Telecom Ramblings

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: [Read more →]

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 [Read more →]

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 [Read more →]

According to various reports originating with option trading activity, there are rumors circulating that Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM - chart, news, filings) could be a takeover target.  The likely buyer?  Obviously a telco or a cable company according to Silicon Alley Insider.    I know I’m something of an M&A groupie at times, but there are merger possibilities out there that just make no sense, and this is one of them.  No, it’s not that a telco or cable wouldn’t find Akamai of value, nor is it that they couldn’t find some cost savings, nor that the combined company couldn’t kick some major ass.  It’s just that pesky net neutrality thing, and the sloppiness of the conversation around it. [Read more →]

According to ArsTechnica, the Belgian ISP Telenet recently published a list of its top 25 downloaders.  At the top of the list was a customer who sometime this summer managed to burn some 2.68 Terabytes of data in a single month.  That’s an impressive number, almost a thousand times the average broadband customer and worthy of almost anyone’s definition of a ‘bandwidth hog’.  No word on precisely what data was being downloaded, but it can’t very well have been anything other than a whole lot of video.  But as Rudolf van der Berg points out over on his Internet Thought blog, it actually isn’t [Read more →]

Over on the Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board, we have a new job posting.  Zayo is looking for an Application Developer in Louisville, Colorado.  The position involves working extensively with Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, adding new features and functionality to Zayo’s backoffice systems.  

I have been running this jobs board for a while now, [Read more →]

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, [Read more →]

Fresh off its acquisition of all those rural lines from Verizon, Frontier Communications (NYSE:FTR - chart, news, filings) has raised issues with the proposed purchase of FiberNet from One Communications by nTelos (NASDAQ:NTLS - chart, news, filings).  Apparently, these guys actually enjoyed all that sharp elbow work they had to endure from the West Virginia PSC and politicians in general back in the Spring, because they’re back for more.  Well, maybe not more of the same as they are on the other side of the fence this time. [Read more →]

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. [Read more →]

Windstream (NYSE:WIN - chart, news, filings) is buying itself a bunch of fiber!  Today the rural ILEC announced that it has agreed to purchase Kentucky Data Link (KDL) as well as Norlight from Q-Comm.  The transaction is valued at approximately $782M, the components of which will be 20.6M shares of stock, $278M in cash, and the repayment of $267M in net debt.  From what I hear, this was not Windstream’s first offer, but rather its third.  Additionally, there were active private equity bidders in the mix, but [Read more →]

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.  [Read more →]

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 [Read more →]