Today's Top Stories AT&T (NYSE: T) reported that vandals cut into a fiber cable in Gilroy, Calif., on Tuesday disrupting Internet, wireline phone and wireless service for local residents and businesses.According to Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith, the fiber cables were cut near Monterey Highway at around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday. After the incident left many subscribers without service for all of yesterday, AT&T said that it expects to fully restore service today. Due to the extent of the damage, AT&T had to install new cable to the affected area. George Ross, a spokesman for AT&T, told the Santa Cruz Sentinel that while he would not reveal how many customers were affected, "technicians are working to repair the damage as quickly as possible." The telco is now offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the people responsible for vandalizing its network in Gilroy. This is not the only time that AT&T's fiber network in Santa Clara County has been compromised. In April 2009, vandals cut cables in south San Jose, which caused a major disruption to telecom services in southern Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. After the 2009 incident occurred, local competitive provider CruzioInternet decided to build its own fiber-based network to support its DSL and hybrid fiber/wireless-based services for residential and business customers. CruzioInternet's co-founder Chris Neklason said they were not affected by the latest fiber cut. AT&T wasn't the only local utility that was the victim of vandalism on Tuesday. The damaged cables were reported not long after a Silicon Valley poser substation owned by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) located about a half-mile from AT&T's facilities were damaged by rifle shots fired at it yesterday morning. This incident prompted the energy provider to ask businesses and residents to conserve energy. Kurtis Stenderup, a spokesman for the Santa Clara county sheriff's department said in a Reuters article that investigators believe that incidents that took place at AT&T and PG&E "are linked." For more:
- Santa Cruz Sentinel has this article
- Reuters has this article Special report: Comparing broadband pricing: where do AT&T, Verizon, Cincinnati Bell and others stand? Related articles:
AT&T sees consumer services grow to $5.5 billion in Q4, driven by IP data
VDSL2 drives broadband market growth to 643 million subs in 2012, says Point Topic Read more about: Network Outage, Vandalism
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Verizon (NYSE: VZ), according to financial analyst estimates, is expected to report that Q1 2013 earnings per share will rise 11.8 percent on strong wireless and FiOS services revenues. The telco will report its earnings before the opening bell rings on Wall Street tomorrow at 8 a.m. ET. A recent Thomson Reuters poll of financial analysts estimated that Verizon will report Q1 earnings tomorrow of 66 cents per share, up from 59 cents per share in Q1 2012 and that revenue grew 4.6 percent to $29.5 billion. Two of the key challenges that will affect Verizon's Q1 report will be expected declines in traditional voice services and a slight decline in business service revenues due to economic pressures in the United States and in Europe. Given the ongoing decline of wireline-based voice services, Colby Synesael, an analyst with the Cowen Group, said that wireline margins will face pressure from "union costs, payroll taxes, content costs and Redbox (online video) launch costs." In Q4 2012, FiOS was one of the biggest contributors to the telco's wireline growth. Although it is now focusing on growing out FiOS in existing markets and transferring problem copper-based customers to Fiber to the Home (FTTH), the telco added 144,000 net new FiOS Internet connections and 134,000 net new FiOS Video connections during that quarter. For more:
- Investors Business Daily has this article Related articles:
Report: AT&T, Verizon retain dominant spots in cloud market
Verizon FiOS lifts wireline consumer revenues to $14 billion in 2012 Read more about: first quarter earnings, first quarter earnings 2013
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Sprint (NYSE: S) has begun offering its large business customers a new bundled service package that includes managed networking, MPLS transport, and CPE that it says will provide greater simplicity and better visibility into their networks. "Businesses benefit from Sprint's customized approach to managing customer networks, simplified pricing and a single account team that understands converged, cloud and mobility solutions," said Mike Fitz, vice president of wireline, Sprint, in a release. The new Managed Network Solutions portfolio spans multiple areas, including network design, performance management, CPE monitoring, SLAs and a single point of customer contact. In addition, businesses will have 24x7 access to CPE performance via Compass, Sprint's online tool which offers real-time views into the health of their WAN and the ability to troubleshoot problems. Complementing Compass, businesses that use Managed Network Solutions can view their entire network through the cloud, giving them visibility beyond the Sprint edge router to customers' edge routers. Although Sprint has become more focused on its wireless network services since spinning off its local telephone division Embarq, now CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), in 2005, it has in recent years built up a sizeable wireline business for larger enterprises served by its growing global MPLS network. Last year, it increased its investment in its wireline business by 53 percent with a particular focus on its MPLS network and Ethernet by establishing E-NNI (external-network to network interconnection) agreements with other carrier partners. Earlier this week, Sprint established a new point of presence with Interxion, a carrier-neutral colocation data center provider in Madrid, as part of its ongoing international expansion. Its efforts are bearing fruit as the Gartner Group upgraded Sprint's status on its Magic Quadrant for Global Network Service Providers from niche player to challenger. For more:
