Telecom Ramblings

There were several items of interest in the international arena lately.

TAT-14, the consortium-owned transatlantic cable, is finally going to get a big upgrade.  Mitsubishi Electric announced that it signed a contract to add 40Gbps DWDM capability, which according to the PR will increase the cable’s total capacity by a factor of [Read more →]

For some years now I have thought that the CDN world at some point would find a way to interconnect with itself.  By that I mean that until now, each content delivery network lives in isolation on top of an IP ocean, exchanging nothing directly with its neighbors.  Yet the idea of seamless caching and delivery across multiple cooperating CDNs is very attractive from a design standpoint, and I know that many on the bandwidth side have seen it in the future for a long while.  Just in the last few days though, I have heard the emerging name for this, the ‘Federated CDN’, start to make real noise.  [Read more →]

That clwr is looking for ways to cut costs and thus improve its operational position by any means necessary is not a secret.  I suppose I should have expected them to take a page from the book of their largest shareholder, Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) and outsource network operations to Ericsson, but it hadn’t yet occurred to me.  But that’s exactly what they did according to [Read more →]

Ok, back in March when Google announced that the lucky community to get its 1Gbps FTTH present would be Kansas City, Kansas, I gave them a bit of a hard time for picking the smaller one to deploy fiber in while getting the marketing boost of the bigger one’s name.  Well, I’m not saying they listened to me (actually, I’m sure they didn’t), but apparently the Google guys have now decided to expand the project to the other side of the river as well. At least now we know what the other 1000 communities needed to to to get some Google-love.  Yep, just [Read more →]

Northeastern fiber operator Lightower also announced a network expansion yesterday, unveiling a new route crossing the Hudson River.  That makes six such crossings for Lightower, increasing even further its network depth in the Hudson Valley. The new route, which I believe shows up on the clipping of Lightower’s network map below, crosses the Hudson to the south of the Tappan Zee bridge between the counties of Westchester and Rockland.  It crosses the Hudson at a narrower point and will help reduce latency [Read more →]

Zayo says it is both expanding and adding capacity to its Memphis network.  That network derives from its purchase of Memphis Networx, which was one of its earliest purchases back in 2007.  Zayo plans to increase its coverage to 425 route miles with connectivity to more than 350 enterprise buildings and an increased fiber count, adding a total of 20,000 fiber miles to be added  and extending [Read more →]

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece today entitled “The Internet Of Things: How Will We Trust A Word It Says?” which makes the future sound rather scary.  The key question posed is this:  “what are the security issues surrounding an internet of 50 billion devices, 48 billion of which are going to be cheap remote sensors of some kind?”  The WSJ then went on to look at the possibilities for malicious activity against corporations by deliberately injecting false data, but the first thing that hit me was the privacy thing and a book I read a while back called ‘The Transparent Society’ by one of my favorite [Read more →]

Fresh off its IPO over the winter, European colocation specialist InterXion (NYSE:INXN, news) posted its first quarter results along with a variety of expansion projects. In Stockholm, they will be adding an additional 1.5MW of power, which will allow them to expand their current footprint by 25%.  Apparently they are also using seawater cooling there to enhance efficiency.  In Vienna, they will be adding 1,300 square meters, while in Dublin the order of the day will be another 1MW and a [Read more →]

XO Holdings (news, filings) had finished off 2010 with two quarters of solid revenue growth and higher EBITDA margins, but saw a sequential decline in both in the first quarter of 2011 driven by churn in long distance voice services.  Actually though, while they don’t say much on the subject of seasonality (or anything else really), Q1 pretty much always looks like this for XO so it didn’t surprise me to see EBITDA margins beneath 10% again.  Over the same quarter last year, XO saw improvements across the board – though nothing spectacular.  Here’s a quick summary of their numbers in context: [Read more →]

With all the noise this year about how cable MSOs are taking share in the business marketplace, the fact that Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA, news, filings) had yet to enter the Metro Ethernet marketplace in force might have seemed odd.  Well if so, those days are now over.  Today the big daddy of the US cable industry formally unveiled its Metro Ethernet product line in 20 markets across the country.  The higher bandwidth offering will take them further into the M end of the [Read more →]

VoIP rarely gets the headlines these days, but Microsoft’s blockbuster purchase of Skype has brought to the fore a not particularly new yet increasingly important phenomenon.  The New York Times ran a piece entitled “Skype-Style Calls Force Wireless Carriers to Adapt” which framed the challenge facing wireless carriers, which despite the last year of press doesn’t have much directly to do with network neutrality, and here’s one response from the eternal voice of VoIP, Andy Abramson.  Specifically, it is the fact that for wireless carriers:

Mobile Data + VoIP = Revenue Loss [Read more →]

