Telecom Ramblings

Comcast filed a description of its new congestion management system a few days ago.  This is what will replace their previous system which throttled P2P traffic.  Of course, they backed off that plan a while back, then were told to back off that plan by the FCC, and have appealed that ruling - apparently to give their lawyers something to do.  But nevertheless, they have what they call a [Read more →]

Telegeography reported today that the transition to VoIP in Europe is moving very rapidly now.  At year end 2007 there were 25.3M voip users, and by year end 2008 that number is expected to exceed 37M.  Penetration rates are all over the map though.  In France 43% of households are now using VoIP, while in Spain that number is only 2%.  But wow, 43%?   That's huge! [Read more →]

Silicon Valley Insider speculated Friday that Ebay may be looking to sell Skype, a thought that was developed further by both Rich Tehrani and Andy Abramson. It certainly would be an exciting move at a time when money is not exactly flowing freely.  The potential buyers [Read more →]

What do investors say when a company overpromises and then sells stock or converts into the rally?  If it's his own holdings, they complain loudly.  If it's company stock or a convertible bond, some will grant that he was just making the case to get the best price for his shareholders while others may feel betrayed.  But what about the opposite case?  What happens when [Read more →]

Yesterday after the close of the markets, Cogent filed an 8-K with the SEC .  Now sometimes when filings come out late on a friday they're bad news, but not this time.  Alongside an update on their stock buyback program, the company repurchased $20M face value of its 1% convertible notes for $9.9M.  That's under 50 cents on the dollar.  I haven't seen [Read more →]

Once again, Dave Rusin over on Telecom Straight Shooter has taken on the issue of forbearance, arguing forcefully against most of the current crop of CLECs.  He'd like us all to step back from regulation and let the market produce the business case for laying fiber to all those buildings.  Very much the laissez faire purist approach, certainly, and quite appealing when put that way. [Read more →]

TMobile today announced who won the backhaul contracts for 6 of the 27 top markets in which they are supposed to roll out their new GSM network next month.  If you've followed this blog, you'll notice that three of the four are private companies that have shown up in my research on metro fiber footprints, the fourth being a cable company.  Congrats to all four, these deals mark a turning point in that one no longer has to go to the ILEC in these locations - that infrastructure will now be in place on independent fiber. [Read more →]

In a filing with the SEC today, Limelight announced they have come to a settlement with Two-Way Media over the patent suit filed by the latter in April.  The patent in question was an old one from 1996, and Limelight joins Level 3 (via Cable & Wireless long ago) as a licensee of the patent.  Two-way is apparently still suing Akamai and AT&T over the same patent, which sure does seem to have legs. [Read more →]

Amazon entered the CDN business today, as usual Dan Rayburn has the inside scoop.   Basically, Amazon will be leveraging its distributed hosting and storage systems for basic CDN services.  Not video, yet, and no add-on services, just do-it-yourself caching and download really.  But that's enough, if they succeed at all with this offering it will probably annihilate the 40+ small fry that are still seeking a foothold.

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Continuing further along my lit building thread, I looked at the smaller regional footprint of RCN Metro.  This of course is a division of RCN rather than a standalone company, however they are kind enough to publish their lit building list.  Once again, I shoehorned their data into the appropriate MSAs so that the data is comparable to others.  With no further ado, here are their top 10 markets by MSA: [Read more →]

Jon Arnold has an interesting article over on TMCnet about harnessing VoIP going forward.  The problem with VoIP applications have always been that they has only really served to replace other voice applications: Vonage replacing your home line, IP-PBX's replacing older PBX's, etc.  Unique features that actually caught on have been few and far between.  [Read more →]

Over on Contentinople is an article on SHV, or Super Hi Vision, which is seen as a successor to HD.  What is it?  Think resolution of 33M pixels (7680 X 4320) and 22 channels of sound.  Think 24Gb/s uncompressed, maybe 1Gb/s compressed.  One hour of SHV video would bust that Comcast usage limit.  Of course, we're just barely seeing HD video go anywhere now let alone via the internet, so this is far far away.  [Read more →]

Over on TelecomStraightShooter, Dave Rusin posted yesterday that he sees XO more as an acquirer than as an acquiree right now.  This is of course in direct contradiction of the unscientific poll of my readers  over the past month (summarized at the bottom of this post) in which XO is the runaway favorite to be bought next, but then Dave doesn't ever fear holding a contrarian view.  While he makes some good points, let me say why I don't think it will happen: [Read more →]

Internap has announced a flurry of small CDN deals this month, is this a recovery?  First there was Million Dollar Round Table after Labor Day, then Synacor last week , and today we have TV Worldwide's FedEdTV.com.  None of these deals are huge obviously, but Internap's niche has always been the [Read more →]

Last week, when we heard that Zayo had made another deal for some conduit assets and fiber to cable landing stations but weren't told who they were being bought from, readers of this blog quickly came up with the name Adesta.  Caruso eventually piped in and demurred, but with Zayo's PR today it turns out we were really quite close. [Read more →]

Telephony Online has an article today discussing the trend of carriers offshoring parts of their network operations.  This certainly is going on, one only has to listen to what networks like Colt and Level 3 have to say in their earnings calls.  And it's unstoppable, like heat flowing from hot to cold and water running downhill - if it can be done somewhere else cheaper then sooner or later it will. However, [Read more →]

DataCenterKnowledge has an article detailing an effort to build another Wall Street West in Binghamton, for backup sites for wall street.  Of course, it is Pennsylvania that started such an effort a while back that has been slow to get started.  I have two thoughts on this. [Read more →]

Following up on my Cogent-North America post, let's now look at Cogent's European assets.  Once again one is able to derive the total buildings, Cogent-owned datacenters, and neutral datacenters for each city they serve.  With no further ado, here are their top 20 markets by number of lit buildings: [Read more →]

Continuing in my series looking at metro assets and lit buildings, I took a look at Cogent.  If you're willing to keep clicking, their website yields plenty of information - buildings, addresses, and whether each is a neutral or Cogent-owned datacenter - the rest I assume to be enterprise buildings for the sake of analysis.  For this post, let's save [Read more →]

After his return from a trip, Dan Caruso found my Zayo Lit Buildings post and kindly offered avenues for more information should I be interested.  Who knows, I might!  He also asked how Zayo's public maps and data stack up compared to others, and I thought about it and voila it turned into a blog post.  After all, I've looked at all of them, all I had to do was put them side by side - so I took the data I had on [Read more →]

Rackspace Hosting, which IPO'd in August, released its Q2 earnings today.  I guess when you are a new listing, they relax the SEC reporting requirements as you settle in, considering how Q3 will be over in just a few weeks.  The market was unimpressed by Rackspaces's results just as it was unimpressed by its IPO, but I think they just don't understand the business. [Read more →]

At the Jefferies conference on Tuesday, Global Crossing was unflaggingly optimistic about its growth prospects.  Economic headwinds or not, they flat out refused to back off from their guidance and said things remain good.  Controversial?  Perhaps, but the most interesting comment came in response to a question on consolidation opportunities: [Read more →]

Lots of interesting but small stuff to comment on today, so let's go through them: [Read more →]