Telecom Ramblings

Allied Fiber’s formal announcement on Monday of its national dark fiber buildout rankled more than a few readers.  The conventional wisdom has been that following the dot com crash, no new national intercity conduit level network builds were even remotely feasible.  Prices had fallen too far, rights of way were too contentious, too much fiber remained untapped in the ground between major markets, and financial backers would simply never go for it.  Whether Allied Fiber succeeds or not in its venture, they may have already blown a fatal hole in that wisdom.  There are many factors that have contributed to this, but for a moment I’d like to focus on how the industry’s view of intercity dark fiber in the USA has changed, and may be changing again. [Read more →]

Lots of news today, here’s a rundown of some of the announcements by larger companies:

Verizon Global Wholesale says that its VoIP minutes grew by 200% in 2009, as the service turns 10 years old.  Of course, ten years ago Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) actually wasn’t pushing VoIP services much, but rather it was [Read more →]

Transatlantic cable operator Hibernia Atlantic put a lot of effort last year into its connectivity to and within Ireland with Project Kelvin, adding a cable landing at Portrush and a land network southward through Northern Ireland and across the border down to Dublin.  All that hard work into some unique infrastructure now seems to be paying off.  Yesterday morning it was a win for their Hibernia Media division at RTE, last night it was the contract with ISP North West Electronics Wireless, and this morning they are announcing a partnership with Tibus. [Read more →]

Northeastern regional fiber operator Lightower is taking consolidation into its own hands, and will today announce the purchase of Veroxity Technology Partners. [edit: here’s the PR]  The news began to break yesterday with an anonymous comment posted here in Telecom Ramblings which has turned out to be right on target.  Strategically, Lightower’s move is a rather easy one to justify, as the network assets are quite [Read more →]

For much of this year, a new company called Allied Fiber has been making waves in the bandwidth sector, promising to do what many have said couldn’t or shouldn’t be done:  build new longhaul dark fiber routes in the USA.  Today Allied Fiber has gone public with its plans, with the first phase already under construction between New York, Chicago and Washington DC (Ashburn).  Here are a few quick highlights and a route map of the NY-Chicago leg: [Read more →]

Irish public service broadcaster RTÉ has selected Hibernia Media for high performance network capacity.  RTÉ will leverage services from Hibernia for secure connectivity to the media hubs around Europe and in North America from which it pulls international content for its programs.  More specifically, they will use [Read more →]

Ethernet exchange operator CENX is continuing to see rapid growth in participation by carriers and service providers.  The latest milestone to be reached is 10 million Ethernet service locations, each of which is a unique physical address with a longitude and a latitude and all that. If it seems like just a short time ago that CENX announced 5 million accessible endpoints in its databases, well yes it was – two months to be exact.  Obviously this number cannot continue to double every [Read more →]

It has been almost six months since I last revisited my list of metro fiber operators, large and small.  For those new to the list, I collect statistics on metro route miles, on-net buildings, and related data, in order to maintain a better picture of the actual competitive fiber footprint available out there.   The larger players are easy of course, but there are many smaller providers out there that fly under the radar – I’m sure I only get a fraction of those and am always looking for more.  For companies that publish public data, if you are already on [Read more →]

It has now been one year since Level 3 began its ‘go local’  initiative, decentralizing resources and decision making power in order to better address the mid-market enterprise segment and finally unlock the value in their 27,000 route mile metro footprint.  The company is now seeing the benefits of this new approach materialize as this portion of its business has stabilized and appears ready at last to contribute to the company’s growth.  Is this the final piece of the puzzle that the company needs to put the past few years behind them at last?  Telecom Ramblings had the opportunity recently to talk with Level 3’s CEO James Crowe: [Read more →]

Yesterday Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) announced a major shift in its product development stance toward 100G.  They now plan to ship a 100G system based on coherent transmission in 2012.  The new system will be capable of supporting 8Tb/s per fiber (80 wavelengths x 100Gb/s each), and will feature next generation PICs in 500Gbps increments (5x100Gbps) with ultra-longhaul reach as well as the [Read more →]

Trans-European operator Interoute offered up some details about its 2009 financial results today.  Privately held by the Sandoz family and Tecom out of Dubai, Interoute nevertheless offers us some valuable data points on the European bandwidth business.  Revenues of €269M were up 9%, showing steady growth despite the continued difficult economic environment in Europe.   [Read more →]

Norwegian regional operator Ishavslink has deployed gear from Transmode across its fiber network in the Finnmark region, the northern corner of Norway up in the Arctic Circle.   Transmode’s intelligent-WDM solution allows them a low cost network that can scale.  Just how far they need to be able to scale traffic in what is perhaps the most remote corner of Europe is an interesting [Read more →]

