Telecom Ramblings

Networking giant Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) issued its sixth annual Visual Networking Index forecast this morning, and as usual the numbers were big. Really big. Zettabyte-big, meaning that the internet will carry 1.3ZB in 2016. But as big as these numbers are, the media does tend to get carried away.  [Read more →]

Disruptive force that it has always been, magicJack VocalTec (NASDAQ:CALL, news, filings) has never been much for the conventional way of doing business, but in the first quarter it seems they really out-did themselves. Check out this Wall Street Journal piece from last night.  Apparently 20% of their earnings per share came from selling put options on their own stock, betting against their own stock going down. In and of itself this sounds like something out of the dotcom years, but there’s another aspect to this that the WSJ didn’t happen to mention. [Read more →]

Some quick looks at a few news items from the infrastructure sector from yesterday: [Read more →]

Thats what CEO Ben Verwaayen told Bloomberg is coming if Europe doesn’t find a way to convince its incumbents to invest more in their networks. He makes the point that European carriers are being out-spent and out-upgraded by their US counterparts, resulting in the loss of the telecommunications leadership position they had a few years ago. His prescription: [Read more →]

A quick look at some items from under the sea overseas to help start the week: [Read more →]

In the continuing debate over net neutrality, what strikes me as most ominous is that there is no debate. Rather it all seems to echo the current odious political environment, as there are only talking points and non-negotiable positions. It’s very hard to find anyone seriously looking for [Read more →]

That’s what GigaOm’s Stacey Higgenbotham said going into the long weekend. The whole point of Google’s dalliance in FTTH has been to test out and prove both the technology and the business model. If what Google has learned from the process thus far is that opening its infrastructure to other ISPs and such won’t work, then [Read more →]

One last roundup to finish off the week: [Read more →]

This article was authored by Dylan Bushell-Embling, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Indonesia’s PT Telkom has confirmed it has submitted a preliminary bid for subsea cable operator Pacnet, and that it is on track to deciding whether to make a final offer in June. [Read more →]

The strangest bit of news this week comes bubbling up from the submarine cable sector, where people are wondering just whatever happened to that new ALBA-1 submarine cable system between Venezuela and Cuba. Alcatel-Lucent finished it more than a year ago, after which it seems to have vanished from sight.  [Read more →]

Here’s a quick survey of some news items, the first two of which are from companies new to me (and hence to Telecom Ramblings): [Read more →]

Windstream has been blazing a new path over the past few years, assembling a unique blend of ILEC, CLEC, fiber, and cloud assets to take on the enterprise market from a unique angle.  With the addition of the PAETEC assets over the winter, they have become a major player in the fiber business.  With us today to look at  company’s plans for all that fiber is Sean Baillie, Senior Vice President of the company. [Read more →]

With Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) obviously kicking off its DTN-X launch, you knew there had to be a research network in there somewhere. And so there is. DANTE has picked the Infinera’s new gear to help power GÉANT’s next generation Multi-Terabit pan-European optical network upgrade. Nothing creates big data like big science nowadays. [Read more →]

This morning saw a new Infrastructure-as-a-Service company formally leave the launch pad.  Backed by private equity firm Grey Mountain Partners, Ajubeo (news) is quickly building out while taking aim at the rapidly evolving space with on-demand compute, storage, and network resources. Their first node is in Denver, with additional locations in New York and London waiting in the wings for the rest of the year. [Read more →]

Here’s a quick survey of some recent news from the colocation front: [Read more →]

Pacific regional operator Pacnet has an interim leader in place following the sudden departure of longtime CEO Bill Barney. The current CFO, Brett Lay, has taken over CEO duties while the board seeks a permanent replacement. However, given the recent rumors about a bid from [Read more →]

But just a little bit. When last we heard, Google had promised to launch its initial 1Gbps fiberoptic service to some Kansas city, Kansas neighborhoods by the end of June. The company has now pushed that further out, albeit with the less concrete deadline of ‘this summer’. I take that as to mean sometime before Labor Day or thereabouts. [Read more →]

Dueling router upgrades this morning from Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings), both of which are boosting the raw capacity of their core systems. The equipment sector is a bit edgy right now, both from macroeconomic effects over in Europe and from stiffening [Read more →]

The Pacific regional operator Pacnet (news) and the DWDM protagonist Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) have collaborated in a demonstration Infinera’s new flagship DTN-X gear in Asia. They tested the 500Gbps PICs on 4500km of the C2C undersea cable network, successfully transmitting more than [Read more →]

I have updated my competitive telecom trends pages with all Q1 data, and also adding Inteliquent to the list of companies tracked.  Except for companies with significant short term news driving their numbers in some way, both EBITDA margins and EV/EBITDA were relatively stable during the quarter.  Here’s the current relative valuation chart: [Read more →]

For many years, when we talked of global fiber networks, it was the US, Europe, and then go to the oceans to get to Asia. But Russian network operators are finally becoming relevant outside of Russia, both by building viable trans-Asian connectivity and expanding internationally in their own right. Today Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) helped Russia’s TTK add capacity in Asia and Europe and add new nodes in the US. [Read more →]

Monday’s early news comes from across the Atlantic from Interoute, Alcatel-Lucent, Digital Realty, NTT, and Eutelsat: [Read more →]

What to make of the scary statistics put out by Infonetics Research last week? According to the outfit’s Optical Network Hardware report, spending on optical gear dropped 23% globally over the fourth quarter, mainly outside North America.  Meanwhile, year over year European spending on WDM fell even faster than on legacy SDH. Yikes, so that’s why Cisco’s John Chambers was sounding the poor visibility alarm.  [Read more →]