Recently in telco Category

• Cbeyond Reports $90.2 in Q3 Revenues, up 25 Percent
• Sprint Nextel $600 Million of Debt Coming Due Is Only One Worry - but they have $3B in cash??? Use it to buy a cool phone - T-Mobile, AT&T and VZW are killing Sprint because they have better phones. Handsets drive cellular. Period.
• EarthLink has a $54.7M profit last quarter!
• I forget that taxes play a huge part in mergers - that's why Embarq & Windstream didn't merge; it plays a part in XO's life (NOL's); and it certainly played a role in the VZ New England spin-off to Fairpoint.
• Sprint and Cogent re-connect but continue fighting
• JD Power's ISP Ratings are in (here). Cablevision, WOW!, Cox and bright House won.

Fresh off of buying Wayport for global wi-fi expansion, AT&T buys Centennial Wireless - $944M for 1.1 million cell subs.  AT&T is either at the point that they have to keep buying to keep the growth going or they have Monopoly Madness.

The FCC voted today too. They took the Inter-Carrier Compensation and USF off the agenda, much to Martin's dismay.

"Federal regulators have approved a plan to open up unused, unlicensed portions of the television airwaves known as "white spaces" to deliver wireless broadband service." [Y! news] [fcc.gov]

FCC approved, with conditions, the mergers of Sprint-Nextel/Clearwire and  Alltel-Verizon. [fcc.gov]

FCC opened an investigation into the pricing policies of major cable operators and Verizon. "The agency wants to ensure the companies' customers are getting treated fairly, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in an interview with The Associated Press." [Y! news]

Frontier Communications has added a download cap to its Internet service. It will charge folks for heavy usage.

The company caused confusion and some dismay among customers earlier this year, when it said it would charge for Internet use above 5 gigabytes per month, starting next year. [tbo.com]

What's most interesting is the comments. People are not happy about caps.

Caps are not new. We had time limits in the dial up days. (When you can only access at 33K, time is the limiting factor.) Satellite has always had bandwidth caps on its Internet service. It will become more pervasive as revenues for ISP's decline in this economy.

UPDATE:  AT&T Trials Tiered Broadband in Nevada

from today's HARO:

"The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley is now accepting applications to present to their Investor Forum on December 5th, location in Silicon Valley (TBA).

 Over the past 6 years, 50% of presenters to our Service Provider and Investor Forums have started talks with our members and 20% of those lead to a deal.
This Quarterly Investor Forum meeting attendees include both the Service Provider and Investor members of the Telecom Council who gather for one purpose - to invest in new telecom technologies and companies. As a start-up in the telecom industry, there is no better room to be in, and no better audience to pitch to. In addition to providing high level networking and quality investment opportunities to our forum members, another one of the Telecom Councils goals is to help interesting start-ups kick start their business development cycles. For an idea of who to expect at our December meeting, past attendees include AT&T, Sprint, Orange, Vodafone and many more.

It is free to apply and applications to present to the 12/5 Investor Forum will be accepted until 11/8. Please submit requests at:
http://www.telecomcouncil.com/speakers.php
All applications are reviewed by the Investor Forum steering committee, and companies selected to present will be notified on November 10. Presenter registration is free for Telecom Council members, or $500 for non-members.
Feel free to contact Liz Kerton for more information on the forum, liz (at) telecomcouncil.com."

According to Businessweek, telecom could get squeezed by the credit crunch - and Sprint could get hurt the most."To start with, rising capital costs are likely to take a bite out of earnings. In addition, the softening economy will probably crimp demand for such telecom services as land lines, cell phones, and Internet connections."

AT&T sounded the first warning signal in late September, when CEO Randall Stephenson said the telecom giant was unable to sell commercial paper for terms longer than overnight. AT"T is the industry's biggest user of commercial paper, with about $8.5 billion in paper outstanding at the end of June.

Although Verizon is not a big player in the commercial paper market, it does have $7 billion of debt coming up for renewal in 2009. The company also needs to borrow another $22 billion to pay for its acquisition of wireless carrier Alltel Wireless....

Sprint is the most leveraged carrier. It holds a junk bond rating and its ratio of debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (or EBITDA) is expected to reach 3.2, Bernstein's Moffett says.

And again, these companies building out 3G and 4G networks with massive backhauls at a huge cost while revenues are dipping. How does that math work?

There is a lot of activity in the International arena. Here are some highlights:

• Vodacom is acquiring Gateway Communications in West and Central Africa. 
• C&W is partnering with Vietnam Data Communications Company and BSNL in India.  
• France Telecom (Orange) acquired 51% of Telkom Kenya. 
• Telefonica now has a 9.9% stake in China Netcom. 
• XO reaches into China with China Netcom. 
• Google, Liberty Media and others are launching 03b, a satellite internet service that will consist of a cluster of 16 satellites delivering wholesale internet access to Asia, Africa, Mid-East, and Latin America.
• Verizon and Google are launching  Trans-Pacific cable (separately).

