Telecom Ramblings

Let’s play a bit of catchup on the various bits of metro fiber connectivity news that has built up over the last week or so:

Southeastern metro fiber builder FiberLight has padded its balance sheet with an additional $22M in cash from CoBank.  The new private debt will be made up of a $20M note and a $2M increase in their existing line of credit, and follows $13M from CoBank last summer.  FiberLight has been [Read more →]

Of late there has been substantial buzz surrounding the details of last year’s Universal Service Fee recipients, or USF, and none of it has been particularly flattering.  We have Verizon and AT&T raking in billions of dollars of course.  Then there is this year’s poster child for excessive spending:  Weavtel, which serves 14 customers in a remote corner of Washington and raked in an obscene $17,763 per line.   And over [Read more →]

Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) made a significant M&A move this morning with an agreement to purchase South African based Dimension Data.  Dimension Data is a systems integrator that focuses on the multinational enterprise market to the tune of about $4B in annual revenue with some 6000 corporate customers.  The purchase price is £2.1B, or about $3.2B.  NTT’s move should be seen as [Read more →]

Following my article about XO’s layoffs last month and the outpouring of comments that followed from both insiders and outsiders, I have pondered what to say in followup. There are obviously strong feelings involved, and there are more than two sides. But from my point of view, XO spends too much time in the shadows relative to the assets they hold and I am not sorry for having briefly shined a flashlight back in the cave. But where is it that XO can or should go from here? [Read more →]

According to the Financial Times, AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) has won a substantial contract with the German consumer goods group Henkel.  AT&T will manage the company’s global network infrastructure, which itself covers some 50,000 employees spread across more than 100 countries.  Supposedly, they won the contract from a field of competitors, and yes I can think of a half dozen who would have been up for this one – especially [Read more →]

NTT America, the US arm of the Japanese Telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) has made its global virtualization services available in Singapore.  The offering is aimed at large corporations that want to outsource their server environments, so that they can focus more on leveraging the computing power and less on the nuts and bolts of [Read more →]

It’s not often we hear about a metro fiber expansion from XO Holdings (news, filings).  Yesterday though, the company announced such an initiative in Seattle.  The company had about 200 miles of metro fiber in Seattle already, but has been seeing a growth in demand in areas adjacent to its current footprint.  Therefore they are adding a loop or two, in this case for connectivity to and around the northern suburbs of [Read more →]

Fresh off its upgrades to the London-Frankfurt route and the NY-Chicago route, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) has improved its low latency position on the transatlantic leg as well.  They nave opened a new strategic positioned node in  LD4/5 datacenter campus of Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) just outside London, and via a new loop that bypasses central London they have connected that node directly to three of their transatlantic routes:  [Read more →]

CENX took another step forward today with the hiring of its first CEO, Sandy Brown.  Mr. Brown served previously in various executive roles at AT&T, including being behind the successful development and deployment of AT&T’s Carrier Ethernet services – which is obviously quite relevant experience when taking the helm at a Carrier Ethernet Exchange.  It must be quite a change though to move from [Read more →]

On Friday, colocation and cloud provider Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] announced its intention to raise $625M, of which $550M would be via a term loan due 2016 with the remaining $75M coming in the form of a revolving credit facility due 2014.  They will use the money in part to pay for the bonds repurchased by their tender offer earlier this month for the $345M of 3% convertible notes outstanding that come due in May of 2012.  Those 3% converts were trading at about [Read more →]

In an interview over on ZDNet published on Friday, VeriSign’s CTO Ken Silva made another of those crazy internet growth predictions:  in ten years we will need to deal with internet traffic 1000 times as large as today.  Actually, it’s not crazy, it’s simply mathematics and exponential growth with a bit of optimism thrown in and then bundled for shock value.  The mathematically-oriented amongst us quickly realize that in order for [Read more →]

No, not their stock of course, they’re privately held.  Rather, in the wake of its purchase of AGL Networks and in preparation for the AFS deal, Zayo has divided itself internally, adding yet another business unit.  Zayo Fiber Solutions (ZFS) will focus purely on the dark fiber side of the business.  ZFS’s president Matt Erickson puts it succinctly: [Read more →]

Today Renesys released another of its updates on the state of the IP transit and peering world, charting the top 13 backbones over the first six months of 2010.  These are always a fascinating read, as the trends in quantity of total IP space transited by the top backbones give us a very independent viewpoint from the world of press releases and sec filings.  You can see both [Read more →]

Readers may have noticed a reduction in the rate of articles in the past few days – I was traveling and am back in NJ now.  As such, there have been a variety of interesting news items which I need to catch up on.

