Telecom Ramblings

Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) surprised the market yesterday with a its second sequential truly powerful earnings report, exceeding even that of the seasonally high fourth quarter.  The stock closed up some 19% on the day at 39.63.  That’s about four times the low it hit back in November of 2008 at the height of the fiscal crisis when everyone was worried about the company’s ability to fend off a gaggle of competitors.  The company’s change in pricing policy in the second half of 2009 has been a huge success thus far.  What do the numbers look like, you ask?  Here’s a table putting them in context: [Read more →]

There has been quite a flurry of interesting bandwidth and fiber deals in the past few days, let’s take a quick look at each in turn:

360Networks announced that it is providing the fiber connectivity underlying the rural broadband wireless solution being rolled out by Frontier Telenet.  Frontier TeleNet is [Read more →]

As anticipated, international network operator glbc reported Q1 earnings today after the market closed, with seasonality slowing them down a bit.  Guidance for the full year was reiterated, which necessarily implies a substantial ramp in performance over the balance of the year.   [Read more →]

Well, perhaps ‘sprints’ is a bit too strong but it has been such a long time in coming…  Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) finally returned to sequential revenue growth in the its earnings report for the first quarter of 2010.  Revenues of $8.085B were up 3% sequentially and a bit better than the consensus estimates.  Loss per share was also a bit better than expected at $0.17 not including a $0.12 non-cash charge related to valuation of deferred tax assets.  The pain still isn’t over at Sprint, but perhaps they have finally [Read more →]

On Thursday morning, Global Crossing will host its earnings conference call, which means that they will likely release their results today after the market closes.  As the first of the nextgen carriers to report and as one of the larger competitive telecoms that is frequently covered here on Telecom Ramblings, it is time to offer is a quick tabular preview of what to expect in the context of 2009 and guidance. [Read more →]

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When the FCC lost its court case against Comcast over the ability to enforce network neutrality, it turned much of last year’s efforts to define the rules into something of a moot point.  The commission is now getting all sorts of advice on how to handle things and reimpose the authority it thought it had before, but it’s of little use. [Read more →]

Nobody talks much about Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) anymore, but they’re still out there and they’re still generating quite a bit of cash.  Their first quarter seems to have gone particularly well.  Revenues of $157.3M were above both guidance and estimates, as were earnings per share of $0.25 and free cash flow of $54.2M.  So much so that the company raised full year EBITDA guidance to $194-$202M and increased their quarterly dividend by 14%.  Hopefully some of that good cheer will [Read more →]

The media is reporting that the cable industry is now looking beyond Docsis 3.0 to a new standard that can support as much as 5Gbps, which on the surface would seem to allow their coax to keep up and perhaps even surpass fiber.  But the situation is far more complicated than this.  Actually, cable is already offering this speed, it’s just that most of it is already carrying traffic that we call cable TV.  The 64 billion dollar question here is what happens to that cable TV traffic if all the spectrum is dedicated toward broadband. [Read more →]

The big bandwidth plans in Africa just keep on rolling in.  Today eFive, SEACOM, and Main One, and announced their intention to cooperate on building a pan-African fiber ring. The objective is seamless connectivity and increased redundancy on both the east and west coasts of Africa. [Read more →]

Colocation and cloud services provider Terremark (news, filings) [a subsidiary of Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings)] announced this morning that it has begun construction of its third colocation facility at its NAP of the Capital Region, which sits 60 miles outside of Washington DC in Culpeper VA.  With 70% of the space in the first two facilities now spoken for and steady continuing demand, a further buildout was widely expected.  [Read more →]

Rising competitive metro and regional fiber operator Zayo made several major moves last week, following up on last month’s purchase of AGL Networks.  First, of all they have accessed the credit markets, selling $250M in notes due 2017 at a rate of 10.25%.  They will use the money in part to refinance their existing credit facilities, but $250M is quite a bit more than they need for that purpose.  The remainder will go into the ‘general corporate purposes’ war chest, which in the case of Zayo always includes possible additional strategic M&A.   [Read more →]

Yesterday’s blockbuster M&A deal between CenturyLink and Qwest brought in a whole lot of readers looking for answers.  I don’t pretend to have them all, but of course that has never stopped me before and won’t today either.  However, please do not hesitate to correct my ramblings in the comments below! [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) has two interesting announcements out this morning.

