Telecom Ramblings

Yesterday Africa’s Liquid Telecom made a significant foray into new territory with the purchase of the East African assets of Altech. The deal is for shares rather than cash, with Altech becoming an 8.6% shareholder of Liquid’s parent company.  Altech’s network business in East Africa hadn’t been performing well lately, and they’re obviously hoping that Liquid’s greater scale will help turn things around. [Read more →]

Now that the battle lines have been clearly drawn in the battle over the erstwhile WiMAX protagonist Clearwire, it’s time for a poll.  Dish’s higher bid for all or part of the company has thrown a potential wrench into the purchase, and several large investors are agitating for a better bid from Sprint/Softbank.  Sprint can stop a competing deal, but it needs more than 50% of minority investors to sign on with its own.  What do you think, is Sprint/Softbank going to win this one? [Read more →]

Three interesting deployment announcements around the world already this week from Infinera, Juniper, and ECI Telecom:  [Read more →]

There’s a new savior on the horizon for those facing the onslaught of video bits over that last wireless mile. But it’s not gear, it’s just a new video codec. The ITU has formally approved H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding, or HEVC, which will join MPEG-4’s H.264 in the industry’s content delivery toolbox. [Read more →]

According to Izvestia.ru (via Telegeography), Polarnet just cleared another hurdle as Russia’s Telecoms ministry has come to an agreement with the government regarding a rather important detail: the money.  The cable system, if it does get built, would go from Bude in the UK through Murmansk, Anadyr and Vladivostok and connect up to Tokyo after about 17,000km.  The pricetag is apparently pushing $1B at this point, and so the real question is just [Read more →]

Here’s a quick roundup of some sector news to start the week, three data center items and one CDN expansion from the end of last week that are worth a look.  [Read more →]

The year has started off slowly on the Ramblings Jobs Board, but we have a new listing this week at last for an opening on the southern side of the Eastern Seaboard.   [Read more →]

Here’s a Friday morning look at various metro news items I didn’t get to this week that I probably should have: [Read more →]

Just as they did in the third quarter, Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) turned in a stronger than expected performance on all fronts in their fourth quarter report yesterday after the market closed.  Revenue, non-GAAP earnings per share, and non-GAAP operating margin all came up very solid.  However, also just as in Q4, they kept their cautious outlook toward the near future and tempered expectations.  Here’s a quick chart with some context: [Read more →]

Tata Communications (news, filings) has taken the 100G plunge beneath the Atlantic Ocean, unveiling an upgrade to its TGN-Atlantic cable system. The 13,000km system between London and New York will have its 100G ready for service during the first half of this year, meaning probably June. Just how big that makes the cable in terms of overall theoretical capacity was not mentioned. [Read more →]

That’s the word this morning from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to have the best rumor trackers in tech these days. In this case though, they don’t know what Google is actually up to – just that it’s wireless and secret. [Read more →]

This article was authored by Marc Einstein, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

The recent news that Myanmar will soon revamp its telecom market by offering two telecom licenses to either local or foreign players in H12013 will quite possibly be the wireless story of the year for Southeast Asia. [Read more →]

Time for a mid-week roundup of news worthy of a quick look, with items from Emerald Networks in the Atlantic, Level 3 in the channel, ADVA in the Balkans, Equinix in the cloud, and ChinaCache in, well, China. [Read more →]

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) kept up its pace of acquisitions this morning with the announcement of its intent to acquire the Israeli software maker Intucell. Intucell’s main product line is software for self-optimizing networks, which enable mobile carriers to ‘plan, configure, manage, optimize and heal cellular networks automatically, according to real-time changing network demands’. Sounds like SDN for wireless equipment. [Read more →]

It’s been a busy week for Zayo already, especially with European data center operators. Today they announced they have hooked up Volta’s data center on Great Sutton Street in central London, which will be of interest to the low latency guys. Zayo has been continuing on the path AboveNet had been following with its UK business and London metro fiber, if not accelerating things as they usually do.  [Read more →]

AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) made another spectrum grab today, this time with the acquisition of the spectrum plus 585,000 customers of Atlantic Tele-Network for $780M. In doing so, they finally made good on speculation a few years back that it was eyeing the pieces of Alltel that Verizon was forced to divest back in 2009/2010 by the FCC. [Read more →]

Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) kicked off the winter earnings season this morning with their Q4 numbers, which had good news, bad news, and nice big pension-related charge of $1.48 per share.  That’s even bigger than the $1.20 non-cash pension charge they posted in 2011 —  it’s not really non-recurring if it happens every year, right?  But anyway… [Read more →]

One of the bigger comeback stories over the past year or two in telecom and internet infrastructure has been that of Integra Telecom and its CEO Kevin O’Hara.  While many still think of the western regional network operator in terms of its traditional CLEC roots, the company has been taking new advantage of its deep fiber assets and is finally emerging as a fiber power in its own right. Kevin O’Hara recently sat down for a quick Q&A with Telecom Ramblings to talk about where Integra is at and where it’s going. [Read more →]

Two more interesting submarine cable news items yesterday from the Pacific.  Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) said that it has upgraded an unnamed but easily identified cable system linking Japan and California, while Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) has demoed 100G with SD-FEC. [Read more →]

Fresh off its renaming and refinancing last week, Hibernia Networks announced a major capacity deal with NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings). Hibernia will be providing 100Gbps of diverse capacity for the Japanese giant’s IP backbone, which Renesys rated as the second largest globally in 2012 last week behind only Level 3. [Read more →]

Just before the weekend, the CEO of France Telecom – Orange suggested that they’ve come to terms with Google and will be compensated somehow for the traffic the content giant sends to their network. Details remain rather scarce, but it comes after a few months of anti-net-neutrality rumblings I’ve been watching out of France generally and that advertising-filtering incident with Free a week or two ago. While it’s not clear just what has or hasn’t been negotiated, forced, volunteered, or whatever, exactly how is anything like this supposed to work for the rest of us? [Read more →]

The economics may still be borderline, but 100G upgrades plans are starting to sprout up all over the place. This week the USA’s largest cable operator and two submarine cable operators took the 100G upgrade plunge, although one of those cables will initially dabble at 40G. [Read more →]

CoreSite (NYSE:COR, news, filings) unveiled plans for a large new data center campus in the New York metro area this morning. The data center REIT is acquiring an existing 280,000 square foot building on 10 acres of land in Secaucus NJ. They plan to develop the property into a new data center campus, with that initial building going by the moniker NY2 – its sixteenth nationally. It will complement CoreSite’s other area facility at [Read more →]