Telecom Ramblings

When the rumors started late last week, I must say I didn’t believe them.  But this time the big one turned out to be real.  Level 3 Communications has this morning announced a deal to acquire tw telecom.  [Read more →]

It’s almost too good to be true from my point of view. News has been coming out of the FCC that has Tom Wheeler & crew looking at peering. While it’s not being treated directly as a part of the net neutrality debate, he has called them ‘cousins’ which is a good start. [Read more →]

On Friday, the Phoenix Business Journal was handed an exclusive PR with some fascinating M&A news. Limelight Networks has a received a bid for the company. Then over the weekend, Limelight threw some cold water on the idea but probably not enough to quench it outright just yet. [Read more →]

This week the Ramblings’ Jobs Board saw its listings surge to a historical high of 16, with the help of a cool baker’s dozen from Lightower. [Read more →]

TGIF, but before you go here’s a set of quick takes on a few other interesting items from this week: [Read more →]

This Industry Viewpoint was contributed by AVANT Communications’ Niko O’Hara.

Service providers today offer a variety of cloud services – everything from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to Hosted VoIP (or UCaaS) – but the area that’s sparking the most interest here at AVANT Communications has to be Desktop as a Service. Over the past year, several large [Read more →]

Zayo has picked up a significant contract expansion with the UK’s TalkTalk. Zayo will be providing 10G waves in the UK and across Europe, a boost of IP transit speeds to 50G, and 10G transatlantic circuits, as well as seven new dark fiber circuits for satisfying future demand. [Read more →]

Here’s a few quick takes on news from the VoIP and UC world this week: [Read more →]

When I first started this website, the so called ‘exaflood’ was looming on the horizon with all sorts of dire but ultimately silly predictions.  According to Cisco, in a few short years the ‘exaflood’ era will give way to what we thankfully aren’t calling the ‘zettaflood’, at least yet. [Read more →]

In this roundup, an interconnection, some new franchise rights, two state contract vehicles, and an update from rural Texas. [Read more →]

The European private equity group Cinven has made a pretty big move into the fiber business with agreeing to the purchase of GNFT, the fiber arm of Gas Natural Fenosa. For a pricetag of approximately $680M, they will get a substantial foothold in the internet infrastructure markets in Spain and parts of of Latin America. Now the question is, what will they do with it? [Read more →]

It’s time for a quick roundup of news from around the globe: [Read more →]

After having its service blame Verizon’s crowded network for streaming difficulties for a few weeks, Netflix is now backing off. Verizon had sent them a cease and desist letter, and had been protesting loudly. But I think that’s precisely what this was all about. [Read more →]

As our friendly global internet giants busy themselves with closing the barn door after the horse got out, the good news is that they’re closing the barn door. Over the weekend, the New York Times had an article detailing just how hard the industry has started working to keep out the spies, foreign and domestic. It’s just rather sad that it took so long and that we only believed it necessary when we realized the enemy could be us. [Read more →]

This article was authored by John C. Tanner, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

You can have SDN without NFV, but you can’t have NFV without SDN – not if you want greater service agility and new revenue streams, said the head of the Open Networking Foundation. [Read more →]

Three new job listings have been posted to the Ramblings Jobs Board this past week, two from FirstLight Fiber and one from Lumos Networks: [Read more →]

Interconnection and Netflix traffic is once again the talk of the sector, with Netflix explicitly referencing Verizon’s ‘crowded network’ in error messages to customers and Verizon crying foul.  What do you think, did Netflix cross the line, are they just being accurate, or have they simply found a clever way to return Verizon’s pressure with a bit of their own?  This one’s not yes or no, you get to pick two adjectives from the list or add your own. [Read more →]

When disagreements play out in the general media like this, the details that matter get lost in competing definitions. Earlier this week social media reports revealed that Netflix has started showing its users an error message blaming slower streaming on Verizon’s ‘crowded’ network. Verizon wasted no time in firing back with a legal threat.  [Read more →]

Back in March, Ciena posted a decent fiscal Q1 with what the street (but not I) deemed weak estimates after which the stock suffered for a quarter.  Today it is surging in the pre-market after the packet-optical vendor posted its fiscal Q2 results, hitting their numbers easily and posting guidance for next quarter above the expected range. [Read more →]

Some corporate mergers hit the markets like a meteor strike, landing all at once and with little warning. The potential Sprint/T-Mobile combination is more like a slow moving hurricane that never seems to come ashore as it waxes and wanes in strength.  But landfall looks more likely now than ever. [Read more →]

CityFibre has a new item in its list of Gigabit Cities over in the UK this week.  They have now completed the acquisition of Coventry’s existing metro fiber network, upon which they will expand to offer connectivity to the city’s business community. [Read more →]

In the metro space this week we have the channel helping out with two contracts with two retailers, and bandwidth for a few good men. [Read more →]

For the second time in a few weeks, Kaia Global Networks has cropped up in the infrastructure news over in Europe. Their relationship with euNetworks has been expanded with multi-year agreements for capacity on their European backbone.  [Read more →]