Global Crossing Pushes Conferencing, Connects to 4K Suites

September 1st, 2010
 

International network operator glbc had a virtual trade show going on today, the subject of which was collaboration and conferencing – sort of a virtual conference about virtual conferencing.  To go along with it, the company this morning announced connectivity to some 4,000 executive video suites across the world, which include more than 500 hi-def public video conference rooms and 400 court reporting facilities.   That’s a rather nice footprint to [Read more →]

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Clearwire Opens for Business in Boston, Providence, Daytona Beach

September 1st, 2010
 

WiMAX operator clwr officially added three more cities to its network coverage overnight.  Two were the major markets in New England, adding coverage for 2.5M in Boston and 590K in Providence.  And down in Florida they added coverage for 190K in Daytona Beach, which will keep Jacksonville company.  Now, as I am a sucker for maps and feel silly describing the extent of each new coverage area in words, here is a quick set of snapshots of the three markets from clear.com’s awesome coverage maps: [Read more →]

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euNetworks Lowers Another Latency Bar

September 1st, 2010
 

While the low latency game in Europe this summer has mostly featured the likes of bandwidth powerhouses like Level 3 and Colt , their smaller regional rival euNetworks (news) today added another bit of its own magic to the mix.  This time the route is between London and a nearby suburb called Slough, and euNetwork’s new line in the sand is sub-500 microseconds, cutting out some 20% from their prior number.  The London metro area is one of euNetwork’s strongest markets, and they have been making a serious push to serve the financial community.  To achieve this new low latency number, [Read more →]

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Ridgemont Buys Into Midwestern Fiber Operator UPN

August 31st, 2010
 

Private equity does seem to be serious about fiber, doesn’t it.  Today, it was Ridgemont Equity Partners purchasing a majority stake in Unite Private Networks (UPN), which provides turnkey fiber networks across 12 states mostly in the midwest.  Kansas city-based UPN is a new one for me, I simply haven’t run into them before.  They seem to focus on building networks for school districts across their footprint.  The investment will help ensure that UPN has the capital for expansion, and existing management will remain in place.  Financial terms were [Read more →]

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NTT America, Verizon Leverage VMWare for Cloud Services

August 31st, 2010
 

Cloud services from telecom providers has been gaining a bit of traction this year, and today we saw announcements from both NTT America, the US arm of the Japanese giant, and Verizon Business.  Both are leveraging VMware technology to power their offerings.

NTT America will be leveraging the vCloud Director to extend the resource pooling capabilities of VMware vSphere.  That pooling of computing, network, and storage resources will allow their enterprise customers greater agility and efficiency [Read more →]

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Wow, the LHC Is Really Pushing Those Bits

August 31st, 2010
 

There was an interesting article over on ArsTechnica late yesterday.  Apparently the fiber network supplying bandwidth to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and processing sites is really opening some eyes.  That’s even better news than the fact that the Earth didn’t collapse into its own personal black hole when they turned the thing on!  The article supplies some details on the bandwidth involved: [Read more →]

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Andrews Air Force Base Contract Goes To tw telecom

August 30th, 2010
 

Today TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) announced a multi-year contract with the US Air Force to supply services to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, 20 miles southeast of Washington DC.  That’s the home base of Air Force One as well as the 89 Airlift Wing, an air base that gets more than its fair share of high profile visitors and which has some 20,000 military and civilians on-site. [Read more →]

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New Datacenters Planned for Equinix in HK, Digital Realty in Santa Clara

August 30th, 2010
 

The boom in datacenter construction continues unabated, today with plans for two new facilities by Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) and Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR, news, filings).  

Equinix is adding a second datacenter in Hong Kong, to be titled HK2 in their usual fashion, which will be built in the western part of the New Territories.  The new facility will cost $63M and house 1450 cabinet equivalents when complete, although phase one will start with [Read more →]

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Would Cisco Really Buy Skype?

