Telecom Ramblings

Two key pre-Christmas executive appointments were announced this morning, one down in Atlanta and the other over in London. [Read more →]

Last year in the US metro/telecom/infrastructure merger marketplace, the pickings were slim once you got past the big deals from Zayo and Lightower. But looking back on 2013,  while it was the wireless soap operas that dominated the headlines, the pace of merger activity definitely picked up once again in the US network space. [Read more →]

As the year winds down, Alcatel-Lucent is checking one more item off its list of stuff to find new homes for.  They’re  selling the LGS Innovations unit to a private equity group led by Madison Dearborn Partners and CoVant.  LGS is the piece of Bell Labs that was separated out from Lucent in the Alcatel-Lucent merger of 2006 to provide various network services for the US federal government. [Read more →]

Before everyone disappears for the holidays (except me), here’s a few expansions and infrastructure contracts from this week to look at: [Read more →]

Hot on the heels of the WSJ report that Sprint is looking at buying T-Mobile comes another that has Dish ominously looking at the same thing. Is Charlie Ergen spoiling for a rematch with Masayoshi Son? [Read more →]

Several quick items out of Europe that are worth a quick look: [Read more →]

It seems like many of the monster mergers that get rumored about eventually happen, even if it is a couple years later — Verizon/Vodafone being one of the latest examples.  This week’s resurgent will-they-or-won’t-they rumor concerned Sprint and T-Mobile, for about the hundredth time in the past few years.  What about it, do you think such a deal will ever happen? [Read more →]

From the vendor side of things yesterday there was some 100G to the south and two strategic acquisitions. [Read more →]

There was a major deal in the northeastern wireline telecom market this morning, with Frontier Communications acquiring AT&T’s wireline business in Connecticut. For $2B in cash, Frontier will get 415K data, 900K voice, and 180K video residential connections, statewide fiber and copper, another 2,700 employees, and of course the business customers too. [Read more →]

Maryland’s network infrastructure is getting a boost this morning via a partnership between two independent players in colo and fiber. BYTEGRID and FiberLight have teamed up to roll out a dark fiber interconnection service they’re calling “Maryland Connect”. [Read more →]

Here are quick-takes on several metro fiber items that slipped past my nets in the last week or so: [Read more →]

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Ryland Marek, business development manager for 3M Communication Markets Division.

To keep up with the demand on their local area networks (LANs), businesses and government entities have begun to replace their copper-based networks with fiber optics. Fiber-based passive optical LAN (POL) technology has emerged as a particularly promising alternative for enterprises in need of a secure, converged network with increased bandwidth. [Read more →]

Just before the weekend got rolling, the Wall Street Journal dropped yet another of its wireless merger rumor bombs. Apparently, Sprint is working on plans to buy T-Mobile USA. If you think you’ve heard that before, it’s because you’ve definitely heard that before. The situation has changed, but has it changed enough? [Read more →]

TGIF and 11 shopping days left until Xmas. But before you get busy, here’s a look at some of the other cloud-related news from the week. [Read more →]

Yesterday saw another expansion in metro fiber, but by an operator that I don’t get to write about that often. Consolidated Communications has decided to take its northern Texas fiber footprint and begin using it to target the enterprise market. [Read more →]

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

One of the biggest challenges of realizing the Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t connecting things to the internet but getting them to talk to each other. [Read more →]

While Cisco’s parallel quarter raised alarm bells on the street, Ciena’s report today may not have been as big as the rest of their year has been but it wasn’t bad either.  Revenues came in ahead of expectations, but higher costs brought down earnings below what analysts were looking for.  Here’s a table of the company’s numbers in some context. [Read more →]

Here’s a nice long list of quick-takes from the colocation sector from this week: [Read more →]

The northeastern fiber operator Lightower announced a major metro expansion on its western frontier. That’s Chicago of course, the Midwestern footprint it picked up with the Sidera acquisition earlier this year. [Read more →]

Here’s a Wednesday look at some of the happenings in the metro and regional fiber world from this week: [Read more →]

Competitive service providers won a regulatory round yesterday, at least for five months anyway. Yesterday the FCC weighed in on AT&T’s proposed special access pricing changes, under which certain long term pricing discounts would be eliminated. In a document posted on the agency’s website, they said: [Read more →]

In the wake of Verizon’s announced purchase of Edgecast Networks, Akamai took a beating yesterday due to the extent of its reseller relationship with Verizon. Dan Rayburn does a great job of analyzing the downsides for Akamai, although I’m not really convinced that Verizon is ready for a wide-ranging offensive on the CDN marketplace. They might be of course, but they’re going to have to prove it and years will pass first. [Read more →]

Yesterday saw a significant merger announcement in the Australia fiber market. TPG Telecom has announced the purchase of AAPT from Telecom New Zealand for AU$450M. The deal will give them a national fiber backbone to supplement and expand their existing ISP business. [Read more →]