Telecom Ramblings

According to Phone+, Level 3 Communications (NASDAQ:LVLT - chart, news, filings) has realigned its North American sales leadership.  Rather than operating North America in three groups: wholesale, content, and business, there will now be a single sales organization with six channels:  large enterprise, wholesale, federal, content, mid-market and indirect.  Jeff Tench, who was head of the business markets group, appears to be out of the picture.  A quick look at Level 3′s management page says that isn’t the only change.  [Read more →]

In their earnings call last week, Level 3 Communications (NASDAQ:LVLT - chart, news, filings) mentioned that they have been re-evaluating their colocation business.  Specifically, in response to an analyst question about their plans for their colocation footprint, CEO James Crowe made the following comment:

“This is a matter of some strategic importance.  We’re doing a review that is largely completed.  We will make some decisions here in the coming months.  Our data center business would be one of the larger colocation/data center businesses in the industry if it were a standalone.  It’s a big opportunity for us.  We want to make sure we take advantage of it properly.”

Since then, I have received [Read more →]

Another month, another bunch of cities with access to WiMAX.  Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR - chart, news, filings) today announced its expansion into several new markets across the country.

First of all, they added Wilmington, Delaware to a growing regional network that includes Philadelphia as well as large parts of [Read more →]

Several data center items hit the wires this morning worthy of a quick look:

Over in the UK Telecity Group (LSE:TCY.L - chart, news, filings) is buying Internet Facilitators Limited (IFL), which operates a carrier neutral datacenter in Manchester.  The purchase will add some [Read more →]

A few days ago over on Forbes, Andy Greenberg recounted the keynote speech by former general Michael Hayden at the Black Hat security conference, focusing in on a fascinating quote:

“There’s a distinction between the other four domains [land, air, sea, space] and cyber. God made four, you made the last one. God did a better job.  You guys made the cyber domain look like the north German plain. Then you bitch and moan when you get invaded.  On the Internet, we are all Poland. We all get invaded on the Web. The inherent geography of this domain is that everything plays to the offense.”

From a military perspective, [Read more →]

It has been a busy news week, with a pile of earnings reports competing for attention with everything else.  Here are several items that went by on the wires that deserve a mention:

Neutral Tandem announced a set of initial participants in its Ethernet Exchange, which is going live this summer:  RCN Metro, Tinet, PAETEC, Deltacom, US Signal, Mosaic NetworX, Wilshire Connection, and ION.  That’s an interesting list which includes [Read more →]

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU - chart, news, filings) has had quite a week, with a bevy of contract wins across a wide spectrum of products, and now a rather strong earnings report.  Revenues were €3.81B, or $4.98B, down 2.4% from last year but coming in ahead of expectations.  Net loss on the other hand was &euro$184M which was wider than expected, but shares of the company in Europe surged on the company’s outlook for a strong second half.  [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NASDAQ:LVLT - chart, news, filings) announced today that it has added depth to its metro presence in Dublin, Ireland.  After being largely bypassed by bandwidth for many years, the connectivity business in Dublin has been surging mightily over the past several years as the business environment has been highly favorable to hi-tech companies for a while now.  Dublin is not a place where Level 3 has [Read more →]

Metro fiber operator Abovenet (NYSE:ABVT - chart, news, filings) has added its first new market since the dot com bubble, with an expansion into Miami.  The company has always focused only on the very largest bandwidth markets and Miami was the biggest gap in that coverage, so this was a natural move.  In addition to having many high bandwidth enterprises in the financial, healthcare, and media sectors, Miami is [Read more →]

Global Crossing (NASDAQ:GLBC - chart, news, filings) has taken the plunge and launched an immersive telepresence product.    in partnership with Teliris.  Global Crossing has long had an extensive portfolio of conferencing and collaboration products, which it uses in catering to its multinational customer base.  Hence this move seems to follow naturally, given the ongoing transition of telepresence to the mainstream. [Read more →]

Recession, recovery, whatever, it doesn’t seem to matter much when Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX - chart, news, filings) reports.  This quarter includes two months of data from the Switch & Data acquisition, which boosts the numbers of course.  Revenues of $296.1 met guidance and expectations, even beating Paolo’s projections by a hair.  Adjusted EBITDA of $132.2M and earnings per share of $0.21 were a bit higher and lower, respectively, than forecast.  As for the Switch & Data acquisition, [Read more →]

Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM - chart, news, filings) reported its second quarter earnings today after the bell.  The 800lb gorilla of the CDN space is following up on very powerful fourth and first quarters, sooner or later the pendulum must swing back right?  Well, it didn’t swing back just yet, but this time Akamai only managed to hit the high end of its own guidance.  What other providers wouldn’t give to hear themselves in that sentence… Here is a quick table of their second quarter 2010 results in the context of the prior four quarters: [Read more →]