Today's Top Stories CenturyLink's (NYSE: CTL) 12,000 employees in 13 states represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union on Monday announced they would strike if they could not come to terms with the telco on a new labor contract. CWA said over 88 percent of its members, which consist of service agents, network technicians and Internet support workers, voted to support the strike. The current union contracts with the CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) expire on Oct. 6. In 2008, the CWA union approved a strike at the former Qwest during contract negotiations, but workers did not walk off the job. Al Kogler, a CWA spokesman, said the two key issues they are debating with the telco are a proposal to increase the contribution union workers have to pay for health care and preventing more jobs from being outsourced to overseas countries. In August, CenturyLink began negotiations with the CWA and IBEW covering former Qwest Communications employees. Mark Molzen, a spokesman for CenturyLink, said at that time that collective bargaining agreements with the CWA and IBEW unions cover over 13,000 Qwest workers. CWA currently represents almost 12,000 workers in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming and Washington. Union workers in Montana are working out a separate contract with the service provider. Negotiating union contracts has been a contentious and ongoing issue in the U.S. service provider industry, with all of the largest telcos trying to trim costs as traditional wireline voice service revenues decline. Besides CenturyLink, AT&T (NYSE: T), Hawaiian Telcom (Nasdaq: HCOM) and Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) are also in the midst of negotiating or finalizing new contracts with their union wireline workers. For more:
- StatesmanJournal.com has this article
- here's the CWA's post Special report: Wireline in the second quarter of 2012 Related articles:
CenturyLink Q2 revenue rises to $4.61B with increased broadband, business service sales
CenturyLink extends North Carolina fiber network to 5 data centers
Savvis pays $7M for pieces of Ciber IT outsourcing business
FCC's Connect America Funding initiative leaves 13 states in the cold
UPDATED: CenturyLink gets $35M in FCC CAF funding for broadband expansion Read more about: CWA
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Right in time for next week's COMPTEL trade show in Dallas, FairPoint Communications (Nasdaq: FRP) has launched its new Carrier Ethernet Services (CES) 2.0 service. Designed to serve its wholesale carrier customer base, including wireless backhaul customers, the CES 2.0 service includes a Class of Service (CoS) capability that allows customers to prioritize traffic based on application. "This is valuable because wholesale customers (i.e., CLECs/RLECs/ILECs/wireless) buying the service to resell or combine with their networks can easily extend the CoS to their customers," said Roopashree Honnachari, program manager of business communication services at Frost & Sullivan, in an interview with FierceTelecom. Honnachari said adding CoS will enable FairPoint to more rapidly provision Ethernet services with more solid Service Level Agreements (SLAs), regardless of whether it is providing the service over its own fiber network or through a carrier partner. "It is more critical when selling directly to enterprises to support converged apps like voice/video/data," she said. "However, considering wholesale customers are buying the service to eventually sell it to enterprises, it is crucial. This helps them to quickly provision the services with better SLAs on on-net and off-net networks." Of course, FairPoint is not the only provider to do this, as large incumbents like Verizon (NYSE: VZ) also have begun offering similar capabilities. This enhanced wholesale service builds on FairPoint's Carrier Ethernet E-Line service targeting Northern New England-based service providers, which the company debuted last October. In its New England territory, FairPoint wholesale leverages its Vantage Point fiber and MPLS-based network to deliver a host of Ethernet services, including Ethernet Private Line and Ethernet Virtual Private Line for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint solutions, with speeds ranging from 5 Mbps to 1 Gbps. Although FairPoint's Ethernet network reach is primarily designed to serve Northern New England, the telco said it currently reaches 90 percent of its business customer base in the region. Augmenting this service with CoS and SLA capabilities comes at a time when regulators in the New England region are realigning the way they regulate traditional telecom service providers like FairPoint. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have proposed or passed regulations that allow telcos to more effectively compete with traditional CLECs and aggressive cable operators in the consumer, business and wholesale markets. For more:
- see the release
Special report: Wholesale provider leaders to watch in 2012 Related articles:
FairPoint taps EarthLink exec Barbara Dondiego as new CMO
FairPoint prepays $25M on its debt
FairPoint extends DSL broadband to 14 more New Hampshire towns
UPDATED: FairPoint expands broadband availability in Vermont, other legacy regions
FairPoint voice-access line losses eat into Q2 revenue Read more about: Carrier Ethernet
