Telecom Ramblings

So yesterday Netflix came out in defense of its OpenConnect caching infrastructure, actually having to tell the FCC that the program isn’t a fast lane. The question had been posed by the FCC’s Ajit Pai and might seem a bit silly, but it’s a direct consequence of the way the network neutrality debate has veered off-road this year. [Read more →]

Predictions for earnings per share for telecom vendors is always a bit of hit or miss, just because of the stochastic nature of the type of sales they make and the currency fluctuations where they make them.  Ciena finished out its fiscal 2014 today, reporting a surprise loss for the October quarter but apparently the market is happy enough there wasn’t worse news given other data lately.  Here’s a quick table of the numbers in some context: [Read more →]

Time for a quick roundup of news from the metro and federal fronts.  Oops, it’s Thursday, not Wednesday! [Read more →]

Contributed by Prayson Pate, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice-President of R&D, Overture

Over-the-top (OTT) services cause fear and heartburn for wireline Communication Service Providers (CSPs) because of the revenue they take as well as the network load that they create.  Rather than fearing OTT services, CSPs should leverage new technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NVF) to [Read more →]

As the year ends, it’s time to look back at what went on around the sector.  Going into 2014, it looked as if the pace of M&A among competitive network operators focused on US wholesale and enterprise opportunities would slow down after the torrid pace of the past few years. To an extent that turned out to be true, however there was still substantial activity and there were a few big deals that really shook things up. [Read more →]

Service providers have a newly upgraded platform to serve subscribers with today, as ConteXtream has updated its SDN fabric. They have launched version 4.0, which supports OpenFlow’s OpenStack and is based on the OpenDaylight SDN controller. [Read more →]

As the Christmas shopping season races by, the news tends to get a bit thin.  But here are a few quick takes to keep up to date: [Read more →]

Of the large US-based telecommunications operators, CenturyLink has been perhaps the most active when it comes to inorganically building a cloud portfolio. Today they added another strategically targeted acquisition to the list, acquiring Edmonton-based DataGardens. [Read more →]

This article was authored by Dylan Bushell-Embling, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Reliance Communications has awarded Ericsson a pan-India contract to provide managed services for the operator’s extensive network. [Read more →]

Across internet infrastructure, perhaps the strongest growth trend we’ve seen over the past several has been that posted by the cable MSOs into the Ethernet marketplace.  With us today to give Time Warner Cable’s viewpoint on the business services market in general and the effect of the pending merger with Comcast on its future is Philip Meeks, COO for Business Services.  Phil was previously at [Read more →]

This week we got two new listings from the northeast to take a look at. [Read more →]

As we close in on the end of 2014, GTT is filling up on cash reserves to take on 2015. Yesterday afternoon they revealed their intention to raise money via a stock offering, the details of which they announced a little while ago.  It’s their second such sale of stock this year, having made a similar move this past May. [Read more →]

Zayo’s next fiber consolidation move is back on this side of the Atlantic, and actually rather far from the coast as well.  The Boulder-based company has agreed to purchase the carrier and enterprise business of IdeaTek. [Read more →]

Here’s another quick look at some news from around the sector: [Read more →]

Since its founding just four years ago, Cologix has grown to 20 data centers across eight markets interconnecting some 350 networks. They started focusing on tier two and three market opportunities before it became popular, blending acquisitions with organic expansions to rapidly establish themselves as a national player in the interconnection-focused data center world. Here to give us an update on Cologix’s approach is CEO Grant van Rooyen. [Read more →]

This morning, Ciena made its move into the network functions virtualization market. Not as a provider of VNFs themselves, but of a new managed services platform they’ll be selling to service providers to help deploy and monetize them. Their new Agility division and flagship Agility Matrix software includes a marketplace, a usage and on-the-fly licensing director, and the ability to run things locally or via the cloud. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick roundup of network and CDN news from around the world this week: [Read more →]

Quickly on the heels of a longhaul fiber build announcement, Zayo has another at the other extreme of the network.  They’ve announced a turnkey small cell deployment out in Indianapolis.  The first sites are already in service, with more than 100 to be installed by the middle of next year. [Read more →]

The data center services company IO has for some time now had two personalities, the carrier neutral colo provider and the modular infrastructure and DCIM software provider.  Today the company announced plans to separate into two companies, allowing each to focus on what it does best. [Read more →]

While new metro loops are almost commonplace these days, new longhaul intercity routes are still a rare beast. We’ve seen a few big projects lately though on the east coast with Allied Fiber in Florida and both Lumos and SummitIG in Virginia, and now Zayo says it is building a new dark fiber route much further inland.  [Read more →]

We had some M&A news in the financial networking vertical yesterday. IPC Systems is changing hands, with Centerbridge Partners paying $1.2B or so to take it off the hands of Silver Lake Partners.  [Read more →]

Seems like everything is in play these days when it comes to telecommunications consolidation in Europe. While Americans were all off on a turkey break, across the Atlantic several soap operas continued. [Read more →]

Holiday weekends are many things to the corporate world, and one of them is an opportunity to bury things they’d rather not have gain that much attention. In that finest of traditions, AT&T sent a letter to the FCC before the break responding to that call for information about its fiber deployments of earlier this month. In short, they’re backing down and still planning to follow through on the plans, although we’re not going to get to see just what those plans are since they were as usual heavily redacted. [Read more →]