Telecom Ramblings

Lots of interesting news items today, here are a few with some brief comments:

Covad has joined CENX’s carrier Ethernet exchange, which will broaden the company’s distribution capabilities for its Ethernet offerings.  Covad’s presence in some 4000+ central offices across the country allows them to address more than 10 million businesses in 240 metropolitan statistical areas, which is a lot of potential endpoints to add to CENX’s inventory.  Frankly, the company’s participation in the Ethernet exchange marketplace is something I figured [Read more →]

At the SubOptic tradeshow in Yokohama Japan today Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) and Apollo Submarine Cable System, which is jointly owned by both Alcatel-Lucent and with Cable & Wireless, demonstrated transatlantic speeds totalling 3Tbps.  The feat utilized 72 40Gbps wavelengths on Apollo’s northern cable, crossing some 6221 kilometers. That nearly quadruples the original design capacity, and would double the capacity available on a live system from today’s 10Gbps implementations.   [Read more →]

International service provider glbc has been upgrading its AC-1 transatlantic cable in stages over the past year, and today it was announced that Xtera gear has been powering the effort.  Xtera announced a contract to upgrade Network Segment C between Brookhaven, NY and White Sands, UK.  Last year it also supported the upgrade of Network Segments A and B2, as well as a capacity upgrade on Global Crossing’s PAC cable between Panama and California.   [Read more →]

Competitive services provider TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) has released its first quarter 2010 results, turning in yet another solid performance. Revenues and earnings per share (not including debt extinguishment charges) were both above estimates. Here is a quick table summarizing their results in the context of the prior four quarters: [Read more →]

Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) has integrated 40G coherent technology into its CN4200 platform, bringing higher capacity to metro and regional applications.  The new module will allow customers to use DPQPSK modulation, coherent detection, and electronic dispersion compensation to send four times as much data on a 10G wavelength.  The solution will apparently work over impaired fiber and without network redesign. [Read more →]

I have been reading the various analyses of the FCC’s ‘third way’ to implement network neutrality with some mystification.  Following the Comcast decision, the agency obviously had to make a choice.  While the last mile providers pushed pretty hard to get them to drop the whole thing, I don’t think that was ever realistically going to happen even though there were rumors to that effect.  But reclassification of broadband under Title II would have been overkill with all sorts of side effects.  Their ‘third way’ makes strategic sense, but it isn’t really a third way but simply [Read more →]

Fiber M&A activity may be heating up, but the first such deal to be announced this year won’t be going forward.  In January Cinnabar Ventures announced it was moving to acquire US Metro, a small metro and regional fiber operator with lines crisscrossing the southwestern Florida, with special focus on Fort Myers, Naples, and the surrounding areas.  The idea was a vertically integrated southwest Florida technology company, offering cloud-based services in the region over its own fiber.  Apparently though the details didn’t work out, and [Read more →]

DWDM specialist Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) announced on Friday that its submarine solutions have been deployed on a 6000+ km transatlantic route for a major global telecommunications provider.  In all, the deployment offers 1.76Tbps over a single fiber pair.  Infinera’s gear uses a 25Ghz channel grid, whereas other deployments use a 50Ghz grid.  That allows them to fit more 10Gbps wavelengths onto a single fiber.  Infinera has seen pretty good success in the submarine market given that they entered it less than a year ago.  The provider itself is unnamed but we can take a stab at it via the process of elimination.   [Read more →]

Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) had a tough act to follow, after its larger competitor Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) surprised the markets.  The question hanging in the air was whether it came at the expense of its smaller rivals or was the CDN pie growing?  With its Q1 report, Limelight suggests that the latter was the case in Q1 as revenues exceeded both guidance and estimates.  Here is a quick table placing their financial results in context with recent performance: [Read more →]

Today is a telecom earnings deluge, it’s raining fiber & data out there today.  Here is a quick summary of the more metro fiber oriented companies in the sector that reported today. [Read more →]

Network operator Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) reported earnings this morning, and their first quarter was a pretty challenging one.  The company is coming off a rough 2009 in which it saw some stabilization in the fourth quarter.  However, the first quarter is seasonally weaker and they were unable to maintain that overall.  Earnings per share of $0.11 were in-line, however EBITDA fell sequentially to $200M, which frankly is not a happy number.  There were some bright spots, especially in the Large Enterprise and Federal grouping and signs of life in the Mid-Market segment.  Here is a quick table summarizing their numbers: [Read more →]

That’s the word coming out of Washington right now.  Unsatisfied with the more obvious choices left to them in the wake of the Comcast decision, FCC Chairman Genachowski has decided to get creative.  He won’t use the Title II sledgehammer to kill a mosquito, by reclassifying broadband.  But he’s also not going to just take his ball and go home.  According to the FCC: [Read more →]

WiMAX operator clwr needed to demonstrate real traction with consumers in its launched markets, and they did so quite powerfully.  They added some 283,000 net new subscribers, of which 172,000 were retail additions, and 111,000 were via their wholesale partners.  That was more than double their Q4 surge of 133K, and well ahead of the sub-200K that most analysts had been looking for.  They finished the first quarter with [Read more →]

Our newly betrothed ILEC couple, q and CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings), both reported Q1 earnings today, telling similar stories of improving performance amidst the usual declines in access lines.

q continued its [Read more →]

Apparently tndm had a bit of a rough first quarter, something that its shareholders are unaccustomed to after years of steady strong growth.  Neither revenues of $44.8M nor earnings of $0.25 was what the markets were looking for.  EBITDA of $20.6M fell sequentially from $22.4M in the prior quarter, although the company did just barely manage sequential revenue growth again.   The company laid the blame on both [Read more →]

The Rural Nebraska Health Care Network announced yesterday a network build that will connect 9 primary care hospitals and dozens of affiliated clinics.  The new fiber will help bring state of the art medical technology networks to underserved areas.  These facilities are currently fed by T1’s – fiber will make a big difference.  They will be partnering with Zayo Group, which will put up a share of the funding, supplemented by some $19M in funds from the FCC’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program.  This was interesting to me, because as far as I know Zayo has no fiber in Nebraska yet.   [Read more →]

Another piece of the puzzle of what CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) will become is falling into place.  Jointly with Sonus Networks (NASDAQ:SONS, news, filings) today, they announced the successful implementation of a large scale VoIP network that will bring substantial amounts of the largely rural ILEC’s TDM voice traffic onto its core IP backbone.  The new voice network, which was built in under four months, includes [Read more →]

On Thursday morning it will be Level 3’s turn to reveal its Q1 earnings report.  The company has changed the way it will break down its revenues, and we therefore will not be getting information on the four customer facing market groups this time, but rather by customer grouping: Wholesale, Large Enterprise and Federal, Mid-Market, and Europe.  That will make things read a bit differently, but it doesn’t change the basic dynamic of what Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) needs to do this year:  return to revenue growth.  Here is a quick tabular rundown of what I am expecting in the context of the prior two quarters in the new reporting format: [Read more →]

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 →]