Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Today in the South Pacific, New Zealand based Pacific Fibre took another step toward making its goal of a new submarine cable connecting the country directly with the west coast of the USA as well as over to Australia.  They have released their ‘Invitation to Tender’ to selected submarine cable supply companies, which I assume would include folks like [Read more →]

So much other news yesterday, let’s quickly catch up:

The highest profile win came over at intellifiber with a government win at NASA.  It’s a five year contract to construct, provision, and deploy a network for NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility out on the Delmarva peninsula.  In the past, the facility’s connectivity all went south through Norfolk, and Intellifiber will be adding a network path along the eastern shore of Maryland to the north and back to the [Read more →]

As promised earlier this year, 360networks has expanded its network northward from Seattle into British Columbia with a new connection to Vancouver.  Along the way they added nodes in the Washington communities of Everett and Bellingham as well.  The buildout is driven by a particular customer win, allowing 360networks to extend its recently added IP transit and Ethernet products into new markets.  The identity of that new customer was not revealed, although there seems to be a Vancouver node on the map of [Read more →]

I have alluded to this before, but today GlobeNet (news) [a subsidiary of Oi (news)] formally claimed title to the lowest latency route between key financial hubs in the US and Brazil.  Specifically, they’re talking about routes to BM&F Bovespa in Sao Paulo from the US centers in New York, Chicago, and Toronto.  And in fact they offered up a hard number for their NYC to Sao Paolo route: [Read more →]

Phoenix-based data center operator and manufacturer i/o has raised $105M in capital through a new round of financing.  They’re going to use the money for growth, specifically to accelerate their Data Center as a Service offerings and to fulfill orders from enterprise customers for their i/o ANYWHERE modular data center technology.  i/o recently opened their third location with i/o New Jersey, which is built upon that modular technology.  They have now also begun work on phase 2 of its giant i/o Phoenix facility using it as well.  But the most interesting bit in this press release was that they intend [Read more →]

Of all that was once Nortel Networks, only the patents remain and even that not for long.  Google has been selected as the stalking horse bidder for the entire portfolio, with an initial bid of $900M.  That’s not the end by any means, all it does is set the stage for an auction in June.  There will almost certainly be other bidders.  Nortel had over the years assembled some 6,000 patents, of which 2,600 are in the USA.  To put that in perspective, Apple claims 3800 or so, and MicroSoft says they have [Read more →]