Telecom Ramblings

This weekend was an birthday of sorts for this website.  Three years ago Saturday I wrote my first article on Telecom Ramblings, which happened to be a financial model for Level 3.  I never imagined that I’d still be here 1,946 articles later, let alone that so many people would be reading them, responding to them, and helping me make sense of it all.  Thank [Read more →]

Over on the Jobs Board, we have a new job posting from the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER).  KINBER will be coordinating the construction and management of a state-wide fiberoptic network in Pennsylvania, or PennREN.  It’s a beneficiary of a piece of the stimulus funding awarded over the last two years aimed at hooking up universities, schools, hospitals, etc.  In particular, KINBER is looking for [Read more →]

Time to catch up on the bits of news that got past my radar or left me otherwise speechless:

Alongside yesterday’s earnings report, PAETEC (news, filings) announced its intention to build a new datacenter facility in McLean, VA as part of its efforts to [Read more →]

TelePacific expanded its asset base with not one but two M&A announcements today. While I wonder now and then if Telepacific might be an acquisition target itself at some point, they are clearly on [Read more →]

Back in February there was a report that pan-European network operator Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) was eyeing MarketPrizm with an eye toward a greater presence in the financial vertical.  Well it took a few months but such a deal did in fact take place, as yesterday Colt announced a binding agreement to purchase a majority stake in MarketPrizm, whose current owner Chi-X Global will stay on as a minority shareholder via its Instinet subsidiary.  Colt hopes to leverage [Read more →]

As promised, three very different fiber network operators reported earnings today, and all three bested revenue estimates.  Here is a quick summary of each with some comments: [Read more →]

In the first quarter, Clearwire added nearly 1.8M net subscribers, of whom 1.6M were of the wholesale variety.  That’s more than the 1.5M added in Q4 and brought their total to approximately 6.15M subscribers, and they now forecast ending 2011 with approximately 9.5M subscribers.  That would correspond to adding just over 1.1M each quarter from here, which suggests additional upside if they continue anywhere near their Q1 pace.  [Read more →]

High end IP and colo provider Internap Network Services (NASDAQ:INAP, news, filings) took another big step into the cloud, unveiling a high performance on-demand cloud computing service.  With dual hypervisor support for VMware and OpenStack environments, as well as the cloud storage service they announced earlier this year, Internap is following a path that has to have been beckoning for a long time.  I expect there are more [Read more →]

Tomorrow before the market opens, three very different competitive network operators will report earnings, here’s a quick preview of what to expect:

AboveNet: abvt is coming off a year of organic growth in which it entered several new metro markets both in the US and in Europe, and investors will be looking to see if they can maintain the pace they have set for themselves.  Some extra capex from 2010 was delayed and will probably show up in an elevated [Read more →]

A recent report by Cowen and other tidbits from the grapevine say that Sidera Networks and its northeastern metro and regional fiber footprint may be up for sale again.  ABRY Partners bought the former RCN Metro division just last year as part of the larger RCN acquisition, and had separated out the metro fiber assets and said it intended to use them as a consolidation platform – and in fact bought the LIFE assets out on Long Island to start the ball rolling.  What’s changed since then? [Read more →]

As promised in an interview here last month, PAETEC (news, filings) has upgraded its Ethernet-over-copper (EoC) footprint from 15Mbps per fiber pair all the way up to 100Mbps.  To power those speeds, PAETEC is leveraging nextgen carrier Ethernet edge and aggregation tech from Overture Networks. The company’s EoC offerings have reportedly been seeing [Read more →]

International backbone and IP solutions operator glbc reported Q1/2011 earnings today, three weeks after the long anticipated announcement of its intended purchase by Level 3 for $3B.  Global Crossing had finished off 2010 with a fourth quarter of strong revenue growth, and had forecast an uptick in organic growth for 2011 overall though not sequentially due to non-recurring items in the UK for Q4 plus the usual seasonality.  In the first quarter they posted revenues of $661 and EBITDA of $84, which lagged composite analyst expectations, but didn’t surprise me much while the company maintained its full year guidance. Here is a quick table of their numbers in the context of prior quarters: [Read more →]

