On Rad's Radar? - data center Archives

A Little Bit of Tuesday News

2012-12-18T17:11:46Z

365 Main returns to the data center space with its completed $75 million acquisition of 16 data centers, in the US from Equinix. Some Equinix execs came along with the acquisition. The data centers - located in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburg, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa and Washington D.C. - seem like the former Switch & Data facilities. It was a great deal for 365 Main (and thier VC backers).

An interesting thing is happening, 8x8 has seen its stock increase in just the last six months from $4.25 to $7.40. What gives? Some of it is the hype around cloud. A good part of it is that the company is really hitting on all cylinders. The financials are looking good. It broke $100 million in business VoIP revenue. That's a milestone. The third reason is the PR - scoring a couple of patents and the Gartner Magic Quadrant. The final reason is that 8x8 is a good takeover target.

Sprint is busy with M&A activity. After Japan's Softbank agreed to invest $20 billion for a 70% stake in Sprint, the cellco bought some spectrum and customers from US Cellular. Now it has finalized a deal to acquire all of Clearwire. The $2.2B deal has been backed by TWC and Comcast - 2 of the three cablecos that own stakes in Clearwire. (the third is Bright House). So if all goes as planned, Sprint will own Clearwire and its spectrum, but will still have a spotty network that it needs to build out - AND will still be a distant third in the US cellular market. Another fine Hesse deal.

Cbeyond rolled out its own Broadsoft based Hosted PBX service. I have no idea how that meshes with their previous hosted Asterisk server in a cloud container. I also don't know how that will go over with its indirect channel. Cbeyond becomes just one more company to roll out Hosted PBX. Is there anyone NOT offering HPBX? The only interesting one so far is - and I hate to say it - VZ with its Virtual Communications Express. The interesting part is that it is OTT (over-the-top) and integrates with Google Apps for SMB. Thus, targeting the 4.5 million SMB's using Google Apps. Who else does that?

2 Small Acquisitions

2012-12-14T16:49:47Z

Zayo just can't help themselves. Zayo is spending $22 million to acquire Litecast/Balticore, LLC. "Litecast owns and operates the leading Baltimore metropolitan fiber network, connecting over 110 on-net buildings, including all of the city's major data centers and carrier hotel facilities. Litecast is focused on providing dark fiber and ethernet-based services to a concentrated set of Baltimore enterprise and governmental customers, particularly within the healthcare and education segments." It fills in the greater DC area for Zayo.

Alpheus today announced that it has acquired Net Star Telecommunications Inc. Net Star was Houston's 3rd largest ISP in 2006, according to the Biz Journal and the company website. No financial details were available.

The Spoken Word

2012-11-01T20:21:12Z

I gave it a shot at podcasting some of the news tidbits. It's 5 minutes. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

Alpheus is going from wholesale to Enterprise. They are going to put their 7 data centers to good use for Hosted VoIP and SIP trunking, managed security, storage and vCompute. Alpheus will be utilizing type II circuits from cable, twt, L3 and Masergy.

Hostway stopped by my desk at ITEXPO to talk about their Cloud white label platform. Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, faxing, web hosting, managed hosting, PAAS, API development, database management, technology consulting, cloud migration - are all just a part of their offerings. To me that is too many things to be good at - or even clear about.

Hostway will tailor solutions for a solution provider (CLEC, VAR, whatever), including helping you decide what customers want to buy and how to market to them.

Colologix, a Canadian data center company, has expanded into Toronto and Dallas at 151 Front and the Infomart, respectively.

Will Sandy Rain on Cloud Adoption?

2012-11-01T17:09:19Z

Storm Sandy has flooded NYC and taken out power, which has resulted in quite a few data centers to have operational issues (i.e., stop working). The data centers experiencing outages include 75 Broad Street; 33 Whitehall (Cogent); 882 3rd Ave (nLayer, XO, Cogent, Verizon, Sidera and AT&T); 111 8th Ave (Voxel, Internap); and 121 Varick. [Paetec/Windstream are having outages but no idea what data center these use. Info about outages from slashdot, CNN and here.]

This is a massive outage - and I have to wonder why the lessons of both 9/11 in NYC and Katrin in New Orleans have yet to be applied.

That said, will this disaster cause people to more likely adopt cloud or shy away from it?

