Telecom Ramblings

One oops and much of northern Alabama found itself even further away from the rest of the world than normal yesterday morning. A utility contractor snagged one of AT&T’s main cables in the region while digging (what else) and took down the region west of Huntsville, including Florence, Decatur, Hartselle, Madison, and Athens for both voice and data.  [Read more →]

With most of the fiber guys at Metro Connect (wish I were there!), let’s look again at news from the colo space lately: [Read more →]

The alternative bandwidth provider ccoi posted its fourth quarter numbers this morning.  Revenue was basically inline, EBITDA and margins were above expectations, and earnings per share was a bit light.  But the steady improvement in the company’s performance since last Spring gave them enough to boost their dividend by another 10% up to $0.12 per share.  Here are Cogent’s numbers in some context: [Read more →]

Some interesting inorganic news today from the alternative service provider side of things. Impact Telecom has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Matrix, or more specifically specifically all outstanding shares of both Matrix Telecom and AmericaTel Corporation. [Read more →]

For those public US bandwidth operators that aren’t wireless driven and have reported Q4 earnings thus far, the market has not been impressed at all. While AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have been stable or even up, take a look at how these six companies have fared in the stock market since the month began: [Read more →]

NTT Communications has been one of the most aggressive early telecom-focused adopters of cloud technology globally, and today they let the horse out of the regional Japan+HK stable they launched in last June. Their Enterprise Cloud offerings are now available globally, with nodes added in Singapore, Virginia, California, and London plus more on the way in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand in March. [Read more →]

Two data center buildouts completed, one getting started, and a contract: [Read more →]

In the Q4 results and forward guidance released by Earthlink this morning, you can just tell that the transformation CEO Rolla Huff is trying to pull off has a lot of miles yet to go. They are looking to newer IT and managed services capabilities for growth, but the results of that effort are still dwarfed by the declining fiber, CLEC, and access businesses they are using to get there. [Read more →]

inxn today detailed some of its expansion plans for 2013. The European data center specialist will be building a new data center in Stockholm, and expanding existing facilities in both Frankfurt and Copenhagen.  [Read more →]

In the wake of CenturyLink’s surprise dividend cut, many eyes were on the earnings report of Windstream this morning to see if they’d do the same. They didn’t, and in fact made a point of reaffirming their current $1/share dividend. [Read more →]

As Metro Connect get started down in Miami, here’s a quick look at some news from the European front from Colt, Sea Fibre, VTLWaveNet, and Alcatel-Lucent: [Read more →]

According to reports, regulators in India are ready to allow service providers to provide voice services on 4G wireless spectrum, regardless of the underlying technology. Or at least they’ll allow it once the fee of 16.58B rupees ($306M) is paid. Yes, you read that right, a government is making service providers pay up for their own over-the-top services over data connections.  [Read more →]

During Level 3’s earnings call last week, the company mentioned an acquisition if fiber in London they made in 2012. The deal wasn’t  big enough to make the news, and there apparently wasn’t enough revenue to be material in a financial sense – so it slipped between the news cracks. But it’s not often a deal goes by without a mention here, so it’s time to belatedly note that in August Level 3 acquired FibreSpan. [Read more →]

Glad to see there’s some hiring going on out there, though the telecom job market isn’t an easy one currently.  This week we have a new listing from Lumos Networks. [Read more →]

It’s Friday before a long weekend, if you take President’s Day off in the US of course.  Here’s a quick look at some news from afar before you go, including an expansion by NTT and three vendor contracts of interest: [Read more →]

This article was authored by Michael J Carroll, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

A break in a key submarine fiber optic cable linking Georgia to Russia caused problems as far away as Oman, web analytics firm Renesys claims. [Read more →]

qts has bought itself a giant facility in Texas, giving it an entry into the Dallas/Ft.Worth market. They’ll be converting it to data center space and bringing it online on phases, with the first tenants moving in the first quarter of next year.  [Read more →]

No US metro market has seen as many low latency elbows as New Jersey since the financial community started paying by the microseconds. Today one of the more comprehensive fiber builds to re-imagine the routes between key locations went online, as Hudson Fiber Network took its four new routes to Mahwah live: [Read more →]

Russia’s VimpelCom has become the latest network operator to decide that network operations are a good thing to outsource, and they’ve brought in Ericsson to do the job in a five year deal. [Read more →]

ctl reported earnings yesterday, with revenue of $4.58B and adjusted EPS of $0.67 each just a hair beneath analyst expectations. But that’s not the story. The story is that the nation’s #3 ILEC decided that it doesn’t like issuing a dividend as much as it used to, and would like to do something else with some of that cash. [Read more →]

With it’s REIT conversion still a long road ahead, eqix posted its usual solid quarterly report today.  The fourth quarter posed them no new problems, as they outperformed guidance and analyst estimates on all fronts after divesting their non-core markets to 365Main last quarter.  Here’s a quick table of their results and forward guidance in context: [Read more →]

Just ten weeks after allying with Akamai for CDN services, AT&T has released its new capabilities into the wild.  Today they announced that the new services are being offered to their U.S. business clients of all sizes.   [Read more →]

On yesterday’s conference call, tw telecom’s CEO Larissa Herda announced an ambitious new network platform that they will be putting together this year. Going by the moniker ‘Constellation’, the new platform aims to give enterprises the same sort of flexibility and speed they can get from cloud computing for their network pipes. [Read more →]