Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Lots of submarine cable news lately, timed in part no doubt with the PTC meeting this week. Here’s a quick look at some more interesting items: [Read more →]

More organic TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) moves by tw telecom to start 2012: [Read more →]

The Marine division of Chinese vendor Huawei is having a busy January. In the past few days, they’ve begun a survey for one submarine cable, finalized a survey and begun manufacturing the cable for another submarine cable, and launched a third. Each of those is much more fun then banging heads with [Read more →]

Here’s a quick look at some of the internationally-oriented news of today and late last week: [Read more →]

I had wondered when we would see something like this. At PTC this week, Carrier-neutral colocation giant Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) and wholesale IP, Ethernet and voice provider tndm have announced plans today to connect their respective Ethernet efforts. Customers of the Equinix Carrier Ethernet Exchange and the EtherCloud will be able to [Read more →]

This is a guest post by Egor Drobyshev, who writes about telecommunications in Russia.  It is translated from its original version in Russian here.  

It is obviously impossible to underestimate a value of The Silk Road, which had connected in the second century both East and West civilizations. It was the first transcontinental route [Read more →]

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

Broadband over powerline is dead. Again.

At least it is in the US, where BPL service provider International Broadband Electric Communications (IBEC) – backed by IBM – announced this week it was shutting [Read more →]

Yesterday I asked readers the annual January question of which US network operators were most likely to get bought this year, and while the poll will remain open for a few days yet let’s take a look at the trends thus far. [Read more →]