Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

Over on Infoworld there is a long article extolling the virtues of a merger between Google and Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) that is worth a read.  The basic argument is that by getting its hands dirty with an actual mobile network, Google could bring about the change that it so clearly wants.  What change is that?  Why an open, data-centric, mobile future for everyone of course.  In the past I have come down on the skeptical side regarding Google’s likely M&A hunger in Telecom, I generally feel that Google is much more interested in prodding others than in taking ownership itself.   [Read more →]

Apparently, q is choosing to embrace the long awaited flood of over-the-top video rather than try to enter the content markets itself.  A Light Reading article details comments by Qwest’s Neil Cox, which include gems like this:

“We are seeing ASV — ad-supported video — and Blu-rays and new TVs hooked up to the Internet, and we at Qwest are not going to stand in the way.  We want to make sure [OTT content providers’] video works better on our network than on anyone else’s network.”

I’m sure that’s music to network [Read more →]

An administrative note.  Apparently, readers who attempted to contact me in the past few days at info@telecomramblings.com had their email bounce back with a message saying my mailbox was full.  And so it was, a particularly gifted spammer decided to pay a visit.  The situation has now been rectified, hopefully permanently.  So for those who may have tried, my sincere apologies for the inconvenience – please do try again.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Pacific network operator Pacnet has announced its intent to build a submarine cable that will connect India to its EAC/C2C cable systems.  The new system, to be called West Asia Crossing, will run between Chennai and both Singapore and Malaysia, with possible additional landing points in Mumbai as well as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.  The new cable will be initially designed to carry as much as 6-8Tbps.  It will cost some $150M and would be ready in 2 years, assuming liftoff is successful. [Read more →]

Over on the Telecom Ramblings Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Vonage, which is seeking a Traffic Engineer in Holmdel NJ.  I have been running the jobs board for a while now, but the timing hasn’t been there – in the midst of a recession there hasn’t really been a huge demand.  However, there are some hopeful economic signs out there, and traffic growth isn’t slowing down so spending will have to recover sooner or later regardless.  And hopefully this website can do its part in helping along [Read more →]

Last winter when it seemed like every telecommunications company was making plans for a CDN of one kind or another, British Telecom (NYSE:BT, news, filings) was said to be building its own rather than buying, reselling, or partnering with one.   Now it has emerged that their plan is a bit different than we might have expected from earlier comments.  BT Wholesale apparently wishes to build a CDN in collaboration with its ISP competition. [Read more →]

Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings),the 800lb gorilla of content delivery, raised guidance this morning for the fourth quarter and fiscal year.  Revenue is now expected to be $230-235M, up quite substantially from the earlier projection of $217-224M.  Earnings per share of $0.42-0.43 are likewise expected to exceed the previous range of $0.39-0.41.  Mid-quarter increases in guidance have been rare in this recession to say the least, and so this is very welcome news.  Does this mean the CDN industry has shifted back into gear? [Read more →]

I have added two more lists of competitive metro fiber maps to my collection:  one for the Maryland, Delaware, and Washington DC Metro area, and one for the southwestern states of Arizona and New Mexico. There is of course lots of fiber around Washington DC, and a major part of it is in northern Virginia out in Reston, Herndon, McLean, etc.  I chose to follow the lead of politics and lump that part of Virginia with DC, the rest of the state will be grouped with the Carolinas.  Why?  I had to divide [Read more →]

On Thursday, Benoit Felten over on Fiberevolution and Herman Wagter of Dadamotive issued a joint challenge to last mile providers to offer proof that that bandwidth hogs exist.  Well, not so much whether they exist, but more whether or not they cause congestion and thus hurt the internet experiences of everyone else.  After all, proof of existence is easy.  Take a bell curve of bandwidth usage, choose a point a few standard deviations to the right, and you’ve defined yourself a hog.  But although Felten’s title was a bit dodgy, it was quite catchy and thus it did its job well and has gotten a great deal of attention.  The article did the remainder of the job, which was to put a finger precisely on a logical [Read more →]

Italian carrier Tiscali has chosen Infinera for its backbone.  They will be deploying both Infinera’s DTN in the longhaul and its ATN in the metro across their footprint.  That includes more than 80 metro areas or most of the substantial cities in the country.  Infinera has been relatively quiet since formally rolling out its new metro gear, but it seems clear that the ATN had a lot to do with this win.  With its 40G gear still about a year away Infinera’s growth in 2010 will lean heavily on its new metro and submarine products, so every joint win counts. [Read more →]

Regional and metro fiber provider Zayo today previewed its capex budget for 2010.  The company has earmarked some $65M for expansion of its fiber networks.  They will finish 2009 having spent $45M while adding more than 400 on-net locations.  Hmmm, will the increased dollars turn into another 600+ on-net locations this year?  I think only TW Telecom is moving faster than that on an absolute basis, but they are [Read more →]