Allied Fiber’s CEO, Hunter Newby, will speak at next week’s Broadband Properties Summit event being held April 26-28 in Dallas, TX. Hunter is speaking on the Economic Development program on Thursday, April 28. This panel will include discussions on creative tax and other incentives, removal of barriers to entry, strengthening America’s educational system, and meeting the needs of vulnerable populations. Panelists in this session will also cover what their companies can contribute to achieving America’s economic development goals.

In addition to the economic development program, the summit will also will feature legal and regulatory tracks and a rural telecommunications conference-within-a-conference. Attendees will hear about the latest technologies like high-bandwidth, ultra-short-range DSL and Ethernet from ONTs.

For more information on Allied Fiber, visit www.alliedfiber.com.

By Jaymie Scotto Cutaia

Level 3 Communications says it will buy IP solutions and networking provider Global Crossing. The transaction is valued at $23.04 per share, or approximately $3 billion, including the assumption of approximately $1.1 billion of net debt from Global Crossing. The deal will be an all-stock transaction.

Already folks are speculating on why this deal is huge news.  Acccording to Dean Takahashi on Deals & More, “the deal brings a much-needed consolidation to the broadband market, where the potential for traffic growth is huge but the major players have been hurt by low prices.”

And Gigaom says that the deal will give Level 3 more clout to negotiate with bigger telecommunications players, such as Comcast, even as network ownership consolidates into the hands of fewer players.

But can we boil this down further?

Both L3 and Global Crossing are losing money.  Level3 lost $622 million last year and hasn’t turned a profit since 1998, according to Mr. Takahshi.  And Global Crossing lost $172 million in 2010 and it last turned an annual profit in 2003.

So why now and why an all-stock transaction?  How can a negative and a negative add up to a positive?  What’s the real pay-off here?

Let’s go back to the quote from John Legere, the CEO of Global Crossing, in the official press release, which stated, “The timing of this combination is perfect. The demand for online content – in all its forms – has created unprecedented demand for bandwidth, and our combined platform will enable us to move massive amounts of content around the world, largely on our own facilities, under our control. The need to bring scale to the market is more important than ever before, and that is something that the combined company will have – in spades.”

As Mr. Legere stressed, the deal is all about “on our own facilities, under our control”. This is a direct reference to owning- and therefore controlling the fiber.  The telecom world is quickly dividing into two factions: those who have fiber and those who do not.

This critical infrastructure— and then the power to select whom has access to this infrastructure–   is becoming an apparent, all-out battle.  It stirs up the old net neutrality argument— and how those who have control over the last mile of fiber can thereby dictate the terms, especially for the enterprise market.  So how do we right this ship and get out of the death spiral?  I’ll tell you this: I’m not holding my breath until Global Crossing and Level3 let me have access to their fiber stock.

We need an immediate, carrier and network-neutral, dark fiber provider that is willing to incur the outrageous start-up costs (ideally with government support- if Obama is still interested in his big broadband push) so we can actually lay the much-needed fiber ducts across the expansive USA, to allow folks in the Bible Belt- and the non-NFL cities- to have access to choice and to ‘fiber freedom’.  We need to take the technology that’s blossoming on the east and west coast – and bring it to rural America who could use the fiber and connectivity and access for increasing the wealth of education, starting businesses and saving the family farms.  As a woman who spends her time between the city and the country, and sees the disparity between “those who have” and “those who have not” on a regular basis, it’s time to connect our country.

The 2011 SubTel Forum had a great article called “2011: The Year of the Investment to Neutral, Dark Fiber Network Infrastructure” — and it points out clearly that this is Allied Fiber’s plan— to build the necessary dark fiber infrastructure and give access to all.  And that this fiber plan can be duplicated in metro communities, over and over again, and similar to the Internet, can branch out and reach the hard-to-reach.

This sounds more like the big deal to me.

Does the Fixed Network have a future in Africa?

The leading heads of Africa’s telcos take the temperature of the region’s somewhat crowded telecoms market

How much is too much?

If you’re talking about telecom operators in Ghana, then 200,000 is too much.

That was the view of attendees at the Next Generation Telecoms Africa Summit 2011 which was held in Nairobi from 25-27 January 2011.

At this closed door summit, hosted by GDS International, around 100 C-level participants looked at a range of topics, including the future of the fixed network in Africa.

According to Eric Valentine, Head of Networks Vodafone Ghana, the fixed network can be a key differentiator and there is significant economic advantage to converging the mobile and fixed architecture.

“A major stumbling block, however, is that some markets have too many operators. For example, Ghana has around 200,000 operators who are currently active, including MTN, Tigo, Vodafone, Kasapa and Airtel. The benefits of a fixed line network can be diluted by too many operators,” says Valentine.