August 30th, 2010
 

According to an article by TechCrunch last night, Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) has made a pre-IPO bid for Skype (news, filings) [a subsidiary of MicroSoft (:MSFT, news)] .  Now, it’s hard to discount the possibility given that Cisco has been buying everything that isn’t nailed down and superglued just in case.  It has also been rumored that Cisco has bid for Skype once before, and there are no structural reasons why they couldn’t do this out of petty cash.  I’m just having trouble finding a convincing rationale *for* such a deal. [Read more →]

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M&A Journal: How to Screw Up An Acquisition? Let Us Count The Ways

August 29th, 2010
 

Given the surge in M&A activity this year, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look backwards and remember some of the mistakes made in acquiring and integrating telecommunications assets over the past decade.  After all, too large a percentage of M&A activity winds up destroying rather than creating value and you know what they say about those who forget their history.  Now, this list is of my own creation, but I’m hardly the last word on the subject.  Hence, I’ll keep it open to further additions, details, and corrections from readers, so don’t hold back.  These are not in any particular order. [Read more →]

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Don’t Drink and … Colocate?

August 27th, 2010
 

For your Friday reading pleasure, take a look at this one over on Data Center Knowledge.  Imagine coming in one morning to see a co-worker passed out on the floor with a .45 semi-automatic on the floor next to him, and your $100K server full of holes?   After waking him up, he tells the police what may be the lamest story of the week about someone mugging him, drugging him, stealing the gun, shooting the server, then apparently forgetting the gun.  Actually, [Read more →]

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ABRY Completes RCN Acquisition, Separates RCN Metro

August 27th, 2010
 

Seemed like it took a rather long time to close, but ABRY Partners has finally completed its acquisition of RCN.  The $1.2B deal was originally announced five and a half months ago back in March, and the question I had at the time is what ABRY’s intentions were toward the metro fiber arm of the company, RCN Metro.  That question is at least partly answered. [Read more →]

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FiberLight Takes Aim at Charlottesville

August 26th, 2010
 

For a small company, FiberLight has had a voracious appetite for organic expansion lately.  The builder and operator of metro fiber networks is expanding its networks deeper into Virginia, announcing today its plans for a new route to Charlottesville.  The build will extend the Culpeper route the company constructed last year by some 46 miles and complete a direct connection to the Washington DC area and the other 500 route miles they have in the region. [Read more →]

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Fibertech Finds Its Buyer

August 26th, 2010
 

According to reports, private equity firm Court Square Capital Partners is buying up Fibertech, taking it off the hands of Nautic and Ridgemont Equity, which used to be part of Bank of America.  The value of the deal was pegged at $500M, though the extent to which that number has been rounded off is unclear to me.  Fibertech builds and sells/leases metro and regional dark fiber in tier 2/3 markets across the northeast and mid-Atlantic, plus a couple in the Midwest.  Court Square will pay for the deal partially via its own funds, partially via debt to be raised, and partially via an investment by Fibertech’s management. [Read more →]

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Catching Up 8/25: Juniper, Namecast, Akamai, Digital Realty

August 25th, 2010
 

I have been travelling for the past 36 hours, and since that included all of a Tuesday I have some catching up to do now.  Here’s some rapidfire responses to recent news items:

Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) won a new customer for its Meda Flow Solution.  CDN challenger BitGravity will use it to overlay on its distributed origin architecture.  They hope to gain improved scalability, allowing them to grow quickly while adding fewer servers and thereby [Read more →]

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Level 3 Picks Up CapLogistics, Transbeam

August 25th, 2010
 

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) continued its sustained PR blitz with two more contract wins so far this week.  

Yesterday it was a three year deal with transportation solutions provider CAP Logistics.  Level 3 will provide a package SIP trunking, IPVN, colo, and dedicated internet access, which will be deployed in Denver, Salt Lake City, Houston, and Illinois.  An interesting mid-market win, and they need [Read more →]

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Helping Out the Doctor

August 25th, 2010
 

A few weeks ago, Dave Rusin over at Telecom Straight Shooter posted this article previewing some nice new work by Andrew Odlyzko from up at the University of Minnesota.  Dr. Odlyzko is of course very well known in the bandwidth world for his independent research on traffic growth rates amongst other things.  Dave included a letter from him seeking data from the movers and shakers in the industry, focusing on the telecom bubble of a decade ago.  To quote Dr. Odlyzko’s email: [Read more →]

