Telecom Ramblings

Quite a few announcements amongst multinational carriers lately, here are a few:

NTT America has a new CEO.  Kazuhiro Gomi will take over from Tetsuro Yamaguchi, who has held the post since 2006.  Mr. Gomi has been climbing the ladder rapidly of late, he was CTO until last June, and then spent a year as COO.  As CEO he takes charge just in time for the [Read more →]

Two weeks ago, Allied Fiber detailed the first stage of its buildout of a new national longhaul fiber network.  The company’s plans have surprised some in the industry, and suggest an evolving view of the economics of intercity fiber.  What has been missing from my articles about Allied Fiber thus far is detailed information on the company’s actual business model, which is mainly because I was still collecting it.  Today we will begin to rectify that omission with an in-depth interview with Allied Fiber’s founder and CEO Hunter Newby: [Read more →]

Today Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) is formally taking the wrappings off of its coherent 100G technology, and taking it commercial, featuring a single carrier 100G over one wavelength.  If there was any doubt that 100G has finally arrived, at least technologically, then it is probably now vanquished.  The new technology is available on Alcatel-Lucent’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS), and can be deployed alongside 10/40G in an existing fiber plant. [Read more →]

Equipment maker Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) reported earnings this morning, including about 42 days worth of revenue from Nortel’s former Metro Ethernet Networks division following the closure of the deal in March.  Revenues were $253.5M, of which $53.5M were derived from the acquisition.  Honestly I had no idea where to peg revenue for the quarter, and I doubt I was alone.  In fact, the 13 analysts listed in Yahoo Finance projected revenues spanning a rather impressive range of [Read more →]

Back in April, I posted about the 2020 Project, in which the Swedish telecommunications giant sponsored a group of videos featuring the thoughts of select thinkers about how communications would change the world over the next decade.  Well, the latest video is of none other than Vint Cerf, who should need no introduction to readers of this blog – except perhaps those few that still think Al Gore invented the internet.  With no further ado: [Read more →]

Competitive service provider XO Holdings (news, filings) has announced two interesting deals this week.

Yesterday it was a contract with Dialink, a provider of VoIP services to small and medium enterprises in northern California.  XO will helping with more than VoIP though, apparently Dialink’s customers are frequently requiring more than T1 services and therefore [Read more →]

According to reports, Indian telecommunications giant Reliance Communications has approved a plan to sell a minority stake in itself.  The rumored names include AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings), Dubai’s Etisalat, and Africa’s MTN Group, but apparently the only one on this list actually far along in talks is Etisalat which is said to be eyeing a 26% stake for something in the neighborhood of $4B.  Other strategic [Read more →]

Few applications have the potential to burn as much bandwidth as telepresence, and Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) continues to push the technology forward.  Today at InfoComm the company announced a smörgåsbord of advances, many of which derive from the integration of Tandberg.  One of the most interesting bits to me is the continuing work on interoperability.  Cisco has now implemented its recently open-sourced Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) on its Tandberg Telepresence Server.  Cisco isn’t the only one working on interoperability, today AT&T also [Read more →]

Transport equipment maker Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) and the Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Communications (NYSE:NTT, news, filings) announced today at Interop Tokyo a successful 100 Gigabit Ethernet demonstration over a live network in Makuhari, outside Tokyo.  The 100GbE stream was handed off from an IP router to a prototype Infinera 100GbE module containing Opnext IEEE-compliant transceivers. [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) had two interesting announcements for its Vyvx product line today.  First, it updated its local switching services, now allowing its customers to transmit video feeds between local loops in the same market, whether they are purchased through Level 3 Vyvx or not.  New rates will be available in some 50 markets, including London.  And HD loops of 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps will be initially in a dozen major markets with more on the way.  It’s nice to see the Vyvx product lines taking advantage of [Read more →]

The Ethernet exchange movement continues to gain converts.  Today Intellifiber announced that it has joined CENX with an initial connection in New York.  Intellifiber has about just over 1000 on-net buildings, but the company brings some 100K buildings to the table which it can address with Ethernet-over-copper (EoC) technology.  Most of those are in the mid-Atlantic region where their footprint is deepest, especially when it comes to [Read more →]

According to Telegeography, prices have been amazingly stable on the New York to London route, with the cost of a 10Gbps wavelength falling just 3% over the past year.  Seeing that number in single digits is quite a sight after the past decade of steady and sometimes torrential price erosion.  It is perhaps another indication that despite the arrival of 40G, carriers can only get so far with electronics upgrades and no longer view [Read more →]

Over the past week or two there have been several news items in the metro space that managed to slip past my nets, so let’s play a bit of catch-up.

