Telecom Ramblings

Ethernet based products have seen rapidly accelerating growth across the sector over the past several years, which has in the past three quarters led to the public unveiling of a new business entity:  the Ethernet Exchange.  The first such exchange to go live was CENX, and the company has since reported rapid growth in the breadth of the total endpoints available to its partners.  With us today to help illuminate the subject is Nan Chen, who [Read more →]

One of the oldest names in VoIP, VocalTec, has merged with one of the greatest disruptive forces today in VoIP, YMAX which is the parent company of both consumer VoIP company MagicJack and Stratus Telecommunications which markets the underlying VoIP network technologies.  The combined company will trade on the Nasdaq starting on Monday July 19 under the symbol CALL.  The combined company pegs its own enterprise value currently [Read more →]

You had to know that Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM - chart, news, filings) was handling a big pile of World Cup traffic, considering their dominant position in the content delivery sector.  But until today’s announcement, we didn’t know too many details.  Akamai handled streaming for some 24 global broadcasters into 65 countries, with key major customers including [Read more →]

Let’s play a bit of catchup on the various bits of metro fiber connectivity news that has built up over the last week or so:

Southeastern metro fiber builder FiberLight has padded its balance sheet with an additional $22M in cash from CoBank.  The new private debt will be made up of a $20M note and a $2M increase in their existing line of credit, and follows $13M from CoBank last summer.  FiberLight has been [Read more →]

Of late there has been substantial buzz surrounding the details of last year’s Universal Service Fee recipients, or USF, and none of it has been particularly flattering.  We have Verizon and AT&T raking in billions of dollars of course.  Then there is this year’s poster child for excessive spending:  Weavtel, which serves 14 customers in a remote corner of Washington and raked in an obscene $17,763 per line.   And over [Read more →]

Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT - chart, news, filings) made a significant M&A move this morning with an agreement to purchase South African based Dimension Data.  Dimension Data is a systems integrator that focuses on the multinational enterprise market to the tune of about $4B in annual revenue with some 6000 corporate customers.  The purchase price is £2.1B, or about $3.2B.  NTT’s move should be seen as [Read more →]

Following my article about XO’s layoffs last month and the outpouring of comments that followed from both insiders and outsiders, I have pondered what to say in followup. There are obviously strong feelings involved, and there are more than two sides. But from my point of view, XO spends too much time in the shadows relative to the assets they hold and I am not sorry for having briefly shined a flashlight back in the cave. But where is it that XO can or should go from here? [Read more →]

According to the Financial Times, AT&T (NYSE:T - chart, news, filings) has won a substantial contract with the German consumer goods group Henkel.  AT&T will manage the company’s global network infrastructure, which itself covers some 50,000 employees spread across more than 100 countries.  Supposedly, they won the contract from a field of competitors, and yes I can think of a half dozen who would have been up for this one – especially [Read more →]

NTT America, the US arm of the Japanese Telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT - chart, news, filings) has made its global virtualization services available in Singapore.  The offering is aimed at large corporations that want to outsource their server environments, so that they can focus more on leveraging the computing power and less on the nuts and bolts of [Read more →]

It’s not often we hear about a metro fiber expansion from XO Holdings (OTCBB:XOHO.OB - chart, news, filings).  Yesterday though, the company announced such an initiative in Seattle.  The company had about 200 miles of metro fiber in Seattle already, but has been seeing a growth in demand in areas adjacent to its current footprint.  Therefore they are adding a loop or two, in this case for connectivity to and around the northern suburbs of [Read more →]

Fresh off its upgrades to the London-Frankfurt route and the NY-Chicago route, Level 3 Communications (NASDAQ:LVLT - chart, news, filings) has improved its low latency position on the transatlantic leg as well.  They nave opened a new strategic positioned node in  LD4/5 datacenter campus of Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX - chart, news, filings) just outside London, and via a new loop that bypasses central London they have connected that node directly to three of their transatlantic routes:  [Read more →]

CENX took another step forward today with the hiring of its first CEO, Sandy Brown.  Mr. Brown served previously in various executive roles at AT&T, including being behind the successful development and deployment of AT&T’s Carrier Ethernet services – which is obviously quite relevant experience when taking the helm at a Carrier Ethernet Exchange.  It must be quite a change though to move from [Read more →]