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Relative Valuations For Competitive Telecoms – Q2/2010

August 24th, 2010
 

Following up on updates to my revenue/capex and EBITDA margin/cashflow posts, we take a look at the overall relative valuations across the sector since the first quarter of 2008.  The metric here is the ratio between Enterprise Value and adjusted EBITDA, which is a common way of looking at valuations in this sector.  Missing from the comparison are Sprint Wireline and RCN Metro, simply because we can’t calculate an EV for them as they are not separately traded.  With no further ado, here is the updated chart: [Read more →]

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EBITDA Margin and Cash Flow Trends for Competitive Telecoms – Q2/2010

August 24th, 2010
 

In the previous post, we looked at relative revenue growth and capex trends, updating my competitive telecom trend charts for the second quarter.  But while revenue growth is important, profit is obviously moreso.  Comparing profit directly doesn’t tell us much because it has too many pieces, not the least of which are very different levels of debt and amortization.  In telecom, the common metric to measure the performance of the operations independent of the balance sheet is EBITDA – which has its own warts but gives us a commonality with which we can do comparisons after normalizing by revenue to get EBITDA margins.  As always, EBITDA margin varies greatly depending on business model, with fiber-heavy companies having high EBITDA margin and high capex, and fiber-light companies the opposite.  Here is the latest graph showing EBITDA margin trends across the sector since the beginning of 2008: [Read more →]

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Revenue and Spending Trends For Competitive Telecoms – Q2/2010

August 24th, 2010
 

I have updated my competitive telecom trends page with the published numbers from the second quarter of 2010. This page is automatically generated from a spreadsheet I store in Google Docs and update periodically.  However, it was pointed out to me that Google’s charts lack the different symbols one can generate from Excel and therefore aren’t suitable for the color-challenged amongst us – plus they just don’t look as good.  Yet they are very convenient for sharing data and automatically posting changes.  As a compromise I decided to improve the presentation at least for my regular quarterly blog post on the subject with better charts drawn from the same data.  In this post, let’s look at two graphs:  relative revenue growth and capex as a percentage of revenue since the beginning of 2008: [Read more →]

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Oppenheimer’s Fiber Infrastructure Panel

August 23rd, 2010
 

Thanks to reader Frank Coluccio who pointed me toward a recording of the Fiber Infrastructure Panel at Oppenheimer’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications conference that can be found on the website of abvt.  The panel’s experts included Abovenet’s Bill LaPerch, Zayo’s Dan Caruso, Allied Fiber’s Hunter Newby, USMetroTel’s Frank Mambuca, and CityTel’s NiQ Lai.  That group contains some of the greatest prophets of fiber and the dumb pipe out there right now, spanning a very wide [Read more →]

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Colt Takes Aim At Latency Market With Infinera

August 23rd, 2010
 

In Europe this morning, Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) launched an attack on the low latency bandwith marketplace.  The trans-european fiber operator is now offering 4.22ms between London and Frankfurt as well as 2.65ms between Paris and Brussels.  The former has been a battleground for a while of course, but the latter is a new one for me.  Is the Paris-Brussels route catching the low latency financial trading bug too?  The more the merrier I guess!   It’s refreshing to get actual numbers for the latency on these routes, although it is just a snapshot since they are continually driving further [Read more →]

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Akamai For Sale to a Telco? Not Likely

August 20th, 2010
 

According to various reports originating with option trading activity, there are rumors circulating that Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) could be a takeover target.  The likely buyer?  Obviously a telco or a cable company according to Silicon Alley Insider.    I know I’m something of an M&A groupie at times, but there are merger possibilities out there that just make no sense, and this is one of them.  No, it’s not that a telco or cable wouldn’t find Akamai of value, nor is it that they couldn’t find some cost savings, nor that the combined company couldn’t kick some major ass.  It’s just that pesky net neutrality thing, and the sloppiness of the conversation around it. [Read more →]

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