Telecom Ramblings

Before everyone goes off for Easter weekend, here’s a quick rundown of some recent fiber news:

Northeastern fiber operator Lightower Fiber Networks (news) has completed its buildout up into southern New Hampshire.  The fiber buildout was first announced in January of 2010, and spans 65 miles while hooking up sites in Salem, Manchester, Merrimack, Nashua, and other towns along the way. Lightower has been expanding aggressively both organically and inorganically over the past year or two, and they seem likely to continue to continue on that path this year.  There are probably fewer [Read more →]

You gotta love the predictable headlines this morning accompanying AT&T’s solid Q1/11 earnings release.  CNBC has “AT&T Earnings Solid Despite Loss of iPhone Rights” and AllthingsD has “Sharing the iPhone With Verizon Doesn’t Kill AT&T”.  As if the company’s $124B annual revenues and gobs of cash flow were going to evaporate overnight?  It’s only been less than two months…  Even if it were going to happen, it would be hard [Read more →]

Fresh off its big M&A announcement earlier this month, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) today let everyone know that it is one of the backhaul powers behind the LTE rollout of none other than Verizon Wireless.  Level 3 is supplying both backbone infrastructure and cell-site backhaul to the US wireless giant to help prepare for the coming wireless data wave.  Unlike the exaflood which has never yet materialized in an actual form worthy of fear, I don’t think anyone doubts that [Read more →]

Recent data from Arbor Networks says that despite greater attention lately the share of internet traffic today that is transferred over IPv6 is still well below 1%.  And much of that is carried via tunneling rather than via native IPv6.  There’s only one word that adequately describes the speed of the transition thus far for the internet as a whole: [Read more →]

Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) is one of the early birds of earnings season, and today offered up a bit of spring with its Q1/11 results.  The company’s revenue of $1.102B and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.32 were down sequentially from the seasonally strong Q4, but were perfectly inline with analyst projections.  Here’s a quick table of the routing giant’s numbers and guidance in the context of last year’s results: [Read more →]

Speaking of that dispute over wholesale fees between clwr and Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings), it figures that minutes after I said the two were close to a deal, they went and announced a long term deal.  The pricing agreement ‘is aimed at aligning the interests of both companies to enable growth for customers using smart phones and dual-mode devices’, which is another way of saying they compromised but aren’t going to [Read more →]

LIME, the Caribbean arm of Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC), and Xtera (news) have finished up work on the Carribean East West Cable network.  Spanning 1,700km the new cable hooks up Jamaica, the British Virgin Islands, and the Dominican Republic.  Xtera’s gear will enable an initial 120Gbps across the system, with the ability to expand to 720Gbps – higher with future technology.  Here’s a map I found lying around someplace: [Read more →]

According to the Wall Street Journal today, Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) is close to deals to share its national wireless footprint with both LightSquared and clwr.  In the case of LightSquared, Sprint would get a mix of cash and spectrum usage, the latter of which might help them reduce roaming costs in rural areas.  Meanwhile, talk of such a deal with Clearwire suggests also that resolution of that pesky [Read more →]

According to a report on African site TechCentral, there is a new transatlantic cable in the works.  But this time it’s in the South Atlantic, connecting Fortaleza Brazil with Angola and South Africa, destinations that one doesn’t normally think about undersea cable hooking up.  The project is being led by eFive Telecoms and will supposedly be built by a joint venture between Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) and [Read more →]

Independent transatlantic operator Hibernia Networks (news) took a detour out of its home turf today and into the Pacific.  They have added Tokyo to their Global Financial Network.  The GFN has been steadily adding new nodes to their offering as the low latency craze has spread beyond the routes that spawned it some three years ago.  In this case, the latency on the Chicago-Tokyo route will be [Read more →]

Suppose you’re a Tier-1 incumbent carrier with a dominant position in your own market, a major international presence both wired and wireline, and a marketcap larger than the GDP of a third world country.  At a loss for a way to increase your mojo?  What you need is obvious:  collective buying power!  Yep, that’s the news this morning anyway from Europe, where France Telecom (NYSE:FTE, news, filings) and Deutsche Telecom AG (ETR:DTE, news, filings) announced that they will [Read more →]

