Telecom Ramblings

There have been several items this week in the datacenter sector that I didn’t manage to write a full article about.  Let’s take a quick look at some of them.

Private equity firm Welsh Carson took control of datacenter provider Peak 10, partnering with the company’s management to buy out Seaport Capital and McCarthy Capital.  Peak 10 builds datacenters in tier 2 markets mostly in the southeast – places like [Read more →]

China Telecom Americas, which is the operating unit of China Telecom (NYSE:CHA, news, filings) in this part of the world, has hooked into CENX’s Carrier Ethernet Exchange.  All year, CENX has been aggressively growing its partner base in order to achieve the scale necessary for a true liftoff.  Initially, China Telecom Americas will connect with CENX in Los Angeles and New York, and will be able to leverage the exchange to better reach customer locations.  Likewise, other CENX participants will have new ways to reach endpoints within China Telecom’s footprint, which obviously opens some new possibilities [Read more →]

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Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) seems to be moving rapidly toward a 100G coherent product.  Today they announced the successful completion of a field trial on the network of XO Communications.  In the Spring, Infinera shifted gears away from its 40G development and chose to immediately chase PICs based on 100G technology.  For Infinera, of course, being first to the 100G game is not the goal – rather by leveraging photonic integration they intend to disrupt the economics.  This time, they hope to do so much earlier in the game than they did with 10G. [Read more →]

Yesterday there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that Sprint’s board was actively discussing the pros and cons of letting TMobile USA invest in clwr.  That would certainly be an easy way to fund the rest of Clearwire’s buildout and possibly gain an ally in the LTE/WiMAX popularity contest.  There have also been occasional rumors (unlikely ones IMHO) over the past year suggesting that TMobile USA and Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) ought to merge, and coming together on Clearwire’s 4G network could be a first step.  But a faction of Sprint’s board is said to be dead set against it, suggesting it would strengthen a rival unnecessarily.  Honestly, I think it just [Read more →]

Following through with the second leg of a one-two punch, euNetworks announced today a new ultra low latency route between London and Frankfurt.  The new route is one of the shortest available, and brings latency between exchanges or other sites in each city to below 9 milliseconds round trip.  As I understand it, that makes them competitive with the fastest routes in the marketplace right now depending on precisely which sites are being connected. [Read more →]

Over on the Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board, we have a new job posting.  Transatlantic cable operator Hibernia Atlantic is looking for a Sales Engineer in Commack, NY, which is out on Long Island.  The position is responsible for the technical accuracy of an opportunity that is developed by a Hibernia sales person or agent and encompassing the process from initial pricing quotation to receipt of signed SOF. [Read more →]

International network operator glbc had a virtual trade show going on today, the subject of which was collaboration and conferencing – sort of a virtual conference about virtual conferencing.  To go along with it, the company this morning announced connectivity to some 4,000 executive video suites across the world, which include more than 500 hi-def public video conference rooms and 400 court reporting facilities.   That’s a rather nice footprint to [Read more →]

WiMAX operator clwr officially added three more cities to its network coverage overnight.  Two were the major markets in New England, adding coverage for 2.5M in Boston and 590K in Providence.  And down in Florida they added coverage for 190K in Daytona Beach, which will keep Jacksonville company.  Now, as I am a sucker for maps and feel silly describing the extent of each new coverage area in words, here is a quick set of snapshots of the three markets from clear.com’s awesome coverage maps: [Read more →]

While the low latency game in Europe this summer has mostly featured the likes of bandwidth powerhouses like Level 3 and Colt , their smaller regional rival euNetworks (news) today added another bit of its own magic to the mix.  This time the route is between London and a nearby suburb called Slough, and euNetwork’s new line in the sand is sub-500 microseconds, cutting out some 20% from their prior number.  The London metro area is one of euNetwork’s strongest markets, and they have been making a serious push to serve the financial community.  To achieve this new low latency number, [Read more →]

Private equity does seem to be serious about fiber, doesn’t it.  Today, it was Ridgemont Equity Partners purchasing a majority stake in Unite Private Networks (UPN), which provides turnkey fiber networks across 12 states mostly in the midwest.  Kansas city-based UPN is a new one for me, I simply haven’t run into them before.  They seem to focus on building networks for school districts across their footprint.  The investment will help ensure that UPN has the capital for expansion, and existing management will remain in place.  Financial terms were [Read more →]

Cloud services from telecom providers has been gaining a bit of traction this year, and today we saw announcements from both NTT America, the US arm of the Japanese giant, and Verizon Business.  Both are leveraging VMware technology to power their offerings.

