Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Ancotel Buys LIDARC to Boost Trans-Atlantic Business

Frankfurt-based ancotel GmbH, operators of the largest and most important telecommunications and data network hub in Europe,  has acquired the Long Island Data and Recovery Center, a Long Island-based collocation and interconnection facility located at 1025 Old Country Road (‘1025 OCR’), Westbury, NY.

This acquisition marks ancotel’s first foray into the United States’ data center and colocation market.  The company will leverage the asset to compete for trans-Atlantic traffic

Long Island serves as a key landing point for submarine cables that connect North America to Europe.

Allied Fiber Talks about Need for More Dark Fiber

If you have the time, this audio of Hunter Newby, Allied Fiber CEO, lays out the argument for why additional dark fiber capacity is needed in the U.S. market.

You might think there is plenty of fiber in the ground, and there is. The problem is that much of it is on routes, and in cables, that do not provide as much resiliency as you would think. Many fibers are in the same cable, and many cables are laid along the same rights of way.

In addition, it is tougher than you might think to buy dark fiber, as opposed to lit services, on diverse routes.

listen to the interview

Half of Internet Users Watch Online Video

About 50 percent of all online uses now report they watch online video at least weekly, up from 43 percent  in 2009, according to Frank N. Magid Associates.

About 85 percent of males 18-24 watch online video weekly or more and 67 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34. That should grow about five percent more over the next year. Short form content continues to represent about 80 percent of content viewed.

About 76 percent of online video consumers report they watch professionally produced clips on a regular basis.

About 38 percent say they are interested in watching PC-delivered content on a TV screen.

link

Zayo Group Buys American Fiber Systems

Zayo Group, based in Colorado, is acquiring Rochester, N.Y. based American Fiber Systems.

Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but a knowledgeable source said AFS fetched between $185 million and $190 million.

Founded in 2000 by David Rusin, a former president of Frontier Communications Inc., the privately held AFS provides dark and lit fiber to businesses.

Zayo Group has grown fast by acquisition, and now operates fiber networks in 23 states, serving 141 markets, including 55 metropolitan markets in the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, Minnesota and Iowa.

Along the way, it has opportunistically gotten into the business voice business, collocation and enterprise communications. There's sometimes a fine line between filling out an adjacency and losing focus, but Zayo has proven to be adept, both at managing its acquisition activities, and taking advantage of business adjacencies.

Though as a general rule consolidation is occurring virtually everywhere in the U.S. communications business, there has been a noticeable pickup in regional fiber network mergers recently.

KDL Inc., of Evansville, Ind., a provider of fiber networks in 26 states; Houston-based Alpheus Communications (News - Alert), which builds and manages the fiber backbone that links major cities in Texas; and Fibertech Networks LLC, which leases fiber networks to banks, colleges and hospitals in the eastern U.S., have hired investment bankers and hope to sell themselves, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Hulu Plus Not a Danger to Netflix

Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth does not believe Hulu's new subscription service "Plus" will harm Netflix subscriber growth, though it is the "first credible competitive subscription offering," especially for viewers who watch serials and other popular TV fare.

Netflix still is heavy on movie content.

link

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Small Business Hiring up 4% for the Year, Pay is Down

Small business hiring continued to increase slightly in June ( 0.2 percent over May) while the average paycheck took a larger month-over-month dip (-0.6 percent over May) than we’ve seen since pay leveled off in March. That brings us to a year-to-date increase in small business hiring of 3.9 percent and a year-to-date pay decrease of -0.4 percent, says SurePayroll.

Is Bit Prioritization Necessary?

Network neutrality proponents, especially those supporting the "strong" forms such as an outright ban on any bit priorities, believe that next generation networks will have ample bandwidth to support all real-time services without the need for prioritizing mechanisms.

Users of enterprise networks might react in shock to such notions, as shared networks often encounter latency and bandwidth constraints that are overcome precisely by policy control. And despite increasing bandwidth on mobile networks, users and network service operators already know that congestion is a major problem.

And the evidence does not seem to support the notion that applications are not affected by congestion, or that use of two or more applications does not create externalities that impair real-time application performance.

"I measured my jitter while using Netflix (Jitter occurs when an application monopolizes a router’s transmit queue and demands that hundreds of its own packets are serviced before any other application gets a single packet transmitted) and found an average jitter of 44 milliseconds and a worse case that exceeds 1000 ms," says Ou.

The Roots of our Discontent

Political disagreements these days seem particularly intractable for all sorts of reasons, but among them are radically conflicting ideas ab...