Cequel Data Centers is purchasing Colo4Dallas, which is one of the major independent carrier-neutral colocation facilities in Texas via its 68,000 square foot facility.  Cequel Data Centers is a new entrant into the datacenter sector, backed by private equity from [Read more →]

International network operator glbc won its own slice of Major League Baseball traffic.  According to an announcement this morning, the company will be providing high-speed, high-capacity connectivity among all 30 Major League ballparks as well as to the MLB.com servers themselves in New York City.  They will therefore be a substantial part of the infrastructure that MLB will [Read more →]

Two items in the past several days have come up questioning the viability of Zayo’s acquisition strategy.  Following the agreement to purchase AFS on the heels of the AGL deal, they certainly must be considered as a very aggressive purchaser of such assets right now.  After some 15 acquisitions over the past three years, though, we already knew that much eh?  Over at On Rad’s Radar, Peter Radizeski asks: [Read more →]

Spanish based telecommunications giant Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings) has tapped Verizon Global Wholesale for mobility services in the USA.  Telefonica intends to serve its US customers via a “white label” service from Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) that obviously derives from Verizon Wireless, which it owns a majority of in partnership with Vodafone Group (NYSE:VOD, news, filings).  The services in question are wireless voice, text messaging and broadband, as well as a variety of [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) has revamped the European leg of its offering to the low latency segment of the financial vertical.  They have rebuilt the route between London and Frankfurt, significantly reducing latency introduced along the way.  Lower latency on London-Frankfurt obviously also improves the Frankfurt-NYC and Frankfurt-Chicago offerings as well.    They are also offering [Read more →]

Following up on its agreement to buy AFS, Zayo had quite a busy few days leading up to the July 4 holiday weekend.  First of all, they closed the AGL Networks purchase and gave a bit more detail in the process.  As expected, the deal brings some 270 on-net buildings and 850 route miles of fiber to the Zayo footprint, spread across the three markets of Atlanta, Phoenix, and Charlotte – in that order of size.  Financially it will add some $160M in total contract value, $17M in [Read more →]

Last week’s big news in the fiber space was Zayo’s agreement to purchase American Fiber Systems, but this deal changes more than the competitive landscape – it has local interest here since the CEOs of both companies are blogging neighbors and frequent commentators here as well. So what should Dave Rusin do after the merger is finalized?  Here’s Telecom Ramblings’s Top 10 List, be sure to vote! [Read more →]

Thus far in its efforts to bring telepresence into the mainstream, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) has focused on virtual corporate meetings and such.  That’s where the money is of course, but it’s also, well, kind of boring – a bunch of conservatively dressed people sitting around a table whether it’s virtual or solid oak.  To show a much more imaginative future side of telepresence, Cisco today took on a [Read more →]

When Lightyear Network Solutions went public earlier this year via a reverse merger, CEO J. Sherman Henderson stated their intention to roll up a half dozen or more fiber-free CLECs.  Apparently he meant business, as today they announced the first such purchase in an SEC filing.  Lightyear will be buying SouthEast Telephone,  which provides residential and commercial services to eastern Kentucky to the tune of some [Read more →]

The synergy between Level 3’s Vyvx business and its content delivery business really seems to be bearing fruit at last, at least if measured by the PR count for major live sporting events.  Today, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced its selection by VERSUS to handle online and mobile content delivery for the 2010 edition of the Tour de France in the US.  They will downlink the signal to a US teleport, backhaul it to several drop points around the country, simultaneously [Read more →]