Telecom Ramblings

This article was authored by Don Sambandaraksa, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Last year was but a taste of the abuse of power that the spy agencies of the Axis of Espionage has unleashed upon the people of the world. From PRISM and interception of Facebook, Google, Yahoo to TEMPORA tapping of [Read more →]

The new year’s first job listing goes to FirstLight Fiber, which until this past September had been known as Tech Valley Communications. [Read more →]

We’ll do the annual network M&A buyers and sellers polls next week when everyone is back.  For now, let’s see what everyone thinks of the NSA revelations and the telecom and internet infrastructure world.  So the NSA has backdoors into a laundry list of equipment, has apparently helped weaken encryption standards, may have hacked into at least one submarine cable’s backoffice, routinely monitors traffic between the big data centers of the largest content providers out there, and has been tapping just about everyone’s phone at will — even the Skype ones.  Is that it?  Are we done now?   [Read more →]

Friday came awfully quickly this week, what with the New Year and all that. Here’s a quick look at some of the industry news that started the year, plus one from the week before that I hadn’t seen: [Read more →]

After those M&A predictions from New Year’s Eve and before the first 2014 news starts to flow in, let’s talk about a few overall trends to watch in 2014 in telecom and internet infrastructure.  Everybody’s got their own list these days, so I’ll just focus on a few: [Read more →]

New Year’s Eve is upon us already, and that means it is time for a few bold M&A predictions for 2014. That’s despite the fact that I pretty much struck out with nearly all of last year’s predictions, but who’s counting. This coming year’s infrastructure markets seem to me to have a less certain path than usual, meaning it is harder than usual to eliminate possibilities.  Nevertheless, a prognosticator must perforce prognosticate so here goes: [Read more →]

There have been a few interesting news items over the holidays that deserve a quick mention: [Read more →]

In this final installment of Ramblings’ review of M&A activity in 2013, we look at the international stage. Indeed, that’s where the real action was in both raw size and media coverage, with wireless taking the stage in a big way. But there were also some interesting infrastructure deals around the world that shouldn’t be forgotten. [Read more →]

Following up on the network M&A article before Christmas, it’s time to take a similar look at consolidation within the colocation and cloud marketplace during 2013.  Here is a quick look at the deals of the year, organized by the underlying trend they were a part of [Read more →]

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

The boom of cloud services and the rapidly-growing demand for more storage has turned virtualization into a hot commodity. Virtualization, the name given to the practice of using a software program to mimic the functions of physical hardware, offers a wide range of flexibility and reduced hardware costs. These benefits are becoming too [Read more →]

The Caribbean operator Digicel Group has added some fiber to its diet.  They announced yesterday the purchase of a substantial set of submarine cable assets from Global Carribean Fiber (GCF) and the Loret Group,  its majority shareholder .   [Read more →]

In another interesting shift, Limelight Networks announced yesterday the sale of its web content management business to Upland Software.  This is the Clickability piece of their business, which they purchased a little more than two years ago.   [Read more →]

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 →]