NYC area metro specialist Lexent Metro Connect is expanding further into New Jersey.  First they are planning to pull fiber into Telx 100 Delawanna facility in Clifton, which has emerged as a key link in the low latency financial networking chain.  But Lexent is also heading further south, [Read more →]

Rumor has it that company-wide layoffs are about to hit XO Holdings (news, filings), an event which would put the COO Wayne M. Rehberger’s announced departure earlier this week in an entirely new light.  The company may actually announce the workforce action publicly on Friday, but I’m not holding my breath given that XO usually only tells the outside world what it is legally required to.  The full scope of the layoffs are not yet clear, but internal rumors peg them as high as [Read more →]

A few news items in the metro fiber space:

Optimum Lightpath continues to expand its network into key financial centers.  Today at the CBX event they announced that they have pulled fiber into the Telx colocation and interconnection facility in Clifton NJ, 100 Delawanna Avenue.  The expansion will help [Read more →]

Colocation and interconnection provider Telx is formally unveiling its Ethernet Exchange platform today at its CBX event.  Over the next nine months, the company will open interconnection points in seven datacenters nationwide, with the first customers as part of a charter program in the third quarter.  The first locations will be [Read more →]

I love the outrage.  I mean, for the media and blogosphere to act shocked and hurt when they’ve been preparing for over a year for some wireless carrier to try this – it’s hard man, real hard.  So AT&T is finally going to try its hand at bandwidth caps for its 3G wireless plans, and unsurprisingly they are deflecting the blame onto the people who love their product the most err I mean waste the most bandwidth.  Lower prices for the good, decent users who love having bandwidth at their fingertips but use it sparingly, and higher prices for the evil, gluttonous, bandwidth hogs who ruin it for the rest.  Ok, well maybe they didn’t quite say it that way, but still…   [Read more →]

Several news items lately that are worthy of note:

Clearwire continues to advance, and this week they formally began service in Kansas City and central Washington DC, and they extended their Baltimore coverage to 725 square miles.  In DC, coverage for the wider metro area will apparently follow over the next few months.  Once complete though, WiMAX will be available [Read more →]

In a $725M deal, datacenter REIT Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR, news, filings) has agreed to purchase the datacenters managed by 365 Main from joint ventures controlled by Rockwood Capital.  In total, the properties cover some 919K square feet of built out space, which is leased out to some 200 tenants right now.  For them of course, the ownership change probably won’t mean much more than a new place to send the rent checks.  The portfolio also includes another 250K square feet of potential space in Arizona waiting for development, as well as [Read more →]

Today we will cross the Atlantic and take a closer look at euNetworks, which operates a metro and intercity footprint stretching across 15 markets in 6 countries in Western Europe.  Their metro assets derive from the European buildout of MFN a decade ago, and are connected by intercity fiber that came from a deal with Viatel a few years ago.  Given the recent successful resurgence of the [Read more →]

Datacenter, hosting, and cloud services provider Savvis (news, filings) [a subsidiary of CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL, news, filings)] has agreed to acquire Fusepoint, a Canadian based company with a rather similar portfolio of colocation and IT services.  The price tag is $124.5M in cash, which will buy annualized revenue of about $47.4M and EBITDA of $12M.  That’s a 10x EBITDA multiple, but there are likely to be [Read more →]

Internet Initiative Japan has signed an agreement to purchase the Japanese domestic outsourcing business of AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings).  The $100M deal will see some 1,600 customers change hands, as well as approximately 250 AT&T employees.   AT&T is not leaving Japan of course, they are just going to focus mainly on the [Read more →]

International online game publisher UTV True Games will be leveraging services from both Level 3 and its solutions partner Solid State Networks.  UTV True games offers massively multi-player online games (MMOGs), and will use Level 3’s caching and download services, origin storage, and Content Analytics reporting service alongside Solid State Network’s integrated game publishing software. [Read more →]