Telecom Ramblings

Carrying the tech world on its shoulders must be tiring for Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings), given the thanklessness of the task.  In their fiscal Q1 earnings report today, the equipment giant reported revenues of $10.75B and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.42, both of which exceeded analyst forecasts.   That happy news was greeted by a 13% decline in the stock price after hours, which when you’re as big as Cisco is a $15B haircut in marketcap.  [Read more →]

Not a lot of big news today, which offers us a chance to catch up on some items I didn’t follow up on yet:

Up in Canada, upstart metro equipment provider BTI Systems raised new funds and reworked their balance sheet for the next phase of their growth.  The arrangement includes $11M in new financing from existing investors as well as increases in credit facilities and reduction in long term liabilities.  BTI expects to top [Read more →]

Hmmm, perhaps I’ll have to expand my definition of on-net buildings even further.  Yesterday, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) announced that it will be working with Stratus Global to improve offshore communications for the oil and gas industry.  Offshore as in oil rigs, platforms, and vessels in the Gulf of Mexico.  The two year agreement is for $5.2M, and will bring reliable voice service, corporate VPNs, high-speed Internet connectivity, and wi-fi hotspots. [Read more →]

Competitive fiber operator Zayo Group (news, filings) is planning a major initiative up north in Minnesota, according to a new PR today.  With the acquisition of American Fiber Systems, the stimulus award they picked up for the area earlier this year, and the regional fiber that came along with the Onvoy assets a couple of years ago, Zayo now has a very solid footprint in and around the Minneapolis/St.Paul metropolitan area.  The new build plans will extend the company’s total Minnesota mileage to 1700 and add service to some 350 wireless towers.  Along with the twin cities, coverage will be added or increased in [Read more →]

There have been several items over the past day or two from fiber operators worth a quick take:

XO Holdings (news, filings) continued its recent series of expansions with another such effort in Phoenix.  The company has added some 130 miles to its metro network on the east side into Chandler, Gilbert and Mesa offering potential access to some 200 more buildings.  They have also deployed Ethernet over copper more broadly in Phoenix as well.  Hanging overhead of course is [Read more →]

That’s the word according to Dan Rayburn, and it matches what I’ve been hearing since my post last week about Level 3’s CDN push.  Multiple sources that are almost certainly independent of Dan’s have now told me that the new content customer won in October for whom Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) is spending $15M in capex is in fact Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX, news, filings).  But that Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) may be the one taking it on the chin is a new one on me, though I doubt we will hear for sure until it’s time for Q4 earnings and 2011 projections.  I somehow doubt that [Read more →]

IP communications specialist Broadsoft (NASDAQ:BSFT, news, filings) put forward its strongest earnings quarter since going public back in June.  According to Yahoo Finance, the company was expected to achieve revenues of $19.6M and a non-GAAP loss per share of  $0.07, which it easily beat with $22.3M in revenues and actual earnings per share of $0.08.  Perhaps they don’t yet have BroadSoft’s measure on Wall Street just yet.  Here is a quick table of the company’s results in the context of the first two quarters of 2010: [Read more →]

Global IP solutions provider glbc announced today that it is providing Office Depot with an MPLS network supporting data and voice services.  The office supply provider will use the connectivity to hook up more than 100 warehouse and distribution centers and large customer sites across the US, Europe, China, and Israel.  This is a three year deal meant to complement [Read more →]

Ever since their merger announcement back in April, CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) and q have been rather quiet, busily working behind the scenes cutting through red tape to get approval from everyone they need to get approval from.  And that doesn’t just mean state PUCs and federal agencies, as shown by today’s announcement that they have come to terms with the CLEC Integra Telecom.  It’s not that they needed approval from the competition (else none of these would ever go through) but rather that Integra could [Read more →]

On Friday, a wide-ranging group of thinkers filed a statement with the FCC in response to an otherwise unassuming NPRM entitled “Further Inquiry into Two Under-developed Issues in the Open Internet Proceeding“.  What they had to say was not for or against the NPRM itself.  Rather, they simply praised how it separated the concept of the internet from that of specialized services.  Several then followed up with blog posts.  David P. Reed’s was particularly well formed, including this section: [Read more →]

Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) added to the evidence of a growing CDN pie with its third quarter results.  Revenues of $49.8M were very strong, above its own guidance of $46.5-48.5M and ahead of analyst expectations of $47.8.  For the fourth quarter, they expect revenues of $51.5-53.5M which is roughly inline with expectations, though perhaps [Read more →]

For clwr life has always been a race, but I’m not referring to LTE and WiMAX.  Clearwire’s race has always been against itself and itself.  By that I mean the triple competition between how much cash it can raise, how fast it can spend that cash to build out the infrastructure, and how quickly subscribers sign on to use it.  In yesterday’s earnings release, we saw awesome subscriber growth, steady spending and building, but a faltering effort to raise money to keep it all going.  And unless they fix that last part, the race will soon end – so they took some drastic actions to give themselves some breathing room. [Read more →]