NTT America will be leveraging the vCloud Director to extend the resource pooling capabilities of VMware vSphere.  That pooling of computing, network, and storage resources will allow their enterprise customers greater agility and efficiency [Read more →]

There was an interesting article over on ArsTechnica late yesterday.  Apparently the fiber network supplying bandwidth to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and processing sites is really opening some eyes.  That’s even better news than the fact that the Earth didn’t collapse into its own personal black hole when they turned the thing on!  The article supplies some details on the bandwidth involved: [Read more →]

Today TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) announced a multi-year contract with the US Air Force to supply services to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, 20 miles southeast of Washington DC.  That’s the home base of Air Force One as well as the 89 Airlift Wing, an air base that gets more than its fair share of high profile visitors and which has some 20,000 military and civilians on-site. [Read more →]

The boom in datacenter construction continues unabated, today with plans for two new facilities by Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) and Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR, news, filings).  

Equinix is adding a second datacenter in Hong Kong, to be titled HK2 in their usual fashion, which will be built in the western part of the New Territories.  The new facility will cost $63M and house 1450 cabinet equivalents when complete, although phase one will start with [Read more →]

According to an article by TechCrunch last night, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) has made a pre-IPO bid for Skype (news, filings) [a subsidiary of MicroSoft (:MSFT, news)] .  Now, it’s hard to discount the possibility given that Cisco has been buying everything that isn’t nailed down and superglued just in case.  It has also been rumored that Cisco has bid for Skype once before, and there are no structural reasons why they couldn’t do this out of petty cash.  I’m just having trouble finding a convincing rationale *for* such a deal. [Read more →]

Given the surge in M&A activity this year, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look backwards and remember some of the mistakes made in acquiring and integrating telecommunications assets over the past decade.  After all, too large a percentage of M&A activity winds up destroying rather than creating value and you know what they say about those who forget their history.  Now, this list is of my own creation, but I’m hardly the last word on the subject.  Hence, I’ll keep it open to further additions, details, and corrections from readers, so don’t hold back.  These are not in any particular order. [Read more →]

For your Friday reading pleasure, take a look at this one over on Data Center Knowledge.  Imagine coming in one morning to see a co-worker passed out on the floor with a .45 semi-automatic on the floor next to him, and your $100K server full of holes?   After waking him up, he tells the police what may be the lamest story of the week about someone mugging him, drugging him, stealing the gun, shooting the server, then apparently forgetting the gun.  Actually, [Read more →]

Seemed like it took a rather long time to close, but ABRY Partners has finally completed its acquisition of RCN.  The $1.2B deal was originally announced five and a half months ago back in March, and the question I had at the time is what ABRY’s intentions were toward the metro fiber arm of the company, RCN Metro.  That question is at least partly answered. [Read more →]

For a small company, FiberLight has had a voracious appetite for organic expansion lately.  The builder and operator of metro fiber networks is expanding its networks deeper into Virginia, announcing today its plans for a new route to Charlottesville.  The build will extend the Culpeper route the company constructed last year by some 46 miles and complete a direct connection to the Washington DC area and the other 500 route miles they have in the region. [Read more →]

According to reports, private equity firm Court Square Capital Partners is buying up Fibertech, taking it off the hands of Nautic and Ridgemont Equity, which used to be part of Bank of America.  The value of the deal was pegged at $500M, though the extent to which that number has been rounded off is unclear to me.  Fibertech builds and sells/leases metro and regional dark fiber in tier 2/3 markets across the northeast and mid-Atlantic, plus a couple in the Midwest.  Court Square will pay for the deal partially via its own funds, partially via debt to be raised, and partially via an investment by Fibertech’s management. [Read more →]

I have been travelling for the past 36 hours, and since that included all of a Tuesday I have some catching up to do now.  Here’s some rapidfire responses to recent news items:

Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) won a new customer for its Meda Flow Solution.  CDN challenger BitGravity will use it to overlay on its distributed origin architecture.  They hope to gain improved scalability, allowing them to grow quickly while adding fewer servers and thereby [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) continued its sustained PR blitz with two more contract wins so far this week.  

Yesterday it was a three year deal with transportation solutions provider CAP Logistics.  Level 3 will provide a package SIP trunking, IPVN, colo, and dedicated internet access, which will be deployed in Denver, Salt Lake City, Houston, and Illinois.  An interesting mid-market win, and they need [Read more →]