Some responses from the VoIP community:

"It could encourage companies to pay attention to their Operations team and build geographically diverse POP's that can handle a disaster in another in a different region." Shouldn't they have learned that in 9/11/2001 and again in 2005 for Katrina?

"Overall I predict a huge uptick in cloud migration. The people whose buildings and servers are under water or cut off from the world will see the value of having that off-site." That may lead to collocation sales, not cloud sales.

"The cloud companies who only had one data center and are now flooded will be out of business shortly. Just like the VoIP companies that are in that situation." Good point.

"People will be attuned to the conceptual irony of the fact that clouds are bad for cloud computing?" Which was one of the survey results from Citrix - consumers think cloudy days affect cloud services. well, 75 mph winds and high tide certainly do! Hard to believe in 2012 that data centers still have required gear in the basement!

The irony is that some of the companies with outages sell disaster recovery!

(Another) Cloud Survey

2012-09-25T18:09:04Z

Big headline on SacBee: "Global Savvis Study Finds Culture Shift on IT Outsourcing, Cloud Computing - More than Half of IT Decision Makers Admit Regret on In-House Infrastructure Purchases."

here are some highlights:

"3 in 5 IT and business decision makers agree that owning and operating in-house IT infrastructure drives costs higher and wastes resources, according to an annual study from Savvis, a CenturyLink company."

"Momentum for cloud computing continues, as 85% of organizations today use private and public cloud for storage, big-data analytics and other applications."

Then I saw this: "Savvis commissioned international research firm Vanson Bourne to conduct the survey among 550 IT and business decision makers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore." That is less than 100 companies per country. It is kind of an insignificant number to most, unless you guess that the 550 companies represent the Top Prospects for Savvis.

More and more of these surveys are being done and the survey size is normally small. A small sample size means that the data may be bias or skewed towards a market segment.

2 in 5 = 40% of these 550 thing in-house IT is the way to go. Is that like the fifth dentist who doesn't want to recommend Trident? Probably not. It may mean that not everyone will go to cloud -- or will go to Private Cloud and not call it that.

The good thing is if you ARE selling cloud this is yet one more survey that you can point to as a way to say, "You are missing the boat! Jump on this cloud bandwagon now!"

Don't forget we have this survey of 1000 adults by Wakefield for Citrix " shows that while 97% use the cloud for one task or another, they don't really know what it is". Mostly what this survey says is that there is still a lot of education to be done in the marketplace before more cloud sales are made.

Equinix Sells Off Data Centers

2012-09-07T17:42:10Z

"Equinix today announced plans to sell 16 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers located throughout the United States to an investment group consisting of 365 Main, Crosslink Capital and Housatonic Partners in a transaction valued at approximately $75 million. After the close of the transaction, 365 Main will own and manage the 16 data centers, led by industry veterans Chris Dolan, CEO, and Jamie McGrath, COO."

"Nine of the 16 data centers are in markets Equinix will exit with the close of the sale. Those markets include Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, Phoenix, Pittsburg, St. Louis and Tampa. The remaining 7 data centers are in markets where Equinix will retain a presence and currently has sufficient capacity to meet customer demand. These sites include CH6 (427 La Salle, Chicago), DC9 (11513-19 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA), DA5 (4101 Bryan St., Dallas), NY10 (65 Broadway, New York), PH2 (3701 Market St., Philadelphia), SE1 (1914 Third Ave., Seattle), and SV7 (534 Stockton Ave., San Jose)." Those 16 sites represent approximately 280,000 total gross square feet of data center space - all for just $75M - including the customers. Good deal for 365 Main.

Equinix's revenue was up from $395M last quarter to $466M this quarter. No idea how much revenue is toed to these 16 centers. "Equinix estimates that the 16 data centers generate less than two percent of the company's annual revenues" which are estimated at $1.9B this year (less than $38M so 2x rev).

Rob Powell points out that 365 Main sold its original 5 data centers to Digital Realty Trust in 2010, but with new backers are getting back in the game.

Sprint Resells Cloud

2012-08-20T18:04:58Z

I don't know if you saw the announcement this morning from Sprint, but Sprint is using Parallels for cloud services - for Sprint's Carefree Cloud service and IT Helpdesk offerings.

"Bringing Office 365 to market quickly required close collaboration with Parallels and the deployment of its service delivery system, Parallels Automation. This comprehensive solution enables many of the features and use cases that differentiate Sprint's productivity suites in the marketplace."

