Telecom Ramblings

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 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 →]

A few recent developments in the metro fiber sector in the past few days:

paet continued to move in the direction of fiber following its acquisition of Cavalier and Intellifiber today by making the full footprint available for its channel partners to sell nationwide.  That includes EoC, Ethernet, EoC, low latency routes, and custom network builds both in the longhaul and metro.  They also revealed the intention to add [Read more →]

tinet today launched EtherCloud, a new Layer 2 service that builds on the integration of its existing wholesale Ethernet business and the Ethernet Exchange launched by Neutral Tandem last year.  Those who connect to it gain both the ability to buy Ethernet and VPLS connectivity to endpoints offered by other participants, and to sell connectivity to their own endpoints in return.  Tinet’s approach seems to be to simplify the relationships potential customers must develop to gain the connectivity they need, as opposed to [Read more →]

As the recent controversial offer by Icahn for the remainder of xoho that he doesn’t already own hangs in the balance, the company waited (as it always does) until the very last minute to file its Q4 anf FY2010 numbers.  The company had forecast some upbeat second half results back in October, and by and large they managed to fulfill those promises.  Revenues of $390.3M were up sequentially again, and EBITDA margins remained above 15%.  Here’s a quick table summarizing their results: [Read more →]

I was traveling on Friday and over the weekend, time to catch up.  The Qwest/CenturyTel deal wasn’t the only one to close:

California’s largest CLEC telepacific finished off its acquisition of NextWeb, after receiving regulatory approval.  NextWeb was Covad’s fixed wireless play, operating in California, Nevada, and suburban Chicago with 3,500 business customers.  The California and Nevada pieces fit in very well with their regional focus, but just what they’re going to do with the Chicago piece is an open question.  Perhaps there might be some further territorial expansion at some point?  They’d fit well with [Read more →]

It’s official, q is off the market.  The merger with ctl is now complete, and where there were two mostly rural ILECs there is now one big one.  Pro forma for 2010, the combined company had revenues of $18.6B, EBITDA of $8.1B, and adjusted free cash flow of $3.1B.  The combined company expects to continue its current annual dividend of $2.90 per share.  While of course the biggest part of the deal is the traditional ILEC business, I’m quite curious to see where they take the combined intercity [Read more →]

Just as the company is about to complete its merger with ctl, q picked up a big win in the government sector.  DISA/DITCO, which handles this sort of thing for the Department of Defense, has awarded the company a contract that could be worth in excess of $100M for IP services.  Under the deal, Qwest’s Governemt Services group will be the sole provider for the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and other agencies.  [Read more →]

Yesterday we saw Cox Business land the contract for a large fiber buildout in Rhode Island for OSHEAN, but apparently Sidera Networks also won some business for the project.  Sidera, which used to go by the name RCN Metro, will be handling part of the buildout across the border into Massachussets.  Specifically, they will help bring fiber to universities in Bristol County, which is that part of Massachusetts along [Read more →]

And the winner is…. Kansas City!?  Yep, the lucky winner of Google’s Gigabit FTTH project is Kansas City, Kansas.  Nope, not the one accross the river in Missouri that has 2.1M people as well as its very own NFL team.  It’s the one with just 145,786 people according to the 2010 census, and is only the third largest city in the Kansas City metro area.  A cynic might suggest that [Read more →]

Three technology and data giants, Dell, Equinix, and Rackspace, teamed up today for the launch of an OpenStack cloud demonstration and test environment.  OpenStack is a collection of open source tech for scalable public and private clouds that was originally founded by RackSpace and NASA.  The geographically dispersed demo and test environment will help speed the deployment of OpenStack proof of concepts. [Read more →]

vz is bringing its European 100G experience back across the Atlantic.  Today they have announced plans to deploy the latest technology on selected segments of their US backbone by the end of Q2.  The lucky routes include Chicago to New York, Sacramento to Los Angeles, and Minneapolis to Kansas City.  Really, they need 100G on a north south route across the great plains?  Not exactly your usual bottleneck there, but hey what do I know.  Perhaps the key there isn’t overwhelming traffic, but rather a route on which they are comparatively [Read more →]

Pan-European service provider Interoute continued its cloud offensive today by nabbing German-based stationer Pelikan as a client.  Pelikan has been selling stationary, pens, and pencils since before Otto von Bismarck unified the country – 172 years according to their PR.  But that long history isn’t holding them in the past, as this upgrade involves moving their IT infrastructure into the clouds. [Read more →]

Cox Business has won a large regional and metro fiber buildout in the state of Rhode Island.  The fiber buildout derives from the $21.7M BTOP award won by OSHEAN last year – OSHEAN is the state’s research and education nonprofit networking entity.  The buildout will take 48-strand cable through some 350 route miles and pass through 38 of 39 of the largest cities in the state.  Here’s a quick map: [Read more →]

Financial bandwidth upstart spreadnetworks added another reseller to its portfolio today.  Managed service provider CFN Services will be offering the company’s low latency wavelengths to the financial community, effective immediately.  Spread just announced a reduction in the latency of those waves, down to 14.6ms (14.75ms SLA’d), and I noted yesterday that [Read more →]

Fresh off the announcement of its first ever dividend, csco is going on the M&A warpath again.  This time the target is privately held software provider newScale.  The California-based newScale’s products deliver a service catalog and portal for IT organizations to deploy cloud services.  Cisco will use the technology to fill out its cloud portfolio, giving it more depth in what it can sell to enterprises.  Having a ready-made self service portal makes sense in that capacity, and buying an existing [Read more →]

As if there were any doubt about Sprint’s feelings on the subject, Sprint has formally announced its opposition to the purchase:

AT&T and Verizon are already by far the largest wireless providers. If approved, the proposed acquisition would create a combined company that would be almost three times the size of Sprint in terms of wireless revenue and would entrench AT&T’s and Verizon’s duopoly control over the wireless market. The wireless industry moving forward would be dominated overwhelmingly by two vertically integrated companies with unprecedented control over the U.S. wireless post-paid market, as well as the availability and price of key inputs, such as backhaul and access needed by other wireless companies to compete.

[Read more →]