Telecom Ramblings

The Danish telecommunications company TDC has bought itself some more fiber.  The company has agreed to acquire the network assembled by Dong Energy for about US$85M.  What a name this company has, I had to be rather careful writing the title to this post.  Dong was rumored to be looking for a buyer in the late Spring, looks like they finally found one. The purchase will go nicely with TDC’s combined wireless and wireline networks, and brings them [Read more →]

Telecommunications companies are definitely pushing deeper into the nascent cloud computing market.  Today it was NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) and AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) who added new cloud-derived products for the enterprise.  As with most new technologies, the cloud is made up of 10% dynamic, revolutionary concept and 90% marketing fluff by people trying to ride the buzzwords to riches.  Nevertheless, we are now seeing real attempts to turn the cloud into actual services people buy, sell, and most of all use.   [Read more →]

Since earnings season has officially ended, it is time for my quarterly look at EBITDA margin trends across the whole range of fiber networking companies.  I don’t use the word CLECs because some of these companies don’t like to think of themselves that way, and frankly the term means less to me than it once did.  The range is all the way from the pure fiber players, to the nearly fiberless – but all of whom specialize in connectivity and compete against the ILECs.  With no further ado, here is [Read more →]

For many in the industry commercial 100Gbps can’t get here fast enough, but it is coming!  Today at the SC09 conference in Seattle, a coalition of made up of Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings), Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings), Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings), Internet2, and ESNet demonstrated a multivendor 100Gbps routing and optical network.  This group has been working steadily together since last November.  In this case of course, we are talking about the 10x10Gb version of 100G, which requires fewer technical advances and will probably come first. [Read more →]

After making dismissive noises for a while in response to videoconferencing provider Tandberg shareholders’ resistance to its initial bid, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) has come back with a new offer.  The new price of $3.41B is a 13.7% increase over its initial bid of $3B.  This time, Cisco seems to have a good number of votes in hand.  Shareholders representing some [Read more →]

Here’s a quick summary of news items that caught my eye this week but for one reason or another I didn’t comment on at the time.

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) unveiled substantial upgrades to its customer portal.  The new portal offers greater visibility into order placement and review, service and network management, invoice management, and reporting and analysis.  It’s one more step [Read more →]

Zayo Bandwidth has further expanded its fiber to the tower offensive in eastern Pennsylvania.  The company announced today that it will bring another 300 towers on-net in Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley.   It was a little over a year ago that Zayo won a contract with TMobile for tower backhaul in Philadelphia and Memphis, apparently that effort has been going well enough to justify further investment. [Read more →]

Terremark (news, filings) [a subsidiary of Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings)] has acquired DS3 DataVaulting, a Virginia based company that as the name suggests specializes in managed off-site backup and restore services.  DS3 will contribute about $6M in annual revenues and $1.5M in EBITDA before synergies.  The $11.5M purchase will further add to the company’s expanding managed IT services suite and enhance the company’s presence in the federal market.   That’s a market the company has been focusing a great deal of resources on, and they seem to have been making some [Read more →]

Continuing its push to decentralize its business markets group and take fuller advantage of its metro fiber assets, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) has turned its attention to Atlanta.    The company will add capacity throughout the reason and start bringing on net more of the 15,000 businesses its fiber already passes.  Level 3 has long had a major presence in Atlanta, but mainly at the wholesale and network operations level.  However, their metro assets in the area are quite extensive, having been assembled from their own original metro build and additonal assets acquired with Telcove, Progress Telecom, and Looking Glass Networks.  On the other hand, Atlanta has one of the more competitive [Read more →]

As soon as WiMAX upstart clwr announced its new funding package this week, you could hear the mumbling.  Google didn’t pitch in!  Google must not believe in the company any more.  Now, I can’t speak for Google directly, but the market consistently misunderstands the companies intentions.  Google didn’t invest in Clearwire in order to take over telecom, or even to make a start at it.  They did it because it’s worth far more to them to have another last mile alternative in the system than it costs them to help get one started.  If they’re not needed to keep it going, then they will [Read more →]

With Carl Icahn’s withdrawal of his bid for the 10% of CLEC XO Holdings (news, filings) he doesn’t already own, the company and its shareholders have entered into a new stage, but one that is clearly temporary and somewhat contradictory.  I frankly didn’t think we would wind up in this position, but when it comes to letting his opponents twist in the wind Carl Icahn is an international grandmaster.  I see his plan more clearly now in hindsight.  Consider the following factors together: [Read more →]

Following up on this weekend’s addition of metro fiber map resources to the website, I have added pages for the Atlanta Metro Area and for California.  Now one might think that perhaps the largest state in the country might merit more than one page, but for now it seems to work best this way as there actually aren’t all that many public maps available for metro fiber in California – that I know of anyway.  I’m sure I have forgotten [Read more →]

Hibernia Atlantic has extended its Global Financial Network into the NY-2 and NY-4 facilities of Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) in Secaucus NJ, hooking into the Equinix Financial eXchange.  The Hibernia hybrid longhaul/metro footprint can now connect Secaucus, Chicago, and London without passing through NYC itself.  The more direct routes have the benefit of lower latency, which is all the rage in the financial world right now. [Read more →]

Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) has announced more layoffs to the tune of 2000-2500 by the end of the year, which includes some reductions mentioned last week or so in the wholesale group and will be from across the company.  They will also be cutting back on outside contractors and other labor costs.  The company is looking to find annual savings of some $350M annually and will take a charge of $60-80M in the fourth quarter for severance and such. [Read more →]

Carl Icahn has withdrawn his bid for XO Holdings (news, filings), according to an SEC filing.  A week and a half ago, ACF Holdings bid $0.80 for the company and gave the XO’s independent Special Committee the weekend to decide.  Apparently negotiations went beyond the deadline, but ACF didn’t raise its bid and XO didn’t make a counter proposal.   I can’t see this little drama as independent of the XO/R2 litigation, in which a ruling is due soon on Icahn’s motion to dismiss.  Depending on your point of view, this was either [Read more →]

Cogent Communications (NASDAQ:CCOI, news, filings) followed up on its great second quarter with a very respectable third quarter earnings report.  Revenues of $60.2M were up 3.9% sequentially – they were up 5% last quarter.  EBITDA was $17.0M, up 2% from the prior quarter, and the loss per share was $0.07.  Analysts were expecting a bit better on the revenue side, and a bit worse on the earnings side.   Last quarter Cogent stopped giving forward guidance, so this was the first quarter the street had to make their guesses blind.  The company was one of the first in the sector to feel the effects of the economic downturn, although some of their issues at the time were self [Read more →]

What’s that old saying?  In for a penny, in for a pound…  Apparently it scales all the way up to the billions.  According to the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, the backers of clwr are preparing another $1.5B to fund its network buildout.  Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) is supposedly putting up about $1B, while a supporting cast of Intel, Comcast, TW Cable, and Bright House would be putting up another $500M.  Is this a real rumor?  It likely is.  While Clearwire could slow their buildout they clearly don’t want to.  Strategically it’s a no-brainer for both themselves and their backers, if they weren’t willing to take this step then they should never have taken the first one.  The future is no sure thing, but failing to feed [Read more →]

One of the more frequent requests I get is for metro fiber map resources along the lines of the various longhaul maps I have already been collecting and updating.  With the holidays fast approaching and the news soon to become almost as sparse as August, I am making this one of my winter projects.  I have decided this must be approached on a flexible  geographical basis.  Specifically, I will try to answer the question ‘Where is there metro fiber in the XYZ area?’ where XYZ is a) generally thought of as a region somehow, and b) has enough metro fiber assets to make a list worth collecting, but not so many to make it confusing.  That means some areas I select will be [Read more →]

Further ratcheting up the rhetoric in the latency war over in the financial vertical, New York City area metro specialist Lexent Metro Connect has built an ultra-low latency network for neutral datacenter heavyweight Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings).  The new fiber path connects two of Equinix’s datacenters in Secaucus with several of the usual carrier hotel suspects in NYC:  60 Hudson Street, 32 Avenue of the America, 75 Broad Street and 111 Eighth Avenue.  No big deal there, the special part according to Lexent and Equinix is that it takes the “shortest path across the Hudson” and manages a route latency of just 100µs. [Read more →]

Continuing its surge out of obscurity, abvt reported an excellent Q3.  Revenues of $92.4M were up a full 5% over the prior quarter’s $88.0M, and were substantially above the market’s expectations of about $88.8M as collected by Yahoo Finance.  Adjusted EBITDA of $40.7M and adjusted EBITDA margin of 44.0% were similarly powerful.  Earlier in the year, when the company reached 44% ebitda margins, it seemed as if they couldn’t possibly keep it up.  But now it looks more and more sustainable.  With growth and scale could they start to edge toward [Read more →]

In the latest sign that the telecom space has turned a corner, national CLEC PAETEC (news, filings) grew sequentially in the third quarter.  In its earnings report this morning, revenues of $395.7M were up from the second quarter, albeit only by $500K.  Nevertheless, this reverses the trend consisting of three consecutive sequential revenue declines amidst revenue pressure, and it beat analyst projections of $392.6 as assembled by Yahoo Finance.  Despite the economy, Paetec has maintained its EBITDA and positive cash flow all year through cost savings, and this quarter’s EBITDA of $64.2M and free cash flow of $36.5M did not disappoint.  Guidance [Read more →]

Lots of earnings reports today, more coming tomorrow.  Here are quick snapshots of companies in three very different sectors of the telecom and internet infrastructure space: Cisco, CBeyond, and Limelight.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) made all the pundits happy by beating expectations handily.  Revenues of $9.0B and adjusted earnings per share of $0.36 were very strong, as were the company’s comments about the improving economic conditions.  The company also announced [Read more →]

Yesterday, the head of the Metro Ethernet Forum, Nan Chen, unveiled the Carrier Ethernet Neutral Exchange (CENX).  The startup, which has been under development for 5 years, aims to do the same thing as what Equinix is trying to do, i.e. serve as a neutral point of contact between the Ethernet services of multiple carriers.  Unlike that of Equinix, CENX’s service is already up and running in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.  One day it’s a vacant lot, the next day there’s a party going on. [Read more →]