Similarly, the advent of mobile technology has meant that investment in fixed technology has been greatly reduced. “So what we did was push people into the fibre network to keep the numbers high. But unfortunately this didn’t work so well.”

Vodafone Ghana even considered selling the fixed line part of its business in the West African nation. “Data growth in fixed ADSL will hopefully bring in more revenue and add huge value. What we’re doing now is targeting the high value cabinet areas. We’re retraining people to interact with their customers and dealing with BT to come and train our staff. We also need to be smarter on workforce management and use tolls in OOS and BSS to do this. Call centres need accurate information because the fixed network is very complex with switches as old as 15 years.”

Looking ahead, Valentine says the next step is to shut down all of the legacy exchanges and evolve to IP transport using CPN and new MPLS infrastructure. “We can then look at backhaul on fixed assets and femtocell technology for improved indoor coverage. There has been a huge surge in data through dongles, so we will be upgrading the internet gateways (multi-service access nodes). We think that simplifying and modifying is the way to go.”

Valentine says Vodafone Ghana plans to start by replacing ageing equipment and launching an aggressive sales campaign for broadband services.

“Customer obsession is the key, the digital divide is closing and data is growing so we need to ensure that we’re not isolated with only one option.”

More than 100 of the industry’s top experts gathered at the Next Generation Telecoms Africa Summit 2011 which was held in Nairobi from 25-27 January 2011. A key opportunity for some of the most respected names in the African telecoms industry to network and engage in a clear and focused dialogue, the Summit also featured key speakers Nizar Dalloul, Founder and Chairman/CEO of Essar Telecom; Patrick Puges, VP Emerging Markets Networks and IT, France Telecom/Orange and Glen Lewis, GVP International Telecoms & Networking, IDC.

The next, Next Generation Telecoms Africa Summit will be hosted by GDS International in Cape Town, South Africa from 13-15th September 2011.

For more information, visit www.ngtafricasummit.com/

Regulation in telecoms industry could kick-start economic growth

The telecoms industry could hold the key to unlocking economic growth and stimulating the global economy – if the regulators get it right.

The global economy may be limping towards the shores of recovery, but the United Nations (UN) predicts that new approaches to regulating information and communication technology (ICT) could help to stimulate investment and growth by rolling out new networks and upgrading technology.

According to a report from the UN International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Trends in Telecommunications Reform, demand for services such as mobile telephones and broadband internet have remained buoyant, despite the economic crisis, with mobile subscriptions set to exceed six billion this year. 

“The industry is currently undergoing a generational shift from fixed telephones networks to mobile connections of all types, next generation networking and broadband wireless networks,” says the report.

Previously clear borders among telephones, broadcasting and online services are being eroded, with people able to watch movies on their computers and programming being downloaded on mobile phones.

Hamadoun Toure, the ITU’s Secretary-General, was reported as saying ICT regulators play a key role in fostering ongoing innovation and competition, “enabling operators to adopt the latest, most powerful technologies and ensuring consumers enjoy the very best range of services at the lowest possible prices”.

Toure admits the economic crisis has sounded the alarm for the need for effective regulation, “and the need for dialogue on the role of Government, which is now considering the need for State intervention to ensure, among other elements, the development of a ‘broadband economy’.”

Furthermore, the report argues that regulators and policy-makers can tackle the potential risk for under-investment in tomorrow’s networks through a two-pronged approach that involves Government-backed funding programmes and effective regulatory strategies and policies.

The role of the telecoms industry in global economic growth is no doubt one of the issues that will be on the agenda at the Next Generation Telecoms MENA Summit 2011, which takes place from 31 October to 2 November at The Meydan Hotel, Jumeirah, Dubai. This closed-door summit, hosted by GDS International, features some of the leading voices in the MENA telecoms sector.

Along with telecoms regulation, other key topics for discussion include maximising mobile broadband profitability, the telco cloud opportunity and mobile payments.

Next Generation Telecoms MENA Summit 2011 is an exclusive C-level event reserved for 100 participants that includes expert workshops, facilitated roundtables, peer-to-peer networks and co-ordinated meetings.

For more information, visit www.ngtsummitmena.com

Recently Rick Peppers, President of  TelPlexus, Inc., spoke with Jaymie Scotto Cutaia at the Telecom One on One networking event colocated at ITEXPO East.  Rick joined other industry thought leaders to discuss trends and developments in the IT marketplace.

As a long-standing engineering firm dedicated to the telecommunications industry, TelPlexus has been helping clients of all sizes through the complexities of IT engineering and broadband network deployments.

Check out the video below and learn more about TelPlexus.

For more information, please visit: www.telplexus.com.

