Telecom Ramblings

A few more expansive notes from the metro and regional fiber providers:

Intellifiber is celebrating its 500th circuit turned up for the Department of Defense, I hadn’t realized they had that much business with the Feds.  However, given their dense coverage in the mid-Atlantic region and especially [Read more →]

Reporting earnings this morning in advance of this week’s tidal wave of announcements was Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] , which last quarter warned of some churn ahead in its colocation business from the financial vertical.  Indeed, revenues of $216.6M were down sequentially for the fourth quarter, but nevertheless that was a couple million above analyst expectations.  The story was similar for EBITDA of $54.0M, down sequentially but a bit higher than expected.  Loss per share of $0.21, however, was slightly larger than anticipated.  Overall though, [Read more →]

WiMAX operator clwr has expanded its coverage again, this time into central Pennsylvania.  Now formally under the WiMAX umbrella are the cities of Harrisburg, Lancaster, Reading, and York.  Total coverage area across these markets adds up to 271 square miles and some three quarters of a million people.  This coverage goes well with the company’s existing Philadelphia and Baltimore markets, and looks like this across the region: [Read more →]

Last week, a lesser known network operator made a further move on the low latency, high speed trading marketplace, and unlike most is including actual numbers in its PR.  First Communications announced that it has cut 1.4ms off its route between the New York and Chicago metro areas.  More specifically, they can now offer just under 17.2ms latency connectivity between the major facilities at 350 E Cermak in Chicago and 165 Halsey in Newark.  The reduced latency number is attributed to the implementation of recent [Read more →]

Earlier this month, I took a look at one of the more exotic broadband stimulus applications – XO’s proposed Northern Lights from Washington to Illinois.  As it turns out, 360Networks isn’t too pleased with this concept, as detailed in an open letter to Congress.  Their own network covers a largely similar route, which derives from the old Touch America build back in the bubble that many may have forgotten about.  Just how similar is it?  Here is a 360Network’s map of the overlap: [Read more →]

Here are several small equipment deals lately that caught my eye:

Mexican provider MetroNet is claiming to have turned up the first 10GbE MPLS metro ring in Mexico, using Orckit-Corrigent gear.  I am just beginning to learn a bit about the Mexican market.  With the 40GbE and 100GbE standards about to come out, I was a bit surprised to hear that until now Ethernet services were so limited south of the border.  I wonder how long before they turn up a [Read more →]

Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) surprised the market yesterday with a its second sequential truly powerful earnings report, exceeding even that of the seasonally high fourth quarter.  The stock closed up some 19% on the day at 39.63.  That’s about four times the low it hit back in November of 2008 at the height of the fiscal crisis when everyone was worried about the company’s ability to fend off a gaggle of competitors.  The company’s change in pricing policy in the second half of 2009 has been a huge success thus far.  What do the numbers look like, you ask?  Here’s a table putting them in context: [Read more →]

There has been quite a flurry of interesting bandwidth and fiber deals in the past few days, let’s take a quick look at each in turn:

360Networks announced that it is providing the fiber connectivity underlying the rural broadband wireless solution being rolled out by Frontier Telenet.  Frontier TeleNet is [Read more →]

As anticipated, international network operator glbc reported Q1 earnings today after the market closed, with seasonality slowing them down a bit.  Guidance for the full year was reiterated, which necessarily implies a substantial ramp in performance over the balance of the year.   [Read more →]

Well, perhaps ‘sprints’ is a bit too strong but it has been such a long time in coming…  Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) finally returned to sequential revenue growth in the its earnings report for the first quarter of 2010.  Revenues of $8.085B were up 3% sequentially and a bit better than the consensus estimates.  Loss per share was also a bit better than expected at $0.17 not including a $0.12 non-cash charge related to valuation of deferred tax assets.  The pain still isn’t over at Sprint, but perhaps they have finally [Read more →]

On Thursday morning, Global Crossing will host its earnings conference call, which means that they will likely release their results today after the market closes.  As the first of the nextgen carriers to report and as one of the larger competitive telecoms that is frequently covered here on Telecom Ramblings, it is time to offer is a quick tabular preview of what to expect in the context of 2009 and guidance. [Read more →]