International fiber operator Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) reported its Q1/2011 earnings this morning, fresh off its long-awaited announcement of the Global Crossing deal three weeks ago.  That deal has taken center stage since, however it won’t close until much later in the year, and Level 3 has unfinished business on the organic growth front to handle first.  The first quarter is traditionally lighter, however in their fourth quarter call Level 3 indicated they expected to manage a bit of sequential growth nonetheless, and in fact they posted solid revenues of $929, including $728M in core network services, which bested street estimates – and my own as well of course.  Communications adjusted EBITDA of $225 was also a sequential improvement.   [Read more →]

Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) took another step into the cloud yesterday with the acquisition of Clickability.  Clickability is a software-as-a-service provider of web content management tools, meaning they enable their customers to create and manage their website content via their specialized software and distributed server infrastructure.  Limelight will take that offering and integrate it alongside its traditional CDN business, video platform, and the [Read more →]

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) formally introduced its containerized data center product today. That the company was moving in this direction surprises no one of course, and the containers are built to incorporate the technology of Cisco’s Unified Computing, Unified Fabric and Unified Network technologies.  The units consist of a forty foot weatherized ISO container design that can hold as many as sixteen cabinets with room for 44 rack units each, built on open architecture.  The full [Read more →]

On Tuesday before the market opens we will hear from the internet backbone duo of Level 3 and Global Crossing, who of course announced their intentions to get hitched a few weeks ago.  Since that deal seems rather unlikely to fall through, it seems appropriate to preview earnings for both companies at the same time.  The two share some common features when it comes first quarter results, namely  a) slower sequential growth due to a seasonally strong Q4, and b) higher cash usage due to seasonal expense trends.  This year, both companies are also projecting a stronger overall growth trend.  But of course they are not yet joined at the [Read more →]

Amazon today finally offered up a detailed failure report itemizing what went wrong last week when its Elastic Compute Cloud went down and took a chunk of the internet with it.  It’s quite a read.  That is, it’s quite a read if you can get through all the definitions and jargon.  Data Center Knowledge does a pretty good job of simplifying it a bit, but let’s make it a bit simpler.  [Read more →]

Sometimes the reports are all spread out, and sometimes they clump together.  This quarter it’s the latter, so it’s time for a quick look at a few more reports from yesterday:

Internap Network Services (NASDAQ:INAP, news, filings) had a bit of a rough quarter, as revenues declined sequentially again to $59.4M and normalized earnings turned negative with the loss of a penny per share.  The company guided toward sequential improvement in Q2, something that analysts seem to have hoped for a bit earlier.  Internap also announced an expansion into [Read more →]

Bandwidth equipment manufacturer Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) filed it’s first quarter numbers yesterday.  Revenues declined sequentially to $92.9M from $117.1M in the prior quarter, which roughly matched composite analyst expectations and reflected as always the lumpiness of this business.  The company’s non-GAAP earnings per share dipped to a loss of $0.04, which was nevertheless better than the loss of $0.07 that they turned in during the same quarter last year and had been projected to repeat.  Here is a quick table of their results in the context of the prior four quarters: [Read more →]

What with all the earnings reports flooding in lately, let’s take a quick look at other items that might otherwise get drowned out:

Unite Private Networks continued to rack up fiber builds for lesser known school districts and municipalities.  Ohio’s Elyria City and Perrysburg Schools both [Read more →]

Embattled US #3 wireless provider Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) reported another quarter of sequential growth, ahead of analyst expectations of a drop.  Revenues of $8.313B were indeed a hair higher than last quarter and up 3% over the same period last year, while loss per share improved to $0.15, clearly ahead of composite expectations which Yahoo Finance had pegged at a loss of $0.21.  The market [Read more →]

Carrier neutral colocation provider Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) easily bested guidance and analyst estimates for the first quarter of 2011, raising guidance for the full year as well.  As one might expect, the market is responding favorably after hours.  In addition, Equinix announced further expansion plans, including yet another major data center facility in the NYC metro market, which will give them eight, and more space in Chicago and Frankfurt.  Here is a quick table of the company’s numbers in context: [Read more →]

Content delivery giant, or leading cloud optimization provider as they like to be called these days, Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) reported its first quarter earnings today after the market closed.  While they managed to beat both their own guidance and analyst expectations on both earnings per share and revenue, the stock is down 10% after hours.  Traders apparently aren’t happy with the forward guidance company management gave on the conference call.  Here’s a quick rundown of the numbers in context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]