I really like this: "This collaboration builds upon the expanding portfolio of cloud-based solutions that Sprint has been focused on launching this year. This portfolio includes Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) planned for launch in late 2012 and Sprint Complete Collaboration, a Unified-Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solution launched earlier this year. Sprint also is delivering an innovative private-label cloud services platform to wholesale customers today, enabling them to quickly deliver simple and affordable brand-name software services to SMBs."

Sprint's IAAS will be delivered through a partner, CSC. For speed to market, companies are leveraging other companies that are already in the market delivering services (or they buy them). There is a tremendous CAPEX behind do-it-yourself cloud - servers, switches, routers, power, bandwidth- and expertise. It is cheaper to buy it than build it.

"Sprint Complete Collaboration bundles all elements needed to deploy UC, including: connectivity through SIP Trunking, IP and video telephony, integrated messaging, collaboration tools, user endpoints and enhanced mobile integration." This is a Hosted Cisco offering, which is strange considering that Sprint offers an FMC (fixed mobile convergence) service via a mixture of MVNO, MPLS and Broadsoft.

While it is smart to be offering cloud services, the challenge will be deployment and on-boarding customers. That is where the rubber meets the road.

CenturyLink Merger Mania Does Add Up

2012-08-15T20:57:58Z

"CenturyLink Inc.'s (CTL) second-quarter earnings fell 36% amid early-debt extinguishment and weaker margins, though the telecom company's revenue was boosted by an acquisition," writes the WSJ. "Revenue increased 4.7% to $4.61 billion, mostly as its Savvis acquisition added $278 million, as well as growth in demand for digital services."

What amazes me is that these giants keep getting bigger and the only metric growing is debt.

It is going to take some big CAPEX to beef up cloud, data center, EoC, broadband and TV services for CLT. How do they focus on that when CAPEX will affect their financials, that is tied to their debt?

Cloud isn't selling as well as the hype that goes with it. Yet. CLT is banking on a big bright future. Truth is CLT, while still headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, is far removed from its rural ILEC days. It's future lies in federal cloud and WAN contracts; Fortune 5000 MPLS based on its fiber network; global sales for cloud, data center and networking; and data center services. None of these services were on their balance sheet 3 years ago.

Interesting corrollary is that 3 years ago, CLT didn't have a channel either. Now it's channel will be looked upon to drive a lot of cloud and data center sales.

I wonder if the CAF, ARRA and USF funds show up as revenue?

Birch Grabs Another Small CLEC

2012-08-14T19:56:06Z

Birch is expanding in the Greater Tampa Bay market with its acquisition of Daystar. Birch recently completed its acquisition of AstroTel, who I was an agent for. Daystar was a facilities-based CLEC based just south of Sarasota, with a customer base from Tampa to Naples. It gives Birch some more assets south of Tampa.

Birch refinanced recently to make room for another acquisition. I guess this was the one.

IN other acquisition news, a Carl Icahn company made a bid for Broadview Networks, according to Telecom Ramblings.

Cincinnati Bell's CyrusOne Files to do IPO. It will use the proceeds to pay off debt for Cyrus One, the ILEC's data center division. There was talk of it being arranged as a real estate investment trust like Digital Realty and DuPont Fabros. I guess it all depends on what Morgan Stanley tells them to do.

TechCrunch reported, "Colt Technology Services made an M&A move deeper into the cloud. They have acquired the channel-focused cloud platform provider ThinkGrid. ThinkGrid's network of 200+ resellers and ISVs will give Colt more options in addressing the SME marketplace." This is just another example of a telco buying channel partners, skills, revenue and a portfolio for a push into cloud services.

Andy Abramson blogged the question, "Did PhonePower Acquire Broadvoice?" They both have the same address, but that could just be a cost saver.

Cloud Outages

2012-07-31T20:46:21Z

I have seen this headline a couple of times in the last month: Cloud Customers at the Mercy of Providers! It's just ridiculous. We left a five-nine world a while ago. Redundancy does not fix everything. And to put it into perspective, to run redundancy on your own Hosted Exchange server would be expensive from a labor and hardware standpoint. It would also be complex and not automatic.