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When the FCC lost its court case against Comcast over the ability to enforce network neutrality, it turned much of last year’s efforts to define the rules into something of a moot point.  The commission is now getting all sorts of advice on how to handle things and reimpose the authority it thought it had before, but it’s of little use. [Read more →]

Nobody talks much about Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) anymore, but they’re still out there and they’re still generating quite a bit of cash.  Their first quarter seems to have gone particularly well.  Revenues of $157.3M were above both guidance and estimates, as were earnings per share of $0.25 and free cash flow of $54.2M.  So much so that the company raised full year EBITDA guidance to $194-$202M and increased their quarterly dividend by 14%.  Hopefully some of that good cheer will [Read more →]

The media is reporting that the cable industry is now looking beyond Docsis 3.0 to a new standard that can support as much as 5Gbps, which on the surface would seem to allow their coax to keep up and perhaps even surpass fiber.  But the situation is far more complicated than this.  Actually, cable is already offering this speed, it’s just that most of it is already carrying traffic that we call cable TV.  The 64 billion dollar question here is what happens to that cable TV traffic if all the spectrum is dedicated toward broadband. [Read more →]

The big bandwidth plans in Africa just keep on rolling in.  Today eFive, SEACOM, and Main One, and announced their intention to cooperate on building a pan-African fiber ring. The objective is seamless connectivity and increased redundancy on both the east and west coasts of Africa. [Read more →]

Colocation and cloud services provider Terremark (news, filings) [a subsidiary of Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings)] announced this morning that it has begun construction of its third colocation facility at its NAP of the Capital Region, which sits 60 miles outside of Washington DC in Culpeper VA.  With 70% of the space in the first two facilities now spoken for and steady continuing demand, a further buildout was widely expected.  [Read more →]

Rising competitive metro and regional fiber operator Zayo made several major moves last week, following up on last month’s purchase of AGL Networks.  First, of all they have accessed the credit markets, selling $250M in notes due 2017 at a rate of 10.25%.  They will use the money in part to refinance their existing credit facilities, but $250M is quite a bit more than they need for that purpose.  The remainder will go into the ‘general corporate purposes’ war chest, which in the case of Zayo always includes possible additional strategic M&A.   [Read more →]

Yesterday’s blockbuster M&A deal between CenturyLink and Qwest brought in a whole lot of readers looking for answers.  I don’t pretend to have them all, but of course that has never stopped me before and won’t today either.  However, please do not hesitate to correct my ramblings in the comments below! [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) has two interesting announcements out this morning.

First is a nice contract  with the television network ABC.  They will bring ABC’s Broadcast Operations Center on-net, and install its Managed Video Network Servics (MVNS) at the New York, Washington, and Los Angeles bureaus of ABC News.  The offering includes [Read more →]

In big M&A news today, CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) and q have announced their plans to merge.  There have been lots of rumors crossing my desk lately, but I have to admit this wasn’t one of them.  That doesn’t mean it’s surprising, it’s just the mother of all RLEC consolidation deals, with the Qwest longhaul network tagging along for the ride.  So what will the combined company look like?   [Read more →]

Competitive fiber operator TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) has been rather quiet of late, but in the past two days has announced a couple of interesting contracts.

Today it was a 12 location deal with Covenant Church, which ministers to some 15,000 people in North Texas.  It’s an expansion of an existing relationship in which they will supply co-location, voice, data and Internet services, enabling Covenant Church to stream [Read more →]

The industry’s 800lb gorilla AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) reported Q1 earnings today, with few surprises.  Revenues of $30.6B were in-line, and earnings per share of $0.59 was a nickel above expectations after discounting that non-cash health care charge everyone was talking about last month.  AT&T’s earnings releases always amaze me.  For a company that seems to report quarterly revenue in a tight range of $30.5-30.9B quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter, they always have such a long list of high growth segments to highlight [Read more →]