Telecom Ramblings

Several interesting items in the past 24 hours or so worth a comment:

Rhapsody has moved its data center into the new space that Internap Network Services (NASDAQ:INAP, news, filings) recently built out up in Seattle.  Rhapsody offers digital music subscriptions, with some 10 million music tracks.  This sort of bandwidth-heavy specialty site is a natural for Internap’s high performance niche, so the decision to move to Internap’s newly built out space seems natural.  Internap itself, however, has continued [Read more →]

Today Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) announced that NFL.com has implemented its HD Network in order to bump up the quality of video delivered from its site this season.  That includes the site’s Thursday Night Football stream, more generally, the majority of all video content from the site.  Also, exclusive content for the NFL Fantasy Football game will be delivered at up to 3.2mbps.  Akamai has had a relationship with NFL.com for a while of course, this is mainly just tracking the adoption of the next generation of streaming in an effort to boost the league’s online presence.  But with the size of the audience, it’s clearly a nice position to be in for Akamai. [Read more →]

As promised, the alternative wireless carrier MetroPCS (NYSE:PCS, news, filings) beat its larger brethren to the punch and opened the nation’s first commercial LTE network today in Las Vegas.  By doing so, they leapfrog the 3G functionality they never developed, and move straight into the world of 4G.  Not only did they get the network up and running, they debuted the first LTE phone, the Samsung Craft.  What they didn’t debut was a data card and plans for laptop access etc, as their network is initially aimed mainly at phones and at augmenting and eventually replacing their 2G CDMA network.  Thus the customers they will be focusing on overlaps far less with [Read more →]

lyns announced today that it has signed a multi-year carrier services contract with XO Holdings (news, filings).  Via this agreement, Lightyear will be able to leverage XO’s Dedicated Internet Access and Ethernet Private Line services as it expands its capabilities nationwide.  Teaming up with XO’s backbone seems like a logical move for Lightyear, as XO has been an aggressive wholesaler over the past few years.  But I doubt it’s exclusive, Lightyear has always partnered with a variety of carriers to serve its customer base.  [Read more →]

Today Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) Business announced an expanded role serving the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  The $169M multi-year award came under the GSA’s Networx Universal contract, and continues a long term relationship that derived from MCI Worldcom under Networx’s predecessor FTS2001.  Verizon Business will manage and secure the agency’s IP and data networks, supporting [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) has been rather active over the past few days.  Early this morning, they announced yet another online gaming CDN victory over in Europe – this time with Virtue Fusion (Alderney) Ltd.  That’s not exactly a household name, but the company offers white label Bingo and other networked gaming solutions that power a couple dozen popular online gambling sites.  Virtue Fusion itself is located on the remote island of Guernsey in the English Channel, where no doubt it takes advantage of a favorable offshore tax environment or something, far from [Read more →]

abvt made good on its promise of expansion overseas and announced this morning that it will open for business in the major markets of Western Europe.  They have long had a substantial metro fiber presence in London of course, but until now had been content with that single foothold across the Atlantic.  By the end of the year they will have expanded their network into Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt, aiming at web-centric businesses, financial services organizations and enterprises with a multinational presence. [Read more →]

At last I have completed the raw outline of my set of network map links internationally with the addition of a page covering Africa and its surrounding seas.  That is not to say the collection is internally complete, it is always a work in progress given new fiber construction, newly discovered sources of information, and of course the broken links caused by website redesigns etc.  Anyhow, Africa was, as expected, a tough place to find a lot of information beyond the new submarine cables being built – lots of national telecommunications and energy companies who are known to operate fiber backbones don’t tend to publish maps of their infrastructure.  Or if they do, [Read more →]

We have a new job posted to the Rambling’s Jobs board.  Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) is seeking a Senior Account Manager on its enterprise team.  The position is responsible for new sales account development within an established geographic territory, and is based in northern Virginia.  The past month has seen a flurry of job postings here – not a blizzard, but a solid flurry nonetheless.  I sincerely hope that it reflects an industry-wide trend caused by a surge in new business!  (Especially at Level 3, which is long overdue for a bit of good fortune.) [Read more →]

Yesterday, Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) and Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) announced a successful field trial of the latter’s 100GbE services.  With prototype 100GbE client interfaces in London and Frankfurt, the data passed over the company’s 861km of fiber.  Testing and verification performed by an EXFO FTB-80 100G Packet Blazer, which is quite a mouthful I must say.  [Read more →]

Hmmm, something about carrier pigeons and bandwidth seems to grab at the media, which makes it a popular stunt for those complaining about slow broadband connections.  This time it was in the UK, where Trefor Davies of Timico staged another race, following up on last year’s uneven African match.  On the right, a rural broadband connection achieving average upload speeds of 200kbps.  On the left, two carrier pigeons by the name of Rory and Tref, each with a data card strapped to his leg.  It wouldn’t be news unless the pigeons won, so of course they did.   [Read more →]

