Thanksgiving and Hanukkah this week mixed with winter weather in many parts of the US has made for a slow week, but a busy travel week. Soon, thanks to the new FCC Chair Wheeler, that passenger barely squeezed into the ever shrinking airline seat next you will soon be able to use his cell phone on the flight - further annoying already annoyed people.
Blackberry has a new CEO, John Chen, who is making $88 million to sell them off, because if his tenure at Sybase is any indication, he isn't a turn around exec.
After 34 years as chairman of Level3, Walter Scott is retiring. Does this mean that L3 can now take a new direction? Or post a quarter of profit?
XO has let one of its channel heads go. Tom Gorey exits XO after 8 years. Gorey is just one of a number of folks I know in the job market right now. But Christopher Ancell Joins XO Communications as Chief Executive Officer.
Dreamforce 2013 had 135,000 attendees!
In the bet on Desktop-as-a-Service, IndependenceIT won again this week with an investment from the former Terremark CFO.
The big rumor coming out of CNBC and WSJ is that TWC is for sale - and that Charter and Comcast are vying for it. Interesting. I wonder if Wheeler's FCC would allow a TWC-Comcast merger. It might have to be split up between Charter and Comcast. TWC has a $39B market cap today with $25B in debt. The buyer will be laden with debt since most MSO's are already carrying a large debt load (and in the case of Charter, it's junk status according to Forbes.)
I'd also like to know what Wheeler's FCC is going to do about the AT&T Special Access rate hikes. Special Access circuits are used to access most of the single tenant commercial buildings in the US. The RBOCs - VZ & ATT - own the majority of them. The RBOCs want out of the copper plant business to focus on Enterprise and Wireless, but the rest of the market relies on those circuits to deliver service. Windstream is the one of the loudest complainers. That might be due to the low margin that they provide services.
Speaking of rate hikes, EarthLink is adding a new fee! "On our customer's January 2014 invoice they will see a 5% increase in the monthly recurring charges for certain services and features in each of the following categories of service if applicable to the service package: data, internet, local and long distance voice service." EarthLink will be adding an Administrative Support Charge. Customers pushed back on this fee before. I figure my phone will be ringing soon. This is the type of crap that makes telecom look like a joke. We have fraud and scams and random fees to increase revenue. Thanks!
ANPI hired Shawn Coyle as vice president of business development. He will report to Michael Cromwell, chief sales officer.
