Telecom Ramblings

Latency, which is simply the delay between action and reaction, has been a part of the internet since it was born.  Gamers live and die by it, and not just the MMORPGs and first person shooter games.  Latency is a big deal even in online chess and bridge.  When your senses are tuned to quick action, [Read more →]

While researching metro fiber providers, I have come to realize that it may be best to classify the different fiber assets in three categories that have distinct characteristics: [Read more →]

Back in May and June, I ran a series of posts looking at the various independent metro fiber companies in the marketplace within the USA.  Well, a quarter has passed, and of course the world is not static, and quite a few companies have updated their numbers.  I plan to update the list periodically, hopefully drawing out new information and even new companies (nope, I certainly don’t know them all even after a fair amount of digging) from helpful readers.  With no further ado, [Read more →]

No, I don’t mean a political zoo, I mean a telecom and data zoo.   So far, I count no less than four telecommunications companies that are attempting to use the Democratic National Convention next week as a demo platform.  Let’s walk through the zoo: [Read more →]

Dan Rayburn emerged with some welcome additional information on the BBC/Akamai/Level3 storm. Akamai is not being replaced by Level 3 for iPlayer video, only supplemented.  Dan is right, the blogosphere didn’t really do their homework on this one. Regardless, [Read more →]

These days, it pays to be careful when reading headlines.  PhonePlusMag has one today, “IPtimize Buys American Fiber Systems” which made me do quite a double take.  You see, I don’t know much about IPtimize, but I know it is very small and trades on the pinksheets.  The idea that they could go out and buy AFS, which should be worth something with 9 digits, just wasn’t reasonable.  [Read more →]

Well, it’s getting late in August, and there must be a lot of people on vacation enjoying the fresh air.  I see now why some say that telecom takes vacation in August and many trade magazines skip a week or two rather than put out new articles.  So what better to do than some site housekeeping?  [Read more →]

ThinkBroadband says that the BBC is switching from Akamai to Level 3 for streaming for its iPlayer offering.   Well, to be more accurate, they say that this information emerged from this blog post by Anthony Rose, head of BBC Digital Media Technology.  To be honest though, that conclusion is skimpy from the actual content of that post, there must be other information out there because it seems to have stirred up some controversy. [Read more →]

TelephonyOnline has an article today quoting Dan Caruso of Zayo and of course neighbor blog BearOnBusiness.  The comments seem to have come from a presentation at some industry event, but the article doesn’t say precisely which one.  The crux of his point is one I certainly agree with, that the fruitfulness of Zayo’s shopping spree has been enhanced by the distraction of other buyers.  And as he says, this phase is probably [Read more →]

XO recently announced another upgrade to its ethernet infrastructure, now offering ‘an even wider range of incremental bandwidth options to choose from’.  Well, that probably isn’t the reason for their PR.  Since it is mentioned more than once, what XO seems to be pre-announcing is the introduction of ethernet VPLS services early next year, as well as classes of service.  Only a couple years late, but still they do seem to be catching up. [Read more →]

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 →]