Telecom Ramblings

Lightyear snuck under my radar went public on Friday, following a reverse merger with Libra Alliance – a former ISP whose shell continued to trade OTC under the ticker LBAL.  As a part of the transaction, Lightyear’s debt to its owners was exchanged for a combination of common and preferred stock in the new public entity.  So suddenly we have a new public telecom company to keep track of.  Lightyear’s revenue for the first three quarters of 2009 was $44M, which puts them at an annual run rate in the $60M range.  Their plan apparently involves substantial inorganic growth, [Read more →]

Applications service provider Navisite (NASDAQ:NAVI, news, filings) [a subsidiary of Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC, news)] today divested itself of its Lawson and Kronos business lines, selling their customer base to Velocity Technology Solutions for some $56M.  Velocity will also take over the lease for the Minneapolis data center from which these products are run.  With this transaction, NaviSite says they will be better able to focus on their core business and further their entry into the cloud services market.  Of course, $56M added to the balance sheet (currently at $4M in cash & equivalents) doesn’t hurt either. [Read more →]

There’s a fascinating article over on Ars Technica suggesting that the problems faced by AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) by iPhone-induced congestion aren’t actually due to insufficient bandwidth capacity at all.  Rather, the issues may stem from the design of the iPhone itself.  No, not the part that makes it easy and fun to burn bandwidth and thus leads to higher data usage rates, oddly enough they mean the part that saves [Read more →]

On Friday, there were reports that Oppenheimer’s Timothy Horan issued a research note suggesting that Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) return to its acquisitive ways.  Hmmm, given that I have beaten this drum more than once over the past year or two – I can’t really let that pass without commenting, right?  Horan picks glbc as the top target, followed by XO Holdings (news, filings), and then on to Sprint wireline and Qwest longhaul.  Very familiar targets obviously, they’re always on the list and from a relative likelihood perspective I don’t disagree.  Each is likely available at the right price, though nobody’s quite sure what Icahn’s [Read more →]

It’s time for another look at whatever happened this week that I might have missed or passed over the first time.

Covad completed its ‘intelligent network platform’ with the rollout of nationwide MPLS VPN services as well as QOS/COS capabilities.  Since being taken private, Covad has been reinventing itself as something larger than the simple [Read more →]

Remember UTOPIA?  No, not that one, I mean the municipal FTTH project in Utah with 16 cities combining their efforts to bring fiber connections to their residents in defiance of their local ILECs.  There have been many bumps in the road of course, but they are still out there and now they are making a bid to become one of Google’s lucky chosen ones.  In doing so, they remind us that this 1Gbps to the home song has been sung before, it is only new this month because Google is the one singing it.  So why start fresh when there is ready-made infrastructure to get behind and communities already primed to hook up to it? [Read more →]

Competitive metro and regional fiber operator Zayo has won some broadband stimulus funding in Indiana.  They are partnering with I-Light, which operates educational networks in the state from GRNOC at Indiana University, and will be building fiber connections to 21 Ivy Tech Community Colleges around the state.  Along the paths to those community colleges, they will also bring broadband connectivity to [Read more →]

On Tuesday, pan-European service provider Interoute announced its expansion into Ireland with a new loop through Dublin.  The driver for the new PoP is demand from multinational corporations.  Ireland was once something of a technological backwater, but nowadays connectivity to the island is increasingly important and network operators have been pouring in.    [Read more →]

Just a few weeks after AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) gave in and said it would allow Skype and Sling onto its 3G network, Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) followed suit.  At the 2010 Mobile World Congress, Verizon and Skype announced that they will team up to give Skype users: [Read more →]

There were several interesting news items in the data center sector yesterday, let’s take a quick peak at them.

q has added a new CyberCenter in Northern Virginia, bringing its total to 17 and adding some 129,000 square feet of space to its footprint.  They chose to buy an existing facility for some $29M rather than build their own or work with the data center developers, apparently simply to reduce time to market.  This comes on the heels of [Read more →]

International fiber and data operator glbc reported earnings this afternoon after the bell, posting solid numbers to end the year.  While slightly below my own optimistic guesses, revenue of $651M and OIBDA of $83M easily delivered on guidance, and the company generated positive free cash flow for both the quarter and the full year 2009.  Here is a quick tabular summary: [Read more →]

tndm reported earnings this morning, continuing their steady performance with revenue of $44.7M, which met guidance but was flat sequentially.  EBITDA of $22.4M was up sequentially, which brought the full year number to $84.6M – just above the guided range.    Overall, a steady quarter but perhaps not as spectacular as some have been accustomed to, but this is probably due to [Read more →]

