Telecom Ramblings

Apparently, the credit markets actually aren’t dead, not quite anyway.  There is still some money out there.  Yesterday independent wireless carrier MetroPCS (NYSE:PCS, news, filings) announced they would try to raise $300M in bonds, offering more of their existing 9.25% senior debt at a discount.  My first thought was “Good luck, you’re gonna need it”, but apparently I was wrong.  Just 24 hours later, MetroPCS announced that they in fact will sell $550M of those bonds at $0.895, for an effective yield of 11.82%.

Now that’s not cheap money, but [Read more →]

Today TeliaSonera AB (ETR:TLS, news, filings) took another step along the road to 4G, awarding its first two LTE contracts for two cities on its Nordic home turf. Huawei won the contract for Oslo, and Ericsson won the contract for Stockholm. The 4G system will be based on 3GPP LTE/SAE standards, capable of speeds in the hundreds of Mbps in trials. What that means in a congested production network is anyone’s guess of course, but it will surely be [Read more →]

According to various sources, nt will file for bankruptcy later today.    At one point back in the bubble, Nortel had a marketcap of $200B and was the largest company in Canada, and that number now looks likely to go the rest of the way to zero.  Speculation is that the company will be broken up in bankruptcy court and sold to competitors.  Who buys (or tries to buy) which pieces of Nortel will probably be a major source of [Read more →]

So now we know that Obama’s choice for FCC Chairman is his longtime friend and advisor Julius Genachowski.  Genachowski is the guy who helped Obama formulate his technology strategy during the campaign, so at least we know he knows how to use the internet.  I don’t envy his position, the current world of FCC regulation is a total basketcase.  Stepping into the role now has to be a bit like voluntarily putting your foot into the [Read more →]

Corning (NYSE:GLW, news, filings) continues to ‘bend’ the rules of physics, making fiber that is easier to use.  We already had ClearCurve, bend tolerant singlemode fiber, which makes it easier to string fiber within buildings such as apartment buildings etc, and now the company is adding a multimode version to the ClearCurve family.  This new multimode version of ClearCurve promises to help out in the data center, replacing copper.  Many people have a misconception of the data center as filled with fiber and only fiber, but actually [Read more →]

As readers of this blog know, I’ve always preferred service providers that own their fiber rather than lease all their connectivity.  Dave Rusin over on Telecom Straight Shooter goes perhaps one step further, referring to himself as a “fiber bigot”.   Now there are all sorts of justifications and reasons for our common obsession, but the jargon can get kind of thick and make the eyes glaze over.  So here is a simplified and maybe light-hearted way to look at things: [Read more →]

Our neighbor in the telecom blogging world, Dan Caruso of Bear on Business fame as well as CEO of Zayo and executive chairman of Envysion, has been named CTP Communications Executive of the year! A hearty congratulations to Dan for this well deserved honor.  Nobody has single-handedly shaken up [Read more →]

At last week’s Citi EMT conference, international telecommunications carrier glbc gave an upbeat presentation where they reiterated the favorable market conditions they see for their products even in this ugly recession. But perhaps most interesting were the comments of CEO John Legere about consolidation in the sector, which were unusually frank and very much on the mark. Here is a quick transcription of [Read more →]

Shares of telecommunications carrier Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) had quite a week, entering Monday at $0.68 and closing Friday at $1.49, up 119%. I thought we were in the throes of a deepening recession that is going to start killing off anyone with debt? Volume just got bigger every day, the volume progression was 9M,16M,19M,54M,61M. What happened? Not much actually, and the rest of the sector was not nearly so lively.  I don’t think we can tie it back to one event. Instead, I’d say there has been a confluence [Read more →]

BearOnBusiness has lately been offering some amazing insight into the operation of a fiber based telecom over the past few days.  But today’s post, The Problem with Telecom Companies is a must-read.  The general idea is that many problems that are quickly blamed on nebulous backoffice failures really originate much earlier in the process.  If your sales force is confused about [Read more →]

Telegeography reports that Indian carrier Tata Communications is looking to raise some INR30B via debt and a rights issue, which works out to about $600M.   They hope to use the money to fund M&A, apparently in the USA and Europe.   Apparently though, they first need permission from the Indian government, which owns more than a quarter of the company, and they have asked before and not gotten it. [Read more →]

They may not have caught up on those pesky SEC filings yet, but abvt is still getting stronger.  Today they announced an expansion to Austin Texas,  opening their 15th metro market.  I’m not going to dig it up, but I doubt they have expanded to a new market since before their spectacular implosion during the bubble.  [Read more →]

