Telecom Ramblings

This article was authored by Joseph Waring, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Five-year forecasts are standard fare for research firms and analysts, which send me a steady stream of ambitious predictions that I mostly ignore. An accurate estimate 12 months ahead is challenging enough, particularly for new industry segments. And it’s no secret that three-year outlooks are at best [Read more →]

In what may eventually prove to have been the least secret M&A dance of the decade, Verizon and Vodafone are supposedly ready to make a deal, at long last. According to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon will be meeting Vodafone’s price of $130B for the 45% of Verizon Wireless the latter holds. [Read more →]

Over on the Ramblings Jobs Board we have a new job listing this week from Unite Private Networks. [Read more →]

America Movil’s bid for KPN hit a bit of a roadblock yesterday, as the independent foundation tasked with protecting KPN’s stakeholders exercised its option to take more than 49% of voting control. The move apparently surprised analysts, not that it happened but that it happened so soon. But I don’t think it surprised Carlos Slim & co. [Read more →]

Well, I can’t say it was unexpected. The news out of Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) this week is a round of layoffs. According to the Denver Post the number is 700, or 6.5% of the company’s global workforce, with 150 in Colorado and the rest spread out around the rest of the world. [Read more →]

Hibernia Networks took another step away from its roots under the waves with an acquisition announcement today. They’re buying Atrato IP Networks, the Dutch-based transit and Ethernet backbone. [Read more →]

Yes, the deal rumor of the year that teases us every month or two is back this morning. Verizon and Vodafone could again be doing a deal for the 45% of Verizon Wireless that Vodafone owns and Verizon wants. This time, however, there are at least a few actual signs that a deal could actually be within range. [Read more →]

Software defined networking is all the rage this year, and service providers are starting to take notice of its potential beyond the data center and into wide area networks. Service provider networks are much different than what you find in a data center, and automation of provisioning and service delivery causes an expanded set of problems. With us today to delve further into the subject and to let us know where Ciena stands on the subject is Mitch Auster, Ciena’s Senior Director of Market Development. [Read more →]

It’s time for a quick roundup of network news from the metro to the Middle East: [Read more →]

A report came out over in the UK this past weekend suggesting that one of the UK’s largest independent fiber assets could be sold in the next quarter or two. Geo, which was bought from Hutchison Whampoa by Alchemy Partners five years ago for £62M, is apparently on the block and the price tag could reach £200M. [Read more →]

We have a bit of late August consolidation among service providers to look at this morning.  TNCI Operating Company LLC has announced the acquisition of UPH, which operates Pac-West Telecomm and PointOne among other things.  The deal will give TNCI much greater depth out on the west coast. [Read more →]

Amsterdam-based EvoSwitch and the London Internet Exchange have partnered up to bring a European-style neutral peering exchange to the USA.  LINX will be moving into a new PoP within EvoSwitch’s WDC1 facility, where it will establish the first node of LINX USA, a neutral, member-driven internet exchange based on the one they run over in the UK.

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Huawei may be persona non grata in US markets these days, but elsewhere in the world they continue to make inroads. Yesterday they helped bring into existence what they’re billing as the industry’s first 400G IP core network and it’s not in the traffic-laden US or European markets, but deep in the Middle East. [Read more →]

Since the Softbank deal closed a few weeks ago, Sprint has been busy announcing new wireline news, and this week’s installment is a new big bandwidth Ethernet Wave service. It’s part of their Network Vision buildout, for which wireless gets more of the press but wireline will be doing much of the heavy lifting when it comes to actually transporting the data. The new Carrier Ethernet services are built off of [Read more →]

When America Movil and its billionaire protagonist, Carlos Slim, bid for the rest of KPN, it was not yet clear whether they approved of the E-Plus deal or not. After all, the common wisdom was that E-Plus and its German mobile presence was a big part of why Slim took that 29%+ stake in KPN in the first place. But they reserved judgement on the deal even while putting in place the financing to finish the KPN deal. [Read more →]

TGIF, especially in the dog days of August.  Here’s a quick rundown of some other news from this week that I didn’t get to at the time: [Read more →]

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Cam Cullen, VP of Global Marketing at Procera Networks.  

In 1996, Bill Gates wrote a famous article titled, “Content is King,” and the thesis of the article was that content sites, not ecommerce sites, would generate the most revenue on the Internet. Although Gates had an ulterior motive at the time— Microsoft had just created the MSNBC news channel—his assertion is becoming a reality today. The key driver of bandwidth consumption is [Read more →]

Cox Business has decided to dip its a toe into the cloud market via a partnership in the southwest. They’re teaming with Viawest in order to add colocation and cloud services to their product portfolio. [Read more →]

Taking another step beyond mere colo real estate development, Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR, news, filings) this morning unveiled an ambitious new internet peering environment. Their Digital Open Internet Exchange aims to bring the ‘more independent and cost-effective exchange options’ one generally finds in Europe to the US market. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick roundup of some news from metro and regional fiber operators this week: [Read more →]

There was a bit of fiber consolidation down in Florida this past week that slipped past while I was travelling, and the source was of the offshore cable MSO variety.  Ok, so that’s not actually a known variety, but in this case it was the US subsidiary of Cable Bahamas doing the buying, taking out both US Metropolitan Telecom and Summit Broadband, as well as Marco Island Cable and NuVu for a combined sum of $89M. [Read more →]

The state of South Carolina has awarded a five year contract to Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings). The deal will supply web and audio conferencing to government organizations across the state, improving the efficiency of the bureaucracy through collaboration. [Read more →]

XO is going on the offensive, adding new markets up in the Great White North to its network service territory. They announced today the availability of their network service portfolio to both wholesale and enterprise customers across all of Canada’s six time zones. [Read more →]