Telecom Ramblings

Geez, the deals just keep rolling in.  I had speculated several times this year about who might buy itcd, but while I was right they were for sale my thoughts as to the buyer turned out to be way off the mark!  Today, Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) announced its intention to purchase the southeastern CLEC for $3.00 per share.  Including net debt, the total purchase price therefore is $516M.  That’s an enterprise value of 4.7 times adjusted EBITDA, which seems reasonable at first glance.  Deltacom doesn’t focus much on its metro fiber and has never traded at the higher multiples of this sector. [Read more →]

Last week I wondered at where the larger strategic buyers were hiding in this frenetic M&A season, and I mentioned my own feeling that TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) seemed the best positioned of the larger fiber operators to make a move.  That got me thinking about just what TW Telecom would want to buy, given that they didn’t seem to be all that interested in all that northeastern fiber that has been changing hands this year.  But what if TW Telecom isn’t uninterested in M&A, but rather is ready to look for something more transformational than a bit of metro fiber to add to their pile?  I have traditionally scoffed at the idea of a combination with glbc, but perhaps it’s not so crazy any more.  Consider the following strategic drivers for such a deal: [Read more →]

Demonstrating that it is quite serious about entering the cloud computing space, Verizon Business today detailed plans to expand its platform into centers in San Jose, London, and Canberra.  Earlier plans for cloud facilities serving the Federal government will come online in Miami and Culpeper in Q1/11.  This isn’t new spending of course, it’s part of the huge $16.8-17.2B capex budget they had already allocated, but it does tell us what they’ll be spending a nice chunk of it on – datacenter buildouts aren’t cheap. [Read more →]

The great WiMAX rollout continues unabated, with clwr officially opening its networks for business in two more major metro areas overnight.  First are the twin cities of Minneapolis and St.Paul, where the coverage area includes some 2.1M people.  Second is the city of Pittsburgh, with another 820K under their belt.  And last week they added Orlando as well, though I didn’t happen to cover it here at the time.  Here are quick snapshots of the coverage in those areas: [Read more →]

Today undersea cable operator Hibernia Atlantic broke ranks with the rest of the sector and announced something we haven’t seen in quite a while:  a new transatlantic cable.  There was some speculation last year about a coming shortage in transatlantic bandwidth, as prices did not yet support new cable builds and capacity was not unlimited with a long lead time needed before one can bring a cable online.  What happened between now and then?  The financial markets discovered low latency in a big way of course, and are [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) squeezed three European sports CDN wins into one PR this morning, further demonstrating the strength of their position in the content delivery market across the Atlantic.  First there was the Everton Football Club, which went beyond the usual live streaming it has had for the last two years, and leveraged Vyvx to also stream its pre-season friendly tour down under in Australia. All that for pre-season [Read more →]

In another sign that the desire for ultra-low latency connections is spreading beyond the major hubs of New York, Chicago, London, and Frankfurt, Hibernia Atlantic today announced the direct connection of its Global Financial Network to several exchanges up in Canada.  The Toronto Stock Exchange,  TSX Venture Exchange and the Montreal Exchange, all of which are located in the TMX primary data centre in Toronto.   That means of course that they get to ring the bell up or whatever they do up north to open the market for trading today. [Read more →]

Dan Rayburn has a lengthy article this morning arguing that the online content industry has been flying so high that it has become detached from reality.  The hype has analysts falling into the habits that often happen during bubbles, i.e. keeping both eyes on the short term trend while ignoring the altimeter.  But when I first read the article, I must admit that my own first thought was “enjoy it while you’ve got it”.  Why?  Because while online video may be flying, the infrastructure it is riding on has seen nothing from the markets this year.  For example, let’s plot the common stock performance thus far in 2010 for three of the high flyers Dan mentioned against three of the stronger of the next generation of internet infrastructure companies: [Read more →]

A few items of regional interest to start off this Tuesday morning:

Regional provider Vision Net has selected the Telx facility at 350 East Cermak in Chicago for colocation and interconnection.  Vision Net operates a fiber network in Montana, one of the more remote areas in the lower 48.  By extending their reach into Telx’s facility, they can offer their customers in Montana direct access to a great many more [Read more →]

In international networking, let’s quickly look at few recent news items:

France Telecom (NYSE:FTE, news, filings) and its Orange Business subsidiary had a few announcements recently.  Yesterday, the latter announced a sweeping alliance with Cisco, EMC and VMware, called Flexible 4 Business.  The idea is to bring cloud computing to large enterprises, which is becoming a familiar theme.  All the big players are jockeying for position ahead of the game.  Late last week France Telecom also announced plans to add new undersea fiber to its [Read more →]

Saw this video via the Fibre to the home UK – Fibrevolution blog.  It shows farmers in a rural UK location taking their connectivity into their own hands and putting fiber into the ground over the space of two days.  They had to cut off part of the spool to get it into a hatchback, but that seems to have been the only real hiccup they ran into.  Anyway, for your entertainment: [Read more →]

It’s not often one gets to flaunt one’s hi-tech sales in Albania, which doesn’t exactly get its share of attention when it comes to the internet.  But today, Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) announced a win with one of the country’s multi-play providers, Tring Communications.  Tring will leverage the routing specialist’s new network architecture in order to meet the next generation’s bandwidth needs across the small Balkan nation.  In its reasons for choosing Juniper, Tring highlighted the subscriber management capabilities that come along with the MX Series edge router.  [Read more →]

