Telecom Ramblings

With so much activity in the past few weeks, there has only really been time to take one quick look at things and move on.  Time to take a breath and a second glance.

EarthLink – The more I look at their intended purchase of Deltacom, the more it seems unfinished to me.  The synergies with the company’s New Edge business aren’t large enough to make this work out.  EarthLink’s core competency right now is generating [Read more →]

I’ve seen several surveys which ask variations of the knee-jerk question ‘would you buy a ūmi?’, but I think the answer to that is obvious right now.  Cisco doesn’t really expect to sell many of its initial home telepresence offering.  They just hope to bring up the subject so that in a year or two the market is ready and they are its daddy.  Instead, I’d like to ask readers a more forward looking question: [Read more →]

The Pacific cable system Southern Cross has extended its own expected lifetime, according to an article over on Subtel Forum.  The system connects the west coast of the US with Australia and New Zealand by way of Hawaii.  The consortium operating the cable now intends to keep doing so until at least November 2025, tacking on another 5 years past the previous date.  The extra time is due to [Read more →]

Global Crossing’s return to positive free cash flow over the past couple of years has had a lot to do with its improving performance in the North American large enterprise market.  I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Neil Barua, who is Global Crossing’s Managing Director for North America.  He began his tour with the company with Asia Global Crossing back in 2000, and has served in various executive roles since then.  With no further ado, let’s dive into the Q&A: [Read more →]

You knew they had to give it a whirl sometime, didn’t you?  Today Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) rolled out consumer telepresence, which it calls ‘ūmi’ complete with that bar over the u just to make you think you don’t know how it’s really pronounced.  All you need to do is spend $599 on the equipment (video camera, set top box, and a remote control), plus $24.99/month for the cloud service to route calls etc, and you can make video calls from your HDTV over your broadband connection – just like a CEO.  By all accounts, it’s quite an experience.  And it doesn’t have a prayer of catching on.  Yet. [Read more →]

Epson Group, longtime maker of printers and other imaging devices, has implemented an IP VPN from glbc improve its network to and within Latin America.  The new service will provide converged voice, data, and video to Epson’s subsidiaries in Argentina, Brazil, California, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela.  That’s quite a list, I had no idea Epson had that big a presence in the region. [Read more →]

Several items of late that managed to evade my clutches for a while:

XO Holdings (news, filings) reached an impressive milestone yesterday, surpassing one million VoIP customer employee end users.  Amidst all the Icahn-related stories, it is rather easy to forget the things that XO does do well, and VoIP for the SME is certainly one of those.  Now for the second million, eh?  🙂 [Read more →]

Last night, Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) did something they rarely do, they lowered revenue estimates for the third quarter and the full year. The company says it underestimated churn as well as discounting to secure longer term contract renewals, plus a dip on revenues from the assets acquired from Switch & Data.  In July they had projected revenues to come in at $335-338M, but now see them 2.2% lower at $328-330M, while for the full year they cut back their forecast of $1.225-1.235B to $1.215B.  Equinix’s plans this year have been grand, with buildouts and initiatives all over the globe even while [Read more →]

Merger activity in the fiber sector took a Canadian turn late on Tuesday, as cable and wireless operator Rogers Communications announced that it has agreed to purchase Atria Networks.  Atria operates a deep fiber footprint in the province of Ontario not all that different from similarly dense regional metro operators in the US, with [Read more →]

ACTIV Financial will be extending its presence into Tokyo and Toronto via space and services from Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) in its TY2 and TR1 International Business Exchanges.  That adds to ACTIV’s current selection of New York, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, and Singapore.  The company specializes in low latency services for high frequency trading, and the opportunities are now expanding geographically. Equinix of course has been working hard to position itself for business like this, and is now seeing benefits beyond the original few cities that were the loci of the low latency frenzy.  [Read more →]

Today internet backbone operator Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced a new agreement with Presidio Network Solutions in an effort to enhance its managed service capabilities and add depth to their dedicated internet access and IPVPN offerings.  The arrangement will allow the company to leverage equipment from a selection of hardware vendors including [Read more →]

Yesterday, President Obama named James Crowe, the CEO of Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings), as the Chair of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC).  NSTAC is designed to provide critical industry-based analyses and advice to the President regarding communications and national security, and to provide recommendations regarding how to assure vital telecommunications links in times of crisis.   [Read more →]

Several items today and over the weekend worth a look:

