Telecom Ramblings

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced this morning that it has connected to CENX, the Carrier Ethernet exchange started by Nan Chen of the Metro Ethernet Forum and opened for business in November.  The connection will allow Level 3 to service more customers more quickly than before, assuming of course that the exchange gains critical mass amongst network providers.  It was just a week ago that it was Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) Business joining CENX to extend its own Ethernet reach.  Given the attention from both next generation and traditional [Read more →]

I have added another page to my longhaul maps collection for Latin America, i.e. everything from Mexico and the Bahamas on southward to Cape Horn.  There tends to be a greater dependence on submarine versus terrestrial fiber in much of this region – fiber backbones over the Andes and through the Amazon are rare except for between Argentina and Chile.  There tend to be national or even simply regional networks strung together with submarine capacity, with Mexico being the notable [Read more →]

Over the weekend I rolled out a new layout for the website.  Artistically there were some minor color changes, but the main differences revolve around the three boxes at the top.  Basically, the main menu bar was getting crowded and new visitors would have to dig quite hard to find things like the map collections and metro fiber list.  Here is a quick summary: [Read more →]

For the first Telecom Ramblings reader poll of 2010, I thought I’d invert the question I asked last summer and see who the telecom community thinks is the likeliest buyer of more fiber.  For this poll, I’m looking only at publicly traded companies that own or directly operate a substantial amount of fiber:

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FiberTower ftwr is embarking on a major expansion of its fiber footprint using dark fiber from metro fiber specialist FiberLight.  The transaction covers some 4000 miles of fiber right now across eight markets, with options for 8000 more miles over the next 6 years.  Fibertower combines metro loops with its spectrum holdings to develop hybrid wireless backhaul systems. [Read more →]

Indian telecommunications giant Bharti Airtel and CDN specialist Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) announced today that they will work together to provide more comprehensive content delivery services to the Indian marketplace. The CDN services market in India is growing at a 30% clip and has huge and rapidly growing online population, which of course means a global CDN needs to find a way to address it or be left behind. [Read more →]

Metro fiber specialist abvt has long had a very dense NY metro area footprint, but this month they have been deepening it further with the addition of several datacenters already.  Yesterday the company announced services to two Telehouse facilities at 25 Broadway in Manhattan and 7 Teleport on Staten Island.  That allows them to offer low latency connectivity to financial clients in either facility, and gives Telehouse some more firepower [Read more →]

It’s not often that the Arctic Ocean comes up in the context of fiberoptics, and my first impression of yesterday’s headline about a proposed ArcticLink cable amounted to ‘Fiber-To-The-Igloo??’  But actually the project calls for a 10,000 mile undersea Japan-UK cable that goes through the Bering Straight and right on through the fabled Northwest Passage.  It’s a route that a decade or two ago would have been fantasy at best, but which now might be plausible due to the receding ice cap.   [Read more →]

Transatlantic cable operator Hibernia Atlantic and US backbone and the competitive carrier XO Holdings (news, filings) announced an interesting partnership this morning.  The two companies will swap complementary capacity, allowing each to extend its network reach.  XO gains both a capacity boost and extra diversity for its IP network to and within Europe.  While XO hasn’t ever had a major presence overseas, they did add transpacific capacity just about a year ago simply to improve their IP backbone cost structure and reach.  Since I doubt they are making a major [Read more →]

US based carriers have had some success internationally over the past few days.

glbc won a nice international voice and data services deal with AeroMexico. The airline will be using the company’s MPLS and DIA services to connect 22 US locations and 8 more internationally and spruce up its scheduling and baggage handling systems, as well as toll free and long distance services for its reservations system.  Overall, that’s a wide range of services to a large international corporate customer taken away from the incumbent, and precisely the [Read more →]

London based PacketExchange annnounced today that it will buy the assets of California based and fellow tier 2 network provider Mzima.  These are two very similar companies, both  focused on providing managed and unmanaged IP and Ethernet services out of major data centers.  Each has had regional strength on their home turf, and their footprints are highly complimentary.  Combined, they have a strong presence in both [Read more →]

European backbone operator Interoute joined the growing list of network operators who have begun 2010 on an expansive note, turning up a new link to Gibraltar with GibTelecom, the dominant provider of both wireless and wireline services in the British territory.  The 900km route from Madrid is independent of other routes in southern Spain from Telefonica and others, offering Gibraltar improved connectivity.  Initial connectivity on the new link will be 2.5Gbps, but more will surely be on the way down the line.     [Read more →]

For a while there, when one talked of pure-play wholesale carriers it was in the past tense.  But for the last six months Tinet has brought this business model back from the brink of extinction.  Formerly part of Tiscali, Tinet is now owned by private equity and is boldly walking the path of the wholesale data specialist.  The now independent company runs a top-10 backbone and sells only IP Transit/Peering and Ethernet services to wholesale buyers such as ISPs, carriers, and content providers.

