Telecom Ramblings

Windstream (NYSE:WIN, news, filings) said today that it is bringing big bandwidth to the Richmond Public Schools in Virginia. The buildout covers 87 route miles hooking up some 58 locations across the school district under an E-Rate contract. Richmond’s teachers and students will hopefully find [Read more →]

Datapipe is teaming up with Hibernia Networks (news) to connect up its data centers in the New York and London metro areas. They’ve purchased wavelength services from the submarine cable operator to bring lower latency connectivity to [Read more →]

Lightower Fiber Networks (news) has been putting a lot of money to work in New Jersey as it adds depth to its network to match what it has on the other side of the Hudson. Today they unveiled a new route and claimed the low latency title between two of the newer data hubs in the region: [Read more →]

Carlos Slim is definitely sending European the telecommunications sector a message: he’s coming and he’s definitely not bluffing. The billionaire’s Latin American’ telecommunications business, America Movil, has been spending quite aggressively to build its European presence. [Read more →]

Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) has finally started shipping its next generation DTN-X platform, by the end of Q2 as they had previously promised. They’ve already announced two early customers over in Europe: EPEG and DANTE for the 500Gbps superchannel PICs, but I expect we will see some additional network operators sign on publicly over the next few weeks and months. [Read more →]

A quick roundup of news from around the world again: [Read more →]

Looks like the purchase of cw by Vodafone Group (NYSE:VOD, news, filings) may have overcome its biggest hurdle. Orbis, which is C&WW’s largest shareholder, is apparently now on board with the deal according to reports.  [Read more →]

Over the weekend we learned that the FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is circulating a proposal to reopen the subject of the dangers of cell phone radiation. [Read more →]

Earlier this month, the Sea-Me-We-4 cable was cut about 60km from Singapore, and while such things happen regularly to submarine cables this one exposed the region’s over-dependence on a few assets. Renesys has a nice piece out describing the unexpectedly large impact the break is having on providers across the region, with [Read more →]

Job listings have started to pick up again after a slow start to the summer season, which hopefully will be the story in the rest of the economy.  This week we saw listings pop up from Unite Private Networks, Fatbeam, and Lightower. [Read more →]

While I am mostly a virtual presence in the world of telecom, the week after next I will be present in person in New York City at the Telecom Exchange 2012, for which Telecom Ramblings is also a media sponsor.  So if you’ll be around, you know where to find me. In the meantime, here’s a quick review of some interesting bits of news from the CLEC and Metro side of the tracks. [Read more →]

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

Chinese telecom vendors now face the prospect of an investigation into state subsidies in the US as well as Europe, with a US vendor voicing complaints about the practice to a congressional commission. [Read more →]

Integra Telecom has continued its renewed interest in fiber investment over the last couple of quarters. They announced today that they have passed the 2,000 building threshold, adding 115 since January to hit 2013. And that reminds me, it’s time once again to update my metro fiber and on-net building statistics  page. [Read more →]

CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) has won a hefty federal contract under the Networx Universal program. They’ll be providing the primary managed data networking services for the Social Security Administration under a $233M task order. The SSA has 62,000 employees worldwide, which seems like a heck of a lot considering it’s main function is simply to [Read more →]

Here are some quick looks at developments amongst the growing cloud services segment, including items from Cbeyond, Savvis, Data Foundry, and TDS: [Read more →]

Tata Communications (news, filings) has launched a global low latency network connecting Asia, North America and Europe aimed at the industries most sensitive to latency in their connectivity. The financial vertical is the most visible segment of course, with high frequency traders still out there paying big bucks for fewer and fewer microseconds. [Read more →]

With its declining wireline business, we haven’t heard as much in the way of big bandwidth upgrades out of Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) as with other major backbones. But today they announced a pretty big one, jumping onto Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical platform. Ciena’s coherent optical technology will take their core network speeds up to 40G and 100G today, with an eye on 400G in the future. [Read more →]

Sidera Networks has been pushing data center connectivity hard lately in a bid to better serve the cloud revolution. Today they teamed up with Digital Realty Trust to deliver a dedicated high capacity, low latency ring. [Read more →]

According to the Wall Street Journal this morning, the Justice Department is ‘conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation’ into whether cable companies are trying to improperly crush OTT video. It’s not yet clear just where the real focus is, but if it’s not on Comcast’s recent exclusion of its own Xfinity video traffic from its bandwidth caps then these guys aren’t doing their jobs.  [Read more →]

Another acquisition by Cologix, a new product for Interoute, and then a contract each for QTS, C7, and Digital Realty: [Read more →]

While the headlines are filled with the data sharing aspects of the new pricing structure announced by Verizon Wireless yesterday, I think the key change is more subtle. Verizon’s new plan finally finishes admitting that basing its business model on overcharging for voice and messaging bits while complaining about how expensive it is to build out bigger data pipes was distorting the market to its own detriment. [Read more →]

Several interesting items from outside the US this morning that are worth a look from Level 3, Interxion, Savvis, and Interoute: [Read more →]

Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) must be starting to fill up those 100G transport pipes it has been slowly rolling out across its footprint. Today they announced plans to deploy Juniper’s giant PTX series MPLS switching platform as a next step in the evolution of their network architecture. [Read more →]