Telecom Ramblings

With its earnings now in the black at last, Level 3 Communications clearly has found some new flexibility with its capex.  Today they announced plans to build new fiber under the waves for the first time in many years.  No, not transatlantic or transpacific, but rather down where all the action has been lately for them in Latin America. [Read more →]

There was some unexpected management turnover yesterday in the data center REIT world yesterday with the news that Michael Foust has left the CEO role at Digital Realty Trust. He has been succeeded by the company’s CFO/CIO Bill Stein, at least in the interim. A search will soon begin for a permanent successor. [Read more →]

With Comptel underway in Las Vegas, there’s a bunch of metro and regional network news to take a quick look at already this week: [Read more →]

Ono…Oh no, get it? Ok, no more puns I promise. But Vodafone has kicked off the week with an expected spending spree down in Spain. Sources around the globe are saying that the UK-based operator has in fact succeeded in its not-so-secret bid to purchase the Spanish cable operator Ono for €7.2b (about $10B).   [update: it’s official, here’s the press release] [Read more →]

At the end of last week, the NTIA finally gave in to the rest of the world after nearly two decades of dithering. They have announced they will give up control of ICANN next year. That’s the folks who run the world of domain names we have long used to find our way around the internet without having to memorize raw IP addresses.  [Read more →]

Time for a quick look at other news from this week that I hadn’t gotten to: [Read more →]

It’s been a bit over four months since Cbeyond announced it would be looking at strategic alternatives, and checking on just where that process is was at the top of the market’s list with their Q4 report yesterday. But the news is that there is no news on the inorganic front, and may not be for a while yet. [Read more →]

The Canadian government may be a bit wary of Egyptian money in the stalled Allstream deal, but for Las Vegas’s Switch SUPERNAP it’s an opportunity. According to an announcement today, they have teamed with Naguib Sawiris’s Accelero Capital and Orasocom TMT Investments in a new joint venture that will replicate the model they’ve perfected in Sin City around the world.   [Read more →]

This week we’ve heard about how Level 3 CEO Jeff Storey told investors at a Deutsche Bank event what they already knew even if they weren’t aware of it. That’s the simple fact that M&A is an option but not a necessity for Level 3’s success anymore.  [Read more →]

We have another bit of fiber consolidation to report today. Up in the Pacific Northwest, Wave Division Holdings has struck again with the acquisition of Capacity Provisioning Incorporated (CPI). [Read more →]

Here’s a quick mid-week roundup of some recent news: [Read more →]

Out west, Integra has made itself a deal, acquiring Utah-based ProTel NetWorks. Protel’s main focus is managed voice and UC systems for enterprises. They maintain a close partnership with the cloud communications provider Mitel, which itself recently merged with Aastra. [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications has picked up the network services piece of a federal contract. The defense contracting giant Northrup Grumman has picked them to support the US Air Force’s Distributed Mission Operation Network, or DMON. [Read more →]

Two announcements from the European vendor this morning, the first being a substantial 100G deployment and the other an acquisition. [Read more →]

After regulators threw cold water on the very idea of a Sprint/T-Mobile US merger, Softbank’s chairman has apparently called in a big gun to make the case more forcefully — himself. And he’s not mincing words, promising Charlie Rose that he would make war against the AT&T and Verizon near-duopoly if allowed to make the deal he clearly wants to make. [Read more →]

Windstream is putting Infinera’s DTN-X and its 500G super-channels to work on a new long-haul backbone deployment. The expanded intercity capacity will help Windstream keep pace with growth in mobile data, cloud services, and of course all that video traffic hitting broadband networks. [Read more →]

It was pretty clear that Netflix’s traffic agreement with Comcast wasn’t going to be its last deal with the last mile. But the next provider it seems to have done a deal with isn’t one of the usual suspects. According to reports out of Norway, Netflix has done some sort of deal with Telenor to gain better service. [Read more →]

Plans for the SEA-ME-WE 5 submarine cable system have moved another step forward, with two companies contracted to do the heavy lifting. The consortium has tapped the Franco-American giant Alcatel-Lucent and its Japanese cousin NEC to build the system, with each taking responsibility for different segments. [Read more →]

Bank Street attended Capacity Media’s 13^th annual Metro Connect USA conference in Miami, FL where its co-founder and senior managing director James Henry participated in a panel entitled Consolidation and M&A: Executive Evaluation.  The following were among the key topics discussed and important findings that the firm took away from the panel:

[Read more →]

Last year was a good one for Ciena, and they kicked off their fiscal 2014 with a strong first quarter.  Analysts were a bit miffed by guidance, but it looks overblown to me.  Here are their numbers in some context:  [Read more →]

I’ll be back from my trip to Metro Connect in Miami and Telecom Exchange West after the weekend. In the meantime, here are three metro fiber items from this week and two that I missed earlier that are worth a look: [Read more →]

This morning, Zayo announced the acquisition of CoreXchange. CoreXchange operates two data centers, one at 8600 Harry Hines Blvd which is new for Zayo, and the other at the Dallas Infomart at 1950 N. Stemmons Freeway where Zayo already has space. In all, the deal will give Zayo some 34,000 square feet of interconnection-focused colocation space in Dallas. [Read more →]