Telecom Ramblings

Competitive service provider Paetec (PAET: chart, news) reported earnings this morning, without too many surprises.  Basically, the met guidance and most trends continued on the same track we had been seeing all year.  Here is a quick table summarizing the company’s sequential performance in 2009: [Read more →]

Tomorrow morning Global Crossing (GLBC: chart, news) will hold their earnings CC, which if their recent patterns hold means that they will be releasing the PR today after the market closes.   That of course means it’s time for a quick earnings preview.  2009 wasn’t a fun year for telecom as a whole, but when you discount currency fluctuations and consider the rest of the tough decade people at Global Crossing had already endured – I suspect they probably enjoyed it more than most.  Here’s a quick table previewing my expectations for how Q4 went relative to the rest of 2009: [Read more →]

According to a study being released by Infonetics today, the optical network hardware sector was up some 5% sequentially in the fourth quarter.  That jives well with the earnings we have been seeing so far; it is clear that some of that capex that didn’t get spent in the prior 4 quarters has begun to trickle back into the market.  For the full year, the sector was still down some 14% overall.  One interesting tidbit was that most of the changes in market share came at the [Read more →]

In a blitz of press releases this morning, telecommunications equipment giant Alcatel-Lucent (ALU: chart, news) offered glimpses of multiple LTE projects.  In tests with Telefonica (TEF: chart, news), they made what were billed as the first 4G LTE phone calls.  For now this has only been in Telefonica’s labs, but in the next stage they will be testing in the field over [Read more →]

Some news gets bypassed during earnings season, let’s look at a few items I didn’t write about this week:

Deltacom (news) changed its mind and withdrew its offering for $325M in senior secured notes, with which it had planned to refinance its credit facilities and thus remove some restrictive financial covenants.  The reason given was that the cost of capital rose unexpectedly and that turned an attractive deal into an unattractive one.  That’s the simplest explanation of course, and probably [Read more →]

Now that a bit of the dust has settled on the announced intention by Google (GOOG: chart, news) to build an experimental FTTX network in a community or communities yet to be determined, it’s time to get a reading on what the community actually thinks they are doing.  We know what the media thinks, or at least what they think will get the most readers to read their articles.  What about the rest of us?  Here’s a quick poll: [Read more →]

Transpacific internet traffic continues to surge mightily, according to a release by NTT America today.  NTT’s total capacity on its global backbone between Japan and the USA has now reached 300Gbps, which the company bills as more than any other network.  I don’t doubt them, as this is NTT’s home turf of course.  Their bandwidth is spread across three cable systems:  Japan-US, TGN Transpacific, and of course PC-1.  It’s interesting that they aren’t including the newer Unity or TPE cables on that list yet, probably because [Read more →]

Regional and metro fiber challenger Zayo (news) has thrown its hat into the low-latency ring.  Today they announced the deployment of a new low latency route between the Chicago and New York metro areas.  The lure of top dollar bandwidth purchases by the financial community for ultra-low-latency connections is drawing in every fiber operator who can muster the necessary assets, and who can blame them?  Zayo did not mention the actual latency levels available on the new route, if anyone out there has heard a number I’d be curious [Read more →]

Data center specialist Equinix (EQIX: chart, news) reported earnings yesterday after the bell, and this morning gave us an update on its Carrier Ethernet Exchange initiative.  Overall, the company had a great Q4 in which revenues of $243M and EBITDA of $111.3 exceeded both guidance and analyst expectations.  However, guidance for 2010 apparently disappointed some analysts, though Equinix has a history of cautious initial full year projections – they looked pretty good to me.  Here is a quick summary of the company’s sequential performance and projections: [Read more →]

Oh my, Google (GOOG: chart, news) does know how to make trouble don’t they?  Yesterday the internet giant announced it would delve into FTTH with a project to connect 50K-500K people to the internet at 1Gbps speeds.  They are now looking for candidate cities and municipalities to work with on this project.  Why are they doing this?  It’s a deliberately provocative move intended to make current broadband providers respond, and I think its effects will rock the access market far beyond the initial shock wave.  For now though let’s look at the immediate implications: [Read more →]

Competitive service provider Paetec (PAET: chart, news) has joined the expansion parade with a move into Vermont.  PAETEC has long been in most markets in New England, but had not cracked the Green Mountain State in any major way.  Of course in internet geography it is well off the beaten path so there aren’t many providers who do have a major business in the state. That makes 46 states now where they have a presence, and I’m sure they will be [Read more →]