Telecom Ramblings

Several news items went by that deserve a mention:

We don’t often hear about the data center business of XO Holdings (news, filings), but it does exist.  Yesterday non other than Thomson Reuters agreed to lease colocation space in the competitive provider’s Minneapolis facility.  The space will become [Read more →]

For Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) and its CDN division, it’s been quite a summer for live sports.  It seems like every week there is an event somewhere they are handling the streaming for.  Some of them are the big events like the World Cup and the Tour de France, but others are lesser known but with an online following.

This morning the company announced that it is providing its end-to-end Internet Broadcast services to FUEL TV, serving live HD both online and to their iPhone application.  FUEL TV’s events are things like [Read more →]

So Harbinger finally launched its wireless juggernaut yesterday.  The idea is to take a pile of spectrum previously assigned to satellite communications, and build a ‘truly open and net neutral wireless network’ based on LTE which will be wholesaled to other industry participants and change the rules of the game.  It’s a grand vision of course, and one which will no doubt spur its share of interesting news over the next few years. [Read more →]

Both Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) and Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) picked up wins with regional fiber operators yesterday:  

Ciena went south of the border yesterday for a contract with TransTelco.  TransTelco operates a 2,500 mile fiber network spanning the US-Mexico border, helping to hook up two very different markets.  They have announced the implementation of [Read more →]

Router maker Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) reported earnings yesterday after the bell, as the Q2 earnings season begins in earnest.  Revenues of $978.3M was just above the range the company guided to back in April, and beat analyst expectations which weren’t much different than guidance.  Likewise, non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.30 topped guidance of $0.27-0.29 and the street’s expectations of [Read more →]

Aside from the NTELOS/FiberNet deal, there were several other interesting news items from companies with a substantial metro fiber orientation:

Optimum Lightpath, the metro fiber division of Cablevision, has now established a connection with CENX’s Carrier Ethernet Exchange.  To the equation they bring some 4000 route miles of fiber connecting some 4000 lit buildings to date throughout the New York City metropolitan area.  CENX boasts some [Read more →]

In a further development in the metro and regional M&A rumble that has been developing all year, regional operator nTelos (NASDAQ:NTLS, news, filings) has agreed to buy FiberNet, a division of One Communications.  For a price tag of $170M in cash, NTELOS will be gaining some 3,500 miles of metro and regional fiber throughout West Virginia and extending into the surrounding states of [Read more →]

Hosting and cloud provider Navisite (NASDAQ:NAVI, news, filings) [a subsidiary of Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC, news)] got itself a buyout offer yesterday.  According to an SEC filing, Atlantic Investors LLC is offering to purchase all outstanding common shares that it doesn’t own for $3.05 – they currently own over 36%.  What makes this buyout offer special is that its CEO Arthur Becker and the chairman of the board Andrew Ruhan, have [Read more →]

Intellifiber, the independently operated fiber network owned by Cavalier, has won a substantial contract with Telecom Transport Management for wireless backhaul.  Intellifiber will provide backhaul service from some 500 wireless towers across the state of Virginia, including cities such as Richmond, Norfolk, Lynchburg, Roanoke, Williamsburg and Petersburg.  For Intellifiber, the addition of [Read more →]

The rumors last week were true: Nokia Siemens has indeed agreed to purchase Motorola’s wireless equipment business.  The price tag for those $3.5-4.0B in revenues is apparently $1.2B.  For that price, Nokia will gain greater scale in the US and Asian marketplaces, including ‘incumbent [Read more →]

Back in March, plans by Harbinger Capital Partners became public to take spectrum formerly intended for the satellite business and repurpose it into a national wireless network based on LTE via the vehicle SkyTerra.  The prospect of a brand new 4G network in the US that stands independent of the large established players is of course enticing.  However, there are still some hurdles that must be cleared first it seems. [Read more →]

Ethernet based products have seen rapidly accelerating growth across the sector over the past several years, which has in the past three quarters led to the public unveiling of a new business entity:  the Ethernet Exchange.  The first such exchange to go live was CENX, and the company has since reported rapid growth in the breadth of the total endpoints available to its partners.  With us today to help illuminate the subject is Nan Chen, who [Read more →]

One of the oldest names in VoIP, VocalTec, has merged with one of the greatest disruptive forces today in VoIP, YMAX which is the parent company of both consumer VoIP company MagicJack and Stratus Telecommunications which markets the underlying VoIP network technologies.  The combined company will trade on the Nasdaq starting on Monday July 19 under the symbol CALL.  The combined company pegs its own enterprise value currently [Read more →]

You had to know that Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) was handling a big pile of World Cup traffic, considering their dominant position in the content delivery sector.  But until today’s announcement, we didn’t know too many details.  Akamai handled streaming for some 24 global broadcasters into 65 countries, with key major customers including [Read more →]

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 →]