectations which Yahoo Finance had pegged at a loss of $0.21.  The market [Read more →]

Carrier neutral colocation provider eqix easily bested guidance and analyst estimates for the first quarter of 2011, raising guidance for the full year as well.  As one might expect, the market is responding favorably after hours.  In addition, Equinix announced further expansion plans, including yet another major data center facility in the NYC metro market, which will give them eight, and more space in Chicago and Frankfurt.  Here is a quick table of the company’s numbers in context: [Read more →]

Content delivery giant, or leading cloud optimization provider as they like to be called these days, akam reported its first quarter earnings today after the market closed.  While they managed to beat both their own guidance and analyst expectations on both earnings per share and revenue, the stock is down 10% after hours.  Traders apparently aren’t happy with the forward guidance company management gave on the conference call.  Here’s a quick rundown of the numbers in context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]

Well, put me down as surprised – I didn’t think svvs would actually sell.  But then, I didn’t think that ctl would offer $40 per share either, and that’s exactly what they did.  And thus we have a deal.  Today, CenturyLink agreed to purchase Savvis for approximately $2.5B in cash and stock, plus the assumption of net debt of about $650M. This follows much speculation over the past two quarters about the next big cloud M&A by a telecommunications company, in which Savvis has been [Read more →]

I’ve been asked now by several people whether there’s a rumor out there about TW Telecom and some sort of imminent M&A.  I think the talk I’ve heard thus far is mostly derived from the surge in their stock price since the middle of last week which took them above $20 again for the first time in a long while, as opposed to word of an actual deal on the table.  Thus far I would stress that I haven’t heard anything beyond that unspecific rumor of there being a rumor.  But I really wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was something at the root of it, so this seems like as good a time as any to ramble a bit on the subject. [Read more →]

Later this week, Hibernia Atlantic will take the wraps off a further expansion of its Global Financial Network (GFN).  A new offering, called Hibernia Secure, bundles multiple protected low latency paths per destination.  It’s not merely backing up one fast circuit with a much slower backup circuit, but rather with one or more often two routes that also offer very low latency – thus ensuring that even the outages are plenty fast enough.  That raises the ante a bit in the low latency marketplace, which has continued to evolve rapidly since bursting [Read more →]

Today we are joined by Clint Heiden, who was until recently President at Intellifiber Networks and is now President of PAETEC Fiber Services.  PAETEC purchased Intellifiber as part of the Cavalier transaction last autumn, and has since expanded the unit’s scope.  They’ve added in the former McLeodUSA assets, national accounts, and fixed wireless services as well, aiming at transforming the once fiber-light CLEC into a fiber power in its own right.  With no further ado: [Read more →]

lvlt announced early today that the company’s Vyvx division has been selected by no less than six national broadcasters in the US and Canada to provide coverage of that minor little shindig happening across the Atlantic later this week.  I say minor because we’ve sort of abolished royalty over here and I’d personally rather watch a Teletubbies marathon or some other more entertaining British production.  But that’s just me and I’m in the minority — it’s certainly going to be a a gigantic [Read more →]

So many cable projects these days hooking up far flung corners of the planet with vast amounts of capacity.  There have been the New Zealand to Los Angeles effort by Pacific Fibre, and the recently proposed Brazil-Africa cable too.  Then there are all those cables to Africa going on.  Key in such cases is obviously strategic interests by national governments.  But there have been much smaller projects to even more exotic destination also, and Alcatel-Lucent has picked up two such contracts this Spring already.  [Read more →]

If you haven’t already noticed, Amazon’s EC2 cloud has had a rather trying few days.  That’s the thing about public clouds.  Even if they’re far more reliable than hosting services of the past, when they go down they take down everyone at the same time.  Then it becomes a very public debacle.  So what you have is a statistically more reliable internet that seems more vulnerable nonetheless.  This won’t be the last time this happens, and Amazon won’t be the only one hit.  ‘Nuff said? [Read more →]

The other day I said I’d make an attempt at vaulting Telecom Ramblings into the IPv6 world.  The idea being that it is somewhat hypocritical for someone as technically oriented as me to complain of the slowness of the transition to IPv6 without ever having considered my own part in it or lack thereof.  After all, I have a static IPv4 address via which you are reading this right now.  Why isn’t this available on IPv6, even the way Google does via ipv6.google.com?  What precisely is stopping me?  And while we’re at it, just what is it needs to be done?  Do any of the journalists writing stuff about IPv4 exhaust and impending doom actually know?  As far as I can tell, the important links in the chain are: [Read more →]