Telecom Ramblings » Internet Backbones

Global Crossing Pushes Conferencing, Connects to 4K Suites

Rob Powell — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:06:47 +0000

International network operator Global Crossing [NASDAQ:GLBC - chart, news, filings] had a virtual trade show going on today, the subject of which was collaboration and conferencing – sort of a virtual conference about virtual conferencing. To go along with it, the company this morning announced connectivity to some 4,000 executive video suites across the world, which include more than 500 hi-def public video conference rooms and 400 court reporting facilities. That’s a rather nice footprint to … [visit site to read more]

euNetworks Lowers Another Latency Bar

Rob Powell — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:49:07 +0000

While the low latency game in Europe this summer has mostly featured the likes of bandwidth powerhouses like Level 3 and Colt , their smaller regional rival euNetworks [SI:H23.SI - chart, news] today added another bit of its own magic to the mix. This time the route is between London and a nearby suburb called Slough, and euNetwork’s new line in the sand is sub-500 microseconds, cutting out some 20% from their prior number. The London metro area is one of euNetwork’s strongest markets, and they have been making a serious push to serve the financial community. To achieve this new low latency number, … [visit site to read more]

Level 3 Picks Up CapLogistics, Transbeam

Rob Powell — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:12:54 +0000

Level 3 Communications [NASDAQ:LVLT - chart, news, filings] continued its sustained PR blitz with two more contract wins so far this week.

Yesterday it was a three year deal with transportation solutions provider CAP Logistics. Level 3 will provide a package SIP trunking, IPVN, colo, and dedicated internet access, which will be deployed in Denver, Salt Lake City, Houston, and Illinois. An interesting mid-market win, and they need … [visit site to read more]

Relative Valuations For Competitive Telecoms – Q2/2010

Rob Powell — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:00:59 +0000

Following up on updates to my revenue/capex and EBITDA margin/cashflow posts, we take a look at the overall relative valuations across the sector since the first quarter of 2008. The metric here is the ratio between Enterprise Value and adjusted EBITDA, which is a common way of looking at valuations in this sector. Missing from the comparison are Sprint Wireline and RCN Metro, simply because we can’t calculate an EV for them as they are not separately traded. With no further ado, here is the updated chart: … [visit site to read more]

EBITDA Margin and Cash Flow Trends for Competitive Telecoms – Q2/2010

Rob Powell — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:00:22 +0000

In the previous post, we looked at relative revenue growth and capex trends, updating my competitive telecom trend charts for the second quarter. But while revenue growth is important, profit is obviously moreso. Comparing profit directly doesn’t tell us much because it has too many pieces, not the least of which are very different levels of debt and amortization. In telecom, the common metric to measure the performance of the operations independent of the balance sheet is EBITDA – which has its own warts but gives us a commonality with which we can do comparisons after normalizing by revenue to get EBITDA margins. As always, EBITDA margin varies greatly depending on business model, with fiber-heavy companies having high EBITDA margin and high capex, and fiber-light companies the opposite. Here is the latest graph showing EBITDA margin trends across the sector since the beginning of 2008: … [visit site to read more]

Revenue and Spending Trends For Competitive Telecoms – Q2/2010

Rob Powell — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:00:55 +0000

I have updated my competitive telecom trends page with the published numbers from the second quarter of 2010. This page is automatically generated from a spreadsheet I store in Google Docs and update periodically. However, it was pointed out to me that Google’s charts lack the different symbols one can generate from Excel and therefore aren’t suitable for the color-challenged amongst us – plus they just don’t look as good. Yet they are very convenient for sharing data and automatically posting changes. As a compromise I decided to improve the presentation at least for my regular quarterly blog post on the subject with better charts drawn from the same data. In this post, let’s look at two graphs: relative revenue growth and capex as a percentage of revenue since the beginning of 2008: … [visit site to read more]

Oppenheimer’s Fiber Infrastructure Panel

Rob Powell — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:22:17 +0000

Thanks to reader Frank Coluccio who pointed me toward a recording of the Fiber Infrastructure Panel at Oppenheimer’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications conference that can be found on the website of Abovenet [NYSE:ABVT - chart, news, filings]. The panel’s experts included Abovenet’s Bill LaPerch, Zayo’s Dan Caruso, Allied Fiber’s Hunter Newby, USMetroTel’s Frank Mambuca, and CityTel’s NiQ Lai. That group contains some of the greatest prophets of fiber and the dumb pipe out there right now, spanning a very wide … [visit site to read more]

Colt Takes Aim At Latency Market With Infinera

Rob Powell — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:31:46 +0000

In Europe this morning, Colt Group [LSE:COLT.L - chart, news] launched an attack on the low latency bandwith marketplace. The trans-european fiber operator is now offering 4.22ms between London and Frankfurt as well as 2.65ms between Paris and Brussels. The former has been a battleground for a while of course, but the latter is a new one for me. Is the Paris-Brussels route catching the low latency financial trading bug too? The more the merrier I guess! It’s refreshing to get actual numbers for the latency on these routes, although it is just a snapshot since they are continually driving further … [visit site to read more]

Thursday Roundup 8/19: FiberLight, Paetec, and 2 for Level 3

Rob Powell — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:25:45 +0000

Here’s a quick summary of several news items that crossed the wires over the past day or two:

Metro Fiber operator FiberLight won a contract with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a member of the Cox Media Group. The newspaper is leveraging multiple GigE connections to hook up its facilities across the Atlanta metro area in a highly redundant, secure private network. Earlier this summer, … [visit site to read more]

Fiber Roundup 8/18: 360Networks, Abovenet, Southern Telecom, Level 3

Rob Powell — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:46:35 +0000

Here is a quick summary of several fiber contracts and expansions that have crossed the wires in the last few days:

Western regional fiber operator 360Networks finished a fiber build for Advanced Data Centers. The build consisted of diverse laterals into the company’s McClellan Park facility, which sits on an former Air Force Base. According to ADC, they can now offer low latency 2.3ms connectivity over to major datacenters in the SF Bay area while not having the same earthquake risks. … [visit site to read more]

TTX Selects Global Crossing

Rob Powell — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:55:16 +0000

Global Crossing [NASDAQ:GLBC - chart, news, filings] offered up an interesting press release this morning. TTX Company will be using their EtherSphere, IP VPN, and Dedicated Internet Access services to support operations across seven locations as well as backup services for their data center, displacing its previous provider. TTX provides railcars and freight car management services in North America, which is not the kind of company one thinks of as needing bandwidth and high tech communications systems. But I guess keeping track of 200,000 flatcars, boxcars, and gondolas in the modern age takes a modern IT infrastructure these days. … [visit site to read more]

Zalando, Nexon Select Level 3′s CDN

Rob Powell — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:38:23 +0000

Level 3 Communications [NASDAQ:LVLT - chart, news, filings] chalked up two more wins over the past several days in the content delivery segment. The company continues to prove out its return to revenue growth, which is at least giving their PR team a sustained workout. Hopefully it will show up in their Q3 numbers when the time comes.

Today it was yet another victory in the gaming space with … [visit site to read more]