I’ll bet Sergey Brin wishes he stayed in bed for May, because he can’t be having much fun.  For a company that is indisputably at the top of the internet food chain right now to suffer blows one after another like this is just stunning to [Read more →]

Datacenter and cloud provider Terremark (news, filings) [a subsidiary of Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings)] has apparently had so much fun in Culpeper thus far, that they are preparing to double down.  The company announced today that it has purchased an additional 27 acres of land adjacent to its current NAP of the Capital Region property.  That will give them the space to put up another 250,000 square feet of colocation space plus another [Read more →]

There were several interesting deals over the past day or two, here’s a quick look:

Flowserve, an international provider of flow control products, will be migrating its worldwide connectivity to Orange Business Services, the international arm of France Telecom (NYSE:FTE, news, filings).  Orange will manage the company’s MPLS network, freeing Flowserve to focus on its core business and of course saving them money as well.  The outsourcing [Read more →]

There has been a flux of telecom activity moving from Western Europe to the east, but today we saw a move coming in the opposite direction.  Turk Telecom, the former state-owned telecommunications company which operates both landline and mobile networks in Turkey, has agreed to purchase Hungary-based Invitel’s international wholesale business for some $297M.  Invitel operates a 27,000km trans-European network that, naturally, is deepest in the east and southeast and is an obvious stepping stone for Turk Telecom to the rest of Europe.   Here’s a quick look at the network being acquired: [Read more →]

Along with XO, two other service providers waited until the last minute to file their quarterly reports.

Lightyear of course is still consolidating its status as a public company, following its reverse merger with Libra Alliance.  Therefore, while trends are in flux and out of context, we can at least note just where the company is just now from its 10-Q.  Revenues were [Read more →]

The US arm of Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) is expanding the scope of its managed security services.  In partnership with Integralis, NTT America will now be offering strategic security planning, policy development, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and other professional services alongside its hosting and network services.   Integralis offers managed security solutions on a global scale that matches up very well with NTT’s international network infrastructure, in fact the two have already apparently [Read more →]

Competitive fiber operator XO Holdings (news, filings) reported its Q1/2010 earnings today after the market closed, which was as usual at the very last possible minute.  Revenues fell sequentially to $369.5M for the quarter as legacy revenues leaked away faster than the company’s Broadband operations could grow.  Adjusted EBITDA was $30.6M for 8.3% adjusted EBITDA margins, which is of course not a particularly inspiring number but par for the course for XO in the first quarter over the years.  Here are their results in the context of the past 4 quarters in tabular form: [Read more →]

For a sector that has been on fire for several years now, the colocation and data center space has had relatively few companies available for investment by the general public in the US marketplace.  And with Switch and Data now part of the growing Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) empire, there are suddenly fewer still.  There are of course the two REITs: Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR, news, filings) and Dupont Fabros Technology (NYSE:DFT, news, filings), and there are Terremark (news, filings) [a subsidiary of Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings)] and Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] , but nevertheless there has been a common perception amongst some that Equinix is the only big game in town.  That era seems about to end as a group of dynamic companies are rapidly moving to restore [Read more →]

Cox Business is making further moves in the southwest, announcing a partnership with Phoenix NAP in an effort to help them further serve the SME marketplace. Cox has built dual fiber entries into the 148,000 square foot facility, supported by redundant switching centers.   According to Cox VP Hyman Sukiennik, “Cox Business is significantly expanding our fiber [Read more →]

Lately there have been various research reports hinting or outright speculating about a consolidation event between Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) and glbc.  Additionally, I hear new rumors almost daily about talks between the two, and the frequency of Google searches on the subject that reach this site have been spiking for weeks.  Whether or not there is fire under all that smoke or not, there is a steady buzz of speculation going on right now.  I have written in detail about the strategic attractiveness of this combination before and the hurdles it faced, but it was quite a while ago – almost 2 year now and prior to the recession we are now recovering from.  Does such a deal still make sense?  Oh yes, and I feel that it is more [Read more →]

Yesterday, Cincinnati Bell (NYSE:CBB, news, filings) announced that it will purchase high density datacenter specialist CyrusOne from ABRY Partners for $525M.  The acquisition will add seven data centers in Houston, Dallas, and Austin to their portfolio which already included facilities in Cincinnati and Chicago.  In total, they will have 609K square feet across 17 facilities, which is becoming a rather substantial footprint.  CyrusOne was growing rapidly, rising 86% in 2009 to $58M in 2009 and apparently was already [Read more →]