Pan-European operator Interoute offered up its 2010 results today, showing off double digit revenue growth and its first full year of profitability.  Full year revenues of €295M were up 10% from €269M, while adjusted EBITDA rose 46% to €58M from €40M.  That corresponds to an EBITDA margin of 20%, up strongly from 15% in the prior year as the company’s scale is starting to tell.  The company has also declared its interest in spending its expanding cash flow on [Read more →]

Fresh off its return last quarter from New England’s telecom doghouse, FairPoint Communications (news, filings) seems to be gearing up for a bunch more fiber in its diet.  The ILEC announced late last week that it intends to invest in its wireless backhaul capabilities across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.  The buildout is primarily aimed at wireless customers, but the fiber will benefit other sources of bandwidth demand in [Read more →]

Over on the Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board,  Zayo has posted another position.  This time Zayo is looking for an Outside Plant Solutions Engineer in Louisville, Colorado “to join its front end sales efforts in the development of competitive solutions requiring the addition of new fiber assets.”  They may have been formed via a series of M&A, but they do enjoy digging as well.  The consolidation activity last year and already so far this year will certainly mean there will be talent on the move, hopefully [Read more →]

Assuming you’ve all got your taxes done and have time to catch up on fiber news, there’s actually been quite a lot lately in the metro/regional fiber space.  So here’s a quick rundown of a few more items this week:

In one bit of news this week that I’m still trying to puzzle through, Georgia-based US Carrier unveiled plans to roll out an Ethernet Exchange.  But despite the similar terminology, this seems to be a different sort of beast than what CENX, Telx, Neutral Tandem, and Equinix are working on.  US Carrier is leveraging Cyan packet-optical transport gear for [Read more →]

Well that didn’t take very long.  A little over two months ago, the last bundles of addresses were handed out to each region.  Today APNIC announced it has reached the last block of IPv4 addresses in its available pool, and has activated its Final /8 policy.  That means it has begun rationing what it has left “to be used as essential connectivity with next-generation IPv6 addresses”.  According to APNIC Director Paul Wilson: [Read more →]

Ok, the dust has started to settle and we’ve all had time to digest this week’s blockbuster M&A where Level 3 has agreed to buy Global Crossing for about $3.0B.  It’s time to take stock of the situation, collectively.  The situation seems more complex than can be captured in an up/down vote, so here’s one of those polls where you can choose more than one answer (Select at most 2 in this case) – and I’ve tried to include something for everyone.  Don’t be shy: [Read more →]

With all the M&A these days, bigger always seems to be the goal.  But in the past few days, the news for two of the biggest equipment giants has been moving in the other direction.  On Tuesday Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) said that it will exit parts of the consumer electronics business, and that would include the Flip video business.  The Umi will be moved into the business telepresence section, an odd place for a consumer product perhaps but it signals they’re not giving up on it yet.  Cisco has been coming to terms with the fact that isn’t a kid anymore, and has started to re-evaluate its path – even issuing [Read more →]

Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) has had a rather whirlwind of a PR week, touching down on both US coasts, in Australia, the UK, and across the channel as well.  Enough for a little roundup of their own: [Read more →]

Internet2 and Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced more details about the next phase of the national educational network.  The new multi-year agreement will crate a new 8.8Tbps national backbone that will support 200,000 anchor institutions nationwide.  It’s part of the Unified Community Anchor Network, or UCAN, network funded with a piece of all that BTOP stimulus money, of course.  [Read more →]

A few more random thoughts about this weeks big deal between Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) and glbc.

Why so long to close? While Level 3 has historically closed deals in about three months, there is a reason they gave themselves until the end of the year this time.  When Global Crossing bought Impsat, it took them seven months to close the deal due to [Read more →]

There’s never a dull week in in the world of LightSquared, the yet-to-be-built independent wholesale LTE network backed by Philip Falcone and his Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund.  What with its funding always under scrutiny, high profile partners either signing up eagerly or being acquired by AT&T, few actual facilities let alone revenue, and GPS providers screaming about potential interference, it seems obvious what the company should do next.  Go public! [Read more →]

I’ve wondered for a while whether Zayo Group (news, filings) might move more into Layer 3 services, in addition to its core bandwidth infrastructure products.  Well, yesterday they did make a move in that direction, but by partnering with the alternative internet backbone Hurricane Electric.  Seems like a natural partnership, as Zayo and Hurricane Electric do not really [Read more →]