Today abvt began an initiative targeting law firms.  That seems to stretch their focus on high bandwidth enterprises down a notch in size, though of course there are some big law firms and many of those have multiple offices.  More and more types of business are looking for private, high bandwidth connectivity, which can only be good for fiber operators. [Read more →]

Verizon Wireless plans to issue up to $90M in refunds to 15 million mobile customers who were charged for data time they didn’t use. As in, their phone was not in use at the time.  Apparently it was possible for Verizon’s software to spend your money when you didn’t, even if you didn’t even *have* a data plan.  Each charge itself was mostly negligible, and each consumer will get back  only a few dollars.  But because [Read more →]

clwr is only partway through its initial nationwide rollout of mobile WiMAX, but we already have the next generation starting to make its own waves.  At CEATEC JAPAN today, UQ Communications and Samsung demonstrated a 330Mbps WiMAX 2 system based on the latter’s prototype.  And how do you demonstrate a 330Mbps mobile connection?  With Full-HD 3D video naturally, after all this *is* at a trade show. [Read more →]

According to very interesting article by Dan Rayburn this morning, AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) inked a deal with Cotendo over the summer to integrate the provider’s application acceleration and dynamic site acceleration services into its own offerings.  The move allows AT&T to challenge Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) directly in the value-added end of the CDN space, which is interesting as AT&T hasn’t seemed interested in taking them on in the more commoditized end of [Read more →]

Geez, the deals just keep rolling in.  I had speculated several times this year about who might buy itcd, but while I was right they were for sale my thoughts as to the buyer turned out to be way off the mark!  Today, Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) announced its intention to purchase the southeastern CLEC for $3.00 per share.  Including net debt, the total purchase price therefore is $516M.  That’s an enterprise value of 4.7 times adjusted EBITDA, which seems reasonable at first glance.  Deltacom doesn’t focus much on its metro fiber and has never traded at the higher multiples of this sector. [Read more →]

Last week I wondered at where the larger strategic buyers were hiding in this frenetic M&A season, and I mentioned my own feeling that TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) seemed the best positioned of the larger fiber operators to make a move.  That got me thinking about just what TW Telecom would want to buy, given that they didn’t seem to be all that interested in all that northeastern fiber that has been changing hands this year.  But what if TW Telecom isn’t uninterested in M&A, but rather is ready to look for something more transformational than a bit of metro fiber to add to their pile?  I have traditionally scoffed at the idea of a combination with glbc, but perhaps it’s not so crazy any more.  Consider the following strategic drivers for such a deal: [Read more →]

Demonstrating that it is quite serious about entering the cloud computing space, Verizon Business today detailed plans to expand its platform into centers in San Jose, London, and Canberra.  Earlier plans for cloud facilities serving the Federal government will come online in Miami and Culpeper in Q1/11.  This isn’t new spending of course, it’s part of the huge $16.8-17.2B capex budget they had already allocated, but it does tell us what they’ll be spending a nice chunk of it on – datacenter buildouts aren’t cheap. [Read more →]

The great WiMAX rollout continues unabated, with clwr officially opening its networks for business in two more major metro areas overnight.  First are the twin cities of Minneapolis and St.Paul, where the coverage area includes some 2.1M people.  Second is the city of Pittsburgh, with another 820K under their belt.  And last week they added Orlando as well, though I didn’t happen to cover it here at the time.  Here are quick snapshots of the coverage in those areas: [Read more →]

Today undersea cable operator Hibernia Atlantic broke ranks with the rest of the sector and announced something we haven’t seen in quite a while:  a new transatlantic cable.  There was some speculation last year about a coming shortage in transatlantic bandwidth, as prices did not yet support new cable builds and capacity was not unlimited with a long lead time needed before one can bring a cable online.  What happened between now and then?  The financial markets discovered low latency in a big way of course, and are [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) squeezed three European sports CDN wins into one PR this morning, further demonstrating the strength of their position in the content delivery market across the Atlantic.  First there was the Everton Football Club, which went beyond the usual live streaming it has had for the last two years, and leveraged Vyvx to also stream its pre-season friendly tour down under in Australia. All that for pre-season [Read more →]

In another sign that the desire for ultra-low latency connections is spreading beyond the major hubs of New York, Chicago, London, and Frankfurt, Hibernia Atlantic today announced the direct connection of its Global Financial Network to several exchanges up in Canada.  The Toronto Stock Exchange,  TSX Venture Exchange and the Montreal Exchange, all of which are located in the TMX primary data centre in Toronto.   That means of course that they get to ring the bell up or whatever they do up north to open the market for trading today. [Read more →]