Even when youtry to build in redundancy (like Netflix did by utilizing different sectors of AWS), it sometimes fails. We have seen outages this year by Google, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, twitter, Rackspace, Salesforce and probably others I am unaware of. I don't think this will slow down cloud adoption. People choose cloud for reasons that have nothing to do with redundancy. Cloud is financially efficient (as Savvis puts it), flexible, and available from any authorized and enabled device. It also removes a required skill set off the books. In other words, businesses can focus on their own business and not on tech or IT. In addition, the remote/virtual/mobile workforce grows every year, driving more cloud adoption. There is no going back.

Think about doing it yourself. You would need the following:

data center room or NOC;
generator that has to be tested and maintained;
battery backup - tested, maintained and environmentally sound;
servers, switches, routers, fiber-channel, power channels;
duplicate gear;
fire suppression system;
compliance certificates;
licensing for any software;
client software or apps for every O/S - mobile and desk;
Internet capacity for remote access;
redundant Internet pipe;
VPN or other security device with RADIUS for access authorization;
staff that knows how to handle all of this stuff, 24x7;
power usage;
air conditioning;

The CAPEX would be large (which is one reason buyers choose cloud) and the labor costs - hiring, retaining, training, benefits, etc. - would be high - and in some cases scarce. And despite the outlay of capital - human and otherwise - there is no guarantee that you can keep it up 99.99% of the time - which means about 1 hour of downtime per year.

I'm not defending the outages, just saying that this will be expected behavior, just like dropped cellphone calls and faxes that required three or more retries.

Various Tidbits

2012-07-11T16:40:49Z

Two of my pals work at Counterpath. It went on NASDAQ today. Congrats! "CounterPath Corporation (OTCBB: CPAH) (TSX-V: CCV), an award-winning provider of desktop and mobile VoIP software products and solutions, today announced that its common stock will commence trading on the NASDAQ Capital Market on July 11, 2012. The stock will continue to trade under the symbol "CPAH" on the NASDAQ Capital Market and under the symbol "CCV" on the TSX Venture Exchange." Counterpath is a Vancouver, BC, Canada, company. Big VoIP/tech hub there.

CenturyLink wants more than the 30% of the $300M USF reform fund called Connect America. In fact, they want to overbuild on existing WISP's with that money. WISPA Opposes the new federal Subsidies for CenturyLink. Personally, I don't think that any LEC or MSO should receive federal funds. If we had the best broadband in the world, I would say okay - that's worth the money. We don't. They spend more than $300M in lobbbying per year!! Spend that money on broadband. Plus there are small businesses called Wireless ISP's already in that market that C-Link is going to spend tax dollars to put out of business! That's the Corporate Way!

MegaPath has the largest Ethernet over Copper footprint in the US. There are 600 Central Offices with ADTRAN Total Access 5000 gear to provide facilities-based EoC up to 20 MB.

Data Centers are growing. That was actually a headline yesterday. No kidding!

Health Care: What HIPAA Means for Data Centers. My understanding is that transport isn't a worry - and there is no such thing as HIPAA compliant transport! It is all about the storage, security and handling of the medical records - physical or electronic. That also means data centers have to be secure and tracking visitors, in case one gets access to a storage device. BTW, it is HIPAA, not HIPPA. How can you even say you are compliant if you get the acronymn wrong?!

Dell Voice is offered in Canada as a competitor to Vonage Mobile. Dell Voice is now on Blackberry, just in time for their corporate jet auction.

XO introduces a purple logo and a new XO Partner Program.

I remember all the WinTel articles about the Intel-Microsoft alliance dominating tech in the 90s. Today, not so much.

Voice Carrier wasn't thinking when it named itself. Branding rule number 1: if they can't find you in search, you don't exist. Didn't you learn anything from Xerox or Kleenex?

"Today services like Dropbox give people access to their work anywhere, any time, on any device, and users love it. (52% of our survey respondents said Dropbox is used in their organizations. Only 12% of IT departments are supporting it.)" How Mobile Consumer Devices Drive Cloud Applications in Enterprise IT.

Are you like a dog with a bone about anything?

