As the Telecom World Spins

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

As the Telecom World Spins

It is happening so fast. Here's this week in M&A:

CenturyLink just sold off its data center business that was a combo of Qwest Cyber Centers and SAVVIS to a group of PE firms for $2.15B in cash and C-Link keeps a minority stake worth $150M in the new company. CL bought Savvis for $2.5B in 2011. Buy High; Sell Low. Bell-Head Mentality.

The PE coalition that bought the data centers also grabbed 4 cyber-security firms in order to announce this global security co, to be run by Manny Medina, former CEO of Terremark Worldwide.

Wired's headline says it best: The World's Telecoms Are Under Threat From All Sides.

Broadband, cellular and voice are all flat or declining markets.

IAAS and PAAS are ruled by Amazon, IBM and Google. Microsoft only got into the game recently and is doing better than all the telco's combined.

PE firms are buying up data centers as the world adjust to cloud computing, an app market and streaming TV and radio.

DDoS attacks are happening too often. So are Hacks. There are not enough fingers to fill all the holes in this dyke.

UCaaS is ruled by 8x8, Vonage Business, RingCentral, Fuze and a bunch of other providers that are not a telco. The PBX market may be shrinking but not fast enough for the other Hosted VoIP players. Cisco and Microsoft have chunks of the enterprise UCaaS business that the telcos don't.

Comcast Business is at $6B in annual revenue, which makes it a bigger CLEC than almost all that are left. WIND does $5B. EarthLink less than $1B. Birch and TelePacific are private. Level3 does $8B. CenturyLink does $17B (much of it ILEC revenue). Zayo is $2B.

Apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype and Slack are replacing voice and SMS and even email. It is a topsy-turvy world. What's a telco to do? Well, merge! Get bigger because bigger solves nothing, but it makes money for top execs in the C-Suite and the Board room and on Wall Street.

Our economy spins on e-commerce and the Internet. When the companies that provide that Internet are too clunky to do it properly, what happens to our economy?

We went from a five nines voice network of reliability to cell phones and VoIP that quite frankly can't be more than three nines. Have you noticed the number of outages lately by telcos and cablecos?

There is a lot going on. There are many areas of opportunity, but the fall back from these guys is "more of the same", "do what I know" and "one more quarter!". None of these transactions is good for the industry, the economy or the consumers. They are stop gap, short term money movers. We are going to wake up shortly and realize that it is 1970 all over again. It makes the NSA job easier when there are few players, but what about the customers?

In the data center space, one master agency contacted me after the C-Link announcement to tell me that the folks at CenturyLink have no details about the sale. How can that be when Monroe has been trying to sell the DC division all year? Great planning, guys!

Whose customer is it? Will the agent still get paid? Will the customer see a price increase? Who is the billing entity? Who will the customer be paying? These are good questions that bothered some TELX customers when Digital Realty took over.

I keep seeing executives at master agencies say these deals are good. Do they say that in print because they have to?

Don't forget that you can leave a public comment with the FCC on any of these mergers. You can voice your opinion here. You will need a docket number but you can google it after the filings are in the system.



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