Telecom Ramblings

Lots of Ethernet-related news in the past few days:

IPNETZONE went with xoho for nationwide Ethernet access for the MPLS Exchange Platform it launched last September.  XO has put enough money into the EoC market to have become one of its larger players, with services in forty or more markets via over 400 LSOs, and hence offers IPNETZONE an easy route to a much larger customer base.  IPNETZONE has been busy assembling network assets nationwide over the past year, having inked [Read more →]

Everybody’s favorite over-the-top poster boy, Netflix, is said to be about to buy the rights to an original TV series.  Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t, but it all sounds to me like a rerun.  I’m thinking of Google and some of the projects they’ve done and why they did them.  You know what I mean…  Bidding on wireless spectrum they didn’t really have any plans to use.  Spearheading a [Read more →]

In its second European infrastructure announcement of the week, lvlt says it has optimized more of its network for the low latency crowd.  New routes to the exchanges in Milan and Zurich are now available from their other major financial hubs, including Madrid which they added just after New Year’s.  Yesterday’s news of a new route connecting Toulouse and bisecting their previous Paris-Madrid-Marseilles loop is probably not directly related, but they are clearly spending money beefing up their infrastructure to the south of the original Level 3 build. [Read more →]

Yesterday the FCC posted an article on their Blogband blog attributed jointly to all five commissioners, promising yet again to take on issues that have befuddled it for a decade or more – intercarrier compensation and universal service.  They started looking at them again last month of course, but the first step is the one they’ve never had a problem with.  Yesterday they began with another thing the FCC is good at:  workshops, or in their words “open, public workshops to identify solutions to key issues.”  As if we don’t already know the key [Read more →]

I read with interest the recent news that Nokia Siemens is trying to restructure its proposed acquisition of Motorola Solutions.  Apparently, regulatory approval is the hangup.  No, not in the US, nor in Europe, but in China where they have delayed clearing the purchase twice now – to the extent that the transaction is somewhat in doubt at this point.  Yes, China is apparently very worried about this deal, and the driving force behind their concerns is none other than Huawei. [Read more →]

megapath is increasing its commitment to copper, and especially Ethernet over Copper.  They intend to add EoC in 15 markets this year, and another 35 by the end of 2011.  They also expect to add more than 300 central offices this year, and are ‘laying a foundation for adding products beyond Ethernet over copper (EoC) such as [Read more →]

Southern New Jersey has long been short on respect unless you’re a casino connoisseur.  I know, as I grew up in North Jersey, where nobody’s quite sure why anyone bothers to live down there.  Actually, nowadays I do live down there, so I found it interesting to see Fibertech announce plans for a major metro/regional fiber build in the area.  Fibertech changed owners over the winter, with Court Square partners taking the reins and promising a new round of expansion, and this is apparently the first volley. [Read more →]

Ah Paris in the springtime, you can just smell the love in the air.  Oh wait, that’s just another IBX buildout for eqix, spring doesn’t start until next week.  Equinix never stops building of course, and this will be #4 for them in Paris – and none too soon it seems.  Phase 1 of its PA3 facility is already ‘effectively full’ and the second phase is due to open in [Read more →]

In another signal that lvlt is shifting to a more aggressive posture, they have added some new network infrastructure over in Europe.  Today they announced a new French PoP in the growing market of Toulouse, on a new route which bisects their previous Paris-Madrid-Marseille ring, thus creating two additional rings that give them more meaningful regional coverage in both France and in Spain.  They did not mention whether the expansion across southern France was via [Read more →]

Let’s catch up on some fiber news while my internet connection holds up:

Financial bandwidth specialist spreadnetworks has added another endpoint to its ultra-low latency Ethernet wavelength offerings.  This time it’s Newark, or more specifically the hub at 165 Halsey, from which it offers SLA’d 15.75ms round trip to 350 East Cermak in Chicago.  That adds to Secaucus, Weehawken, and of course Carteret.  Sooner or later, they’ll manage [Read more →]

Telecom Ramblings doesn’t get many readers from Japan, but to those it does have – godspeed.  Japan is obviously staggering from a huge disaster that words cannot begin to convey.  The earthquake itself wasn’t that bad due to their preparations, but humanity has yet to create a tsunami proof building code.  The submarine cables that serve the island nation, however, came through it with manageable casualties.  There are reports of some damage to APCN-2 and a WSJ article suggests some others took a hit, but nothing beyond the capabilities of the redundancy one expects these sorts of assets to have. That’s how it should be of course, what with ring [Read more →]

tndm gave us our first real look at its numbers following the acquisition of Tinet at the beginning of the third quarter.  Owning and operating a major internet and Ethernet backbone gives Tinet a much different look, but of course its main tandem switching business remains the primary driver for the company.  Revenues of $63.8M seem to have been basically inline with guidance though a hair below composite estimates, while diluted earnings per share of $0.31 came a bit stronger.  Here’s a quick table of the company’s results in context: [Read more →]

