Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

According to NEC, construction of the South East Asia Japan Cable is finally underway.  It was first envisioned back in 2008 by Google to go along with its Unity cable system, but the plans have evolved over the years.  The six fiber system as currently being built will have a design capacity of 15Tbps and will now span 8900km with landings in Japan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, the Phillipines, Brunei, and Singapore.  That length may be further extended to 10,700km via additional routes to Thailand and Indonesia.  Just for context, here is a map of the proposed project in 2008 alongside that of today: [Read more →]

The announced acquisition of Global Crossing by Level 3 yesterday drowned out a bunch of other news, so it’s time to take a quick peek at a few of them before they’re all the way past:

Telx Group (news, filings) expanded its Ethernet exchange service coverage into its facilities at 100 Delawanna in Clifton NJ and 8435 Stemmons Freeway in Dallas.  Perhaps not so coincidentally, they just [Read more →]

One of the themes that emerged in yesterday’s news orgy about the LVLT/GLBC deal was that it may act as a catalyst for other deals in the sector to emerge.  Certainly we saw things snowball last year amongst the smaller metro fiber operators and CLECs, and it has seemed logical that 2011 would see it spread to the larger carriers.  Yet I don’t think there is yet that sort of momentum.  There’s less a need for a land grab here, and any deals will be much more opportunistic and driven by specific strategic needs just as Level 3 and Global Crossing had.  So it’s time to prognosticate.  Let’s look at a few of the larger potential strategic buyers out there and what might make sense for them: [Read more →]

NTT America (news) [a subsidiary of NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings)] is taking its efforts in the cloud space to larger customers with a new enterprise private cloud hosting environment.  Having long had an enterprise hosting business, NTT America has been one of the most active telcos when it comes to offering cloud services.  They got started back in late 2009 and fleshed out their offerings with VMware last summer.  Today’s enterprise cloud offering is also built using VMware products, and is aimed not only at the mid-sized customers but to large enterprises in need of a flexible approach.  The approach creates [Read more →]

One of the first questions that springs up in looking at this deal is whether Level 3 really ought to be taking on another integration after the well known troubles they went through in 2007-2008.  Actually, there are a number of reasons why this one should be much easier: [Read more →]

Rumors had been swirling for several days, but now it is official.   Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) is buying glbc for roughly $3.0B!  It’s a stock deal, with Global Crossing shareholders receiving 16 LVLT shares for every GLBC share they hold, which works out to $23.04 per share at the moment – a nice premium.  That means Singapore Technologies and Telemedia will be joining Level 3’s other major investors rather than cashing out.  Level 3 will also assume $1.1B in debt.  Over the past three years, I have speculated at length about the merger of these two networks.  It has always made a tremendous [Read more →]

Orange Business (news) [a subsidiary of France Telecom (NYSE:FTE, news, filings)] has expanded its Telepresence Community via an interoperability agreement with Tata Communications (news, filings)‘s Global Meeting Exchange.  The deal will allow customers of each carrier to conduct Telepresence meetings across the two combined networks.  Tata has been one of the most geographically expansive implementers of telepresence, with 33 public rooms across 17 countries and five continents, so the deal materially [Read more →]

Ever since AT&T outsourced the value added end of its CDN efforts to Cotendo, I have been trying to keep an eye on the small but dynamic challenger to Akamai in this corner of the content delivery market.  Today they opened up a new battle front with the introduction of their Cloudlet platform, which is billed as “the world’s first fully customizable, high-performance and globally distributed cloud application environment.”  And they seem to have some other carriers testing the waters as well.  First off, let’s look at what it means – minus [Read more →]

Competitive operator XO Holdings (news, filings) lost its top officer today.  Carl Grivner has announced his resignation as CEO, President, and Director after eight years, saying he intends to pursue other opportunities.  Grivner took over when Icahn bought the company out of bankruptcy after the last bubble, and has led it ever since.  He won’t be going far initially though, as he has agreed to assist the company during the transition as the board searches for a new CEO.  [Read more →]

I haven’t spent much time lately looking at the data center and cloud marketplace, so let’s take a quick look at some highlights of this weeks news:

Telx Group (news, filings) and CoreLink Data Centers have entered into a strategic alliance under which each will be able to leverage the other’s footprint to augment its own coverage.  CoreLink has [Read more →]

Pacific regional network operator and Indian giant Bharti Airtel are teaming up for a new $120M high speed network directly connecting Chennai to Los Angeles.  The network will leverage Bharti’s i2i cable between Chennai and Singapore, and then Pacnet’s EAC-C2C and EAC Pacific cable systems for the Singapore-Japan and Japan-Los Angeles legs.  Unclear from the PR and the coverage I have seen thus far is just how much they are actually building here, since these cables are already in place.  They will be adding capacity between Chennai and Singapore, but does that mean new [Read more →]

Seems like a week doesn’t go by without Chinese insurgent equipment provider Huawei being accused of something.  Today it’s corruption again, this time in Austria.  The business magazine Format has alleged that Huawei displaced Nokia Siemans and Ericsson for several contracts at Telekom Austria by doing improper things with a publicity consultant by the name of Peter Hochegger.  Allegedly this Horleggor fellow got 10% of any contract he helped secure.  At €60M or so in contracts, that was a heck of a windfall. [Read more →]

Two interesting releases from abvt recently:

This morning, AboveNet announced further reductions in latency in its London metro market.  Specifically, they are now claiming 225 microseconds from Slough to the City of London, one way.  Intra-London latency for the financial traders has been a very competitive marketplace over the last year, with various providers claiming top honors depending on [Read more →]

And now for something completely different.  The dangers to fiberoptic cables are many, but the country of Armenia managed to get its internet taken down completely last week by one 75-year-old woman in the country of Georgia.  Scavenging for copper near Ksani, she apparently came upon a major fiberoptic cable owned and operated by the Georgian Railway Telecom company which supplies bandwidth to all three wholesale providers in Armenia: [Read more →]