Telecom Ramblings

This is a guest post by Paolo Gorgò, who blogs over at Nortia Research.  Anyone else who might be interested in a guest post may contact the webmaster.

How has the year 2009 been for the colocation sector?

From an investor point of view, not too bad (slight understatement, here).  Two charts say it all:  for clarity we will divide the sector into a) Companies who were priced for bankruptcy at the beginning of the year (whose performance was obviously outstanding), and b) everyone else (whose performance was still in the triple digits, with only one exception reaching a “poor” +50%…) [Read more →]

This one gets classified in the ‘You know nothing is happening when…’  folder.  Here I am scanning the meager news and blog articles out there, and what do I find?  Article after article about a mysterious gap of a few hours in the ability to buy an iPhone in New York City via AT&T’s website.  The instant conclusion?  That AT&T’s network in NYC must be being crushed under the weight of data traffic so badly that the company had to stop selling them.  The evidence?  None of any sort. [Read more →]

Brace yourself, the flood of top 10 lists reminiscing the best and worst things that happened in 2009 has only just begun.  They’re a lot more fun to read when life has been easy than they are this year.  While there were a few bright spots like colocation and metro fiber, most of the telecom and internet infrastructure sector remains solidly in a defensive posture.  But remember how dark everything looked when the year started?  Rather than dwell on the discouraging events that I wish hadn’t happened, or try to fluff up the rather meager list of wonderful things, I thought I’d think back to the things that didn’t happen, whether good or bad.  Think of it as a list of loose ends: [Read more →]

Spanish based telecommunications giant Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings) announced yesterday its intention to purchase Jajah for €145M in cash, which amounts to about $207M.  That’s about 6 times what Jajah’s investors had originally raised, which means at least someone out there is already having a very Merry Christmas.  While the deal is subject to approval by regulators in Spain, I find it hard to believe there will be any major hurdles.  As deals go, this one is simultaneously tiny and huge.   [Read more →]

In this week’s installment of As Nortel Liquidates, the company has now found a bidder for its carrier VoIP business.  Genband will take its turn in the hot seat as stalking horse with a $282M bid.  It probably won’t go for that little of course, but at least the process is still moving steadily onward.  [Read more →]

A couple weeks ago, AT&T Mobility’s President Ralph de la Vega made comments at an investor event in response to a question, suggesting that the company is looking at various ways to reign in the data usage of their voracious iPhone users.  After the resulting firestorm of outrage that surprised nobody except perhaps Mr. de la Vega, the company has been seeking to soften the perception of their efforts as seen in this BusinessWeek article today.  I found this particular quote illuminating: [Read more →]

In a surprise acquisition, content delivery specialist Limelight Networks (NASDAQ:LLNW, news, filings) announced today the purchase of EyeWonder, a provider of interactive digital advertising, and especially video advertising.  Normally when I see a buy such as this it is a small one, but Limelight is shelling out $110M – $62M in cash and $48M in stock plus more stock if financial targets are achieved.  That’s 40% of the company’s cash reserves, which means that this move is a major part of Limelight’s strategy as we enter 2010. [Read more →]

On Friday, Zayo Bandwidth announced yet another FTTT initiative, this time in the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene area.  That latter one is definitely a city I never would have known if I weren’t writing this blog, maybe next year I’ll learn how to pronounce it.  Zayo intends to bring 45 towers in the area on-net for TDM and Ethernet backhaul, no doubt as part of the [Read more →]

I have completed two more pages of links to metro fiber maps covering the Midwest.  I split the region into the Rust Belt and the Great Plains, neither of which includes the Chicago Metro Area which already had its own page.  The Rust Belt has quite a bit of competitive fiber across a wide selection of metro areas, whereas the Great Plains cover a very large geographical area but with comparatively little.  I don’t have any maps at all for the Dakotas yet for example. The usual national suspects [Read more →]

All year we’ve been hearing about those BTOP and BIP stimulus funds, but there hasn’t actually been any money involved yet – just bureaucracy and a whole lot of waiting.  Well, that ended yesterday with the announcement of the first 18 projects and $182M awarded,  just in time for Christmas too!  I’d grumble that now we must likely also wait for the money itself to be passed out, but that would be too cynical.  So who is on the first list?  [Read more →]

You know, I have noticed that it’s not often one gets to write about Mongolia and the internet in the same article, but apparently today is the day.  Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) has announced a contract with GemNet, one of Mongolia’s main fiber networks.  Level 3 will be providing one of the company’s main IP transit feeds which will bring US internet traffic to and from the country.  It takes a lot of IP transit deals to get anywhere these days, but every little bit counts for Level 3 at the moment.  Of course, Level 3 still doesn’t have assets in Asia that I know of, so presumably [Read more →]

