Telecom Ramblings

This is a guest post by Paolo Gorgò.  If you might be interested in a guest post, then contact the webmaster.

Equinix’s recent offering of $750 million of 7.00% senior notes put the company in an even stronger cash position to fund its expansion plans – including increasing its footprint in new markets around the world. Add to this the fact that the company should generate in 2011 alone about $400 million in discretionary free cash flow (money that can also be used for expansion CapEx), and we feel authorized to start the guessing game. [Read more →]

DQE Communications has entered the M&A fray with the purchase of Met-Net communications, which also operates in the Pittsburgh metro area.  Met-Net specializes in Metro Ethernet and Ethernet over copper to the enterprise, and they do it via fiber which is largely leased from, yes, DQE Communications – so this is mainly consolidating customers onto the fiber platform and thus increasing depth of penetration.  [Read more →]

According to a report in the Communications Daily newsletter this morning, xoho is planning to file comments this week opposing the Level 3-Global Crossing merger with the FCC and perhaps DOJ.  The grounds?  That it will give Level 3 too much leverage in the Tier 1 backbone market of course. [Read more →]

I was asked recently why I haven’t offered another predictive model for lvlt in light of the Global Crossing deal and the dramatic resurgence of their stock over the past eight months.  For what it’s worth, I think there are indeed very good reasons supporting the TTID thesis this time around.  TTID for the uninitiated, is Level 3 investor shorthand for This Time It’s Different – which it wasn’t the last few times.  But those same reasons are making analysis rather challenging in my view, in that [Read more →]

The US employment rate may still be struggling to find a way down, but in the world of fiber things still seem to be picking up – at least if the number of postings to the Ramblings’ Jobs Board are any measure.  This weekend we have another new posting, this time from way down south at FPL Fibernet. [Read more →]

So it has finally happened.  The media industry has finally managed to get US ISPs to agree to help it police copyright infringement.  Under the terms of the deal, a group including Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and TW Cable will now be sending out copyright alerts when its subscribers are determined to have infringed on copyrights.  When ignored for long enough, the ISPs then have the right to limit that subscriber’s connection speed or even block them altogether.  ISPs have fought this for a long time.  And you can’t blame them, consumers already hate when these companies tell them what they can and can’t do, they don’t want to do it even more often.  However, I’m not actually fully convinced by the reluctant act.   [Read more →]

VoIP used to be the vanguard of the tiny challenger to the status quo, the David we could all root for against Goliath.  There have been three big VoIP stories MicroSoft’s Skype purchase that drive home just how much our world has changed:  Microsoft’s Skype purchase, a recent FCC filing by TW Telecom, and Facebook’s Skype integration.  Perhaps its time that we stop thinking of it as that proverbial innocent child swinging on the tire in the back yard who needs his freedom to encourage creativity and more as that slacker with five o’clock shadow who lives in his parents basement with few possessions but fewer obligations. [Read more →]

Along with its convertible debt move earlier today, lvlt also won a renewal and expansion of one of its most visible contracts today.  The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA), which provides healthcare coverage for 98 million, or perhaps 30% of the nation’s population, has signed on for another two years – we last heard [Read more →]

According to a press release this morning, Fairfax Holdings and lvlt have signed an agreement whereby Fairfax’s $127,962,000 in converts due 2013 will be converted into stock.  These are the 15% converts that Level 3 sold $400M of back in the darkest period of the recent financial crisis – November/December of 2008 – with a conversion price of just $1.80.  It was expensive money no matter how you looked at it, but [Read more →]

Western regional operator Integra Telecom announced another new PoP yesterday in Arizona, bringing Phoenix NAP on-net.  While most of their revenues come from the CLEC side of things, Integra has been emphasizing its fiber footprint more and more, bringing key sites on-net across the region.  Continuing in that vein, Integra will use its new PoP in Phoenix NAP to focus on [Read more →]

With the Telstra/NBN deal finally reaching the endgame, Australia’s bandwidth market has been very dynamic lately as everyone in the competitive landscape prepares for, well, a completely different competitive landscape.  iiNet, one of the country’s largest alternative network operators, has decided that what its future needed was a little more bandwidth.  They have been rolling out the first, but surely not the last, 100GbE [Read more →]