- see the release Related articles:
Sprint extends Ethernet reach into Spain via Interxion
Gartner: Sprint's MPLS, Ethernet expansions advance its standing Read more about: Managed Services, Sprint
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Fiber to the home may be the last-mile endgame, but hybrid copper/fiber-based VDSL and VDSL2 drove up the number of broadband subscribers worldwide to more than 643 million, a new Point Topic report reveals. In 2012, VDSL and VDSL2 grew 27 percent overall, while FTTH grew 3 percent. Overall, FTTx technologies grew 21 percent, beating out cable and DSL, which reported 7.2 and 3.6 percent, respectively.  | | Global market share by technology, Q4 2012. Click to enlarge. (Source: Point Topic / Broadband Forum) | "Demand for bandwidth can be satisfied by FTTx solutions, particularly in combination with vectoring, bonding and other incremental VDSL2 improvements so operators will continue to maximize the lifetime of their existing assets," said Oliver Johnson, CEO of Point Topic, in a release. Despite the growth of VDSL services, copper-based DSL, including ADSL and ADSL2+, still account for 56.95 percent of the market, down from 59.6 percent in Q2 2012. The decline is likely related to existing customers migrating off lower speed ADSL services to the higher speed VDSL2-based services. Besides AT&T (NYSE: T) and CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), which offer VDSL2-based services in the United States, a number of large European incumbents have laid out aggressive VDSL2 and vectoring plans. Deutsche Telekom, for instance, got conditional approval from Germany's telecom regulator to proceed with upgrading its existing copper plant with VDSL2 and vectoring technology. The German telco's VDSL2/vectoring deployment is part of a previously announced a €30 billion ($39 billion) plan to improve its last-mile wireline and long-term evolution (LTE)-based wireless networks. While AT&T won't announce its Q1 2013 earnings until next week, in Q4 2012 it reported that it added 192,000 U-verse TV subscribers and 609,000 U-verse broadband Internet subscribers. U-verse helped AT&T offset ongoing DSL service losses. Similar trends took place at Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and Cincinnati Bell (NYSE: CBB), which both reported that they added 144,000 FiOS and 5,000 Fioptics broadband subscribers during the fourth quarter. From a geographic standpoint, China continues to be the dominant broadband market, growing 15 percent, but other countries such as Brazil, India and Russia each reported growth of 3 percent or higher. Meanwhile, established markets such as the United States and France reported sustained growth of 0.77 percent and 0.98 percent, which Point Topic said is a "a sign of broadband strength even during economic challenges." For more:
- see the release (.pdf) Special report: Comparing broadband pricing: where do AT&T, Verizon, Cincinnati Bell and others stand? Related articles:
AT&T sees consumer services grow to $5.5 billion in Q4, driven by IP data
Verizon FiOS lifts wireline consumer revenues to $14 billion in 2012 Read more about: FTTH, fttn, Vdsl2
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TDS Telecom (NYSE: TDS) is leveraging Metaswitch's Perimeta session border controllers (SBC) as one of the elements in its growing managedIP services suite for business customers. Already using Metawitch equipment in its network, the service provider found that the vendor had the right SBC that could scale to address the scale of its IP services, particularly SIP. "After an extensive evaluation process, it was clear that Perimeta was the only SBC that could deliver the performance we required under heavy SIP message loads, even when handling fragmented packets and applying complex rule sets." Like other traditional telcos, TDS Telecom is seeing an uptick in its managedIP hosted VoIP services, which is now available in 17 states including South Carolina. Although it has announced the date of its Q1 earnings, TDS continues to report managedIP services growth every quarter. In Q4 2012, managedIP stations (both CLEC and ILEC) rose 77 percent, or 41,000, to end the quarter with a total of 94,600 stations. The telco increased its managedIP growth potential in late February when it acquired regional cable operator Baja Broadband. At the time of that announcement, Drew Petersen, vice president of government and regulatory affairs for TDS Telecom, told FierceTelecom that managedIP is "a product we can bring into the Baja marketplace and penetrate the commercial space." For more:
- see the release Related articles:
Setting definitions: IPTV is to IP video as CATV is to cable TV
TDS Telecom begins new broadband stimulus projects in Kentucky, Mississippi
TDS adds South Carolina to its growing hosted VoIP market base
TDS appoints CoBridge veteran Mark Barber to oversee emerging cable operations
TDS expands broadband, business reach with $267.5 million Baja purchase
TDS revenues rise to $1.4 billion on triple play, managed services gains Read more about: session border controller
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Tracking the wireline industry's Q1 2013 earnings
Comparing broadband pricing: where do AT&T, Verizon, Cincinnati Bell and others stand?
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