Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Moving to fill a gap increasingly left open by ISPs, TELEHOUSE America said this morning that it is now offering its own IP transit services. IP transit has long been a very tough neighborhood, and many network operators would rather focus on managed services, Ethernet pipes, and the like. [Read more →]

As I try to shake off the jet lag, here’s a quick roundup of news from the colo sector: [Read more →]

Eight months into 2013, Zayo hadn’t bought any fiber networks yet — just a data center in Austin. So you knew there had to be something in the works, and there was. Today Zayo announced an agreement to buy Access Communications for $40M.  [Read more →]

It’s not *all* about developing properties for Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR, news, filings), like everyone in the sector they are diligently working on their ecosystem.  Today they established what is billed as a ‘distributed cloud data center connectivity platform’ with the help of Epsilon Telecommunications. [Read more →]

Well, it took a bit more than the expected 45 days, but Vodafone has indeed signed on the dotted line for capacity on the Emerald Express cable system. The anticipated deal between Emerald Networks and Vodafone Iceland was first announced almost six months ago, and was signed on August 9 in the Harpa Concert and Conference Center in Reykjavik.  [Read more →]

I’m on the road today, after a summer in NJ that has been all too short.  In the meantime, here’s a quick catch-up on some other news from this week. [Read more →]

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

Cellcos are increasingly unconvinced that Joyn – the branded RCS offering backed by the GSM Association – is the ticket to compete with OTT messaging, according to a vendor survey. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick roundup of news from international network operators this week: [Read more →]

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) reported a reasonably nice quarter, but the guidance looking forward didn’t make investors happy. And the announcement of layoffs of some 4000 worldwide didn’t make employees very happy either. [Read more →]