Telecom Ramblings

Private equity money found another metro fiber home this morning, as Ridgemont Equity Partners has announced a deal to acquire a majority stake in Cross River Fiber.   The company’s current management, led by CEO Vincenzo Clemente, will continue to hold a substantial stake in the company, and will keep on doing what they’ve been doing — just with more resources to do it with.  [Read more →]

The wireless backhaul specialist PEG Bandwith is putting resources into its intercity links. This morning they announced a new, more direct 100G Ethernet route between Dallas, Texas and Jackson, MS. [Read more →]

Every now and then, some obscure limitation in some corner of the hardware or software that makes up the internet manages to take the whole thing down. The story is always the same: someone long ago thought that the number X was much more than there could possibly ever be a need to use, and boy were they wrong. [Read more →]

The VoIP/UC side of the industry has been very dynamic lately, seeing both organic and inorganic activity on the uptick for several years.  Yesterday there was a bit more of the latter variety.  Thinking Phone Networks has announced the acquisition of Whaleback Managed Services. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick roundup of some other interesting news already out this week: [Read more →]

With a launch yesterday, tw telecom has taken its network expansion campaign to Philadelphia at last. It’s a brand new market for tw telecom, starting to fill in what had long been perhaps the biggest hole in the company’s national coverage — the entire state of Pennsylvania. [Read more →]

According to Capacity, a consortium of six companies has launched an effort to build a new transpacific cable system, called FASTER (as if anyone would call a cable ‘SLOWER’? haha). The cable will cost some $300M, and will put six fiber pairs capable of 60Tbps between the US west coast and Japan. [Read more →]

In a move that seems to have caught everyone by surprise, the FCC’s Tom Wheeler has taken aim at Verizon Wireless’s network optimization plans for LTE. It’s a bit puzzling, as network neutrality itself is still in regulatory and legal limbo in the USA. And even if it wasn’t, the wireless has generally been pretty [Read more →]

This industry viewpoint was authored by Prayson Pate, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice-President of R&D, Overture, and first appeared on Overture’s company blog.

One of the big drivers for Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is reducing CapEx and OpEx. While attractive and perhaps necessary, cost cutting is not enough to [Read more →]

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Kevin Vachon, COO of the MEF.  

Increased enterprise agility and a dramatic boost to user productivity are promised by the latest wave of dynamic CE services now coming to market – a market set to grow by several percentage points in size to over $50bn globally in the next five years. [Read more →]

Two data center facilities are getting some new connectivity from Zayo: a recently reborn one in New York City, and one that hasn’t even opened yet down in Houston. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick roundup of other interesting news from this week: [Read more →]

Lumos Networks announced connectivity into two significant data centers this week as it posted its second quarter 2014 earnings.  They’ve been expanding on multiple fiber fronts lately, but with offsetting trends from legacy services holding down their overall revenues. [Read more →]

Cogent has been raising its dividend every quarter since it started returning cash to shareholders, but this quarter saw the biggest boost yet.  In terms of their quarterly numbers, revenue and earnings per share came in lighter than expected, while EBITDA and margins were stronger than anticipated. [Read more →]

Alpheus made a small, strategic M&A move down in Houston yesterday.  They have announced the acquisition of StratIT’sphere’s business colocation unit down in Houston’s energy corridor. [Read more →]

Over in the bandwidth infrastructure market in Europe, euNetworks released its Q2 financials this morning.  They posted another quarter of strong new sales, with recurring revenue up 3% sequentially.  Here is a table of their overall numbers. [Read more →]

Windstream’s move last week to spin off/lease back its network and copper into a REIT certainly shook things up last week. Monday’s poll shows quite clearly that folks in the industry have diverging views on what it all means.  There are definitely unresolved questions out there, at least for me. Let’s ramble on about a few of them: [Read more →]

According to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg this morning, Sprint has given up its quest to purchase its rival T-Mobile US — again. Of course, it’s not an official decision and even if true they could restart things in a heartbeat if they wanted to, but the WSJ has had the inside track on this since the beginning. [Read more →]

With its home turf in Spain still a painful market, Telefonica seems to have decided that its best bet for the future lies in Latin America.  Rumors last week had them sniffing around assets in Mexico in the wake of Carlos Slim’s retreat, but this morning they took a more concrete action.  Telefonica has bid for GVT, and if they succeed they’ll have the biggest marketshare in the largest regional market.   [Read more →]

Here’s a quick rundown on some news from abroad: [Read more →]

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Max Silber, executive director of mobility, MetTel

Before the era when cell phones became permanently glued to our hands and our ears, walkie talkies were the fastest and most efficient way of communicating over a short distance. As mobile technology advanced both the devices and the service, field workers such as construction companies and police departments became synonymous with the chunky phones and scenarios depicted in the Nextel advertisements of the late 1990’s. After the demise of the original iDEN Nextel National Network just a short year ago, some may think that the “push-to-talk” movement is over, but that is far from the truth. [Read more →]

This article was authored by Jouko Ahvenainen, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Amazon (Amazon Web Services, AWS) is the leading enterprise cloud provider. Amazon surprised the market with a larger than expected loss. AWS has had a big impact on the result. What does it mean that the leading cloud company cannot run a profitable business? [Read more →]

Last week had a few surprise moves, but perhaps the most puzzling one was Windstream’s plans to spin off a fiber REIT.  We’ve had a little while to digest the idea, so I’m posing the question to Ramblings’ readership this morning.  What do you think? [Read more →]