I have finally updated my competitive telecom trends graphs both with new data and also with some new technology that makes them easier to read and interact with.  Enhancements include: 1) the ability to hide/show each company’s data interactively, 2) display of the numerical value when hovering over a datapoint, and 3) valuation projections that include the current stock price.  I am still tweaking the style, let me know if you have any ideas to help improve the presentation.  First up, let’s take a quick look at how EBITDA margins have been evolving recently: [Read more →]

Zayo Group (news, filings) continued to roll on forward according to its Fiscal Q3 earnings report, which came out last night.  While it is privately held, Zayo generally issues more public information on the state of its business than most (or perhaps all) private companies in the sector. This is one of those rare quarters where Zayo’s numbers don’t have to be read in the context of an acquisition, since the last one they did closed two quarters prior and they finished most of the integration work for AFS last quarter.  Here’s a quick look at their numbers (to be updated later when the CC supplement comes out): [Read more →]

Viatel’s European network business, VTLWaveNet, seems to be waking up from its long post-bubble slumber.  Last month they lit their French routes south of Paris, and this week they took the effort further by lighting their Geneva-Bern-Zurich route and adding a new route from Zurich south to Milan.  [Read more →]

Earlier this week, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) reported reasonable earnings but a depressing near term future, and promised a major cost savings effort to save $1B in annual costs.  We all know what that means.  Yep, top management will probably have to forgo their bonuses to show solidarity with the several thousand employees they will be downsizing.  Now is the toughest time for those employees, as they know [Read more →]

A bit of catchup to do now:

Down in Texas, regional and metro network operator Alpheus Communications has joined the IPv6 bandwagon, having implemented the new protocol across its fiber footprint.  I’m still figuring out how to get Ramblings on that bandwagon of course.  As for Alpheus, this time last year there was talk it was up for sale, at one point said to be in [Read more →]

Following its new presence in Zurich, euNetworks (news) extended its financial bandwidth business even further south across the Alps into Milan, Italy today.  That gives them low latency connectivity from the other financial markets in their footprint, including 8.81ms to London, 4.71ms to Frankfurt, and 1.98ms to Zurich.  euNetworks also reported earnings this morning, as it continues to put in place all the pieces of a European version of the metro-fiber-driven business we have seen take off in the past few years here in the US.  Here is a quick tabular summary of their results in context: [Read more →]

Ok, I admit it.  That was a really bad title, but I just couldn’t resist.  Another week, another high profile CDN win for Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings).  HBO selected them to provide streaming of content for their new HBO GO mobile app to various devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, as well as select Android devices.  As you might expect, HBO GO gives HBO subscribers access to 1,400 titles worth of premium channel content they would otherwise have only been able to see at home.  The app has the potential to drive some serious bandwidth if people use it, as HBO saw over 1M [Read more →]

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that both Sidera and FiberLight are for sale.  Of course Ramblings’ readers knew about Sidera already, as I broke that news last week.  As for FiberLight, they are owned by the Thermo group and have been since 2003.  I’m certain that they’d sell if they got the price they want, however Thermo has made sure FiberLight has the funding to expand and I suspect their price won’t be cheap.  But those aren’t the only rumors I’m hearing right now.  Actually, it’s quite chaotic on the rumor front, much like it was last year around this time – there are lots of assets in play.  Here are a few rumored deals that seem to be popping up the most: [Read more →]

The world of bandwidth down under continues to evolve rapidly.  Today Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) announced that it has been commissioned by a subsidiary of Leighton Contractors Telecommunications to build a new submarine cable between Australia and Singapore.  The obviously named Australia-Singapore Cable will, unlike most other cables in the region, land on the west coast of the continent at Perth.  The route will traverse 4,800km and pass through Indonesia’s Sundu Straight.  From Perth terrestrial fiber will connect it all the way over to Sydney.  I’m still looking for a [Read more →]

The competitive metro provider with the most buildings on-net, TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings), posted its first quarter results today.  Revenue growth accelerated at a higher rate than in the past and bested estimates at $332.5M, while earnings per share fell sequentially as expected to $0.08 due to seasonality in costs.  Capital expenditures remained high, and the company continued to expand its on-net footprint very aggressively.  Here is a quick tabular summary in the context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]

tndm reported earnings this morning, posting revenues of $66.4M that easily surpassed composite analyst estimates while earnings per share came in on target at $0.24.  I’ll be keeping closer track of Neutral Tandem given the fact that they now own and operate Tinet and its international backbone, and with their EtherCloud and other plans they seem to be evolving into a more complicated company.  More on that after a quick table of results: [Read more →]

So ever since Om broke the rumor on Sunday, the word was that Skype was about to get bought by a big internet powerhouse.  Some said the buyer was Facebook, some said Google, but it turned out to be Microsoft.  The pricetag was a whopping $8.5B, and it obviously takes Skype’s IPO off the table.  But does it make any sense at all?  [Read more →]