Good News from CenturyLink Channel

2012-07-10T18:21:05Z

Sat in on the CenturyLink Channel Alliance - Get back in the Game Roadshow in Tampa this morning. It was nice to see Stacy Conrad from Microcorp; Josh Anderson and his co-workers from Telephony Partners; Dale Tucker from CCA; and put a face to an old Qwest SE, William Hobbs, now a CCA Emerging Sales Technology Consultant (ETSC) for Florida. Hobbs did a nice job on Why VPDC and The Benefit of Cloud over Colo. The roadshow had 3 parts (Hobbs did part 2):

New Savvis-CenturyLink Phase II Rules of Engagment overview;
Cloud/Hosting Solutions portfolio;
Third Party Data Center Updates/E-Line;

Dale Tucker went over the Rules of Engagement, You definitely need charts and glossaries to follow along the categories and acronymns. Basically, colocation, managed hosting, virtual private data center (VPDC), public cloud, private cloud, and managed servcies (like Hosted Microsoft Exchange) are all available to the Channel to sell at full commission - unless you engage an account exec - then it is HALF!

For agents used to working with AE's, this will be a bummer. However, half is better than zero. Also, with the ETSC as your godfather inside the C-Link-Qwest-Savvis beast, you won't need the AE.

A lot of colo and data center business comes from the Channel.

And for those that do not know how to sell Colocation and Data Center, the TCA has done quite a few webinars, including Getting Your Arms Around the Cloud by Allan Watkins of Total Telecom Management n Atlanta and Let's Talk Colo, moderated by Khali Henderson of Channel Partners magazine and featuring Dany Bouchedid of COLOTRAQ and Chris Palermo of GCN.

Tucker did mention that Savvis is working on a sales certification for colo and hosting. This silo will be a huge focus for C-Link it seems, especially with 54 data centers

Hobbs spoke about not talking about the technology of cloud, but about the business side of cloud, especially cloud services like VPDC and Compute-on-demand. It's about right sizing the data center. It's about OPEX versus CAPEX. It's about DR/BC. It's about getting out of the IT business and back to their own business focus.

C-Link also has an initiative to light up data centers with C-Link network - wave, IP-VPN, MPLS and Internet Bandwidth. There are 154 data centers now. In Jacksonville, FL, C-Link is putting in a ring to connect CSX, Peak10, Colo5 and the C-Link data center on a metro fiber ring. C-Link is also connecting 4 data centers in Charlotte on a metro ring. AboveNet did something similar in Atlanta by connecting almost all the data centers on a metro fiber ring. Agents can easily sell ELine, IQ Port, Private Port and WAVE into these 154 lit buildings.

Hobbs pointed out that the integration is going well with CenturyLink-Qwest-Savvis.

Fiber and Data Centers

2012-05-28T22:38:13Z

For fiber today, it is all about 3 things: exclusive route, low-latency and data center access.

We see a number of fiber operators talking about low latency routes now, something that AboveNet was already capitalizing on - that and its unique (non CO-based) network design.

"Zayo Group announces it is enhancing its low latency service between Seattle and Chicago." In addition, Zayo added 60 miles in Richmond that will connect to a data center campus. Data centers need fiber. Apparently, they also need low-latency routes, which, by the way, means staying on one carriers network end-to-end.

Sidera is offering ultra-low-latency fiber in Toronto, NYC and London.

Exclusive routes are the key to high margins. When you have a route, say, from Chicago to NYC, there are a number of carriers, so it becomes a commodity, unless there are differentiating factors, like low-latency or diverse paths. A number of fiber providers, like FiberLight, have been building out their network. This gives them reach and, in some cases, exclusive fiber paths.

To that point, Lightower Fiber Networks has announced a new 21-mile network expansion n Providence, Rhode Island. Lightower is also expanding its existing colo facility in RI. (Who knew RI had a data center?) In February, "Lightower Fiber Networks opened a new office at 101 Eisenhower Parkway in Roseland, New Jersey. The office will support the increasing demand that Lightower is experiencing in the region for end-to-end fiber networking."

Data center space is just exploding. Most of that growth is due to more cloud services, more data storage, and the pervasive utilization of IT by companies big and small.