Windstream (NYSE:WIN, news, filings) has been quite busy this year already, but they aren’t done yet. Today the company announced its intention to acquire Hosted Solutions from the private equity firm ABRY for $310M.  Hosted Solutions operates multiple data centers in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Boston.  The acquisition will bring Windstream’s datacenter count up to 12, and will add 65K square feet to their footprint.  Hosted Solutions did $51.7M in revenue in the twelve months ending on September 30, 2010, with $25.7M in adjusted EBITDA.  Those are some pretty [Read more →]

As expected, four metro fiber operators have reported earnings either after the bell yesterday or this morning.  Let’s take a look through the results we previewed yesterday:

TW Telecom – Overall, Q3 results were perfectly inline with my expectations.  Eerie actually, it doesn’t usually work out that well.  Revenues were perhaps a tad [Read more →]

Time to catch up in the metro fiber segment, which will bring me back up to date following the tsunami of sector news this week.

Tops on the list is the departure of Zayo Bandwidth’s President and COO John Scarano.  Scarano and Caruso go way, way back, through several generations of the bandwidth industry all the way to its first metro fiber play at MFS before it was sold to Worldcom.  Citing the end of his original four year contract and an interest in moving to the next phase of his career, Mr. Scarano explained that [Read more →]

Enough of earnings for the moment, and back to raw theoretical traffic consumption.  The pan-European research network GÉANT is taking the plunge into 100G with an upgrade to key portions of their backbone.  They plan to procure the equipment during 2011 with rollout of the upgrade by mid 2012.  No word on whose equipment they will use, I’m sure that will involve some sort of [Read more →]

Occasionally, the planets align in a certain formation or something and everyone in the sector picks the same day to release earnings.  This November 4 is one of those times, with a dozen or so providers deciding that there is strength in numbers, or perhaps just safety.  Four of those providers are operators of substantial metro and intercity fiber that I cover regularly – TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings), abvt, Cogent Communications (NASDAQ:CCOI, news, filings), and PAETEC (news, filings) – and therefore in the interests of brevity I will limit myself to this group when making projections in advance of the announcements. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at several international items that hit the wires yesterday:

Down in Australia, they are still haggling over the NBN and probably will be for years yet.  But yesterday Telstra stirred up a new hornets nest when it pegged the value of the network it has already agreed to sell to the government at AU$16B – saying that the often quoted $11B was a post-tax number.  It’s really a bizarre negotiation isn’t it, where the agreement to sell comes before an agreement on price?  If that weren’t odd enough, [Read more →]

Some days the news is slim pickings, and other days it just pours.  Here is a quick look at several items in the datacenter and cloud space that were of interest:

Back in February when Pacific operator Pacnet (news) announced a plan to turn some of its landing stations into datacenter space, I was somewhat skeptical.  Today they unveiled the first such facility in Hong Kong, dubbed a Data Landing Station.  As I suspected, [Read more →]

It’s not often we get so much news on one subject in one morning, even for Ethernet Exchanges which have been hot for a year.

Independent exchange operator CENX announced that it has reached 15 million Ethernet Service Locations served through its exchanges around the world.  That’s just four months after it reached 10M, and suggests continued growth ahead.  Another major operator also announced its participation in CENX’s exchanges as well.  This time it was [Read more →]

The jury may still be out on its overall revenue growth path, but there have been several items lately that demonstrate that Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) is on offense when it comes to the CDN sector.  The latest data point is today’s announcement of its expansion in both capacity and reach.  They have added 1.65Tbps in total capacity to their CDN capabilities and added nodes in Toronto, Montreal, Hamburg, Brussels, and Munich.  They had mentioned in their earnings conference call last week that a large chunk of their higher capex during the quarter went to [Read more →]

Colocation and cloud provider Terremark (news, filings) [a subsidiary of Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings)] turned in a strong fiscal Q2 yesterday.  Revenues of $84.9M were up 7.5% sequentially and 22% over the same period last year, not to mention above both guidance and analyst estimates.  EBITDA of $22.9M was likewise above guidance, up some 28% from last year.   That should push further into the background any worries about the colocation sector seeing [Read more →]

International network operator glbc announced their Q3 earnings results after the bell, but the results didn’t match up to earlier projections of a big second half.   The company therefore reduced its guidance for revenue growth from $2.3-2.375B down to $2.275-2.3B, and cut its free cash flow estimate back to straddling the break even line – it had been $10-60M.  OIBDA guidance remained generally inline, as they narrowed guidance a bit below the midpoint of what it had been previously.  Here is a quick tabular summary of the company’s results in the context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]