Telecom Ramblings

In an SEC filing on Friday afternoon, Rochester based competitive telecom operator PAETEC (PAET) gave notice that it is downsizing by 5%, or ‘approximately 222 full-time employees’. As Christmas seasons go, this one is turning out pretty poorly so far in the telecom job market.

It actually isn’t clear to me that this move was induced by the economic downturn. Yes, I realize [Read more →]

Level 3 Communications (LVLT) today named Jeff Storey as its President and COO, finally replacing Kevin O’Hara who left in March. Followers of the sector will recall that Storey was the President of WilTel Communications while it was under the wings of Leucadia National Corporation. Level 3 needed some more operational muscle to help it break out of the rut it has been in for a year, it’s good to see them fill the COO position at last.

At WilTel, Storey won [Read more →]

Today I am introducing the Telecom Ramblings Event Calendar.  I follow lots of different events in the telecom and internet infrastructure sectors, enough that I often lose track of them, whether it be the who, when, or where.  I always wind up wading through many pages to get back to the link I need, or to find out just what time that conference call was supposed to start.  There’s just no central location for such information.  Lately I’ve begun tracking these events in Google Calendar, and it has helped.

Then it occurred to me though that such a calendar would work well for a group, and in fact might be useful to readers of this blog.  The idea is [Read more →]

So AT&T decided it could do without 12,000 employees, and is laying them off just in time for the Christmas shopping season.  What can one say?  I truly hope everyone affected lands on their feet as soon as possible.  I’ll bet they didn’t sell the company jet yet though, and those management bonuses will still come through somehow won’t they?  [Read more →]

It appears that the FCC may soon vote on a plan to auction off the AWS-3 spectrum with the condition that the winner must provide service to 95% of the country with 25% of the capacity available for free.  I just have one question.  Are these people insane?  Is there anywhere other than Washington DC that an idea like this would be considered viable?  Sometimes I think the politics of the word ‘free’ just suck the intelligence out of debate.  Nothing is free, all you can do is disguise who pays.

Why does the media keep harping on this idea as if we are days away from [Read more →]

Dan Rayburn has a long article on Akamai’s pricing travails in the video streaming market, I recommend a read.  Put simply, Akamai (AKAM) has long sold at a premium to the market.  But the market is segmenting, and the basic delivery of streamed bits is largely commoditized.  Dan says that Akamai is still quoting the higher prices for this product, but cutting it in half or more in negotiations.  This is not the whole CDN market, just raw streaming video delivery, but it is a challenge to Akamai’s leadership nonetheless.

Followers, or should I say survivors, of the IP transit wars over the last decade will recognize the pattern.  [Read more →]

The National Hockey League has chosen Level 3 to stream its content in high def (HD) on www.nhl.com. As deals go, this one isn’t a shocker.  Back in October, they had unveiled their subscription based “NHL GameCenter Live“, and Level 3’s existing relationship with the NHL via Vyvx made them the likely candidate. Indeed, the NHL seems to prefer a one-stop shop in this case.

In a way, the NHL is the perfect online streaming candidate.  When it comes to professional sports on TV in North America, hockey is nearly always the odd man out.  The NFL, NBA, MLB, and even tennis and golf take priority, and the NHL struggles for viewership scraps with [Read more →]

There is an article on Seeking Alpha today Three Stocks Selling Below Cash With Little Debt of which one is telecom equipment provider Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN, news, filings).  The argument goes that Ciena’s pile of cash and marketable securities (over $1B) is substantially higher than its current marketcap, and since the company is profitable and has a P/E of 7, they’re cheap cheap cheap.

And they are, but of course, they aren’t the only ones.  If I had a nickel for every undervalued company in this sector, I could buy probably one of them. That said, it should be noted that Ciena’s P/E may be 7 now, but everyone who follows them at all knows that number will be rising [Read more →]

If you’re in the USA you probably think that title has a typo, but AAPT is the #3 telecom in Australia, and a subsidiary of Telecom New Zealand.  The company runs a network having some 89 PoPs in Australia and has capacity on various cables from there to the world.  According to various reports Pacnet has bid some $420M for it, although it remains unclear just how solid the basis is for those reports. [Read more →]

Internetnews.com has a fascinating article about NASA’s implementation of the internet in space.  It never really occurred to me before, but with many vessels and satellites out there sending or relaying data and the many earth locations receiving and processing it, obviously NASA has its own uses for networking.  But out in space where the distances are, well, astronomical, and the lag times are measured in minutes and hours, it turns out that TCP/IP just doesn’t get the job done.  The handshakes are too frequent, the conversations between routers and endpoints are too ‘chatty’. [Read more →]