Two Denver area school systems gained high speed connectivity from q, according to a release today.  While most of the metro fiber news lately has been from the competitive carriers, Qwest has been investing as well.  With the sort of limbo that comes along with the impending mega-merger with CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings), it is easy to forget they’re still out there, but the bits don’t slow down for anyone. [Read more →]

Just when you think they can’t find another live niche sporting event with which to demonstrate their CDN prowess, they pull the surfing card.  Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced today that it is working with MSI Live, Hurley, and IMG Action Sports to provide streaming for the Hurley Pro this week (Sept. 12-18) at California’s San Onofre State Beach – Lower Trestles.  This apparently follows a similar effort in August for the US Open of Surfing in which Level 3 delivered [Read more →]

No, not the bar of soap, Dial Telecom – or more accurately, just the Slovakian division of Dial Telecom.  GTS Central Europe is buying Dial’s Slovakian assets to bolster its presence in, you guessed it, Slovakia.  The major asset is an extensive metro network in Bratislava.  After the deal is completed, GTSCE’s Slovakian revenues should top €50M annually.  For its part, Dial Telecom will use the proceeds of the sale to drive its main business in the Czech Republic.   [Read more →]

Last week, RCN Metro was reborn as Sidera Networks following ABRY Partners’ acquisition of RCN and separation of the business.  Since that deal was announced, I have wondered just what ABRY had in mind for these assets.  Did they want to operate it or sell it?  Would they focus its expansion on organic growth or turn it into an acquisition platform?  Here today to supply us with more detail on Sidera’s plans going forward is the company’s newly minted CEO Mike Sicoli, [Read more →]

The news has been pouring out this week, what with multiple M&As and CompTel going on.  In the equipment sector there have been a bushel of announcements worth a look:

In France, Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) won a contract with Roubaix based webhosting provider OVH.  OVH has deployed the gear maker’s Digital Optical Network for its pan-European network.  OVH is billed as the second largest hosting provider in Europe, and the Infinera gear hooks up the larger hubs of Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Frankfurt.  They also have a nice network map which you can see to the right – I’ll have to see about [Read more →]

Continuing its recent PR offensive, XO Holdings (news, filings) today announced a substantial expansion of its Ethernet over Copper (EoC) network.  They added service in  Charlotte, Buffalo and Rochester, and deployed new EoC-enabled local service offices.  They are now in some 400 LSO’s and claim a reach of some 1M businesses.  No doubt they will be listing those buildings CENX’s Ethernet exchange as well, which they connected to back in the Spring.  I do wish I had some sense of how much penetration [Read more →]

The wave of consolidation in the metro fiber space took another important turn this morning as Northeastern fiber operator Lightower Fiber Networks has agreed to purchase New York City-based Lexent Metro Connect.  Lexent sells dark fiber solutions in both Manhattan and across the river in New Jersey, and has been a key player in the region when it comes to the low latency frenzy in the financial vertical.   No financial details were provided, as both companies are privately held.  That leaves us guessing for now as to what sort of [Read more →]

There have been lots of expansions and new initiatives from metro and regional fiber operators this week that are worth a comment:

Integra Telecom has expanded its connectivity in Arizona, building new connections into i/o Phoenix in order to offer a full suite of products to business customers there.  Since its restructuring last summer, Integra has been more aggressive in taking advantage of its fiber.  Phoenix is at the edge of its coverage area, maybe soon they’ll [Read more →]

After the market closed, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced plans to offer $175M in convertible senior notes due 2016.  The financing is expected to be completed by the end of September, and includes the option for another $26.25M to cover over-allotments.  It has been 9 months since Level 3 last accessed the credit markets, so I suppose they were due.  What will they be doing with this new funding?  It’s tempting to see this as Level 3 preparing to enter the M&A frenzy that has been growing all year, however in this case I tend to doubt it.   [Read more →]

Regional metro and regional fiber operator Zayo Group has reported its results for its fiscal fourth quarter and full year ending on June 30, 2010.  They were very active in adding new buildings and especially towers to their network.  They added 162 structures to their network, of which 132 were towers and most of the rest were enterprise buildings.  They have over 500 more towers in the pipeline, so that sort of trend seems likely to continue.    Here is a quick tabular summary of their results in Q1. [Read more →]

Catching up on a few metro and regional fiber news items:

Over in Europe, euNetworks (news) continued to add heft to its management team, bringing in James Thomas as Chief Financial Officer, effective tomorrow.  Thomas came from TalkTalk Telecom Group Plc, and from Carphone Warehouse before that.  euNetworks is in the midst of an expansion of its lit building footprint, as it moves to take [Read more →]

There had been rumors for several days foreshadowing it, but the deal is now official [EDIT: here’s the PR] according to the Wall Street Journal.  PAETEC (news, filings) has agreed to purchase privately held Cavalier Telephone for $460M in cash.  The fact that Intellifiber, the regional and metro fiber arm of Cavalier, was for sale has been known since we reported it here back in May.  At that time, I even speculated that one buyer that made a lot of sense was in fact PAETEC.  However, it did not occur to me at the time that PAETEC might be interested in buying all of Cavalier, an event which puts quite an interesting slant on things. [Read more →]