Telecom Ramblings

Border crossing operator Transtelco (news) has further expanded its fiber network in central and southern Texas.  They have spent the last six months deploying the route from Dallas south to Austin, San Antonio, then through Laredo and down to McAllen. [Read more →]

Houston’s Phonoscope has picked gear from Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) to power the next generation of its metro network.  Ciena’s gear will let them offer 40G and 100G services across their footprint.  One of the first customers to benefit will apparently be a national wireless company that needs 10G backhaul links from LTE cell sites in the city.  I’m guessing that would be [Read more →]

Remember back in November when Nokia Siemens Networks announced its 23% headcount haircut of 17,000? Well, apparently they weren’t kidding — especially if you happen to be in Germany. A Bloomberg report today says that the company will be laying off [Read more →]

The research out fit Ovum has a report out saying that growth is going to be slowing down for the telecommunications sector as a whole. In 2011 capex and revenues grew at a nice clip of 12% and 7%, respectively, a solid bounceback. However, Ovum says that the overall trend for 2010-2017 will be more like [Read more →]

A few items from overseas to start the week: [Read more →]

Martin Geddes put out a screed on Friday that is well worth a read, detailing his view of the impending doom of the telecommunications business as it is today. It makes for depressing reading, but its principle point is that the dollars generated by voice and messaging are going away and the industry simply has [Read more →]

Two more job openings were posted to the  Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board this week.  I have plans to change the jobs board over from the current limited, hosted system to something a bit more extensive, hopefully for next month.  This week’s  job postings are from Zayo Group (news, filings) and sidera, both of whom seem to be hiring steadily of late. [Read more →]

Channel Partners Online has a nice report on what XO has been up to lately, as the company discussed with a group of agents yesterday.  Apparently, they’ve got a three year plan aimed at radically transforming the company’s revenue profile. [Read more →]

A quick roundup of items worth a quick look before you take off for the weekend: [Read more →]

According to a fascinating piece over on Information Week yesterday, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) just handed out a late Christmas present to its salespeople and sales engineers. While the company is in the midst of the Global Crossing integration, it has been simultaneously fighting hard to stay on the path of organic growth it returned to in 2011. So what better way to move forward than to give out 1,300 iPads loaded up goodies from [Read more →]

Apparently, when Juniper pre-announced Q4 results a few weeks ago, they didn’t quite get all it all out there. In their Q4 report yesterday after the close, the routing giant did meet its revised guidance for Q4, even hitting the top end for EPS.  But forward guidance was even more dismal than expected – at least if after-hours trading is to be believed. Here’s a quick table of Juniper’s numbers in some context: [Read more →]

Telecommunications giant AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) reported its Q4 numbers this morning. Overall, revenues of $32.5B were measurably higher than analyst expected ($31.95B according to Yahoo Finance) on a big quarter for smartphones. But as usual, when you sell to many of those subsidized smartphones, your profit takes a hit – and thus their adjusted EPS of $0.42 was perhaps a penny off the mark. They’d be partying harder though, if they had fared better [Read more →]

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 →]