Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Yesterday Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) won an interesting deal with China Telecom Shanghai.  The Chinese incumbent has implemented Juniper’s top of the line, multi-chassis routing system, the TX Matrix Plus hooking up multiple T1600 core routers.  The massive bandwidth upgrade was necessary in order to scale its metropolitan network to handle both consumer demand and that of the World Expo currently going on in the city as well.  They had been using [Read more →]

German datacenter operator ancotel GmbH has landed in the USA, or more accurately on Long Island.  They are announcing the purchase of the Long Island Data and Recovery Center (LIDARC), a colocation and interconnection facility located at 1025 Old Country Road in Westbury, NY.  They intend to develop the property into a major [Read more →]

Well, you heard it here first if only by a few hours.  Zayo Group has announced an agreement to purchase Rochester-based American Fiber Systems.  The deal will be Zayo’s 15th acquisition since its 2007 inception, and the second so far in 2010.  Financial terms were not disclosed but the Rochester Business Journal pegs the price at [Read more →]

Sources tell me that Zayo Group is preparing what would probably be its largest acquisition to date:  American Fiber Systems.  Both Zayo’s Dan Caruso and AFS’s Dave Rusin have been amongst the most vocal proponents of metro fiber in the sector, both having their own blogs and both even frequenting this site’s comment section as well.  They’ve been unusually quiet lately, which has had me wondering what each was up to.  The idea of the two joining forces seems, well, formidable.  [Read more →]

Several items in the news today that are worth noting:

24/7 Fiber Network, a relatively new entrant into the metro and regional fiber business in the Maryland and Delaware markets, has completed phase 1 of its buildout.  The new 432 count fiber build connects the company’s Baltimore area metro network through Salisbury to the eastern Virginia shore, cutting across the [Read more →]

The market may not be showing much love for Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) these days, but professional sports broadcasters sure seems happy with them.  Yesterday we heard about the streaming of World Cup matches over in Europe, and today we’re back across the Atlantic with an expanded deal with MLB.com, the official site of Major League Baseball.  MLB.com has had a relationship with Level 3 for CDN services in the past, but that has now expanded to include [Read more →]

Three interesting items went across the wires in the datacenter sector yesterday:

Colocation’s 800lb (and still growing) gorilla, Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) is building another datacenter down under in Sydney.  The new facility, named SY3, will add some 1000 cabinets to the company’s sellable footprint in its first phase, and some 3000 when complete.  SY2 opened a little over [Read more →]

The WiMax parade just keeps on marching.  clwr formally opened the doors on three new substantial markets for its next generation wireless network.  One on the east coast, one on the Mississippi, and one in the mountains.  In St.Louis, some 1.2 million people across 600 square miles will be able to access the network.  In Salt Lake City, some 790,000 across 450 square miles from [Read more →]

I figured they must have won a decent piece of the World Cup CDN business.  This morning Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) confirmed my suspicions, announcing that they have been delivering the World Cup matches in HD to online audiences for several European broadcasters.  Of particular mention was Telecinco in Spain, whose relationship with Level 3 was already known.  Some 220,000 people watched Spain vs Switzerland live online concurrently.  That was the biggest online event that Level 3 and Telecinco have put on so far, but I’ll bet they eclipse that record with ease when [Read more →]