Colocation provider Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) today announced yet another construction project.  The company intends to spend some $70M to build a 79,600 square foot facility in Tokyo, which will be named TY3 in the company’s predictable alphanumeric tradition.  Due for completion next summer sometime, the new IBX will add another 960 cabinet equivalents to Equinix’s footprint.  That should boost them over 2500, I believe.  It will be directly connected via fiber to [Read more →]

Telecom Ramblings is proud to be a media sponsor for Capacity North America 2010.  Perusing the agenda for the conference, I noticed that a rather large portion of the event will be spent on the subjects of carrier’s prospects in the content delivery and cloud computing marketplaces.  It seems to me as if these are two sides of the same coin, just at different stages in development.  Carriers started their invasion of the CDN space more than two years ago, while the cloud is only now maturing from an unusually poorly defined buzzword into a set of actual products.  But both involve new revenue streams that derive from stacks of servers, and differentiation has thus far come not from [Read more →]

I was looking back over yesterday’s post reviewing the M&A activity this year, and it occurred to me that I may never have written a general fiber/bandwidth M&A article and not mentioned ANY of the names AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Level 3, Global Crossing, TW Telecom, XO, Abovenet, or even Cogent.  The only large, public network operators which have participated in this year’s M&A binge (as a buyer) have been the rural ILECs CenturyLink and Windstream plus super-CLEC PAETEC, each of which is in the process of seriously boosting the fiber in their diet.  So where are the other guys? [Read more →]

Departing from the usual custom of simply asking for additional comments until an issue is obsolete, the FCC yesterday actually did something.  They have officially released “white space” spectrum for unlicensed wireless broadband use.  That’s the now empty slots of spectrum in the TV Bands that are so good at penetrating obstructions like trees and walls and travel longer distances to boot.  Given the increasing demands for wireless spectrum in the face of the iPhone and other devices in the pipeline this was probably inevitable.  Efficient spectrum usage is critical – it’s not as if we can make more of it.  [Read more →]

Today we see the start of trading of CoreSite (NYSE:COR, news, filings), which becomes the third public datacenter REIT.  The others of course are Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR, news, filings) and Dupont Fabros Technology (NYSE:DFT, news, filings), and all three are in the business of buying property, developing them into datacenters, and leasing them wholesale to the sector.  In CoreSite’s case, it owns and operates 11 such facilities thus far, adding up to around [Read more →]

When it comes to network operators of all stripes, the M&A season warmed up early in 2010 and has only gotten hotter since.  In fact, there have been so many it is actually quite a feat of memory to list them all.  It hasn’t all been metro or regional fiber, though that has been the biggest focus.  Let’s take a quick stroll down the aisle of transactions thus far, categorized by who has been doing the buying. [Read more →]

Pan-European network operator Interoute has been extending its reach further east recently, with announcements in the past two days of initiatives both into the Middle East and deeper into Russia.  It’s not an opportunistic foray, but a sustained strategy as one can see by following the breadcrumbs the company’s interest in SEACOM and its recent connectivity into Turkey.

To increase its capabilities in the Middle East, Interoute today announced that it has [Read more →]

Several interesting items in the past 24 hours or so worth a comment:

Rhapsody has moved its data center into the new space that Internap Network Services (NASDAQ:INAP, news, filings) recently built out up in Seattle.  Rhapsody offers digital music subscriptions, with some 10 million music tracks.  This sort of bandwidth-heavy specialty site is a natural for Internap’s high performance niche, so the decision to move to Internap’s newly built out space seems natural.  Internap itself, however, has continued [Read more →]

Today Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) announced that NFL.com has implemented its HD Network in order to bump up the quality of video delivered from its site this season.  That includes the site’s Thursday Night Football stream, more generally, the majority of all video content from the site.  Also, exclusive content for the NFL Fantasy Football game will be delivered at up to 3.2mbps.  Akamai has had a relationship with NFL.com for a while of course, this is mainly just tracking the adoption of the next generation of streaming in an effort to boost the league’s online presence.  But with the size of the audience, it’s clearly a nice position to be in for Akamai. [Read more →]

As promised, the alternative wireless carrier MetroPCS (NYSE:PCS, news, filings) beat its larger brethren to the punch and opened the nation’s first commercial LTE network today in Las Vegas.  By doing so, they leapfrog the 3G functionality they never developed, and move straight into the world of 4G.  Not only did they get the network up and running, they debuted the first LTE phone, the Samsung Craft.  What they didn’t debut was a data card and plans for laptop access etc, as their network is initially aimed mainly at phones and at augmenting and eventually replacing their 2G CDMA network.  Thus the customers they will be focusing on overlaps far less with [Read more →]

lyns announced today that it has signed a multi-year carrier services contract with XO Holdings (news, filings).  Via this agreement, Lightyear will be able to leverage XO’s Dedicated Internet Access and Ethernet Private Line services as it expands its capabilities nationwide.  Teaming up with XO’s backbone seems like a logical move for Lightyear, as XO has been an aggressive wholesaler over the past few years.  But I doubt it’s exclusive, Lightyear has always partnered with a variety of carriers to serve its customer base.  [Read more →]