Competitive service provider PAETEC (news, filings) reported earnings this morning, without too many surprises.  Basically, the met guidance and most trends continued on the same track we had been seeing all year.  Here is a quick table summarizing the company’s sequential performance in 2009: [Read more →]

Tomorrow morning glbc will hold their earnings CC, which if their recent patterns hold means that they will be releasing the PR today after the market closes.   That of course means it’s time for a quick earnings preview.  2009 wasn’t a fun year for telecom as a whole, but when you discount currency fluctuations and consider the rest of the tough decade people at Global Crossing had already endured – I suspect they probably enjoyed it more than most.  Here’s a quick table previewing my expectations for how Q4 went relative to the rest of 2009: [Read more →]

According to a study being released by Infonetics today, the optical network hardware sector was up some 5% sequentially in the fourth quarter.  That jives well with the earnings we have been seeing so far; it is clear that some of that capex that didn’t get spent in the prior 4 quarters has begun to trickle back into the market.  For the full year, the sector was still down some 14% overall.  One interesting tidbit was that most of the changes in market share came at the [Read more →]

In a blitz of press releases this morning, telecommunications equipment giant Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) offered glimpses of multiple LTE projects.  In tests with Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings), they made what were billed as the first 4G LTE phone calls.  For now this has only been in Telefonica’s labs, but in the next stage they will be testing in the field over [Read more →]

Some news gets bypassed during earnings season, let’s look at a few items I didn’t write about this week:

itcd changed its mind and withdrew its offering for $325M in senior secured notes, with which it had planned to refinance its credit facilities and thus remove some restrictive financial covenants.  The reason given was that the cost of capital rose unexpectedly and that turned an attractive deal into an unattractive one.  That’s the simplest explanation of course, and probably [Read more →]

Now that a bit of the dust has settled on the announced intention by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG, news, filings) to build an experimental FTTX network in a community or communities yet to be determined, it’s time to get a reading on what the community actually thinks they are doing.  We know what the media thinks, or at least what they think will get the most readers to read their articles.  What about the rest of us?  Here’s a quick poll: [Read more →]

Transpacific internet traffic continues to surge mightily, according to a release by NTT America today.  NTT’s total capacity on its global backbone between Japan and the USA has now reached 300Gbps, which the company bills as more than any other network.  I don’t doubt them, as this is NTT’s home turf of course.  Their bandwidth is spread across three cable systems:  Japan-US, TGN Transpacific, and of course PC-1.  It’s interesting that they aren’t including the newer Unity or TPE cables on that list yet, probably because [Read more →]

Regional and metro fiber challenger Zayo Group (news, filings) has thrown its hat into the low-latency ring.  Today they announced the deployment of a new low latency route between the Chicago and New York metro areas.  The lure of top dollar bandwidth purchases by the financial community for ultra-low-latency connections is drawing in every fiber operator who can muster the necessary assets, and who can blame them?  Zayo did not mention the actual latency levels available on the new route, if anyone out there has heard a number I’d be curious [Read more →]

Data center specialist Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX, news, filings) reported earnings yesterday after the bell, and this morning gave us an update on its Carrier Ethernet Exchange initiative.  Overall, the company had a great Q4 in which revenues of $243M and EBITDA of $111.3 exceeded both guidance and analyst expectations.  However, guidance for 2010 apparently disappointed some analysts, though Equinix has a history of cautious initial full year projections – they looked pretty good to me.  Here is a quick summary of the company’s sequential performance and projections: [Read more →]

Oh my, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG, news, filings) does know how to make trouble don’t they?  Yesterday the internet giant announced it would delve into FTTH with a project to connect 50K-500K people to the internet at 1Gbps speeds.  They are now looking for candidate cities and municipalities to work with on this project.  Why are they doing this?  It’s a deliberately provocative move intended to make current broadband providers respond, and I think its effects will rock the access market far beyond the initial shock wave.  For now though let’s look at the immediate implications: [Read more →]

Competitive service provider PAETEC (news, filings) has joined the expansion parade with a move into Vermont.  PAETEC has long been in most markets in New England, but had not cracked the Green Mountain State in any major way.  Of course in internet geography it is well off the beaten path so there aren’t many providers who do have a major business in the state. That makes 46 states now where they have a presence, and I’m sure they will be [Read more →]