Telecom Ramblings

The Middle East’s newest, biggest cable has now officially gone live. Gulf Bridge International (news) and TE Subcom (news) today pronounced the system ‘ready for service’, bringing at least 5.18Tbps to the table and dragging the region’s bandwidth markets further into the modern world. Local ownership and landing stations in eight Gulf countries give each a direct pipe to both [Read more →]

A reader recently asked me to comment on a possible combination of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) and Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) after the two have finished their respective integrations. Various articles and research notes have alluded to the possibility of late, including [Read more →]

So much time, effort, and money were spent on LightSquared’s effort to build an LTE wholesale alternative over the past year or so, and now unless there is some serious magic left in Philip Falcone’s wand it all seems to have gone for naught.  LightSquared blames the GPS industry for sloppy design and inflexibility in finding a fix.  The GPS industry blames LightSquared for trying to kill their technology first and check for problems later.  Still others blame [Read more →]

Systems integrator CSC is planning to add some substantial infrastructure to its cloud effort.  They have launched a 1.5MW expansion at two of CoreSite’s facilities in Boston and Northern Virginia in support of a one of their clients in the global financial vertical.  The infrastructure is already in place, with direct access to CSC’s [Read more →]

This article was authored by Joseph Waring, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

It’s been a banner week for the French-American network gear vendor. Last Friday Alcatel-Lucent reported its first full-year profit ever, posting earnings of $1.32 billion for 2011 after a loss of $439 million the previous year. With revenue down 2% during the period, that’s quite a turnaround involving some serious cost cutting. [Read more →]

Let’s catch up on some recent news from the metro fiber operators and a quick look at the U.S. Business Ethernet Leaderboard according to Vertical Systems Group: [Read more →]

Having spent the year integrating the assets of Deltacom and One Communications as well as other smaller purchases, Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) closed out 2011 with its fourth quarter earnings this morning.  Revenues of $350.2M were slightly above expectations, while earnings per share of $0.04 was inline with estimates.  Here is a quick table of the company’s results alongside the prior quarter’s numbers: [Read more →]

Data center builder and operator Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) filed its Q4 earnings yesterday, turning in its usual workmanlike growth report.  Of course, the stock has risen sharply since the beginning of the year and probably overshot a bit on expectations, but at its core Equinix seems to have had a fine quarter overall in which it met guidance and maintained its forward projections.  Here’s a quick tabular summary: [Read more →]

Time to catch up on some bits and pieces from the colocation sector recently: [Read more →]

According to the New York Times and others this morning, LightSquared (news) has finally run out of runway.  In response to the NTIA’s conclusion that there is no practical way to resolve the GPS interference issue, the FCC has decided to revoke the conditional approval they had handed [Read more →]

We haven’t heard much from metro fiber builder and operator FiberLight (news) recently, so it was nice to see them kick off a big expansion project yesterday. With anchor customers in hand, they announced a massive metro and regional infrastructure build-out into [Read more →]

Zayo Group (news, filings) turned in its usual steady performance for its fiscal second quarter, boosted especially by one month’s revenue from the 360Networks purchase.  Here’s a quick table of some of the company’s results in context: [Read more →]

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) issued another of its traffic forecasts of doom today, putting a few numbers to the challenge faced by mobile networks over the next five years. In a nutshell, they are projecting 18-fold growth over that time period, reaching 10.8 exabytes per month when 2016 rolls around. Meanwhile, AT&T has chimed in with the news that its’ mobile data traffic doubled again last year.  There’s no doubt, it’s going to be a lot of bits. [Read more →]

Really? According to the Wall Street Journal this morning, hackers penetrated the internal networks of Nortel and stayed in there for a decade. Yes, a decade, and may still be in there eight years after the attack was discovered in 2004. You know, way back when we all thought MicroSoft was the root of all evil and Google was harmless and wonderful.  [Read more →]

This article was authored by Don Sambandaraksa, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

Corrupt and politicized regulation is rearing its ugly head spooking telco investment across Asia. [Read more →]

Last week Renesys came out with its annual Baker’s Dozen analysis of the travails of the major IP backbones, and the most striking thing in it this year was the rapid retreat by both of CenturyLink’s acquired backbones: Qwest and Savvis. Over the summer, Renesys looked at the combination of the two and concluded that when combined the two would rank as high as #2 behind the then-pending LVLT/GLBC combination. But by the end of the year, [Read more →]

Over the weekend, rumors started to spread that Vodafone Group (NYSE:VOD, news, filings) is looking at a possible purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide. And in fact today Vodafone has confirmed that it is in the “very early stages of evaluating the merits of a potential offer.”  Such a deal would give Vodafone [Read more →]

This is a guest post by Paolo Gorgò.  If you might be interested in a guest post, then contact the webmaster.

Telecity Group (LON:TCY, news, filings), one of Europe’s leading network-neutral data center providers, today announced its results for 2011 and issued a positive outlook for 2012.  Some highlights: [Read more →]

On Friday alongside its quarterly earnings report, Cincinnati Bell (NYSE:CBB, news, filings) said that it is considering strategic alternatives for its data center business, CyrusOne. That could mean anything from an IPO in which they keep a stake to an outright sale of the business to a third party, or even that they don’t make any changes at all. But if they do, they’ll definitely be bucking the [Read more →]

Another job was posted to the  Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board this week.  The success of the jobs board is something I hope to build on when I unveil the next version of it in a few weeks.  This week’s  job posting is from Windstream (NYSE:WIN, news, filings), newly enlarged following the PAETEC acquisition back in December. [Read more →]

I don’t yet follow the financials at Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) with any regularity, but like Cisco they apparently didn’t find the fourth quarter to be terribly difficult either. [Read more →]

This week, the Metro Ethernet Forum dived into the problem of how to scale mobile backhaul. With LTE now ready to take off in earnest, scaling the costs needed to bring all that traffic to the backbone is an urgent issue for most wireless carriers. As you might suspect, the MEF’s solution involves [Read more →]

Pan-European network operator Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) is expanding its network out to the northwest, far beyond its usual haunts. They are adding a PoP up in Iceland, hooking up the Verne Global data center campus in Keflavik. If that location sounds familiar, it’s because it does. In September, Colt manufactured and shipped a 500 square meter data center to the same campus by [Read more →]