Telecom Ramblings

Over on the business of online video blog, Dan Rayburn had the chance to interview Jim Crowe about Level 3’s CDN business.  It’s a must-read, being the most comprehensive discussion of the company’s CDN plans so far.  One key point Crowe makes is this: [Read more →]

Eric Bush of ThePlanet has a nice writeup of what a datacenter supervisor does every day.  Since I have not yet had the pleasure of working inside one, I greatly appreciate the summary. At least, the summary of what a datacenter supervisor is *supposed* to do every day – where does the MMORPG gameplay come in? 🙂 [Read more →]

Despite the rise of Infinera and the PIC, the dream of the all-optical network still lives.  The other day I read about the use of ‘metamaterials’ to slow down light, thereby enabling the next generation of speeds.  These are the same materials that scientists are trying to make into invisibility cloaks, they can manipulate light as it passes through them – bending it, slowing it, etc.  From a scientists point of view, this stuff is amazing.  From an engineering point of view though, it doesn’t yet exist. [Read more →]

Over on TMCNet, Rich Tehrani has an article on how the recent public spate of outages is hurting the Software as a Service (SaaS) movement.  When Apple, Amazon or Google goes down, everyone notices, and hence fewer people will entertain the idea of outsourcing their software needs.  Of course, none of this should surprise anyone but the media has a very short term memory.  [Read more →]

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ITC^Deltacom reported Q2 earnings last night, nothing like waiting until the last minute. Revenues were $125.5M, adjusted EBITDA was $21.8M. A reasonably strong quarter, I had expected that the economy might hurt them in parallel with PAETEC but it didn’t show up.  [Read more →]

When PAETEC bought McLeodUSA, along with it came a fiber footprint of 13,000 regional route miles and 4000 metro route miles connecting 20 states.  PAETEC has never owned much fiber before, they lease nearly all the connections in their network from both ILECs and CLECs, and the natural question was whether that might change.  It now looks as though change is not in the cards. [Read more →]

Earnings season is ending, so let’s have a quick summary of the how the companies that build and operate our internet/telecom infrastructure did. [Read more →]

Ever since all that fiber went into the ground in the late 90s, there have been lawsuits claiming that the telecoms (Qwest, Level 3, and Sprint) played fast and loose with rights-of-way along railroad tracks.  It may be that these cases have finally been settled, according to a release from the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.  [Read more →]

Over on Contentinople, there is speculation that Internap will exit the CDN business.  The argument is basically that they have screwed it up so badly so far, they may just give up and write it off.  Personally, I doubt it.  The street tends to create urgency where there is none, there is no urgency for Internap to just give up and it is against [Read more →]

XO reported earnings last night, and despite their focus on the SME and on leased ILEC connections in this economic environment, they came through largely unscathed.  Revenues of $367.4M were up just 1.7% over Q1, but for XO any growth is better than the last few years.  As usual, their data and IP revenues grew at a healthier clip, but their integrated voice and legacy TDM services held up ok – hence [Read more →]

TW Telecom reported results after the bell today, their conference call is tomorrow morning.  The speedy release was understandable though, because their results were powerful.  Revenues of $290.1M exceeded most forecasts as did EBITDA of $98.8M, and most importantly they did in fact break through to [Read more →]

On Friday, Rackspace (RAX) went public, and its IPO was widely panned as a failure.  The stock finished at $10.01, below the $12.50 it had been priced at.  The whole IPO-day rat race has seemed stupid to me for a long time.  After all, it sounds as if the people who had a bad day were [Read more →]

On Tuesday morning, TW Telecom reports Q2 2008 earnings.  TW Telecom is perhaps of the most solid of the nextgen fiber-based telecoms.  And this earnings call could usher in a new era for them:  positive earnings.  Not positive EBITDA, or positive cash flow, [Read more →]

Level 3 has returned to Asia at last, albeit just for CDN so far. Well, that’s not entirely fair. The company has always done business across the Pacific, and until they sold it their Software Spectrum business had a presence as well. The CDN assets they bought from Savvis did include a few starter nodes in Asia, which is the seed they are now trying to get started. But Level 3 hasn’t built and maintained substantial network assets there since they [Read more →]

Cogent reported earnings today, with revenues checking in at $53.9M – below the $54.5M floor they had projected.  EBITDA of $16.6M wasn’t far off the $17M projections, however the company made material reductions in guidance for the second half of the year, cutting revenue projections from $225-235M to ‘over $218M’, and ebitda from $75-85M down to ‘more than $65M’.  Earnings per share estimates were reduced from $(0.20)-(0.30) to $(0.50)-(0.60).  [Read more →]

Today’s rant stems from an insightful reader’s comment on my earlier post Bandwidth Intensive Applications and IP Transit which prompted me to put something into words.  Here is the comment by Graeb: [Read more →]

CBeyond (CBEY) reported earnings today, reporting revenues of $85M, EBITDA of $13.7M, and earnings of $0.02.  None of that came as much of a surprise, it was in line with guidance and expectations.  Some, including Citibank, thought CBeyond might show the same symptoms as PAETEC, since both serve the enterprise and both build their networks out of leased circuits from other carriers. [Read more →]

It seemed everything was over last week when Carl Icahn and XO came to terms on the refinancing of its senior debt.  The terms were steep but not unexpectedly so, but apparently the game is not over.  Today R2 Investments/Amalgamated Gadget filed a letter with the SEC announcing its suspicion that minority shareholders were taken advantage of, here is part of it: [Read more →]

Hey everybody!  Abovenet has a 10G backbone!  How exciting, welcome to the 21st century, yeesh.   This is news?  Heck, even Viatel managed do that last year, and they might be a bigger financial basketcase than Abovenet.  [Read more →]

Internap reported earnings a short while ago, and comparing with the primer I posted earlier things don’t look particularly wonderful.  IP revenues fell sequentially, as did CDN revenues.  Colocation revenues were up, but not particularly strongly, and rising costs meant that EBITDA of $5.5M was well off the pace. [Read more →]

Global Crossing reported earnings today, and they don’t seem to be feeling any effects from the macro economic environment.  With respect to the projections from my earnings primer, revenues were a bit stronger than expected at $653M, adjusted gross margin was inline 53.1%, and [Read more →]

Internap (INAP) reports earnings Tuesday after the market closes, so here is a quick summary of what to look for.  Internap has three lines of business:  IP transit, colocation, and CDN, and they focus all three on small to mid-sized web-centric companies that colocate their servers in datacenters.  They do not serve the enterprise customer base that is apparently giving PAETEC trouble but they do compete with Akamai on CDN, their results will be a barometer for the high end web-centric sector. [Read more →]