Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Phil Koen has stepped down as CEO of Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] as of Jan 8, and its chairman James Ousley has stepped in as interim CEO while the company puts together a search committee to find a permanent successor.  Koen joined the company in 2006 when it looked far different than it does today.  His reasons for leaving are not entirely clear, only that he is ready to look at new opportunities. [Read more →]

Last week, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) started the new year with a refinancing move, variants of which seem to be on pages 1-27 of its playbook.  But is this really about getting an early start at chipping away at the 2013 debt pile?  There are a few interesting points that suggest an M&A motive, and of course M&A is on pages 28-50 of that playbook [Read more →]

On Friday I mentioned widespread use of femtocells as a long term wireless replacement.  But today, femtocells are expensive and are marketed by a few large wireless carriers mainly to those with poor indoor cell coverage.  But at the CES show last week we heard the rumblings of change.  MagicJack unveiled an early version of its own femtocell, which they have been working on for a year or two now.  It’s still not for sale yet, but if it’s anything like the company’s consumer VoIP offering then it’s going to make a big splash.  Many people, myself included, underestimated the company’s VoIP effort, but it has turned out to be a very savvy formulation of [Read more →]

In June of 2008, T-Mobile opened a new front by offering over-the-top VoIP to its wireless customers.  It was an interesting move, but little was heard on the subject after that.  Therefore it came as no great shock to me when the company announced its intention to pull the plug on new sales.  This has always been an outsourced service, so they have little infrastructure to take down and will therefore continue to [Read more →]

This morning, q announced its intention to sell $500M in new debt due 2018, intending to use the proceeds to redeem $525M in 7.25% senior notes that mature in February of next year.  Just seven hours later, the offering had morphed into $800M, a full 60% more than originally planned.  The notes will bear interest at 7.125% and were priced at 98.44% – not a [Read more →]

Shareholders of telecom equipment maker Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) have sure had quite a ride recently.  The most recent news of course was an eruption of buyout rumors.  Supposedly, it was Nokia Siemens that was sniffing around, fresh from losing the Nortel MEN auction.  Nokia Siemens flat out denied it, but the rumor kept right on trucking without an actual named buyer like some sort of headless [Read more →]

Equinix’s proposed purchase of Switch and Data seems to be facing some hurdles at the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice.  In filings today, the two companies pushed back the expected closing of the deal into the second quarter.  After resetting the waiting period once already in December, Equinix has now received a second request to which it needs to respond and which adds yet another 30 days to the process.  Is there a chance the government will nix the deal entirely?  I doubt it. [Read more →]

T-mobile has reportedly upgraded its US 3G network to HSPA 7.2, which is capable of downlink speeds of 7.2Mbps.  That is twice as fast as previously supported, and technically makes T-mobile the fastest national mobile network out there – though where available Clearwire’s WiMAX does burst higher of course.  With the higher downstream speeds comes greater backhaul requirements, but T-mobile has the ‘blessing’ of not having to support an iPhone explosion in the USA – yet.  They still haven’t publicly said much about their plans for 4G, but I think [Read more →]

Transatlantic cable operator Hibernia Atlantic has received a cash infusion of $13.4M from Constellation Growth Capital, which until now was owned entirely by Columbia Ventures Corporation.  It was just last month that Hibernia announced the purchase of video networking specialist MediaXstream in an all stock transaction.   The company will use the funds to continue to expand its business and especially to extend its network reach deeper into both the North American and European markets.   [Read more →]

Reliable sources tell me that Intellifiber is preparing to light the lowest latency route between the NYC and Chicago metro areas.  Rumors peg the latency at all sorts of physically impossible numbers, but the new route will likely check in just below current SLA’d latencies of about 17ms.  In addition to speed, the route will be physically diverse from other high speed routes, which will help add resiliency to the new generation of financial networks.  The latency war that began in 2009 continues to heat up, and the NYC-Chicago route is one of the major flash points.  The speed title currently is, last I heard, held by [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) this morning announced that it plans to issue $640M in new senior notes due 2018 to qualified institutional buyers.  They will use the money to tender for their 12.25% debt due 2013, of which they have $550M outstanding.  There will be some left over, even if they were to get all of the 12.25%’s.  It is a while yet before 2013 rolls around, but the company has a large pile of debt due that year and is clearly not going to wait to chip away at it.  Early refi action has been their policy for so many years now that this move probably doesn’t surprise anyone.  The amount the debt markets are apparently willing to let them refinance, however, is quite [Read more →]

It’s taken a few months, but I have finally filled in the rest of the continental US map with pages of metro map links for Virginia and the Carolinas and for the Rockies.  Of course, two states are still unaccounted for, I will add a page for metro maps in Hawaii and Alaska if I ever find any.  It has been quite a job, but now that it is in place I hope that the full collection of US metro fiber maps will serve as a resource for anyone researching or just hoping to browse available fiber networks by market. [Read more →]