Telecom Ramblings

When Lightyear Network Solutions went public earlier this year via a reverse merger, CEO J. Sherman Henderson stated their intention to roll up a half dozen or more fiber-free CLECs.  Apparently he meant business, as today they announced the first such purchase in an SEC filing.  Lightyear will be buying SouthEast Telephone,  which provides residential and commercial services to eastern Kentucky to the tune of some [Read more →]

The synergy between Level 3’s Vyvx business and its content delivery business really seems to be bearing fruit at last, at least if measured by the PR count for major live sporting events.  Today, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced its selection by VERSUS to handle online and mobile content delivery for the 2010 edition of the Tour de France in the US.  They will downlink the signal to a US teleport, backhaul it to several drop points around the country, simultaneously [Read more →]

Yesterday Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings) won an interesting deal with China Telecom Shanghai.  The Chinese incumbent has implemented Juniper’s top of the line, multi-chassis routing system, the TX Matrix Plus hooking up multiple T1600 core routers.  The massive bandwidth upgrade was necessary in order to scale its metropolitan network to handle both consumer demand and that of the World Expo currently going on in the city as well.  They had been using [Read more →]

German datacenter operator ancotel GmbH has landed in the USA, or more accurately on Long Island.  They are announcing the purchase of the Long Island Data and Recovery Center (LIDARC), a colocation and interconnection facility located at 1025 Old Country Road in Westbury, NY.  They intend to develop the property into a major [Read more →]

Well, you heard it here first if only by a few hours.  Zayo Group has announced an agreement to purchase Rochester-based American Fiber Systems.  The deal will be Zayo’s 15th acquisition since its 2007 inception, and the second so far in 2010.  Financial terms were not disclosed but the Rochester Business Journal pegs the price at [Read more →]

Sources tell me that Zayo Group is preparing what would probably be its largest acquisition to date:  American Fiber Systems.  Both Zayo’s Dan Caruso and AFS’s Dave Rusin have been amongst the most vocal proponents of metro fiber in the sector, both having their own blogs and both even frequenting this site’s comment section as well.  They’ve been unusually quiet lately, which has had me wondering what each was up to.  The idea of the two joining forces seems, well, formidable.  [Read more →]

Several items in the news today that are worth noting:

24/7 Fiber Network, a relatively new entrant into the metro and regional fiber business in the Maryland and Delaware markets, has completed phase 1 of its buildout.  The new 432 count fiber build connects the company’s Baltimore area metro network through Salisbury to the eastern Virginia shore, cutting across the [Read more →]

The market may not be showing much love for Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) these days, but professional sports broadcasters sure seems happy with them.  Yesterday we heard about the streaming of World Cup matches over in Europe, and today we’re back across the Atlantic with an expanded deal with MLB.com, the official site of Major League Baseball.  MLB.com has had a relationship with Level 3 for CDN services in the past, but that has now expanded to include [Read more →]

Three interesting items went across the wires in the datacenter sector yesterday:

Colocation’s 800lb (and still growing) gorilla, Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) is building another datacenter down under in Sydney.  The new facility, named SY3, will add some 1000 cabinets to the company’s sellable footprint in its first phase, and some 3000 when complete.  SY2 opened a little over [Read more →]

The WiMax parade just keeps on marching.  clwr formally opened the doors on three new substantial markets for its next generation wireless network.  One on the east coast, one on the Mississippi, and one in the mountains.  In St.Louis, some 1.2 million people across 600 square miles will be able to access the network.  In Salt Lake City, some 790,000 across 450 square miles from [Read more →]

I figured they must have won a decent piece of the World Cup CDN business.  This morning Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) confirmed my suspicions, announcing that they have been delivering the World Cup matches in HD to online audiences for several European broadcasters.  Of particular mention was Telecinco in Spain, whose relationship with Level 3 was already known.  Some 220,000 people watched Spain vs Switzerland live online concurrently.  That was the biggest online event that Level 3 and Telecinco have put on so far, but I’ll bet they eclipse that record with ease when [Read more →]