Is the wholesale business model finally ready to rise again?  This could be a substantial shift in the marketplace, and yet it gets little press amidst all the noise about network neutrality, iPhones, and layoffs.  Hence, I thought we could do with a bit more first hand information.  With us today to offer his perspective is Tinet’s [Read more →]

Ok, maybe that’s a bit premature but everyone needs goals to shoot for.  But as 2010 starts rolling, I think we are starting to see a much more aggressive stance from industry participants overall, and especially from the metro fiber space which seems ready to explode.  Alongside the expansive noises Abovenet is making, this week there were interesting announcements by Lightower, Optimum Lightpath, Intellifiber, Orange Business, and 360Networks that hopefully foreshadow more to come: [Read more →]

As I thought might happen, abvt seems to be ready to leverage its success over the past several years to do launch an aggressive expansion into new markets.  After managing to maintain a torrid growth rate and EBITDA margins in the mid 40% range during a recession, one has to wonder what they have planned for a recovery.  Just before the new year, the company drew down the remaining $24.57M of its Delayed Draw Term Loan, though for current operations it has no need for that money.  And this week in an interview with Reuters, CEO Bill LaPerch discussed continued growth driven by its financial customers and offered the following quote: [Read more →]

A rebound in the telecom sector is something we are all hoping for after last year’s frantic cost cutting and delayed purchasing.  One key step along the path to a more sustainable capex level across the industry is obviously the choice of what new gear to spend it on, and therefore I find it encouraging that we have seen quite a few interesting selections this week.  Here are a few that caught my eye: [Read more →]

Southwest Florida metro fiber provider US Metro is being sold to Cinnabar Ventures, which is a new technology company focusing on cloud-based network solutions.  US Metro, which operates fiber in Lee and Collier counties, isn’t the largest metro fiber company around, having just past the $2M annual revenue mark.  But the price tag of $18M is some 9 times revenue, which implies a hefty EBITDA multiple and reflects the value of the assets in the ground.   [Read more →]

Over on the Telecom Ramblings Jobs board, we have a new listing.  Intercarrier Networks is looking for a Field Technician in St Louis, Missouri.  I’m hopeful that with the economy looking better this year that we will see many more such jobs open up, though of course if there is M&A activity then there will also be jobs lost due to consolidation.  

Are you in the market for a job in the telecom and internet infrastructure sectors?  Subscribe to our Jobs RSS feed, and you’ll receive updates on new jobs posted.  Or, conversely if you are you hiring, you can list your company’s job openings on the Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board.  They will appear not only here, but on other related sites since we use the SimplyHired service which shares listings.

According to an article over at Phone+, itcd has recently been playing some serious hardball with its agents.  The southern CLEC appears to have unceremoniously severed its relationship with a variety of agents and master agents.  Now, Phone+ caters to the channel and their article is of course from that point of view, but regardless it is clear that Deltacom is in the midst of reorganizing its channel sales.  This sort of thing is never fun for those involved, and I can’t say anything about the merits of the accusations on either side of the fence.  As a general matter though, this sort of event happens periodically in the sector when a carrier decides it isn’t getting what it wants out of the channel for whatever reason.  So what is Deltacom not getting? [Read more →]

Regular readers know that I love fiber maps.  I’d have to, or I wouldn’t collect links to them.  But despite that, Telecom Ramblings had no map of its own – until now.  No, I didn’t just acquire some fiber so I can add myself to my own list (someday perhaps!?).  But I did build myself a clickable map of my metro fiber maps to make them easier to navigate.  The existing list of regions was both long and arbitrarily organized, and readers looking for a fiber in a particular market had to think about not only where it was but also what I might have called it.  So instead, let’s try this: [Read more →]

This morning, 24/7 Fiber Network announced an expansion of its metro and regional footprint in and beyond Washington DC and Baltimore.  The company plans to construct a dark fiber network that extends into the under-served Delmarva peninsula. That’s the land on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay whose name derives from the three states occupying it:  Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.  The 432 strand fiber route will run through Salisbury to [Read more →]

Yesterday a high profile, international group of communications companies, government and nonprofit agencies, and research labs banded together to launch Green Touch.  The idea behind the group is to work together to lower energy consumption in the communications industry.  And of course to kick things off they needed to set an a goal worthy of the effort.  Led by the likes of Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs, AT&T, China Mobile, and MIT’s Research Laboratory for Electronics, they clearly have a lot of firepower to bring to bear.   [Read more →]

There’s a nice article with comments from NTT America’s  CTO Doug Junkins over on Enterprise Networking Planet.  Amongst the interesting bits are that the company’s capex budget will be some 20-30% higher in 2010 than in 2009 in response to continuing traffic growth.  On their transpacific routes – which now include the Pacific Crossing cable, their lit capacity will reach 320Gbps this month and likely 500Gbps by the end of the year.  But the most interesting portion is NTT America’s growing interest in 100G.   [Read more →]