At the Citi Global Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications conference this week, many carriers and service providers have been giving presentations.  And while most have done so cautiously and without disclosing much about the fourth quarter, there have been a few tidbits of information.  And those tidbits have not indicated [Read more →]

Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) today announced a new program they are calling the Verizon Port Partner Program which is aimed at winning CDN business.  The media of course picked this up and repeated it heavily, because it was about Verizon and content delivery and that has to be news, right?  But what is it exactly?  That’s the humorous part to me.  If you cut through all the marketing and packaging, here’s what Verizon did.  They [Read more →]

Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings), long the little brother of BT, FT, and DT in Europe’s corporate telecommunications market, is looking to move up in the world. The Spanish based carrier announced a big contract today worth €350M over 5 years with Deutsche Post, which amongst other things owns DHL and has 500K employees all over the world. Most of Telefonica’s €2B revenues from the corporate market come from places that speak, well, Spanish. A deal of this size is not minor at all, [Read more →]

As part of the debut of WiMax in Portland by clwr, the company demonstrated live streaming video over a mobile WiMax connection. And it was apparently on both ends. The video itself came off a commuter train, showing the scenery passing by, meaning that it was uploaded live via WiMax, and then downloaded. The movement of the train was followed on a map next to the video. As demonstrations go, it was pretty cool, even when the video stuttered as the train went through a tunnel. [Read more →]

Over the holidays, telecom giant Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) won a high profile lawsuit against OnlineNIC for cybersquatting, and was awarded $33.15M.  Apparently they went and registered all sorts of domains like itunesverizon, iphonefromverizon etc.  But in a rather humorous turn of events, it seems Verizon’s adversary may be beyond their reach.  According to InternetNews they are based in Xiamen, China and are one of the largest domain name registrars [Read more →]

Usually when a company is private, we get less information or even no information at all.  But there is the rare occasion when not having to worry as much about the timing of disclosures lets a private company give us information that a public company wouldn’t – at least not yet. Dan Caruso over on Bear On Business gave us all a bit of unexpected early information on the performance of Zayo Group (news, filings) yesterday as part of a series of blog posts detailing the company’s goals in 2009, and in an interview with [Read more →]

Ethernet equipment makers Force10 Networks and Turin Networks are joining forces, according to media reports.  This news follows on last month’s purchase of Ceterus by Overture, and of course Nortel is still shopping its Ethernet unit.  It certainly seems as if the the Carrier Ethernet equipment market is undergoing a bit of a consolidation frenzy.  Smaller players are seeking safety in numbers and in the cost savings they can eek out of the synergies there.  Of course that means [Read more →]

Last week, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) wrapped up its refinancing activities just as 2008 came to an end.  With a new COO, an improved balance sheet, and the December layoffs probably complete as well, the company can start the new year with a fresh (though perhaps not clean) slate.  While we won’t know what Q4 looks like for a while yet, let’s try to summarize where the company seems to stand after [Read more →]

A new blog started up before Christmas, Infrastructure 2.0 by the folks from Infoblox. Their premise is fairly simple yet compelling. IP Networks of all scopes are becoming too large for the manual labor that administers them, the old way of doing things doesn’t scale to meet the next problems. Of course, network automation is what Infoblox is all about, so to an extent they are calling for the use of their own product – but that is a common thing these days in the blogosphere. After all, the people most interested in a subject and most qualified to ramble on about it are often those who hope to make a business out of it. The articles are insightful and [Read more →]

If Vitesse Semiconductor (PINK:VTSS, news, filings) were human, it would have been a medical miracle. The company, which manufactures a variety of semiconductor devices that go into equipment built by the likes of Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings),  Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings), and Huawei, has been in a coma and left for dead by Wall Street for two years now. The story dates back to the stock option backdating scandals of a couple years ago. Remember those wonderful days, when scandals involving theft of a mere few million dollars seemed so important? Well, much of Vitesses’s top management went down in the flames, previous financials were disavowed, lawsuits and investigations started flying, and the company looked like it was about [Read more →]

As followers of the colocation and data center sector know, Dupont Fabros Technology (NYSE:DFT, news, filings) has been struggling with the credit markets since the crisis began.  They have suspended construction at several locations after being unable to raise the funds to complete the projects, and those sites now sit in limbo.  The uncertainty has just killed the stock price of course.  I do keep an eye on the company but not a close one, so it was only when a reader alerted me to the sustained insider activity over the last two months that I took a closer look.  I fully expected to see a token purchase here or there.  You know what I mean, the orchestrated ‘lets all buy a little stock to show everyone we believe in the company’ kind.  But I was surprised, it seems to go well beyond that.  [Read more →]