To follow the latest updates and discussions on Twitter, click HERE

Jaymie Scotto & Associates invites you to take advantage of the early-bird savings until midnight on January 5th for the Telecom One-on-One (T1on1) Power Networking Event colocated with ITEXPO. The event is being held on February 1st, 2010 in Miami, FL.  T1on1 is an industry networking event aimed at bringing buyers and sellers of telecom networks together to conduct business. Register now and receive the early-bird discount, saving you 28% on registration fees.

The Miami event is projected to be the largest T1on1 event to date! T1on1 attracts top thought leaders from companies like: Allied Fiber, Arbinet, CSF Corporation, Deutsche Telekom, DIDXchange, GlobeNet, HyperCube, INOC, Oak Tree IT Consulting, One Source Networks, PacketExchange, PGi, Starview Technology, Telx, Tinet, XKL, and more. To view a complete list of registered attendees please visit, http://telecom1on1-itexpo2011.eventbrite.com.

Once registered, attendees can schedule meetings using our online meeting management system, DealCenter. Request and arrange your meeting schedule before, during and after the event. All meetings occur on-site, in 20-minute intervals, throughout the three-hour event.

Sponsorships are still available; if you are interested in becoming a sponsor of T1on1 please contact events@jaymiescotto.com. View a list of available sponsorships at http://www.jaymiescotto.com/clients/documents/NewJSAEventSponsorship-MiamiFL_001.pdf.

We hope to see you in Miami!

The glory days of an unlimited broadband appear to be nearing an end as ISPs look to implement caps and metered pricing for broadband services. In the not-so-distant-future, broadband users will be forced to pay on a metered basis in the same way as other utilities such as electricity and water, with customers only paying for what they use.

Unlimited flat-rate packages are a reflection of internet companies’ desire back in the mid-1990s to get potential customers to sign-up and explore the internet revolution. Now, with just under two billion people using the internet globally, companies are keen to reinvent and monitor how costumers utilize their bandwidth.

“We’re going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes, and at the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable,” Dick Lynch, Verizon’s Chief Technology Officer has said in the past. Frontier Communications made headlines last year when it claimed it would start implementing service caps as low as five giga-bytes per month.

It could be a case of one-ruining-it-for all; Cisco Systems found that one percent of global users are consuming 20 percent of global bandwidth, consistent with other findings that a small minority of users are consuming a disproportionate share of network resources.

With an impending move to a metered broadband, top executives from the Telecoms industry will meet at the Next Generation Telecoms Summit in December, to discuss the risks of implementing metered usage, the best practices to mitigate the risks, comparisons between US & Canadian attitudes and lessons a potential move from the mobile world would mean.

Those in attendance will include John Harrison, Vice President of Engineering and Operations, Sprint; Jim Zerbe, Director Product Development, T-Mobile; Tony Scicchitano, Executive Director IT Open Systems, Verizon; Joseph Houle, Lead Technical Architect, AT&T; Lance Condray, VP Strategic Services, Bandwidth.com; Victor Perez, VP Engineering and Operations, Comcast and Michael Coleman, SVP/CIO, Comporium Communications.

More recently, AT&T have stirred things up with an announcement that it was heading away from the all-you-can-eat buffet style of broadband and was keen to adopt consumption billing for wireless broadband. Verizon co-signed a manifesto with Google that outlined a set of network neutrality principles. Though the Verizon proposal was neither solely, nor explicitly about consumption billing, consumption billing was certainly implicit.

Service providers are definitely moving away from one size-fits-all, said Susie Kim Riley, the chief marketing officer for Tekelec (which earlier this year bought Camiant, which Riley co-founded). “There’s no disputing we’re moving away from that,” Riley said. “You see that with AT&T, you see that in Europe, and even when you read between the lines with Google and Verizon.”

Contact : Emma Naylor
Tel : 0117 921 2764
Cell : +44 7885725 500
Email : emma@ngonlinenews.com

The average telephone handset has evolved, and as a result thousands of start-up companies are profiting out of the Telecom sector’s advances, supplying the various add-ons which inevitably accompany any new wave of technology.

Such innovations were used by the operators to supplement the pricey voice packages. However, the operators are now finding themselves in the hands of the ever-creative software/hardware companies and a changing consumer culture. iPhone appstore was the first to take fiscal advantage from operators’ customers, creating a financial redistribution within the Telecom industry.

With the telecom giants left to maintain the costly infrastructure that supports this ever growing new-media industry, the outlook for today’s communication service providers is set to get worse in a new 4G world where broadband is everywhere; LTE, WiMax, FTTX and cloud services to name a few..  The NGT APAC Summit committee is only too aware of this and believes that they must act now to prepare for the future.  How can telecom giants sustain increasing costs and avoid being relegated to the sidelines as bit-pipe providers?

