Telecom Ramblings

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 →]

They haven’t caused much of a stir, but glbc has really been on the march in South America.  It’s not for lack of trying though, the company has issued a dozen PRs since the beginning of the second quarter alone that relate to events in the region.  Today’s deal with Minera Chinalco in Peru is just the latest in a string of awards, deals, and facility expansions.  [Read more →]

According to Ryan Lawler over at Contentinople, Verizon is poised to enter the CDN game. But Verizon doesn’t seem to plan on following the paths taken by AT&T or Level 3, they seem to have an entirely different approach in a partnership with Velocix.  The idea is that Verizon wants to efficiently distribute content both internally and externally by leveraging [Read more →]

Amazon (AMZN) formally launched its CDN last night, called “Cloud Front“.  It’s HTTP only, is limited to those storing data on Amazon S3, has no SLA and fewer bells and whistles than any CDN has ever had.  And it’s revolutionary. [Read more →]

Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR, news, filings), Infinera (NASDAQ:INFN, news, filings), and Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) announced today that they will work together towards the eventual development of highly anticipated 100 Gigabit Ethernet technology, along with research networks Internet2 and ESnet.  Of course, we already knew that each was working on their own part of this, so one might wonder why we needed a press release.  And given that the economy trumps everything right now, especially new technology that won’t be here until 2010 when the media expects us to be living in caves, nobody is likely to get that excited today. [Read more →]

Dupont Fabros (DFT), which builds and operates datacenters as a REIT, has suspended construction at both its NJ-1 (Piscataway NJ) and ACC-5 (Ashburn VA) sites.  This follows the news of three weeks ago that their Santa Clara project had been suspended.  The company had just raised $100M but had needed far more than that to continue in Santa Clara.  Well, apparently they need more to finish in New Jersey and Virginia as well, because this news effectively suspends their construction across the board. [Read more →]

Wow, while I was writing up my model, Level 3 dropped a bombshell.  The company announced commitments for $400M in debt from a group of holders ranging from top shareholders Southeast Asset Management and Fairfax on down to board members Walter Scott and Robert Julian.  Simultaneously, they issued tenders for their 2009 and 2010 convertible debt, currently trading at various discounts.  Where to start?  They totally surprised me, I expected the company wouldn’t make a move for a while yet.  Others did see signs recently that the company had a refinance in hand, congrats to them. [Read more →]

Here is my updated Level 3 Communications (LVLT) model with projections for Q4 and onward into 2009 and 2010.  As with recent spreadsheets, this one is stored on Google Documents. I have included a summary page for Q4 and full year 2008 projections, but if you really want to see the details or further projections then you can delve into to the other sheets. [Read more →]

It was only two weeks ago that Sprint said it would in fact rejuvenate the Nextel network rather than sell it.  Now a court has given them 12 months to shut it down in 81 markets mostly in the Midwest due to conflicts in their affiliate agreement with iPCS.  Even assuming that Sprint manages to delay this brings up the obvious question, how do you rejuvenate a network that you have been ordered to shut off? [Read more →]

itcd reported earnings on Friday after the bell, as always waiting until the last possible moment.  And the news?  Well, the economy may suck but you wouldn’t know it from their earnings report.  But then, when the economy was good it never showed up then either.  Not much ever seems to [Read more →]

First it was wave powered floating data centers, then tidal powered data centers in the Scottish Highlands, and today Data Center Knowledge has a fascinating article on possible nuclear powered datacenters. The idea revolves around a hot tub sized 27 megawatt nuclear power module from Hyperion that you bury on the property. [Read more →]

Alternative network services provider PAETEC (PAET) reported earnings this morning, offering us perhaps one of the last remaining datapoints before we enter a long winter.  All that gloom out there just makes it feel like it’s going to be a cold one, doesn’t it?  Anyhow, PAETEC had a disastrous Q2 stumble – at least in the [Read more →]

Internet security sites are buzzing with the latest success of self-policing.  As reported by Brian Krebs in his blog on the Washington Post site, San Jose based web hosting service McColo has been cut loose from the internet by its providers.  According to various security experts, perhaps 75% of daily spam & scam email globally was knocked offline, at least temporarily, as it either originated from McColo or was otherwise controlled from there.  I find this whole situation quite fascinating. [Read more →]

Hello All, thejuice here. I wanted to update a previous set of blogs regarding Cogent (CCOI). As previously indicated, I purchased a group of next gen carriers when their EV/Ebitdas got in the 3.5 range. One of those names, Cogent was of particular interest to me as I believed that management needed [Read more →]

Just when you might have thought Broadband over Power Lines was finally dead and buried, here it comes back again.  In this iteration, it is IBM and an upstart called IBEC pushing the idea and, yes, putting money behind it.  As if we don’t have plenty of viable business models in need of investment right now?  The idea for BPL this time is to go where the cable and DSL providers [Read more →]

Today I am updating my list of metro fiber providers that I last revisited back in August. As usual, I look for metro route miles and raw on-net buildings of all types, and look at the ratio as a raw metric for relative density and penetration. This quarter’s major surprise came in an email from Fibertech, [Read more →]

Over at The Business of Online Video Dan Rayburn reports that this month Level 3 (LVLT) has opened broadcast encoding centers in Manhattan and Tulsa.  This represents yet another step in the evolution of Level 3’s content offerings, one that it has always hoped will separate it from the pack. [Read more →]