Telecom Ramblings

Up in Canada, MTS Allstream today provided an update on its metro buildout status. According to an Allstream PR yesterday, they added connections to 75 buildings to their fiber infrastructure in the fourth quarter, and 299 for the year altogether. The company says its expansion into new targeted markets has helped to [Read more →]

Pan-European infrastructure provider Interoute (news) said today that it has launched a Virtual Data Centre product. The idea is to fuse the security of private clouds with the convenience of public clouds.  Enterprises get to pay as they go, with the necessary bandwidth [Read more →]

Time to catch up on a few items that have slipped past in the last few days: [Read more →]

What if I told you a major international wireless carrier was making everyone pay the usual data rates for some sites, but was serving a few favored ones for free. Actually, what Orange said was that they are partnering with Wikimedia to provide Africa and the Middle East free access to the ever-useful Wikipedia online encyclopedia, meaning that it doesn’t count toward their data usage.  The new partnership will be launched gradually during 2012 across Orange’s footprint.  [Read more →]

This article was authored by John C. Tanner, and was originally posted on telecomasia.net.

The overlying theme at this year’s PTC conference: the rise of cloud services is leading to a not-so-distant future where carriers can only remain relevant if they get into the data center and content delivery business. [Read more →]

Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) made another key cloud/colo purchase this morning, but not one that we in the US will have been terribly familiar with. They are acquiring a 74% stake in Netmagic Solutions, giving them the capability to directly address the key South Asian marketplace as a part of its [Read more →]

Following its deal with Sprint in December and subsequent raising of capital, clwr is out in the market again – this time looking to sell $300M in debt. And as a part of doing so, the company has pre-announced some unaudited Q4 numbers for us to look at.  [Read more →]

According to today’s earnings release, Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) had a reasonable fourth quarter. That’s a good thing if you’re looking for evidence of macroeconomic weakness affecting the telecom sector. Overall, revenues checked in at $28.44B, just slightly above analyst estimates of $28.39B, or right on the [Read more →]

Pan-European infrastructure provider Interoute (news) and Israel’s Bezeq International are teaming up to add some serious bandwidth between Europe and Israel. Bezeq has selected Interoute’s landing station in Bari, Italy and extensive terrestrial fiber network as its means to extend its network into the heart of Europe. [Read more →]

Happy Chinese New Year to those who celebrate it.  Two bits of M&A, some dark fiber, and low latency featured in the news lately: [Read more →]

The wholesale arm of the German incumbent Deutsche Telecom AG (ETR:DTE, news, filings) and Latvia’s Lattelecom are teaming up to solve a mutual infrastructure problem. The two will be teaming up to build a new network route across Lithuania and Poland, entitled the [Read more →]

Router giant Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) beefed up its content delivery capabilities this morning by acquiring the rights to BitGravity’s service management layer.  Juniper intends to use the technology to complement its Media Flow Solution, enabling it to better address the needs of service providers.  They’ll be producing an integrated solution by [Read more →]

Late last week, Bloomberg carried a rumor suggesting that Reliance Communications is floating a plan to sell a stake in its FLAG unit. The idea, apparently, is to sell as much as 75% of its submarine cable division in an IPO in Singapore.  While I think the rumor has legs, I am skeptical that they will come anywhere near the [Read more →]

Shares of Cogent Communications (NASDAQ:CCOI, news, filings) are down 15% today due to attention of a very undesirable variety. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies internationally have taken down MegaUpload, a file sharing site that is accused of empowering massive copyright infringement and related piracy.  People have been arrested, and dozens of search warrants executed.  So what does this have to do with Cogent?  Well, MegaUpload is, or should I say, was [Read more →]

Time to close out the week with a quick look at the rest of this week’s news in telecom and internet infrastructure: [Read more →]

There’s a new cable in the works between Australia and Southeast Asia. Privately held Australian submarine cable developer ASSC-1 yesterday announced the development of a new cable between the major cable hub of Singapore and Perth on Australia’s west coast. The system will span 4,600 kilometers and will have four fiber pairs and an initial design capacity of [Read more →]

What is billionaire investor Carl Icahn doing snooping around LightSquared’s debt? That’s what reports are saying, apparently he and Andrew Beal and David Tepper have purchased $300M of the prospective LTE upstart builder. Buying up debt at a company’s weakest moments is a common way for Icahn to [Read more →]

Almost ten months ago, Google finally picked Kansas City, Kansas as its 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home project, promising to start offering service in 2012. So where are they now? Stringing and laying fiber? Hooking up the first neighborhood? Actually, according to the Kansas City Star, they’re still trying to finalize the negotiation of pole attachment rights.  [Read more →]

So yesterday’s poll “What to Do About SOPA?” was just a little bit one-sided.  The score so far?  78% say kill it outright, 20% say try to fix it first, and 2% don’t know or don’t care.  What about passing it?  That would be zero, and it may be the most lopsided result I’ve managed to collect in the various polls I’ve put out there over the years.   [Read more →]

One would have hoped that by now cooler heads would have prevailed, but it looks like the heated rhetoric between LightSquared and the GPS industry is going the distance. Following tests by the Air Force Space Command in which they fared badly, the company says that the whole thing was rigged by [Read more →]

A few quick takes from across the sector: [Read more →]

It seems there are now two efforts to lay fiberoptic cable in the Arctic Ocean.  Yesterday a Russian outfit named ZAO “Polarnet Project” invited tenders for the supply of ROTACS, or the Russian Trans Arctic Submarine Cable System.  This system was also discussed in Monday’s guest post by Egor Drobyshev.  Like the Arctic Fibre plans, the Polarnet Project seeks to shorten the latency between Western Europe and East Asia by taking the same route that airplanes take – over the North Pole or nearly so.  But this one is through Russian waters.  Here’s a map of Polarnet’s route, cribbed from a PDF on their site: [Read more →]

Today you’ll notice many big websites are blacked out in protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  Big internet companies are angry with the legislation, which is backed by big media, because they think it will do damage to the the internet in all sorts of ways and because they weren’t allowed at the table to prevent those ways when it was drafted.    Instead of a blackout, I thought I’d run a quick poll to see what the telecom and fiber world thinks of all this: [Read more →]