Telecom Ramblings

In their earnings call last week, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) mentioned that they have been re-evaluating their colocation business.  Specifically, in response to an analyst question about their plans for their colocation footprint, CEO James Crowe made the following comment:

“This is a matter of some strategic importance.  We’re doing a review that is largely completed.  We will make some decisions here in the coming months.  Our data center business would be one of the larger colocation/data center businesses in the industry if it were a standalone.  It’s a big opportunity for us.  We want to make sure we take advantage of it properly.”

Since then, I have received [Read more →]

Another month, another bunch of cities with access to WiMAX.  clwr today announced its expansion into several new markets across the country.

First of all, they added Wilmington, Delaware to a growing regional network that includes Philadelphia as well as large parts of [Read more →]

Several data center items hit the wires this morning worthy of a quick look:

Over in the UK Telecity Group (LON:TCY, news, filings) is buying Internet Facilitators Limited (IFL), which operates a carrier neutral datacenter in Manchester.  The purchase will add some [Read more →]

A few days ago over on Forbes, Andy Greenberg recounted the keynote speech by former general Michael Hayden at the Black Hat security conference, focusing in on a fascinating quote:

“There’s a distinction between the other four domains [land, air, sea, space] and cyber. God made four, you made the last one. God did a better job.  You guys made the cyber domain look like the north German plain. Then you bitch and moan when you get invaded.  On the Internet, we are all Poland. We all get invaded on the Web. The inherent geography of this domain is that everything plays to the offense.”

From a military perspective, [Read more →]

It has been a busy news week, with a pile of earnings reports competing for attention with everything else.  Here are several items that went by on the wires that deserve a mention:

Neutral Tandem announced a set of initial participants in its Ethernet Exchange, which is going live this summer:  RCN Metro, Tinet, PAETEC, Deltacom, US Signal, Mosaic NetworX, Wilshire Connection, and ION.  That’s an interesting list which includes [Read more →]

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) has had quite a week, with a bevy of contract wins across a wide spectrum of products, and now a rather strong earnings report.  Revenues were €3.81B, or $4.98B, down 2.4% from last year but coming in ahead of expectations.  Net loss on the other hand was &euro$184M which was wider than expected, but shares of the company in Europe surged on the company’s outlook for a strong second half.  [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced today that it has added depth to its metro presence in Dublin, Ireland.  After being largely bypassed by bandwidth for many years, the connectivity business in Dublin has been surging mightily over the past several years as the business environment has been highly favorable to hi-tech companies for a while now.  Dublin is not a place where Level 3 has [Read more →]

Metro fiber operator abvt has added its first new market since the dot com bubble, with an expansion into Miami.  The company has always focused only on the very largest bandwidth markets and Miami was the biggest gap in that coverage, so this was a natural move.  In addition to having many high bandwidth enterprises in the financial, healthcare, and media sectors, Miami is [Read more →]

glbc has taken the plunge and launched an immersive telepresence product.    in partnership with Teliris.  Global Crossing has long had an extensive portfolio of conferencing and collaboration products, which it uses in catering to its multinational customer base.  Hence this move seems to follow naturally, given the ongoing transition of telepresence to the mainstream. [Read more →]

Recession, recovery, whatever, it doesn’t seem to matter much when Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) reports.  This quarter includes two months of data from the Switch & Data acquisition, which boosts the numbers of course.  Revenues of $296.1 met guidance and expectations, even beating Paolo’s projections by a hair.  Adjusted EBITDA of $132.2M and earnings per share of $0.21 were a bit higher and lower, respectively, than forecast.  As for the Switch & Data acquisition, [Read more →]

Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) reported its second quarter earnings today after the bell.  The 800lb gorilla of the CDN space is following up on very powerful fourth and first quarters, sooner or later the pendulum must swing back right?  Well, it didn’t swing back just yet, but this time Akamai only managed to hit the high end of its own guidance.  What other providers wouldn’t give to hear themselves in that sentence… Here is a quick table of their second quarter 2010 results in the context of the prior four quarters: [Read more →]

TW Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC, news, filings) announced two customer contracts today with FirstCall Network and Members Credit Union.  As the competitive metro fiber operator with the most lit buildings nationwide, they have long focused on mid-market customers with great success.  I’m quite curious to see the company’s Q2 earnings report, in the light of others that have reported thus far.  I’m sure there will be another 250 [Read more →]

Back in March, a group of investors down in New Zealand started Pacific Fibre, a planned direct link from the country to North America.  There was some skepticism that the effort would get off the ground, but they now have some new backing.  Pacnet, the regional undersea cable operator, has signed on to the team.  [Read more →]

This is a guest post by Paolo Gorgò, who blogs over at Nortia Research.  Anyone else who might be interested in a guest post may contact the webmaster.

Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings)  will report earnings tonight.

This quarter will also include Switch and Data revenues (from May 1^st), and the conference call will represent an interesting update on the integration efforts (and planned future [Read more →]

When the larger competitive carriers report earnings, other news tends to get drowned out around here.  That can’t be helped, but we can at least catch up.  Here are a few interesting items that have come up in the past few days:

CENX added another puzzle piece to its Carrier Ethernet Exchange business in the form of [Read more →]

Before the bell today, we had Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) issuing its Q2 2010 earnings report, which I offered a preview of yesterday.  The company did succeed in delivering on its promise of a return to core network services growth excluding the $7M asset sale last quarter.  EBITDA of $209M was roughly what I expected, and was achieved via pretty decent cost controls.  However, the market will surely be looking for a bit more than that in the second half.  Here is a quick summary of the company’s relevant metrics alongside prior quarters: [Read more →]

As expected, glbc issued its Q2/2010 earnings report this afternoon after the market closed.   The top line revenue number of $630M was lower than the street had it pegged at, but this was due to a $20M reduction in the company’s low margin wholesale voice business after the company raised prices in an effort to improve those margins.  Much of the rest of the company’s numbers weren’t too far off from the guesses I made yesterday, though I was a bit too optimistic on GCUK revenues.   Here is a quick tabular summary putting the company’s quarter in the context of the past four quarters: [Read more →]

Tomorrow before the bell Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) will report earnings, which means it is time for a quick earnings preview.  Analysts expect total revenues of $910M, flat with the prior quarter and a loss of $0.11 per share.  As is often the case, I am slightly more optimistic.  But when it comes to Level 3, the details are more important than those overall numbers.  The key right now for Level 3 is to demonstrate tangible growth in their core network services.  They know it, the street knows it, everyone knows it.  Here is a quick table of my own projections in the context of the prior few quarters: [Read more →]

Colocation, hosting, and cloud operator Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] issued its earnings report for the second quarter, during which they acquired Canadian provider Fusepoint.  That deal, which closed on June 16, added $1.5M in revenue and $3.5M in M&A-related costs to the company’s results, skewing things only slightly.  Overall, the company saw reasonable growth over the prior quarter that was roughly inline with expectations. [Read more →]

International network operator glbc will hold its earnings CC on Tuesday morning, which means that if past behavior holds they will release their earnings PR on Monday after the market closes.  Hence it is time once again for a preview, the idea being to help frame our expectations in context beforehand.  The biggest feature for Global Crossing is its 2010 guidance, which suggests a hefty ramp through the remainder of the year for the company’s core revenues and OIBDA.  Analysts, however, expect total Q2 revenues in the neighborhood of [Read more →]

While Zayo has been certainly active on the M&A front for metropolitan fiber networks, they have also been making moves to build unique regional fiber routes in underserved areas as well.  Two announcements this week highlight that trend, with one project in partnership with rural ILECs, and the other receiving broadband stimulus funding.
[Read more →]

The economic overhang is greater right now over on the other side of the Atlantic, and it shows in the results of pan-European network operator Colt Group (LON:COLT, news).  Revenues for the first half were €794.2M, down from €817.4M last year.  For several years now, Colt has fought steadily declining voice revenues with increasing data and managed services revenues, but thus far in 2010 data revenues haven’t grown, and in fact were down slightly from €398.4M to €396.8M.  Looking deeper, the weakness was rather specifically with the large enterprises, whereas data revenues for mid-sized enterprises and wholesale customers both advanced.  Managed services revenue was [Read more →]

After the markets closed, DWDM specialist Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) reported its Q2 earnings, easily trumping analyst expectations.  It has been my position for several quarters now that Infinera positioned itself very well during the recession by widening its customer base despite the meager carrier spending at the time.  Those efforts are now, perhaps, beginning to tell, as Infinera’s Q1 results were also ahead of expectations and the company seems to be accelerating now [Read more →]