That's the round up in a nutshell (thanks to Capacity magazine).

The FCC is holding a meeting on Nov. 4. On the agenda: Inter-Carrier Compensation, Alltel-VZ merger, Clearwire-Sprint merger, and a vote of White Spaces. Lots of heavy lifting on this agenda. Martin wants to give his pals at VZ one more gift before he goes.

The VZ-Alltel merger is big, but the topic that can really rock telecom is the Inter-carrier Comp issue, which has been a stagnant FCC docket for years.

If companies can show high costs, they will continue to benefit from the subsidy program. Martin also wants to eliminate wireless providers' right to claim government subsidies for offering service in hard-to-reach areas. Martin wants all companies, wireless included, to show they have incurred losses in providing rural service before they can collect the subsidy. Without those changes, Martin worries that the subsidy fund will collapse of its own weight and rates will go up anyhow. [CNN]

It depends want the Compromise looks like -- and it will be a large compromise. Democrats want one thing. Republicans another. Cellcos versus Wireline. Rural versus Urban. Inter-Carrier Comp even bleeds into the USF issue. How? Because rural carriers count on both Universal Service Fund subsidies AND rather high call termination charges to keep afloat.

Why now? The ISP inter-carrier comp rule has been in court for six years. Earlier this year, the DC Court ruled that the FCC had to get off the pot:

The court set the deadline for an order from the FCC at November 5, 2008, six months from the date of oral argument, stated it will not grant an extension and warned that if an appropriate order is not timely issued, it will vacate the interim inter-carrier compensation rules.

Consumer groups are against another largess for the monopolies at the expense of the ratepayers.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission wants a massive overhaul of the fees that phone companies pay each other when they connect calls. Supporters say the reforms will help fund improved broadband Internet access for rural America, but consumer advocates question how much the plan will raise people's phone bills. "This could be potentially a billion-dollar giveaway to phone monopolies, paid for out of consumers' pocketbooks," said Chris Murray, an attorney with Consumers Union. [AP]

Intercarrier comp is how the various phone companies pay each other for traffic. VoIP providers and cellular carriers, especially Sprint, would like a fairer shake. The old RBOCs would like the Rural LEC's to stop getting so much money. (see Free Conference services not getting paid by RBOCs).

The National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, which represents small phone carriers, told FCC officials earlier this month that a new rate of $0.0007 per minute puts many of their members' livelihoods at risk.

And then there is the White Spaces issue. When broadcasters make the DTV transition in 1Q09, there will be unused spectrum that the Wireless World would like to use for its own bandwidth needs. However, due to bleed over (interference) with cordless microphones and other broadcasting devices, the NAB is opposed. [see dailywireless]

All of this is at one meeting while America votes.

Nuvox is out kicking tires to see who they can buy. Rumor has it that Greenville-based Nuvox is looking to buy One Communications in the Northeast to expand their footprint, especially their MPLS reach. (I didn't know Nuvox sold MPLS. I thought they were just a cheap Integrated T1 supplier).

Rumor also has it that One Comm. is having problems. Provisioning being one of them, which usually leads to sales declining. Customers don't like install issues and neither do agents, since it costs them time - time they need to be out selling to make up for the shrinking commissions. (The shrinking commissions correlate to the shrinking prices).

Nuvox is coming off its merger with FDN last year that created a good amount of internal strife as former Nuvox folks didn't relate well to FDN people. Maybe that has been straightened out. Here's hoping another merger will have better integration.

UPDATE: In another rumor, it's Nuvox will get bought by XO to increase its VoIP customer base. (And because privately held Nuvox has debt coming due end of 2008).

In a discussion on LinkedIn, it seems that IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) isn't killing it in terms of measuring up to the hype. According to Ericsson, an IMS proponent and vendor,

"IMS is defined by 3GPP/3GPP2 as a new core and service 'domain' that enables the convergence of data, speech and network technology over an IP-based infrastructure. It is the operator choice of control and service logic for primarily IP/packet-based person-to-person communication but also for person-to-content communication.

For users, IMS-based services will enable communications in a variety of modes - including voice, text, pictures and video, or any combination of these - in a highly personalized and secure way.

The most widely deployed application on IMS are: Instant Messaging, Presence, Push-To-Talk and Video Sharing. There is lackluster customer appeal so far.

IMS was supposed to help to be like cartilage between the legacy telecom architecture and IP-based next gen systems. It was supposed to reduce OPEX and enable new services quickly to the end users. Likely that has not all been worked out yet, although SKT and AT&T are working on it.

Informa's IMS Conference is next month. Here's one guy's preview.