I have finally updated my table of metro fiber networks, route miles, and on-net buildings, and have added a column describing the main markets each is in.  The recession didn’t slow the industry’s investments in metro fiber connectivity very much, but of course it did affect some participants more than others.  I am pleased to welcome several new additions to the list: [Read more →]

Nortel’s 100G gear has certainly been making some waves lately.  On Monday its gear went live between Frankfurt in Paris on Verizon’s network, and today we have regional fiber provider Lightower successfully testing it between Boston and New York City.  This one isn’t live commercially yet, rather it was a 4 day test over a 600 mile span.  Lightower already uses Nortel’s 40G solution, and all they had to do for the 100G test was to insert new line cards at each endpoint. [Read more →]

According to LightReading, Infinera has come out on top at Vodafone UK.    Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) has been doing very well with European carriers this year, from the big guys to the small ones.  Off the top of my head there is DT, Interoute, Colt, Tiscali, and Teliasonera – I’m sure there are more.  Vodafone would of course be a nice addition to that customer list.  Now all they need is for all these customers to start [Read more →]

It seems like there’s so much bandwidth news these days underneath the waves, but perhaps it’s just that there was so little for many years.  It’s not just the big ones, lots of hard to reach places are getting fiber.  Last week the Asia America Gateway (AAG) came online commercially, bringing the first direct connection between North America and the southeast Asian nations of Philippines, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia.    No more routing everything through [Read more →]

Transatlantic cable operator Hibernia Atlantic announced this morning the acquisition of video transport and services provider MediaXstream.  MediaXstream operates a Dynamic Transport Mode (DTM) network across 20 cities on both sides of the Atlantic, specializing in transporting full HD content between site and studio.  Combining their assets with Hibernia’s fiber footprint, both undersea and on land, will enable the extension of the video network to another 17 PoPs.  This is not the first time we have seen these two companies together, [Read more →]

Telisonera has taken its LTE network live, the first one in the industry.  The network is operational in Stockholm and Oslo, with additional major Scandinavian cities to follow.  It is currently usable only by laptop users via an LTE dongle from Samsung, but if you’ve got one you might see speeds in the 100Mbps neighborhood.  But one thing you can’t do is find a phone that will use the network.  Well, I suppose you can if you get one of those handsets that plug into your laptop, but that’s not really the point right?  LTE phones won’t show up until next year sometime, which means [Read more →]

This morning, Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) announced a commercial 100G ULH deployment between Paris and Frankfurt.  No, not a plan to work together with someone to investigate possibly thinking about trying out some gear, they have actually deployed within a production network.  That does seem to win them the blue ribbon in the race to commercialize 100G.  As for commercial viability, with just one link who can tell?  Regardless, they did it, and a quick check of the calendar says it is still 2009! [Read more →]

According to a Reuters news report, Indian telecommunications giant Reliance Communications may be trying to sell off all or part of Reliance Globalcom.  That unit’s primary assets are its FLAG undersea cable assets and US metro Ethernet operator Yipes.  There are also the Vanco assets which were not mentioned.  Supposedly, Reliance is trying to sell the unit to someone like KDDI, Verizon, or AT&T for some $3B.  On the other hand, a Reliance spokesperson has ‘vehemently’ denied the rumor.  Personally, I smell a [Read more →]

Continuing my push to collect publicly available metro fiber maps from all regions of the US, I added two new pages today:  Pennsylvania and Upstate NY/Ontario.  In Pennsylvania there is actually quite a bit of competitive fiber out there even though TW Telecom is not present anywhere in the state.  Obviously the two largest markets of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh get the most attention, however once you get outside those two there are only two:  Zayo and Level 3.  Zayo’s footprint derives largely [Read more →]

While there wasn’t an overflow of news this week, there were nevertheless many stories I didn’t manage to cover for one reason or another.  In this case, there were quite a few contracts announced that I didn’t have enough to say about for a full post but which were interesting nevertheless.  Sometimes it is the smaller company news that winds up in a weekend update, but this week it’s the other way around I guess [Read more →]

I have added a page on New England to my metro fiber maps section.   As always, if you know of any companies and/or maps that ought to be on this list, let me know.  The deepest players in the region (each in its own way) are Fibertech, RCN Metro, and Lightower, with Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) also holding a former Telcove stronghold up in Vermont that I don’t have a map for yet.  One company in the region that I am still learning about is Veroxity which seems to have a substantial presence in the suburbs of Boston amongst others.  [Read more →]

Telecom equipment provider Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings) reported earnings this morning, giving us our latest glimpse into what will hopefully be a sustained economic recovery in the sector.  Revenues of $176.3M were up 7% from 164.8M in the prior quarter and were well above expectations.  Guidance had been for flat revenue growth, and analysts weren’t looking for much more than that.  Sales in the equipment sector tend to be very volatile, and when the recession hit [Read more →]