To wit, the Palm Beach area of Florida is getting some new data centers. "Both Equinix and Peer 1 are set to open up in Blue Lake in Boca Raton in a few months and they will dominate the Palm Beach market which previously only had Host.net," according to S. Chris Palermo of GCN, a telecom agency that specializes in data centers. Cloud South took over a data center that was designed and built by Global Crossing in 2003 on 424 Hampton Road, West Palm Beach, FL. "Enterprise Florida, the official economic development organization for the State of Florida, reports South Florida as among the world's Top 5 Internet gateways." That explains the Miami NAP and the numerous data centers in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale corridor. Host.Net is an established player in South Florida with a data center in Boca Raton and another in Ft. Lauderdale (the old Hostway and Affinity Internet/ValueWeb space). Host.Net also owns WV Fiber, which gives them up to 10GB of connectivity across the US and Internationally. Most data centers can not claim that.

Owning the network is a security benefit, according to this video from PEER1

And in a last nugget of news: "Data centre solution provider Digital Realty Trust has entered into a joint venture with Savvis, a cloud infrastructure and IT solutions company, to provide next generation, large co-location and managed cloud services to Hong Kong," according to LBO.

Data centers are booming. Cloud services are taking off. Do you still want to stand on the sidelines?

Cincinnati Bell to Spin Off Data Centers

2012-05-04T17:02:23Z

Last week when asked, I said that I did not see Cincinnati Bell spinning off its data centers. One reason was that the ILEC would be left with a declining wireline business and debt, which was the reason that CinBell had pursued a data center acquisition -- to offset the line losses.

This week, CinBell announced that it will examine spinning off Cyrus One as a REIT (real estate investment trust). The IPO will bring in much needed cash to pay down debt - $2.5B.With the data center business up 21% to $53M, CinBell is expanding the data center space.

Cincinnati Bell 1Q 2012 revenue is $363 million. Wireless revenue for the quarter is $64 million; Total wireless subscribers decreased to 446,000. Postpaid ARPU in 1Q2012 increased to $50.82 with Postpaid churn for the quarter at 2.2 percent. [source]

Wireline revenue for the quarter was $182 million - down less than 1%. CinBell is offsetting wireline (copper) revenue with FTTH.

"Total local access lines declined 7.8% year over year to 621,300 at the end of 2011, and comprised 552,400 in-territory lines and 68,900 out-of-territory lines," Zacks states.

"The company passed 13,000 additional homes and businesses during the quarter with its Fioptics product suite, bringing the total number of units passed to 147,000. Wireline added 3,000 new Fioptics entertainment subscribers and 4,000 new Fioptics high-speed internet subscribers during the first quarter, bringing the totals to 43,000 entertainment and high-speed internet subscribers at the end of the quarter," reported Seeking Alpha.

I wonder if cell churn is due to coverage or handset choices.

I don't know what the IT Services and Hardware segment is but it increased 4% to $73M.

Some Stuff Happened While I Was on Daycation

2012-04-23T18:23:04Z

I was taking today and tomorrow off to visit with some pals but the news won't quit.

In the I-can't-stand-it zone, the University of Florida decides that TD's are more important than IT and cuts the Computer Science Department. Just when Florida is playing host to the Rupublican Convention and is looking to make a name for itself, that name becomes DUM or MUD. In a time when we need more science and computer nerds, the state U decides to go a different way.

In Tampa, the former CEO of Savvis has closed his e-commerce company, Savtira, after a flurry of promises to hire 200 people and a number of odg and pony shows about the hot future. Apparently, he has done this before.

Cbeyond has decided that traditional agents are not its future. The Cloud has different demands and demands different partners.

Coresite bought Comfluent to enter the Denver market. "Comfluent plays a vital role in the interconnection community in the western U.S., serving more than 75 customers and managing the Rocky Mountain Internet eXchange (RMIX), the region's largest Internet exchange with access to more than 25 networks. Comfluent currently leases two sites that total approximately 9,300 NRSF," according to the SunHerald

Verizon Wireless wants its deal with the cablecos / SpectrumCo to go through, so it promised to sell off some spectrum. T-Mobile and others think that is just smoke and the deal should still be axed. [see here and there]

Tucows, a domain registrar and fellow ISPCON standard, runs an MVNO called TING.

Vodafone is bidding $1.7B USD to buy Cable & Wireless, according to Rueters

Linux talent will be important in 2013, especially in data centers, reports the Channel Insider

Alex Doyle left Broadsoft for Polycom. Good luck at the new position, Alex!

from Tony: An Insider's Guide to Technology Analysts

Dean Parker, CEO of Callis in Mobile, AL, has been selected in the top 12 finalists for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Alabama/Tennessee/ Georgia region.