Telecom Ramblings

For quite a few years now, the Indian telecommunications giant Reliance Communications has been looking for a way to monetize its international networking assets.  According to Telegeography, China’s CITIC Telecom is said to be preparing a bid, at least for the submarine cable part.   Have they finally found a buyer? [Read more →]

Netflix and AT&T have apparently made an interconnection pact, following the same path as we have seen over the past two quarters with Comcast and Verizon. Perhaps this time will be a little less acrimonious, as the two plan to have the necessary connections in place ‘over the coming days’. [Read more →]

In a proposed move that could shake up the way the industry looks at its assets, Windstream today announced plans to spin off some assets into a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). When I saw the headline, I figured it was their data center assets & business al la Equinix etc, but it is not about colo at all. They are actually looking to put their fiber and copper network assets into a publicly traded REIT. [Read more →]

With the tw telecom transaction still looming large in the autumn, Q2 and Q3 for Level 3 are about not tripping over anything.  And they didn’t, posting another strong quarter of enterprise revenue growth.  This time it was Europe and South America that held things up, even after taking out boosts from currency fluctuations.  Here are their actual numbers in some context: [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at some of this week’s early announcements and some of last week’s later ones: [Read more →]

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

Many telcos are worried about OTT voice/messaging services cannibalizing their revenues. India’s Idea Cellular is not one of them – at least on the domestic voice front. [Read more →]

Last quarter the question was whether Level 3’s revenue and EBITDA growth would justify its stock price gains, and they came through big.  On Tuesday they’ll report their Q2 numbers and the dynamics are rather less organic as we have the tw telecom deal hanging overhead.  But it is important that the company maintain its growth momentum going into the merger.  Here are my guesses for Level 3’s Q2 numbers in the usual historical context: [Read more →]

Three more job listings this week on the Ramblings Jobs Board, with one each from Logix Communications, Walker & Associates, and FirstLight Fiber. [Read more →]

Now that all the immediate aftermath of the Level 3 merger announcement has subsided and we wait a quarter for the deal to close, tw telecom is pulling everyone’s focus back down to the company’s main operational task for 2014. That would be the expansion of its metro fiber footprint in markets across the country, a few the details of two of those markets being announced today. [Read more →]

Equinix’s entry into the Brazilian data center market is now officially complete.  Yesterday they announced the purchase of the 47% of ALOG Data Centers that it didn’t already own, bringing two data centers in Rio de Janeiro and two more in Sao Paolo all the way into their orbit. [Read more →]

From the data center space, here are a few quick takes on news from the past few days, with three from across the Atlantic, one in Texas, and one in content delivery. [Read more →]

If there is demand softness from carriers out there in the world, it’s not as big a problem at the DWDM layer right now at least at Infinera.  The company posted its Q2 financials yesterday after the market closed, easily meeting the higher revenue guidance they had issued in April and coming up with an extra seven cents per share.   [Read more →]

Level 3’s federal team has landed a high profile Network-as-a-Service contract.  The Department of Homeland Security has awarded them a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract for LAN managed services under WITS-3 in the National Capital Region.  [Read more →]

In their Q2 report yesterday after the markets closed, Juniper Networks posted pretty solid numbers. Unfortunately, the ones they forecast for Q3 were not up to expectations and the stock is down 6% in premarket trading.  Meanwhile they forged ahead with their streamlining plan with the sale of Junos Pulse. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick mid-week roundup of some interesting news items from this week: [Read more →]

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Stefan Bernbo, CEO and founder of Compuverde. 

The Internet of Things (IoT), an ever-expanding web of connections generating unprecedented volumes of data, holds promise as well as challenges for the telecom industry. The Open Interconnect Consortium was recently formed by a group of technology vendors to define connectivity requirements that ensure the interoperability of the more than 30 billion devices that research group IDC projects will come online by 2020. It’s a blistering pace. [Read more →]

The closing of the deal may be a few months off, but the management team that will lead the combined Level 3/tw telecom was announced today.  We already knew Larissa Herda wouldn’t be staying on of course, leaving the top slot for Jeff Storey, but two of tw telecom’s top management will be merging in. [Read more →]

In an announcement today, Hibernia Networks brought their plans for a new transatlantic cable off the back burner at last. The cable system will be called the Hibernia Express, and manufacturing has already commenced over at TE SubCom. I had heard that SubCom was on the job last year, but Hibernia itself had been rather quiet about it until now.  [Read more →]

Private equity dollars earmarked for the internet infrastructure sector are increasingly getting spent over in Europe.  Today the Carlyle Group announced it has not just invested in Expereo, but has taken a majority stake in the company. [Read more →]

This morning, the news is that Verizon is boosting FIOS upload speeds to match download speeds.  The media is initially talking about how this is about Verizon taking on the cable giants since cable’s technology infrastructure can’t match such a thing.  But I think part of the it could be another side effect of the Netflix traffic war of words. [Read more →]

The Wall Street Journal speculated over the weekend that Carlos Slim and his company America Movil might make a big move north of the border. And of course in the US mobile market, there is only one target getting that sort of attention – T-Mobile USA. Just what the US telecommunications markets need: another foreign billionaire? [Read more →]

Let’s kick off the week by finishing up with a few of the announcements from last week that I didn’t get to look at at the time. [Read more →]

At least one piece of the simmering interconnection dispute over Netflix data bottlenecks has been getting clearer lately. Following Netflix’s ‘crowded network’ warning message to subscribers in June, last week Verizon put out a piece demonstrating that its last mile wasn’t congested at all. And yesterday, Level 3 turned that around in a blog post, saying that Verizon’s explanation is more of an admission.  [Read more →]