Telecom Ramblings

Last week marked nine months since Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) closed its purchase of Global Crossing, and this week will be fifteen months since the deal itself was announced. The company’s stock price today is still below where it was on both of those dates, but the underlying fundamentals seem poised to shift dramatically in their favor over the next quarter or two. [Read more →]

With the first big heat wave of the summer mostly over in North America (we hope), here’s a quick look at some interesting news already this week from Reliance, Equinix, Xand, Interoute, and Vonage: [Read more →]

There’s a nice piece in Sunday’s New York Times about the huge and growing demand for surveillance information from wireless carriers by law enforcement agencies local to federal. Apparently, wireless carriers responded to 1.3M such requests last year, up sharply from last year. [Read more →]

You know, perhaps this would have gone better if we had outsourced it to the RIAA and MPAA that have so much experience tracking down individual internet activity across the globe. They certainly seem to have no problem finding and notifying the owners of computers accessing bits they oughtn’t.  The FBI is [Read more →]

Sometimes you just have to sit back and wonder about the world. This week, Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) and its smaller mobile competitor MetroPCS took another swing at network neutrality regulations. This time though, timing things to coincide with our annual preoccupation with 5-4 Supreme Court rulings du jour, they brought out the legal guns of last resort, claiming net neutrality violates their freedom of speech. [Read more →]

As promised (but a little later than expected), I have updated my Metro Fiber and Lit Buildings statistics once again. There are a few stragglers promising new data that still may come in for whom I will update this post, but here’s the current list (recent updates in purple): [Read more →]

Yesterday was Independence Day in the US of course, but that doesn’t mean that nothing happened but fireworks and hot dogs elsewhere. Here’s a quick roundup of telecom and internet infrastructure news from the likes of Facebook, Verizon, Ericsson, and Equinix over the last day or two: [Read more →]

This article was authored by John C. Tanner, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

ITEM: The Korea Communications Commission has reportedly made it legal for SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ to charge their customers extra fees to use VoIP apps – or block their use entirely. [Read more →]

NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) is continuing to build out its European network presence. Today they extended their Tier-1 IP network southward into the city of Milan in Italy in response to customer demand.  [Read more →]

Yesterday’s article produced quite a spirited response, both online and offline.  So let’s try a reader poll on the subject.  You know my view, what’s yours? [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at some other news already this week: [Read more →]

Down in Texas, Alpheus Communications says it is expanding both its workforce and its fiber network to take on the enterprise market. The regional fiber operator has traditionally been more of a wholesale player, with its fairly conservative chief focus having been to sell fiber access to central offices and major aggregation points across the region to larger telecommunications carriers. [Read more →]

As I expected might happen today, Zayo Group (news, filings)‘s purchase of AboveNet is now officially a done deal. Zayo has come a long way from its earliest days picking off lesser known assets like Indiana Fiberworks and Memphis Networx, and is one of the largest fiber operators in the country. They have 61,000 route miles of fiber, 4.6M fiber miles, 20 colo facilities, and about 9,000 on-net buildings.  Of US network operators, only [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) said this morning that it has launched a new data center service in its Latin American markets. The managed hosting solution is offering usage-based, virtualized computing capacity to enterprise customers, but also guaranteeing resource availability and enabling burst consumption. [Read more →]

If Zayo’s pending purchase of AboveNet says anything, it’s that those islands of underinvested fiber (metro, regional, or intercity) that were orphaned by the hundreds across the USA when the dotcom bubble burst are getting pretty darn scarce. [Read more →]

Job listings have started to pick up again after a slow start to the summer season, which hopefully will be the story in the rest of the economy. This week we saw a new listing posted by OpenCape, the Massachussetts buildout bringing fiber and big bandwidth to Cape Cod. [Read more →]

Time to catch up on some of the other news this week with a few quick looks before everyone goes home for the weekend. [Read more →]

This article is by a new contributor to Telecom Ramblings, Gunnar Oddsson, who has been in the business for the last 17 years, working as a technician, project manager, consultant and a business owner.

On Tuesday, April 4th, 2012, Anton Troianovski wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal titled: “OPTICAL DELUSION? FIBER BOOMS AGAIN, DESPITE BUST.”  [Read more →]

Pan-European operator Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) has turned up its new ultra-low latency route between London and Dublin, bringing the Irish capitol just a bit closer to the rest of Europe when it comes to connectivity. [Read more →]

According to reports, America Movil has succeeded in buying the 27.7% stake it has been aming at. As of yesterday afternoon, it owned 24.91% with another 2.8% on tap, finishing off the planned purchase smoothly and efficiently. [Read more →]

I had a great time at yesterday’s Telecom Exchange event in Manhattan, congrats to Jaymie Scotto & Associates for another awsome event!  Now it’s time to catch up on a bit of the news issued there that I didn’t get to yet, which was focused on colo or connectivity to colo. [Read more →]

Plenty of news this morning, much of which has been timed to coincide with today’s Telecom Exchange event, which I should be physically at when this gets posted. More later on that of course, but first some quick-takes on news from Inteliquent, Cross River, Telehouse, and IceHook. [Read more →]

This article was authored by John C. Tanner, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Good news for those of you who find Wi-Fi usage a pain at home and even worse when on the road: Passpoint is here. Almost. [Read more →]