Carrier neutral datacenter giant eqix is raising yet more money, announcing today its intention to offer $500M in senior notes due 2021.  They included the usual laundry list of potential uses – capital expenditures, working capital and potential acquisitions – as well as the potential repayment of their 2.5% converts which mature next year.  Those converts total only $250M and would convert to stock above $112.  They have $450M on the balance sheet, so [Read more →]

One of the more vexing problems in the wireless business is handling those temporary but truly high density cases, the most extreme of which is the stadium.  With up to 100,000 people packed into a few dozen acres, nearly all packing cell phones including lots of data-gobbling smartphones, keeping them all supplied with enough bandwidth is a challenge.  It’s like having everyone in a small city temporarily converge on one [Read more →]

They’re going to be needing some more bandwidth down in Latin America later this way.  Internet traffic has already been growing at a very rapid clip throughout the region, but that was without the nflx phenomenon.  The streaming video specialist today announed plans to expand into Mexico, Central and South America, and the Carribean in the second half of this year.  [Read more →]

Independent, wholesale, LTE protagonist LightSquared continued its contrary ways today, shrugging off the escalating GPS spectrum dispute and other hurdles to raise yet another pile of money.  The company said today that it has raised another $265M from both existing and new investors, bringing their 12 month total above $2.3B.  The company’s plans for the money are obvious of course, as they will need a whole lot to [Read more →]

Over the past week, quick articles have sprung up around the internet telling of Vermont’s Claude Desmararias and his fiber-laying Belgian draft horse Fred.  Apparently frp has been getting creative in its efforts to satisfy the data cravings of denizens of upper New England, moving beyond the mere, unimaginative truck roll.   Creativity is obviously a good thing, as Fairpoint has obviously had its troubles since taking over Verizon’s unwanted northern territories. [Read more →]

The UK subsidiary of glbc announced a key government deal today.  The company has been selected as one of the three key suppliers to the Managed Telecommunications Convergence Framework, which will be the procurement service for much of the UK public sector starting at the end of the year.  Services under the MCTF framework will either be PSN-certified or provide transition to others that are. I didn’t find a reference, but I’d guess that the other two key providers would likely be [Read more →]

One of the themes I am increasingly hearing about from both inside the industry and the investment community is just what it means that many of the longhaul fiber IRUs that were sold back in the bubble are now at or beyond middle age.  You know what I mean, the fiber connecting the major cities that got swapped and traded and eventually purchased out of BK or some other restructuring 5-10 years ago, but which powers much of the internet today.  Will those IRUs be renewed and at what price?  And if not, what happens?   There are two sides to the coin.  [Read more →]

Today a consortium consisting of Apple, Microsoft, Sony, RIM, Ericsson, and EMC emerged victorious in the auction for Nortel’s patents.  The pricetag was a staggering $4.5B, or five times the original stalking horse bid from Google and substantially more than [Read more →]

Before you go off for that idyllic weekend of barbecue and fireworks we’re all hoping for, let’s finish off the week with a look at a few more interesting tidbits:

Zayo picked up a a substantial metro deal up in Idaho, where one doesn’t come across too many substantial [Read more →]

Carrier Ethernet Exchange protagonist cenx and Zayo’s zColo division have signed an agreement under which CENX will deploy its platform at the critical 60 Hudson Street datacenter in New York City.  It’s one of the most-connected buildings in the world, and will give CENX easy access to hundreds of operators of all stripes. [Read more →]

QuantHouse, which if you couldn’t tell from their name specializes in high speed algorithmic trading solutions, has selected connectivity from lvlt to power its network between London to Stockholm.  This is a relatively new low latency route for Level 3, which has been expanding its European low latency portfolio steadily having gone to [Read more →]

Today I had a great time at JS&A’s first Telecom Exchange event, where I met many people and talked myself hoarse.  There were also several interesting announcements made at the event that are worth a quick look: [Read more →]