On Friday, southeastern metro fiber operator FiberLight announced further fiber expansions, this time in the Atlanta area.  They have added fiber routes both downtown and in the surrounding counties of Fulton, Gwinnett and Cobb in response to demand from both the wholesale and large enterprise segments.  Atlanta was already one of the company’s deepest individual markets, and also perhaps the most competitive – the metro area has a  [Read more →]

More activity in the metro and regional fiber space today.  DukeNet, the telecommunications arm of Duke Energy, has brought in private equity money to fund its expansion.  Alinda Capital Partners and Duke Energy will form a 50/50 joint venture, with Alinda injecting some $137M in cash for the privilege.  DukeNet covers both North and South Carolina with some 5300 route miles of metro and intercity fiber, focusing on wholesale customers and large enterprises with a fair amount of [Read more →]

I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with a purported representative of DeepBore Networks, yet another startup said to be taking aim at the low latency bandwidth market from a very unique angle.

TR: I thought all reasonable routes for fiber between NYC and Chicago were already in use, how do you intend to reduce latency by yet another couple of milliseconds? [Read more →]

This is a guest post by Jaymie Scotto Cutaia of Jaymie Scotto & Associates.  If you have something pertinent to say and would like a turn at the microphone, let me know.

As Rob’s recent blog states, “having a connection has always been both an opportunity and a risk.”  And today, with our utter reliance on technology, it’s a risk we need to protect as having no connection or communication with other continents, countries or neighborhoods would be [Read more →]

Competitive service provider XO Holdings (news, filings) may be shrinking its workforce this summer, but they’re still adding products to the mix.  Today they announced the addition of VPLS to the XO Ethernet Services portfolio.  XO’s VPLS service will be sold to enterprises seeking to turn isolated local area networks into [Read more →]

The steady stream of bandwidth and managed data contracts serving the financial community just seems endless nowadays, but when it’s hot it’s hot!

Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] announced this morning that they will be providing strategic elements of the hosting infrastructure for Thomson Reuters Elektron, an ultra-high speed network and hosting environment aimed at traders.  Savvis has already built out the [Read more →]

Internap and Level 3 both had dual CDN and data wins over the past day or so:

We haven’t heard too much lately from colo and IP services specialist Internap Network Services (NASDAQ:INAP, news, filings), and especially not from its CDN products.  Today though they announced an interesting streaming win with Ottawa’s Carleton University, which serves some 24,000 students.   Carleton has long dabbled in distance learning, having started with Carleton University Television all the way back in 1978, progressing into DVDs and podcasts, and has now adopted an [Read more →]

There is no shortage these days of tests with 100G somewhere Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) in the title, but today Verizon announced the successful completion of a 100 Gigabit Ethernet field trial on a metropolitan Ethernet infrastructure.  The test was performed using Alcatel-Lucent gear deployed in Verizon’s Switched Ethernet Services network and successfully transmitted data over approximately [Read more →]

The international carrier arm of Swedish telecommunications giant Teliasonera is opening a new node in the southwest at i/o Data Center’s Phoenix One facility.  Teliasonera has been relatively quiet in North America for a long time, selling wholesale bandwidth out of the top ten or so markets but not much else.  They don’t need Phoenix for that business, but rather they seem to be actively trying to more effectively reach national and multinational corporate clients and are moving beyond.  That shift in focus suggests [Read more →]

There were three other interesting networking deals focusing on the financial vertical this morning:

Colocation provider Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) announced that CFN Services has connected to its Chicago, Frankfurt, London, New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle and Toronto IBX centers.  From them CFN will be able to offer its [Read more →]

International IP services provider glbc is enhancing its CDN portfolio by adding the latest version of Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings)‘s SITE acceleration service, which includes added control over cache management, Secure Sockets Layer support, increased failover options, and integrated content security options.  Global Crossing began reselling the CDN products of both EdgeCast and Limelight since back in early 2009, and they still seem comfortable in addressing the CDN market from that position.  Actually, except at [Read more →]

Yesterday I posted about the apparent arrival of Spread Networks based on their website, and it turns out I was just a day early.  This morning the company has made it official, they are opening a sub-13.33ms route between New York City and Chicago that is specifically tailored to the financial community.  The business plan is to sell both the dark fiber and the management of the gear, and therefore they also announced what gear has been certified to achieve their latency targets.  Two of those have been announced thus far: [Read more →]