To answer this question visionaries from companies such as Skype – Dan Neary, VP and GM Asia Pacific, Telenor - Sanjay Vaghasia, CTO, Vodafone – Durgadas Misha, Head of IT Outsourcing, Deutsche Telekom – Neil Millner, Head of Network & IT Procurement, and Virgin Mobile – Carl Ambrose, CIO, have joined a closed door meeting at the NGT APAC summit last week in Singapore to provide a unified investment strategy and Long Term Evolution (LTE) across the existing 3G networks. Such increased download speeds will allow the telecom industry to capitalize on the change in consumer habits and provide wider service offerings.

‘Such a meeting has been a long time coming, large operators have been losing revenue as the communication market has diversified, network optimization should lend to them finding new revenue streams as the level of service can expand’ – NGT Summit Director Asia Pacific.

A lack of focus has brought about inefficiencies related to roaming issues for users, and limited development efforts for each technology, the world is soon to be “unified” under LTE and at that point the industry can expect much greater economies of scale for both hardware makers and services providers, the NGT APAC committee are sure to take advantage of this.

Contact : Emma Naylor

Tel : 0117 921 2764

Cell : +44 7885725 500

Email : emma@ngonlinenews.com

September 27, 2010:  Global Telecoms Business 40 under 40 gather this week in London to discuss some of the biggest challenges and opportunities that lay ahead for the global telecom industry.   Industry leaders, voted in by their global peers, will discuss a variety of challenges that businesses may face over the next decade including how/if social networking could change mobile telecoms; the future of telecoms and generating shareholder value; do bankers and financiers understand telecoms and more.

Some of the key participants, and award recipients include Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber;  Nick Heller, Director of Strategic Alliances for Google; Dan Warren, Director of Technology at the GSM Association; Heather Kirksey, chair of the Broadband Forum’s broadband home working group for Alcatel-Lucent, and many others from companies including Tata Communications, Ixia, TiasNimbas Business School, BT, MobilelQ, Expoential-e, Brightstar, Expand Networks, Clickatell, Velcom, Telcordia, MTS, Telekom Austria, GSMA, Mycom, Ciena, Vodafone, Vip Operators, Monitise, HP, Syniverse, SpiriTel, AT&T, Comptel, MTN, Orckit-Corrigent, Voxbone, Spin3, CSL, Huawei, and XConnect.

Congratulations ladies and gentlemen for your achievements!

On August 11, 2010 Allied Fiber, America’s ‘All Access’ Network,  participated in the Oppenheimer Annual Technology, Media & Telecommunications Conference which took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, MA.   During his 30 minute presentation, Hunter Newby, the CEO of Allied Fiber explained sort of the nuts and bolts of this new, carrier-neutral integrated dark fiber, colocation and tower network that they are building throughout the US.

What is most interesting about Allied Fiber is that it is a completely new business model, one that bridges together disparate pieces of the telecom puzzle into one holistic solution providing a complete layer 1 communications platform.   Beyond the integration of fiber and wireless network infrastructure, here are some highlights of the Allied Fiber solution:

• Allied Fiber is addressing the lack of accessible dark fiber in the market by making carrier neutral dark fiber available
• Key to Allied Fiber is that it’s substantially diverse from all existing long-haul networks
• Allied Fiber is employing the most advanced fiber optic cables in its ducts to meet the ever increasing bandwidth demands for wireless, Video over IP and other advanced technologies
• Allied Fiber is meeting the increased demand with 432 fiber strands in each duct (up to three ducts)
• Allied Fiber is designing, owning and operating its own regeneration huts/colocation facilities along the Network optimally placed for long/short-haul and wireless backhaul providers

So what does this network look like? 

It has both Long Haul Routes and Short Haul Routes.  The Short Haul routes are accessible approximately every 60 miles for the purpose of regeneration or power boosting the light carried in the Fiber.

The company’s Fiber to the Tower (FTTT) product is offered on even shorter distances, approximately every 1-2 miles, making lateral extensions from the main fiber rout to to towers more accessible.

And to make it all possible, Allied Fiber offers colocation and regeneration facilities along its route, approximately every 60 miles.  Offering lease racks, cabinets and maintenance for customers accessing this network.

The company certainly has a large undertaking, but with the level of experience in its leaders who have illustrated industry success there is no doubt that this network will succeed.    The company has pre-designed solutions illustrating how its network works with Data Center Builders, Tower Operators, Hardware providers and more.  Their partner page describes these solutions in great detail.

For more information about Allied Fiber visit their website, www.alliedfiber.com or email pr@jaymiescotto.com.  To request Hunter Newby to present on a panel at an industry conference or an investor conference, please contact ilissa@jaymiescotto.com.

To stay in the ‘know’ follow Allied Fiber on TWITTER:  @AlliedFiber and subscribe to their LinkedIn Group:  Allied Fiber