Telecom Ramblings

It will come as no surprise that the FCC’s latest network neutrality effort is being challenged in court.  Actually, I’m somewhat surprised it took this long – I guess all the lawyers spent a bit longer in the Caribbean over the holidays.  But it is just a little bit ironic that it is Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) that is making the challenge, because the rules the FCC passed are more than a little bit similar to the principles that Verizon and Google put down on paper a few [Read more →]

Private equity firm Pivotal Group announced yesterday that it has purchased telecommunication logistics company Global Capacity.  Global Capacity filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy back in June, and Pivotal has now taken control by paying $65M of the company’s debt.  They are finalizing the plan to emerge from bankruptcy, and a hearing has been scheduled – not that there is any doubt since Pivotal owns 100% of the debt now.  So now the question shifts to what exactly Pivotal has in mind. [Read more →]

Am I the only one that thinks Comcast has made a mistake here?  Everyone seems to be worried about how Comcast is going to stomp all over both sectors, while reducing choice for consumers.  But I think the whole idea of marrying content with the last mile and everything in between is just a bad idea that at best will flounder and at worst will make us all forget about the AOL/Time-Warner debacle.  My reasons: [Read more →]

There’s been lots of things going on this week in the international networking arena that I haven’t touched on yet:

Upcoming international network PacketExchange is taking a swing at the cloud.  Over at PTC (Hawaii… I’m jealous) they unveiled their new product: Network Infrastructure as a Service or NIaaS for short.  The idea is to package the network access one uses to communicate to and between cloud applications.  Sounds like a good plan, but isn’t this ‘aaS’ acronym stuff [Read more →]

Time to survey recent developments in the data center marketplace:

Interconnection and colo specialist Telx Group (news, filings) turned on the lights at its new Ethernet exchanges in Miami, Dallas, and Los Angeles this week.  Three months ago, they added their first five such exchanges, and are of course partnering with tndm for even greater coverage.  Telx filed to [Read more →]

Verizon’s Global Wholesale division has been busy this week.  I always find it a bit hard to cover Verizon’s, they’re so big it’s hard to isolate a particular storyline that doesn’t involve consumer wireless stuff.  But if I just think of it as MCI or uunet, it gets easier.

Yesterday the international networking giant unveiled upgrades to its transparent LAN services, including extra bandwidth, combined [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) is moving deeper into the CDN space, offering a new service called CDN Site Transformer, which integrates website optimization technologies from Strangeloop.  Strangeloop – hmmm, sounds like it ought to be a metro fiber operator someplace…haha.  The idea behind the new service is that there are bottlenecks slowing down delivery of websites that are not addressed by optimizing the network and caching the data close to the recipient.  The website’s code itself can get [Read more →]

Ethernet exchange protagonist CENX (news) has found itself a datacenter partner in newly public CoreSite (NYSE:COR, news, filings).  This is more than a simple transaction for space and power, the two are collaborating on many levels.  CoreSite had considered building its own exchange capability, but chose this route instead in order to maintain focus on what it does best while partnering with one of the leaders.  They already offer interconnection and peering services alongside colocation, and some sort of foray into [Read more →]

There have been interesting developments in the submarine cable marketplace lately:

Reliance Globalcom is using Ciena gear to add 40G capabilities to the cable linking the UK, Spain, Italy, and Egypt.  That would be the former FLAG cable, 6,400km of fiber that lies between Reliance Globalcom’s Atlantic and Asian systems.  The upgrade gives them a future 100G upgrade path as well.  Reliance is said to shop the FLAG assets last year, I wonder if they’re still [Read more →]

International network operator glbc has added substantial muscle to its wholesale wavelength offerings, according to an announcement this morning.  At the top of the list is the 40Gbps services across their networks in the US and in continental Europe.  The company has of course been leveraging 40Gbps links on some routes for its IP network for a while, but they are now selling such wavelengths to customers as well, both in the [Read more →]

Content delivery provider Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) took a bit of a break from the content side of things, and got its hands dirty with a bit of IP transit work.  The company announced that the Arizona Internet Exchange, which it is backing, is now open for business.  Limelight is based in Arizona, which I actually did not know until today, and therefore has a vested [Read more →]