A survey commissioned by Verizon says that 57% of people are planning to watch TV rather than go out for entertainment. Of course this is a natural response to the ongoing economic disaster, but Verizon thinks it will be a boon to its FIOS revenues with all the on-demand video and such. They’re probably right about that, but I think the corollary is that bandwidth growth should be robust. [Read more →]

Well, they finally did it.  The long engagement between Clearwire (CLWR) and Sprint’s Xohm has finally ended in a wedding.  In a release on Friday the two announced that the vows have been taken, the bride has been kissed, and wedding presents from Intel, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and Google in the amount of $3.2B are already being unwrapped.  It was a bit earlier than expected, but after the FCC and Clearwire shareholders approved earlier this month it was just a matter of taking care of loose ends. [Read more →]

TelephonyOnline has a nice article about CenturyTel’s acquisition of Embarq.  The gist of it is that Embarq (EQ) turned down a higher offer to take the CenturyTel (CTL) deal, the reason being that it was the better deal in the long term.  That’s not that uncommon, I recall that MCI turned down a higher offer from Qwest (Q) to go with Verizon (VZ).  In this case, the competing offer was at one time partly cash, and Embarq replied it was only interested in all-stock deals.

I hadn’t really thought about it that way.  It seems as if cash is king most of the time, after all it’s harder for big shareholders to dispose of a big stock position – they have to want to hold it.  And I guess that’s the point right now.  Embarq’s shareholders don’t want to sell out for cash at these prices, their shareholders still want to have chips [Read more →]

Yesterday was, of course, the day before Thanksgiving, which is notorious for being a day when companies release things they’d actually rather not talk about much. It was no different this year in telecom and data, let’s look at the news and try not to cringe.

Qwest may have finally settled its shareholder lawsuit from the bubble days. Late Wednesday they announced that a $445M deal was approved by a federal judge in Denver. They thought they settled this a few times already, but appeals from former CEO Joseph Nacchio kept it up in the air. Everyone seems to be happy now, but I don’t blame [Read more →]

Yes, ToIP. Turkey over IP. Maybe even a TDN or something. Ok, I’m being silly, it’s just that I’m 10,000 miles away this Thanksgiving and I’m going to have to make do with substitutes for more things than I’d prefer. I’ll have to speak to the guy in charge of my location… Oh yeah, that’s me, oops. [Read more →]

In a press release today, European network operator Interoute Interoute (news) touted its use of Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings) gear to turn up 60Gbps of bandwidth over a 1200km route in just 48 hours.  The rush job apparently, was to rescue a customer from a tough situation.  Now that’s very interesting, and I congratulate Interoute for its quick feet and Infinera for the performance of its gear – I have to admit, that’s fast!  But of course even more interesting to a guy like me is who [Read more →]

Have you ever seen those African wildlife specials where the dry season turns a watering hole into a puddle, leaving the last remaining denizens flopping around in increasingly thick mud waiting to be eaten? That’s something like what VoIP services provider Deltathree (DDDC) faces right now. The company refinanced its lease to free up some restricted cash to stay wet, but if the rain [Read more →]

Corporate debt ratings are wierd.  Today Moody’s called Level 3 Communications’s (LVLT) new debt deal a default and cut their ratings, following on similar S&P move last week.  As many have noted, this is by the book, it happens almost anytime a company tenders for its own debt below par – and certainly every time Level 3 has.  But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense at all.  Cogent bought back half its debt below par last month but it wasn’t in ‘default’ according Moody’s and S&P because, I assume, the company didn’t [Read more →]

On Friday, Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S, news, filings) announced that they have successfully implemented a 40G transatlantic IP connection between New York and Sweden.  That’s 40Gbps over a single wavelength on an existing submarine cable system, in this case over TAT-14 from SeaGirt, NJ to Blajberg, Denmark, not 4x10G or anything similar.  The link was established using [Read more →]

Various articles have been popping up out there suggesting that along with the incoming Obama presidency will come a substantial change in the regulatory winds around Telecom.  The Wall Street Journal yesterday went through a long list of Democrats in congress who have a historical interest in telecom regulation who will be ascending [Read more →]

Todd Underwood made his last post for Renesys the other day, with a perceptive yet dismal view of the wholesale bandwidth business – I recommend a read.  Wherever Todd winds up, I hope he finds a way to keep blogging, his voice on the subject of internet traffic has consistently been one of the best around. [Read more →]

DataCenterKnowledge has a nice article today summarizing the current market valuations of datacenter-related stocks. It is a shocking table that reminds us just how ugly things are out there. In the financial markets anyway… [Read more →]

Yesterday, Verizon announced its new content distribution strategy, using Velocix caching solutions and focusing on delivery to their own customers more so than the rest of the internet. And yet, the more I think about it, the more I think this is less about the CDN business than it is about the other elephant in the room: net neutrality. [Read more →]