According to Vertical Systems Group, business fiber penetration increased to 27.7% in the US by the end of 2010, which is a substantial increase from the 22.9% they reported last year.   The fiber penetration in Europe rose at a similar rate to 18.4% from 15.1%, still lagging the US by a couple of years.  According to VSG, demand for higher speed Ethernet services [Read more →]

Here for a Q&A today is the CEO of Cogent, Dave Schaeffer, who doesn’t really need much of an introduction.  Since the dot com bubble Cogent has followed a rather vocal and independent path, fusing a wholesale IP backbone, a metro-fiber fed enterprise data business, and simple but aggressive pricing.  He didn’t make many friends along the way, actually earning the title ‘the most hated man in telecom’ from Forbes in a profile a few years ago.  But two weeks ago, ccoi posted a solid quarterly profit after several years of steady, disciplined growth, announced a new stock buyback effort, and appears poised to [Read more →]

National WiMAX protagonist clwr has been having some trouble stabilizing its top management team lately it seems.  Today the company announced the departure of its CEO and two others, an interim appointment, and two promotions – and that’s just at the CXO level.  The company’s CEO Bill Morrow has resigned ‘for personal reasons’, and the chairman of the board John Stanton will be standing in as interim CEO while they look for a new one.  Morrow had taken the helm almost precisely two years ago, taking over from Wolff in March of 2009 – perhaps [Read more →]

optimum-lightpath took away another customer from Verizon in the healthcare vertical, according to an announcement today.  Jersey City based Horizon Health Center has revamped its voice and data services.  Their 5Mbps copper based infrastructure is now a 100Mbps fiber-based infrastructure complete with hosted voice, saving money and restoring [Read more →]

Yesterday at the OFC/NFOEC conference, glw unveiled the next generation of its LEAF non-zero dispersion shifted fiber.  The new version is optimized for longhaul applications, with an attenuation specification at $0.19db/km at 1550nm.  That corresponds to a 3dB per 100km over other NZ-DSF products, and means this new generation will be able to achieve [Read more →]

Pan-European network operator interoute did a little cloudy M&A yesterday, announcing the acquisition of Visual Conference Group.  VCG offers managed video conferencing and telepresence services from its home turf in Scandanavia, having been founded by former Tandberg personnel back in 2002.  Interoute’s plan is obviously to take that product and expand it to rest of Europe by leveraging [Read more →]

Another 100G deal for cien today.  The research network Internet2 has partnered with the Maryland-based equipment maker to overhaul its backbone as part of that BTOP grant they got a while back.  The purpose of the grant was to support UCAN, or the Unified Community Anchor Network project, aimed at connecting up schools, libraries, community colleges, public safety organizations, hospitals, and other worthy locations to real bandwidth.  That’ll be 200,000 of them nationwide to be exact, or perhaps ‘inexact’ [Read more →]

s is in the news all the time these days, but almost entirely for its wireless business and the company’s rather public indecisiveness over Clearwire, WiMAX, TMobile, LTE, LightSquared, etc.  But there’s also that pesky wireline business that nobody ever talks about much even though it contributed $5.04B in revenue and $1.09B in EBITDA in 2010.  In all the speculation about Sprint’s future in the soap opera of wireless networks, the fate of one of the largest international fiber and IP backbones seems to get far less than its share of attention.  For instance, just what would happen [Read more →]

As the rollout of cloud services by telecoms continues, Indian giant tcl is staking out some turf in Southeast Asia.  They have now launched their InstaCompute service in Singapore, aiming at customers across the region, e.g. malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Phillipines, and Hong Kong.  This follows their initial roll-out in India last fall, and they expect to move on from here to Europe, the US, and South Africa by the end of 2011.   Tata’s IaaS service appears to be [Read more →]

The news this morning has s in talks with dt over a potential merger with T-Mobile USA.  And in other news, the sun rose this morning and is rumored to be likely to set this evening.  You’d think if a deal were to be had, they’d have made a bit more progress on it by now.  On the plus side, such a deal would make a bigger wireless carrier that is more able to compete with AT&T and Verizon in scale.  On the minus side, the two networks are incompatible as it stands, and to say that Sprint has been burned recently by integration troubles is [Read more →]

Alternative fiber operator zayo announced an expansion of their Dallas footprint.  As I recall, Zayo’s footprint in Dallas originally came as a part of its second acquisition of wholesale assets from CityNet.  However, until now, Zayo had done very little with the asset.  A quick perusal of their public on-net building list revealed [Read more →]