When they actually buy the fiber, you know the network is probably going to get built.  Today Corning announced that its Australian division has been awarded the contract for that fiber and other gear.  The deal could be worth up to AUS$1.2B over the full term, with an initial purchase commitment of AUS$400M.  That’s real money, meaning that [Read more →]

Rumors have been trickling out of Global Crossing since late last week that there has been a round of layoffs at the company, including but not limited to several comments left on this site.  There has been no official word out of the company on this subject just yet, but it does appear that something is going on.  How many?  I’m hearing 3% or so, i.e in the neighborhood of 150 people.  Where?  [Read more →]

ftwr has picked up another pile of fiber, working out an agreement with Zayo’s dark fiber division, Zayo Fiber Solutions.  FiberTower will lease some 2,500 miles of dark fiber for the long term and has options for additional fiber leases.  They will use all that fiber to fill out their wireless backhaul coverage, obviously, however there was no mention, however, of the [Read more →]

Time to catch up on the rest of the fiber-related news this week:

Hibernia Atlantic had two notable announcements.  First, they announced the further reduction of latency across their Global Financial Network.  They reduced the NJ/Toronto routes to 9.5ms, and also sped things up in the NJ metro area.  They also have that new transatlantic link in the works of course, but a solid footprint on land is critical regardless.  Secondly, [Read more →]

So last week we ran two polls about the M&A potential in 2011, the first one picking likely buyers, and the second one picking likely targets.  Readers of this site tend to be very knowledgeable on this subject, as they are often sitting in the front row if not on stage when they happen.  So who won the somewhat dubious honor of leading each list? [Read more →]

Content delivery giant Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) took a public lump or two last month with the news that they lost some Netflix business to Level 3, but yesterday they showed a bit of their own aggression.  Akamai and Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX, news, filings) announced a strategic relationship under which Rackspace’s dedicated and cloud hosting portfolio will leverage Akamai’s CDN.  Rackspace’s cloud services don’t get as much press as those of Amazon, [Read more →]

Yesterday, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced an agreement with eSchool Solutions in which the educational software provider will leverage the company’s CDN to deliver a training program and also to enhance its voice needs as well.  eSchool Solutions is a provider to more than 600 school districts and thousands of schools across the US and Canada.  They will use the CDN services to support a new virtual training platform, while both [Read more →]

Renesys has put out its traffic rankings for the end of 2010, and the field continues to shift.  In general, the trend is the old guard treading water or even dropping, with the alternative US carriers and Asian and European PTTs rising in response. I always find Renesys’s year-end graphs fascinating, even if they track traffic rankings which doesn’t necessarily translate to progress in revenue or EBITDA.  But it does give insight into who is [Read more →]

So, it’s official now, Tata Communications (news, filings) has agreed to purchase BitGravity.  While financial terms were not disclosed, Dan Rayburn pegs the deal at about $35M.  If true, then since $11.5M bought them about 15% of the company back in 2008, there wasn’t much of a premium here.  Tata had partnered with the company to power its own CDN services, and they will now take all of that technology in-house.  [Read more →]

Zayo’s zColo unit is undertaking a substantial expansion, adding five new markets.  The company has leased space down in Memphis, in the three largest Ohio markets of Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland, and in Plymouth MN which lies 15 miles northwest of Minneapolis.  In all, the company is increasing its colocation footprint by 46,404 square feet of space, or 40%.  They will use that space to offer interconnection and other services to their customer base, including [Read more →]

Quite a bit of news in the datacenter space lately, here’s a quick look:

Telehouse America is moving deeper into the Manhattan Datacenter market.  Today they announced the acquisition and opening of a 60,000 square foot facility in the Chelsea-Meatpacking District at 85 [Read more →]

Cogent isn’t the only one seeing a window of opportunity in the debt markets.  Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) today announced its intention to raise $300M in senior notes due 2019 in a private offering.  In parallel, the company reaffirmed its guidance for the fourth quarter of 2010, i.e. that free cash flow will be positive and that [Read more →]