First is a nice contract  with the television network ABC.  They will bring ABC’s Broadcast Operations Center on-net, and install its Managed Video Network Servics (MVNS) at the New York, Washington, and Los Angeles bureaus of ABC News.  The offering includes [Read more →]

In big M&A news today, CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) and q have announced their plans to merge.  There have been lots of rumors crossing my desk lately, but I have to admit this wasn’t one of them.  That doesn’t mean it’s surprising, it’s just the mother of all RLEC consolidation deals, with the Qwest longhaul network tagging along for the ride.  So what will the combined company look like?   [Read more →]

Competitive fiber operator TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) has been rather quiet of late, but in the past two days has announced a couple of interesting contracts.

Today it was a 12 location deal with Covenant Church, which ministers to some 15,000 people in North Texas.  It’s an expansion of an existing relationship in which they will supply co-location, voice, data and Internet services, enabling Covenant Church to stream [Read more →]

The industry’s 800lb gorilla AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) reported Q1 earnings today, with few surprises.  Revenues of $30.6B were in-line, and earnings per share of $0.59 was a nickel above expectations after discounting that non-cash health care charge everyone was talking about last month.  AT&T’s earnings releases always amaze me.  For a company that seems to report quarterly revenue in a tight range of $30.5-30.9B quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter, they always have such a long list of high growth segments to highlight [Read more →]

ftwr won a key Ethernet backhaul deal helping MetroPCS (NYSE:PCS, news, filings) build out their LTE network, the initial launch of which is scheduled for sometime in the second half of this year.  FiberTower uses a hybrid approach to its backhaul networks, leasing or building metro dark fiber where it makes sense and using wireless backhaul to extend coverage where it doesn’t.  The relationship is not a new one, FiberTower has been supporting MetroPCS’s wireless footprint in several markets since 2005.  With this new deal, MetroPCS will be able to scale backhaul from its towers from a few megabits per second up to 1Gbps or more if the need arises – thus meeting the needs of the bandwidth-hungry [Read more →]

Both Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) and Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) reported earnings after the bell.  Both beat their guidance, and both exceeded published analyst estimates by a bit, but both stocks had been up in the past couple months in anticipation of such an event and thus beating expectations was a formidable task.  That being said, [Read more →]

A coalition of eight service providers specializing in nextgen hosted IP voice and data communications have announced the creation of the Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA).  As the consortium name suggests, the idea is to take the new architectures and approaches of cloud computing and apply them to IP voice service platforms.  It’s easy to get lost in the definition (or lack thereof) of what the cloud is when trying to envision [Read more →]

Today after the market closes, two of the most dynamic telecommunications equipment companies will kick off the Q1/10 earnings season:  Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) and Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings).  Together, they will give us a pretty good first look into how the equipment sector has been faring, as well as offer an initial view into carrier spending.   Here’s a quick look at each company’s guidance and current analyst expectations in the context of their 2009 performances.  Q1/09 was at the very bottom of the recession, so of course all trends point upward sharply right now.   But Q1 isn’t [Read more →]

In a release today, Force10 Networks revealed its plans to run with 40GbE in the near future.  The 40GbE and 100GbE standards are now (finally!) pending, and in its preparations to roll out gear they have for now chosen the slower but more affordable speed.  Force10 will be adding the higher speed to its 10GbE top-of-rack access switch for converging Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics, and its E- and C- Series switches are already [Read more →]

Ah the perils of depending on a few lines of communication.  For the Middle East, international bandwidth and the rather long acronym SeaMeWe are almost synonymous.  When SeaMeWe-4 goes down, lots of countries see degraded service (or worse), and the Mediterranean is just a tough place for undersea cables overall – lots of activity and not much route diversity.  This time there is a fault between Marseilles and Egypt, and a cable ship is of course en route to the scene – which by now we perhaps should start calling a patrol. [Read more →]