In an XCHANGE Magazine article on Thursday, Level 3’s Lisa Guillaume mentioned an intriguing new aspect of its CDN business.  Here is the quote: [Read more →]

In a NY Times Bits blog post, Saul Hansell makes the case that Netflix may be in a great position as online video develops.   His point boils down to the fact that Netflix has an existing business that acts as an on-ramp to the new services.  Their DVD rental service transitions naturally to a stream-to-the-set-top-box model.  But in a blog post today on The Business of Online Video, Dan Rayburn shot some holes in this theory [Read more →]

On TechTicker yesterday, Paul Kedrosky painted an ugly picture of how the credit crisis hurts telecom infrastructure.  It goes like this:  big telecom infrastructure rollouts like 3G in China are very often financed with debt, not from cashflow.  With no access to the debt markets, the buildouts will stall and this will hurt the equipment makers.  This is a surprise? [Read more →]

In the face of a deteriorating economy, PAETEC (PAET) has scaled back plans for its new headquarters building in Rochester, NY.  Just four months ago the large CLEC’s plans were for a 37 story monster of a building with luxury apartments above office space, and just two months ago they still said all systems were go.  Now they have now settled on [Read more →]

Not everyone is paralyzed by the financial crisis.  Far from Wall Street, the economy does go on.  Fiber does get installed and lit, and services get sold.  No less than three expansions of metro and regional fiber were announced in the last few days, one by Fiberlight, another by AFS, and yet another by US Carrier. [Read more →]

In July, back when the credit markets were merely horrible, Vonage announced a financing package to allow it to refinance its debt that comes due in December, and even then it was a brutal refinancing.  Well, today Vonage announced the package has been renegotiated.  Why?  Well, I’m guessing it is because the original package ‘contemplated’ raising $30M from other parties to make it to $220M total, and that obviously didn’t happen.  Given the state of the markets, you know the new package isn’t going to be much of an improvement. [Read more →]

Back in July I posted that big money might return to telecom in the form of enabling acquisitions.  Apparently I was much to early, the opportunities then seemed clear to me but they look petty and small compared to those in the current environment.  As the financial crisis deepens, it seems inevitable to me that the vultures [Read more →]

Finally, Verizon (VZ) lost a VoIP patent case yesterday.  Cox, accused of infringing on 6 patents, took the ILEC all the way through a jury trial and won on all counts.  Well, it is Cox and not Vonage (VG) this time or someone even smaller, so this isn’t quite a giant killing story, yet it is satisfying anyway.  [Read more →]