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INTERNEXA, a Peru-based terrestrial fiber optic network operator, on Wednesday selected Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) as its vendor for a 100G network that it says will support the distribution of global digital content in the region it serves. The network will also enable INTERNEXA to meet subscribers' fast-growing demands for mobile video, high-speed Internet access and other data services in Peru. The 100G capabilities will be incorporated into the service provider's telecom network that currently provides wholesale connectivity to service providers in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and eventually, Central America. As it continues to establish agreements with the main Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), INTERNEXA is migrating digital content from outside of Latin America to data centers in Colombia and Brazil. By putting the content in local data centers, INTERNEXA said it will be able to "enhance efficiency for operators, quality of service for subscribers and create new opportunities for content developers." For this deployment, INTERNEXA is leveraging Alcatel-Lucent's 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS). The vendor will also provide its 1660 SM STM-16/64 Optical Multi-Service Node for Metro Applications, the 1850 Transport Service Switch (TSS) 320 and the 1350 Management Suite. Luis Francisco Gamero, operations director of INTERNEXA Peru, said in a release announcing the deployment that by using Alcatel-Lucent's platforms it is "taking a major step to deploy a highly flexible network that will support present and future bandwidth demand with improved performance and allow faster delivery of services to the market." While 100G is the initial speed that the network will support, it provides a foundation to support 400G when INTERNEXA needs it without a forklift upgrade of its existing equipment. Given the continued growth of digital content in Latin America, something that will continue as Brazil, for one, ramps up for its World Cup games in 2014, service providers of all sizes are making major upgrades to their networks throughout the region. Even though Alcatel-Lucent did see a wide loss in its Q2 2012 earnings, it did report growth in the Asia Pacific, Americas, and the EMEA regions. For more:
- see the release Download our eBook: Looking Beyond 100G Special report: Wireline in the second quarter of 2012 Related articles:
Alcatel-Lucent cuts 5K jobs amid Q2 2012 loss
Earnings preview: Verizon seen doing well; ALU to miss guidance
Switching and routing market to grow 4.4% in 2012, breaking stagnant Q1
BT Ireland chooses Alcatel-Lucent for its IP/VPN Ethernet initiative Read more about: Alcatel-Lucent
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Cross River Fiber, a competitive dark fiber provider serving the New Jersey area, extended its fiber backbone reach Wednesday in order to target new opportunities in the healthcare market segment. But this expansion is not based on a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. The service provider just signed an agreement to provide services to the Atlantic Health System. This new dark fiber connection, which connects Newton Medical Center in Sussex County with Atlantic Health System's primary data center, will be used to support Atlantic Health System's large transfers of electronic medical data. Vincenzo Clemente, CEO of Cross River Fiber, said that with this fiber network in place, Atlantic will be able to converge its "voice, video and data solutions, connecting back office, telecom network, servers and data centers." Being still a relatively young company that has to compete with a host of incumbent and competitive players, namely Verizon (NYSE: VZ), Sidera Networks and Lightower Fiber Networks, Cross River Fiber's dark fiber deal with a multi-site organization like Atlantic Health System will give it a sound customer reference as it ramps up its network build throughout New Jersey. For more:
- see the release Related articles:
Hudson Fiber Network, Cross River Fiber tap into New Jersey's low-latency opportunity
Cross River Fiber capitalizes on NYSE Euronext's new data center rules with New Jersey fiber routes Read more about: Cross River Fiber
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Hurricane Electric, a neutral data center provider and IPv6 network, on Tuesday set up a new Point-of-Presence (PoP) at DataCenter.BZ's facility in Columbus, Ohio. Located at 555 Scherers Court, the new PoP will give the service provider a new entrée into both Ohio and the rest of the Midwestern U.S. territory. With this symbiotic relationship, DataCenter.BZ's carrier customers will be able to exchange IP traffic and peer directly with Hurricane Electric's Internet backbone. At this PoP, customers will have access to a host of next-gen Internet and IPv6 systems and three flavors of Ethernet: 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE), 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 100BaseT. In addition to providing new service capabilities, the new PoP will offer improved fault tolerance, load balancing and congestion management infrastructure capabilities. Because Ohio has become one of the fastest growing U.S. markets, the other key benefit that both Hurricane and DataCenter.BZ gain is a more efficient route into the rest of Ohio and the Midwest territory. "This decision represents both a strategic network expansion for Hurricane Electric and also significant opportunity not only for Columbus but also for markets throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Kentucky and Indiana, where customers previously had to route through Chicago or New York to access such services," said Mike Leber, president, Hurricane Electric, in a press release announcing the new PoP. Leber added, "this expansion will provide area customers with greater bandwidth, reduced router hops and latency, and improved quality of service." Customers in Ohio and the Midwest who need IPv6 connectivity will also be able to get a more efficient means to connect to Hurricane Electric's larger international presence in Asia Pacific and Europe. Having these capabilities in hand also improves DataCenter.BZ's ability to differentiate itself from other area data center providers like FiberMedia, a data center provider that has a facility located in Cleveland. For more:
- see the release Download our eBook: The New Data Center
Related articles:
Hurricane Electric, ISOC Hong Kong introduce IPv6 certification program for Asia region
World IPv6 Launch results: What effect did the event have on the Internet?
IPv6: Are we ready? Let's go
Keeping IPv6 on the radar is critical in 2012
IPv6 clears test hurdle, but more stress tests lie ahead Read more about: Hurricane Electric
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